I.
I wandered around New York for five days.
The cold wind made me cough, and the cough never really went away.
There was no water in the hotel—only a vending machine selling Coke and lemon tea.
So every night, my tongue fell asleep with lemon tea and a trace of mint.
I saw large amounts of trashy contemporary art at MoMA, then went to Metrograph to watch Possession—a film that is brilliant and peculiar. Whether one likes it or not, no one can deny how beautiful the actress is.
In the end, I spiraled upward along the ramp of the Guggenheim, looking at Orphist paintings. Information rushed through my brain together with the spiral corridor, leaving me slightly dizzy.
New York is expensive, and there are simply too many things to buy.
I went into Y-3 and Off-White. I quickly lost interest in the former—probably because I had only recently realized that Yohji Yamamoto is still alive. I later remembered that the one who passed away was Issey Miyake. In any case, the two have almost nothing to do with each other, except that they are both Japanese and both designers.
By contrast, I found myself genuinely liking Off-White. Perhaps because they are so good at playing with their logo. It feels like fiddling with a long file folder: open, it looks one way; closed, another. The two silver handles on the sides can be twisted into countless variations. The only thing that never changes is its essence—it is still a folder, the kind of toy most beloved by elementary school students.
II.
About W.
W has many strange hobbies. One of them is going to arcades to play a rhythm game called Maimai. The machine looks like a washing machine, but in terms of function and essence, it is closer to a pinball machine.
Pinball—an object that already sounds outdated—has a peculiar power to absorb people. Standing in front of a pinball machine, one enters a private solitude: time is consumed, and something not quite happiness is exchanged in return. One hears only the clatter of the ball, watches the scoreboard flicker, and waits for the inevitable Game Over.
Maimai produces a similar sensation. One simply steps forward, strikes the surrounding buttons in time with the music, and can remain alone in front of it for hours—or even an entire day—without boredom. Some money is spent, some points are earned. There are many reasons to leave: the money runs out, the hands begin to hurt, or dawn approaches and the arcade closes.
Compared with pinball machines, Maimai clearly has a more malicious temperament—or so I thought as I crouched beside W, watching him pound the machine.
Maimai’s Chinese name is Wu Meng. Players interact with it by striking its circular screen and the ring of buttons around it in rhythm with the music, trading accuracy for points. During play, the upper body must move rapidly and precisely—swinging, striking—so that at first glance, it does resemble dancing.
But if this behavior is truly considered dance, it becomes rather strange. Dance is a performative act, meant to express the self and convey emotion to others. When people play Maimai, however, they press themselves close to a washing-machine-like object, moving quickly within a confined space—like the mating dance of a flamboyant bird-of-paradise. It feels as if the machine itself is the audience. They dance for the machine.
At the same time, their movements are strictly constrained and guided by the machine’s commands. In this tango, the player is merely the follower; the machine leads.
Such an uneven distribution of power inevitably produces performances tinged with shame. I still remember a song that included cat sounds. With each meow, keys appeared on the screen. The player followed the sound, clawing downward along the prompts, looking exactly like a cat scratching a scratching post.
In short, unlike pinball machines, Maimai not only takes the player’s money—it also forces them into a kind of compulsory performance. One could say it has a rather nasty sense of humor.
III.
People around the world have always worshipped gods. One common way of doing so is to dress oneself in the image of a god—Shiva costumes during Indian festivals, masks worn by African tribes to channel divine power, and so on. By this logic, cosplaying Hatsune Miku is probably also a form of god worship.
W loves cosplaying as Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku herself—like all gods—exists as a construct shaped by the desires and expectations of her worshippers. Just as Miku has countless outfits and forms, God changes appearance with sects and schisms; Chinese deities evolve their aesthetics with dynasties.
In short, in this era saturated with god-making movements, modeled after figures like Miku, within a world of over eight billion people—each attached to increasingly peculiar interests—the number of gods is probably unprecedented.
Humans on earth continue to die in endless waves. Gods, meanwhile, grow harder and harder to eliminate. It is difficult to imagine humanity thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. In some eras, there may be more gods than people. And the further into the future we go, the longer—and more sorrowful—history will become.
IV.
Why sorrowful?
First, because history exams will only become harder.
Second, because people in the future will more frequently discover that what they want to do has already been done—that their ideas have already been thought.
Take that middle-school student leaning against a window during lunch break, nearly kissing the corpse of a bee, and thus beginning to think about the a priori and the thing-in-itself. (Of course, at the time he had no such terms—only abstract intuitions.)
Flying back into that moment, and then returning to the present, I can only speak up for that naïve boy born more than two hundred years too late:
Fuck you, Kant.
Seen this way, Zhou Yu was truly petty. “Since Heaven gave birth to Yu, why did it also give birth to Liang?” What truly drives people to despair is never rivalry with peers—or even with one’s own generation—but the impossible competition with sages across history. Standing on the shoulders of giants is ultimately an activity on a different level. And when every generation of giants carries the next—smaller—generation on their backs, people will eventually become pitiably small.
New York has countless museums. I long to explore them, yet each visit inevitably tightens my heart. I believe that some of the ideas I once thought brilliant are hidden somewhere in the corners of this vast city. And once I encounter them, my former self-satisfaction will sour into the bitterness of disappointment.
In any case—farewell, New York.
I hope that someday I will have the chance to live here for a while.
