I'm not much of a storyteller. Or at least I've built stories up into too terrifying a concept for me to deal with directly. I imagine there’s all sorts of rituals involved. You have to establish characters, create conflict, generate intrigue, delay climaxes, and so on. I have no idea how to do any of these. All I know how to do is write sentences that begin with the word “I.”
It was strange yesterday, when for a few moments I actually was telling a story — one that only lasted for a paragraph. One event followed another. Sentence by sentence information was revealed. I forgot that was a thing I could do.
Usually when I sit down to “write a story,” I get lost in conceits. If I’m telling the tale of a man who’s found himself trapped in the apartment of a 富二代 student at an Ivy League university at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, lost in her narration as she talks about her friends all dispersed across the great centers of world culture and commerce, inevitably I start writing paragraph after paragraph of this man’s opinions about music or Greek historiography, and have no idea what to say about any of the events that led this to this apartment or the dialogue within. When I feel nervous enough about nothing having happened yet, I send him into the bathroom and have him describe the pajamas this 富二代 has forced him to wear (leftovers from her days collecting men’s clothing) that reveal a hint of his feeble chest hair in the mirror. Or I describe the shag carpet beneath his feet, the dried soap scum on the shower curtain, or all the banana-scented bath products imported from Japan that line the bathtub.
Once I get to this point, having partaken in so many imaginary opinions, I feel proud of some of what I’ve written, take a break, then come back and realize I have no idea what I’m writing anymore. If only all these opinions could occur in a spatio-temporal structure, rather than spread about at random on the sheets of ink-stained printer paper that cover my desk. If only opinions could substitute for action and tension.
When I’m trying to comfort myself for my failures, I insist that stories (or at least the kinds with “development” and “dramatic tension”) are actually evil. They’re just excuses to relitigate the disappointments of real life, the impossibility to reach any objective truth or meaning, into a kind of fantastical catharsis-inducing junk food. When I find myself enthralled by other people’s stories, whether in writing or movies or comics, I start to worry that I’m being brainwashed. I yearn to brainwash others — this I can’t deny — but when I’m in the self-conciliatory mood, I’ll take my inability to perform such brainwashing as a virtue.
Such sentiments have rotted my brain.
That little paragraph-long narrative embedded in yesterday’s “blog” fills me with disappointment. I told a story involving myself and two other characters: the girlfriend I had when I was 18 and a man ten years older than her that she knew — the second of these being the primary focus. In the language of Jin Shengtan’s commentary on Water Margin (which I have been quite painfully working my way through), my girlfriend was nothing but “a wedge” (楔子）, a character whose only purpose is to lead to the introduction of another character, the circular-glasses-wearing fellow from New York. In Water Margin, such wedges survive a few paragraphs, and then they’re dismissed with the phrase 不在話下: we’ll speak no more of them — such a painful thing to say! Humans sacrificed to the divine tidal wave of narrative!
If were I to promise, no matter whom I may mention, I will certainly have more to say about them sooner or later, would that kill all the drama in this little world of mine I’ve been constructing?
That mixtape my girlfriend I listened to so many times the autumn of 2015 feels a bit like that. It never occurred to me until last night, when I was writing yesterday’s “blog”, that she had emailed me a Google Drive link to it. All this time I could have redownloaded it and listened to it again. I remember when she started talking about this guy who makes mixtapes, I was a little skeptical of the terminology. If it's just a bunch of numbered mp3s in a zip file, isn't that a playlist? I think part of me wanted to treat it like an actual tape — a physical object that could be lost forever (provided it wasn’t copied). Thus the surprise at it being so easy to reobtain.
I wonder, when will Google Drive stop operating? When each and every byte of data stored on it be erased once and for all? I’ve found myself lost in those calculations of dates and times I sometimes do. Gmail became publicly available (though initially only by invitation) in 2004 and exited “beta” in 2009, which is also around when I made my first gmail account (I actually think it was before that, around 2007 or 2008). Google documents was released in 2006, and also exited beta in 2009. All of that was integrated into Google Drive in 2012. Yet when my girlfriend forwarded me the email to the mixtape, the renaming to Google Drive already felt like ancient history to me.
The mysteries of time…
As I listen to the mixtape now, I’m drawn to all the songs that didn’t spawn enough interest in me to download the albums they’re from off of Soulseek. Lovely Snooopy Love, for instance, or Broadcast. Why did I instead look up Apogee & Perigee, listening to their one album dozens of times until I finally realized it was Jun Togawa, someone I had discovered years earlier from a fellow American in China with an internet presence (though obviously far predating my own) back when I was 13. Now a song by Etsuko Yakushimaru is playing, which must have been the first song from the mixtape, which in memory seemed haunted me — yet apparently not enough for me to listen to anything else by Etsuko Yakushimaru. A song about marriage and funerals…
Well, we’ve reached the point where I forgot what idea it was I was driving at and have instead resorted to idle chatter. I suppose I had something more to say about that 富二代 mentioned above in my little non-story, but I’ll leave it until tomorrow (or some date far in the future) to elaborate on all the curiosities surrounding her.