We live in a twilight world.

Can we be friends?

Twilight is “黄昏 tasogare” in Japanese. The kanji 黄昏 is shared across the Chinese character sphere, but in Japanese, the sound is also linked to the archaic phrase “誰そ彼,” roughly meaning “Who is that over there?”

The human eye is an insanely good lens. In the dim light, there are moments when I point a camera at something I can still see with my own eyes, and somehow it barely shows up at all. I can see it, but I cannot pass that exact feeling to anyone else. That sometimes feels absurdly sentimental, but I don’t hate it.

It is the hour when the light gets low, and people can no longer recognize each other’s faces. And if I cannot see them clearly, then they probably cannot see me clearly either. It has that feeling of something almost visible, but not quite. A presence you can sense, but cannot fully catch.

In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, “We live in a twilight world” and “No friends at dusk” are used as code phrases. I love them so much. The film was about trying to stop the end of the world while no one could clearly tell who was a friend and who was an enemy, so it felt tense and painful, though.

When I look at the news from around the world and see terrible things happening again and again, it feels like the world is slowly moving toward some dark age. These days, I often remember those words. I wonder if this is the twilight before the dark.

Also, in Japanese, “tasogare” can be a verb too: “黄昏れる,” like “twilighting.” It means drifting off somewhere in your mind, a little narcissistically, lost in thought. There is also a slightly mocking nuance to it, maybe close to the feeling of “naive.” I often find myself twilighting, sentimentally, a little narcissistically, and naively.

What I am doing here is all naive reading, and also naive writing. I don’t use being an amateur as an excuse to defend myself. It is more an awareness of my own limit: no matter how much historical research I do, no matter what theoretical frame I borrow from somewhere, in the end I can only speak about this world naively.

There is nothing I can speak about from a privileged position. Not about Japan, and not about anywhere else in the world. Even as I try to imagine other people’s pain and hope to stay thoughtful, I can never be anything more than naive. Still, I think I will keep reading, writing, and creating while hating myself for that.

Maybe none of this has much artistic value, but I’m fine with that. It was never pure art in the first place. Just an extension of messing around with friends.

We live in a twilight world.

Can we be friends?