Or, in the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, many protestors were reported to have carried wills with them – some written on their helmets, others buried in their backpacks. So just in case, we bring an emergency kit with a whistle, an emergency blanket, and a flash light, to prepare for “Wintermelon-Tofu”. Say, we might be joking about someone preparing for the possibility of being caught in a storm when hiking. It keeps the humour as much as the caution the phrase suggests. I love it though, for the shapes the characters draw around them and the sounds they make.Ī friend translates it as “anything can happen”. It is not so commonly used these days for being a little old-fashioned. In the language I was born into – Cantonese, there is a colloquial that goes, literally, “Wintermelon-Tofu” (dung1 gwaa1 dau6 fu6 冬瓜豆腐).
Preciado for wreaking havoc on the way we process any matter.
Stealth can be an alternative to binary thinking: heterosexual or homosexual, white or black, capitalist or communist, good or bad, etc., criticized by Spanish philosopher Paul B. Stealth inserts those critical and often contradictory possibilities that we need to assume to deliver new ideas.
Thinking that is falling into the “noise vs. It is not true that silence only denotes apathy, repression or defeat, nor that megaphones, shouts and public demonstrations are the most effective forms of protest. I think about the Mexican March of Silence on September 13, 1968, or The Silent March of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on December 21, 2012. I intuit stealth as a political tool, as part of a resistance methodology, as a bridge to listen and share better, that allows us to act bluntly after that necessary pause, especially nowadays when we have no answers to more urgent questions, or citing the Chto Delat collective, that the questions have been changed when we thought we had the answers. This might sound banal and even somewhat new agey, but bear with me: It could be necessary in our grizzly present which is neither characterized by a rebellious nor a radical stridency, but trivialized by the extreme saturation we receive and partake in one way or another at all times, and that usually only flows towards the economic benefit of the big capital owners. I conceive of stealth, quietness, as an “enabler” or “maximizer” of experiences and sensations: to listen and talk (the most logical conceptions), but also to get closer to literature, to cook, to taste food and drink, to smell with greater concentration, to wander and “get lost”, to be critical, to self-evaluate, to sharpen our sight, to encourage imagination, to rethink our relationship with time, to appease thoughts, to feel our bodies, to become sexier (as Einstürzende Neubauten proposed in its only concert in Mexico twenty years ago). Literature has, undoubtedly, a greater imaginative potential around sound than what has been developed by focusing on its physical production in several other fields. I link it to the territories that legendary Mexican writer Juan Rulfo shared with us, portraying with unlimited clarity the noises of silence between death and life, thus breaking the (useless? conceited?) binary thinking between “noise” and “silence”, between what is and what’s not music that has been the basis of numerous essays, for example, on “the silent piece” by John Cage, and its many remakes and covers. I understand stealth as a condition, a state or a situation even that allows a mild flow of information that is intimate, vital, almost secret, regularly clear.