Forewords by Isabella Lai

[616 words]

In some sense, everything seems self-evident, so nothing needs to be written down; on the other hand, communication is impossible no matter how intimate two people are, so again, nothing needs to nor can it be ever written down without possible drift in interpretation. But there is this constant compulsion, this itch to articulate, knowing it will be misread and I doubt the perverse want for contradiction is ever fully absent knowing it will degenerate into actual arguments¹ (speech beyond mere verbal behavior) but being loved (or the anticipation of it) is the end objective, so I must have been thrown into some kind of a desert. My mother was very right when she described the extreme sense of loneliness during her pregnancy (a life sealed inside a life), that no matter how intimate two people are, there is an intrinsic, infinite barrier that sets us apart². The incursion of you in the near ending of The Unnameable fascinates me in endless ways. In my very narrow reading, you is the not yet born, faint lights scattered across the desert³ that engulfs mom while she was carrying me.

An impossible child. The impossible child yet to be born and the contingencies that foreclose all alternatives entailed but our compulsory, animal want to procreate, secular hope that communication is possible (hence procreation is meaningful and all that we could do to prevent full degeneration into pointlessness⁴) and the impossible process to accept in its full faith that this is not true and we are back to the terrain of contradictions⁵. Which is why, in some respect, Dirac delta (being a nonfunction) is my favorite function. In a sparse and punishing midnight desert, a point event lifts the distribution of all promises as they might ever propagate. I should stop embarrassing myself here.

1.  In a narrow, mechanistic sense, an argument is what remains after love fails to translate. I believe that intimate speech has two concurrent purposes: (i) to transmit propositions (the immediate aim); (ii) to secure recognition or acceptance (the relational aim). In early intimacy, the relational aim dominates and language functions as presence; but when presence feels insufficient or unsatisfying, the speaker leans on the epistemic aim—more precision, more reasons, more words—to recover closeness. That shift, by and large, backfires, producing a peculiar kind of interpretive drift, due to (i) channel limits (lexical gaps, private context); (ii) incompatible goals between the lovers as interlocutors; and (iii) mismatches in arousal or state. ↩︎
2.  My favorite geometric objects include the Poincaré disk. ↩︎
3.  In my mind there is nothing optimistic or even purposeful about the idea of a hope, which is all but the faint impulse to continue/of continuation that appears when everything else degenerates into futility, much like (it is, in some sense) an animal desire to defy extinction that arises within despair, not against it. I read Beckett’s idea of “you” as the residue of meaning, the thing that survives comprehension, cold and distant points of hopes which don’t even bother to redeem the desert but mark that it is still there, it outlives everything in front of your eyes, it outlives you, it outlives your unborn child, which then degenerates into some kind of recursion and I should stop embarrassing myself here. ↩︎
4.  At a more rudimentary level, I believe the provision of broad, non-coercive liquidity is the ultimate social good because it expands real options and mutual aid at the moments that define a life. the ultimate goods are dignity, care, and truth; liquidity serves the ultimate goods when it is in hands of just institutions and oriented to ends beyond fair exchange. ↩︎
5.  A. A. Markov defines contingencies as contradictions born out of one node. ↩︎

Isabella Lai has been delivering sustained attention under conditions designed to defeat it since 2002.

Image Credit