minus [+93 years] Abandonment … [after the singularity, [exiles 5], part 11 of a serial]

For him this is how it began — Footsteps crunched on the gravel path. He slipped in behind the wheel, my mind a blank again, He was reluctant getting into the car, his heart in my mouth, my body ready to drive the black car away down the hills, the last thing to do before they left and tried to repair their crumbling relationship on the holiday a flight to Japan. It was a terrible idea. With what seemed like disastrous consequences. It should have been an unthreatening set of events, it wasn’t. He stopped at the crossroads and turned left to drive to the garage where he was leaving the car. Why doesn’t matter. They were meeting there before going to the airport. This was long ago. They parted on the holiday, He left her, she stayed. He returned with… in a state of exile…… for me he was always the existential crisis that caused everything. So romantic. Which is how it began for me… a long time ago.

abandonment…. and loss…I was confused by the ideologies of this language (for years) and then as it became familiar, abandoning my past willingly and only slightly reluctantly. Like an ancient migrant, before such concepts could exist, before the meaning of migrant even existed. [The embers of the campfire, did they have fires in those days? I don’t know. Walking away from the fire towards the rising sun. The setting sun. Those around the campfire expected us to return.] The act of leaving existed then just as it does now. I left as my ancient foremother left, leaving friends, colleagues and family behind them. Perhaps it was on a horse, a raft or small fragile boat, most likely on foot in the late afternoon, walking north. There we are walking away from the home of my old home. True. Though that I was expelled, so were most of my foremothers, exchanged or sent to die because of lack of food. [perhaps standing beneath an apple tree unable to eat the fruit because they did not recognise and know.] But here I was abandoning my past and ending up here. My pen scratching words onto the fine paper from Japan. (I dream of books as they dream of me, words.) I abandoned my past as they abandoned me, they expected me to die, but as they sacrificed me, the act of sacrifice, the ancient tradition of sacrificing a child for stability, money and power. They missed. Running from the sacrificers leaving death behind us we ran. Abandoning my life and becoming nomad. From an assassin to war machine. We ran across the city. #To be nomadic is to be abandoned in our societies. If like me you belonged and were abandoned. Should I say discarded. That would be more appropriate, like labourers, workers no longer required, skills no longer needed, surplus to requirements, abandoned, lost. No longer a person of the state. It’s not enough to say exiled as its more than that. These words, these thoughts are part of why they abandoned me. By the time I was thirty years old I was uneasy in that culture. I was thirty years old. I changed my name. My identity changed. It took years for me to understand what had happened. It took years for us to understand what had happened. Lost — with being abandoned there is loss. I lost everything as I ran. With every step, I left them behind. Left everything. The future accompanied me, he ran beside me across the city until we could negotiate a peace, exile. until we could talk with minimal interference, the noise died down, we ran. I left my life behind. Losing everything, abandoning everything. I must have been abandoned by my family, my ocommunity, my society; weeks, months, years before i understood. Before we ran along a line of flight. I was sacrificed for peace. With a gun in my hand I ran across the city and flew across the world. Like a scythian nomad on her horse, him beside me carry weapons in a brown leather bag. Leaving africa 100,000 years ago on foot, becoming nomad, arriving in Japan 30,000 years ago and leaving by plane in the 21st century “an amazon travelling north, pentheselia” he says. He, my weak achilles who preferred nomadism to being an agent of the state and yet… Exiled, my name is Park again, abandoned, since we arrived here, my name is Park again. Of all the names I have had, this is my favourite. My first name was Hokugai Nomiko, Nomiko to my family and the dead. I was Nomiko until I became Park and then Song and really I preferred Park. His name […] After I was abandoned, we left the metropolis of 38 million people, we left together holding hands as we walk into the desert. Nomads walking out of the city into the desert. They stood in the terminal and watched us board the plane, making sure we left (they considered us as exiles) and became nomads walking into the desert. I met him with the intense joy of a liberty always to come, traversing as nomads the lives we were forced to live, no longer a metropolis, but the capitalist city on our way to the steppes, the desert where all encounters are possible, producing lives without transcendence. And then here he had to accept the apparatus of capture and continued being an agent of the state, I joined him. It was a forced choice…. How ironic that to live we had to do this, becoming nomad became our lives. Nomads Eventually we arrived in a new country, his country, surrounded by the state we adapted. I, alien, exile and refugee, the people who we had to accommodate in our invented situation as nomads standing in one place. We planted trees to hide behind. We built a library. Surrounded by those people of the state and capital who were allowed to travel whilst we could not. […] I had children, we had children, they had parents, I have memories of other children… Knowing the violence of our pasts, present and future, still we continued. We planted trees, we bought woodland and adjacent fields. Planted an orchard. Built a small hidden building in the woods. The silence suited us. We worked for the state, ourselves and the universe. As we could not become invisible my old family and colleagues surveilled us from a distance and sometimes close by. Criminals, exiles and police.

Release and Capture… When I was discharged from all the juridicial and most of the contractual constraints and responsibilities, deterritorialized after twenty five years of exile, twenty-five years of working for the state. They gave me a normal british passport sometime later. After more than twenty five years I was a citizen, a sub(=)ject of the crown, rather than an exile under geo(=)political arrest, under constant threat and surveillance, human and inhuman, then now nonhuman. We were able to start travelling again. In the years that followed after receiving the passport with my chosen name, Song, we had several trips into Europe and we travelled thousands of kilometres. We, and I have to honest here, it was ‘we’ who were released by the discharge — not I — not it = not they — but I — (me, him, our children) and what we are talking about are movements through the periphery of empire which is to say they remain ordering mechanisms related to the state of exile that we had volunteered for, desired even. We travelled along passages that became landscapes, up and down, in and out, here and there. Empire exists and I and we were exiles within it. Newly learning how to move within it. There was no outside of empire for us. I am writing this in the library and really I should be reading, books to read and papers to evaluate. Let’s go back to the beginning… The young men who had come to our house, my office with the discharge papers, signed by the minister and his secretary, had been both the bearers of the papers of citizenship and also perhaps more importantly; a reminder of the power of the state apparatuses they represent. A threat even as they delivered the papers. The ever present possibly of violence. Difference and repetition in a room signing papers in black ink. What will you do? Will you travel? One of them asked me. As I signed the papers, as he signed the papers as a witness. Not sure, i told them. Perhaps we’ll travel to the hotel I own on the coast of Africa. You own a hotel? I own lots of things, and also nothing, mostly nothing as it was forced on us… They, the universe of the state and criminal aristocracy that I had left behind me, had territorialized me onto this island North of London, off the coast of Europe. an acre of land with a house and a library. Occasionally we, me and him had been giving special permission to travel to special places. With guards and jailers. It was strange to be in a place under even more intense surveillance than when we were here. We had been happy for decades reterritorialized in this way. Sitting on a sofa watching K drama, Gangster in being. Citizen in becoming. Enemies of the state that we had to work for.

Beyond the glass wall a man was talking to a young woman, they are father and daughter. Family. I know. My family. Perhaps nobody else can know this,from this distance, through a glass wall. We, Song and Sam have become middle aged again, living in exile. Why didn’t we live lives of despair? But this would have been a lie. Rather it is that we are here and I was looking at two people I know well and these people who are delivering the discharge papers will leave with our signatures. I know he has already signed his equivalent documents, at his office, witnessed by his boss … When can I get a passport? I would like to go on holiday. Explaining, justifying like a normal person. Soon after all this has been processed. Thankyou. And that is how this exile was allowed as an young-old person to travel outside the borders of the UK.

Libraries; but how does it work with libraries anyway? For exiles its different, we source books and other objects both locally but also from the place we have left. A stream of things, arriving on a molecular line, still segmantarity but also more fluid, running through the societies and groups between us and what used to be home. They trace out little modifications, they take detours, they travel up and down hills. But are no less precise for all this, they even direct irreversible processes. We wonder what the people who scrutinize our mail makes of the arrival of a book from Japan. Of course we are not speaking about the notes and words that are recorded and transcribed in a studio. Though these may be important they are rare. Instead we are talking about the notes as they arrive on the library table. To be looked at and then indexed and filed. How are they filed? , english language tyexts filed according to japanese indexing. the reverse ordering for english to japanese translations. And then there are my partners books, different specialities, different histories, different {situational ordering, he says}. Here though in the vagueness I admit that they are recorded in my journal, at least the first time I read some pages or other. The encounter with the text is recorded somewhere in my brain, the actual time of the encounter doesn’t matter too much, because these texts are not perishable with an enddate, though this will happen as my exiled brain detonates and finally either my body or mind, inevitably fails. At my age i have twenty or so years of life left, i keep the guns near to hand…

Analysand: Footsteps crunched on the gravel path. The side door is open, there is a corridor, to my left a door into the bathroom, the other door to my right leads to the consulting room. I sit down in the chair in the consulting room. Neutral off-white walls. Two paintings on the walls. An oak chest by the door into the house. A door into the coat closet. The clock ticks, tick tick tick. John, my analyst enters and sits opposite me, across the room… I speak, we speak, we listen. An hour passes, I have been seeing him for over decade.I have spent well over 1200 hours sitting in that room. I have become an expert at being a patient. He has become an expert at being the psychoanalyst of an assassin. He is the only person, apart from my partner who knows about me. Who knows about my parents, brother, the living and the dead. He is no longer scared. I walk away after an hour, my footsteps crunching on the gravel path. I slip in behind the wheel, my mind blank in driving mode, I drive away in the dark blue car towards my island in hertfordshire. I stopped at the cross roads on and turned left. I always knew it was It was a terrible idea with potentially disastrous consequences. None of which happened. Later, thirty or so years later, when we left to die in the hotel we could do so happily because of this. “This is our science fictional life” he says. I write years after we left the hotel.