Saturday Night Fever
Something strange would have happend in Manchester if you see no one queuing outside the pubs at a Saturday night. Walking by, I always ask myself, ‘what drives them so obsessed in drinking?’ Yes, I did not use the word ‘alcohol’ because apart from beer Englishmen cannot live without coffee as well.
The behavior of drinking itself is what they are obssesed with. Let alone the chemical stimulations in the liquids, the moment when the liquids pass through the lips and enter the throat must be unbelievably pleasurable. Drinking becomes a substitution of kissing others’ mouth. If that’s true then drinking is a very narcissistic habit.
The other thing is that people do not stop drinking until getting drunk. Whether they are at the side of spontaneity – let themselves drink as much as they feel so – or at the side of reactionary – pushing themselves to drink as much as they can in order to get drunk, I have not a clue. The point is, most of the young Englishmen do not mind getting drunk and do not mind being look at when they are drunk. That rarely happens in my home town, where people are much more self-conscious and narcissistic in a pretentious way.
The hateful truth is also her loveable side – having some 80000 Uni students in a single city is energetic as well as rotten. Like a sardine can about to expire – bacteria inside grow outrageously and are going to break the can immorally. Why immorally? Because bacteria is not human, but sometime, human is just like bacteria.
Humanity
‘I must get this written and shared’ I told myself. What is ‘this’? And why do I insist to write it out? It is human, the experience of being a human being, which strikes me at this mid-autumn festival night. I must tell – though seems trivial to you – this palpable interaction with other human beings. They are beyond intellegence, rationality and morals. It’s genuinely human, purely ethical. As to an ethical moment, you are obliged to do nothing but show your responsibility to the others. I think I have encountered the ethical moment tonight. It’s the worst of the time; it’s also the best of the time. Everything happens on the 25th – the day of union, as well as the day of separation…
Being academic
Thesis binded and handed in. People were rushing in and out to fill in the mark sheets and do their final checking. A woman, sitting opposite to my side, kept sighing while flipping over her work. ‘Haaai! Haaai!’. I lowered my head deliberately as I didn’t want to embarrasse her with my questioning look. Then another woman entered. In her fourties I guessed, she always made a fuss, washing away the remaining bookish air in the room. ‘I am so glad that i have finished! Without a rush!’ As if writing up a dissertation is like walking through the hell. ‘It was the worst life ever, as painful as the time when my grandma died.’ My heart couldn’t help smiling at her quasi-joke. The woman asked the moaning woman, ‘Are you going to do a PhD?’ And she said, ‘You are joking! I can’t wait to get rid of all these!’ After a few more silly remarks, the room was quiet again.
People were screaming and chattering outside the office. The intensive three months finally paid. Whether the works are good or not is not important (this left for the poor examiners). The thing is, those tedious academic way of thinking suddenly is not necessary anymore. People will be lax, and return to their everyday life. Socrates said ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’, but Dostoevsky also wrote ‘thinking too much is a disease.’ How to think? When to think? Of what to think? Of whom to think? Those wh- questions are not only useful in high school comprehension. While they have an excuse to enjoy a fancier life, I am far from elated. Those questions have to be answered in the coming 3 years. But, I doubt if I am too young (or too old) to be a Socrates or Dostoevsky.
The woman idea
Pop songs has always been the spokeperson of the ideology in their times. A pop song is popular because it speaks the values of majority. If we study the songs, we can somehow trace the mass consciousness, and hopefully decode the ideologies behind. Lam chik has written many pop songs explicitly about women. (女人心, 烈女, 女人之苦, etc). To see how the idea of woman trasform, I first pick Anita Mui’s song written in 1993:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOS-02Droz0
Anita is irreplaceable. Also note how Lam Chik conceptualizes woman:
看著眼前人漸散
而在那喧嘩過後
只有忽然倦透的
是我的一對手
努力向前誰沒有
誰料歇息的藉口
是要把抑鬱眼淚再流
誰自願獨立於天地
痛了也讓人看
你我卻須要
在人前被仰望
連造夢亦未敢想像
我會這樣硬朗
但是又怎可
使你或我失望
看著眼前人睡了
和幸福多接近
等了多年這角色
做你的女人
我沒有權來令你
承受太多的情感
但我始終不過是個人
地球老餅 (Global Elders) 好鬼型!
‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the star.’ said Wilde. Can life be more meaningful than that?
Driving Her Crazy
She was sad. Those sentimental expressions frozen on her mouth. Not a word could reflect the tears whirling in her heart. Even she herself had no idea why the water tap is turned off. The man with her had not the slightest compassion. He looked at her eyes, which kept trying to avoid his mysterious gaze. She suddenly thought that it is he who makes her unhappy. While she tried to calm herself, he resumed:
‘You are escaping. From what you have not a clue. Haha. You are triggered aren’t you? I mean sexually. I know you like me. The weather is crazily hot isn’t it? And the downpour every night, it’s like God is washing the streets just because they are too filthy. How can you stand a place like that? I would rather shoot myself. Oh look at your face. How sad and ugly. Your skin was not like that. How rough and dull it is. There are even spots on it! Has anyone told you that your logical thinking is repression of lust? I said you are triggered, believe me. Oh but I hate you. I hate you! Haha. You think I am serious?
No I am not. I dislike your pretence so much to an extent that I cannot help to love it. You are like a clown on the stage juggling with balls. Funny but stupid! The clown is so irritating that the audience want to stab her to death. Yes, blood coming out from your face and mix it with those cosmetics. Bloodshed becomes just another laughable moment. Haha. See how entertaining you are even though you are bleeding! How long do you think you are going to live? Do you remember you were almost killed by a bus when you stumbled on the pedestrian? Death is so close to us. Your grandpa has just passed away…I am so sorry about that…Where is your smiling face? Come on. Cheer up! You are supposed to be a happy clown. Mimic someone, we all like it. Hey, you should impersonate a dead person! You can do it, can’t you? Give it a go dead person!’
She shuddered and knew not what to say. Whether to be happily mad or unhappily mad she had no choice. The tap was open again – indeed it would not closed for some while.
Of the City
I feel uncanny everytime when I finished watching a rthk program – breathing in Manchester but I am thinking about Hong Kong. Especially these days when social aquaintances drop to almost zero, the Hongkongness inside my mind has been very vivid. Confucius said at the age of thirty a person should have achieved ‘something’ in his life. Supposedly 7 more years later I will have done ‘something’. What will it be? Of my personal interest or general welfare? What can I do for Hong Kong? I will despise myself if seven years later I am working only for myself and doing nothing for general interest. One may say the seem-to-be altruism is merely pride in disguise. But achieving pride through others at least is more meaningful than that through the self. Everyone is a Narcissis but those who expand themselves in a mirror are the worst.
But better not to think too much about the future, let alone the past. The most productive moment does not have the sense of time. Funny enough, the more conscious a person feels about the past and future, the more he is wasteful of time. I should be more loyal to Manchester otherwise she will not love me anymore. Most of my friends fall in love with London, the brother of my boring host. They thought London is the only lovable place in the Kingdom. It is like Hong Kong, whose younger brother is Kwong Zhou. The elder lives with pride and prejudices while the younger emulates with a bitter and quiet smile. If the pairing is right, I am in a relationship with the younger and elder brothers at the same time. No wonder I feel schizoid about how to read the people, the architecture, the football culture, the drunkards, the snail-paced buses, the trashes on the streets, the inefficiency, the…the city…
I will date her more often, though the weather sometimes can be awful. I will stay indoor and sit on her couch, looking at people at the other side of the glasses who wander in the city and also want to be looked at. I will update her news everyday – rapes, robberies, suicides, gun shots, stabbing, kidnaps, bombings, car crashes, etc. See how caring I am. My heart share no spaces for the Peru’s quake, India’s flood, Jamaica’s hurricane, Iraq’s blasts or anymore Chinese coalmine-explosions. Either stick to one lover at one place, or I will feel melancholic for the world.
PS. Btw, anyone knows the Chinese orginal version of this saying?
– ‘The way out is via the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?’ Confucius.
Rain
I know it is raining. Whether they are numb or my sixth sense is at work I don’t know. But the droplets always signal me, as if I am responsible to call people attentions to the rain. My vertical windows are always open. The rain hits on the tilted pane: ‘tic-tic-tar-tar-tic-tar-tic-tar.’ The rain is bored, so are the people indoor. My eyes look for a plain and black wall, which is an efficient indicator of the rain. If I have a camera I would be interested to calculate my friend’s velocity and frequency. The fact that the rain traps people in their houses excites me. It is the rain pulls people together. They are going to stay with me for another hour. How thankful I am. Sun, I hate the Sun. He brings people out, making everything mobile and in disarray. No, the rain has gone. People start leaving the house. Comes back. Both the people and the rain. I need someone to look at, I need the rain’s tickling for my scattered thoughts. I will pray for rainy days tonight. Trust me. Everyone needs somewhere to turn to. Don’t say you hate the rainy sky. Or what you have said changes people around you. People turn together, agree with each other and make sighs. Say rain is bad and it does good to you. Gaze at the rain, with your soulmate, would be a wonderful thing to do in this late summer.
An image of eternity
Took off my clothes, pants and underwear, I dipped into the base and turned the knob. For how much time in the past 12 months did I spent in this tiny shower room? I squeezed my bottle of gel twice – first time for my hair and second for the body. I almost forgot the meaning of taking showers. Spread it all over my skin and then wash it with the water slowly dripping out from the cone. I dare not to touch a tile just next to my arms. They even wear a slippers in the shower.
It never takes longer than 10 mins. When I dried my body I always listened if anybody is outside the corridor. Sometimes people are peeing or whistling just opposite to the place I am naked. Some other like to pee everywhere like living in desert. The floor all get wet and we often have to do acrobat in front of the cabins. The wet floor never stings but no one dares to say that it is not urine spelt on the floor. The other time two women were curious to look at the urine. They even brough a camera. As one of the cabins were still dry enough to unrinate in the usual way, people just walked by the wet cabins and become used to them. There were hard words on the hygiene and suspicions that people lose control on their urine bladders. Less than a month, all the complaints were forgotten but the floor is still abjectly wet.
People carry the urine with their slippers to their rooms and kitchens. Some of them like to make the kitchen floor soaked with water. They clean it with a mop, which is probably used for cleaning the washroom on the other day. There are gaps between the cupboards and stove that we can never reach. Some raw food has been staying there for months. I pictured mouse and cockcroaches devouring bits and pieces. When the sun comes out, they go back to their holes to wait for another prey.
There were mould growing in the fridge. How can I describe the smell coming out from it? The smell is a mixture of dead chicken, expired milk, black vegetables and green tomatos. When people take out their own food, they pretend they smell nothing. There’s liquid leaking out at the bottom as well. If it’s not the fridge urinating, I don’t know what it is. Machine needs no less excretion than human beings.
I put on my clothes and hurry to my room. On the corridor I see the kitchen, the cabins and miles of dusty carpet. I turn my door knob and tell myself I was hallucinating. When I ready to close my eyes and dream another dream, my left leg feels itchy – a palm-sized spider is lurking on my toes. I feel her hairs and the salava dripping from her mouth. I shun her to the wall and splash her with bare hands. Her blood was black and sticky. I wrapped her body with a piece of tissue and went back to sleep. Thereby all over my body feels occasionally itchy. Whether it is the spider’s revenge or urine’s contamination I really don’t know. A sudden thought comes to me – a house full of spiders is the image of eternity.
Love versus creativity
I suggested that when one falls in love he or she will loses his/her creativity. Few things to clarify: falling in love does not neccessarily mean getting married. Love here is specifically refers to the relationship between a subject and its object. Any social and physiological variation like marriage and growth have to be put aside.
When one falls in love, s/he has a great affection towards a particular object. Such affection is so powerful that it fully occupies your mind. Two become one. The object that you love becomes the subject; the subject that you are becomes the object that it loves. This is the first stage of love. The subject and object appear to be so seperate that not a third party dare to say the two are ‘together’. Yet this is the moment where the subject incoporates the object and two become one. It is the subject’s infactuation for the object. Such preliminary stage of love is hungry, possessive, fantastical and selfish.
The second stage gives a more balanced relationship between the loving and the loved. Such relationship is what we called an ‘ideal’. In this stage one expresses his/her very true self to the loved one. As infactuation has gone, an emotion armour is taken off from the loving. Emotion is something we use to connect ourselves to the others – infatuation is an example.
An ‘ideal’ relationship is that neither of them need emotion to connect with the partner. Put it simply, the girl will not cry for attention from the boy; and the boy will not think he lose her just because he is jealous. Emotion is very much ideological, or, most of the emotions are simply artificial. The ‘ideal’ stage is where the subject keeps a distance from the object, yet be very sure that the object will not run away. (con’t)
PS. The son of Albert Einstein who suffers from schizophrenia is only one of many examples to show that great thinkers are too ‘great’ to bring up their children. For details and discussion see the article on June 17th from http://www.yiban.net/
Obshchechelovek 