18 IX 2002 - 17:46 - verba29

So another month has come, which means another Alchera project is up, which is good, because it would seem that Alchera is the only reason I update this thing these days.

What was the project topic I chose this time around? (Yes, only one; I can't do all of them every month or I'd soon go mad). Here it is:

OPTION NO. FIVE: Why are you here? (Free interpretation).

Free interpretation? How can I resist that? I tried to make it longer, because I'm not doing as many options; also, I wrote it a few days ago, on Yom Kippur. So here goes.

Why am I here?

(location)

I have the Chinese Civil War (to 1949) to thank for my being in San Francisco. Without the Civil War, there would have been no (or certainly far less) threat of persecution of my mother's family, and they would not have moved from Shanghai to Kaohsiung on one of the later navy transports. This uprooting gives me some right to claim dispossession; on the other hand, it has made me who I am by allowing me to be born and raised in the United States. Although I don't necessarily agree with the state of politics in the United States, I have the right here to say that I don't agree with it, which still doesn't really exist in either Big China or Little China. I won't deny that there are pretty strong threads tying me back to Taiwan especially -- as I learn more Chinese, I become more and more sickened by the course Taiwanese politics has been taking of late, perhaps because the amount of hypocrisy and nepotism there is far greater than the amount found here, or at least is more blatant. I was born here, and I love it here, and although a small part of my brain is reserved for dreams of Taiwan's eventual enosis with the mainland (as I'm sure Greek Cypriots have), my life is here. Perhaps I'm not as tied to the United States as I am to the Western, Anglophone world. Even now, at my age, I feel the beginnings of a wanderlust smoldering within me. The 'classics' I grew up with are certainly very different from those I would have grown with under a Chinese system of education -- like it or not, I'm no longer really suited for life in a lot of Asian cities, having developed a very Western foundation. There's still time to change it, of course; there are broad areas of my thinking that owe much more to the stereotype of Asian culture than that of Western culture. And this is the way, more or less, my parents wanted it when they came over, made uneasy by a repressive government, corrupt Asian politics, and the (not terribly good) state of education in Taiwan.

(Diaryland/LiveJournal)

Huc Aliquis me pesti orbi terrarum misit. Which phrase means, basically, 'Someone sent me to this place in order to be a plague upon the world,' or at least it does if you've taken it the way I do (which is difficult, as it lacks context). Take that first offering of mine as you will; if you're still reading, perhaps you don't consider me too bad a plague, or perhaps you enjoy plagues.

The Internet is a logical medium as any, for me. In person, I can be somewhat inarticulate, and when it's important that I be heard, my voice has a tendency to drift into that decibel range in which no one farther than five feet from me can hear me. The written word remains the easiest form of communication for me; in writing, I can see what I'm saying and change it before too much of my meaning is perverted. (I still, however, manage to end up with my foot in my mouth quite frequently; every week finds a new source of chagrin.) And the Internet for me has become another arm for the power of the written word. Libraries of texts are online, including many of the important Latin ones, thanks to the Perseus Project. Email provides a method for quick conversation, although I am also a firm believer in the pleasure of receiving a paper letter in one's mailbox once in a while. And with such things as instant messenger services, Diaryland, and LiveJournal, the written word suddenly has an immediacy very close to that of speech. This is not always a good thing -- as I said, I often put my foot in my mouth with the greatest of ease -- but it's a start at making me feel comfortable with thinking I might at last have something to say.

Diaryland and LiveJournal in particular allow me to be the exhibitionist I become when certain moods seize me. What is wonderful about them is the way in which they offer the choice -- the person who's reading it isn't being forced to read it. Both of my regular readers may think that everything I write is tripe -- but perhaps it's tripe they can relate to, or perhaps they like tripe for its own sake. And to think that I'm here, and I've got something to say, and that for the first time, it doesn't really matter how insignificant it is -- I can say it anyway -- well, that's a great part of why I'm here. Perhaps with time, I'll come to believe that there may be some meaning in what I say, that even if I speak truths that everyone has come to know already, it doesn't matter -- because what matters to me, then, is the trying of it, the struggle to find structure through which I can express myself.

(Alchera)

I found Alchera in its second month, a month which coincided with pauses in two of my former collaborations (ampersand and poet-collab). Of these two, ampersand has started up again, but at a different URL, one that is long and difficult to remember and to which I cannot seem to compel myself to turn my computer, even if I do have it bookmarked and sitting in my list of collaborations. To be honest, it was a matter of being the first one that's made my semi-committment to Alchera -- I've seen many collaboration rings since then, especially through mechaieh's diaryland, and turned them down because I simply wouldn't have time to spit out projects for much more than one per month. (This may also be why I've had such difficulty getting back to Ampersand.) As for why Alchera should have caught my eye as it did -- I should think this would be self-evident; it's offered consistently interesting (well, at least for me) project options, and I'm certainly a fan of this new five-option project Laurie has going (even if I did find four of the five options this month excruciatingly difficult to write about). I do miss the two-month project term, though.

So I came to Alchera because it filled a recent hole in my life, and as for staying -- especially now that I've got my LiveJournal, which I find much easier to update, it allows me an excuse to keep a Diaryland site going. It often allows me to do a good deal of thinking about myself, which I also find gratifying -- isn't adolescence supposed to be that time when the self is formed and settles down at last?

(Life)

So why then am I here? Alive, breathing, typing, and keeping a sizeable portion of my brain reserved for lust, as any good red-blooded man would do? I'd be lying if I said I was certain. I was discussing this earlier with one of my friends, but the conversation quickly veered into a probing of our beliefs about the nature of God (she doesn't believe, I do; at the same time, she celebrates Yom Kippur, I don't. Life is funny like that). My beliefs are what seems to me an unpardonable mass of contradiction. I believe in the Big Bang model and in evolution, but require a sort of watchmaker God to get it all started; I tell myself I believe in the supremacy of reason, but I scratch myself to find faith under most of (possibly all of) it. I believe in an odd animating principle that I call a soul, because it's simple to do so and in keeping with custom, but am at a loss to explain where it comes from, and why a god would pop in randomly to insert a soul if we are created by simple biological processes, and were I to get into my full theology, I would forget completely the topic at hand. Besides, I explain myself much better in person, given space and time.

Am I a random event? I'd prefer not to think so, but I may be. Am I meant for some high purpose? Probably not; I'd die of mortification if it were reavealed to be so, and statistics show it unlikely that I, one out of more than six billion persons on this planet, have some sort of vocation for greatness. If I can use a concept of divinity that allows discreet meddling in our affairs, then the largest role I'll admit for myself is one of a cog in a greater machine. There is no indignity in working to make a larger cause go more smoothly. And if I die having fulfilled whatever mysterious purpose people in general serve -- even if that purpose is only to die calmly in order to make space for the rising generations -- then I'd like to think I can die happily.