#09405

Woke up this morning to a wave washing over the shores of my heart (and mind) again, the water eroding the edges of that secret land. I'm plagued by helplessness today because I'm feeling like the drops of water dripping down the roof of a cave or the moss clinging to the underside of a rock. Question: What if nobody ever finds me here? What if the sunlight forgets all about me? What if the stories in my heart never makes it out in time for the one to hear them? Or God forbid, what if nobody even wants to hear them? Nothing around me seems to be moving these days and yet, when the world falls silent, I can feel an incognizable force shaping the landscape of my river.

Endriade from Dino Buzzati's The Singularity (truthfully though, I don't think this novel will ever measure up to his short stories but I'll save this discussion for another day) appears to remind me of this: "Think of a river in the Karst, subsiding into a sinkhole and then reappearing a few miles farther on; what the water did while underground no one is able to know." Yes, no one knows precisely because no one sees but an absence of the roving gaze could never stop the river from flowing. So I must have faith in the movement of the water, even if it disappears out of sight, because the river knows where it's carrying me. In fact, I am the river subsiding into a sinkhole, waiting one day for a crack in the earth to appear so that I can finally flow, flow, flow out into the sun.

I came across a paragraph in Deleuze's Cinema II: The Time-Image that reminded me of something María Kodama said to Borges when he once asked her about love. Deleuze, on writing about uncovering clichés in what he calls a "purely optical and sound situation", describes visions and revelations as such: "Nevertheless, are there not equal amounts of fantasy and dreaming in what we claim to see as there are of objective apprehending? Moreover, do we not have a subjective sympathy for the unbearable, an empathy which permeates what we see? But this means that the unbearable itself is inseparable from a revelation or an illumination, as from a third eye." An illumination! Oh, but of course! Of course the unbearable should be inseparable from illumination! Why else would María Kodama have said: "There can be no illumination without faith. And faith is like love: either you feel it or you don't."

Because it is unbearable, love with all its grandeur promises of revelations. I mean, it is unbearable because I know that I want to spend the rest of my life painting and writing for the trillions of trees breathing alongside me but I can also see what the light of this love is illuminating for me: a made-up world in which the hours I spend bringing colours to life are considered nonfunctional or frivolous (I sometimes imagine myself talking to my favourite painter, Odilon Redon, about the forests in my paintings but our conversations will never progress beyond my tear-filled confessions of guilt for loving what I love and doing what I do). It is unbearable because I'm also possessed by a freedom-loving spirit, a spirit that a lot of people at home would call "irresponsible" or "immature", but all I want to do is stretch far and wide across this earth with my soulmate (and only my soulmate, please!) without ever settling down anywhere. Look, I don't know if a spirit like mine could ever be loved, especially when the light above is illuminating the path ahead of me, but it is my chosen destiny and it is still unbearable! So forgive me for asking the wind for the googolplex time this month whether somebody out there believes in the same love I believe in because this is driving me crazy. I mean, does anybody else see this? This love that glows within my heart? This love that refuses to be contained within a white picket fence because it is strolling endlessly along an eternal river? Hello?! Oh my god, Deleuze, I think the subjective sympathies I feel for the unbearable love in my life is going to drown me ... but I won't let it. I have to be brave enough to jump into the river of my own spirit one day and when I do, I promise to do it with a song in my heart and the entire forest cheering for me.

家安夢遊大觀園, 1st August 2025

𓊡 : A river winding through a mangrove forest in Sarawak