The Glass is Already Broken
I’m more of a glass-overflowing-until-it-breaks kind of person. Call this the psychedelic standpoint. Rather than suffering from a lack of something—depravity, emptiness, or void—I typically suffer from a surplus, a too-muchness; as Wayne’s World likes to say, intensity-in-ten-cities. I often feel that I’m some kind of mute witness to the catastrophe, seeing everything, understanding nothing. Dumbstruck seems to be the predominant mode. I tend to gape a lot. I am inundated from day to day by irregular intervals of bliss, terror, beatitude and agony. If emptiness and void exists, it’s in passivity, in the will-to-zero, in ataraxia. While some may read privation and lack in Freud, I tend to read overdetermination and irresolvable conflict; there is something in us that exceeds all limits; the drive is in excess. And that’s just on the inside, meanwhile the vicissitudes of life are overwhelming, unavoidable, and relentless. Precarity is the situation. We are overdetermined on every front; contradictions obliterate narrative coherence or any stable sense of self. Fecund meanings overflow the seawall and flood the streets and garden apartments; the insomniac rationality of the sun torches away grassland and forest and the desert grows with every year. All is flux and ceaseless movement from one season to the next. The buddhists make this a position, admitting that the glass is already broken—that the law of death is the impermanence of all things. Nevertheless, the world refuses to admit any such thing: knows nothing about it; this is why it is the world.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, Ai Weiwei
