Ethan Li Responds to the Conversation around September Hofmann's 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥

Ethan Li is back! With far more words than would be reasonable to publish in a standard roundup, and with content that wouldn’t make any sense in the format of a roundup anyway, and thus is being published as a standalone post again. Presented here without further ado:

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review of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 & the end of the world & 今 & reviews of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥

by Ethan Li

I read 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 as a critique of the “cruel optimism” (following Lauren Berlant’s description as introduced in Mari Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory, and as will be discussed further below) carried by words like “it’ll get better / just shake it off”, and a simultaneous recognition that this kind of cruel optimism seems so appealing because we desperately need some source of hopeful strength in order to make life bearable. I suspect this latter issue explains why MoonXplorer’s review of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 includes the following words despite the way 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 ends (i.e. with nuclear annihilation):

“life is shit right now, but it'll get better!!!!” [...] isn’t a bad message on its own

so the challenge appears to be: can we locate some source of hopeful strength that is stable enough to permanently free us from the straitjacket of cruel optimism that binds us all?

in the March 2022 interview How Much Bolder Could You Be?, Dean Spade negates such cruel optimism by presenting an imperative to fully face our difficult reality, along with a call to be fully alive in the face of this reality:¹

what we don’t want is the kind of classic, kind of culturally U.S. hope thing where it’s like, have good self-esteem. say, “I love myself,” and be like, “things are going to be great.” [...]

[...] we want to get out of that thin, that very thin, shallow, emotional space of “feel better in the today. girl power,” or whatever. and towards a very deep: what’s it like when I live in sober reality about how things are actually quite bleak and I choose to connect with others about what we care about and move together towards that? like that. so it’s like that satisfaction, that’s pleasure. that’s in some ways I think of it as like, how do I restore a full emotional range? I think that the hope and self-esteem industry is like, “don’t feel bad.” so you cut off any grief and devastation and despair and fear and anger that we might rightfully feel in these conditions. and you also lose the other end of the range. it’s hard to feel authentic joy, connection, pleasure, because we’re living in this kind of like numbed out, chipper, fake smile, go to the entertainment technologies to feel good kind of vibe.

[...]

I don’t know where this is going. none of us know where this is going. it’s not looking good, but what do I want to spend the rest of my life doing? being fully alive, being with other people, being in it together, taking risks, being really, really caring, learning to love people even if they annoy me. learning deeper love. having that move me more, feeling the pain and grief of loss with others instead of just being alone in my kitchen with the headlines, feeling like I need to numb out and turn away towards celebrity gossip or something. it’s like how do I just be deeper in this life, despite the conditions? and because of the conditions.

[...] we can’t have the kind of hope that’s like, it’s all going to work out. no idea. I mean, it’s not working out. a bunch of people, like millions of people have died of COVID, it didn’t work out for them the way that I lived through this crisis. and there was this utter abandonment of, and I would say murder of everybody who is most vulnerable. I need to grieve that. I can’t pretend things are working out. that feels… I feel like I want to be in sober reality with how bad it is and how beautiful human resistance is and how the choices we make right now actually matter a lot about that suffering.

is it feasible to sustain this way of being fully alive as an alternative to cruel optimism? how might we realize this vision of truly living?

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the assertion that things will just (somehow) get better rests on an assumption that we’ll live long enough to experience such improvements, and that no disasters will happen in the meantime to overshadow those improvements. but none of us can predict the future in that way. it seems to me that cruel optimism will follow us like a shadow as long as we cling to this kind of wishful thinking about the remaining duration of our lives or about how smoothly our lives will go. this is why Dean Spade makes the rhetorical shift from “none of us know where this is going” - as a negation of such wishful thinking - to “but what do I want to spend the rest of my life doing?” - as a reorientation to the question of how to live in a pain-filled world for however much longer we end up living.

the Sōtō Zen priest/poet Ryōkan (1758 - 1831), when he was asked (in the aftermath of an earthquake which struck his area and killed many people) about how to escape disaster, is said to have replied in a letter (as quoted by Takamaro Shigaraki and translated by David Matsumoto in Heart of the Shin Buddhist Path: A Life of Awakening):

when you meet with disaster, you should truly meet it. when it is time to die, you should truly die. this is the wondrous teaching that will enable you to escape disaster.

difficulties and death are inevitable in this life; we cannot pray or positive-think our way out of these facts of living. instead, we (somehow - but how?) must honestly and wholeheartedly face our difficulties and our impending deaths. and we (somehow - but how?) must make choices in that awareness of sober reality. otherwise, in running away into thoughts about our situation and thoughts about those thoughts (and maybe even thoughts about those thoughts about those thoughts), we will be consumed by various kinds of self-created suffering in addition to the difficulties themselves which we have thus made ourselves unable to confront², and we will have cut ourselves off from the possibility of truly living. and without having truly lived, how could we possibly be ready to truly die? and without being ready to truly die - without being ready to face our deaths as universal marks of the conditions of our own lives and the lives of others - how could we possibly be truly living?

the imperative to truly meet disaster also reminds me of Donna Haraway’s words of “staying with the trouble” - though, having not yet read Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, I’m almost certainly misrepresenting her to some degree. 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 seems to say: we have been (and will continue to be) meeting with disaster after disaster. can we truly meet these disasters, and how? we may die soon. when death arrives, can we truly die, and how? in this review I’ll attempt to stay with the trouble of these challenging questions. specifically, I’ll see how far I can go in (to quote Bevibel’s review of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥) facing down the issues at hand directly, and we’ll see what comes out the other end - whether that’s getting incredibly depressed (to quote Bevibel’s review), or an idea of how to be deeper in this life (to quote Dean Spade’s interview), or something more ambiguous.

starting with escaping disaster by truly meeting disaster, we can recognize similar questions in the collective range of emotional reactions to the climate crisis. indeed, “staying with the trouble” was crafted as one such response. along similar lines, science-fiction-award-winning long-distance hiker/writer Kim Stanley Robinson proposes that we might truly meet disaster by committing to the “angry optimism” of action, as a position against both the cruel optimism of “we’ll be fine even as the masses are washed away on judgement day, so no need to imagine a radically different future” and the cruel pessimism of (to extend some words in 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥) “we are powerless before systems beyond our comprehension and everything’s doomed, so let’s give up now”:

use the optimism as a club, to beat the crap out of people who are saying that we are doomed, who are saying let’s give up now. and this “let’s give up now” can be very elaborated academically. you can say: “well, I’m just into adaptation rather than mitigation, there’s nothing we can do about climate change, all you can do is adapt to it. in other words, stick with capitalism, stick with the market, and don’t get freaked out. just adapt and get your tenure because it is usually academics who say it, and they’re not usually in design or architecture, they aren’t really doing things. they’re usually in philosophy or in theory. they come out of my departments, they’re telling a particular story and I don’t like that story. my story is: the optimism that I’m trying to express is that there won’t be an apocalypse, there will be a disaster. but after the disaster comes the next world on.

one hundred and twenty years from now, everybody alive right now will be dead. an entirely new crop of humans and new generations will be out there operating. for them, whatever the situation is, it’s the natural situation. so, as a science-fiction writer you have to say: “one hundred and fifty years from now? there are going to be people having fun, young people trying to hook up with other young people to have sex and then there are going to be complications, and people trying to make a living and they are going to be having fun.” that militates against the old “I give up.” [...] there’s a sort of apocalyptic end-of-the-world “ism” that says that I don’t have to change my behaviour, I don’t have to try because it’s already doomed.

in a way that reminds me of the kinds of social media commentators³ skewered by Isabel J. Kim’s February 2024 short story Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 also depicts cruel optimism and cruel pessimism through the drawn titles and thumbnails of (mostly-)imagined YouTube videos:

Robinson’s political project of writing speculative utopian novels started with his Three Californias Trilogy (1984 - 1990) imagining three futures for young people in Orange County (post-nuclear-war, dystopian, and plausible-utopian), later resulted in his more widely-known Mars Trilogy (1992 - 1996), and ended with a transition to non-novelistic writing in his 2022 nonfiction release The High Sierra: A Love Story about the Sierra Nevada Mountains and his lifelong relationship with the Sierras. this body of work, an artistic project spanning decades, is his gift to future generations - in other words, us - of imaginative tools so that we might be better able to emotionally sustain the angry optimism needed in fighting to bend this drowning world out of its dystopian trajectory.

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the urgently uncomfortable question posed by 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 seems to be: given the social support/friendship/community each of us has in the present, is that (or could that become) sufficient (or at least a major component of sufficiency) for each of us to truly meet disaster and death? I call this question urgent in a personal sense because none of us can really be certain when disaster or death will finally arrive in our own lives: after all, maybe tomorrow - or maybe an hour from now, or maybe next week - will finally be the moment that a plane crashes into my apartment, or a car runs a red light while I’m walking across an intersection, or the long-overdue big San Andreas Fault earthquake causes me to be crushed; these things cannot be predicted or fully controlled⁴, so I would like to have lived right this moment being able to say that I’m glad I finally got to live - to truly live - so that right now I’m ready to leave without fear (even if future-me should discover that my mind is not quite so fearless in the actual moments of death), or at least without wasting my final moments of consciousness being totally consumed by terror and despair.

I also call this question uncomfortable because it seems to me that the public comments on this track so far (especially on YouTube) have avoided engaging this question. at best, they’ve danced around it: Bevibel's review of this track raised the parallel question about whether art could really help us to truly meet with disaster. my response/extension to Bevibel's argument is a challenge to myself: if we accept the position that art is more suited to nonmaterial dimensions of life than to the very urgent material needs, then might art - and, just as importantly, art-making - at least help all of us to enter new subjectivities which, like the subjectivity forged by Kawakami Hajime (described below) amidst the disaster he met, make us strong enough to throw our entire being at truly meeting and working against these enormous systems of oppression? might art guide us into, and through, a realistic depression from which we might then be born⁵ as fully alive humans who can respond with our full depths to these depressing times? on the art-making side of this challenge, I don't yet have any concrete observations from my ongoing personal experiment, so I can’t draw any settled conclusions about taking material action. but I can already report that my in-progress art project is what led me to an encounter with the examples of Kawakami and other people who stared down the overwhelming disaster that was Imperial Japan, is what broke the shell of my long silence, is what allowed me to begin to face the troubles I have caused other people (though I still have a long way to go), and is what introduced me to Buddhist ideas which have now coalesced into the reading I captured below of two music videos which are all about truly meeting disaster and death by truly living⁶. and, most importantly, those ideas carried me out of my latest long period of wanting to isekai myself⁷. so that’s the art-making side of this challenge so far. on the art side of this challenge…well, let’s see where this review takes us.

I can attest from my own past two years (or, rather, ten years? or, rather, twenty years?) that this question about social support/friendship/community can be uncomfortable enough to lead one to eventually doubt everything about oneself⁸ and fall into a path towards cruel pessimism/optimism, into and beyond a limit-situation of losing oneself and leaving a shadow of...some other kind of subjectivity, one which I suspect could only have revealed to me in the course of art and art-making. given such risks to our current personhood, it's entirely understandable if we were actively avoiding serious engagement with the question posed by 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥. and yet the historically persistent question about how to truly meet disaster - a question which each of us must ask ourselves if we don’t want to take the coward’s way out (to reuse words from Bevibel’s review of the track in making a different but perhaps related point) from being confronted with this question - will continue to remain as urgent as ever.

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following Melissa Anne-Marie Curley’s discussion (in her 2017 monograph, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination) of transwar Japanese thinkers who developed modern reinterpretations of Shinran (1173 - 1263)’s religious thought⁹ as a philosophical resource to oppose the Imperial Japanese state, we might see in this question (the one about truly meeting our present disaster) an echo of the conditions which Marxist economist Kawakami Hajime (1879 - 1946) confronted. as a political prisoner in an Imperial Japan which was moving towards an ultranationalist+militaristic totalitarianism acting to crush all possibility of truly human life, Kawakami spent his time during incarceration developing an account of “意識そのものを意識 / ishiki sono mono o ishiki / consciousness of consciousness itself” (which is how he defined “宗教的真理 / shūkyōteki shinri / religious truth”, in opposition to religion) as a path of liberation from religion and as a mutually-supporting complement to Marxism. by developing this understanding of an earlier self-guided pre-incarceration “特異な宗教的体験 / tokuina shūkyōteki taiken / strange religious experience” he had undergone¹⁰ - a subjective experience which he described as his first extinguishing of the ego, leaving the newfound subjectivity of having become only an “公器 / kōki / instrument” of “天下 / tenka / the world”, he secured an interior world of peace strong enough that he successfully resisted the state’s attempts at using religion to coerce him into renouncing his political ideology (and therefore accommodating the totalitarian state’s demands) throughout his incarceration. he succeeded in this even when so many of his fellow Japanese communists were (very understandably) broken by the same carceral conditions of isolation from their social support/friendship/community. Kawakami’s life during and after imprisonment seems to suggest that, even if the possibilities for action become so constrained that action is confined to one’s inner world, there is always something to fight for. he demonstrates that it is possible to sustain such resistance as one way of truly meeting disaster, a path of living as a true human being: an instrument of the world which fearlessly and defiantly refuses to break under the machinery of oppression despite all reasons for fear and despair.

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I think 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 examines the possibility of social support/friendship/community (together with the communal dimension of art-making, as depicted by the scene from the YouTube playback of a section of the track until the nuclear apocalypse, but also through the IRL act of publishing this track itself) as the source of strength for truly meeting disaster and even for truly dying. is it sufficient for that goal? or, at least, how much can it help? in my reading (and in saying this I start to notice the existence of significant not-yet-examined implications about the personal history I bring as a reader to this reading), I see an ambivalent response to this question. I think the track achieves this ambivalence by blurring ironic humor with sincerity and by blurring disappointment with commitment, in:

• lines such as “everybody hates me!!! ...but I love you. even when you’re really mean to me and call me ‘stupid’”, “the sweetness I once felt is gone”, “but I want to 4give!!”

• the ending section, which says: “and even as the bombs go off / as you say some stupid shit, / I’ll listen, too.”

• the sharp parody of various idiosyncrasies in Line Rider artmaking today, combined with the directness of the video’s description (partially quoted below).

perhaps this track’s use of irony can be traced by ancestry¹¹ to those tracks it critiques for failing to be artistically vulnerable, those tracks which speak in a seemingly sincere voice while failing to support that sincerity with vulnerability¹². the failure being critiqued by this track is a symptom of neglecting the possibility of poetry¹³ (a medium of physical rhythm¹⁴, both spatial and temporal) in Line Rider (also a medium of physical rhythm, both spatial and temporal). as September writes in the video description of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥:

words are also something to be treated thoughtfully: the line between writing something that is meaningful and something that fails to be meaningful can be razor-thin. [...] sometimes people overlook how we can use symbolism and metaphor in Line Rider to emotionally show¹⁵ people things instead of just telling them those things.

and we might also see this critique reflected in this track’s parody of how some tracks, too scared to truly live by leaving a track of footprints of artistic self-examination, may instead indulge a desire to cram themselves¹⁶ with hollow visual non-sequiturs attached as floating nonsymbols-masquerading-as-symbols to certain words in their song lyrics (but maybe this is too harsh. as I say this it sounds too harsh.¹⁷):

speaking as someone who only rarely tries to use irony-based humor because of my own lack of skill/confidence about pulling it off successfully, I imagine that it may be quite tricky to craft a deployment of ironic humor which critiques a lack of vulnerability without in the process also undermining the critique itself. this sounds like it might be even more difficult if the critique is delivered as a parody built on works exhibiting that exact lack of vulnerability being critiqued. I wonder if the trickiness of such a use of irony might have (consciously or non-consciously) contributed to Bevibel’s initial reaction as captured in the sharp phrase “coward's way out” in their review of the track; and to MoonXplorer’s reading of the “literal depiction of duck tape” (shown in the screenshot above) as simply one among “some nice pictures”.

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we might compare the use of ironic humor in 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 to the utterly sincere joy and melancholia of two other music videos about what friendship means for the possibility of truly living (and thus also for truly meeting disaster and truly dying) in a disintegrating world. the first one, korean comedian/idol band SEVENTEEN's August 2023 release 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- (Ima -Even if the world ends tomorrow-), features lyrics such as (translated from Japanese to English):

the joy of encountering tomorrow
after journeying today.
this whole feeling is so lovely.
if the final night
of the world
wеre to come,
what would I be able to do for you?

[...]

our last dance
and last chance
even if the world ended tonight,
I just want
to cherish
our “now”.

these word-Daffodils are accompanied by visual shots which cut back and forth between the past “now” (D-1, one day before the end of the world) and the present “now” (the final night). I'm not fully sure why watching this music video hits me so hard. I suspect it’s a combination of its utter sincerity, its juxtaposition of sincere joy with sincere awareness of death (and therefore of sincere awareness of separation), its musical chord progressions, and the question implicitly raised by the music video: in this irreplaceable moment, this finite “今 / ima / now”, are you truly living? I think these are the artistic elements which make 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- speak to me very differently compared to 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥. to me, the latter track feels most pointed in rejecting a cruel optimism while the former video feels most pointed in rejecting a depressed pessimism (being convinced that one is doomed, and spending all remaining moments unable to enjoy that remaining life) and perhaps also a distracted optimism (being convinced that one’s life can be extended by taking actions which sacrifice the possibility of enjoying the remaining moments of a life which might be in reality actually be extremely limited regardless). because of my twenty years of relationship with suicidality and my deep familiarity with depressed pessimism as a teenager, my own reading here will probably end up being more attentive to the rejection of depressed pessimism than to the rejection of distracted optimism.

if we read the music video for 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- following the order of shots in which they appear in the narrative (rather than, say, ambitiously trying to construct a chronological order by somehow unshuffling the narrative order and thereby undoing the video’s choices in structuring subjective time to develop a relationship with “now”), we might see in the plot a progression which starts from people collectively panicking and running through a burning world into a high school gymnasium designated as a shelter from the sky falling down and which then rises to a commitment to truly live and truly die by rejecting depressed pessimism and distracted optimism. initially, the legible banners in the gymnasium say things like “you will be safe here” and “survive the end of the world”¹⁸ / “emergency shelter”, and people are fearfully rushing around inside as civil safety volunteers try to maintain safety:

the narrative moment of turning away from depressed pessimism and distracted optimism and choosing to truly live by truly dying (in other words, to truly die by truly living) is introduced to us as we (following the SEVENTEEN member shown above) vicariously encounter a wall, titled something like “最後の瞬間、私たちが叶えたいことは / saigo no shunkan, watashitachi ga kanaetai koto wa / in our final moments, what we want to achieve is…”, of post-it-note life wishes. many of these appear to be written by children whose futures are uncertain¹⁹ but/and who wish for things like “pass university”, “see the Northern Lights in Iceland”, “have a family”, “watch a sunset”, “plant flowers”, “stay up super late”, “nature hike”, and “learn how to surf!”. there are also many child-like sketches, depicting scenes such as spending time with family, eating, and riding a paper airplane:

the act of posting these wishes together, for everyone to see together, is an act of connection, vulnerability, and acceptance of the possibility of dying with these wishes left unfulfilled in a conventional sense (though perhaps the act of naming these wishes and accepting the possibility of either their fulfillment or their loss could be considered the only reliable way to fulfill them, just as the act of truly meeting disaster when it comes could be spoken of as the only reliable way of escaping disaster). we also saw the content of these wishes reflected in the first half of the music video (before we were introduced to the high school gymnasium), with SEVENTEEN’s members doing things like staying up late, throwing a paper airplane, and dancing a bed of flowers into bloom around a truck; in this way, these artists live as a reflection of, and a reflection in, the dreams of the people around them.

and with so many of these post-it notes written in the voices of children (even though we had only seen adults in the hectic scenes of the gymnasium), perhaps we adults are being encouraged to face the world as if children meeting and loving the world for the first time²⁰ again and again in every single moment - to live the childhoods we were/are denied. one of these post-it notes is picked up and read by the SEVENTEEN member we’ve been following as our stand-in character in the gymnasium; according to Google Translate, this note says something like:

enjoy this moment without running away²¹

at this very moment, the scene lighting shifts and the aspect ratio changes to fill the screen. now everyone inside is truly living this fragile “now”, facing each other warmly, cheering each other on, and holding various banners and signs such as “keep the warmth of the sun in your heart”, “大切な今 / taisetsuna ima / precious ‘now’”, “挑 / take on the challenge”, and “戦 / match/competition”. while people were previously running fearfully in all directions, now they are throwing their entire being into helping each other to wholeheartedly face this shared difficulty in life which would otherwise be overwhelming. they celebrate as SEVENTEEN’s members run joyously to a finish-line ribbon and cross it into the open exit doors (which open into an emptiness of overwhelming light, perhaps the light of life and death, perhaps the death and life of inconceivable potentiality, perhaps the potentiality of the blank canvas and empty page, perhaps the empty page and blank canvas of a full “now”, perhaps the “now” of creative emptiness-activity) as they are showered by pieces of confetti shaped like flower petals (which I am tempted to read as cherry blossom petals):

whether we live or die, shouldn’t we truly live (i.e. live a true and sincere life as human beings granted the opportunity to adorn and appreciate each moment we receive, rather than waste it on a false life clinging to cruel optimism, cruel pessimism, depressed pessimism, or distracted optimism) now, so that we are ready to truly meet each disaster whenever it arrives, to truly die whenever death arrives? but such possibilities may be difficult for us to imagine.

after the movement into this brilliant light, the music video’s shots are constructed and sequenced (out of chronological order) as if the SEVENTEEN members who were in the gymnasium are exiting it in order to be with their bandmates who were outside of the gymnasium (though a more symbolic reading could be that walking into the white void instead signifies walking into the subsequently-depicted memories of togetherness from the previous day, and walking to meet disaster). this family, these artists, choose to reconnect²² (whether in narrative life or in memory) and reunite outside in order to watch, memorialize, and appreciate their time together all the way to the very end.

and we can tell it’s the end because the words “The End” are literally written on a background billboard in complete sincerity²³ as the group members set up and pose for a group picture while the sky falls. then the group picture scene is replaced with a rendering of its recording as a hazy tape projection, a retrospective memory, a subjective bridge across time and space:

in this music video, SEVENTEEN’s members choose to truly meet disaster and truly die by truly living as an expression of grateful joy at every single “now” they are able to share together with other people right until the very end, running towards and then walking into the end instead of falling backwards fearfully into the end. and (both through including the crowd in the gymnasium and through the act of publishing this music video with this narrative) they are inviting us to join them in this way of living the strange little gift (to quote September’s review of Branches / Jade’s April 2022 track Mount Eerie) that is “now”. I can’t help but wonder if part of the emotional force of this message comes from the representation of physical togetherness (just like in Jade / Branches’s February 2024 track 人がいます (There Are People)) of these humans who are, after all, descendants of beings who had first lived and died in close physical presence with each other through challenging circumstances from before human prehistory. this contrast makes me aware of what I now recognize as a loneliness in the ambivalence of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥, that the nuclear explosion is experienced in front of a computer with not a single physical body visible in the world. this isolation is just like in Andrew Hess’s November 2022 track Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 and also like in a previous Ethan Li’s February 2021 track A Fleeting Life: both are tracks about meeting death, and both tracks mirror the isolation in which so many people died during the first two years of the COVID pandemic. perhaps that kind of loneliness has implications for how we might approach social support/friendship/community in our question about how much it can help us to truly meet disaster, and whether we are condemned to meet death by fearfully trying to take the coward’s way out by studiously avoiding facing down the issues at hand too directly. from How Much Bolder Could You Be?:

more people than ever live alone, more people than ever live in really small groups, have almost no support system. and this is even before COVID and it’s the nature of wage labor, long commutes, really expensive housing, lack of child care.

[...]

the emotional conditions of isolation, I think, lead to burnout. when people²⁴ talk about like doom scrolling or getting really lost in very exhausting entertainment technology that they’re spending all their time watching TV and playing video games and they feel really bad inside, but they’re like, I also just need to get away from it all. they’re not finding a way to have a resilience activity that makes them actually feel rested, but instead it’s kind of draining and numbing them.

that’s all to me about like, oh gosh, we all really need more friends to talk to about what we’re mad about, what hurts, we need more spaces to grieve together. isolation is making the conditions more burn us out. so, I think there’s a lot of pieces to that and all of it, the solution is some kind of collective action or connection to others.

connection to others? joy in togetherness?? gratitude??? maybe these lofty goals sound too hard for us to reach. after all, who was it that quoted the following words (from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning) in the video description for the December 2022 track The Name Engraved in My Heart (刻在我心底的名字)?

indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude. in his poetry, Ross Gay gives thanks to small moments in his life: tasting the “velvety heart” of a fig, drinking cold water cranked from a rusty red pump; he even gives thanks to his ugly feet, though when they're bare, his feet make him so self-conscious he digs “his toes like twenty tiny ostriches into the sand.” to truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. it is happiness, I think.

to be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. but whose are these? not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I'm like this because I was raised wrong - browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. thank you for sacrificing your life for me! in return, I will sacrifice my life for you!

I have rebelled against all that. as a result, I have developed the worst human trait: I am ungrateful.

…oh right, apparently it was some miserable “Ethan Li” trapped in a painful past and a fearful future, unable to imagine how it might feel to sprawl out into the light of the “now”, unable to even make sense of Ross Gay’s language of living.

so instead of futilely trying to run up the cliff above us to grasp the light of connection, joy, togetherness, and gratitude, maybe our (my) only option is (was) to instead accidentally sneak up on those feelings from behind by walking backwards, tripping over the edge of the canyon below, and falling to find ourselves (myself) caught in their grasp all the more.²⁵

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let’s continue walking backwards here by further developing our reading of fear in the time of disaster. the tonal arc I see in the visual content of 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- is one of turning from being totally consumed by anxious fear to being - even with reasons for fear - joyfully settled in gratitude: a gratitude for every single “now” together with - and supported by - other people, as I described in the previous section, and as I will discuss in the next section’s analysis of this theme’s further development in a subsequent music video. but, like, maybe gratitude is hard - so in this section we’ll turn our attention to fear and to the space between fear and gratitude.

to see how the initial anxious fear is represented, let’s rewind time back to the start of the video. the montage throughout the first half of the video (until the extended gymnasium sequence I showed with my screenshots above) interspersed shots of SEVENTEEN’s members looking lost or hurried, surrounded by uncertainty, with shots of them having fun and recording memories, and with shots of them back to facing reality after their parties are over:

this initial montage sequence makes it easy to read the partying as a way for SEVENTEEN’s members to anxiously distract themselves from their newfound awareness of future death and loss, just like the hurried movement by them and the people around them feels like a obviously anxious response to this same awareness of future pain.

I can’t help but read a similar kind of fear and anxiety from 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥’s ambivalence between irony and sincerity and disappointment and commitment (which I had described in the previous section); from its use of YouTube content production/consumption as an anxious way of being distracted from - and an anxious way of engaging with - the possibility of imminent death; from its unsettling sound effect for the nuclear detonation at the end; and from its words which pulse with a very sincere undercurrent of fear - with many such words positioned right before an immediate swerve into words of cruel optimism as part of the track’s ironic critique of such cruel optimism:

• “every single one of us is sad”

• “I don’t think any of us have ever been happy”

• “everybody hates me”

• “things are fucking horrible and there’s no hope”

• “life has lost all meaning to me”

• “freedom is impossible”

• “we are caught in a cycle of love & despair with no end in sight. truth is dead.”

• “we are powerless before systems beyond our comprehension”

• “do you ever wonder if you might just be a fundamentally broken person?”

• “words do nothing and the world is burning”

• “as the bombs go off”

the fears embedded in this despair are very real kinds of fear, and 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 is (through its veil of irony) asking us to face the fact that we feel fears like these: right now, we may be feeling anxious and afraid of death, of disaster, of leaving behind people who depend on us, of losing people we care about, of losing the world, of causing harm to other people, of threats to our well-being, of all the uncertainties in this life, of isolation, of not being able to connect to other people, and/or of so many more things. when we then turn from these fears to become absorbed in thoughts about these fears - thoughts like “my life is hopeless”, “I have no future”, “there’s no point in continuing to live”, “I guess I have friends over the internet, but I don’t have any friends IRL…isn’t that depressing?”, “I’m such a screw-up”, “I’m worthless”, “why did it have to be me?”, “nothing I do will make a difference”, “I’ll never be enough”, “I’m trapped in this life”, “I don’t know how to be happy”, “I don’t know how to love”, “I’m too cowardly to escape”, “all I ever do is run away from my responsibilities and from accountability”, “the fact that I feel this way must mean that I’m a broken human being”, “I’ll never be able to truly communicate”, and “the world is just going to get worse and worse” (to name just a few examples from my personal experiences which seem to find some resonance with the above quotes and other words from 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥) - at that point we’re no longer really facing those fears, are we? in walking this path I was trapped in a psychological hell of my own creation, unable to truly live or to truly die. this kind of depressed pessimism is a totally understandable coping strategy in a similar way that cruel optimism is a totally understandable coping strategy - a way to escape our fears by avoiding the emotional risks of facing down the issues at hand too directly, an escape of creating suffering as a distraction. in my case, “getting incredibly depressed” served as a perverse way to avoid facing those issues “too directly” because such depression was a known quantity compared to the unknown risks of the fear-inducing difficulties, and this form of self-abuse was a trap I was unable to exit by my own self-power, even with years of therapy. I was clinging to the illusion that this difficulty-filled life was at least something under my control and calculation, hanging on as if to the edge of a deep cliff below me. this kind of clinging is a particularly human way to avoid facing down the deep limitations of our abilities to control the difficulties we’ll inevitably face in the future, as well as our present difficulties anchored in an unchangeable past of anguish. for me, I was only able to let go when my strength was exhausted and I was introduced to stories of people²⁶ who had been similarly stuck in despair and yet were freed specifically through their process of collapse. and so I sincerely hope for anyone currently trapped in such thought patterns to encounter plausible paths towards ways of coping/living that are less of a self-perpetuating hell and less of a self-reinforcing obstacle to connecting with our deep humanity and with the possibility of truly living.²⁷

in addition to the kinds of difficulties which are inevitable with the condition of being alive and which we may instinctually react to with fear, right now we may also be feeling afraid as an instinctual reaction to the wielding of fear by other people who seek to control us (such as with intimidation tactics and fearmongering and punitive disciplining, as we have been seeing throughout these past few weeks or months or years or decades or centuries or millennia). we can see the controlling power of fear in the horrible ways that imperialism, capitalism, so many religions, and other structures/ideologies work to divide, subjugate, and/or materially exploit us by actively creating so much paralyzing fear and anxiety in our lives that many people in this world are left feeling so powerless before these systems, so isolated, and so unable to truly live.²⁸ such systems and institutions also maintain their power by creating other fears which, rather than paralyzing us away from action, instead motivate us to take selfish actions (such as, but certainly not limited to, when we say some stupid shit) which create senseless cruelty, selfishness, and/or harm - leaving ourselves and each other worse off and less able to push back against these systems and institutions. and to make matters worse, we (I) sometimes (often?) create those fears ourselves (myself) and then act in senseless ways in the absence of external incentives for such actions, perhaps sowing seeds of isolation for ourselves (myself) and others in the process. it seems to me that creation-of-fear and turning-away-from-fear are two of the major forces crushing us into puddles of cruel optimism, cruel pessimism, depressed pessimism, distracted optimism, etc., and all sorts of ego-centered harmful behaviors, thus forestalling the possibility of truly living and truly meeting disaster. is there an alternative? here’s what Dean Spade says in How Much Bolder Could You Be?:

so, I want to feel the whole thing. I watched the Democracy Now! headlines this morning and saw the people who are experiencing such severe bombing in Ukraine. and I tried to feel it. I felt for all the people who’ve been bombed there now, and people who’ve been bombed elsewhere and people in my family who’ve been bombed. and just people in communities I care about who’ve lived through [bombing]. but I just was like, “Dean, be in this reality. do not turn away.” people in my community are living in cages within miles of my home. feel that. live that. people are living, sleeping outside and then being swept away again out of the park.

the bombs go off

and the world is burning.

in facing this reality, we (I) must also deeply reflect on how we (I) are living in this moment. we collectively commit immense wastage of irreplaceable life each time our society condemns someone to live and die in fear, each time it callously acts to deny someone a moment of truly living as an equally valuable being in this life, and each time we (I) turn away from facing the reality of such violence. we (I) must also face the ways we (I) behave harmfully out of selfish fears, creating so much suffering for ourselves and so many difficulties for each other. there is a deep connection between our society and our hearts (my heart) through greed, hatred, and wrongheadedness which drive us (me) to drunkenly treat other people as if they were trash to us (me) the moment we (I) feel afraid about threats to our (my) ego-selves. for the sake of everyone we lost, everyone living today, and everyone to come, may we (I) aspire - even with our (my) countless limitations and imperfections which we (I) cannot shed as long as we are conscious, or rather specifically because of those limitations and imperfections - to let go of this present way of living which so foolishly disrespects the true goldenness of such limited and imperfect beings as every single one of us in this world. in that aspiration, we can open ourselves up to the possibility of reorienting ourselves (myself) towards the horizon of a life in deep grief/regret/responsibility which treats other people more humanely (especially in every moment that the sound of each other’s goldenness looks covered by the clouds of selfishness in the shallow and partial touch of our/my self-centered minds), a way of living which cherishes the equal preciousness of every single “now” of every single life. as How Much Bolder Could You Be? continues:

people are living, sleeping outside and then being swept away again out of the park. feel that, so that I can also feel deep appreciation for how beautiful it is when I get to be with people who want to fight this or a deep connection to when I’m writing letters with somebody who’s locked behind bars and we’re finding humor together or pleasure. I’m having this one pen pal relationship where we talk about ducks all the time.

just like, feel the pleasure of the resistance work. [...] I’m just like, I’m moved by people’s bravery, by their boldness, by their spirit of resistance. people trying so hard and beautifully to give out a lot of stuff to people in crisis. stories of the ways we’re all rescuing each other in ordinary and big, bold ways. I need those stories to remind me to be brave when I feel scared and to remind me that is worth it.

for the rest of our lives we will unavoidably face this continuous thunderstorm of difficulties and reasons for fear. our ethical responsibility to ourselves and to each other is to discover every way that works for us to fully face each fear and to loosen (wherever possible) the all-consuming grip of the suffering we create in reaction to those difficulties we fear; and when we feel fear, we might do our best towards finding ways for our fears to be properly cared for so that they don’t explode or leak out quite as frequently and quite as uncontrollably into new harms that we inflict on ourselves and everyone around us. and then, each time we bump up against our limitations in doing our best, we might fully face our imperfections and continue doing our best in aspiration to do even better as a way of facing the impossibility of being even remotely close to perfection. perhaps we can even imagine this as an expression of gratitude in response to receiving each moment as another possibility for truly living and for facing/recognizing/embracing each other as our deeply imperfect and troublemaking and apologetic selves in this violently turbulent world where life is so uncertain and so vulnerable to being ripped out without even a moment’s notice.²⁹ I think becoming filled with aspiration towards this way of living is a significant part of what it means to be on a path towards becoming a person who can truly meet the disasters in our lives.

and the world is burning
but still, you listen.
and even as the bombs go off
as you say some stupid shit,
I’ll listen too.

from How Much Bolder Could You Be? again:

I don’t know where this is going. none of us know where this is going. it’s not looking good, but what do I want to spend the rest of my life doing? being fully alive, being with other people, being in it together, taking risks, being really, really caring, learning to love people even if they annoy me. learning deeper love. having that move me more, feeling the pain and grief of loss with others instead of just being alone in my kitchen with the headlines, feeling like I need to numb out and turn away towards celebrity gossip or something. it’s like how do I just be deeper in this life, despite the conditions? and because of the conditions.

[...] we can’t have the kind of hope that’s like, it’s all going to work out. no idea. I mean, it’s not working out. a bunch of people, like millions of people have died of COVID, it didn’t work out for them the way that I lived through this crisis. and there was this utter abandonment of, and I would say murder of everybody who is most vulnerable. I need to grieve that. I can’t pretend things are working out. that feels… I feel like I want to be in sober reality with how bad it is and how beautiful human resistance is and how the choices we make right now actually matter a lot about that suffering.

and yeah, all these words are easier said than done. if we’re stuck, let’s just start one lost-child-sized step at a time. one hesitant moment at a time, one fear at a time, one difficulty at a time.

one of these easier-said-than-done steps I mentioned above is to find ways for our fears to be properly cared for. what might that look like? given what I had said above about the loneliness at the end of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 and SEVENTEEN’s togetherness in meeting the end of 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-, I wonder if one strategy - starting within a position of being socially isolated - might be to give our fears some metaphorical good friends and companions: to hold our fears closely together with other non-fear emotions; and to hold our fears together with other people’s fears (which I now realize could be an implicit impulse in 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥’s publication, and which we can see in the communal sharing of wishes in 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-); and to hold our fears together with other people’s sheer existence in this moment; and, at the intersection of these three categories, to hold our fears together with our gratitude for other people’s existence - however emotionally close or distant - in the lives of those of us who are so isolated and so afraid. maybe even gratitude for being embraced specifically in such a condition. indeed, this seed of possibility sprouts in 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 via the sincerity that peeks out from behind its irony and demands to be noticed when that track names all sorts of people (including people who have not always been friends or friendly, people who’ve said some stupid shit, and people who, like me, ran away when times were tough - people who somehow might nevertheless be embraced in the brokenness which feels like a fundamental aspect of living as a human being) while saying:

I just wanted to stop the track here a bit & talk a bit about how much i appreciate y’all - the Line Rider community - for being my friend and for being there for me when times are tough.³⁰

we also saw some aspects of these themes of gratitude and commitment for each other in 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-’s tonal arc of attending to fear and anxiety and then also attending to gratitude and joy and connection and togetherness as a way of becoming able to boldly face death and disaster. maybe this is one way to begin a personal answer to the questions which How Much Bolder Could You Be? raises:

I have a lot of conversations, literally every day, [with] people who are like, they’ve given up on some level, but it’s often that they’ve given up on themselves. I’m like, how much bolder could you be? people who are like, I’m afraid of getting in trouble, I’m afraid of taking more bold action. and it’s like, we all are instilled with those kinds of fears by living in a society, going to schools, being in families. is that the end of the story? or does anything make you feel braver? when was the time when you were courageous? so thinking about how could we all be more bold in our actions? how can we be more bold than what we could imagine? if we’re in pain about something, how could we go from that pain to also being like, what do I wish was in place?

[...] people, I think, in the U.S., are very demobilized. we’re more mobilized than we’ve been at some moments. there’s some really beautiful stuff happening, but not anywhere near where you need to be to stop the war machine, to stop the prison [&] policing [&] immigration enforcement systems, you know? so what would it take? and I think that it’s like a deep dig in each of us. where did their programming get inside me and make me think I come to a screeching halt when I’m overwhelmed by how bad things are? instead of, oh, I look for support. I break my isolation. I connect to others. we get wiser together. we can find ways to move again together when we’ve [...] gotten stuck.

for those of us who’ve descended into such a deep point of stuck despair that we struggle to recognize, accept, or seek out efforts within our personal relationships to support us or to help us break our isolation, is there any possibility of being freed from this hellish suffering? or are we condemned to continue meandering through life like lost ghosts, unable to make meaning out of our past pains, lacking a clear view of who we’ll be in the future, not even understanding why we continue our aimless wandering in the “now”?³¹ I was unable to see a plausible path out of this state of my own life until a metaphorical light was shined in my inner world of melancholia to reveal people from before and within my life who had suffered greatly and who would continue to suffer right alongside (or, rather, within) my heart - entirely idealized representations carried in my 心/heart-mind of people I had never met and people no longer in my life, and my connections to them. this illumination enabled me to face the shadow which accompanies this grief, a feeling of gratitude for these people’s existences and for the ways they - perhaps even without realizing it - had touched my life. the deeper the grief I fell into, the clearer the gratitude which held me. and those inner connections, having been planted as seeds within me all along, have begun sprouting into tentative expressions of thanks in my newfound (and newly refound) connections with other people.³² in turn, these external connections have started giving me an appreciation of the ways that countless people continue to touch my life, and their presence has begun moving me to better express this gratitude in the way I live, however imperfectly I do so.

let’s develop this more concretely by pushing 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-’s narrative arc a bit further, maybe off the edge and into the canyon of despair.

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to my post-election surprise, SEVENTEEN subsequently released another music video on November 11 2024, 消費期限 (Shohikigen), as a direct (and, at least for me, intensely melancholic and grief-inducing) sequel to the visual narrative of 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-. this video makes a move which reminds me of the first novel of Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy - and also of Robinson's 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, a near-future cli-fi optopia in which a bad future has already arrived but people continue fighting to truly live, by bending civilization towards a less bad future-future. each of these works collapses the hyperbole of the so-called “end of the world” by showing us how humanity continues in the so-called post-apocalypse - continues in a precarious vulnerability to death, continues in a state of loss, continues in drastically constrained horizons for flourishing, and continues with so many reasons to be afraid (in other words, just like the present day but even more extreme) - after the catastrophic disaster which had been imagined as “the end”. in other words, this music video shows that the world has in fact not ended in the catastrophe, but instead has turned into a post-disaster [intensified] dystopia.

at the risk of nitpicking, I believe there is a meaningful difference between the major catastrophe of a post-disaster and the “end of the world” of an apocalypse as understood in the English language: life in the dystopic post-disaster is (or at least can be) about survival and resistance. in contrast, the apocalyptic end of the world (at least with the saturation of the English language and of American culture with particular conceptions of time and history rooted in Christianity³³ and the doctrinal weaponization of fear through such temporalities by hegemonic forms of Christianity) quickly becomes elided with ideas about the absolute impossibility/futility of human activity, and with perhaps the salvation of a select few (Using Primitive Tools to Build a Bomb Shelter?!) alongside the eternal damnation of all others. the end of the world is an absolute/Absolute’s end of history from the perspective of the present looking into our future, while the catastrophe is an extreme disaster within history from the perspective of the future looking into its past. I think it is also significant for this distinction that 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- is written like “even if the world ends tomorrow” (hypothetical/not-yet-knowable/potentially-avertible) rather than like “as the world ends tomorrow” (prophetic/revelatory/inevitable): the end of the world is not guaranteed (much less guaranteed to be in the immediate future), and it does not change the imperative to truly live now:

even if the world ended tonight,
I just want to cherish our “now”.

narratively, 消費期限’s music video picks up with an unresolved message in 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-, which had ended with a post-credit shot of a fortune cookie message saying “bad luck today, do it tomorrow” where the word “tomorrow” had been scribbled out with a handwritten “now”. each day before a catastrophe and each day after a catastrophe brings a new difficulty which we must fully face by truly living now, not tomorrow - and it is of utmost urgency that we must truly live now, not tomorrow, by fully facing that difficulty now. 消費期限 opens with this same fortune cookie message on a day when yet another disaster will strike, and then we see walls of post-it notes of unfulfilled life wishes in a space station - on the outer hull of which is written the text “dreams left behind” - where the members of SEVENTEEN are living, with nobody else present³⁴. we also see the clock pass from D+999 to D+1000 after the so-called “end of the world”. the band members have decided to spend their days operating virtual-reality holodeck vaults - one per band member, in rooms labeled “消失した願いの部屋 / shōshitsu shita negai no heya / room of lost wishes” - where the members have been fulfilling the post-it note wishes, one-by-one, written by everyone from 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-. if some of the people who wrote post-it notes had died with the previous video, then they live on in SEVENTEEN through the way the SEVENTEEN members live their remaining lives - living in deep commitment to the people who had recorded their wishes for truly living. or, if we instead decide that these absent people had been separated onto other space stations rather than killed by the catastrophe, then they remain subjectively present despite their objective separation from SEVENTEEN through what the SEVENTEEN members do with these post-it notes. either way, SEVENTEEN maintains their connection to (and subjective togetherness with) their humanity by truly living in intimate awareness and appreciation of each individual person they are no longer physically together with, and in the presence of the inner togetherness (through the subsequent lives of the post-it notes and the SEVENTEEN members as dreams left behind) - i.e. the “we”ness - of all those individual members of humanity.

the sense of deep love, appreciation, and togetherness-in-absence can also be felt in the song lyrics which complement the video’s narrative about renewing the presence in our lives of people who are no longer physically present:

walking home slowly at sunset
to a dark house.
you’re not here,
but somehow, it feels warm.
saying “tadaima”³⁵
and “itadakimasu”³⁶,
even saying it alone:
because of you, it’s okay.

[...]

countless pasts and futures:³⁷
even if I can’t see them, it’s okay,
no matter the day, if we can look at each other
and smile.

in the rain that suddenly started,
I can hold you in my arms.

the first wish we see being fulfilled by SEVENTEEN members in the video is “何もしないて一日中とろゴロゴロすること / nanimoshinaite tsuitachi chūtoro gorogoro suru koto / doing nothing and lazing around all day” - which is, after all, an important way to savor the spaciousness of our lives when done in complementarity with other activities, and a precious experience too often denied to us (sometimes also denied by ourselves). the second depicted wish is to plant flowers, but this doesn’t quite work beyond the home ecology and gravity of planet Earth,³⁸ and the flowers eventually die - just as all beings must eventually die:

experiencing this loss, the SEVENTEEN member who planted those flowers hugs one of his bandmates/friends for comfort. grieving together, holding each other’s suffering, and making ourselves intimately vulnerable to the deaths of other beings (both human and non-human): these are all fundamental dimensions of living as a true and real human. and it is in being embraced for our suffering that we become able to face - and pass through - life’s difficulties. this embrace is crucial for the possibility of truly living and truly facing disaster.

we then see a third wish, previously rejected in a flashback as being impossible to fulfill - “永遠に幸せでいること / eien ni shiawasede iru koto / to be happy forever” - now be picked up from a pile of notes in the hallway by these two friends. they hold that note and the dead flowers while they watch wishes being blown away through the hallway (perhaps from a rush of wind caused by a structural failure in the space station as it begins to fall apart, which would suggest the imminent death of these two friends) as the video’s aspect ratio changes again to a taller format:

perhaps facing death together with someone you care deeply about and together with the dreams and lives of everyone who touched your life, sincerely holding those we lost to death, is indeed a way to achieve eternal happiness. in other words, to truly live by truly dying, to truly die by taking proper care of our fears and by maintaining a connection with people to be grateful for in the face of such difficulties. and even if we’re physically separated from those we care about - such as being physically isolated at the moment of death, as we’ll see for another SEVENTEEN member at the end of 消費期限 - we can die in subjective togetherness with everyone who had died before us, with everyone we had engraved and carried in our hearts so that they might live on through us³⁹ like ocean waves which have returned to the ocean⁴⁰ of life.

similarly, after the end of our human subjectivity upon death we might live on in posthuman form through other people as the literal notes and drawings⁴¹ we’ve left behind for them and as some of the metaphorical breezes and sunsets and spring rains and seaspray of their minds, living through them in the ways we had touched their lives just as our lives had been touched by so many people who are no longer physically present today, people who might not even have personally known us - people who remain only in our memories and in our awareness of their lost wishes, of their dreams left behind, of their hopes for each of us to live happily and freely even with (or because of) so many understandable reasons for being totally consumed by fear and despair in the depths of countless difficulties. in this way, beyond the limits of ego-bound consciousness and material separateness they/we pervade the world as the objective and subjective ripples of their/our past interactions with us/others (and as the ripples created by those ripples, and so on), these posthuman ripples of the universe’s activity which touches the lives of every single future being - just like how that metaphorical butterfly continues to touch us beyond its death through its contribution to objective causes and conditions of weather patterns on the other side of the world. thus, when we die we can die not only in togetherness with everyone before us but also in togetherness with everyone after us⁴² - in mutual recognition and togetherness with the entire world, just like the continuity of an ocean wave with the ocean.

although it may feel rather melancholic to be constantly living with loss in such an immediate and enormous way as carrying the losses of the entirety of humanity⁴³, this is also a way of accepting the nature of living in a world with death, a way of fully facing the troubles we have inherited, a way of truly meeting the disaster that has come. and as SEVENTEEN’s members live towards the past, they aren’t simply stuck in the past: in fulfilling lost dreams (such as a birthday), they are truly living into the joys of every moment⁴⁴ - both in the holodeck vaults and in the rest of the space station - and they are living not in a way that is entirely consumed by self-focused anxieties and pleasures but rather in a way that is centered on everyone else who lives on through them and everyone who lives together with them. in other words, living through a deep sense of gratitude together with grief together with joy, held together by their recognition of their togetherness with humanity. and they are recording these experiences for each other in their present and their future (and, we might say by extension, for us as viewers of the music video in their past, for those of us who left our dreams behind for them), in a continuation of the same kind of recording they had done (with the exact same camera) during 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-:

recall that the post-it notes were written in response to the question of “in our final moments, what we want to achieve is…”. this music video shows how these notes were left by our fellow human beings (and, in extension to IRL, by SEVENTEEN and the music video’s production crew) as a gift to all survivors of the disaster in 消費期限 (and, by extension, to us as viewers of the music video). what is the meaning of this gift? it’s a present to SEVENTEEN (and, by extension, us), an encouragement and a path for truly living in the present moment with their (and, by extension, our) full presence, living under the conditions of their (and, by extension, our) dystopia. what is SEVENTEEN’s (our) responsibility as receivers of gifts like these, profound gifts which cannot be repaid to the giver? if we feel grief/gratitude as recipients, then we are called to share these gifts with everyone else in a way that renews and strengthens the bonds which tie us together into a kind of “Immeasurable Life”, that “we”ness of the ocean in the ocean waves, that posthuman activity of water ripples, that inner togetherness⁴⁵ of everyone (everyone who came before us, everyone who nurtured us, everyone who will follow after us, everyone we ever passed by, all humans, animals, trees, dewdrops, sand grains, winter breezes, ocean waves, rocks, rivers, brittle star cities, clouds, sunsets, cloud-forming microbes, stuffed bears, thunderstorms, backpacks, cherry blossom petals, grapes, fleece sweaters, spring rains, facemasks, campfires, gay poems, potted flowers, translated subtitles, ducks, water bottles, planets, neighborhood cats, soybeans, calling frogs, summer cicadas, open-source software dependencies, moons, bicycles, toaster ovens, song lyrics, forests, dairy cows, chopsticks, bits of rubble, rocky foothills, books, book-wrapping cloths, autumn ginkgo leaves, bluesky shitposts, house spiders, walrus flotillas, galaxies, onenju, hummingbirds, post-rain mushrooms, shoes, polar bear cubs, bamboo groves, gut bacteria, art films), so that we might all⁴⁶ truly live and thus truly die together as each other’s ancestors and as fellow travelers of the universe. in doing so, perhaps we might open ourselves up to becoming instruments of the world, recipients of the gift of the unfathomable strength and support of the world to truly meet every disaster we encounter and to truly die in acceptance of the inescapable breaking of our bodies and our cherished memories when we die:

消費期限 shows SEVENTEEN’s acceptance that they must bid farewell to each other as the space station of holodeck vaults finally falls apart in a catastrophic cascade of system failures.⁴⁷ they grab each other’s hands, they embrace each other just as they are, they rest into the eternal and unbreakable bonds of Immeasurable Life exactly by accepting and holding each other’s suffering and impending deaths.

through this part of 消費期限, the lyrics are as follows:

my love for you,
my feelings for you:
they have no expiration date.
they stay like this forever.

and the final SEVENTEEN member in this music video⁴⁸ writes this space station’s final post-it note, leaving us (the viewers of the music video) with the final wish of SEVENTEEN and all their collaborating artists who had joined together to make this video:

みんな幸せに、
今の感情が 永遠に 続きますように

min'na shiawase ni,
ima no kanjō ga eien ni tsudzukimasu yō ni

may everyone be happy,
may this feeling of “now” last forever.

embraced in the sincere wishes of everyone who had come before him and had gifted him their deepest dreams as a present for him to truly live after the catastrophe, he renews those aspirations by making them his own. this is his way of expressing his eternal gratitude and love to everyone for enabling him to truly live - however briefly - with such difficult circumstances. and in writing this aspiration as a vow in the presence of the stars (and the presence of us, viewers of the music video in his pre-catastrophe past) as his witnesses, he now fulfills for us that long-inherited aspiration “to be happy forever” which had initially been dismissed as impossible to achieve. through the sincerity of the vow he has thus received with his entire being, he becomes able to truly die by living and dying with his remaining moments in the embrace of the Vow.

and as 消費期限 ends and alarms blare and explosions fly behind him to spark a warm firelight which quickly grows and blazes the entire screen into a brilliant and momentary flash of “now”ness,⁴⁹ he floats in perfect peace. about to burn, he does not need to fear the rapidly-approaching crash and dissipation of his ocean wave because he has entrusted himself to (by accepting his continuity with) the eternal Vow-ocean of inner togetherness for every single one of us to attain true and real happiness. through his death he becomes the aspiration of unconditional love and eternal acceptance for us - just as we are⁵⁰ - as the sincerest gift from every single “now” of Immeasurable Life’s activity in “we”ness. as he truly dies, he smiles serenely to us, the recipients of his Vow-life for the joyful and fearless feeling of his “now” to last forever in each of us through the working of Immeasurable Life as embodied in art.⁵¹

in this music video’s dystopian world, so full of loss and grief and difficult separation and the ghosts of lost dreams and so many reasons to be fearful and despairing, this group of artists embodies a way to truly live and truly die, facing every moment - in joy and in grief - with total sincere acceptance of that exact moment. carried by the compassionate activity of Immeasurable Life in the “we”ness of everyone who sustained their lives, however directly or indirectly. living and dying in gratitude to - and for the sake of - everyone they ever encountered; and everyone else, too. doing whatever they can for each other and for everyone they had become separated from, for everyone ripped apart by catastrophic disaster and by the daily difficulties of ordinary life.⁵² living fully, with the full depths of their hearts. this is the message SEVENTEEN offered to us as a gift for trying to live through this year - an aspiration for us to truly live so that upon death we can truly die, and a vision of one way to do so through the embrace of inner togetherness. just as SEVENTEEN joyfully accepted the cheering of everyone in that gymnasium in 今 -明日 世界が終わっても- on their journey to truly face disaster, to truly live, and to truly meet death - so they gratefully cheer me on through 消費期限 in my aspiration to truly face disaster, to truly live, and to truly meet death⁵³ - and so this essay is a Daffodil-flock of my dying/living aspiration to gratefully cheer you on to truly face disaster, to truly live, and to truly meet death.

⁵⁴

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as the band members die in 消費期限’s music video, they live forever into the time before their narrative existence by reaching back and breaking through the mundane boundaries of temporality. rooted in their “now”, they reach back to us through art in order to enter and embrace our “now”, inviting us to participate in the fulfillment of the eternal Vow that everyone may attain the deepest serenity and joy and that the preciousness of our fragile “now” may last beyond time. in this way, the music video rises above fear and dystopia to manifest a timeless call of “we”ness and utopia. as Kim Stanley Robinson writes in Dystopias Now:

dystopias are the flip side of utopias. both of them express feelings about our shared future; utopias express our social hopes, dystopias our social fears. there are a lot of dystopias around these days, and this makes sense, because we have a lot of fears about the future.

both genres have ancient lineages. utopia goes back to Plato at least, and from the start it had a relationship to satire, an even more ancient form. dystopia is very clearly a kind of satire. Archilochus, the first satirist, was said to be able to kill people with his curses. possibly dystopias hope to kill the societies they depict.

for a while now I’ve been saying that science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. one lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. the other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem. together the two views combine and pop into a vision of History, extending magically into the future.

by definition, dystopias today seem mostly like the metaphorical lens of the science-fictional double action. they exist to express how this moment feels, focusing on fear as a cultural dominant. a realistic portrayal of a future that might really happen isn’t really part of the project - that lens of the science fiction machinery is missing. The Hunger Games trilogy is a good example of this; its depicted future is not plausible, not even logistically possible. that’s not what it’s trying to do. what it does very well is to portray the feeling of the present for young people today, heightened by exaggeration to a kind of dream or nightmare. to the extent this is typical, dystopias can be thought of as a kind of surrealism.⁵⁵

these days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through. vicarious thrill of comfort⁵⁶ as we witness/imagine/experience the heroic struggles of our afflicted protagonists - rinse and repeat. is this catharsis? possibly more like indulgence, and creation of a sense of comparative safety. a kind of late-capitalist, advanced-nation schadenfreude about those unfortunate fictional citizens whose lives have been trashed by our own political inaction.⁵⁷ if this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness.

on the other hand, there is a real feeling being expressed in them, a real sense of fear. [...] dystopia is surely one expression of that feeling of detachment and helplessness.⁵⁸ since nothing seems to work now, why not blow things up and start over? this would imply that dystopia is some kind of call for revolutionary change. there may be something to that. at least dystopia is saying, even if repetitiously and unimaginatively, and perhaps salaciously, something’s wrong. things are bad.

probably it’s important to remember the looming presence of climate change, as a kind of techno-social disaster that has already begun and which will inundate the next couple of centuries as some kind of overdetermining factor, no matter what we do. this period we are entering could become the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and the first caused by human activity. in that sense, the Anthropocene is a kind of biospheric dystopia coming into being every day, partly because of the daily activities of the bourgeois consumers of dystopian literature and film, so that there is a nightmarish recursive realism involved in the project: not just things are bad, but also we are responsible for making them bad. and it’s hard not to notice that we’re not doing enough to make things better, so things will get worse too. collective political action is necessary in order to make things better; fixing the problems will require more than personal virtue or renunciation. the collective has to change, and yet there are forces keeping the collective from seeing this: thus dystopia now!

it’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. you need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. for every concept there is both a not-concept and an anti-concept. so utopia is the idea that the political order could be run better. dystopia is the not, being the idea that the political order could get worse. anti-utopias are the anti, saying that the idea of utopia itself is wrong and bad, and that any attempt to try to make things better is sure to wind up making things worse, creating an intended or unintended totalitarian state, or some other such political disaster. 1984 and Brave New World are frequently cited examples of these positions. [...] as Jameson points out, it is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many. this observation provides the fourth term of the Greimas rectangle, often mysterious, but in this case perfectly clear: one must be anti-anti-utopian.

one way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. it’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. in avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism - we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it.

perhaps optimism and pessimism are ways by which we displace ourselves - and our fears - into an imagined future and then project from that future back into our present, never quite truly meeting our “now”⁵⁹. Robinson here seems to be floating the possibility that we might instead let go of both moods as a way of truly meeting the imperative to act now, rooted in the present, and thereby act towards the future. but if we’re consumed by fear and despair, how could we possibly act now and face our present disaster head-on?

I think 消費期限⁶⁰ offers a nurturing replacement for optimism and pessimism and a way to hold our eternally hungry fear and despair without being consumed by them, a replacement which might actually fill this unfathomable void within us.⁶¹ I’m referring to that all-embracing Vow which - acting through art and life - extends forwards and backwards from every single “now” to permeate our timeline. in 消費期限’s Vow I see an activity which moves to meet us here-and-now, just as we are, by holding us in an unconditional embrace for us to rest into, as if we were a clenched fist⁶² which eventually⁶³ notices itself naturally relaxing and opening up within the firmly gentle warmth of an open hand.⁶⁴ in 消費期限’s path to that Vow I see the illumination of a compassionate relationality we might eventually allow ourselves to rely on without hesitation,⁶⁵ together with a path of realizing and expressing a spontaneously-blooming and ever-deepening gratitude through (and for) the strange little gift of becoming somehow enabled to truly live. and in 消費期限’s presentation of that Vow I see an activity which seeks to help us develop an existential fearlessness to truly meet the fires consuming our “now” from inside and out - and perhaps this kind of fearlessness, in not being conditioned on optimism or pessimism, can be a way to transcend both moods so that we might act in the present, even with the fears which wrap around us. in retrospect, I also see echoes of various aspects of this kind of Vow-activity for my life from - for example - the Korean gay/queer film 안녕, 내일 또 만나 So Long, See You Tomorrow,⁶⁶ the Japanese BL series 永遠の昨日 Eternal Yesterday, the Thai BL series นิทานพันดาว A Tale of Thousand Stars, or various tracks by Branches / Jade such as You Are the Sunset, Don’t Worry⁶⁷, 人がいます (There Are People), Line Rider, My red little fox, and review of EATEOT Stage 3 review / maybe also actually a review of my desire for Ethan to review my review of their review of EATEOT Stage 1? (though my experiences of these works might not be especially generalizable, given how much the uniqueness of every person and every work of art affects the relationship which emerges between that person and that work of art). in other words, to me these art-Maples are stories of the ways we’re all rescuing each other in ordinary and big, bold ways [, ...] stories to remind me to be brave when I feel scared and to remind me that is worth it. and now I can see a similar kind of reminder in🔥Words Do Nothing🔥’s representation of fear and isolation and appreciation and hesitation, in the strange little gift of that track.

by providing the kind of embrace I see in these works, perhaps the activity of art could become to awaken each of us - in an embodied sense that shakes the very core of our existence and transforms our feeling of collective responsibility to all beings in this world - to work together in dislodging the present dystopia and averting future dystopia. in other words, art as a being (and a becoming) whose activity leads us to gratefully take action in service of those distant worlds which we must imagine for the possibility of becoming them:

from Introduction: Feeling Utopia, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

(by José Esteban Muñoz)

queerness is not yet here. queerness is an ideality. put another way, we are not yet queer. we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. we have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. the future is queerness’s domain. [...] we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations.

we need art for this imagination. we need art who⁶⁸ fills our inner void with the strength to truly meet disaster after disaster amidst all our uncertainties and unknowns. art who makes us more bold in reaching for the horizon, in building bridges from here to there, in reorganizing our social relations. from How Much Bolder Could You Be?:

just like letting ourselves be bold in our imaginations. how else would that plan ever happen if [...] a lot of people didn’t take time to try to dream it and try to imagine it? which is true of every bold plan. so that kind of bravery and having faith in ourselves instead of like, oh gosh, that’s so overwhelming. I’m just going to stop thinking about it. or I’m just going to get stuck in [...] overwhelm, numb, sad. and then the third piece is like, how bold can I be in what I can share? there was a young person in my community coming out of juvenile prison, a person from the LGBT community and needing a place to stay. and it’s like, why is it so hard for anyone to imagine they could let this person into their house?

what have we been told about the kinds of control we need to have about our housing space? it’s not like it’s easy to have a stranger come live with you and a teenager and all those things, of course, but people do it. so how bold can I be in how I can imagine being a more flexible person or being more able? and not all of these things are for everybody, but just like, where am I giving up on myself too soon? that is I think a question that these times require of us. where would I take more risk or where would I be more loving or compassionate or where could I be more willing to share or where could I be more imaginative? and there’s no right, correct single path of action for any of us to be doing in this.

but there’s just a lot that needs to get done. we need a lot more people to join our movements and to be doing mutual aid with each other. and what’s stopping each of us from finding our place in that or from taking that next move? and I think some of it is these messages we’ve been given to give up on ourselves and to give up on imagining things being different and what it would take, what’s between here and there [...]

[...] during crisis and disaster, people shockingly become capable of more than they thought, and they collaborate with people they didn’t think they wanted to collaborate with and they take risks they would never have guessed they would take to share and save each other.

and so I feel like it’s like, this is our nature, I think, and there’s some really bad programming in the way of it, but we can do it. we would do it. if the more you felt that house was on fire, the more you would do it. let’s just do it now. you know what I mean? it’s on fire. [...] there’s some ways some of us are slightly buffered from some parts of that fire, but the time is now to skill up about how to love people we don’t like, how to work across difference, how to be flexible, how to be principled [...]. and it’s like, there are not going to be better conditions for doing it, you know?

we need art who transforms us amidst this burning house in the same way that Vietnamese people and American people were transformed by Bodhisattva Thích Quảng Đức, who manifested the call of the Name⁶⁹ Nam mô A Di Đà Phật (the Vietnamese translation of the Sanskrit form “Namo Amitābha Buddha”, which is one of the linguistic forms of the awakening of Immeasurable Life in Pure Land Buddhist traditions) as a “now”ness-Daffodil from an immovable point of profound silence while maintaining calm stillness as the world of absolute truth intersecting with our burning world throughout his 1963 self-immolation,⁷⁰ who “so loved the world”, who loved existence, that he gave his life for it (to quote September’s review of Mount Eerie), who in acting through Immeasurable Life continued after the end of his human life to share himself as a posthuman gift to us: a living mycelium of resulting events which ended the brutal authoritarian dictatorship of Ngô Đình Diệm, and an open-handed voice calling to us within every thought-moment of Nam mô A Di Đà Phật/Nāmó āmítuófó/naa1 mo4 o1 mei4 to4 fat6/Namu Amita Bul/Namu Amida Butsu. we need art who - like an echo of that voice - illuminates us into an awakening of boldness as it burns forever in a brilliant light of wisdom and compassion, of unfathomable love and gratitude beyond words.

I’m moved by people’s bravery, by their boldness, by their spirit of resistance. people trying so hard and beautifully to give out a lot of stuff to people in crisis.

perhaps we need art who helps us imagine utopias so magnetic that we might eventually gift to future generations even our entire existence, doing so at the very risk of our current subjectivities which are so lost in an aimless wandering of isolation. art who becomes us and works through us to bring all beings into utopia, even after life and death break our bones and shatter our bodies. art who helps us feel the utopic irresistibility of truly human life, who reaches out to lift us toward the horizon so that we might joyfully reach back within this world to participate in the timeless Vow of bringing everyone along with us.

i love you to the moon &
(by Chen Chen)

not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don’t forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let’s wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other
(so good) on the moon, let’s love
the moon
on the moon

and we need art as suicide-prevention and life-illumination for this crisis, and the previous crisis, and the next one. art who holds our fears and our despair and our fundamental brokenness in the supportive hand of Immeasurable Life. because we need the effort of every single person alive right now in order to halt the machines and systems chewing each of us like bits of rubble. we need every single person to truly meet this disaster in their own unique way according to their own unique circumstances. because we can only become utopia if we become utopia together with every single being.

being fully alive, being with other people, being in it together, taking risks, being really, really caring, learning to love people even if they annoy me. learning deeper love.

so we need art to help deepen each of us into people who can truly live and truly die⁷¹ by truly meeting disaster, who can truly die and truly meet disaster by truly living in the middle of our dystopia. art to help each of us access such possibilities in this very moment. as Will Clark writes in Queer Desires, Queer Disagreements:

the hope is to [...] make a claim for a future in which the negative affects of the present could transform into something we have not yet imagined.

“there is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation,” James Baldwin argues in Nobody Knows My Name. “the challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”

and we need art who awakens each of us to our own unique encounter with whatever particular form is manifested in our particular lives by Immeasurable Life, that universal activity of “never-giving-up-on-us-ness” which rises from below the unfathomable oceans within each of our hearts in order to meet and transform those greedy systems beyond our comprehension which aim for us to give up on ourselves so that they can crush us more completely from above. we need art to guide us towards flowing through the boundless and fearless strength of great-compassion-beyond-our-limited-selves in working to materially reverse these crisis conditions. guidance to become people with an unshakeable inner world which provides restfulness within every single “now” of acting, like bits of broken rubble stacked into forests of gold,⁷² to do everything we can towards saving the burning world around us while knowing that the fires will continue beyond our best efforts and our final “now” of consciousness, while knowing that our activity must - and will - continue through generations not yet born.

from Maple Sugar Moon, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
(by Robin Wall Kimmerer)

there was a custom in the mid-eighteen hundreds of planting twin trees to celebrate a marriage and the starting of a home. the stance of these two, just ten feet apart, recalls a couple standing together on the porch steps, holding hands. the reach of their shade links the front porch with the barn across the road, creating a shady path of back and forth for that young family.

[...] surely those two were sleeping up on Cemetery Road long before the shade arched across the road. I am living today in the shady future they imagined, drinking sap from [Maple] trees planted with their wedding vows. they could not have imagined me, many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of their care. could they have imagined that when my daughter Linden was married, she would choose leaves of maple sugar for the wedding giveaway?

such a responsibility I have to these people and these trees, left to me, an unknown come to live under the guardianship of the twins, with a bond physical, emotional, and spiritual. I have no way to pay them back. their gift to me is far greater than I have ability to reciprocate. they’re so huge as to be nearly beyond my care, although I do scatter granules of fertilizer at their feet and turn the hose on them in summer drought. perhaps all I can do is love them. all I know to do is to leave another gift, for them and for the future, those next unknowns who will live here. I heard once that Maori people make beautiful wood sculptures that they carry long distances into the forest and leave there as a gift to the trees. and so I plant Daffodils, hundreds of them, in sunny flocks beneath the Maples, in homage to their beauty and in reciprocity for their gift.

may we allow ourselves to rest on the inescapable grasp of “we”ness beyond our own lives, the gift-grasp of transformation into a “we” who find and create deep nourishment in spending every single present moment to offer gifts for every single being, possibilities for truly living in this very “now”, and the next “now”, and the next. may everyone be happy. may this feeling of “now” last forever. may we become the calling voice of utopia, the beckoning embrace of the open hand, the Daffodils and the Maples - together.

Namo Amida Butsu.

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rating of the idea of the arrival of the end of the world: anti-utopian.

rating of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 / rating of reviews of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥: I appreciate the [Maples] you [plant], and [I aspire to humbly and respectfully receive with gratitude all the gifts you offer us]. Line Rider is a conversation between Line Rider artists, and [I am awestruck that] your work has prompted me to [find Daffodils] in that conversation.

rating of “now”: today is another difficult day. it just so happens that it’s our first time living today, that in this suffocating world I still found little things that made me smile. this world is precious and precious again just as we are right now. just as you are right now. as a kid who has grown up a lot. and the world is burning. be in this reality. do not turn away. it just so happens that it’s our first time living today. it just so happens that we might never see each other again in this life. even if I can’t see them, it’s okay. we can sing anywhere with our voices cheers to you in which every day is more brilliant, let’s go by the speed of queer zest, are you packing your bags yet, let’s paint this world, which has become charred, with a pure bright heart, like a kidult.

rating of the idea of the end of the world: thus have I heard. we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. during crisis and disaster, people take risks they would never have guessed they would take to share and save each other. I’m moved by people’s bravery, by their boldness, by their spirit of resistance. we’re all rescuing each other in ordinary and big, bold ways. survival - living on despite everything, limping forward despite injury - is worth talking about. such a responsibility I have to these people and these trees. their gift to me is far greater than I have ability to reciprocate. all I know to do is to leave another gift, for them and for the future, those next unknowns who will live here. Namo Amida Butsu.

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you get verbose when you’re not saying what you really want to say. erase all those words and make a new start from the point where you felt you’ve said everything.

ā yí, I don’t know if we’ll be able to see each other again. are you still in Beijing, alive?|
millions of people have died of COVID. countless pasts and futures.
this story is dedicated to their memory.
this story, this echo, this lifetime.
the mask, the Vow, the Name.
Namo Amida Butsu.

1. I was introduced to this interview through a quote shared by Mariame Kaba in a Bluesky conversation.

2. speaking from extensive personal experience, the only way I can describe this is to say that it’s like being trapped in a personal hell.

3. from Isabel J. Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole:

kids were put in a series of holes and were summarily killed. the deaths were reported on public television and were dissected badly on social media through a variety of angles.

like: “this kid is a metaphor for the third world and for the slave labor that mines the rare metals that go into iPhones and for the boys who cross the border to work in the fields while they’re underage and the girls who are sold into marriage to pedophiles.”

like: “this kid is a reincarnation of a Bodhisattva and is perfectly happy to experience suffering for the sake of her fellow man, so really it’s like, totally fine that the kid is suffering.”

like: “why do we care about this kid so much, it’s just one kid?”

like: “the kid is a SYMBOL of the LOWER CLASSES and how they SUFFER.”

like: “no, seriously, where does the kid come from? my mom says she saw a kid disappear off the train, that they’re kidnapping kids off of public transit.”

like: “if we put a pulsating mass of tissue cultured from the cells of an Omelan child, and put that in the prison, would that have the same effect, in the same way that lab-grown-meat is still technically meat?”

by now everyone (except the newscasters) had stopped counting dead children, and nobody has any questions for the murderers anymore.

4. though, as the pedestrian car death example illustrates, there certainly are structural factors - also not under any one person’s control - which make different people vulnerable to different levels of risk. more on this in the 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 section.

here I also mean to explicitly disavow the logic of petitionary prayer which is advocated by so many religions.

5. to borrow words from Mari Ruti in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 5, The Uses and Misuses of Bad Feelings):

for [Lee] Edelman, [the humanist] subject dies in a suicidal act; it is undone by jouissance. for me, in contrast, this subject dies so as to be reborn into new processes of becoming and humbled-yet-still-viable agency. [...] the rebirth I am referring to is not akin to the Christian notion of resurrection by divine grace but rather to “revolt” in the [Julia] Kristevian sense of regaining enough psychic aliveness to be able to rethink, revise, and rework what does not work. it is also related to [Lauren] Berlant’s description of our belabored efforts to break our cruelly optimistic attachments to forms of life that “don’t work.” and it is conceptually connected to [Ann] Cvetkovich’s attempt, in Depression: A Public Feeling, to pursue the pathways through which depression can sometimes - though not always - generate tenuous yet life-sustaining modes of creativity. [...] I recognize that there are situations where a categorical No! to the status quo brings enormous relief. but, for me, such a No! can only mean something in the context of a life that - beyond that No! - still remains livable (unless, of course, it is uttered for political purposes, as when the subject sacrifices itself for the sake of a cause, as Antigone arguably does).

6. or as Ruti writes in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 3, Why There Is Always a Future in the Future), by, “between the present moment and the moment of death[, ...] meeting the world in ways that are worthy of our passion”.

7. “isekai myself” as in “514”.

8. from The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 4, Beyond the Antisocial-Social Divide):

it is often through circumstantial experiences of wounding that we are brought face to face with our constitutive wounding. if it is the case [...] that we spend much of our time building fantasy formations that allow us to avoid confronting our constitutive lack, then moments when something goes wrong in the concrete texture of our lifeworlds are ones when our carefully constructed fantasies collapse and we have no choice but to stare right into the abyss (in the Nietzschean sense); moments when a painful event scrambles the coordinates of everyday life force us to grapple with the fundamental uncertainties of human life. an excellent example of this dynamic is the failure of love: when we are abandoned by a loved person - a person who seemed to contain a tiny sliver of the lost Thing - we experience two levels of deprivation: we mourn not only the person we have lost but also the promise of wholeness and plenitude that this person represented; our circumstantial deprivation leads us to a direct confrontation with our constitutive deprivation (the lack of the Thing). this is precisely the lot of the melancholic who mourns not only the lost object but also the loss of the fantasy of overcoming alienation; in melancholia, the subject’s circumstantial loss cuts into the wound of its constitutive alienation, causing this wound to bleed anew by deepening it.

9. the innovations for Pure Land Buddhism developed by Shinran and his teacher Hōnen (1133 - 1212) were forged during a time of political and military strife, natural disasters, and social turbulence with the rise of shogunate rule accompanied by a widespread societal anxiety of upheaval and existential doom.

Shinran’s thought underwent a tempering process after he was disrobed and exiled to the outer reaches of Japan at the time, never to see his teacher again. this exile was demanded by the dominant elitist Buddhist institutions because their material foundations were being undermined by Hōnen’s teachings, as described by Martin Repp in Buddhism and Violence in Premodern Japan:

Hōnen taught that faith in Amida Buddha and the calling of his name (nenbutsu) would be sufficient for religious liberation. this implied that offering donations to monasteries or entering celibacy would not produce religious merits. because these two important Buddhist practices constituted the basis of Buddhist monasteries, Hōnen and his followers came in for harsh criticism. subsequently, Enryaku-ji and Kōfuku-ji succeeded in convincing state authorities to punish the new group. in the end, Hōnen, Shinran and followers were sent into exile in 1207 and two of Hōnen’s students were executed. in his work Risshō ankoku-ron (Treatise on Establishing the Proper [Teaching] for the Safety of the Country) Nichiren (1222 - 1282), for example, complained about the devastating economic and social consequences of Hōnen’s doctrine:

the rulers of the nation contributed counties or villages so that the [dharma] lamps might continue to burn bright before the images, while the stewards of the great estates offered their fields and gardens (to provide for the upkeep of the temples). but because of this book by Honen, this Senchaku Shu, the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni is forgotten and all honour is paid to Amida, the Buddha of the Western Land … if temples are not dedicated to Amida, then people no longer have any desire to support them or pay honour to the Buddhas enshrined there; if monks do not chant the Nembutsu, then people quickly forget all about giving these monks alms. as a result, the halls of the Buddha fall into ruin, scarcely a wisp of smoke rises above their mossy tiles; and the monks’ quarters stand empty and dilapidated, the dew deep on the grasses in their courtyards.

this and other cases suggest that the reason for intra-Buddhist violence was not so much a new or a heretical doctrine. the hongaku hōmon teaching could be called heretical because it eliminated practice and transformation, but its representatives were not persecuted because they supported the economic and social functioning of the monasteries. the reason for the violent oppression of the nenbutsu movement was that it endangered the economic support and decreased the monastic membership.

even after the disrobement and exile orders were rescinded, Shinran chose to maintain his exile status in continued estrangement from the Buddhist institutions, instead ministering to his “同朋 / dōbō / fellow” practitioners - individual equal followers of the nenbutsu - in his liminal position of “非僧非俗 / hisō hizoku / neither monk nor layman”.

for the purposes of this review I would summarize Shinran's thought as a religious experience that the moment of fully awakening to the universal condition of being a fundamentally broken & finite person in this fleeting world, this burning house, is exactly the moment of awakening to the universal condition of being already always grasped as-is, never to be abandoned, by the compassionate working of the infinitude of inconceivable reality (which we might call “Immeasurable Life” and “Immeasurable Light” in English, or “阿弥陀仏 / Amida Butsu / Amida Buddha” in the vocabulary of Japanese Buddhism, or “阿彌陀佛 / Ēmítuófó” in Chinese Buddhism); and this awakening is exactly the moment of deeply hearing the call of infinitude with the mind’s ear, for example when (but not limited to) truly intoning “Namo Amida Butsu” as the name and calling voice of infinitude. for Shinran, this awakening resulted in a present experience of joy and firmness (grounded in an ever-deepening self-understanding of being a fundamentally and totally broken person who is saved all the more for that exact reason) rooted strongly enough in hearing the call of universal acceptance in this very moment (and a utopian world of peace) that it enabled him - and religious followers in subsequent generations - to act in the present moment to contest and partially supplant ideologies practiced in a mode of cruel optimism as instituted by politically dominant Japanese Buddhist institutions. this mode of Buddhist awakening, along with the later hierarchical sectarian institutions which Shinran's descendants built around it in ways inconsistent with Shinran’s spirit of egalitarianism, later became a supportive force for the Ikkō-ikki peasant rebellions/rebels - such as the Kaga ikki - against various daimyō of a later shogunate.

10. from Jijoden as translated and quoted in Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination (Chapter 3, Special Marxist, Special Buddhist):

I was able to assign a koan to myself, for myself: “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” should one live one’s life according to these words? and if so, how? this was the koan I assigned myself, and happily I was able to examine it thoroughly, giving it my all. at last by means of making a firm decision to neither sleep nor rest, killing the self by its own power, I was able to see [the answer]. by means of plunging deeply into such a course, I believe I ultimately attained the experience of the moment of Great Death, or the extinguishing of the ego (jiga mekkyaku 自我滅却).

following this experience, Kawakami writes, he no longer worried for himself because for him, “there was no I” - from that point on “this five-foot body was turned truly to an instrument (kōki 公器) of the world (tenka 天下).”

although he takes a passage from the Bible as his prompt and interprets his experience in language borrowed from Zen - a koan practice leading to his Great Death - Kawakami also emphasizes the absolutely personal character of this revelation. he refuses any association with sectarian religion, identifying his understanding of religious truth as purely self-taught (garyū 我流): he assigned a biblical koan to himself and arrived at his realization without a teacher.

11. and if we speak of artworks like sentient beings in themselves, beings with agency and lineage, beings which are birthed into the world, then might we also speak of inherited trauma and mutual healing within those artworks and in relationship with other beings?

12. connecting with the previous section of this review, it seems to me that cruel optimism and cruel pessimism are also coping strategies to avoid truly meeting our existential vulnerability. but they are false/vain/hollow sources of comfort, distracting us from truly meeting disaster as it arrives. they are the opposite of a stable shelter: as we cling to them in an attempt to make life less unlivable, they make truly living all the more impossible for us. we must seek out or create alternatives.

13. from poet Lee Seong-bok as translated by Anton Hur, Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

poetry is what is unsayable. to blurt out what is unsayable is to ignore this fundamental premise.

[...]

this is an anecdote from a film titled The Long Ships. people searching for a golden bell by digging all over an island eventually give up and throw down their hoes. as the hoes strike the ground, they hear the sound of a bell. the entire island has been a bell this whole time. the moment their hoes become useless, the tools are reborn as musical instruments. language, when used in poetry, is something like this.

[...]

keep rolling around words in your mouth like candy. words that butt in, stick, and stain are the best ones.

keep rolling the words in your mouth to make other words stick to them. language seems foolish and a mess, but the only way to escape language is through language. always get ready to transfer onto a word going in the opposite direction. if you come by a pebble in the road, the first thing you should think of is whether you should change the pebble in your pocket for it.

from poet Chen Chen on Bluesky:

love it when souls get leaky and poems happen

14. from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

mount a poem lightly. like it’s a bike or a horse saddle, or a running tiger. you just have to get used to the rhythm from there on. there really isn’t much else for you to do. let the rhythm “permeate” into you.

[...]

try riding the rhythm when you’re writing, like riding the wave. any part that’s too off the mark, you can always cut away later. but the underlying rhythm or “form” in your expression has to be alive. this form creates a pleasing drop, that feeling of released window blinds falling into place. energy comes from resistance.

it’s this “form” that creates poetry; metaphor isn’t what creates poetry. form that’s revealed is superficial and ornamental. it’s like dead branches on a living tree. you’ve got to quickly trim them off.

15. from poet Chen Chen in a post on Bluesky:

increasingly i like to describe the writing i love most as “soulful.” full of seeking. full of reaching for another’s hand. techniques of verbal restraint or seeming coldness serve always an underlying vulnerability and warmth and tenderness (or a deep longing for these)

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

don’t be scared of poetry. write as if you’re whispering intimately to yourself or someone next to you. but remember: half of speaking is silence. don’t forget, also, that in order to say something, you have to say it through something else.

[...]

we wrap our glassware with old newspapers when we move houses. writing poems is like that. if you don’t handle your words carefully, they’ll end up chipped.

[...]

you get verbose when you’re not saying what you really want to say. erase all those words and make a new start from the point where you felt you’ve said everything.

[...]

if you say everything you want to say at once, there’s no opportunity for poetry to sneak in. say it slant. don’t speak directly toward the listener but a little bit off to the side. no direct attacks; use guerilla warfare. they say that if you want to send your golf ball into the nine o’clock direction, you’ve got to hit it not from three o’clock but somewhere between four and five o’clock.

16. and perhaps this aptly describes the way we are raised to live our lives, habitually filling ourselves up so much that we can’t see or hear ourselves (or the world) clearly out of a fear that being fully exposed to this “now” will be intolerable for the way we are living.

or, as Ruti writes in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 2, From Butlerian Reiteration to Lacanian Defiance):

the vast machinery of our commercial culture works overtime to eclipse the Thing’s aura. we are bombarded from all sides by objects - enticing lures - that are deliberately manufactured to shine brightly enough to distract us; in the society of the spectacle, nothing is easier than losing sight of the truth of our desire. against this backdrop, insisting on this truth becomes an ethical stance, making it possible for us to appreciate the preciousness of what we may be culturally encouraged to shun, ignore, or trivialize.

in 2023 I lived 135,056 minutes of my life listening to music on Spotify, averaging 6 hours per day. in 2024 I listened to 109,054 minutes of music on Spotify, averaging 5 hours per day.

17. it’s possible that I just missed the meaning in those tracks because I stopped paying attention because I got bored in the middle of the first watch, and I have no desire to rewatch those kinds of tracks in order to check the fairness of my argument. maybe that’s even harsher, hmm.

…or maybe that is also actually a reflection of my inability to see or hear the world clearly, my fear of facing “Boredom [as] an encounter with the void”. hmm.

18. [here] is the wondrous teaching that will enable you to escape disaster.

19. and I notice a resonance here with Line Rider artmaking…

20. from the official English translation of the lyrics of SEVENTEEN’s 2024 release 청춘찬가 Cheers to Youth:

it just so happens that it’s our first time living today.
and though their hurtful words make us hate ourselves more,
let’s try not to care.
we can sing
anywhere with our voices
cheers to youth.

I get scared when my phone rings.
these days, my heart is easily startled.
I want to be by myself, but I don’t want to be alone.
even I can’t understand myself.

where could my happiness possibly be?
no one can answer that for me.
I talk to my reflection
on my turned-off phone screen,

on my way home today, I’ll tell myself that I did okay,
that it wasn’t easy but it wasn’t too bad either,
that in this suffocating world
I still found little things that made me smile -

it just so happens that it’s our first time living today.
and though their hurtful words make us hate ourselves more,
let’s try not to care.
we can sing
anywhere with our voices
cheers to youth.

my cozy blanket wrapping around with its humble warmth
gives me hope for tomorrow
before I go to bed.

the loud alarm that will go off tomorrow morning:
I hope I will hate it less than I did yesterday.
even in this suffocating world
everything will be fine because I will love myself as I am.

it just so happens that it’s our first time living tomorrow.
and though their hurtful words make us hate ourselves more,
let’s try not to care.
we can sing
anywhere with our voices
cheers to youth.

21. 走了 (zǒule).

22. okay, now I understand more clearly why this music video hits me so hard.

23. and with the emotional weight established by the music video up to here, this choice works for me here in a way that it probably wouldn’t work in any other context.

24. e.g. me for large chunks of 2023 and 2024

25. I personally prefer this over a previous footnote’s quote of Lee Seong-bok (as translated by Anton Hur) that “if you want to send your golf ball into the nine o’clock direction, you’ve got to hit it not from three o’clock but somewhere between four and five o’clock”: I don’t understand golf, so that comparison lands for me like a five-holes-in-two sandpit. or something.

26. such as Shinran.

27. easier said than done, right? in a way, this review is my attempt at describing the path I had found out of the hopelessness of my personal hell, a difficult path that involved being led to face my hell and to accept that I was in hell, and thus becoming freed to look around in this hell and discover that people before me had faced the same hell and that, in gratitude for being shown a path to truly live, they had left me a path to truly live and to start facing death and disaster.

to be precise, this review is the result of the words constituting that path which entered me and are now speaking themselves into language through me.

28. from Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination (Chapter 3, Special Marxist, Special Buddhist):

Kawakami [Hajime] tells us that religion and religious organizations rely on the masses feeling frightened and insecure; they use these feelings to maintain the exploited masses in a state of stupefied despair. and so they insist again and again that the masses are right to feel frightened and insecure. in the Buddhist case, as Kawakami sees it, the doctrine of impermanence asserts that individuals are powerless with respect to their material circumstances (nikutaiteki seikatsu 肉体的生活), and the notion of sin (zaiaku 罪悪) asserts that they are powerless with respect to their moral circumstances (dōtokuteki seikatsu 道徳的生活). but Kawakami thinks that these assertions of powerlessness are lies and we can be liberated from fear and insecurity.

he maintains that our feelings of fear and insecurity have both a material basis and an epistemic basis. the material basis is poverty: “old age. sickness. death. fear of these things is born in large part from the economic insecurity of oneself and one’s family. if one could say that I am confident that my wife and children will never struggle to eat, even when I die, then for many people in the world now, the fear of death would be partly resolved.” the epistemic basis is ignorance: “ignorance (muchi 無知) (not understanding, not comprehending the situation, not being informed, etc.) gives birth to insecurity and fear.” because Kawakami holds that there are two distinct realms of knowledge to be grasped through two distinct methods of knowing, “ignorance” can have two senses for him - an ignorant person might misunderstand the external world of objects, or an ignorant person might misunderstand the inner world of religious truth.

Kawakami wants to say that the masses are experiencing fear and insecurity because of real material conditions in the world: they are suffering because they are poor. organized religion amplifies this suffering by creating a situation in which the masses must find their consolation in an illusion: they cannot address their real material conditions because religion, as a tool of the ruling class, is preventing them from fully comprehending those conditions. this means that if we want to liberate the masses, we need to address those material conditions directly. Kawakami quotes Marx to this effect: “to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” here transforming objective reality and reaching a correct understanding of objective reality are bound together. we can imagine that for Kawakami the arrival of this kind of utopian workers’ paradise might have seemed a long way off.

but Kawakami also wants to say that solving the problem of ignorance can eliminate fear and insecurity here and now: “knowledge (chishiki 智識) sweeps away insecurity and fear and gives birth to peace (heian 平安) and joy (kanki 歓喜).” here he can only be talking about coming to a correct understanding of mind itself, or consciousness of consciousness. grasping religious truth gives rise to inner peace and joy, transforming one into the kind of person for whom “the death of the five-foot body is not a problem.” this is not to say that anything has changed structurally or socially - poverty remains a problem, economic disparity remains a problem, class exploitation remains a problem. for the individual who has realized consciousness of consciousness, however, the premise upon which religion operates - fear of death - no longer holds. this is not a material transformation but an affective transformation based on an epistemic transformation.

Kawakami finds one expression for this affective transformation in the Confucian Analects: “hear the Way in the morning and it won’t matter if you die that evening.” and he finds another in Shinshū: “the dark clouds and fog open and limitless radiance (kōmyō 光明) shines forth. there great peace (in other words, the settled mind [anjin]) and great joy (in other words, the mind that leaps with joy) are born.” for the proletariat as a whole, the practical benefit of grasping the truth of external objects will be liberation from the sedating effects of belief in religion, enabling them to act toward securing a future free from poverty and exploitation. but for specific individuals, the practical benefit of grasping religious truth will be more immediate: realizing contentment and joy in the present, despite external circumstances.

29. and no, I still haven’t become a person who could be okay facing my parents. but the ice of my 心/heart-mind has been thawing day by day, thought-moment by thought-moment. and I am starting to see a possibility that maybe someday I could be okay talking to my parents, and that maybe someday I could be okay not talking to my parents. that’s more than I had thought possible five years ago when I recognized I had become a glacier that I could not melt by my own power.

I don’t know if my parents will still be alive before I might be ready. I don’t know where they are in this world, or if they are indeed still alive. but I entrust myself to the compassionate activity beyond myself which has been melting this ice for me so that I can truly face whatever the outcome will be, to embrace that “now” without running away from myself yet again.

from 人がいます (There Are People) by Branches/Jade:

I can’t go back and tell you it’s okay not to hide or lie,
but I can tell you this now.
i can’t change the past, but
i can change our future.

Namo Amida Butsu.

from the Pratyutpanna Samādhi Sūtra as interpreted in a hymn by Címǐn Huìrì 慧日慈愍 as quoted by Seikaku as quoted by Shinran as translated by Dennis Hirota et al. in 唯信鈔文意 Yuishinshō mon'i:

I will come to welcome each of them,
not discriminating at all between the poor and the rich and wellborn,
not discriminating between inferior and the highly gifted,
not choosing the learned and those upholding pure precepts,
nor rejecting those who break precepts and whose evil karma is profound.
solely making beings turn about and abundantly say the nembutsu,
i can make bits of rubble change into gold.

30. and perhaps by closely reading this sincerity, we might say that 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 is really doing its best to face down the issues at hand as directly as it knows how. maybe that track is not as direct as this review. but unfortunately this review is so direct that it’s, like, nowhere near the possibility of poetry.

31. I owe this framing to Takashi Miyaji.

32. which, in my personal case, is a path leading through a sangha of 御同朋 御同行 ondōbō ondōgyō in the sense described by Enrique Galván Álvarez in The Chanting Frog: Speciesism and the Possibility of Communication in Issa’s Haikus:

Shinran speaks of the sangha or Buddhist community as one of “fellow travellers” (dobo dogyo) without room for hierarchies; all beings are equally selfish and are equally the object of Amida’s compassion.

33. for a comparison between conceptions of history and time in Abrahamic religions with Pure Land Buddhism, refer to Whalen Lai’s Buddhism as a Historical Faith: Answer to John Cobb in Pacific World Journal, Fall 1991 (New Series Number 7).

34. perhaps other people are/were living in other space stations? the music video doesn’t explore this question.

35. “只今 / ただいま / tadaima / just now [returned]”

36. “頂きます / いただきます / itadakimasu / I humbly and respectfully receive with appreciation [for the support of all beings whose lives enter my life in nurturance through this meal]”

吃完才說：
頂きます，
凡夫味道！

“I humbly receive”
only after eating…
my bombu taste, ah!

(from now, 2025-03-17)

37. from The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 5, The Uses and Misuses of Bad Feelings):

the melancholic’s grief, in short, arises from the fact that he will (now) never know what he could have had with the person who has been lost; it is the loss of future possibility - as well as the promise of plenitude and wholeness that the loved object tends to contain - that is so painful. a loved person’s death, for example, is devastating in part because we know that we can never have another conversation, another interpersonal encounter, with that person, so that what has been lost, along with the person, is the bit of life we could have had with this person.

38. and we might see here a parallel with the fundamental unsustainability of generation starships against the entropic forces of ecology without a home planet that is depicted in Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora.

39. and this point reminds me of 人がいます (There Are People) and its approach to art-making for such togetherness, as highlighted in Bevibel’s review of that track.

40. I owe this metaphor to Ken Tanaka.

41. as Jade wrote in review of EATEOT Stage 3 review / maybe also actually a review of my desire for Ethan to review my review of their review of EATEOT Stage 1?:

UTD said “now every time I watch The Name Engraved in My Heart I’ll appreciate that bear. I’ll be like, wow, that’s the bear”, and I’m like, yes, this is how I feel: that’s the bear we hug when we can’t sleep at night, the bear that understands us better than our family or the people at school, the bear that affirms the hope of children when their worlds are cruel to them.

and when I read some of the reviews I apparently wrote in the past about Line Rider tracks, I’m like, who the fuck was this person that gathered words which speak so directly to my difficulties in my present situation, and how is it that they are also named “Ethan Li”?? how was that a real person? and how am I supposed thank them for leaving me those words after they took the coward’s way out by running away from themselves into oblivion, leaving all the responsibility for their guilt and shame and past wrongdoings - and also their helpful words - to this hungry ghost that is me???

42. I believe such a conception of death - of death as a transition into a posthuman mode of presence and compassionate activity in the world - can be nourishing in its orientation toward a this-worldly activity-network of interconnection and togetherness, especially as an alternative to both 1) the cruel optimism which often wraps around other-worldly spiritual beliefs in individualistic “souls” as immortal identity-substances persisting beyond death; and 2) the lonely individualism which tends to haunt material-substance-only beliefs in total personal annihilation upon death. as September had put it beautifully in her review of Branches/Jade’s Mount Eerie:

a key insight within posthuman and ecofeminist thought is that the objects in the environment around us are participatory and - either in a literal/panpsychist or socially constructed sense - are lively, active participants in human and cosmic relationality. [...] if we step out of our limited human perspective, into the cosmic expanses of “deep time”, stone is no longer solid: it is fluid, flowing, and alive. [...]

compassion and love for others even after we are gone, after time has eaten us up, feels like such an incredible statement on the human capacity to love existence, to love reality, even as it is cruel to us. in the 2020 track You Are the Sunset, which Branches names as the sequel to Mount Eerie, [Phil] Elverum describes another such example of this capacity for love even after we return to dust:

a week after you died a package with your name on it came
and inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
and collapsed there on the front steps I wailed
a backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
you were thinking ahead to a future you must have known
deep down would not include you

instead of (fearfully or suicidally) anticipating death either as the transition to eternal soul-bound agony/bliss or as a total oblivion of static nothingness which cuts us off from suffering/joy, we can greet death as a posthuman reunion with a creative emptiness-activity full of boundless potentiality in this world, death as a future joining with that emptiness’s dynamic activity which enters our “now” from past and future beings so that we might truly live now by planting seeds of love which sprout for others in the compost of our deaths. this dynamic view of emptiness is - I would argue - a more life-affirming/death-affirming soil to ground the joy and humility which September had found from a sense of “all-nothingness” in the ending of Mount Eerie:

and oblivion will come for the universe, too - somehow, bizarrely, our universe has a beginning, and it will have an end, a heat death. there will be a period of time several orders of magnitude larger than the current age of the universe where only black holes will exist, each and every star having long been snuffed out. eventually, even the black holes will dissipate into nothing. and then there will be a long, long all-nothingness. as a child, these things used to terrify me - when I was 10, one of my greatest fears was the threat of black holes. another one of my fears was that one day, a little long while from now, the sun would swell up into a ball of fire and consume the earth. these things no longer scare me; they make me happy. they fill me with shivers and joy and humility. the same shivers and joy and humility I feel when the universe of Mount Eerie zooms out even further, as it drifts further and further away - and disappears entirely into the white nothingness of Line Rider’s blank canvas.

END

but “the white nothingness of Line Rider’s blank canvas” is not an “end” or a “long, long, all-nothingness” of the extinction of everything. quite the opposite: the nothingness on display here is the undifferentiated emptiness of artistic beginnings - an emptiness so absolute that it empties itself by calling forth myriad forms into an alive fullness of creativity through its dynamic artistic engagement with us, resulting in the births of such art-beings as “Line Rider tracks”. the creative fullness of blank-canvas emptiness-activity feels more convincing to me as a possible source of joy and humility than the barrenness of a mere negation of being, a negation which loses the “canvas”ness of the blank canvas. from Bret W. Davis’s overview of the Kyoto School of philosophers:

if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of being (i.e., at negation of the illusory independent substantial reality of things and the ego), then the idea of “emptiness” is not itself emptied. that would leave us with either a pessimistic nihilism or, ironically, a reified view of emptiness itself. these are what the Buddhist tradition calls “emptiness-sickness” (Japanese: [空病] kūbyō). true emptiness must be understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness. hence, in Mahāyāna we find an explicit return - through a “great negation” of a reified misunderstanding of being - to a “great affirmation” of a non-reified understanding of being. emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood. [...]

[...] Nishitani [Keiji] explicitly employs the Mahāyāna term “emptiness” (śūnyatā, [空,] kū) in his attempt to think a way beyond both the exacerbated attachment to being and the reactive nihilism that together plague the modern world. Nishitani writes as follows: on the one hand, emptiness can be termed “an absolute negativity, inasmuch as it is a standpoint that has negated and thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the transcendence-through-negation of all being.” in this sense, “emptiness can well be described as ‘outside’ of and absolutely ‘other’ than the standpoint shackled to being, provided we avoid the misconception that emptiness is some ‘thing’ distinct from being and subsisting ‘outside’ it.” on the other hand, then, emptiness is truly emptiness “only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some ‘thing’ that is emptiness. … [true emptiness] is to be realized as something united to and self-identical with being”.

we can reformulate “true emptiness” from this (apophatic) explanation-through-negation instead through a (cataphatic) affirmative expression of its activity: emptiness makes itself known to us through the “inner togetherness” (a term introduced in one of the next few footnotes from Kaneko Daiei via Jeff Wilson) of all things, a snapshot of which is visually represented in Mount Eerie’s zoomed-out vast universe filled with those myriad forms and beings which were generated/embraced together and in relation to each other by Line Rider’s blank canvas within Mount Eerie. the infinite blank canvas (whether of Line Rider or of Google Documents) implies - or rather, necessarily contains within itself and seeks to express - the entire lively universe of all beings in an ever-shifting katamari of mutual self-recognition/all-recognition, of inexhaustibly creative becoming-and-unbecoming-and-rebecoming through interconnected potentiality, of each being embraced just as it is - and in all of its ceaseless transformations - by the entire universe of all other beings/forms/formlessnesses. to fill the nihilism of static non-creation and artistic isolation, the universal inner togetherness within this blank canvas joyfully moves in an endless dance embracing us to co-generate new artistic forms from the flow of life through our own unique knot of ties to other beings. and in embrace of our extremely-human striving toward illusions of our own egoistic substantiality as artists/gamers/dethroners/content-creators, this exact emptiness of the blank canvas also joyfully devours (in order to exhaust) our conscious calculations of drawing/writing something on the screen merely to satisfy our self-aggrandizement - exposing and then absorbing our foolish efforts “like waters that, on entering the ocean, become one in taste with it” (from Shinran’s Hymn of True Shinjin and the Nembutsu from 教行信証 Kyōgyōshinshō (Chapter 2, Practice) as translated by Dennis Hirota, et al.) so that it can open a space for the birth of art-beings who affirm (by reflecting some distant sliver of) dynamic life in its “we”ness and its creative-yet-ineffable “suchness”. this activity of the blank canvas’s “inner togetherness” with the entire universe is another way of approaching true emptiness as something united to and self-identical with being, in contrast to a mere static nihility.

indeed, even as Mount Eerie ends by zooming out from the full universe, zooming out to what September described as “white nothingness”, what follows in the remaining six minutes of that track is not a long, long all-nothingness of annihilative silence but rather a long, long scrolling sequence of end credits filled with myriad drawings and words which affirm life, creativity, and interconnection with other people and other art-beings. thus, in Mount Eerie the narrative of birth and death/rebirth-awakening of an individual’s separate selfhood into the universe’s collective selfhood gives way - as part of a continual movement of transformation through emptiness - to an end-credits meta-narrative of artistic interdependence and “we”ness in motion. such is the dynamic fullness of “true emptiness”/“inner togetherness” as expressed in Mount Eerie, the receptive formlessness of being fully open to our interdependence, the emptiness of being filled by the movement of endless potentiality from beyond our finite ego-selves, the blank vacuity so full of artistic form and mutual recognition. it is this kind of emptiness which produces the true responsiveness to others that manifests as a posthuman life of true compassion and love for others even after we are gone in You Are the Sunset. and it is this kind of emptiness which acts in the movement of clearing away previous words - which is not a literal consignment of words into annihilative oblivion, but rather a process of our composting our foolishly ego-bound calculations and our dead words (maybe even by publishing those words) in order to bring about the germination of new words which might better approach the “inner togetherness” of language - expressed in the following Seon Buddhism-inflected observation/suggestion offered by Lee Seong-bok (again via Anton Hur):

you get verbose when you’re not saying what you really want to say. erase all those words and make a new start from the point where you felt you’ve said everything.

this dynamic emptiness of boundlessly-creative potentiality-in-change also self-expresses its otherwise-inconceivable-to-ordinary-beings truth in the comprehensible/conceptual language of the narrative world of Pure Land Buddhism - both in 1) spatial language of the ultimate reality of absolute truth as the un-created nirvana of non-birth called rebirth in the Pure Land of ideal relationality among beings; and in 2) personal language as the compassionate activity called Amida Buddha (and more specifically Amida Buddha as exactly the Name Namo Amida Butsu, along with various other translations of the Name, and as exactly the Primal Vow which is continuous with the Name, and as exactly the gift of 信心 shinjin continuous with the Name and the Vow) - for example, in a hymn by Címǐn Huìrì 慧日慈愍 as quoted by Seikaku as quoted by Shinran as translated by Dennis Hirota et al. in 唯信鈔文意 Yuishinshō mon'i:

solely making beings turn about and abundantly say the nembutsu,
I can make bits of rubble change into gold.

43. which, to be fair, is necessarily bracketed by some amount of abstraction, given that the totality of the losses of humanity is just as inconceivable and unfathomable as the totality of the dreams and wishes of humanity.

44. 人がいます. there are people. there are going to be people. “there are going to be people [...] trying to make a living and they are going to be having fun.” that militates against the old “I give up.”

45. as elaborated by Jeff Wilson in Shin Buddhism: An American Religion:

the Shin philosopher Kaneko Daiei [...] was a professor at Otani University and disciple of Kiyozawa Manshi. he was highly critical of how materialistic Higashi Honganji had become, and was excommunicated for ten years before being reinstated. occasionally in his writings Kaneko used the term inner togetherness, by which he meant the natural bonds that we share with other beings. there is an emotional quality to this feeling of “fellowness” with others, so that when someone else is suffering, we too suffer. troubled by the suffering of ourselves and others, we look to see what its cause is. we look at the real situations of actual people in their everyday lives, rather than focusing on the ideal of how we ought to be in order to avoid suffering. this is very much a Shin path, as it looks to ordinary beings instead of monastic ideals. there is a poem by the monk Ryokan that expresses this very well: “when I think about the misery of those in this world, their sadness becomes mine. oh, that my monk's robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world. nothing makes me more happy than Amida Buddha's vow to save everyone.” Kaneko goes on to indicate that in realizing that we and others are fellow beings bonded by an inseparable inner togetherness, we seek a solution to our misery that will be adequate for all. the answer, according to Kaneko, is the Primal Vow, which embraces all beings just as they are, and provides the nembutsu as the easy practice that anyone can perform.

[...] I want to expand on the trail that he pointed out, fleshing out this concept of inner togetherness. [...] as

I understand it, inner togetherness arises from the fact of inter-relatedness. interrelatedness or interdependence is the central insight of Mahayana Buddhism. it means that nothing exists separate from all the other things in the universe. every person lives only because they rely on the support of others. no matter how far out you trace the web of relations, there is always more that can be said about it: it is infinite and total, and only a buddha can truly perceive its full extent. indeed, in the Mahayana tradition it is often said that comprehension of this totality is what provokes buddhahood or is buddhahood itself. thus while I seem in my deluded mind to be one individual person struggling in the world against others, in fact from the Buddha’s viewpoint there is no separation between self and other. in traditional language this is often called emptiness, because we are empty of independent existence. but inner togetherness is a uniquely Shin term for this understanding, which stresses the positive side of connection and the fellowship aspect, without losing sight of the inseparable inter-relatedness that informs the basic concept.

so, there is no separation between self and other, and my life only exists because of others. it is the power of others, the power-beyond-myself, that sustains my entire existence. we say there is no-self, but another way to express it would be that when you have a near death experience, the entire history of the universe ought to flash before your eyes. this vision is embedded in Shin within the story of Amida’s Pure Land.

46. from Shin Buddhism: An American Religion:

in Pure Land Buddhism we say that we wish to be born together with all beings in the Pure Land, so again we see the emphasis on togetherness. we seek a common destination that will be acceptable to all people. in this life, we have separations and disputes with other people based on our deluded egos: this is a fact of living that we cannot fully overcome. actually, there are forms of Buddhism that attempt to transform this world into a literal Pure Land. that is a noble goal and I strongly support all efforts to improve the human condition and preserve the natural environment, but realistically samsara is never going to be entirely free of suffering. the story of the Pure Land upholds our greatest values: that even though we are imperfect, we are embraced by great compassion, and even though we are unable to get along now, our goal is total reconciliation and togetherness.

[...] we need to emphasize that being born with all beings is an attitude that is quintessentially Mahayana in orientation. the Pure Land is an expression of compassion, not selfishness. we seek the Pure Land because it is the place where we can be reconciled with everyone, not merely for our own individual liberation. there is no such thing as individual liberation: like Amida, who vowed never to achieve buddhahood unless all beings would be liberated through the power of the nembutsu, we cannot achieve Buddhahood unless all others are included in it.

[...]

inner togetherness is also a vision of totalness: all beings will be born together, all are embraced. in the [教行信証] Kyogyoshinsho Shinran quotes the Nirvana Sutra as follows: “all sentient beings without fail ultimately realize great shinjin.” this vision of Shinran’s was so expansive that elsewhere in the Kyogyoshinsho Shinran says that 10 billion maras (these are the Buddhist equivalents of devils) were liberated when the [Candragarbha] Moon Matrix Sutra was preached, and that in the [Sūryagarbha] Sun Matrix Sutra the king Mara (i.e. [the equivalent of] Satan himself) was converted to Buddhism and worshipped the Buddha. that’s an incredible concept. [...] if even Mara will be liberated, that means that all beings, even those we hate, will be freed. and it means that even the aspects of ourselves that we hate the most will nonetheless be released in the end. Shinran doesn’t even stop there, however. in [唯信鈔文意 Yuishinshō mon'i], Shinran proclaims that “this Tathagatha pervades the countless worlds; it fills the hearts and minds of the ocean of all beings. thus, plants, trees, and land all attain Buddhahood.”

47. for them, whatever the situation is, it’s the natural situation.

48. in the real-life paratext of this text, he enlisted in South Korea’s mandatory military service a few months ahead of the release of this music video. so this is also his artistic farewell-for-now message to SEVENTEEN’s fans, a message delivered in his absence until his eventual return.

49. which we might compare with the nuclear explosion at the end of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥.

50. from HAMZZI’s translation of the lyrics of SEVENTEEN’s 2020 release Kidult:

there is a young kid inside of me.
today is another difficult day.
you and me, who are going in the opposite direction,
(the distance between us) doesn’t narrow down easily.
[...]
although everything is cold
I’m not lonely because I have you:
me, who is like a young kid, is right here.
but where have I hid?
to you in which
every day is more brilliant than sadness

it’s okay.
your world is precious and precious again just as you are right now.
stay here with me.
after I have laughed it off like an adult,
even when I cry like a young kid,
we resemble each other a lot.
let’s be together,
just as you are,
like a kidult.

at times, it’s okay to waste time,
even if they say that you’re immature.
I find myself in those images of you.
I’m not afraid of tomorrow, which may fall apart.
I’m not afraid of my tears, because we’re together.
[let’s] paint this world, which has become [charred], with a pure [bright] heart.

[....]

it’s okay.
this world is precious and precious again just as we are right now.
stay here with me.
even tomorrow, which I’ll live as a kid who has grown up a lot.
we resemble each other a lot.
let’s be together,
just as you are,
like a kidult.

51. Namo Amida Butsu.

52. and now I realize why I had only been able to watch this music video once, upon its first release, before I wrote this review.

53. Namo Amida Butsu.

54. photograph of a plaque in section 19 of the Angel Island Immigration Station’s Immigrant Heritage Wall. the plaque reads:

I still remember vividly the moment that I saw my father cry for the first time when he helped me pack and told me that I would have to leave the country to stay with one of my older cousins overseas and that we might never see each other again in this life...

Into Bo Champon ອິບໂຕ อินโต 邱英途

Refugee from Laos, arrived in California in 1977

55. I think this perfectly characterizes 消費期限, where we see a space station constructed solely to house thirteen very attractive men whom I would very much like to live and die together with in a surreal dream, a kind of fulfillment of my wish of Asianness/gender/friendship.

but also we see a surreal representation of the weight on our generations of inheriting so many lost dreams and uncertain futures.

56. though I wonder if the way the kpop industry fosters a parasocial feeling of friendship between idols and their fans might disrupt the readerly pleasure which Robinson criticizes about dystopia: if the idols who you (I) delulu-ly imagine as your (my) remote friends are the ones living in the dystopia represented on-screen - with their beautiful faces looking at the camera and their melancholic experience of grief and loss and impending separation and your (my) experience of their impending death and loneliness - that sounds less like a vicarious thrill of comfort and more like a way to recall feelings of distress and anxiety and fear, such as about the SEVENTEEN members’ impending mandatory military service requirements. in other words, due to the kpop industry’s collapse of a distinction between fantasy and reality, perhaps 消費期限 thus collapses a distinction between our uncomfortable/melancholic/bitter experience of its fantastic future dystopia and our experience of the real present world. certainly 消費期限 does not offer us the satisfaction of the traditionally-recognizable catharsis or heroism critiqued by Robinson; instead, it evokes our fears in order to hold fear together with a reassuring gratitude of inner togetherness. but maybe 消費期限 is the rare exception which demonstrates Robinson’s critique, due to its text and context. compare, for example, the music video for SEVENTEEN’s Maestro (CW: flashing lights) which tries to build a sense of pleasure in its slight depiction of SEVENTEEN’s rebellion in a dystopian cyberpunk world taken over by militarized robots.

57. Robinson’s argument here returns my attention to part of the emotional force of critique which burns with urgency in Isabel J. Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, in which Kim lampshades this exact schadenfreude and ties it directly to our present moment:

most days, Omelas is sunny and beautiful and nothing bad happens. and then there will be a day that is overcast and cloudy, and on that day, people die in circus accidents and carbon monoxide leaks and start harassment campaigns on twitter. and sometimes on that day people die through lethal injection. so it’s clear that sometimes the kid is alive and suffering, and sometimes the kid has been killed and doesn’t exist.

or maybe there’s no kid anymore, and Omelas is just like everywhere else: lucky until it isn’t.

occasionally a content creator will walk into Omelas and film a video while standing on one of the balconies of the Nice Houses or while sitting on one of Omelas’ beautiful beaches. they will talk about the history of Omelas in the same way that people talk about the Uyghurs situation in China, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the comfort women imported from Korea by Japan, the Belgian Congo, the Atlantic Slave Trade in relation to the American South, and the refugees who sink in ships off the coast of Western Europe.

and they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society. thank God there is somewhere that shows us how fucking bad things could get. what a pit in the ground. what a fucked up little trolley problem. what a lesson for us. thank God we don’t live there. thank God we know it exists.

58. this point leads me to consider the final computer-screen scene of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥 as a one-shot story of an extremely-near-future dystopia - connecting Robinson’s comment about dystopia as an expression of fear and to my reading of 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥’s sense of fear and loneliness at the end in comparison to 今 -明日 世界が終わっても-’s sense of gratitude and togetherness at the end. in turn, this consideration brings me back to the comparison between the YouTube thumbnails of that scene and the internet commentators in Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole.

59. or, as Ruti writes in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 5, The Uses and Misuses of Bad Feelings):

[José Esteban] Muñoz counters the fetishization of negativity that characterizes the antisocial rhetoric of opting out with a critical utopian rhetoric of hope. this is not hope in the banal sense that mainstream culture markets to us through popular psychology, advice columns, sappy television shows, and the idea that thinking good thoughts will bring good things into our lives. instead, it is hope as a tool of critical thought, as a means of envisioning alternatives to an impoverished present: in the same way that I have proposed that critical forms of desire can lead us to ask for “something more,” Muñoz believes that critical forms of hope can lead us to insist on a better future. indeed, even the fact that hope is regularly thwarted does not alter Muñoz’s conviction that it is “indispensable to the act of imagining transformation”. hope can obviously be disappointed but disappointment must be risked “if a disabling political pessimism is to be displaced”.

Muñoz is close to [Sara] Ahmed’s argument that pessimism can function as a disabling defense against disappointment. in other words, as critical as Ahmed is of the overly optimistic happiness scripts of our society, she recognizes that pessimism can become a bad habit of sorts, a strategy of “preparing” oneself for disappointment well before one has had a chance to be disappointed. pessimism, according to Ahmed, mitigates the anxiety that might arise from being (hopefully) invested in the future, thereby serving as “a way of inhabiting the world through shielding oneself from possibility”. that is, if being optimistic about the future can keep one from living in the present, pessimism - when it becomes excessive - can foreclose the future as a space of possibility (as it does for [Lee] Edelman).

60. or, rather, the linking of (a perhaps modern reinterpretation of) Shinran’s thought to 消費期限 through the reading which spoke itself into existence through me in this review.

61. for me, this was a very literal embodied feeling in my chest during my high-school years as a queer Asian teen in the Midwest whose queer friendships only existed through the internet. this loneliness was the ache of a hole in my heart tied to an inability to imagine any plausible future worth enduring an unbearable present for. yes, I was able to hold on because of the minimal crumbs of life offered by the cruelly optimistic sentiments of “It Gets Better” and homonormativity (as I discussed in my review of Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1). but those hollow promises only made this existential isolation wider and deeper in my heart, until I finally collapsed. and then collapsed again, discovering new depths of suffering. and then collapsed again, discovering an ocean floor full of life.

62. I owe the metaphor of the clenched fist to a lecture by Mia Mingus; this metaphor is also discussed in The Real Work: A Podcast About Theater Culture and Transformative Justice (Episode 3, Softening the Fist). this metaphor appears to have been used in a Buddhist context, as recorded in Krista Tippett’s blog post Softening the Clenched Fist about her experience at the Plum Village monastery founded by Thích Nhất Hạnh. I have not yet managed to identify any prior uses of this metaphor in describing aspects of Shinran’s account of 信心 shinjin (such as an analogy for self-powered paths to enlightenment as a way of trying to pry open the clenched fist), but I think it points to a powerful - and practically relevant - connection between transformative justice ideas (at least as described by various writings published by Mia Mingus and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective) and the Jōdo Shinshū teachings.

63. even if it might, say, take four months between the first viewing of a music video and the second viewing. or twenty-four years between a loss and a sudden realization in absence.

64. it is silly to imagine a clenched fist opening up out of any declaration of the safety of the world around it - it naturally closed into a fist as an embodied response to a lifelong experience of constantly being pummeled by the world, and (because of trauma) it will remain closed even if/when it stops being hit. trying to pry it open will instead make it clench even more tightly. even if the fist tries to open up by itself, it will reflexively tighten back up at the slightest threat. rather, the fist has to be made to undergo a deeply embodied transformation into an open hand as a natural/spontaneous response to being held by someone else’s warm and soft open hand. perhaps most fists refuse to open until their muscles tire from being clenched for so long? regardless, once the appropriate conditions arise for the fist, the persistent supportive contact of the open hand’s firm gentleness makes any claims for or against the safety of the world irrelevant to the fist’s process of opening; the fist opens as a spontaneous response to the open hand’s consistent contact. and the longer and tighter a fist’s clench, the more wondrous its subsequent relaxation - or, to quote from Shinran’s hymns interpreting the writing of Tánluán, as translated by Dennis Hirota et al.:

the unhindered light filling the ten quarters
shines on the beings in the darkness of ignorance
and unfailingly brings to attainment of nirvana
the person who realizes the one thought-moment of joy.

through the benefit of the unhindered light,
we realize shinjin of vast, majestic virtues,
and the ice of our blind passions necessarily melts,
immediately becoming water of enlightenment.

obstructions of karmic evil turn into virtues;
it is like the relation of ice and water:
the more the ice, the more the water;
the more the obstructions, the more the virtues.

obstructions: karmic evil and blind passions.

65. “reliance on the universal Vow” is one aspect of the concept of 信心 shinjin in the Jōdo Shinshū sense; 信心 shinjin used to be translated as “faith”, but it’s different from the Christian conception of faith embedded in the English word “faith”. English-language understandings of “faith” are often associated with a sense of assent or of some other dichotomous relationship with the object of faith. as Kaneko Daiei (quoted in a previous footnote about the concept of “inner togetherness”) writes in The Meaning of Salvation in the Doctrine of Pure Land Buddhism:

any form of faith, so long as it remained an expression of one's will to believe, can never be pure. it is branded with a self-willed character. it is mixed and defiled with calculation, self-interest, suppressed doubt etc. pure faith must be something cleared of all these defilements and admixtures.

we can find such admixtures in the “assurance of things hoped for” used in a description of faith by the Christian text Hebrews 11:1 and in any Christian sects which rely on accounts of supernatural events, miracles, or prophecies as evidence to support a willful belief. because of such ambiguities within the English word “faith”, modern translations do not use that word to refer to the Jōdo Shinshū understanding of 信心 shinjin, which extends beyond dualistic belief or disbelief.

when you pour water out of a bottle (on Earth), do you feel a sense of reassurance that water will come out of the bottle when you tilt it? do you even think about gravity when your arm starts moving to reach for the bottle? probably not: your body already begins to hold and tilt the bottle, in total reliance on the working of Earth’s gravity, so that water will flow out. and water has already started flowing down before you start thinking about which direction the water is flowing in. when the phenomenon of water flowing from a tilted bottle is a natural consequence of how your body moves about in the world, it is beyond faith, doubt, or calculation. lacking faith in the existence of gravity will not prevent water from coming out of the bottle when you tilt it (though consciously doubting that water would come out of the bottle when your arm tilts it might reduce your receptivity to developing a reliance on gravity to make the water flow; and refusing to pour water from bottles may naturally prevent the development of an embodied awareness of how to pour water from bottles). having faith in gravity does not make the water flow from the tilted bottle, and in fact thinking about gravity as something you have to trust or believe might make you hesitate before relying on it for pouring water from the bottle (just like how thinking about the fact that you’re breathing right now makes you have to consciously breathe instead of relying on your body to take care of the breathing naturally). you didn’t even need to learn about the law of gravity in elementary school before being able to pour water out of a bottle, because the way your body moves was already integrated with the phenomena of gravity, of how bottles work, and of how water flows under gravity.

if you wanted a toddler to become able to pour water out of a bottle by themselves, the only way they’ll really learn it is by watching you do it repeatedly over an extended period of time, while themselves also playing around with water in open and closed containers. after their awareness of gravity has naturally unfolded, they’ll be able to pour water out of similar containers they haven’t seen before - such as those giant boot-shaped beer glasses - and they might even be able to pour other materials - such as rice from a bag. from these experiences, they will gain a deeper appreciation for the power of gravity. this is a way of receiving an awareness of invisible phenomena in our material world through our embodied reliance on such phenomena, and of those phenomena becoming nondichotomous with our subjective experiences of the world. maybe you’d have to consciously think about Earth’s gravity right before pouring water out of bottles if you just came back from spending a very long time in the International Space Station’s microgravity - but after spending enough time gaining familiarity with gravity on Earth through your conscious awareness of being in a terrestrial environment which for now feels somewhat unfamiliar, at some point your body’s nondual relationship with gravity will have fully replaced any conscious chain of dualistic thoughts about gravity, any faith or doubt in Earth’s gravity. at that point, Earth’s gravity becomes a part of your subjective self, and thus of your awareness of the world, through how your body naturally interacts with water bottles - independent of faith or doubt. we might even say that your pouring of water from the bottle is one of the many ways that gravity can be seen as “coming alive” within your subjective world.

my water bottle is made of aluminum, so I can’t easily see how much water is left inside. I often forget to refill it, and then a few minutes after I’ve emptied the bottle I’ll hold it up to my mouth again - only to be momentarily surprised when nothing comes out! this is a result of my forgetfulness in refilling the bottle, combined with my body’s total faithless reliance on the way water flows out of a tilted bottle under the Earth’s gravity. in turn, by reflecting on this experience I receive an opportunity to begin appreciating how Earth’s gravity enables me to live, beyond any question of whether I deserve those benefits. isn’t it a truly precious gift that the Earth supports us in such fundamental ways?

although there are limits to this metaphor of relying on gravity when pouring water from a bottle, I believe it illustrates one key aspect of the difference between 信心 shinjin and the way we typically understand “faith”, “belief”, or “trust”.

66. which was the final inspiration that produced the start of the film project I mentioned in section 🔥🔥.

67. in rewatching this track, I’m struck by the accidental overlaps between Don’t Worry and 🔥Words Do Nothing🔥, especially the themes of being there for each other when times are tough and the literal drawings of bones according to musical lyrics. I think comparing these two tracks could provide an interesting case study in how they express very different feelings about the same subject matter through their craft choices; and I think these tracks together point to the importance of the question they both engage with.

68. from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Chapter 6, Learning the Grammar of Animacy)

I remember paging through the Ojibwe dictionary she sent [...] but the spellings didn’t always match and the print was too small and there were way too many variations on a single word and I was feeling that this was just way too hard. the threads in my brain knotted and the harder I tried, the tighter they became. pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word - a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.” pfft! I threw down the book. since when is Saturday a verb? everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” “ridiculous!” I ranted in my head. “there is no reason to make it so complicated. no wonder no one speaks it. a cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that, it’s all wrong. a bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing - a noun and not a verb.” I was ready to give up. I’d learned a few words, done my duty to the language that was taken from my grandfather. oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration. “she’s going to surrender,” they said.

and then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. an electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. in that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. a bay is a noun only if water is dead. when bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. but the verb wiikwegamaa - to be a bay - releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “to be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. because it could do otherwise - become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. to be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. this is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up around us. and the vestiges of boarding schools, the soap-wielding missionary wraiths, hang their heads in defeat.

this is the grammar of animacy. imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, “look, it is making soup. it has gray hair.” we might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. in English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. that would be a profound act of disrespect. it robs a person of self hood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. so it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. because they are our family.

to whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. in Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. [...]

English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. in English, you are either a human or a thing. our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. where are our words for the simple existence of another living being? [...]

when I am in the woods with my students, teaching them the gifts of plants and how to call them by name, I try to be mindful of my language, to be bilingual between the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. although they still have to learn scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”

69. from Akira Omine as translated by David Matsumoto, Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

no matter how much we may look upon words as being tools which we are in possession of, language, in reality, is a gift to human beings[, who ...] are enabled to live through the truth of language.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

we distrust language even as we write poetry. we treat it like a lazy servant. but language is greater than us.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

the realm of our everyday lives is such that, in the instant that words are born, they immediately die. there, the possibility that words could be born, become perfected, and continue forever does not arise. words are never anything other than simple means and never become identical with the end itself. thus, in our ordinary lives, we may seem to put our faith in language, but, in reality, we do not. [...]

such ordinary words of everyday life do not comprise all language. within language, there is a deeper dimension, which [John] Locke’s view of language cannot reach.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

language can be messy or vulgar, yet without it there is no seeing or hearing. language is not a means to an end but an object and objective in itself. to use it as a mere end only leads to unhappiness.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

ordinary language is like a sign that seeks to refer to an actual thing from the outside. in contrast to that, poetic language holds within it the actual thing itself. the Swiss thinker, Max Picard (1888-1965) had this to say about the difference between ordinary and poetic language. “with ordinary language, human beings hear what they are saying about people and things. with poetry, humans hear what the thing is saying about itself.”

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

words dragged by force from the brain are stiff and devoid of feeling. instead, your words should be a beat ahead of your brain. like a child rolling a steel hoop, the words will come alive only if they roll on ahead of the brain.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

how is it, we ask, that the words of the poet can embrace an actual thing? it is because they are words born naturally out of a selflessness realized when one has discarded the calculation of self-consciousness.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

weak poems are weak because language was not treated with proper reverence. language is the alpha and omega of poetry. but just because language is the only true refuge, it doesn’t mean it has to take the forms of poetry.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

the final dimension of language comes to be revealed when we fully are able to know the limitations of all human language, including poetic language.

for ordinary beings filled with blind passions, in this fleeting world which is a burning house, all things without exception are empty and false, completely without truth or sincerity. the Nembutsu

alone is true and real.

this passage from Notes in Lament of Divergence (Tannishō, Postscript) teaches us that an encounter with the Name, that is, the true Word, may be realized for the first time within our despair over human language. “empty” here means that things and the words that refer to them are not in conformity. because other people and we ourselves speak “empty” words, we suffer in transmigration and are not able to escape from the world of words. yet, however much suffering “empty” words may bring about, we cannot exist without language. just as water is to a fish, language constitutes the basic ground level for human beings. human beings are only able to be human in the midst of words.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

our world is a world made of language. if you go “beyond language,” there is only more language

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

“true and real” in the phrase, “the Nembutsu alone is true and real,” refers to the Name “Namuamidabutsu”, or that is, the Tathagata which becomes true language in the very midst of the deluge of “empty” language. the empty world of ordinary beings is supported by the single true and real Word, which is the Name.

in answer to the question of why the Primal Vow of the Tathagata selected the sole practice of recitation of the Name, the Master Shan-tao states in his Hymns in Praise of Birth that “it is because reciting the Name is easy.” here “easy” means that it is not necessary for us to leave our world, that is, the world of language. what is important is simply that we discard our own calculation.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

literature isn’t made by us. literature is made by language. there is no path that language cannot enter. [...]

the only thing that can be depended upon is language.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

although we may think that human beings speak language, in fact it is the language that is speaking.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

we do not give voice to our poems when we write them; our poems, rather, give voice to us. words, in a sense, give voice to themselves through us. perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase veritas veritatum (truth begets truth).

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

the Name, “Namuamidabutsu,” is not a self-powered incantation to be recited by human beings. it is not a tool. the Name is the Word that comes from the Tathagata; it is the Tathagata, which has become language. it enables us to understand the unfathomable compassion of the Tathagata, which makes itself into the Name in order to save desperate ordinary beings like us, deluded by language, yet unable to escape from it.

from Indeterminate Inflorescence: lectures on poetry:

in Seon Buddhism, “to see what’s fundamental” is understood as “to see is fundamental”. perhaps poems can arise from switching subject and verb, what is seeing and what is seen.

from Religion and Language: The Soteriological Significance of Religious Language:

the word “of” in the phrase “the Name of the Tathagata” does not indicate the genitive case in which two things are joined together. rather, it describes a unique relationship whereby the Tathagata is the Name, and the Name is the Tathagatha. this means that no Tathagata exists apart from the Name that calls to sentient beings. in the case of the “Word of God” in the Judeo-Christian traditions, God and Word are apparently distinguished as two separate things. this is because God speaks of some matter to human beings. the Name “Namuamidabutsu” is not like that. the Name does not mean that the Tathagata speaks about it as if it were some other matter, but rather that the Tathagata speaks of itself, announcing itself and revealing itself as Name. when the Buddha completely becomes the Word and the Word fully becomes the Buddha, this is the Name of the Primal Vow.

70. here I am specifically naming my aspiration for analogous activity from art-beings rather than from human beings, out of similar concerns as what Ruti describes in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Conclusion, A Dialogue on Silence with Jordan Mulder):

JM: extreme forms of self-inflicted violence can carry immense political consequences: among various unforgettable images of silent self-annihilation are those of Buddhist monks [...]. instead of uttering vehement declarations, these monks silently lit themselves on fire and did not scream as the flames leaped up their robes and bodies. silence was an integral feature of the political statements that such self-immolations intended to make. the conflagration, when it arrived to conclude the period of silence that preceded it, took on the character of symbolic impositions themselves. the self-immolator exposed the symbolic for what it really is: the fire that consumes the self.

MR: this is the sense in which Edelman’s account of the Lacanian act [of defiance] as a plunge into the [suicidal] jouissance of the real, or Foucault’s account of desubjectivation, becomes tangible. it is precisely out of respect for these kinds of historical actions - and I am also thinking of Mohammed Bouazizi, whose “act” of self-immolation instigated the Arab Spring - that I have, in this book, been resistant to the easy rhetoric of self-annihilation - a rhetoric that remains purely figurative, that does not in any way touch, let alone destabilize, the subject professing it - that characterizes so much of progressive theory, including queer theory.

when I refer to art with the language of personhood and when I suggest the possibility of kinship between art-beings and human-beings, I am imagining such art-beings as embodying fragments of our own personhoods (and us as embodying fragments of art-beings’ personhoods) in ways that I think of as producing different kinds of relations and responsibilities than those ruptured by the self-immolation of other kinds of beings - such as differences in how art-beings are born, what “aliveness” looks like for an art-being, how art-beings are sustained, how art-beings touch people, and how art-beings die. out of caution about the “easy rhetoric of self-annihilation” (as well as an aching melancholia for people who have died by suicide without having felt the support needed to truly live and truly die - in other words, for people whose self-caused deaths took a very different trajectory compared to Thích Quảng Đức’s actions), in this section of this essay I am specifically talking about my aspiration to continue encountering and participating in the birth of art-beings who touch and literally destabilize me (and hopefully also other people) - as successors to the art-beings who have already transformed me. but I admit that I have not yet fully followed this line of thinking to its starting and ending points.

71. from Ken Liu’s The Litigation Master and the Monkey King:

they tied him to the pole on the execution platform and stripped him naked.

Tian watched the crowd. in the eyes of some, he saw pity, in others, he saw fear, and in still others, like Li Xiaoyi’s cousin Jie, he saw delight at seeing the hooligan songgun meet this fate. but most were expectant. this execution, this horror, was entertainment.

“one last chance,” the Blood Drop said. “if you confess the truth now, we will slit your throat cleanly. otherwise, you can enjoy the next few hours.”

whispers passed through the crowd. some tittered. Tian gazed at the bloodlust in some of the men. you have become a slavish people, he thought. you have forgotten the past and become docile captives of the Emperor. you have learned to take delight in his barbarity, to believe that you live in a golden age, never bothering to look beneath the gilded surface of the Empire at its rotten, bloody foundation. you desecrate the very memory of those who died to keep you free.

his heart was filled with despair. have I endured all this and thrown away my life for nothing?

some children in the crowd began to sing:

the Tree of Dem herded dozens of Cap Tea
like dogs and sheep.
if any Cap Tea walked too slow, the Wood Beet
hmm’d immediately.
or else a quill, slim on the dot.
the Why-Men were strong to gather wits & loupes
like a strand of pearls.

the Blood Drop’s expression did not change. he heard nothing but the nonsense of children. true, this way, the children would not be endangered by knowing the song. but Tian also wondered if anyone would ever see through the nonsense. had he hidden the truth too deep?

“stubborn till the last, eh?” the Blood Drop turned to the executioner, who was sharpening his knives on the grindstone. “make it last as long as possible.”

what have I done? thought Tian. they’re laughing at the way I’m dying, the way I’ve been a fool. I’ve accomplished nothing except fighting for a hopeless cause.

not at all, said the Monkey King. Li Xiaojing is safe in Japan, and the children’s songs will be passed on until the whole county, the whole province, the whole country fills with their voices. someday, perhaps not now, perhaps not in another hundred years, but someday the book will come back from Japan, or a clever scholar will finally see through the disguise in your songs as Lord Erlang finally saw through mine. and then the spark of truth will set this country aflame, and this people will awaken from their torpor. you have preserved the memories of the men and women of Yangzhou.

the executioner began with a long, slow cut across Tian’s thighs, removing chunks of flesh. Tian’s scream was like that of an animal’s, raw, pitiful, incoherent.

not much of a hero, am I? thought Tian. I wish I were truly brave.

you’re an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary choice, said the Monkey King. do you regret your choice?

no, thought Tian. and as the pain made him delirious and reason began to desert him, he shook his head firmly. not at all.

you can’t ask for more than that, said the Monkey King. and he bowed before Tian Haoli, not the way you kowtowed to an Emperor, but the way you would bow to a great hero.

—

Author’s Note: [...] for more than 250 years, An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was suppressed in China by the Manchu emperors, and the Yangzhou Massacre, along with numerous other atrocities during the Manchu Conquest, was forgotten. it was only until the decade before the Revolution of 1911 that copies of the book were brought back from Japan and republished in China. the text played a small, but important, role in the fall of the Qing and the end of Imperial rule in China. I translated the excerpts used in this story.

due to the long suppression, which continues to some degree to this day, the true number of victims who died in Yangzhou may never be known. this story is dedicated to their memory.

72. but/and as Ruti writes in The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Chapter 5, The Uses and Misuses of Bad Feelings):

[Heather] Love is suspicious of modalities of queer criticism that seek to overcome difficult histories by transforming “the base materials of social abjection into the gold of political agency”. [...]

Love’s concern about this strategy is that, in its haste to refunction the legacies of abjection, queer theory may not adequately account for the lingering effects of these legacies, the fact that they may motivate the present moment in ways that cannot be translated into positive politics; in Love’s view, the attempt to transform negative affects into affirmative politics may keep us from fully grappling with the persistent power of queer abjection. this is why Love’s own endeavor focuses less on moving beyond a difficult past than on developing “a politics of the past”: a theoretico-political practice of exploring the impact that the past continues to have on the present through bad feelings such as shame, sadness, despair, bitterness, and self-hatred. such feelings, Love notes, tend to be seen as politically “useless” in the sense that, unlike more “dignified” sentiments such as anger or outrage, they are not easy to translate into collective resistance. if anything, such feelings block action by paralyzing the subject. yet Love finds much to honor in her queer archive of bad feelings, advocating the act of taking an unflinching look at this archive so as, precisely, to understand why action is thwarted.

at the same time - and here I return to the potential value of the approach that Muñoz and I favor, the approach that seeks to resurrect the kernel of positivity within the negative - Love recognizes that the central paradox of transformative criticism is that it cannot help but wish for a better future: “the emphasis on damage in queer studies exists in a state of tension with a related and contrary tendency - the need to resist damage and to affirm queer existence”; “despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people”. indeed, as much as Love stresses that she wants to dwell within the damaging aspects of the past, ultimately even she cannot entirely avoid implying that such dwelling within damage will do some good. in saying this, I do not mean to criticize Love, for it seems to me that, theoretically speaking, the only alternative would be the route taken by Edelman (which Love explicitly rejects).

Love’s analysis may foreground what is ambivalent and embarrassing - and it may wish to live with injury instead of fixing it - but there is still something affirmative, even comforting, about it. after all, making (some) sense of past suffering may help us make (some) sense of present suffering: understanding the historical sources of abjection may shed light on current sources of abjection in ways that offer solace. in this sense, Love’s project may be closer to that of Muñoz than her dismissal of utopian, hopeful attitudes may suggest.

[...] both Love and Muñoz try do something with negativity, even if they go about this task in different ways, Love by looking backward, Muñoz by looking forward. both refuse to disavow negativity. but neither do they valorize it as a heroic counterhegemonic stance. there is a certain working through of suffering that takes place in the theorizing of both thinkers, which suggests that both are interested in the rebirth - rather than merely just the death - of the subject, particularly the queer subject.

I see my own relationship to negativity along similar lines: I do not wish to avoid a confrontation with suffering - how could I? - yet I am also interested in the unpredictable effects of suffering. such effects are not always positive; sometimes suffering merely produces more suffering. I would never argue that all suffering yields meaning. much of it is “useless”, as Emmanual Levinas once put it. indeed, it may be that none of it is “useful” in a conventional sense. but parts of it may be usable. [...] I am the first to admit that the amount of suffering in human life, particularly in the lives of those who are socioeconomically or otherwise marginalized, can be so excessive as to be unbearable. yet I am also interested in how the unbearable can be borne (if and when it is). that is, unlike Edelman, and like Berlant, I believe that survival - living on despite everything, limping forward despite injury - is worth talking about.