The lore of signal.

I believe I mentioned leaving my job in the last post; I haven’t done so because there are some matters to be settled before the epilogue. Besides, I’m trying to leave some space between decision and action for obvious reasons. The good news is that I haven’t changed my mind.

Standing on the threshold always pushes me into a special state where all the common happenings around me now carry a deeper meaning; they didn’t change, but I choose to interpret them in a different way—like I’m sitting on the court, so everything has to earn its exemption.

On the one hand, I’m doing my work as usual. On the other hand, I’m conceiving every possible situation in which I may state my proposition and the response it may entail, and it’s inevitable to imagine how my colleagues would react to this event. What I can envisage is that they would behave as if it’s a normal mission, but what I can’t predict is how they would actually feel about it. To be honest, I think feeling carries a much more profound influence across the whole company, and how intense this influence would be is a matter that depends largely on what I’ve done.

Let’s deviate a little and talk about the title of this post. I put the word ‘signal’ in it since I found it’s a good fit for what I want to define—more specifically, this is what I want to define:

一个人选择放弃，其他人的绝望感也会随之增加。那些活到八十岁的虚无主义者和愤世嫉俗者，尽管痛苦，仍能在他们从不放弃的勇气中却给其他人安慰。我想我们都认识一个或两个断了联系的人。对于敏感的人来说，这是存在与否的可怕边界，如果我不再想起某个人，他是否还存在于这个世界上呢？

一个人的缺席是无法描述的——尤其是当涉及到彻底消失时（可能发生的死亡）。“这里有一切曾经存在的证明，但它就是不存在了”。直到连痕迹也逐渐褪去，故事结束，遗憾却还在。如何面对那些没有痕迹的记忆？什么能证明那曾经是真实的？这不仅仅是在心理上怀念过去，而是在永恒的尺度下。你或许能接受万物沉入虚无，但不能接受终点到来的如此之快，或许更可怕的是，人会逐渐忘记一个亲近的人——即便你再努力去回想时，记忆还是从指间滑落，生活会逐渐填补所有伤口和空白，一切痛苦在时间面前都是平等的，这既美丽又可怕，你永远无法判断这究竟是好事还是坏事——唯一确定的是，痛苦的空洞永远无法被填满。

你可以接受自己的痛苦，但无法接受他人的痛苦。因此，不管怎样，必须尝试、不断尝试，不要让自己沉沦，去抗争那抹去自我的渴望。扶起自己的身体，擦去怜悯的泪水，骑上黑马去参加周四的公寓派对，嘲笑自己的渺小，甚至在烂醉后开口侮辱所有人，说他们是满脑子享乐的小资阶级。只是要明白朋友们想你了，这比什么都重要。否则，就像那首Manic Street Preachers的歌《什么时候你成了另一个故友?》唱的那样，“每一个爱你的人，都会一直等到最后”。

“Don’t you think it takes terrific courage to make one’s final gesture with one’s own naked, crimson-headed corpse? He told the truth through the act of dying. I don’t know just what truth it was he told, but the one absolutely certain thing is that he told it. When I heard about it from Natsumi, something inside me gave the signal, ‘OK, message received.’”

The first excerpt is from Helen Hindpere in her post Ühest üksindusest on the ZA/UM blog, and the second is from Kenzaburō Ōe in his book The Silent Cry. The originals are in Estonian and Japanese respectively, but I’ll put translated versions here since that’s the form I initially read and thought about.

Signal is always a byproduct derived from actions. The interesting part is that neither producer nor receiver can figure out exactly what the signal is about, since it can only be consumed by the volatile minds of people, and words always fail as a perfect mapping of the mind.

If one, settling a pillow by her head

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all

That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

From my perspective I’ve done something that may leave a signal after my resignation—simply imagining how things may turn out feels like an invisible mark on an invisible mind, which makes me laugh, invisibly.

There is a concept called noise; for me it’s just an alias for worthless signal. By analogy, we call certain combinations of sounds music because we understand and enjoy them, while we call other combinations noise since they’re chaos to our ears—the criteria largely depend on our own interpretation. Signal is of the same kind as music: you don’t want to be surrounded by noise or even produce it yourself, but you can’t simply express your feeling about the noise you heard, since it’s noise only for you, so you endure as if it’s nothing… or leave.

The act of enduring or leaving is such a strong signal in itself that almost any creature with an ear would stop to listen; it’s fascinating both for the one crossing the line and for those witnessing. We are creatures of the same kind striving to live—so why do some of us want to step into fire?

My own idea of resignation stemmed from the resignation of my direct senior—or I’ll call him a friend, even though we have strong conflicts about the product goals. It’s hard to say which part of his resignation left the biggest impression on me. I didn’t want to leave because my friend left; he merely uncovered the line that splits two spaces, and I simply couldn’t draw my thoughts back from that threshold every day after the discovery, until my thoughts passed their judgement on the new topic and demanded radical action.

OK, my personal matters have taken up enough space; I will close this article by relating this to a larger picture: what kind of signal is worth producing.

I still won’t define what the signal is; what I want to say is that minding your signal is minding your actions. Someone told me not long ago that people will someday realise that the most important thing is not what you have or do, but what’s going on inside your mind. You can’t be yourself by pretending you’re someone else day after day, you can’t reach your destination by enduring every deviation forced on you by others for whatever reason, and your mind will crumble or squeeze into the niche that’s left to adapt to the dire situation—but its nature will remain and yell.

I’ve never meant to attract attention; nonetheless I’m posting texts here and forcing myself to stand in front of my own thoughts—because I realise that I can’t wholeheartedly accept myself if I hide my true opinions or fail to honour how valuable my signal could be under the circumstances. In a rock star’s tone: I speak because you all suck.