One Sound Makes No Music; One Element Makes No Pattern — Discourses of the States, “Discourses of Zheng”#

The rehearsal passes, and the director says they can record. Haruki relaxes, Kazusa exhales, and Setsuna cheers. The narration distinguishes their experiences: the guitar has drawn much criticism; the faultless piano has repeated everything alongside it; the singer has been happy throughout. All three can be said to have worked for the song. The time they have borne differs.⁵

Haruki needs to learn the part, Kazusa to accompany him, Setsuna to sing. Translating these differences into “We are finally together again” would obscure the substance of cooperation. Togetherness here means that someone can already do what another cannot, and the person who can must wait. Waiting cannot play the part for him. Neither can urging. Fingers must learn their own relation to strings. Someone else’s skill temporarily becomes a condition of one’s own activity; one’s improvement then gives that skill somewhere to connect.

This differs from three people independently finishing objects and placing them in one room. Voice must connect with accompaniment; a mistake enters what another person is doing. The fourteenth attempt therefore has two results. Haruki’s ability increases a little, and so does the activity available between them. One person learns, and another thereby acquires a new next step.

Seeing his pain, Setsuna first asks whether he wants a plaster on his fingers. Haruki says it would affect his touch. She suggests a breather and another attempt from the beginning; he agrees. The exchange is ordinary, but it gives a person’s condition a place in the work’s timing. Before the formal recording, Setsuna cries again. Concerned about her voice, Kazusa eventually asks for a thirty-minute break and embraces her. The epilogue returns to the moment before recording: the nasal sound has gone, only fifteen minutes remain, and the song still has to be recorded.⁶

Care has not abolished the work. Work has not temporarily turned people into things that need no care. This pause also preserves conditions for the recording to follow. Of course, the session has a director, equipment, a schedule and staff; the three friends’ goodwill cannot create these by itself. After midnight, Haruki and Setsuna gather their everyday belongings while Kazusa keeps playing. Downstairs, staff continue editing the audio and plan to work until morning. Writing this night only as three hearts finally understanding one another would erase labor that does not appear in the song.⁷

Because people record, edit and distribute the sound, it acquires a life beyond that evening’s feelings. The three performers cannot predetermine every later listener or mood. The song may recall a shared past or simply sound good to someone who knows nothing of it. It comes from their relationship; once outside, it finds other ears.

This achievement deserves happiness. Happiness need not first obtain a certificate declaring every problem solved.

Each Is Simply Speaking of Their Own Aspiration — Analects, “Xian Jin”#

Yet Haruki often hears more in “afterward” than the other two have said.

After recording, Kazusa tells him she will not leave them again. She immediately adds that he can no longer treat her and Setsuna alike. Haruki first imagines all three leaving together. She wants him to go alone with Setsuna now. As he is leaving, she says she still loves him and will continue to love him. Her final farewell also asks him to remain part of her life.⁸

Dividing these words into noble relinquishment and abject attachment would be easy, and save much thought. Kazusa is separating things formerly tangled together. She wants continuing contact, acknowledges Haruki’s romantic choice and retains her own love. The form of their contact changes; feeling has not vanished on command. She offers no new identity free of inner contradiction, but a relationship that must go on with contradiction still inside it.

Nor does she stay only for Haruki. In the same ending, she explains to her mother how she will continue as a pianist. She wants to compete with the Youko Touma of her remembered prime and take up her mother’s dream of becoming the world’s best. Her mother may cease to be the destination she pursues, but must become somewhere she can return. Their old competition and dependency are rearranged, giving remaining in Japan another positive meaning. The story does not complete the career that might sustain this direction. Kazusa can already describe staying as her own ascent, rather than only a concession.⁹

Setsuna wants a different time. At the proposal, she asks why Haruki could not let “Kazusa and me” talk at leisure. She hopes to take the next step when Kazusa can smilingly give her blessing. The wish has difficulties too. Can Kazusa’s smile become a condition of marriage? On whom would waiting place further burdens? There are no ready answers. Setsuna proposes time for this relationship, and the proposal itself needs an answer.¹⁰

Haruki is in a hurry to hear one. He says he fears abandonment. He asks her to scold, rage and reproach him—and finally forgive him. Even anger is assigned its endpoint: say many bad things, but reassure me at the end. He is willing to hear her anger and unwilling to wait as she wants.

Žižek examines a peculiar freedom in which people routinely ask for consent and routinely assume it will be given. The contrary answer supposedly allowed reveals itself as display only when someone actually gives it. The analysis identifies a gap between the form of a question and the answers it can accommodate.¹¹

Haruki’s proposal is no institutional command, and Setsuna has her own love and choice. Yet his fear of loss leads him to place forgiveness after the reproaches in advance; the same gap helps us read this. He wants her to speak and to restore him to an “I” that can be loved. A step that could be repeated in recording becomes, in a lover’s answer, a step for which he cannot wait.

This does not annul his choice. Haruki can decide whom he loves. Kazusa need not pretend the pain has ended, and Setsuna need not immediately assent because he has finally decided. Several people can decide without their decisions arriving together. One person’s courage cannot make the other two ready.

Setsuna finally asks for five minutes in which to be jealous, suspicious and angry with her lover. After five minutes, back in his room, she says she will become the person who “understands everything.” Haruki has already heard acceptance in her words.¹²

She wins a moment to speak and confines her anger within it. Love, consideration, irritation and self-suppression coexist. She chooses love and takes on the task of finishing things for several people. Having won time for anger, she hurries to promise him the self that can understand everything.

Knowing Is Not the Hard Part; Acting Is — Book of Documents, “The Charge to Yue,” II#

In the last session of Seminar XX, Lacan places love’s encounter between contingency and the wish for duration. Two people meet through signs of symptoms, affects and unconscious knowledge. A relation seems to write itself for a moment; love wishes it never to stop being written. This movement from contingency toward necessity is both love’s fate and its drama.¹³

Wanting a future together is therefore not itself childish. Advising people to withdraw their wish simply because it lacks a guarantee would turn love into a business designed never to suffer loss. Shared experience matters partly because people want it to exceed this occasion: meet again, play again, come to my home another day.

The difficulty is that hoping for duration differs from already possessing it. Lacan’s “there is no sexual relationship” concerns the impossibility of writing jouissance and subjects into a complete relation of complementarity. It does not mean two people cannot love or three people cannot record a song. Used as a universal explanation of interpersonal failure, it would stuff changeable work arrangements, forms of refusal and living conditions into “impossibility,” sparing us many things that should be done.

An encounter has no universal formula of complementarity, but it can contain actual stretches of coordination. Rehearsal gives limited knowledge: after practicing this way, Haruki can join Setsuna; after resting, they can still record. Such experience promises no forever, but gives the next effort a basis. This is where “limited” should first acquire substance.

For cooperation to produce a result, people need to commit in a direction, let a stretch of work actually unfold, then reflect on and revise it through what happens. The absence of an absolute guarantee cannot justify perpetual suspension and refusal to enter action. Finite things deserve serious effort too. One cannot spend a lifetime on the bank judging how to swim.

But willingness to carry an action through does not entitle someone to require the same persistence from others. Practicing together means spending time, enduring repetition and returning as promised. If someone can no longer sing, “We must persevere” does not justify forcing her onward. What counts as a stretch of work, and when it can pause, is also limited by people’s conditions and the conditions of work.

The object of cooperation exists through its participants. Breaking one of them may no longer uphold the original aim more firmly. The aim may have changed into proving that the person directing the work cannot fail. Reflection cannot always be postponed until that person’s chosen endpoint.

Persistence must be judged within the relations it actually changes. Practicing until a piece can be played together can show clear progress. Waiting until a lover has no further objection ends whenever the person demanding it decides that objection has disappeared. Both are called persistence; they do different things.

This also clarifies the object of psychoanalytic attention. We are concerned with how a complete “we” attracts someone, makes actual progress sound like a final guarantee, and turns another person’s hesitation into a threat to his own worth. Music can temporarily supply a shared object they can work on: how to enter the next passage, where to stop, how to bring the sounds together. Here they have something to do that still needs the other person without requiring that person’s entire inner life as its foundation. Haruki will soon hurry after guarantees again. That demand has not occupied all the time of their shared activity.

Such coordination also matters because, for a while, another person can appear as a singer, companion, someone who laughs and tires, without continuously sitting in the witness’s seat to prove that I deserve love.

If Only There Were Countless Rooms of Shelter — Du Fu, “My Thatched Roof Torn by the Autumn Wind”#

How should we judge an achievement if shared activity depends on someone continually bearing pain? Erasing the achievement would slight what the person has given. Praising only the result would make the burden grounds for the next demand.

The Sting of Death takes the question where intimacy can no longer resolve it by itself. The husband’s lover comes to the house and his wife Miho attacks her. At his wife’s demand, the husband blocks the exit and slaps his lover. After she escapes into the yard, he locks the gate and later also helps drag her. Calling him merely a weak bystander would already omit what his hands are doing.¹⁴

Something here cannot wait for agreement on an explanation: an injured person is still being detained. A woman living in an adjoining building objects to the violence, and police arrive outside the gate. The husband unlocks it and tells his wife the police are there; Miho then releases his lover. The interruption has a concrete, limited effect on an ongoing injury. It does not adjudicate how the love began or everyone’s interpretations of the past.¹⁵

Later in the novel, an uncle helps arrange earlier hospital admission. K-ko cares for the children. People outside the household share tasks the couple can barely sustain. The wife enters the ward, the husband accompanies her, then leaves to collect bedding for himself. Children, bedding and admission dates—apparently small matters—no longer depend entirely on two people questioning each other in a room.¹⁶

The new arrangements also bring restrictions. A nurse locks the ward entrance; wooden bars in the room prevent escape. Outside, the husband briefly feels light, then is pulled back by the thought of his wife alone inside. Finally he boards a tram carrying bedding, wanting to hurry back and also anticipating a new life. The narration stops in transit. Locks and bars remain.¹⁷

Care gains a place and people to provide it, while freedom remains concretely restricted. Sharing one responsibility does not prove every arrangement appropriate. The novel preserves this difficulty. We need neither call hospitalization a happy ending nor deny the importance of stopping harm and sharing care because no happy ending is given. Who can leave, who remains confined and who looks after the children still require separate answers.

The point shared with recording is only that life needs people to undertake concrete tasks. Levels of danger, justified duties and kinds of action must remain distinct. Rehearsal can be repeated; injury cannot be undone that way. In such a situation, “Give them more time alone” may further delay intervention. Nor does an injured person owe anyone a return to the ensemble to provide our common world with a warm ending.

A common world is therefore larger than an intimate relationship. When some people can no longer live together, others can help carry children’s lives, work and care. Someone formerly enclosed within “This is between the two of us” should also have somewhere to stand outside that relationship. Separation can make room for these connections.

A Little Water Is All I Need to Stay Alive — Zhuangzi, “External Things”#

Discussing what happens after Nora leaves, Lu Xun brings the beautiful gesture of departure back to an unbeautiful question: how to eat.

He discusses money and asks what money still cannot change. It reduces dependence without necessarily ending all domination. Nor can a starving person simply await a great transformation of the economic system. His lecture invokes the fish stranded in a dry rut: urgently find a little water now, while considering other means as well.¹⁸

That “while” matters. Once water is given, other work remains. Because other work remains, the water must not be withheld. Limited improvement and larger change meet within one life; neither needs to cancel the other. Nora may gain the means of subsistence without gaining complete freedom. The incompleteness of freedom cannot be a reason to tell her she need not make a living today.

Read this way, the three friends’ recording need not be elevated into a miniature of emancipation before we acknowledge its value. A singer can sing, a guitarist can accompany her, a pianist can finish a work with people she loves. Each is new substance for life. Enjoyment has weight of its own and need not submit accounts to a grand objective every time.

Another objection nevertheless deserves attention. Might such small satisfactions help unfairness persist? If the three people’s happiness always requires Setsuna to suppress herself, praising happiness can also speak well of suppression.

The answer returns to what has changed. After a song is sung, has only the judgment “She will forgive us after all” become firmer? Or has she also gained relationships in which to express wishes, receive answers and continue doing what she likes? Both may happen. This night has a shared work, and pressure in the proposal is real too. The achievement’s value should be preserved while asking what it is used to demand. It can become material for further cooperation or be conscripted by “Wasn’t last time fine?” into a reason to carry on as before.

A new ability acquired through shared activity can also give someone another place to go and more people to know. The original relationship ceases to be her only site of action, speech and response. The significance of the change depends on whether the new connections can continue and whether they really have room for her when difficulties arise.

Judging common activity therefore requires more specific questions. Beyond a finished product, has it left new abilities, connections and positions from which to speak? If these changes occur, even within the existing order, they cannot be dismissed as emotional consolation alone. Conversely, a beautiful product that requires its makers’ continuing silence cannot prove their relationship just by its beauty.

Lu Xun also says we cannot require everyone to be a warrior. He refuses lightly to decide another person’s sacrifice in the name of a magnificent future. A little water now is more than retreat from a great cause. It gives this particular person strength and time to decide the next step.¹⁹

Setsuna deserves the same consideration. We may love how she makes the music sound again and should also let her happiness, anger and plans have futures of their own. She has already done much. Doing it well cannot oblige her forever to perform the same work of settling everyone’s feelings.

Let Us Share the Joy of This Cup — Tao Yuanming, “Drinking Wine,” IX#

In the ninth of Tao Yuanming’s “Drinking Wine” poems, an old farmer visits with a jug and urges the poet to follow convention. The poet thanks him for his goodwill and plainly refuses to change direction. The final two lines invite shared pleasure in the drink while insisting that his carriage cannot turn back.²⁰

Sharing a drink and taking the same road separate in these lines. The farmer retains his goodwill; the poet retains his direction. He offers a drink and thanks the visitor for his concern without accepting the advice. The poem makes the weight of “together” tangible: I thank you for coming and drink with you this time; our roads still differ.

“My Old Home” carries this difficulty into deeper relations of life. Runtu’s “Master” makes the old brotherhood hard to resume. Yet he is not merely silent. He explains that harvests are bad: produce sells at a loss or rots unsold. He chooses tables, chairs, a carrying scale and straw ash for fertilizer. If we remember only the incense burner and candlesticks, we risk following the narrator’s momentary inward mockery and reducing a living person’s needs to backward belief.²¹

The narrator’s mother has Hong’er take Shuisheng outside, and Shuisheng follows at ease. The adults’ estrangement remains; the children already have new contact. On the boat leaving home, Hong’er asks when they will return because Shuisheng has invited him to his house. The agreement is unfulfilled, but has already given the old home a future different from the adults’ memories: Shuisheng is there, and I can visit him.²²

The narrator hopes they will have a new life he has never lived, then wonders whether hope too is a handmade idol. He no longer stands solely on the supposedly enlightened side judging Runtu’s superstition. His own hope must be tested by life still to come. The road at the end remains unfinished in a concrete sense: people must walk it. The person speaking of a road cannot guarantee it alone.²³

This is also why the children’s agreement deserves remembrance. It is more than an example proving to adults that the world still has hope. Hong’er really wants to play; Shuisheng really issued an invitation. Their wishes begin the next encounter. If they are allowed only to overcome their fathers’ tragedy, the old assignments have arrived before new life can begin.

We can hear the three friends’ song this way too. It carries an old tune and feelings still present, but only today’s fingers, voice, piano and many people’s labor make this recording. The past has not been lived in vain, and today need not repeat it. People already changed can finish the same tune anew. After finishing, they must still walk separately through the door.

The common world discussed in this series should finally contain such objects and actions: a song that can be heard, somewhere to live where care is available, an invitation that can receive an answer. It also contains abilities, friends and plans for another occasion that grow from these activities. The extent of what is shared changes with the task: three record a song, relatives share a life a couple cannot sustain alone, and two children have their own invitation. These connections let people do what they could not do before and meet people previously beyond their reach. Beyond winning or losing in love, there is life worth cultivating.

None of these things can take charge of the whole future. They are not empty either.

At Setsuna’s home, Takahiro finds the album’s seventh track. Hearing that it contains singing, their mother says she may understand that a little better. Much remains to be explained about five years, and there is still no lifetime guarantee. But they can already put the song on and listen.