I mean I want to see

Image © No Idea

THIS made my day.

As did this: (๏̯͡๏)۶

A (flouncing up to a colleague in the pantry): B! Now that we’ve moved, do you miss us?
B: Er, sorry, what’s your name?

B: Story ready for you, ma’am.
A: Thank you, uncle.
B: Sad u know call me uncle. Can call me Pak Chic pls (pak chic, not pak cik).
A: Yes, pak chic. You’re ready for the runway.

*

Heard this Jason Mraz song again on Yen’s new site, and it’s just what I needed to hear.

Well no no, well open up your mind and see like me
Open up your plans and damn you’re free.

LITERARY quiz as pointed out by Minz. There’s more…Dickens novels. States and capitals. Regional countries. Etc. Was killed by the periodic table.

*

A day that’s just been packed full.

From YL’s blog:

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
- James Richardson, 500 Vectors and aphorisms

*

A: I wish there could be volunteers who go around giving massages or hugs.
B: Volunteers to touch you!?
A: Hah, yes. What can I say? I’m desperate.

B: Flowers are pointless.
A (flippantly): Well, I like diamonds.
B: Ditto diamonds. Gifts should have an element of investment not mere consumption.
A: Brk-a shares man. Gimme gimme.
B: Books.
A: I feel sorry for your future wife. Birthday: vacuum cleaner. Valentine’s day: running shoes. Anniversary: plumbing for dummies.

*

Playing a game where we list things of a particular letter in the alphabet

Letter A –
Things in a football game:
A: Axes!
(debate over what sort of axes)
B: Ambulance.
C: Well you need the ambulances after the axes are used.

Occupations:
D: Animal lover.

Stores:
D: Abraham Lincoln museum shop! (this comes after he gave “FDR museum shop” for the letter F)

Letter E —
Things at a football game:
D: Eyes!

Letter F –
Vegetables
E: Falafel! (sounding very confident)

E (on C): She once wrote down “Huge Tank” for the letter H when we had to name bodies of water.

FROM assorted e-mails I found today:

*

“This is the first time? Good. You must taste it now, while the sun is on your skin, in the place where it grows. Then you will never forget, and every time you taste it, you will remember us, and the sunshine, and this day.”

I tasted. She was right. As with the first sip of fine wine, such moments, so small, so seemingly unimportant, are so rare that we are allowed no more than a few in a lifetime. These, indeed, are the stuff of memory.

The cluster of little yellow globes yielded a thick, almost buttery juice, each globe centred by a hollow seed that yielded easily to the teeth. But it was the flavour that haunted the mind. Neither sharp nor sweet, but with a fragrance, intense but delicate, of pine trees and birch, of heather, juniper and thyme — subtle, addictive.

*

He is clever, funny, sharp-witted and heart-stoppingly perceptive. He can be difficult and even harsh with those he loves, but his anger is a storm which quickly passes.

And what I admire most is his gift — unusual in one so clever — a generous kindness towards his friends. He does not judge his friends on intellect. Like the naturally intellgent, he does not put a high value on such things. Instead, he looks for other qualities which he values more: a capacity for happiness, a particular skill which he can encourage and admire, an enjoyment of life which he can share. And once he has found these things in a friend, he will not easily lose them.

*

Apparently, instead of playing normally with model planes (by pretending they were fighting in a war), they used to play with them by pretending that they were in a beauty pageant, i.e. making them walk up the runway and ranking them.

*

A: Singaporean girls just want my soul.
B: What, you mean they’re like Satan?
A: No. I’m a good-looking guy. But they just want to go out and talk and talk.
B: Oh, by just wanting your soul you mean they don’t touch you.

(English version here)

四川强烈地震后，中国政府表现出同情和透明。这好像加强了其权威及与普通民众的情义。政府与军队携手，与大批志愿者和私人网络一道援救地震受害者。总理温家宝动情安慰灾民的场景甚至感化了顽固的玩世不恭者。

但是壮烈的赈灾之举无法一劳永逸地帮助政府，所以，人们就有必要探寻什么东西可以提供长期的政治合法性。毕竟，共产主义已经没有能力鼓舞中国人民了。那么，用什么来代替它呢？

大多数西方人认为自由民主制度是解决之道，二十世纪的许多中国自由派人士也是如此。但是还有一个途径。这一途径采用古老而又受人仰重的儒家传统形式。政府官员、具有独到见解的知识分子以及普通公民正在复兴这一传统。

北京奥运会的开幕式将会突出这一复兴。开幕式不会引用马克思的语录，而是引用论语。诸如“四海之内皆兄弟”、“有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎”等等将传播给全球几十亿观众，展示中华文化精华。

但是这样我们又陷入困局。从汉朝(两千多年以前)以来，历代中国政府为自身目的而操纵对儒家思想最为重要的政治解释。儒家与中国另一个主要政治传统法家合二为一，用来为一些做法提供依据，例如对统治者的盲从、压制妇女以及使用重刑。如今正在恢复的官方儒家可能并不如此危险，它强调社会和谐，也就是和平解决冲突。但是它依旧是传统道德。

但是人们对儒家还有另一种解说，姑且称之为“左派儒家”。它强调知识分子批评错误政策的责任，要求政府为百姓提供物质利益并且扶助无权无势之人，吁请政府更加具有国际视野并且更加依赖道德力量而非军力来实现政治目标。它开启基本的形而上学承诺并且对宗教生活采纳更为多元和宽容的观点。它强调教育机会平等以及政府为才是举，各级领导应当由最为德才兼备的人士担当。

此类价值观来源于独尊儒术之前的“原本儒家”、孟子和荀子。在帝王时代，黄宗羲等学者秉承批评传统。如今，新儒家左派人士甘阳等人呼吁建立“儒家社会主义共和国”。

儒家学者蒋庆等人公开承认其对儒家的解说最为贴近社会主义理想，亦即并非中国“现实存在的社会主义”，而是马克思等人所维护的社会主义理想。这一儒家传统志在影响当今政治，但是又分立于国家权力和正统，时刻准备指出理想与现实之间的差距。

实际上，左派儒家从现状脱离切中要害。它意在为社会批评人士提供道德标准并且激发一个更为可取的政治愿景。与共产主义不同，它设想一种未来，也就是其合法性取自于传统并且建立在历史之上、包括社会主义传统，而不是加以摧毁。

因此，左派儒家人士倾向于机制改革。他们主张社会长治久安以及政治机构的合法性要求建立于中国传统之上。蒋庆主张建立三远制，也就是民主选举产生的庶民院代表普通民众利益，道儒院确保受到政府政策影响的所有人的福祉，包括外国人和少数民族，还有国体院维护中国不同宗教和传统。

如此具体的、由儒家价值观引发而出的政治改革提议难以在中国大陆公开发表。实际上，正是由于鲜有中国人受到西方自由民主制度鼓舞，所以对于自由民主机制的公开讨论才限制较少。如今，中国政治现状最为可行的替换者就是左派儒家学说。

*

“If I were God” revisited

A: Why have appendixes? I’d also get rid of unnecessary body hair. We’ll put Gillette out of business.
B: I’d make humans able to swivel their neck 360 degrees.
C: People should have majestic prehensile tails.

Librarian

WAS the name of a dress shop at college — I’d only vaguely known why as a friend sketched out the outline of It’s A Wonderful Life over a meal at the Ratty.

But I didn’t see the movie then — and I’ve just caught it tonight. Oh I love it! I love it so. The vivid personalities and the humour and the courage and doing one’s duty, the joy, holding on to life itself, despite naivete, failures, detours, stupid mistakes, unforeseen circumstances, missed opportunities.

Image © Telefunker

IF THE two great subjects of modern literature are the artist and the city, then the one great subject has to be the artist in the city — an aesthetic consciousness in the midst of the mob, a controlling sensibility within the maze. Joyce, Mann, Proust share this theme.

Two kinds of urban reality emerged from literary modernism — the city as constituted by the artist, whose inner feelings and impressions embody an urban vision, and the city as constituted by the crowd, which had a personality and urban meaning of its own. The frenetic qualities of the crowd take on a nervous quality of the city. Baudelaire’s 2nd edition of Les Fleurs Du Mal: observer finds in the crowd or Paris streets an object that triggers his imagination or memory and thus is internalised. We move inward from the street to the crowd to an impression drawn from the crowd to the associations that impression evokes in the mind. Baudelaire believes in the reality of evil, in experience as sordid and nature as inherently fallen and yet redeemable through art. Man is drawn towards both God and Satan — and they both can be found in the crowd. The poet thus goes to the crowd to find versions of himself. Baudelaire in the crowd embodies the artist in the city, the move from an objective to a subjective view of the city — the move, that is, from naturalism to modernism.

As a literary movement, modernism evolves from romantic realism, naturalism, and neo-realism to aestheticism and mythic symbolism controlled by cyclical theories of time and Bergsonian consciousness and then to versions of postmodernism. Impressionism was the main means of moving from naturalism to modernism — from an impersonal, objective realm to the personal and subjective, with a distinction between descriptive detail (the detail controlling the mind) and impressionistic detail (the mind controlling detail). It is no accident that literary subjectivity and impressionism in art coincided. Along with impressionism, cubism broke up the nineteenth-century ideal of photographic realism. Cubism, with its overlay of images, is the artistic equivalent of the superimposed layers of reality in Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Pound’s cantos. In collapsing space and time, the use of montage produced a new sense of reality. Under the influence of impressionism, naturalistic reality began to take on a subjective quality, as when a personal response — as in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway — is overlaid on a more objective account of events. Both the modernist self and impressionism were urban phenomena: impressionism discovered the landscape quality of the city and depicted the world through the subjective eyes of the city dweller, reacting to the external impressions. As the impressionistic view became more intense, the ability to see the city objectively became more difficult, and an intensity of personal feeling was often accompanied by a more opaque sense of one’s surroundings. Thus the views of Conrad’s Marlow and Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway gave way to darkness or to the opaqueness that Nick describes.

The modernist’s inward turn, insisting upon mythic and symbolic reality, could not reconcile theories of cyclical history with a belief in linear revolution and mechanical progress, and could not accept a mechanistic reality that gave priority to the realm of science at the expense of art and mind. The interest in myths and archaeology found an important complement in the literary use of landscapes, particularly urban landscapes. In Salammbo (1862), Flaubert superimposed Carthage upon the spectre of Paris in the Second Empire, and James Joyce loosely superimposed the heroic world of Ulysses upon Dublin.

The play between mind and descriptive detail ends in a series of impressions that represent the urban mind. This technique gives us an urban narrator whose response to the city moves us from an objective to a subjective realm, as well as from a shared to a private reality. The meaning of the city comes from within such a special realm of perception. In Ulysses, myth is superimposed upon a modern city; in Finnegans Wake, myth is superimposed upon a dream.

Flaneur: the crowd contains the potential for experience — meeting a lover or a friend and experiencing a spectacle. But the flaneur is discontented because the city offers more experience than he can assimilate. He always feels that he is missing out even in the process of experiencing: his state of mind is restless dissatisfaction, aimless desire qualities we find in many of Dreiser’s and Fitzgerald’s characters. When this sense of potentiality becomes frightening, it threatens stability and leads to the kind of neurasthenia we find in Eliot’s writing; when the threat becomes personal, it leads to the paranoia that informs Pynchon’s novels. And paranoia takes us to the doorstep of the uncanny. As Baudelaire demonstrated and Walter Benjamin noted, the uncanny — the mysterious and the eerie — is born out of heterogeneous crowds, which is to say it can be born of the city: out of the stranger who steps from the crowd, out of the postcolonial migrant who returns as alien (see Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely). When the city gives up its secrets, we enter the realm of the uncanny. From Dickens’s Orlick to Joyce’s Walpurgisnacht at Bella Cohen’s, the literary imagination has revealed the urban uncanny. As the modern city became more impenetrable, the hidden as something hostile and unhomely informed the literary text.

Intelligence turned outward accounted for the Enlightenment belief in instrumentality and progress — and was directed at the instrumentality of the city, its institutions, the way it functions as a commercial or industrial system. Intelligence turned inward — ie intuition — accounted for the modernist belief in an inner, artistic reality inseparable from the realm of form. It moved towards intuitive truths pertaining to a realm of being, an elemental reality, that preceded the city. Thus the deeper the inner reality intuited by narrators like Marlow or Nick Carraway, the more opaque the outer reality. For Woolf, impressionism became a way of seeing the city. The city became a personal, often isolated experience, with each inhabitant caught in his or her own subjectivity. What they see is an extension of themselves — Nick Carraway, Marlow, Dalloway characters.

As the mind moves inward, the physical world becomes a subjective reality. Joyce’s Dublin takes on the meaning projected on it by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom or assumes the extended quality of dream and language that characterises Finnegans Wake. The end product of modernism led to an aesthetics of self — Wilde’s aestheticism created the dandy, the self as the equivalent of an art object, Joyce through Dedalus — whether taken literally or ironically — established a realm in which beauty unfolds as an epiphany and reality is transformed by the imagination.

*

The modern city will represent the cities of old because the same forces have worked throughout history. In Heart of Darkness, for instance, Conrad tells us that there is little difference between civilisation and savagery; savagery simply operates beneath the surface of civilisation — Brussels is described as a “whited sepulchre”, a monument of power that cannot be separated from the reality of death and degradation despite its status as an Enlightenment city that tries to deny its limits and emblematises its capacity to rule. (More on cities and limits). Eliot’s use of the wasteland landscape is a take on vegetative myths in which the land has been depleted because of drought and other natural disasters, lore that in turn involves sacrificial myths. But Eliot superimposes these primitive myths onto modern-day London where they overlay — and take on the meaning of — the depletion of an urban and industrial society, as seen in its emotionally exhausted citizenry.

The Waste Land, centred in modern London, functions on three levels of reality: the individual, the historical, and the mythic-religious. The city, the culmination of Western history, embodies a state of individual consciousness and reflects a complex plane of existence. London is one of several cities caught in the process of rise and fall:

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Each city represents the high point of a culture or an empire that falls to barbarians.

*

The commercial/industrial city, the subject of the imperial city. Dickens, Balza, Gogol, Dostoevsky all created versions of a city as a maze, seemingly beyond human scale, with an influx of young men and women from the provinces in search of a heightened essential self, as well as the breakdown of the family as the hero went his lonely way in search of success in a new moneyed, commercial world. Events turn on the melodramatic, fathoming the maze, restoring the city to human scale by personalising it. (Egs Balzac’s Vautrin or Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Dickens’ Inspector Bucket)

Dickens’ world turned on sentiment, the belief that social evil could be overcome by the capacity of the human heart to do good, but this notion could not long prevail in an urban environment with its diminished sense of the individual. Dickens’ London takes its being from an imposition of the melodramatic upon the city’s commercial nature. Joyce’s Dublin takes its being from an imposition of commonality upon the city’s commercial nature. (Egs)

Invested with emotion, too — the city of education and dreams. Thinking of cities shaped by imaginary lands, literary places.

*

Emphasising the power of reason and technology, Enlightenment thought treated the city as a way of controlling nature for the purpose of bringing wealth into being. This was a city organised on the principle of natural rights rather than birthrights, so the individual could be called to it to pursue a higher sense of self, a personal destiny. The city is the end product of the evolution of capitalism — from commercialism, to mercantilism, to imperialism, to international capitalism and the multinational corporation.

The relationship between the city and its hinterland was symbiotic: the city was energised by its rural surroundings, and the hinterland supplied raw materials and a marketplace. It also became the basis for a mystical nationalism that allowed capital cities to turn into monuments to imperial and later totalitarian power.

The literary imagintion chronicled the advantages and disadvantages of urban existence. The advantages of a material society had to be weighed against the cost in natural and human resources, and romanticism was the reaction against Enlightenment values. The romantics wanted an organic community that took its being from the land and that was consolidated through the working of myth, not pure reason. They reversed Locke’s thinking: the wilderness was opportunity, which only became waste after the depredation of urbanism. One of the first poets to express this notion was William Blake (1757-1827), who in Songs Of Experience (1794) maintained that the city encouraged luxury, allowing a radical departure from the natural state that led to decadence and waste. His “London” finds capitalism responsible for the dehumanised commercial city.

Naturalism also made inroads on Enlightenment assumptions. As a product of evolution, humanity was more a creation of environmental chance than the product of reasoned planning. The naturalist city was a place of limits, a product of mechanical activity and of mechanical forces, all working in a zero-sum way. The city produced only so much wealth; therefore if some were wealthy, others had to be poor. Adapting to the city involved the same rules as adapting to nature: some would succeed, others fail. Herbert Spencer believed in the survival of the fittest, especially as the city became more complex.

In its view of the city, modernism was another stage of romanticism. The modernist city was reconciled to myths of the land, involved a community of like selves, and kept alive a cyclical sense of time by juxtaposing the present against a more heroic past. The modernists — turning to aestheticism, religion and politics — tried to ground the self within the city, but the result was often a sense of individualism either autistic or power hungry, paralleling the trials of the nation state. Modernism looked backward towards what were considered simpler times. Both the romantics and the modernists held on to visions of the city that had already been discounted by the forces of industry. In Europe, Spengler’s mystic nationalism had great influence between the wars; and in America, a Jeffersonian idea of democracy kept its allure from the beginning of the republic to the end of WWII. Given the political collapse of modernism in the twentieth century, one can understand the postmodernist search for alternative values.

Postmodernism provides a radical departure from earlier urban paradigms. For example, an existentialist like Sartre, grounded in phenomenology, believes that consciousness (pour soi) brings the city (en soi) into being; Baudrillard, in contrast, believes that consciousness comes into being within the systems that produce it. Mass media informs urban reality. The postindustrial city also takes its meaning from the complex handling of international capital and from the modern MNC. Urban activity becomes more abstract and “unreal” as power operates from hidden sources. Such a city is at once a physical reality and a state of mind: to read the city is to read an urbanised self, to know the city from within. Once we lose a transcendental signifier, the totalising process is called into question and the city turns into a place of mystery: chance and the unexpected dominate, a romantic sense of the uncanny becomes exaggerated, and the city takes on the meaning of pure text, to be created by each individual and then read. The self is no longer the Enlightenment individual, calculating its endless possibilities, but a discontinuous self, fraught and overloaded with electronic stimuli.

The city — a vortex, a power mechanism — is indeed a wonder. It brings together the forces of business, law, medicine, and education; it gives us the glory of great universities, libraries, museums, theatres, restaurants, sports arenas and parks. But these great benefits come with a price, and the literary imagination responds with both excitement and reservation — and more recently with a sense of fear of what awaits.

*

Postmodernists such as DeLillo and John Barth systematically undo the wasteland myth, the search for meaning in the historical past, and the belief in a subject — that is, a consciousness that centres meaning. The narrative shift is parallel to a philosophical and theoretical movement that collapsed consciousness into forms of structure (Saussure), discourse (Foucault), paradigm (Kuhn), systems (Bertalanffy), or grammar or rhetoric (Derrida, de Man). While modernism owed much to a theory of aesthetics, postmodernism takes its being from the linguistic-philosophical-anthropological paradigm displayed in Saussure’s structural theory of language and applied by Levi-Strauss to the reading of culture. Meaning is no longer in nature, manifested through revelation (Defoe) or through the unfolding of symbolism, whether cosmic (Coleridge) or evolutionary (Darwin): it is nowunderstood as the structure the mind creates. Synchronic time replaces diachronic time, substance gives way to a system of signs and reality to relation.

Modernism sees human consciousness confronting an unmade universe, a universe without a creator. The wuality of that consciousness may differ in james, Eliot, Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway, but their characters all define themselves and their world in terms of it. Postmodernism takes us one step further by asking what would happen if we postulate a universe without such subjectivity — a universe that is intelligible in terms of consciousness that is already collapsed into culture and thus inseparable from discourse, from the way we talk about it. No longer independent and in control, consciousness then comes into play as part of a system. Such consciousness is generated by and inseparable from a specific culture, held in place by that culture’s institutions and no longer personal. As a result, the city becomes a state of mind: It thinks us and not the other way around.

*

Literary texts and cultural paradigms help us to focus and to arrest the flux of time. Comic and romantic realism give us insights into the commercial city, naturalism and modernism into the industrial city, postmodernism into the postindustrial city. No matter how conceived, the city has played a large part in human destiny for almost five thousand years; it has created a historical rhythm of its own, even as its functions changed and its reality was reconstructed and transformed. Urban constructs must be continuously reexamined: They are, to be sure, artificial and diverse — but through them we interpret the past, test our sense of reality, and structure the future. And the city — for better or for worse — is our future.

To read: Raymond Williams: The Country And The City (1973)
Burton Pike: The Image Of The City In Modern Literature (1981)
William Sharpe: Unreal Cities (1990)
Hana Wirth-Nesher: City Codes (1996)

- Most treat city as dichotomy: private vs public space, static city vs flux, country vs city.

*

凤凰古城－尤今

是五四作家沈从文把我“带”到湖南的凤凰古城的。

　　一个地方，如果有了文学作为基本的色调，也就有了文化的氛围。童年与少年时代居留于凤凰古城的沈从文，在《边城》一书里，对于这个充满湘西风情的古城，有过令人心醉神迷的描绘，从而给凤凰古城赋予永恒不变的魅力。我们可以这么说，如果没有沈从文，凤凰古城就仅仅只是一个风光绮丽的山城；可是，有了沈从文，这儿却成了意味隽永的文化名城。

　　抵达凤凰古城时，是初冬的深夜。瘦瘦的沱江，静静地穿城而过，两岸的灯火，成了镶嵌在河中闪闪烁烁的钻石。

　　在沱江畔找了一家私人经营的旅舍，天气实在太冷了，我们一放下行李，便外出打酒。凤凰古城的居民约有65%是少数民族，其中以苗族与土家族居多。苗族传统的酿酒业在此非常兴盛，许多酒铺子出售的，全是自酿的酒，家家风味不一。信步走入其中一家酒铺，糯米酒、猕猴桃酒、枸杞酒、菊花酒、杨梅酒等等，全在圆肚的大酒坛里静静地、含蓄地散发着淡淡的香味。和酒坛一样又圆又胖的，是卖酒的苗族女人，非常友善，话语像是沱江的水，长流不息：“很久以前呀，苗族和汉族的关系不好，两族不相往来，也严禁通婚。可是呀，现在，苗汉成了一家，长来长往，汉族最喜欢喝的，便是我们苗族酿制的酒啦！”说着，掀开其中的一个酒坛，香醇的酒气，立刻冲了出来，她用杓子把酒舀出，盛在纸杯里，说：“来，试试！”我试了一坛又一坛，但觉坛坛味美坛坛香，离开酒铺时，左手拎着四斤糯米酒、右手提着四斤弥猴桃酒，脚步踉跄，耳畔却还响着那苗族女人的话：“旅游业兴旺了整个凤凰城，可是，由于外界通向凤凰古城的交通不很便利，游客还不算很多，物价依然偏低。”这酒，每斤人民币才8元（约合新币1元6角）！此外，我们所下榻的旅舍，位于美丽的江畔，房间宽敞洁净，有暖气供应，每晚人民币才 60元（约合新币12元），着实便宜得令人咋舌！

　　次日一早，站在窗畔，一看，便吓了一跳，在摄氏两三度的酷寒气温下，居然有好些男女在沱江里浮浮沉沉地冬泳！据说他们是刻意通过这样的方式进行身体锻炼的！

　　江畔，有苗家女在捣衣、淘米、洗菜，展现着一种朴实无华的风情。

　　漫步于历尽沧桑的石板路上，满眼尽是别具风情的吊脚木楼、错落散布的亭台楼阁、陈年古朴的砖墙瓦片，走着走着，我好似不小心掉进了沈从文笔下的岁月里。有人说，来凤凰古城，不是玩的，而是逛的，这话可一点儿也没错，我就看到有外地人一手拿着沈从文的著作，一边走，一边读，读读看看、看看读读，整个人，痴痴地走入了一个悠远雅致的文学情境里。

　　在凤凰古城邂逅了来自广州的一位商人，每年冬天，他必定百忙拨冗到安静的凤凰古城蛰居几天，让脑子里的杂思全然沉淀，再回顾往昔，策划未来。另一名来自旧金山的美籍教师更妙，他原本只打算玩几天，没有想到深受吸引，回国辞职后再来，迄今已住了半年，他说：“也许，我会终老于此哪！”我想，正是古城这种超尘出世的气韵，陶冶了沈从文的性情，也为他孕育了无比丰富的创作灵感。

　　夜晚，许多游人把点了烛火的许愿杯放入沱江，也同时放入了一个个美丽的憧憬。当大量涌入的游客带来滚滚财源的同时，肯定会把凤凰古城现有的宁静和安恬夺走，不知道这是凤凰古城居民所期盼的前（钱）景吗？

A: Pot-luck? Have you tried my cooking?
B: No, but it can’t be that bad. A dip and something to go with it, like chips and veggie sticks?
A: Right. More like an ambulance.

Dress from Mayle

(Eye-candy, from filling up my head with fluff and looking up dresses on e-bay that you can’t get in Singapore.)

*

REREADING Toni Morrison’s Beloved — the novel is based on a true story of a woman who killed her child in order that it not be returned to slavery. The characters in the story are in such a state of extremity that they have to suppress all emotions, all normal respoinses because their lives have been so terrible that mere survival becomes central and you only survive by not feeling. And yet precisely because the feelings have been pushed under, they have a power and a dignity and a ferocity that the feelings of ordinary people in ordinary novels don’t have.

Sethe’s sole preoccupation is that the baby misunderstood her, and is angry because she feels unloved. The ghost stays with her for ever, obviously because she lost her child and wants her back, and it is unbearable that she can’t undo what she has done. It pains her horribly that the baby doesn’t know how much she loves her. She killed her, and meant to kill the other children and herself, so that they could all be together on the other side.

We tend to think in terms of the nineteenth-century European novel, which is about tensions of the family and people trying to break out of families — here we have a novel about people to whom this very basic human structure, a man and a woman and their children, is denied by the social structure within which they live.

Morrison draws on biblical and Christian language in Beloved, as she does in all her work — black slaves and their descendants took Christianity and made it into the religion of their suffering, with strength and hope, which is part of the strength. Combined with the feeling that everybody in the book has a point beyond which they can’t go on hoping or believing or loving or caring. And they all know at which moment they broke down.

It’s a book about memory, about characters who don’t want to remember, written by an author who is making the point that we must not forget. Memory and remembering are connected to keeping alive in the mind those who have died, and therefore with the whole process of mourning, which implies both keeping an internal relationship with the dead, but also working through the loss and allowing some degree of separation. This is what Sethe can’t do: She is so occupied with the ghost of the baby that a normal mourning process can’t take place. Mourning is necessary so life can continue in the present, but the wish of every character to obliterate the past in fact disrupts this process. When remembering is so unbearable, there can be no gradual distancing from the past.

When in real life you are mourning somebody, the mourners are present to each other and all differently and intensely aware of a presence of an absence. In a book all the characters are ambivalently there and not there, and Toni Morrison has exploited this wonderfully. Sethe and Beloved are equally real, in the book, as presumably imagined people are in the world of your inner objects and attachments or in dreams. (Cf Landen in Thursday Next) So she’s used both the conventions of the realist novel and the conventions of dream reality to embody mourning, and the power of imagination is conveyed through the creation of alive and dead characters who all have exactly the same quality of reality, of concreteness.

However horrible the past, you can only live and be sane and integrated if you are in contact with it. The connection with beauty is important — the sense of hope and the will to create a better life are deeply connected to the ability to preserve beauty and goodness in the internal world. One of the fundamental ideas in Kantian psychoanalytic theory is that sanity depends on the capacity to retain a good, trusting link with good figures in the internal world — the capacity to survive loss through the internalisation of the good experience.

Because you’ve read this, you’ve acquired memories you might not like to have, but because the book is so strong you now have them and they are part of you. The imaginative power of Morrison is Tolstoyan — she gives you no option but to inhabit her world. The novel haunts you as the ghost haunts the novel, and it’s a form of moral power, good and terrifying.

READING something I copied off the papers written by Janadas Devan some years back:

“THO’ I call them Mine, I know that they are not Mine.” The English critic F.R. Leavis liked to cite that remark of William Blake about his works to point to the essential impersonality of literature: Blake “meant that when the artist is creatively successful, the creativity to which the achievement belongs is not his, though, while transcending the person he is, it needed his devoted and supremely responsible service,” Leavis wrote.

“The creative power and purpose don’t reside within his personal self-enclosure; they are not his property or in his possession. He serves them, not they him.” The same can be said of the relationship each of us has to whatever language we speak: “Tho’ I call it Mine, I know that it is not Mine.”

For one thing, every language pre-dates our own existence - by many thousands of years in the case of ancient languages, like Chinese, Tamil or Persian. Every child that gains access to a language, gains access to a pre-existing order of meaning. A language speaks us long before we learn to speak it. For another, every language is through and through a communal artefact. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has established, there can be no such thing as a “private language”.

For to speak a language is to participate above all in a ‘form of life’, as he puts it. To share in that form, one must first be trained to share in it. And that training must necessarily be public, for there cannot be private access to a “form of life”. Every word in every language must first be understood by a community of speakers before it can be uttered meaningfully by anyone. The meaning is prior to the utterance; the public comes before the personal. “Tho’ I call these words Mine, I know that they are not Mine.”

And thinking of how to write my essays for application (freaking out over the GREs, and I’ve not even found out about subject tests — the application process is about to start soon. I’ll probably take a year off to do a Master’s in S-E Asian studies, and if I can’t get a scholarship to go abroad I’ll stick to the local university, and it’s exciting to be starting over again, starting afresh. Ah, the smell of freedom) and thinking of why I want to learn more about this plural region, to do scholarship here, when what training I have is East Asian (Chinese) or European (French, German). It’s going to be a long road ahead, but I’m looking forward to it.