- Error 404: Not Found
“Where there is a wound, there is a subject.”
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
3 June 2025
Dear reader,
Personal encounters, online acquaintances, those sweet instances of touch among strangers through words—I find all these intersections equally fascinating.
Dear reader,
Don’t be a stranger. I'm welcome to be known beyond my material artifacts and I’m always interested in conversing with my readers beyond these words.
Dear reader,
I once lived on the soils under the concrete grounds of prisons. But now that I’ve clawed my way out, I have decided to live in the wilderness. I learned that this is how I want to learn about myself and the world. When I see buildings, I always try to see the people inside these buildings. I have always been passionate about the things I deeply care about, but as someone who decided to stay, exist, and thrive in the wilderness, from shifting in registers between allowing myself to be feral and learning how to be tame, I realized that I do not want to burn these buildings down—I just want to play and crank the dial up in terms of fun and excitement. This way, I hope that the people peeking at me and my people having fun in the open field through the windows of their own buildings would find more fun and excitement with joining us here in the haunting yet emancipating freedoms of the university parks. I hope that with people seeing the amount of fun we're having, they would find themselves drawn towards walking outside of their classrooms, leaving their buildings, and join us as we try to learn about what it means to care for each other amid the real chaos of this world and the smallness of our mortalities.
Dear reader,
This field is an open space where you are free to enter and leave on your own accord. As long as we are alive, we are here. As long as there are people who stay in these fields, the spirit of play will always continue to live.
Dear reader,
I know, I seem eccentric, peculiar—whatever and whichever adjective/s you prefer to frame me in understanding me. When I was still under the concrete grounds of my prisons, amidst strangulating and immobilizing conditions, I became adept at reading everything—the footsteps, the rattling of the keys, the sound of other people caressing the bars of their cells, the loudness of silence, the dampness of the soil, the humid air above the concrete, the echoes of sounds, the cold breeze seeping through the tiny windows of the cells, the flapping wings of passing birds, the quivering of leaves. I became well-versed with the language of things, both palpable and invisible. In literary terms, to quote a disembodied voice, “All space is semantic space.” One can only imagine the kind of life that wrestled this persona into existence.
Dear stranger,
You might be wondering, amid these profuse ramblings—what is the point that this persona is trying to prove? Well, I don’t really have concrete answers. But let me tell you a parable that I continue to hold onto—the scenes in my mind that I cherish and relish, the images that keep me tethered to these open fields:
Each of us converse with each other in this world with our own set of languages and our own set of rules. However attuned we are to our own languages is a matter of personal discernment. But of course, since you’re still continuing to read my words, I assume that there is something ineffable inside you that pulls you to keep listening to me. Here is a hypothesis: I think that you find fragments of yourself in my words from the smooth surface of these screens.
So let me tell you about my image of beauty:
I want to go back to the chaos of the collapse of the Tower of Babel. I want to go back to the wrath of God when these silly little mortals desperately scrambled towards power to be on equal footing with the divine. I want to give you a certain framing: amidst the collapse of the Tower of Babel, amidst the chaos of these mortals’ bifurcated tongues, these silly and audacious mortals chose to go beyond their Godly fears. Amidst the collapse, amidst the impossibility of total understanding, they took these punishments as constraints.
How can we keep the spirit of the Tower alive despite these conditions and constraints?
To those who chose to stay amidst the collapse, there is only one thing that binds them together—a resolve to make sense and arrive at a higher form of sense despite the preconditions of the impossibility of making and arriving at total sense.
As one of the people who chose to stay in the collapse, this is how I'm trying to work with my constraints—I am trying to foster and nurture my relationship with my language in the most intimate way that I can. When a silly mortal being persists on choosing to take constraints as obstacle courses, it is inevitable for this silly mortal being to arrive at its own desired outcomes. But what this silly mortal being does acquire from finishing these obstacle courses is this—it becomes, more and more, deeper and further, self-possessed.
So let me tell you about my image of happiness:
In my attempts of working with constraints, in my attempts of getting as intimate as I can with my language, I will become well-versed with how to decode and interpret the language of others who speak in tongues that I don't really fully understand. This intentional syntactical negotiations will eventually fracture my own language as I incorporate some of their vocabularies into my vocabularies as I try to widen my language, my world, and my understanding.
So let me tell you about my happiness:
I hope that with my attempts towards the impossible, my fellow silly little mortal beings would catch on to what I am doing, and maybe, try to borrow some of my techniques and strategies and incorporate them in their own strategies and techniques.
So let me talk about pleasure:
The sweetest thing, for me, is for all of these silly little mortal beings who stayed in the rubble to keep pushing and pushing, to keep laboring towards these impossible tasks, to keep speaking as if their tongues are on fire, simply because despite the difficulty of trying to wrestle with the wildly untamable, there is deep joy that they feel deep inside their bodies as they keep trying to do whatever it is that they just feel like doing for the sake of fun and play.
So let me tell you about what freedom ultimately means for me.
Amid staying, existing, and choosing to stay and exist in the wreckage, I would reach my mortal limits to the point of total collapse. I would glance up at these silly little mortal beings in a vegetative state, still persisting on trying to arrive towards the impossible, perhaps towards the fringes of the realm of the divine, and I would smile and cackle manically as my body surrenders to its mortal limits.
Even as I drift away from consciousness, it is now fine to relax and rest for a while. Because despite my momentary non-existence, I am assured that the spirit of what I'm doing has somehow possessed the people who stayed in the rubble alongside me. Thus, if ever I drift from unconsciousness towards death, this is the story that I tell myself for consolation: I have done my task. I have lived well according to the life that I want and chose. Only then would I experience blissful and absolute shameless surrender. Only then will death become so sweet— the texture of its cloak caressing my body as if it was some sort of warm and soothing embrace.
Anyway, that is just a story that I believe in for now. As in the nature of life being subject to a myriad of contradictions, these stories will eventually evolve into something more and more and less and less— perhaps something more anecdotal than parabolic.
However you read this parable, I hope you found some form of value in it. If you want to get to know me beyond these words, you may reach me through my professional email, personal email, or Instagram account.
I look forward to chatting with you, as in the demeanor of people chatting about life amid coffee and cigarettes.
Fondly feral,
Ember (noun): a glowing fragment (as of coal) from a fire.
“Error 404: Not Found” is an old contact page repurposed through a critical lens, utilizing Jacques Lacan’s concept of jouissance as the organizing metaphor in the epistolary form. By re-interpreting the parable of the Tower of Babel through the French concepts of jouer (play) and jouir (pleasure), the work maps an ironic psychoanalytic web of desire, pleasure, surrender, and happiness. Through the spatial metaphors of institutional buildings and an emancipating wilderness, the piece proffers an open invitation to bypass institutional containment in favor of a joyful yet defiant resistance within the wreckage of a riotous political playground.
