悲情城市

With such room, such weather, such timing, such mood, I watched a film that I will never forget. I admitted that I had projected my depression onto the film. But that will only add more sadness to the world and not reducing its beauty. What will I write? My dreadful state of mind, or the mind of the dreadful, which shown in the film? Of course. How come I forgot it again. Sadness can only be written about when it has not reached the maximum threshold. Let's drop the pen. I surrender to my heart. It hurts, especially at night.

Okay. Let's look at my rational side. I am very very very very very happy to have watched the film. And it's a shame really to have watched it almost 20 years after it was released. I asked a friend from Taiwan about the film and we had a very interesting discussion. We talked about White Terror, the martial law, the hybridity of taiwanese, the history of democracy, the meaning of Chinese culture, and so on...but i can't go on...

I watched the film on 4/6 and the film was filmed in 1989. The film's white terror is just the opposite but not very far from the 'black' terror happened in the same year. As if everything is meant to put together. Suddenly I thought myself had a glimpse of what human really is - his brutality exploded under dominion, his infinite sadness cannot be articulated with words, his perpetual desire to end his own life. What is humanity? Is it not destructions in disguise. Is it not chaos in order? Is it not soberiety out of the spirit of drunkenness? I just cannot cry. My retarded mind is pitifully rationalized. But yet fully rationalized. As if a machine foresees that he will feel tired one day. Why should we look at the brutality of history? Does it mean there will be none in the future? When brutality stops at the outside, it will revenge on the inside. Everyone will be brutal to him/herself. Mind you the difference between brutal and cruel. We are cruel, but we will become brutal one day. Cruelty is pleasurable violence; but brutality is dreadful; it's dreadful! It destroys without remorse and no redemption is ever needed.

I thought I could forget my pain by throwing myself into books and writing. Now the machine is trying to forget. The common saying is that: if you try hard to forget, that to-be-forgotten thing will be more vivid in your memory. I can't say it's wrong, but i think something more complicated is going on. Perhaps memory becomes dormant at times and active when you have the least expectations. Can I store my heart in the freezer? I got a good freezer in the kitched. It's 2m x 1m x 1m big and i think people have also been storing their organs inside. Shall we try this? But i need your help. Because I might not want my heart back when i can get rid of all emotions in human beings. Please, 3 years later, 3 years later, put my heart back to my chest. Just plunge it with a garden knife. Use gloves, and wipe the blood with care. I don't want to be dead when I have my heart again!

Now slash here. No, a bit closer to the left. Yes. Plunge it. I said plunge it!

With such room, such weather, such timing, such mood, he will never forget the film he watched. At the same time, he forgot his feeling about what he watched, he tasted, he heard, he smelled. For that he made the decision. Three years later he will be fine.

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'.