Endless Verse / A Routine between Fiction and Faction
Yindan Wang
PROLOGUE
This is a fictional story about my mother. In the fiction, she keeps finding herself and I keep finding her as well. At the end, it’s hard to tell who it is.
FICTION AND FACTION
Our earth is round and the road is flat (and curved, but we don’t often remember that). We move a little further each day in a particular trajectory. Countless times we pass by a certain place we must pass through, but very few of us will look back at these paths that have been trodden in our footsteps.
Until one day, what we expect to happen happens. These familiar paths, these surroundings, disappear in a loud bang, echoing from the distant past, and we don’t see how far away these echoes reflect and disappear. But we know they have not disappeared, caught between the contradictions of the faction and the fiction.
Precisely because of too much riding and too much freedom, and of the unchanging horizon, in spite of our desperate gallopings,
the pampa assumed the aspect of a prison for me, a prison that was bigger than the other.
– Supervielle
We are in a forbidding space, both inside and outside. There is a morass of contradiction all around us, we know nothing about it,but we satisfy ourselves in it.
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwvBn2HQM-s
SITE
Countless times we have travelled through the motorway, countless times we have looked at the tips on the motorway signs and driven through at 60 yards fast. We don’t realise that each time we drive, we are in an invisible arc over and over again. We seemed to know exactly where we were going, following the signs, but in reality we had no idea that the road ended where we were.We are in a three- dimensional space under a gantry, with a gantry on top of the car, a tarmac road under the tyres, and a protective belt on the left and right, where yet we are on the outermost part of the world. It is a terrible road that is both inside and outside, we are constantly in a space that is both inside and outside. We think we are travelling freely, but in reality? We are unconsciously repeating the same path on a road that is being planned. We are planned, yet in being planned we attempt to break boundaries. We are in contradiction, yet in contradiction we nd balance and break the contradiction.
In just about 0.336 seconds of driving over the gantry ((1.6+4)*60*60/60,000). There is Observer and Observed, The manager and the obedient… We play different identities, both active and passive; both balanced and contradictory. We accept each identity as a matter of course, erecting barriers to draw a clear distinction from them. But unintentionally, the gaps on each barrier allow the di erent identities to interpenetrate, to be inverted and hostile to each other.
SEQUEL
I started to go looking for you who had disappeared and was wondering if you had really disappeared. I took your picture with me all the way up the motorway. I saw many views that were amusing, but which came up over and over again. I searched for you in the crowd.
I started driving on the highway, looking for your footprints. I passed one motorway after another, past one gantry after another. I rested your picture on the window. Then I noticed that there seemed to be a sign of you ahead…
We were written in the script, just like my mother’s character. We play our most authentic selves. It’s like Truman’s world, trying to find yourself in the constant repetition of each day. Eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of free time. Our lives are divided into three equal parts. And we do our best in the limited 24 hours.
Whether we can really escape from the endless plain, we do not know. But maybe there is a chance to stop time, to stop the machine, to stop society from manipulating. Then we can stop acting. And finally, there’s no more endless scripts.
