Inspiration

Electric Shadows

I dreamt that James and I were in a sinister world where people were throwing homunculi at me—little men the size of spiders. If I chanted, "This is not real. This is not real..." and focused on mundane details like a bureau of drawers, I could exit out of the Video Place. But it took over screens and re-hypnotized James and was pulling me in again, so I dragged us outdoors. When we got outside, we found hundreds of people in a daze, chanting to themselves, "This is not real. This is not real..." Because we were all chanting at the same time, it made our environment so surreal that none of us could snap out of it.

The Video Place is now a disturbing and provocative thing in my head. I wonder if it's because I'm reading Valis by Philip K. Dick. Probably. I'm enjoying it, though. He's funny and lucid about what may or may not be a psychosis, and his theories about God seem no less wild than Leibniz's monads or Lacan's knot of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. The worlds we create for ourselves is a theme in books I've enjoyed lately, including The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke—art, mythology, and labyrinths are all on my mind.

Thanks to an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, I'm spending the Spring of 2025 in Taiwan and Japan to do independent research, studying sacred architecture and the traditional Asian arts. I'm excited to marinate in temples, art, night markets, and the unknown. To prepare, I've been brushing up on my Chinese, which is full of holes.

The secret to memorizing something, according to experts, is to associate it with imagery that will stick in the mind. The weirder the better. Chinese is made of symbols, so I'm trying to follow them, and now I associate a lot of Chinese with horror. The word for meat (肉 ròu) looks like two people (人) being hanged. Steamed (蒸 zhēng) looks like a child (子) wearing a grass (艹) hat being boiled in water (水) over fire (灬).

Mom and Dad find it amusing that I want to spend more time in Taiwan. They prefer America and the convenience of a miracle mile. But we all enjoy musing on the wordplay baked into the Chinese language. Fish (鱼 yú) sounds like surplus (余 yú), so we eat fish during the New Year to summon abundance vibes. Chinese doesn't get bogged down in words like a, am, and is, so it's full of pithy four-character idioms like 心满意足 xīn mǎn yì zú = the heart is full, the feeling is satisfied (good to say after a meal with friends) or 画蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú) = to draw legs on a snake (one of my favorites, which means you're overdoing it).

I also love Chinese words for technologies. Telephone (电话 diàn huà) means “electric speech”. Television (电视 diàn shì) is “electric vision”. Computers (电脑 diàn nǎo) are “electric brains”. Movies (电影 diàn yǐng) are “electric shadows,”and electric shadows make me think of Plato's Cave and the Video Place.