It’s a privilege to see the various segments of Chinese society colliding against each other in Shanghai, but once you get past their differences, you begin to focus on
their commonalities–you begin to notice the way people talk, their inflections, their slang, the content of their conversations, the things they choose to emphasize.
ANd you realize, not surprisingly, that it’s an overwhelmingly utilitarian and mundane world, and that people aren’t debating poetry and philosophy and politics on the morning commute to work.

The reason why it seems I am belaboring the point is because although i was aware of this, I don’t suppose I ever gave up the hope somewhere in my heart of hearts, that things would be different somewhere else, and that people that would understand and empathize with all my intellectual and artistic yearnings would somehow pop up out of the woodwork, as if they’d been hiding behind the curtains at my
surprise birthday party, yell surprise and then somehow be there, to stay, always with me, thereby creating some kind of cocoon within which
I could completely function. This would be, in other words, some kind of nurturing atmosphere, much like what I had at home, with my parents.
Put in that light, it’s going to be hard for me to truly find a place in this world. IT’s not only about me carving out a niche for myself, but somehow creating
and maintaining that kind of environment. YOu look at people here and the first thing are immediately overwhelmed by the sheer incommensurability
of your ideals–despite everyone being human, wanting happiness, etc. There is a just a sheer abyss, and that’s because the tendencies of any artist or intellectual
is towards greater individuation–and although this isn’t necessarily the case, it is quite often the case that there is collateral damage. The damage is you:
the alienation between you and the great mass of people that don’t share our intellectual or artistic proclivities. It takes some work to reacquire that
familiarity, that sense of belongingness with people. The great mass of people never quite lose it, because there are no forces within them that would
necessarily make them stray far from that cultural, psychological orbit. But the centrifugal forces that threaten people like are always going to threaten to
take us farther from the crowd. Colin Wilson’s “outsider”–is not going to simply, through sheer, brute force exercise of the will, change his status, reverse his fortunes
and somehow devolve or de-evolve into what he was not. The process, in some way, is irreversible. And here you get into Ernest Becker territory
because what you will find is that the artist’s attempt to find an inch of ground on which to stand outside society is doomed to failure: not because society is
all encompassing or powerful, but because the attempt itself contains a structural, inherent flaw: it comes from you, the individual. It presumes that you can somehow
become a god in your right and destroy part of the world (in your imagination, hopefully) and rebuild it in your image. And according to Becker that is going to fail.
One therefore simply has to find a consciousness that is higher: the point is that the artist has to climb to the heights that only artists can reach
only to crash back down to earth: and then from there, he must climb back up again, but this time, not just as artist, or artist-hero, but as mystic, artist, hero, and animal–all
rolled into one. And then, and perhaps only then, is there going to be any shot at redemption, some kind of peace that is something deeper than what a few minutes of meditation or yoga practice or anger management will ever give you.

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作为一个词语“,活着”在我们中国的语言里充满了力量,它的力量不是来自于喊叫,也不是来自于进攻,而是忍受,去忍受生命赋予我们的责任,去忍受现实给予我们的幸福和苦难、无聊和平庸。

This is from the preface to YU HUA’s “To Live”, and was written by the author himself. The gist of it is that “to live” is not something you shout out, or something that is aggressive, outwardly defined, but rather means to suffer and persist through both the happiness, pain, joy and grief, boredom, mediocrity and everything that life inevitably brings.

I don’t think that off the cuff translation really works, and i don’t think that the point is especially profound but it’s eloquent and that makes it worth sharing

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not sure what I expected out of life, but i think there was some kind of core that persisted even as everything else changed. And what was that core? Some kind of feeling–some kind of feeling that life was meaningful, that things were on the movie, that I was working towards something, towards a goal that was both meaningful for me and somehow beneficial to at least someone, somewhere among the rest of humanity. I was never good at just taking in the small pleasures–at least not without the greater framework of meaning intact. So long as I knew what life was about I could occasionally stop to smell the roses…but now I face a more difficult challenge: when life seems like an absurd repetition of daily rituals, how to find meaning above and beyond that. I think one really does need a spiritual practice–because it’s possible to derive meaning and stimulation from the secular world, from our social activities–but they are, as we know, notoriously unreliable in this regard. So one must delve deeper, if one is looking for an anchor.

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Sometimes it seems very clear, what i must do: i simply can’t do the whole work a 9-5 white collar job and live in the city. to say so in damning especially if my future employers are reading this. However, despite that risk it must be said: without some kind of overarching mission, I don’t think that I will ever be happy. My life is never going to seem real, and it’s never going to be what it ought to be. It will always be a life half-lived.

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i suppose you just need a respite, some kind of reprieve from this feeling of anxiety: and what’s sad is that this undercurrent we take as normal. I hardly even notice it, but i actually am tense most of the time. I am always pulsating with ideas or impulses and worried about things that arent’ done or can’t be done or seem impossibly difficult. And the unremitting loneliness comes from the fact that the more you lock yourself up like that the farther you are away from people–because there is just no way they can bore a hole through these barriers. They don’t have the time or the wherewithal. So one must learn how to make life “thin” again–like a chrysalis of sorts. There has to be a kind of dying so that one can be reborn. Purified. Sound christian? well, it kinda is even though I am a nonbeliever and an atheist at that. However, we dont need god to enter this equation–what would probably be better suited for this situation is what they call mindfulness based therapy, and even minus that, just mindfulness in general. Because any other strategy is going to amount to some kind of escapism, and hence is no real strategy at all. It’s just enticing because it’s easy, and that’s what everyone else does, and therefore becomes a path of least resistance. Swiping your credit card and paying money for a flight outta here seems to involve some kind of resistance–becuase i hate spending money–but that’s not real resistance. Real resistance would be undergoing a process akin to what saint john of the cross describes in “dark night of the soul”–and there’s no way in hell that i could do that, even if i wanted to, even if sounds intriguing, even if there is the slight promise of redemption. To go back to a buddhist strain–one might say that those who seek and yearn for enlightenment are never going to find it . Not that way. Lacking business-wu wei-is the only way forward.

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i suppose you just need a respite, some kind of reprieve from this feeling of anxiety: and what’s sad is that this undercurrent we take as normal. I hardly even notice it, but i actually am tense most of the time. I am always pulsating with ideas or impulses and worried about things that arent’ done or can’t be done or seem impossibly difficult. And the unremitting loneliness comes from the fact that the more you lock yourself up like that the farther you are away from people–because there is just no way they can bore a hole through these barriers. They don’t have the time or the wherewithal. So one must learn how to make life “thin” again–like a chrysalis of sorts. There has to be a kind of dying so that one can be reborn. Purified. Sound christian? well, it kinda is even though I am a nonbeliever and an atheist at that. However, we dont need god to enter this equation–what would probably be better suited for this situation is what they call mindfulness based therapy, and even minus that, just mindfulness in general. Because any other strategy is going to amount to some kind of escapism, and hence is no real strategy at all. It’s just enticing because it’s easy, and that’s what everyone else does, and therefore becomes a path of least resistance. Swiping your credit card and paying money for a flight outta here seems to involve some kind of resistance–becuase i hate spending money–but that’s not real resistance. Real resistance would be undergoing a process akin to what saint john of the cross describes in “dark night of the soul”–and there’s no way in hell that i could do that, even if i wanted to, even if sounds intriguing, even if there is the slight promise of redemption. To go back to a buddhist strain–one might say that those who seek and yearn for enlightenment are never going to find it . Not that way. Lacking business-wu wei-is the only way forward.

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there are times when you think that your life is messed up enough that you have to somehow “reset” it. But of course, that would mean extricating yourself from many things. The problem is how, and what, and to what degree. and i don’t think anyone can you tell you that since for one, no one has complete information about what these things mean to you and by what criterion you judge them

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there are times when you think that your life is messed up enough that you have to somehow “reset” it. But of course, that would mean extricating yourself from many things. The problem is how, and what, and to what degree. and i don’t think anyone can you tell you that since for one, no one has complete information about what these things mean to you and by what criterion you judge them

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I have a problem whereby instead of feeling better after pouring my heart out, whether it’s to parents or lovers or other confidantes, I actually feel worse: this because you felt that you’ve exposed yourself, thus imbricating yourself further in relations with these people, when in fact, someone with my “problem” should make it their mission to flee and roam, to settle in their own purgatory and find their way through it without recourse to others except as necessary. I don’t mean that help is wrong or help is bad, but there is a time and place for it. And there are times when you need self-reliance and you need to make it through the dark nights alone. Because you have to test yourself. That’s the only way through . You need to develop that courage. So sometimes it’s better to slip out the door silently while the world sleeps. Just pack one bag, and see where things take you. As soon as you step out that door, you are in terra incognita–even if you are familiar surroundings, you are, mentally or even spiritually, in terra incognita. And that’s how it ought to be

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I spent the week or so prior to the chinese new year in Anchang and the Beichuan area, which was one of the hardest hit and in which there are many quake victims living in temporary housing. I talked a bunch of them and in general just observed their lives there. I will write something more in depth later. I hope to follow their story in the coming months and years.

Technorati Tags: quake, earthquake, victims, pictures, photos, tragedy, life, china, chinese

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