I had occasion a couple of weeks ago to revisit the Yapoos song 「赤い戦車」("Red Tank"). It was more or less incidental. As often happens, Ni asked me for some music while I was cooking dinner, to break the silence that becomes a stage for unbearable thoughts. I must have been feeling lazy or pressed for time, so I went to the music stored locally on my phone, and landed on the Togawa Legend: Self select best & rare 1979-2008 compilation[1]. I've always loved the handful of tracks that Hirasawa Susumu worked on with Yapoos[2]. I clicked on "Hysteria", an old favorite which features two majestic Hirasawa guitar solos, and then the queue advanced to "Red Tank".
I[4] already liked this song a bit, but it held on in my memory in a new way after this listening. Why did the chorus, despite Togawa's restrained delivery, sound so wrenching? In a break from old habit[5], I sought out the lyrics. Togawa describes painting a canvas with layer after layer of paint, until it becomes "a self-actualizing cube". The color: blood-red, "a color that convinces me I was born so I could live." I found my way also to a translated commentary on the song by Togawa herself, a long account[10] of childhood abuse and molestation that engendered both a suicidal streak and its opposite. Maybe it's best summed up by this passage:
"When I look back on my life so far, then I feel it’s a good thing that I have become an expressive person. If I had turned into someone who does office work at a company, I really don’t know what would have become of me. As an expressive person, and I mean not just as an actress, but also as a singer, as someone who writes lyrics and who can supply the part that can’t just be expressed through the lyrics with her singing style, I can express my true meaning. For me, this is 'living’. The barbarism inside of me - my survival instinct - tries determinedly to keep on living, as the wild part of me, even when my heart tells me that I want to die. I was saved, was kept alive by this instinctive element that animals have. And I accept this as a good thing."
Ni had been telling me recently about the same thing, an animal instinct rising up in opposition to her own suicidality. She even has her own, real painting, one in which she wrote over the canvas again and again, with the objective of making the paint thicker than the canvas, much like Togawa's "self-actualizing cube". The painting, which is hanging on our wall, is black (the color of ink). Ni made a second version in the color of her flesh, but got rid of it because she thought it was ugly. Maybe she would have landed on red eventually, but the move from black to flesh-colored, to lively embodiment, is important in a way that I'll gesture at vaguely later. There are further parallels between Togawa's story and Ni's as well, particularly regarding childhood experiences that called into question the /reason/ for existence. Togawa thought that her suicide would free her mother from her father's abuse. Ni, for her part, was conceived with the hope that a baby would cure her mother's schizophrenia. Needless to say, it didn't work[11], and she grew up with the awareness of teleological failure. It's not hard to see how this (combined with the beatings[12]) leads to suicide attempts and hospitalizations.
So, maybe you can see how "Red Tank" moved me more than when I first heard it. It actually led to a minor therapeutic breakthrough in my understanding of my marriage. Really, I can only get close to this type of woman. Otherwise, there's a deficit of vitality or 'barbarism', and things fizzle out.
Red is the color of blood, vitality, and Communism. The Soviet theoretician Evald Ilyenkov believed that Communism would culminate in an act of civilizational self-sacrifice that would literally reverse the heat death of the universe and initiate a new big bang. Red is active and anti-entropic. If it's the color of both barbarism and Communism, then it's the color of history itself, and the color of violence, which is the naked union of history and humanity. Black is the color of Anarchism (and Fascism). Anarchism may be Communism's opposite, more properly than Fascism, in the sense that it is entropic[14]. I've been in therapy/psychoanalysis for the last several months to treat a schizoid condition, which sometimes presents as a lack of endogenous vitality, and leads me to pursue intense experiences and, as previously described, to only tolerate intense relationships.
Last year, I sought out training from Ed Calderon in two separate weekend-long classes. Ed is an ex-state police officer from Tijuana, a veteran of the drug war at the border from roughly the early 2000s to the early or mid 2010s, at which point his unit was subsumed by a cartel and he fled into the US. I first heard of him on an episode of knifemaker Ernest Emerson's podcast, but he has since made a mark with his own show, and is probably best known from more than one appearance on Joe Rogan's show. Among people who offer this or that manner of tactical training, Ed stands out personally and practically due to his extreme openness and his scrappy, extremely Mexican pragmatism. Most remarkable of all, though, is his (innate?) ability to round out a class with an experience that tilts into spiritual territory.
The first class, called "Organic Medium Entry", focuses on the construction, concealment, and finally, usage of improvised weapons. After an overnight homework assignment to construct a cheap or free shiv (or prepare to construct one in-situ), students are subjected to a search on day two of OME, and then have the opportunity to test the weapon (if it wasn't found and confiscated) on a suspended[15] pig carcass. As Ed leads each student up to test his or her shiv, he directs the student to touch the pig's torso, and then to touch his or her own torso, and to repeat this a few more times. The stated purpose is to "compute" the anatomical similarity between a pig[16] and a human, but it seemed plain to me that, intentionally or not, Ed is forcing his students to confront the more basic parity between themselves and the pig they are about to stab––two pieces of flesh[17]. I have a vivid memory of looking into the pig's eye[22], noting the human-like quality of its eyelashes. This moment, and the subsequent plunge of the sharpened nail into the torso, had a tremendous effect on me, placing me back into my body, or maybe more fully into my body than I had been until then. My suicidal ideation before that was almost totally focused on my head––a drill or a bullet through the temple, or hammering a nail through the forehead. The locus of the ideation shifted down to my chest after the experience with the pig. It got me into therapy for the first time in eight or nine years.
I returned in September for "Counter-Custody", a class focused on escape and evasion of "irregular custody" scenarios--kidnappings. At the end of the second day, more concealment of tools and another, more intense search, before students are restrained. In an adjoining room, dark, laid down on a plastic sheet. "I'll be back to kill you in five minutes," an assisting instructor says. A strobe flashes, Ed stomps on a collection of panic buttons that screech in the concrete interior of the room.
I was the first into the room, and first to break free from my restraints (duct tape and a set of police standard M100-1 handcuffs). I sat on the floor, fingers in my ears and squinting to make up for the loss of my glasses, watching as my classmates freed themselves and joined me against the wall. What was most striking was to observe Ed himself, Ed who during the course of his police career [REDACTED]. Standing over the students writhing on a plastic sheet, he repeated the same cycle: first, lean over and dispense a bit of advice or firm encouragement. Then, tase the student[18]. Finally, tase himself. Again and again, in a kind of dance, punctuated by stomps on the panic buttons to keep the noise up, playing the role of angel, devil, and at last, penitent[21].
The self-tasing was not a stated thing, and I wasn't sure it was happening while I watched. I was only able to confirm it by asking Ed[19], after thanking him for indirectly getting me into therapy. Ed's lower teeth are broken, like glass shards set into the top of a brick wall. The iris of one eye is notched like the code wheel of a combination lock.
[1] My mp3s of this compilation are, for some reason, of higher quality than the other Togawa/Yapoos tracks I have, so I go to it when I want to listen to the hits. I don't know why it mattered in this case, because I was playing the music through my phone's tinny and slightly water-damaged speakers.
[2] Dadada ism was the first album I downloaded from Togawa Jun's discography, off of a thread of Rapidshare links on /mu/, and "Virus" was the first track that took hold of me. I was already well aware of Hirasawa because of his soundtrack work, but I didn't learn until some later time that he worked on "Virus", and I didn't learn until much, much later (very recently) that Togawa and Hirasawa are good friends on top of being collaborators.[3]
[3] At this juncture in writing the essay, I stopped to hang a painting on the wall. Temporarily propped against a sofa cushion, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin looked at me as if expecting me to do him harm.
[4] I'm painfully aware of my usage of "autocentric language," but what else am I to do?
[5] When I was 23, I struck up a serendipitous online-offline friendship with the members of the Swedish band Team Rockit[6]. An emphatic point of mutual understanding[7] was the notion that understanding lyrics (in other words, proficiency in the language of the lyrics) is not necessary to appreciate or even understand a song. I still believe that it's not necessary, but[8] it can deepen the understanding of a song that's worthy.
[6] Team Rockit are better disciples of Hirasawa than I am. They even dedicated the only episode of their radio show, Omega FM, to his music.
[7] It felt entirely symmetrical at the time, but distance has given me the perspective that we were approaching this from very different places. Team Rockit, on the one hand, were self-consciously writing lyrics in their native language for an international audience that doesn't understand it. In their capacity as music listeners, they are also, well, Swedish, which is to say rather good speakers of international English, but not native. I, on the other hand, as just a music fan from the USA, was always seeking out music from outside of my country. The reasons for this are probably manifold: on the one hand, there was the prodromal sensation of America's declining cultural hegemony and the corresponding drop in the quality of its cultural output. Then, there's my basic rootlessness[9]. Finally, avoiding English-language lyrics was a way of protecting myself from the impingement of painfully bad writing. I'm not talking about straightforwardly dumb pop lyrics, which are basically just tones from the vocal instrument. I'm talking about trying-but-failing lyricism. For instance, I've always hated "Desolation Row", but this is an exceptional case of aiming high and falling far. I also can't listen to the likes of Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift, because the sound of the fans' overidentification with the lyrics is too loud within the lyrics themselves.
[8] As a teenager, I always read books with music playing, and I always skipped the introductions and footnotes.
[9] My psychoanalyst was recently nudging me toward Ludwig Wittgenstein, because of resonances between our respective personality structures (schizoid), and also shared literary preoccupations (Dostoyevsky). I'll probably have to delve more into it at another time, but a third-hand source (a review of a biography) describes Wittgenstein as "in some sense Jewish", which resonates with other writing on this website. But more to the point: "[Wittgenstein’s] was a life lived utterly outside the shadows of any orthodoxy, any deference to outside authority, any standing affiliation with a particular religious community. In his diaries, Christian terms are wrenched from him nearly instinctively[…] in the face of his recurrent crises of confidence.”
[10] Here I am really struggling against the urge to just include Togawa's full commentary as a long block quote. It's here: https://juntogawaforever.tumblr.com/redtankexplained. As an aside, I find her description of workshopping lyrics with her bandmates very endearing.
[11] This seems to have been a hope fostered by Ni's mother's family, and I don't really know how much her father was aware of the schizophrenia to begin with. There is some impression of a conspiracy by my mother-in-law's family to marry her off on the sly. My father-in-law has borne the burden with stubborn grace for decades.
[12] Incidentally, Togawa notes in her commentary on "Red Tank" that after a beating by her father, her mother would give her "this medicine called 'Balance’ that psychiatrists prescribe." I've noticed over the years that borderline people talk about medications vaguely, always vaguely and with little recall for even the most basic details[13]. More than once have I acted as an underqualified pharmaceutical consultant for a borderline friend or loved one. I wonder whether there's a deeply-buried element of self-protection in this, because borderlines frequently experience paradoxical reactions to psychiatric intervention. I looked into it, and the "Balance" that Togawa refers to is a Japanese brand name of chlordiazepoxide, the benzodiazepine known in the English-speaking world as Librium. If Togawa is borderline, as I suspect, the chlordiazepoxide would have come with a risk of increasing suicidality. An acknowledgment of sorts in her commentary: "more than that I thought that I wanted her to fix a poultice for me." Ni had her own bad experience of psychiatry when a normal SSRI caused her to experience uncontrollable rage.
[13] A day after writing this, I noticed a corresponding vagueness in my own recollection of past attempts at therapy.
[14] I saw an Anarchist poster the other day calling for "human and animal liberation", with a strong implication that human predation of animals is unacceptable. I am a vegetarian, but doesn't this by extension call for the cessation of all biological activity?
[15] The carcass is suspended in order to provide a better simulation of attacking a standing target, without an immovable, hard backing like a wall or floor. Some of the force of the blow is lost in the backward motion of the target.
[16] Ed split his youth between skating and going to hardcore shows in Tijuana and working on his family's pig farm in the countryside. He self-identifies as an Anarchist, or rather, he made no mention of it in May, and then said so proudly in September, so maybe it's a developing identification. He describes himself as an "agent of chaos," in that he does things like training BORTAC and then training migrants on the other side of the border. Obviously there is something to be said for the notion that Anarchists and Left-Communists always wind up as servants of the state, but I still respect Ed's stance. For one thing, he's a very decent and gentle man (I saw him interact with a child; it's undeniable; trust me), but more importantly, it seems that his Anarchism stems from having been deeply, deeply hurt by the state that he served in his youth, leaving him with little choice but to raise up the most blunt and direct ideological opposition available to him.
[17] One of Togawa Jun's most famous songs, "Teinen Pushiganga" (「諦念プシガンガ」), contains a memorable lyric, roughly translated: "Like a cow or a pig, it's okay to kill me. It's okay; I'm just a piece of flesh." The "Teinen" of the title means "resignation", the element in Togawa that is dialectically opposed to the "barbarism" (野蛮, yaban) elaborated in "Red Tank".[25]
[18] I am proud of how well I handled the taser. Other students cried out more, but I was able to basically accept it after the first time.
[19] I told him, "you don't need to do that," which is true in that he's heaping the entire class roster's taser pain upon himself, but I still feel it's one of the dumbest things I've ever said to someone, and I regret it.
[20] At this juncture, I stopped writing for a few weeks.
[21] I was struggling with the desire to text a dear friend of mine, whom I lost touch with, and I observed within myself a corresponding and nullifying "anti-desire", so I started to reflect more on the nature of this negation. In plain English, we can say "I want it," and negate that by saying "I don't want it." The negative "I don't want it" is actually an ambiguous sentence, in that it could express either a passive lack of desire or an active revulsion: pseudo-formally: negating the predicate (I[don't want] it) or the object (I want[not-it]). But there exist either one or two additional options that are inexpressible in English: negating the subject ([Not-I] want it), or negating the entire statement(Not[I want it]). The "anti-desire" I noted is one or the other of these, or maybe both. When I brought it up to my therapist, he said it's a negation of the subject[23], and told me I was basically describing Ronald Fairbairn's concept of the "antilibidinal ego". Fairbairn developed a complex endopsychic model with a 'coping, everyday ego,' an 'antilibidinal ego', and a 'libidinal ego', resulting from a split within the self that corresponds to splitting of objects into good/preserved, rejecting, and exciting/disappointing part-objects, with the three ego parts relating to these respectively. I was studying a diagram of this when I had a sudden recollection of Ed steadying me as he led me, dazed, off the 'killing floor'. I almost burst out crying at work, as if the memory had hit me, but I'm of the sort that doesn't cry at being abused, being brought to tears rather by kind words and gestures.
[22] After the regular portion of class with improvised shivs and small knives, students were free to take apart the pig with larger implements. Two guys were going to town on it with a Winkler tomahawk and a macuahuitl when what looked like a blob of clear gelatin landed on the concrete floor at my feet. It took me a minute to realize that this was a piece of eyeball.
[23] There are a number of schisms or ruptures in the chronology of my life, separating it into segments that look as if they were lived by different subjects, discontinuous from my present self (if such a one even exists). I've spent many hours trying to piece back together one in particular: After a tumultuous 2014, I entered in 2015 into a six-month relationship with a 'normie' girl, someone who shared none of my interests or affinities, a careerist. It's something that I sought for myself, and even fantasized about, and it came shortly after a mental illness-induced exit from a job and the deletion of my social media accounts. When the relationship ended with her single text––"here let us stop"––I emerged to find the social life I'd built for myself since finishing school had evaporated[24]. I've come to recognize this relationship as an act of self-abnegation approaching suicide. I have almost no memories from that six-month period, something my therapist attributes to my being 'emotionally comatose.'
[24] I've loved the story of Urashima Tarō since I first heard it as a child.
[25] If it's not clear by now, this is the whole point, and this my self-actualizing wall of text against resignation.
