走到人生邊上.
What drags me back to this fire squad again? Yes, here is a fire squad, where condemned men get shot by the soldiers. Don’t worry, they are blindfolded before the very last minute comes. Which kind of execution do you prefer? The shot? Guillotine? Hanging? Or eletric chair? Do you know that the Americans began to record the execution with a video camera? For whom? For the dead man’s parents I guess. As if the execution is too brutal that the parents cannot bear the real sight of it. Do they watch it live? I wonder. It seems the parents are the ones who bear the right to watch their son/daughter being executed. Do I have the right? Are you interested to witness a guillotine if you are back to the 19th century? They all say that no one can move away their eyes from the machine, particularly when the blade is screeching down to split the head and body into two. Hmm, does the man feel or see after his head is cut out? Since most of the sense organs are located in the head, i guess the man can still see the curious crowd, hear the gloomy hoots, taste the motherly soil, and smell the freshness of his own blood. Within a second or so, the consciousness extinguishes. Perhaps pain can be quantified by the duration. But this time, all but the sense of touch is lacking. Just image, the most painful thing is actually painless, because the pain exceeds to a limit which destroys the sense of touch. Perhaps the most painful ends up in the consciousness. The mind! As long as the conscoiousness alive, one cannot run away from pain. Although to exist is akin to exit, there is no exit in pain.
楊絳 has a book called 走到人生邊上. For her death is the margin of life. As if we are walking away from the centre, from day to day, year to year, end up stumble at the edge, and fall over the cliff. In the west, it’s a totally different discourse. Death is seen as the ‘last stage’ of life; death is the very last chapter of a linear narrative. Infant, child, adolenscence, young adult, adult, elderly, death. Can we not see death as something ‘at the end’? Can death be part of our everyday life, so that I touch the ‘edge of life’ as a habit, as an everyday life gesture? We never know how a condemned man thinks. Unless s/he survives in the execution. Not many people did; Dostoevsky is one of them. If a psychologist says he knows everything in other people’s mind, does he know what inside the mind of a dead man (who survived)? When experiences are more and more reduced by technology, when imaginations and tolerance are replaced by the triviality of so called wester culture, is there any job easier than being a psychologist? Sounds ridiculous. But it is true that the more naive we get the more psychologists we need. The more we think our problems can be solved, the more we need a guy called psychologist to ‘cure’ us. Simple doesn’t mean being naive. No wonder psychology is a dminant discourse in america. ‘Prescription please doctor. I am mentally sick!’ When thousands of american soldier cannot speak some years after coming back from Iraq, what a psychologist can do? When someone survive in a earthquake with all his parents buried under the crust, what a psychologist can do? Perhaps one can only be a psychologist of himself. Not an other outside person. Never.
Smoking til the End of the Night
Puff puff – the smoke puffing out between her little pink fat lips. Puff puff – a sort of image formed in the air. Like a face, a car, a high-heel shoe. Puff puff – her hand holding the cigar that she rolled by herself. ‘I am penniless, but I smoke all the same.’ They are not contradictory; what confuses her is the grammatical structure ‘something….but’. How many time is she asked to use conjunctions? Unfortunately, however, on the other hand, on the contrary, on the flip side, etc. ‘Enough! I could have been happy!’ She thought tears will run off at once but nothing comes out. She laughs, while everyone smiles. She weeps, while everyone depressed. She exists, while everyone enters. Perhaps medication?’ Whimsical, as medicine will extend her luxury to feel unhappy. Talk to a psychologist is equally useless. She becomes the mother and the psychologist the child. Every thing he said is expected. Formulations. Every way out she has thought over and over in her sleeplessness. He holds her hands and tries to lead her in a maze, but it is the psychologist himself who gets lost at the end. Poor scientist, tell me the truth if there’s one!
She is captured by the crooked smile in the starry night. The sun has eaten most of her body. What remains is a pointedly curved brightness amid the flickering burning gas in the space. Lunar madness. Lunacy has not been that close to the moon. ‘Where’s my shadow?’ Had she found her shadow madness would not have survived. F says in mourning the world becomes empty to the mourner while in melancholy, what is empty is the ego itself. The emptiness sucks everything (yes, everything) into the vacuum. Like kenosis, the self emptying as a form of self-renounciation. Goddess, pray!
She remembers she saw an old woman standing in front of a Jewish synagogue. The maam wanders with some heavy supermarket bags. Sometimes stops and fixes her gaze on something particular in the darkness. Is she finding the moon? Her motions are snail-paced. People like her who maddens the city are popular. Whether it’s the city who makes her mad or it’s she the city we are not so sure. She, the blossoming woman, sees a certain connection with the maam at the synagogue. An idea rings in her mind that she should talk to her. ‘Will you forgive me everything, yes, everything?’ She moves not. When she turns her head again, the old woman has disappeared. Perhaps she has found another site for staring the moon. She remains speculative. Puff puff. We never know where the other eyes land. Not even ours. The puff fades before the end of the night. Or is there an end? How can two things without an end arrive at each other?
Melancholy I
‘You look happy tonight. What happened?’ She looks at me, wondering why I smile a lot tonight. Yea, perhaps that’s too much. ‘You got something to tell me, don’t you?’ She studies my face, shakes my shoulders with her unhealthy hands. There is a film begins like this, she says, ‘I don’t care how people see me, but I will never let people feel happier than me.’ And we are here again tonight. Forget repititions, forget Nietzsche’s eternal return. That vile little thing called happiness is sweetened at the very present. ‘What happened?’ She probes into my eyes. Once the question uttered the moment has passed. I know very well I will destroy happiness immediately if I find its origin. Do I hate happiness, or happiness hates me?
Too educated to be uneducated. The difference between innocence and naivety means nothing to me anymore. Hey, love life, even though life does not live. The puzzling sky, the fat moon, the veiled breasts, the knockings of the high-heels, the aura of an intellectual life. That a life is ugly doesn’t mean it’s not lovely. At least the ugliest thing sometimes could be the sweetest thing for someone else. Perhaps I should also find a cause for my happiness. Further bound my freedom and squeeze out a bitter smile. ‘I would rather become an accountant if I had to choose again.’ she says. Yes. the job will not allow much self-reflections. The wheel of time. Instead of seeing oneself in her self-directed movie, she will watch a Hollywood film. That vile little thing called pleasure is lurking in the darkness. She sees herself, like what she sees in the mirror. ‘Off now, it’s time to go.’ I was itched when she says ‘time’. I looked at my watch, it’s 22.07. I left the room, saying anything about my ‘happiness’.
三月
三月，天空的險色變了
時晴時陰
時雲時雨
三月，生命走了一半
來作個小結
讓另一半命
找個想法藏身
三月，情感要懶惰
不是叫忙
就是叫悶
沒有節日的那些月
愛情也捲到被裏去
怕找煩，還是愛自己那個啥自我
只有那盤希臘水仙能答話
三月，沒有槳舵
讓雨水隨著天薘上的那支小鐵管
決定方向
讓甚麼國家天災動盪橫禍
提醒那個我
在活著活著
三月，一齊都馬列高尼亞
無病呻吟，為小事找煩
就是要用厭世文字
背起命中
不能承受的輕
三月，濫調陳腔
端中又是另一條悶路
歷史是直是圓
與死亡下棋，還是把屍體作走肉走完不斷重覆的路
是後現代
最棘手的迷思
三月，若叫時間快走
必先狂讀狂寫
狂人白痴戀人陌生
武士魔鬼愚昧天真
三月，Life Does Not Live
在曼城，想香港，懂意大利
厭現在，戀過去，傻想未來
若不能活出生命
只好繼續批判
把虛無
當作成最有價值的按摩椅
即使所有責任都消失
也不要讓精神生活死掉
活吧三月，活吧!
Fugue
Silent, then comes a few notes. Slowly, yes slowly. But don’t stop there. Faster, faster. The sentances are waiting for you. The finale is there but not there. Every note is like dancing. But at the same time we are all under a bigger harmony. That’s how you called a fugue. A rhizome growing, growing crazily in all directions. Like the facebook, with unbelievably complex relationships hanging like a patch of nerves weaving in the virtual space, tremendously growing. Growth is not natural anymore. What distinguish nature and culture needs a second thought. What fascinates me is how fugue develops with many little variations and reaches a chaotic harmony at the end.
What is music? Answer: it is the most calculated and most sensual work of art. While the notes on the score are about to jump off the paper and find their own route to death, the fugue bounds its growth with pure mathematics. Music can be most experienced through the ‘fugue state’: the flight from one’s own identity. Music pulls away your Being. Suddenly you forget who you are; what is left is simply a pair of banal ears, passively percieving the most sensual and rational stream of sounds. Music explains man’s behavior. They have a thirst for knowledge about everything. But like music, even the most calculated phenomenon in the world fails to explain everything within that phenomenon. There is something missed, elapses, eluded in the infinite time-space. The music discussed is not easily found. Some say music was dead since Beethoven’s op. 111. That might be true for ‘heavy’ music. But how about the ‘light’ ones? And the black and white notes with different weights eventually hear the summon. ‘Line-up!’ The score paper is filled with an array of beautiful notes again. Yet their shadows are kept somewhere else. While the rhizome has stopped growing, it has initiated another kind of mutation in other space. No, there’s no growth which is natural. What is natural is the ‘unnaturalness’ of growth.
Glenn Gould on Bach’s fugue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkn5mv_TQA
I say I am Not Sick – the World Is.
I am always amazed how two different things can happen at the same time in this wonderfully sick world. While an Italian young man in his 29 is pondering on the problems of democracy and freedom (Do we live in a democratic society? Are we, city lonemen, free?), A childish half-witted American Born Chinese (who is also around 29) enjoyably captures himself having sex with hundreds of women with a digital camera. (Not to mention he carelessly had all those exhibitionistic pictures stolen by a stranger).
With the Italian young man, I recall how illusive society is. Destructive city planning, population control, marginalization of the homosexual, exploitation of the labour, obsession with fetish and commodities, etc. There are myriad of evidences showing that democracy is bullshit and freedom is almost an ideology. With that ABC, I become even more convinced about the illusion argument. I am afraid to say, it’s not fashionable to talk about moral values anymore. 911 showed the case: it is impossible to say what is absolutely moral and what is not. A boy steals a loaf of bread is ‘immoral’, but a skinny sickly boy speaking no English also in poverty stealing a morsel of bread is pardonable. Perhaps 911 is a thousand times of that poor boy example. We cannot assume men are inherently moral anymore. The question of the 21st century is an ethical one, which means how do we cope with that boy in poverty? How do we look at terrorists when they are people who were also injured and exploited by other ‘moral’ countries?
It’s not a question of whether the pictures are obscene or not. (Well, of course they are not, they are explicitly on-the-scene. ‘ob-scene’ literally means off-the-scene). Oh especially with this wonderful lovely cyber space, it’s almost impossible to stop children to imitate what the celebrties do with their uniforms and dv camera. My guess is: the limitless development of the cyberspace will redner a more and more repressed city. That is simply because we cannot bear to say something like ‘oh the pictures are normal, I also do that with my friends.’ Moral issue is unimportant only on a uttered, oratory level. There is still a stubborn discipline master living in our psyche, which Freud would called it the super-ego. As if those pictures remind us of the very fact that everyone does that kind of things secretly too.
I have no time to discuss the Italian man. While students might worship that ABC for his excessive womenizing power, I see the Italian man as my intelletual lighthouse. Not to mention the many languages he speaks (he even speaks Latin, the dead language), he read philosophy ranging from pre-Socratic to Deleuze (I mean, he understand them all). But now he simply put aside those and focus on medieval history. He asks me to practise Russian with him and I feel ashamed. His powder blue eyes and messy moustache designates certain mysterious charm i cannot quite explain. And his inbalanced shoulders are just unique. No, it’s not. The genius Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is also like this. Spare me a few more spaces to quote the paragraph:
‘He waited a little gazeing after his brother. For some reason he noticed that Ivan swayed from side to side as he walked and that, when looked at from behind, his right shoulder appeared to be lower than his left. He has never noticed it before.’ (5.5)
Ivan and the Italian young man share the same pair of shoulders. I don’t quite know how to end the entry. These two young men will probably be the materials for my novel (if i were to write one). I mean, a story about a genius and a complete idiot is incredibly interesting. Let me end by saying that I quite enjoy reading a German novel recently. It is exactly about a genius musician and his doomed course towards madness. It was written just when Hitler was enjoyably gassing thousands and thousands of Jews. And anyone who is interested in the philosophy of music should have a go.
Ah yes, an idiot has no time for morality, neither has a genius.
And the novel is Mann’s Dr Faustus.
For those who feel bored with their life but still want to stay alive: what do you think, are there more lonely people or bored people in Hong Kong? (too tired to go on tonight…..continue next time)
Gotcha!
After all these years of solitary meditations, he finally finds an answer to his life-long seemingly philosophical question – why am I so unhappy? What a question. A question that never trouble to believers. Are you a believer? No I am not. He declares himself as a thinker. Wow, grandiose. While a believer has faith in god a thinker renouces the world god creates. Why am I here? For what I live? Why not end my life at this very moment? These are questions the man has been troubling himself with since his birth under his happy properous little family.
What am I so unhappy? The man suddenly comes up with a rather strange answer. It took me some 20 years to grasp what it means. Here it goes. What am I so unhappy? Because the man has lost his spontaneity. Or he has no ‘space’ to ‘live’ spontaneously. [another 10000 words deleted].
Another reason is that, the man has been extracting himself from his body. How does he mean? The man sees his life as a movie. When he is eating his favourite food, he jumps out from his body and look at himself eating the food. When he is dancing and singing with music, he ‘sees’ himself doing all these and signals his body to stop moving.
Almost for the last 5 years the man did not once behave spontaneously. He smiles and cries for the sake of the others (actually he is too careful to squeeze a tear). What interesting about the man is that, after all these year, he has almost forgotten what he loves. I guess that’s how people say that they have ‘lost themselves’. [another 5000 words deleted]
Suppose the man can be spontaneous again if he is placed in an repression-free environment. But i am afriad even if that happens, the man will not feel happy again. Because happiness for him has a different meaning. Happiness for the man must be attained through others, even if the others are not present. When i thought about this, a strange shiver suddenly spreads my spine.
My friend long time ago said that whether happy or not is of no importance. I met another friend recently and it seems that finding happiness is always her priority. Some others think that happiness has to preceded by sufferings. And some others simply see sufferings as pleasure. [1000 words deleted]
And so it is. Life goes easy on me. What a worldly statement. As if everyday life and ‘me’ are seperate entities. Now i know why the man is unhappy. Probably he thought he can see himself from the ‘life-perspective’. Me is me, life is life. Only when me jump upstairs to the level of life and gaze back, there come unhappiness. The man had better sung the Blower’s Daughter and see how it goes. I mean, how life goes on him.
Losing happiness, the man might win some sort of intelligence. Tragedy is always more entertaining. But it is more difficult to be a comic character in a play. [10000 words deleted]
Ecclesiastes
‘What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world.’ Even this quote itself is not any new in your mind but god knows why the statement always slips away from your tongue. Whenever something ‘new’ happens, the feeling of surprise knocks out memory, knocks out thinking, knocks out the narrow snobbish spectacle that has been put on your eyes since your so-called maturity. Those whom you think are mature and oblivious are (could be) much more naive and artless than we generally assume. Being naive, we believe that there is something new to be told. Yet naivety does not necessarily give meaning to life just because something new is waiting for you to discover. What is tragic about being naive is that we will simply forget what is new today, and need another ‘new thing’ to satiate our curiosity.
Even if there’s something new in the whole world, it’s not much better than there’s nothing new at all. While the Bilble presents a world of nothingness, the ‘real’ world is the world of eternal excessiveness. Ceaseless desires – never be satiated – on and on and on. If one can only take one of the two worldviews to continue living in this world, which one will you choose? The mature Schopenheurian loner, or the naive cinematic fans of joy? Are we being too harsh to put ourselves into such either/or situation? Isn’t that more dramatic, more like a deep deep profound philosophical inspirational prose. Thank you. But in the very beginning ‘worldview’ is a problematic term. As if the philosopher who speaks in the Bible can remove himself from his body, looking at the whole world from a bird-eye view and utter such a cliche to God. Perhaps, really, the philosopher was standing in a helicopter in the age before Christ is born.
Suddenly foggy. My eyes cannot see the glamorous light at the other end of the habour. What is my point of view? What is my ‘wordview’? What can I say, if I have nothing new to say? What do I want to say, if I have so many to say?
Obshchechelovek 