ARTHUR
You dream in a language that I can’t understand. There’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.

Arthur turns to Nora and gazes at her. Arthur tries to smile a little to hide his fear and loneliness.
Nora reaches over and holds Arthur’s hand.
…

I dreamt of my mom weaving, slouching as she runs the spool through the loom. She contorts her body, stretching her limbs as she stretches the fabric. She tightens the yarn and sets the pattern in place. Nu, na kawng ana hia? Mom, does your back hurt? Thud. Thud. She strikes twice with her wooden beam to fix the loose threads. She ignores me and quietly moves on to spool the next line.

I sit in the living room of our residency, a non-place I’m slowly starting to call home. Yet, I struggle to move on to the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph. Sometimes, it feels as if my thoughts are a flock of startled birds, escaping me more quickly than my fingers can coax them onto the screen. They flutter and dart, forming intricate patterns in the air, only to dissipate before I can capture them in the neat, linear cages of words. My back hurts.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ 

Two weavers. She weaves textiles. I weave text. Nevertheless, she’s the better weaver.

---

There’s a lot of doubt that I harbour. There’s the doubt born from an insatiable curiosity, the kind that makes you question every assumed truth and every comfortable answer. Why is it this way? This doubt is invigorating. But then, there’s the heavier, more insidious kind: doubt that feels instilled, handed down by some invisible curriculum of expectation.

Doubt that is imposed, one that echoes the past. And perhaps the most insidious of all: the doubt that becomes deeply, stubbornly internalized, burrowing into your core until it feels like a fundamental part of who you are. Your struggle is to say otherwise.

I spent the first few weeks of the residency trying to figure out what being and becoming a critic entails. It seems rather ironic that these doubts emerged after entering as a “critic-in-residence.” Had I been a critic before I was deemed as such, or was it only after entering a space with its ‘legacy’ of critics that I could also become one? Do I stop being a critic after the residency? 

Looking at the past lives of the critic, I began reading previous Peers catalogues and blogs to find out how my predecessors wrestled with the idea and the position. “What is a critic? What does a critic do?” More importantly, “What does criticism mean to me?” Every critic seems to have faced these questions one way or another. I speculate the next one would too, as these questions weren’t lost on me either.

“Art criticism has become quite descriptive, if not biographical”, lament the various acquaintances I made over the past few weeks, slightly nudging me toward—तुम कुछ करो| Perhaps description is why “nobody reads anymore!” (another lamentation of the well-read). The quick fix to not reading would be to, well, read. How the cure to depression would be to stop being depressed.

The privatization of mental health reads the word ‘private’ in two ways: one, in its relation to capital and the “business ontology” of the market, and the other, to the individual¹. That is to say, depression is a commodity, and the cure is priced at the individual, not the system that exacts this exchange. “It is the problem—the institutions and patterns of the status quo—that is offered up as the solution.”² If you’re depressed, it’s probably your fault. Oh, and here’s your bill.

The ‘crisis’ of reading, and writing, may be read in a similar vein. The issue of not reading enough or not reading at all is levelled at the individual, although it may be recognized as a planetary miasma. Nobody reads, so you must read. And you must read more. But what good is it to be the only one reading?

“You write what you want to write!”
अरे, लेकिन पढ़ेगा कौन?!

Like Josephine the Songstress, whose unique piping might fall on the ears of a mousefolk increasingly disinclined to listen, one wonders if the act of literacy has lost its communal significance. Moreover, “Why do anything? Why do anything at all?” These pertinent questions inflict a “reflexive impotence” in our post-lexical milieu in which an unstoppable तुम कुछ करो only meets an immovable मैं क्या करूँ|³

Writing is presented (or rather assumed) to be the realm of the critic. If one is to play into this historically charged configuration, writing—and, by extension, criticism—is bound to be absent. “Writing respects Eurydice by saying Eurydice is no more—not by saying she is immortal.”⁴

It is absent, not in the sense that writing-as-criticism ceases to exist, but by acknowledging the inherent absence in writing itself. “By the time its light reaches us, the star has long since burned out.”⁵ Writing is thus a “relic-in-progress.” It is that part of Nora that Arthur can’t go to; where Orpheus, instead of saving Eurydice, admits:

“Love of mine
Someday, you will die.
But I’ll be close behind.
I’ll follow you into the dark.”⁶

It is with this “consciousness of failure”⁷, of being only close behind, that the “struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” emerges⁸. Language’s inherent limitation lies in its perpetual dance with the void interval of actuality—the fleeting, the ungraspable—to connect disparate understandings, a gap that it can never fully bridge⁹. “But you don’t weave to fill the gaps, you weave through and with them”, Pipi interjects¹⁰. 

Yet, I do not wish to romanticize struggle. After all, whose struggle gets to become beautiful, acclaimed, and showered with accolades? Whose labour gets romanticized? My mom does not answer when I ask if her back hurts. “Who gets to make work slowly and who has to keep churning it out at a breakneck pace?

As a “quiet bunch,” we often get asked, “Do you guys even talk to each other?” We exchange furtive glances and say, “Yes, we have good conversations.” Lee Weng Choy reflects that a “good conversation doesn’t turn on whether you have something interesting to say, are articulate or educated, thoughtful or charming, important as those things may be. What’s crucial to a conversation is not the speaking but the listening.” ¹¹And “quiet must not be conflated with silence. Quiet registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention.”¹²

For me, as much as for Choy, “writing is a practice of listening… of becoming attuned to the world as well as your own thoughts.”¹³

I listen to Josephine.

I listen to Eurydice.

I listen to my Peers.

I listen to myself.

I listen to you.

I dreamt of my father, now friends with Eurydice, sketching out a design for someone’s house. He begins to draw a line, adding a few more until it takes shape. He erases a few and draws again. How do we make a house for somebody else? How do we make them feel at home? But he too doesn’t answer.

…

ARTHUR (CONT’D)

I think that’s why I’ve been trying to learn Korean, even though I know it’s a little annoying for you.

NORA

You want to understand me when I’m dreaming?

ARTHUR

Yeah.

Beat.¹⁴

…

¹ Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Lanham: John Hunt Publishing, 2009), 17–37.
²  Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 21.
³ on “reflexive impotence” see Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 21–30.
⁴ Nurdan Gürbilek, The Orpheus Double Bind: What Can Writing Save? (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive Limited, 2021), 93.
⁵ Gürbilek, 93.
⁶ “Death Cab For Cutie – I Will Follow You Into The Dark Lyrics | AZLyrics.Com,” accessed June 23, 2025, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/iwillfollowyouintothedark.html.
⁷ Gürbilek, The Orpheus Double Bind, 24
⁸  Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, sec. Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity, accessed June 22, 2025, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.
⁹ George Kubler, “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things,” 1961, 16–23, https://monoskop.org/File:Kubler_George_The_Shape_of_Time_Remarks_on_the_History_of_Things.pdf.
¹⁰  Pipi means grandmother in Paite, and in other related dialects and languages with slight variations.
¹¹ Lee Weng Choy, “Prompts and Annotations #1-4,” 18–19, accessed June 22, 2025, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/prompts-and-annotations-1-4–1-4-365619.
¹² Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham London: Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
¹³ Choy, “Prompts and Annotations #1-4,” 18–19 annotation #5.
¹⁴ Celine Song, “Past Lives (2023),” Script Slug, accessed June 23, 2025, https://www.scriptslug.com/script/script/past-lives-2023.