there's a lake of stew and of whiskey too

“Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

“It shows a healthy instinct that today’s youth is beginning to show new interest in religion. Even if the churches should prove themselves unable to cater to this instinct, the initiative is important because it creates a framework for comparisons. It reveals what was possible in the past, and hence what one may be justified in expecting from the future. What was possible is still recognizable today in only a single limited field, that of art history. Yet the futurists were at least right about one thing: that all the paintings, palaces, and museum cities mean nothing in comparison with the primal creative force. The mighty current that left all these creations in its wake like colorful seashells can never run dry—it continues to flow deep underground. If man looks into himself, he will rediscover it. And with that he will create points in the desert where oases become possible.

Still more important is the consideration that in many people today a strong need for religious ritual coexists with an aversion to churches. There is a sense of something missing in existence, which explains all the activity around gnostics, founders of sects, and evangelists, who all, more or less successfully, step in the role of the churches. One might say that a certain definite quantity of religious faith always exists, which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches. Now, freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything. This is the gullibility of modern man, which coexists with a lack of faith. He believes what he reads in the newspaper but not what is written in the stars.”

“Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.”

Ballad of Ch'ang-Kan

My hair had hardly covered my forehead. I was picking flowers, playing by my door, When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse, Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums. We lived near together on a lane in Ch’ang-kan, Both of us young and happy-hearted.

...At fourteen I became your wife, So bashful that I dared not smile, And I lowered my head toward a dark corner And would not turn to your thousand calls; But at fifteen I straightened my brows and laughed, Learning that no dust could ever seal our love, That even unto death I would await you by my post And would never lose heart in the tower of silent watching.

...Then when I was sixteen, you left on a long journey Through the Gorges of Ch’u-t’ang, of rock and whirling water. And then came the Fifth-month, more than I could bear, And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky. Your footprints by our door, where I had watched you go, Were hidden, every one of them, under green moss, Hidden under moss too deep to sweep away. And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves. And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses And, because of all this, my heart is breaking And I fear for my bright cheeks, lest they fade.

...Oh, at last, when you return through the three Pa districts, Send me a message home ahead! And I will come and meet you and will never mind the distance, All the way to Chang-feng Sha.

(Interesting alternate translation of the last couple of lines that I like better:)

It's September now. Butterflies appear in the west garden. They fly in pairs,

and it hurts. I sit heart-stricken at the bloom of youth in my old face.

Before you start back from out beyond all those gorges, send a letter home.

I'm not saying I'd go far to meet you, no further than Ch'ang-feng Sands.

“In history as it really is, there can be no conciliations. Whoever believes that there can must suffer from a chronic terror at the absurd ways in which events do occur, and he is only deceiving himself if he thinks that he can control them by means of treaties. There is but one end to all the conflict, and that is death—the death of individuals, of peoples, of cultures.”

“When the King “wiped away” the debt— using the precise Greek word relating to debts and not sins— he wiped away all debts connected to that debt— he didn't do a solid for the servant and give him a 0 in the liabilities column and +100 in the assets column.  It wasn't merely a good idea or a noble gesture that the servant in turn forgive servant 2's debt.  That debt no longer existed.  The servant's crime, therefore, wasn't in not  being merciful but in lying, tricking the other servant into believing a debt existed when one did not.

The next question then becomes: why didn't servant 1 “forgive” servant 2's debt— why did he insist— pretend— lie— there was a debt when there was none?  Greed does not explain it, the timing is there before you: how badly does he need 100 denarii right now, suddenly and out of the blue, when he was content merely to be owed this money all that time before?  For orientation note that 100 denarii is three months wages or 2500 loaves of bread, or a third of a bottle of perfume, it's a weird economy, anyway—  did he actually think he was going to get paid immediately?  He wasn't unmerciful, he was enraged— because he was shown mercy, because the mercy that was shown to him was a kind of enslavement: when his monetary debt was waived, he owed a different debt to the King; with the cash debt gone another debt overwhelmed him, he owed a debt with his entire existence, his soul.  The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king of men who wanted to settle accounts. This debt can never be paid back, and how one lives with such a debt determines... how one lives with such a debt. The servant couldn't live with it, his brain collapsed into a black hole. That kind of infinite dependency to the King was intolerable.  To him, far from the debt being a new kind of freedom grounded in a new kind of duty— the debt meant madness.”

“World-city and province – the two basic ideas of every civilization – bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place of world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially the highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end – what does it signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York.”

“The topics the Master did not speak of were prodigies, force, disorder, and gods.”

Ignore Them

If you've seen the videos, a new one every week, of Black people attacking Asian people, you might come to the conclusion that Black people are attacking Asian people. That they've been attacking us for quite some time. This is apparently the wrong conclusion to come to. An inflammatory and inherently violent conclusion to come to. Unfortunately, we can't trust our own eyes, and even if we could, we lack the expertise to put it all into context. Fortunately, we can be sure our media class will be right there with us to hold our hands and help us correctly interpret what we're seeing. We will be asked to analyze all the reasons why these attacks are occurring. We will be asked to meditate on the nuanced interplay between a clever constellation of weighty, academic concepts including, but not limited to: white supremacy, ’the carceral state’, misogyny, capitalism, not-leftist liberals, how your dad didn’t support BLM, the model minority myth, imperialism, media representation. If it appears that generating this requisite worldview to fully understand what we’re seeing seems like a surefire way to develop schizophrenia, there's no need to worry, our media class has already figured it out for you.

Get Out.

Away from the screeching. You can disengage from these 'debates' entirely. In the case of a black man stabbing a Korean woman 40 times in her own bathroom, why the guy did it, or the 'structural forces' that supposedly made this murder inevitable are irrelevant. Would Christina Lee’s death have been more or less palatable if we were certain that the man did it because he had some demons about Northeast Asian geopolitics? If he hated women? When the focus is shifted towards understanding this chain of 'root causes' leading up to the murder, Christina Lee's death becomes merely incidental. Unfortunate, no doubt, but you are then drawn to ask, “Isn't Assamad Nash also a victim?” Or, for the more politically deft, “Isn't he really just a symptom of a much larger problem? Given the complexity of the world we live in today, shouldn't we consider a more nuanced approach towards dealing with people like him?” No on both counts. Fry him.

The premise of the Model Minority Myth is that our parents kept their heads down, kept to themselves in insular ethnic enclaves, and worked hard without major, visible involvement in contemporary movements for social change. This made them vulnerable to be used by right wing forces as an ideological cudgel to delegitimize the demands of black and brown activist movements. They could not correct this cooption, could not exercise political power on behalf of their own interests nor of their minority brethren because they didn’t know any better. They were uninformed. Not about trivial matters, like say, civil engineering or how to provide for a family in a way so selfless our writers cry about it in supermarkets. Our parents didn’t know the language of liberation we take as gospel today. Magnanimously, we don’t always hate them for it, sometimes we pity them.

At the heart of the Harvard admissions scandal were 1st generation Chinese parents who felt that their children were being punished for their academic success. The ensuing backlash from our media class accused our parents of not taking into account the disparate effect the loss of affirmative action would have on black students. They were putting too much emphasis on Harvard; academics weren’t everything, other colleges were just as good. Our parents were once again playing into the Model Minority Myth. What made them so uniquely worthy of our contempt this time around was that they were acting, consciously, as if all of these considerations were irrelevant to them. They were acting without consulting with and learning from the right type of people. Instead, our parents went with what was best for their bottom line, which was what they perceived as the absolute well being of their families. When asked, “Do you want what's best for your children regardless of the political implications?” for better or for worse, they answered, “Yes.”

When you read our writers today, you will note an increasingly concerned tone, hinting that the Asian American 'community' is on the precipice of splintering off into two antagonistic groups. Actually, this split happened decades ago. Asian American is a misnomer not because he is Japanese and you are Cambodian. The competition is not between rich yellows and poor browns. It is between people who believe a community is self-complete and those who believe a community is ever expanding, on its way towards encompassing the whole of humanity.

It is why when the wrong type of Asian American civic group raises objections to New York County DA Alvin Bragg’s explicit commitment to impose a “presumption of pre-trial non-incarceration for every case” and actively avoid mandatory minimums, they are then directed to first ponder all the reasons why a habitual, violent offender who spent very little time in any sort of correctional institution might attack someone for no apparent reason. You see, if you really think about it, really listen to our academics and experts, the offender's aggression is just an extension of American imperial wars in Asia, a case of whiteness, somehow, some way, pitting minority against minority yet again. Endless reflections on how publicly identifying the murderer as a black man perpetuates the image of black criminality. How this might affect the hard won gains won by our fabled multiracial working class coalition fighting for racial solidarity and every other thing that is good in this world. Before you do anything, remember to consider everything first.

If you find this reasoning to be spineless and obscene, and you believe that Asian Americans being physically attacked is reason enough to say no to these masturbatory worldbuilding exercises, you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of the Asian American split. You are implying that our media class isn’t just wrong, but that they are unimportant to you. Your sympathy has human limits, their pride does not. You will be called a racist, a fascist, a misogynist, a house slave, an MRAsian, a pick-me. Then you will be told that you are overreacting if you object to being called these things. It is only natural that your higher ups, in all their moral clarity, tell the world what you really are. And while you unwisely prepare to explain yourself and prove why you are not these things, consider that nothing you say will change these people’s minds. They were going to call you that anyway. It’s their job.