六月廿一   陰

I told myself I must write in Chinese but my thoughts again run faster than my mother tongue. English is a language I have never mastered either. Can I be sure that I have articulated my feelings every time when I click the login-out icon? What have I got in mind this time? Right…it is an image, an image of someone writing her diary. She is irritated…no, it’s not irritated, but precisely, jealous. Jealous of what? Jealous of whom? That I am not sure but one thing is clear is that, the girl feels ashamed of her feeling. That’s the image. Jealousy is not the point, feeling ashamed of her jealousness is what strikes me. Yes…we all feel ashamed of our ‘negative’ feelings. Envy, guilt, jealousy, vengence, nostalgia, hatred…they are all inside us but we just can’t admit that we suffer from them. Go back to jealousy. To be precise, jealous is not an emotion. What is jealousy? When you feel jealous someone has stolen something from you. That ‘something’ is your imaginary possession. You don’t possess it, but you thought you owned it. You feel jealous of the person stolen your love. But who is your lover and who is not? Is there an absolute to define an love relationship other than setting ‘In a Relationship’ in Facebook?

I said jealousy is not an emotion. Why? Emotion is something we can master. If we feel sad we can stop the sadness by doing something else to distract ourselves. If we want to feel happy we can sing a song, cook a dish or read a book. Emotion is uniting whreas jealousy is separating. How is it so? Through controlling your emotion you get a sense of existence. You feel you have come back to the world where people are connected to each other. Emotion is harmonizing; it makes you feel good. Oppositely, jealousy makes you seperate from the others. Or it reminds you that you are seperate from your mother in the very first place since you are born. If only you find yourself different from a person you start to feel jealous of her. You can’t control jealousy because it is not an emotion. It is what Freud called Affect, something comes back to you again and agian. Look at her. How ashamed is she to her own jealousy. It’s like a burning iron poker running around the body – shapless, itchy, piercing. That is the image. She is ashamed of her jealousy against another woman. A movie nor photography can tell her state of mind. Only language can, only language can……

Shall I continue to explore her emotions and affects? No I can’t. If I do I will only misunderstand her. What inside her is never what I wish to see. To write about a person is another step forward to an abyss of misunderstanding. Stop writing her! But can I? Is writing a channel to alleviate jealousy? I think not. I write and then I feel happier or less sad. Writing is only powerful enough for emotions…I need a cigarette to pull out all her images out of my mind. Lighter, I need a lighter. To burn, to burn every page of memories stored in my mind. Otherwise my memory for jealousy will come back and make me itchy again. A song, I need a song as well. To sing at the top of my voice, I shall transfer all my emotions to the song and it will dissipate in the dusty air.

I told myself I must write in Chinese but my mother tongue was deadened by the whirlpool of images. Every bit and pieces gather at the centre and clash. Some form a new word, most of them vanish like ashes. I think I have just taken a picture of her. Her image is now fixed in my mind. Violence! How dare you said that! But for the sake of a second of peace, I better stop here…

Run

I know this is the last chance. Tomorrow I will have to go back to the cage, stuff myself with papers and ink. How much effort I put for today only God knows. I know not better than every set of muscles grow on my legs. They have very good memory. Every time I practise they remember how fast I was last time and push me beyond my limit. I was surprised how fast I have improved. I always find certain narcissistic pleasure to caress my legs. Look at the lovely fleshes. I walk thousands of miles and show any signs fatigue, what is this run to me? I spent almost a year to equip myself and I shall live with my pride for my entire life. And how long does it take? Not more than a minute. If I win I will be anxious of the future and if I lose I will be regretted of the past. Wherever I go there will be at least two shadows stand next to me. Do I lead the shadows or am I driven by them? I wish the weather is like Manchester. The lines among past, present and future will be overlapped and blurred. Sometimes I look at the clock in every 15 minutes, but most of the time I wish I could forget time. But the sun would not filter her beam on my head. The sun either lives or dies. If only an individual forgets time he will be called idiot. Since when do we use the word individual? Do we not always live in a herd? Who was the first narcissistic lamb who jump over the cliff? I know this is the last chance. I have first-rate physique and mentality. I am what I am. I am the result of thousand accidental events and unintentional faults. If I chose to be xxx, I will never be standing here today. I wish the present will return in the future so that I will be equally determined and strong. Get set. On your mark…

09.04.14.2.2002 

So much to tell you but I cannot artiuculate. A rainy day, an long essay. A few people popped up, a few lines exchanged. So much to tell you but I cannot articulate. A baked cake, a mouthful of coke. My age is 22 but acts like a 30s. So much to tell you but I cannot articulate. Exorcist, Hostel, Shinning, 28 Months Later. A fan of horror movie is always a male. So much to tell you but I cannot articulate. Coughing goes on and I cannot speak. So I begin to observe. And I realize my eyes have been deteriorating since I don’t know when. So much to tell you but I cannot articulate. Glad to see someone is happy; glad to see someone is sad. ‘Do not will.’ says Raskolnikov. Is not ‘do not will’ a will? So much to tell but I cannot articulate. London in white, London in black. I forget how interesting the city is. Perhaps the photographs articulate. They are my eyes speaking. Some voices of indifference. Some mehanical framing of life into a rectangule. So much to tell you but I cannot articulate:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28022&l=13368&id=514035079

The Dead

Another plate of pasta. Scattered on the plainest plate, horribly thin and light, the pasta is certain that her life will be take away very very soon. If you were the pasta, if you are certain that your soul is going to fly away from your body, how would you feel? Before the guillontine, the pasta was brushed with some greenish paste which feels like greasy gasoline leaked from a tank. Who can prosecute the pasta? Only an idiot could devour her. She felt tremedous fear. Her body turned paler and paler; even the monstrous greenish liquid could not disguise the dead woman walking. The living soul began to wither before the moment of death. A smell of corpse and disintegration diffused from every single bundle of her body. Her blood is shapeless but known by its disgusting odour rushes into the eater’s nose. Dead! The eater rolled his fork, gather about ten bundles and put them into his mouth. The corpse crushed among the canines, dissolved inside the red chamber.

Had the eater starved himself the day before, he would have devoured her in one go. He had normal appetite and took a look at her corpse lying on the plate. Dead! The idea of eating a corpse flushed into the eater’s mind. The smell, the grease, the thinness of the pasta suddenly became odorous, sticky and bony. As if he could finish a dish of corpse comfortably without the slightest disgust. Eating for him is a refill of things put into the stomach for digestion. He had forgotten how many thousands of pasta he had put into his mouth. The pasta was dead, so was the eater! Even though he is disgusted by her, he did not vomit. Whether the eater had become robotic and forgot his basic instinct, or he is so humane that he chose not to torture the pasta by ruminating her body, a third person can hardly tell, let alone the eater himself. One final obversation is that, the eater hit his chest with his palms to make the digestion more efficient. He also drank huge amount of water in order to wash away the grease and odour left in his oesophagus. The pasta was dead and will die again. As to the eater, he was dead a long time ago. How he was killed we don’t have the slightest clue. But if the pasta can speak, she would be the most evident witness.

The Little Match Girl

Groping in dark, a little girl is desperately selling a bundle of matches shabbily wrapped up in her bony hands. I remember the girl vividly. First met her in a school textbook and in ETV, I was deeply moved by her death. I wonder if my classmates had felt the same. My slight affinity to the tragic began to grow since then. Remember the ETV on Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince? A story about the decay of a statue of a prince. There is another one called the Snowman. A silent animation. The snowman smiles all the way but somehow what caught me was the little bitterness in the protagonist. No matter how happy the snowman is, the sadness of the hero is still the object of my childish identification. It seems that indulgence in the tragic is symptomatic of today’s mass audience. But my little indulgence in the tragic started early in an all-male classroom. What’s going on in me? Probably at that time I had already fallen into the abysmal trap of tragedy. That means I treated myself as the tragic hero, seeing myself as the only one who is connected to the Little Match Girl. It is not only me who was fascinated. Or we can never know how her death changed perceptions of my classmates. The idea of a tragic is tragic in a sense that we treat ourselves as the centre of the universe. When the hero gets stabbed, every single spot light turned on him. Tragedy is indulgence of a subject; tragedy is opposite to carnival. I like the Litte Match girl all the same. Freezed to death, she burns the fourth match which is also the last one in her hand. She sees her grandma in the feeble flames and ceases her breath as they extinguish. Tradegy is not tragic if it is real. How many people are happy enough to be elated to their death?

PS. Looks interesting to compare Anderson (The Little Match Girl, The Emperor’s New Clothes) and Brothers Grimm (Snow White, Cinderella). The latter seems to be more honest to humanity by including issues like envy and jealousy.  

Moonlight

A dying body, crawling, mourning, staring at the black sky. Limbs are weak but her mind is as strong as the soldiers standing around. The heavy downpour lossens the soil and washes away every life rooted in it. She is the only living soul on the earth. Stretching her arm, pushing with her legs, the woman wishes to pierce through the deadly soldiers. Like statues wrapped up with coffins, the soldiers make not the slightest move. Yet she has no intention to give up. The crawling will only last for 6 minutes. After that the body is drifting to another space. Presto, agitato, allegretto, the score will not wait until the mourning ends. 2/4, 3/6, 6/8, get moved, the woman is not the one who chooses. The black sky is changing its colour. Never be blue, the sky confirms your wild fantasy as the sonata moves on. The sky is motherly and affrimative at the same time. When it storms, it storms; when it clouds, it clouds. Has the sky ever let you down? The woman is not blind, but her fantasy about self-pitying and tragedy pulls her into the six minutes estascy. The soldiers are only to melodramatize the woman’s pain. After all, every imagination comes from the moonlight, the only cosmic object visible to your eyes. The sun is too glamourous and stars are not vivid enough. The only connection we can create with the universe is one we create with the moon. No wonder he wrote such beautiful poetry. I doubt anyone could understand this without becoming a woman. You are right, life is a woman; music is a woman!

(Ref. Beethoven’s sonata C sharp minor, ‘Moonlight’, Adagio, first movement, performed by Rubinstein, 6.10)

On Some Cliches in Love

While she has again conquered an average man, other women moan about love and are doubting whether they aim too high or simply unattractive. Jealous you would not feel of your friend who is handsome and with angelic character. The thing which troubles you most is that, your friend (you think) who is equally attractive experiences much more love than you do. Crudely, it is always the uglier who are more experienced in love. If that’s the case, then firstly, appearance (aesthetics) is not the most crucial factor to motivate love. However cliche, people never overlook the importance of being beautiful. People count on appearance at their first sight, and forget its important when falling in love. But the importance of beauty returns when a relationship begins to expire. Secondly, something else is more ‘attractive’ than appearance, which contibutes to the conquer of the other sex. What is that ‘something’? Can it be qualified or quatified? I shall neglect any qualitative changes in the object (the loved one) and deal with ourselves first. For example the object engages with another affair besides yours, or the object has another secular concerns which he prioritizes (e.g. money, reputation, personal achievements) – all these I leave for next time. Let us come back to the question about what is the ‘something’ in your which is so attractive.

Living On

I guess everyone in his/her own life has been clinging to certain glamorous experiences in the past. Something which we are proud of; something which is recognized by the others. We clinge to that experience because we are somehow too vulnerable to the everyday life. We need our past to deal with the present which is threatened by future. It’s not quite right to say we are too vulnerable. By saying it we were only masochistically messaging our ego by  putting ourselves in an inferior, self-pitying position. How about this: We are rather paranoiac animals who are afraid of knowing the fact that our friends are actually living much better than me (in all sorts of senses). ‘Oh look at him, how hardworking he is!’ – ‘I wish I could be prettier!’ – ‘Oh no, I can’t help envying his talent’ – ‘If he is not that well-off, everything will not be the same.’ 

With varied rate of paranoia, from unconscious to conscious, we have our own way to deal with that naughty bitterness burning inside us. One of them, of course, is to clinge to our glamorous past. We cannot count our envy nor jealousy. Nostalgia is a fantasy about our little success in the past. It is obvious that by going back to the past we can never achieve anything new, especially things of which we envy. But we are too smart to not to be deceived. Many university students behave any differently from the time when they were in high-school. How have we changed since the first day we recieved our University library card? Are we still haunted by the tiny bit of nice memory before our twenties?

Not being paranoiac, some people would externalize their bitterness and make very few friends. They tightly clinge to something inside themselves they think it’s the best. Even their life prinicple sets up according to that very best thing. Graudually they become hostile to those who are far away from that standard they called the ‘best’. What comes next is a binary opposite world which is populated by either smart or stupid people and nothing else. ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the star’ (Oscar Wilde). By no means we need to despise the others who like to look at each others.

The first sect is Nostalgics, and the second is the Aggressor. The Child, which is the third sect, is rare and admirable. Obviously, He is the person who is envied. But do not think that he knows a better way to live. It is exactly because he has no chance to experience enviness and other feeling like a revengeful will, his knowledge to the self is unexpectedly limited. He lives in a discrete space which their friends could not understand. Every time when he moans, friends never take him seriously. They think they deserve much more pity than him. The Child’s innocence is an cutting arrow fired to people around.  

Nostalgics, Aggressor, and the Child, to which sect do we belong? All happiness resemble one another, but unhappy experience is unhappy in its own way.

Living on, it is time to live on.

Aiyaya!

Get irritated by Amazon UK. Spent 10 pounds to buy a novel which I could get a second hand with 1 pound!

Having said that, the novel is my favourite: Brothers Karamozov, new Oxford edition.

Still, irritated, like a burning iron-bar running over my heart. So careless. So itchy!

The 300th Letter

Three hundreds letters in over twenty months, roughly twenty-thousands words of feelings and care, they are longer than a thesis! We have a long way to go. Still, how lucky am I to have captured this powerful moment!