I can’t sleep. Every bit of me feels clustered in this smokescreen brevity, and it gets harder to breathe. My thoughts scream at once and I’m too muddled to focus. I feel as if I’m getting nowhere.
It’s late. So late that drinking coffee is a really stupid endeavor, especially in lieu of all my sleep-deprivation, but I long for it all the same, wanting to relish in the bitter magnificence. I could drift, bring about the factors I want to portray, enter into that unseen world of my perception, but I’m not ready. I feel heavy with what I can’t say, with all the willingness to utter those simple words. I walk down the dark stairs, and fling myself into the swell of the dirty street. Forward march until I reach the bridge. Comfort calls for me.
I arrive just before the downpour. I can hear the rain fall loudly outside, and the wind whisper and whistle across the sky; I hear it through the thin walls. It whispers to me, welcoming me, beckoning me to step back into the street and feel it pour. Someone opens a window, and the cool reaches me, sending shivers up and down my spine. I want to walk outside and open my arms to its wispy embrace, to feel the chilly, swift breeze run its hands through my hair, down my back, to the bruised, complacent arches of my thighs. I want the rain’s caress on my face, heartfelt and smooth, no pang of loss when it’s gone. The smell will linger, the clean, sweet smell only left by hard rain, then I will walk back inside, fresh and unruffled, composed by its long brutal shower.
Lightning awakens the sky, and the world is lit up in a golden background. I gasp at its magnitude, and for a moment, I feel small and feeble in the face of all its power, at its ability to disrupt the stagnant ease of this chaotic world. That kind of ability, to disrupt what’s already disrupted, to plague the icy indifference of this city that seems to thrive off madness. Who can I be amidst all these forces? These loud people crushing my faculties, while Nature herself brightens the world around me, opening her shrewd, angry arms. What have I done to deserve this kind of isolation? Sleep-depraved and saddened, I stare into the wall until I go blind.
Sleep-depraved. I’m wired.
I lie back and close my eyes, trying to drift somewhere far away, but nothing comes. Consciousness hovers around me like a cloud, clawing at my lungs, at my throat, and as if cold water is splashed in my face, my eyes wince and open. I feel dry; my skin cracks. My mouth begs for water every waking moment, an insatiable thirst I cannot appease. I drink and drink, and still gasp and plead for more. It’s too much. The hairs on my arms rise, my nerves tremble, and my eyes flash back and forth looking for more lightning, for the familiarity, the flash of the brilliant apron. Falling deep into the comfort of a cushioned chair, I spill myself onto pages and pages, unconcerned with any farce or obscenity. I whisper my truths, and in return, I feel moments of calm, moments when I might entertain peace, and the cool transition of organized thought. The words position and posture; I breathe easier. The smoke clears slightly, my eyes quiver and split, and a slight tunnel of light blares within my view. Somewhere in the distance, I can see an end.
…
Perhaps I’ve addressed nothing in regard to China itself. What is there to say? The life I lead is not even a little bit Chinese. I live amongst people that are themselves completely westernized. All that heightened authenticity, yes they are Chinese, perhaps, but I walk down the street, and there’s 711, and McDonalds winking, smiling, waving. It’s the Chinese NYC, the only real differences are the scenery and the language. WuDaoKou (where I live) is smothered by foreigners, even more so, the universal “college student”, with all its stereotypes and connotations. We’re all the same, really. The same universities promote the same ideation. Money will always be money.
And to clarify the obvious, I don’t think beyond what I think, and it seems no matter where I go, what I think doesn’t change. Like most things, the idea of “who we are” is universal, though we might be affected and changed by our environments, we can only be ourselves. Yes, we might become disheveled or caught up in the novelty of change, but on the return of routine, and normality, the unsettling inhibitions return as well, and we settle back into ourselves.
Within all the boundaries of this inevitable self, the interesting factor is that though you might be aware, all consciousness is always a consciousness of something. You can’t just be aware; you have to be aware of something. It’s incredibly aggravating, if you think about it, because there is really no escaping any of your embedded inhibitions/traditions because you are always yourself, yet within the confines of those traditions, you’re always trying to be something else. There is no escaping your own perception. So I open up the floor for lovely Mr. Edmund Hesserl. Step into the world of phenomenological reduction, the idea being you bracket an experience and describe it, while suspending all presuppositions and assumptions normally made about that experience.
In regard to everything I said before, this is impossible.
In terms of the surrounding world, things don’t exist to just exist, they exist because our perceptions allow them to exist, and the experiences only exist because we provide them with foundation, and meaning. Our perceptions, our emotions, our humane individuality is what brings life to life. Yet within the confines of our own perceptions, there are biases. There is the partiality, and tradition that has become apart of us, yet there are no intransitive mental states, and it is this intentionality that distinguishes consciousness from everything else in the world, this ability to conceive awareness.
With all this in mind, it seems the one use of the phenomenological reduction is to realize that time and space are really nothing except figments of our consciousness, mere measures for which we just measure experience. So imagine we were to suspend the belief in clocks, and schedules. We would discover that lived time is always experienced as an eternal now, something so inherently tempered by the memory of earlier nows, yet something that is always rushing into the semiexperiencable, but ultimately nonexperienceable thenness of the future. We realize it is impossible to do something then, yet it seems we’re always planning around the past in order to attain the future. Sadly, in terms of space, you can clearly determine the obvious differences between lived space and mapped space. Lived space is always experienced in terms of a here-there dichotomy. It’s a matter of intensity, of recognition of yourself in terms of what you are and what you are not, and then what you are not in regard to what that is not. It seems knowing is just a matter of being in the world; yet knowing itself is not remotely an intellectual act. We recognize our being in terms of a world that is filled with objects that are there for us, completely ready at hand, yet we often have no care for these objects, they exist because we are so used to their existence. We do not question what is given to us, we just perceive it. Honestly, we hardly question our own perceptions, we just see what we see, what is there in front of us.
Of course, this establishes a base for the abusive nature of our own perceptions in regard to consciousness in regard to progress and all the suppression, repression, and denial that goes with it… but that’s for another day.
So in terms of this consciousness, this inevitable time/space paradigm, and the inability to actually comprehend our being except in regard to what its not, well, I don’t have any supreme epiphany, but perhaps I do recognize an ironic one…
I’m in China, yes? What am I doing in China? I am asked this constantly. Yes, I’m studying Chinese. No, I am not in any programs. No, I’m not sure where I’m going to college. Don’t ask me where I’m from, I really couldn’t tell you. So what am I doing in China? What’s the point? Well it seems I’m just perceiving more; I’m searching for more. Maybe I haven’t addressed any remote differences in regard to the culture, place or time, but I already said I didn’t intend to do this. I don’t really care that much. I say what I see and the most obvious realization is that there really aren’t that many differences. No, this is not the U.S., so the exact mapped space has changed, obviously, but a bar full of college students is always a bar full of college students. You drink, watch the World Cup, and root for your native team. Your team isn’t on, root for whoever appeals. You’re feeling German? Go Deutschland! North Korea? Don’t expect Kim Jong-il to shake your hand, but there will be plenty of drunken Koreans around to take part in your newfound glory. This is no “Good Earth”. There is excessive pollution from too many cars, everyone has a cell phone, the internet, there’s Mexican food, 711, and a McDonalds on every street corner. So yea, what I’m looking for, that whole idealistic home, well, here’s your epiphany. Home has nothing to do with environment, or crowd. Home emerges from the clarity, and clarity emerges from comfort. So I can’t just write with the intention of addressing the time/space materialistic actuality of this Chinese world. It has to be more than that. It has to be my view, my vision, my ability to be conscious of what surrounds you, and my desire to achieve this so-called clarity. The traditions, the differences might alter my singular perception and allow me to hopefully see more clearly… so maybe that’s why I’m here?
And ironically, it could be I’m becoming so contorted by the jumble of too much variation that I’m inevitably becoming blind. It’s quite easy to get caught up in other people, and their worlds.
I guess I’ll never know.
This isn’t to say there aren’t immense differences. The deeper you go into conservatism, into the mainland, the more tradition there is. I don’t want to say ignorance, but it’s just not remotely Western. There’s some of it here, in this hectic cultural melting pot, but its intertwined, mixed in with the immense amount of other cultures. It’s a city, and the Chinese seem to be relatively accepting if you’re white, and want to communicate with them, at least way more accepting then most Americans/Europeans I’ve met. Granted, that’s a huge sweeping generalization. Oh well. I guess generalizations exist for a reason, or maybe you just need to perceive it yourself in order to prove me wrong.
…
For now, I’ll just listen to the rain.
