If you want to find something, throw it in the bushes. If you want to lose something, hold it and prize it above everything. A game of semantics, sure: One must of course no longer possess something in order to find it, and one can only lose what one already has. But there is something true in these paradoxical reversals. A kind of entangling.
Feeling caught in a cage, we might seek its escape routes. Be it the desire to just be left alone, or to lose ourselves in the warm comfort of communality, the feeling of holding in our hands something that has already been lost creates the urge to return to a state in which we believe having been in full control of things. Perhaps this is what gives us the urge to hold onto what we have — the feeling that it’s slipping through our fingers, that we need to go back and find it where we left it.
But what if the precise reverse is true? There’s nothing in that cabin in the woods but a doubling of ghosts and ceaseless talk, now unmoored from the sound of real human voices, echoing around the eaves. There is nothing in that ‘ideal community’ but the reverberation of ancient grudges and neighborhood strifes. This is the odd logic of fantasy, one that communicates and animates the sorrowful (and oh-so fulfilling) song of loss: It is not that we have to set out on a journey, so as to once again hold the prized object firmly in our hands. This simplistic solution that fantasy arrives cloaked in is the sure recipe for a total dissolution.
So, perhaps, it is not what we think has been lost that is to lead our way. Perhaps, we should not be looking for a way out at all. But, rather, a way in and through. ‘We’ grow tired of society, and want to escape it, to be by our ‘selves’, only to discover that ‘we’ and ‘selves’ are left behind in the escape. Enough. We’re all in this together, the only way is through, to throw what is most valuable forward into the torrent that threatens to consume it, only to realize that it was this very torrent that delivered it unto us in the first place. Logic of the yo-yo.
— Beijing, DDC Bar, 23.8.2019