It is to that other one, to Lydia, things are. I wander through the streets of China and America and I pause, one could say curiously, to gaze at others; of Lydia I receive news from my weekly telephone conversations with mother and I hear her name mentioned in her random conversations with distant relatives. I like Chinese calligraphy, Japanese flair, American vintage pottery of the thirties and forties, fabric with textures, modern architecture, the taste of coffee, the novels of Hermann Hesse and the films of Akira Kurosawa; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into attributes of a versatile amateur. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is ambiguous; I exist, I let myself exist so that Lydia may live her life in pursue of the arts, and this pursuit justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that she has put together some decent creations, yet these creations cannot sustain me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to humanity. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to exist in the other. Little by little, I surrender willingly to her everything, even though I am aware of her steadfast tendency to wander.
The Zen masters understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Lydia, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in her creations than in those of many others, or in the incessant questioning of my mind. Long ago I tried to free myself from her by moving on from the mythologies of body and spirit to quarry of duality, but those are now Lydia’s and I will have to conceive of other things. In this way, my life is vanishing and all that I am (if it is that I am someone) is infinitesimal, or has become the other.
I question which of us is writing this piece.
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