The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 18
couldn’t not be precisely matched up. “Tell me your name,” one said in English; “you tell me your name,” was the almost-translation. “Jug-gee-yoh” said Korean speakers attracting a waiter; the Japanese felt a twinge of impoliteness. “New face!” announced ROLLER day four; the Japanese speakers all stared at each other.
All in all, people were improved. SHINO went blonder that year, but she made a close male friend back home who helped to balance her perversions. AKEMI, looking to be punished (and this is a whole other universe of relationship analysis, the sadist/masochist little sister/older sister model), got what she wanted and became more Japanese—though she persisted in wearing black leather boots and her handbag was still a bulky mass of black leather. MIKI became more skeptical of foreigners and ERI, as mentioned, ERI started a year long relationship. She acquired skills in psychological analysis, she went through her May blues easier this year, and her entry into the Ministry went off without a hitch. Airplanes flying through skies, tanks rolling in column; ERI was where she had always wanted to be. (Even as others just posted every single travel picture they had on their computer.) TABUN, still 19, went back to university; she continued her studies and felt more adjusted to her Korean background and more informed.
None of the Yale interviewees got in. The statistical outcome was not irregular, although perhaps TUSK sank SNIPER rather than finessed her in. TUSK, worrying for some time that he would be persecuted (okay, fine, he sent her one inappropriate text) escaped punishment except for being kicked off Alumni Volunteer Interviewing (AVI). Maybe the girls however could still continue to make MPGs (not SMGs) and other videos; that was entirely their business.
"Analysis, analysis, analysis!” This section cries out for its own capping logical system, something beyond that sun and snow simultaneously or AKEMI’s sweet scent as they slowly peeled off from QUARTERBACK and then slowly peeled off TUSK. (So small, so perfect!) So we have structuralism, now; we have Claude Bernard Levi-Strauss, who lived among savages for ten years and then finally wrote a book.
The failure of the analytical systems to date is a failure of ideas in relevance to actual facts on the ground. If this document is a map and the events are the landscape, the document loses utility as it grows to the same size as the landscape but loses utility when it becomes too data-poor to offer any true cartography. Let’s read this document as a set of encoded instructions to a GORILLA group. If that is the case, we see the major flaw as a lack of secondary support (at least one out of 180 should have backed up the main actor) although things in the end probably ended up as best as could be expected given initial conditions. If Seoul is not Tijuana and not Keijo’, then maybe it is a European capital, at which festivities went off without a hitch and no lives were lost, contact was made with the Chinese, and higher echelons offered support for what was going on down below, but only in a moral sense. Where was management? ROLLER, the Christian, only precipitated events; the act of bringing together all the Chinese natives only added a third layer of complexity to the culture of the class, and what they never saw was two out of the three Chinese speakers didn’t even see it as part of themselves.
"But Korean culture is clearly inferior,” commented JOHANN.
Yes. The café was noisy. Yet in a sense, we are the ones who are flawed rather than ERI or COPENHAGEN since actually in the broadest sense, everything existed for them to get together. It was never about childhoods spent “learning the game,” so we could apply it now. It was just about being natural.
"Yet we saw both lose face.”
And this was a true fact on the ground as well.
Structuralism, compared to psychoanalysis or Marxism, would never have the same impact on academia or world culture as its two senior step-brothers. But it would enjoy a brief renaissance as pop-structuralism in a best-seller; it made closet semioticians out of everyone.
"Okay S is father, B is father’, and all the various girls are merely relatives. The joining together of N and P signifies the birthing of a family structure where N and P are understood to be sibling forces (incest taboo) or just merely children in general. So actually we’ve conducted a huge marriage ceremony, out of which ERI and COPENHAGEN are now together.”
"You’re saying these entire three weeks were a marriage.”
"Of course, it is comedy, not tragedy. Tragedy would have been JOHANN stabbing us all to death.”
"Which I personally think was closer to happening that you realize.”
"Maybe. But he was in the end the honor student; maybe all honor students are potential rage killers.”
"The turmoil filled world of academia.”
If these three weeks were a marriage ceremony, the key analysis would not be sexual forces or classes of political economy, but the distinction between raw and cooked; sacred and profane. And GORILLA team, now formed, would be ready for action in future years, action without movement, force without release, a potentiality. Events as they were resisted merely classification into signifier-signified; these theories were in any case only invented by monoglots (bilinguals at best); it wasn’t until you bridged things completely to the Eastern aesthetic (and there was a structuralist who was frankly astonished by Japan) that you finally began picking up on things.
Without getting too deep into things, LINGLING is raw because she’s good at sports and unselfconscious. SHINO is clearly totally cooked. But just as language has different words for raw and cooked food items, so we see that the cultural difference between the two can be characterized both as transition and states of being. LINGLING can become SHINO but SHINO can never become LINGLING. Evocation of the names of Hindu deities will make some clans clamor for destruction of this text but others believe a revelation is underway.
In the end, there was nothing but the dance. Not the last one, NB, the bodies pressing against each other so firmly one could barely squeeze against each other in some timorous undulation. Rather, M2, the Shanghai-named club somehow in Seoul, the drinks liquid and multicolored, the swarms flowing now here, now there, and COPENHAGEN pressed against ERI; everyone liquored up, AKEMI so sweet and small and perfectly coiffed, so perfectly prepared like a dish, made-up, sliced for consumption, fresh. She said, “well I never liked anyone enough to stay with them. though I’ve only slept with three guys.” TUSK never knew why girls so frequently volunteered their count to him. The laser lights sparkled and the speakers shook.
[God, why do these Japanese girls chase so many foreign guys; reversal of normal gender relationships; aggressive Asian woman sexuality.]
It was all about the boundary. Writers could never understand; he had never come across good description of self-same. Tomorrow never existed, of course; it never did, and there never was certainty in life, that was the lesson of all that quant-qual back and forth, the job in media, the job in finance. When the DOW collapsed, you were responsible, no matter what. When things got back together again, it was your boss that got the credit. Friends would come and friends would go, but the ever-shifting boundaries of social awareness couldn’t exceed an upper-limit of about 300, and your first circle of pals would never be more than 40, regardless of your use of technology.
It was house! 300 bpm meant dissolution of consciousness, meant the blurriness of now, meant you kept control only to keep things going. Her hips were firm against him, her cheeks was pressed tight to his face, she was soft, yielding, gentle. How many months and years had passed for this moment to happen, how many crises had to be resolved, how many red-faced Australians had to be sent skipping back to Australia for the noise finally to stop, the moment to become separated from all others, for the we of me to emerge, for time utterly to slow to a halt, for the meridian lines to emerge, tuneless, senseless, without reference point. Nobody ever said you had to leave Japan to find a Japanese girl; nobody ever taught you that fleeing something at full speed would bring you just full-circle in the end. It was the age of affluence; the time when media-g
enerators would pour out light and sound, but the technicians would work the bolts and press the sliders forward; they laid down the beats and you surrendered yourself completely.
Sweet alcoholic daze. It came only in this town, perched on the riverbank, lacking in romance, purely functional and Nagoyaesque, business people eating spicy food and washing down beers; the crowds spilling out onto sidewalks, the smell of meats and smelts flowing pungently through the littered passageways. AKEMI knew what she was doing; she would be plunging into ferroconcrete housing projects, the bored housewife, the listless middle-aged woman, but until that day came, she was still AKEMI five foot nothing, ninety pounds, a strong chin but otherwise Japanese cutie. Perfectly eatable, thought TUSK, and realized that he would eat her out completely if she liked, the dorm rooms in Ewha with enclosed shower unit absolutely suitable for all sorts of play, the warmed raised floor hard but not too hard, the dorm bed narrow but not too narrow. Why were ERI and COPENHAGEN so over each other anyway? AKEMI pretended helplessness but then they too kissed; just once, as the music entered a new decade, slurring away into hypersonic beats, then slowing down again, speeding