Revolution of Our Times Blah, Blah Blah (28 poems, 70 minutes)

I wanted to continue to go east.

I planned a trip to Myanmar, Taiwan, and South Korea through the fall and winter. I purchased flight tickets with miles in January 2020. Then, in March, COVID-19 appeared.

I had been to mainland China a number of times, exhibiting as an artist. I also stayed, on those and other trips, in Hong Kong. I spent two summers in Japan, a summer in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and six weeks in India.

After I was forced to cancel my trip due to the pandemic, I realized that to continue the project, I would have to write my impressions of these places from memory.

I choose to write three more scenarios, taking place in Hong Kong, Yangshuo, China, and Varanasi, India.

Very quickly, I realized that the starting point, the orientation to time, space, and social cues, the rhythm of things, and the sensitivity to things were something very different here. And this interested me a great deal.

Societies are built on shared narratives, which very often become invisible, and in seeing them, they help us see ourselves.

As I write in the last of these works, it often believed that: "Modernity implies the West, reason, history, state, and rationality. Rationality implies modernity, the West, and so on."

"The East implies tradition, ritual, myth, community, and emotion."

"But, of course, what really counted was not that it was an invention – rather, the geopolitical order and the historical consequences of such an invention. The reasons for this enduring enchantment, this 'coloniality of power,’ is the fact that the discourse of modernity (the enunciation) that defined modernity (the enunciated) was successful in hiding the fact that there could be no modernity without coloniality."

Coloniality – already exceedingly apparent to many around the world, including those living it and resisting it – became for young Americans in the 1960s very clear in the wake of the indiscriminate murder of the Vietnamese people. This brought on what has been termed the New Age and the Human Potential Movement – where the young, like the Hindus of old, would ask, "what is it that I want? Immortality, or eternity?"

In this, I would ask myself where I was and just what the very notion of 'I' might mean in a post-post-modern world.

The 'world' seemed a peculiar mixture of pleasure and tension at a time of inconceivable levels of interconnected communication and knowledge – environmental collapse looming, wars and international tensions running high.

'West' and 'east' were built on the myth of progress, yet anxiety and frenzy devastate us. Yes, the looming climate emergency, the enmeshment of technology with domination, imperialism and colonialism and the relentless exercise of forms of power, sovereignty and parochialism that perpetuate the mentalities policing our external national borders and geopolitical thinking – all have ‘us’ worried, disorientated, and troubled.

Is it because we’ve become accustomed to the here and now, perpetuating itself by excluding every possible elsewhere? Our future was right there: ready-made, a future of mastery and prosperity. Now, everything is falling apart: climate, species, finance, energy, confidence, and even the ability to calculate, of which we felt so assured and which seems doomed to exceed itself of its own accord.

Capitalism and technology were supposed to drive humanity toward a new, utopian condition. Was that not the dream of modernism? Everything was going to keep getting better forever – until we merge with our machines, attaining the technological 'Singularity,' a silicon-based Rapture.

Have we exhausted our imagination and our strategies today in our scientific materialism? In our political ideologies? In our capitalism?

By looking across time and cultures, I hoped I could see other possibilities – other ways of adaptation or system-making, of social contracts, of metaphysics, of notions of individuals and collectives.

In 2019, I read about five Hong Kong teenagers advocating for independence from Chinese rule who were sentenced to three years in detention at a correctional facility for urging an "armed revolution" in a national security case. I knew that this would have to be something to include in my story of Hong Kong – that is, amongst other things, both the idealism and disillusion of youth. Yes, youth; I am always drawn to them, the promises and perils, the deep intensities that only the young can feel, the future that is theirs and ours.

It reminded me of that fact that, in reining in the overzealous youth of the cultural revolution, Mao sent some 16 million teenagers and young adults to rural areas to do hard forced labor. The youth that had carried out his revolution – that adored and worshipped him – he would turn on.

While Hong Kong was teeming with youth wanting a voice in the Umbrella Revolution, the revolution of our times, the elderly were increasingly being cared for by robot care takers.

Youth were constrained in increasingly inflexible regimes of politics, technocracies, hierarchies and capital, while the elderly were living longer and were having their bodies inhabited by more and more replacement parts, the very parts that were making up their cyborg or robot caretakers. Both occurred in worlds with increasing surveillance and control.

This control was there to protect them: to protect ‘us’ from each of 'us’.'  Us, me, you, being the imaginary of a social media that had no grounding in any facts. We live in atemporal times, in a post-truth world where all of ‘us’ now were potential threats and enemies. This, while at the same time, the youth and many others were experiencing ecstatic states of love and embrace.

The promise of the linear advance of the techno-economy locks the time to come within a calculable future and reveals its own aimlessness. Can we say that there is a certain delirium to this? Danger and delirium? Was part of this delirium that more and more people were beginning to be convinced that there was this deeper reality: that it's all a flow, an interconnected field, an information energy field – a field that is extremely rich, and everything is in it? Was the danger that such knowing unmoored us, took the ground from under us – and that we could not longer depend on the old identities (and not know how to live the new ones)?

–––––––

So who was 'I’ as the narrator of this story in Hong Kong? I could not continue in the same voice of the first two pieces. But I would once again explore the psychic conundrums that revolve around ‘place’ and 'identity.' At once tuning into the non-local correlations, the inseparability or entanglement of being while at the same time being in one of the densest cities of the world, this verdant island, where I would motor cycle about with Min, imagining myself in Wong Kar Wai’s film, Days of Being Wild, while actually being in the films Solvent Green and THX 1138 while being in Hong Kong in 2023.

Blurring fiction and the real, our narrator now – a program, a person, an abstracted conglomerated text: uncertain of where they reside, in what body, in what being, or data bank – falls under an avalanche of uncertainty during a monsoon with wet bulb conditions in a sweltering hotel in Hong Kong.

When a mysterious invitation comes from a Hongkonger (a former avalanche rescue course trainee and student by the name Min), our narrator travels to Hong Kong to better understand the passions and logistics of the Umbrella Movement. They learn of the writing community of Hong Kong, many of whom are exiles from Shanghai who have made Hong Kong their home. One is Min’s uncle, a book publisher, who along with the famed film director Wong Kar Way tells us about Hong Kong and its languages, cultures, and costumes. Min tells us of how the revolution failed. “Blah Blah Blah,” she says – and yet there is some solace as she and I go to a green mountain, above the heavens and naked in the rain walk amongst hundreds of Buddhas in a sun shower. For a moment, I believe that Min is my soul mate and that I am in love – until she reveals herself as a member of an orchid-eating cult, a simulacrum working for a robotics multinational.

Oh my!

Exiled from himself, from the very hope of the ‘we’ and the 'Blah Blah Blah' of it all, our narrator falls into a great despair, feeling an immense sorrow at the ineffectiveness of collective action to affect change. He discovers that Min is a sim, who is working for a orchid-eating cult of high-end neuroscience and developed the policing surveillance platform used by the Hong Police.

After an afternoon of watching lustrous heavy clouds, the Island of Hong Kong suffers a breakdown, a black-out due to monsoon rains that take out the power grid. In the suffocating conditions, she/he/they overheat in what is called 'wet bulb temperature condition.’ While breaking down, he feels the very breaking-down of the planet – all living things heating up, in dissolution and disarray, and with that, his ego, his hurt and shame, any identity at all. With the help of Bruce Lee, who comes on the television, they find solaces and comfort.

As the monsoon continues, under the wet bulb conditions, the narrator finds themself in the slippage of time on Mars in 2042, prosecuting a trial of Elon Must who had murdered a robot, in the sensational case of the Robots against Must.

When the heat subsides, they return to their body – not the fevered sick body, but another body, a body alone amidst thousands, walking the crowded streets inside the claustrophobic city of Kowloon Walled City, the most densely populated ungoverned settlement in the world. There, in a used record store, he questions whether Brian Eno’s lush An Ending Ascent was more requiem than hymn of celebration. There, they think of the concept of "free space" – the idea that somewhere, there must be exist infinite amounts of space. Somewhere, yes.

That evening, he goes to a Butoh performance, where Min dances with the great Butoh innovator, Akaji Maro. At the afterparty, he makes a silent connection to Maro and walks into the dark night and rain under the aegis of what he believes now are his two masters: Akaji Maro, the Japanese Butoh dancer, and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist poet and monk. 

I was now firmly in the East, in one of the most contemporary of cities, and it would be from here that I would venture to the mainland of China, then onto India, and in doing so, examine more deeply this sense of place, self, time, and belonging.