Years of Poems and Spirits

Not sure if I am ready to write this … but just so that I won’t forgot some of the thoughts before they are lost to the dark ether.

1. Watched the Coen Brothers’ latest movie, “A Serious Man”. Not sure I really get it, but it certainly isn’t a stranger. While “The Man Who Wasn’t There” reminded me of “The Stranger”, this one feels like reading Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Or to be more precise, it is the anti-Underground Man that proves the Underground Man’s point. A Serious Man is one that does what the community and the tradition expected of him. He follows the law, trusts the authority and believes in reason. Yet absurd events follows him like air. But what are the Coen’s up against? Conformity? Isn’t that a bit too old a theme? Or Conformity with a Jewish twist?

2. Talking about the Underground Man: I didn’t know one can write a novel like that. The first part is a manifesto of some sort. It reminded me of an encounter about ten years ago. We just bought the house and decided to replace the carpet on the main floor. So I was at home in this empty space, it was a sunny afternoon and I had the whole afternoon off. Then came with this young carpet guy. He was an unusually energetic guy and very talkative. We started chatting about carpets, house, cabinets, etc. But before long the topic wandered into the Bible and his born-again experience. The whole setting just struck me as somewhat odd and funny: we were both crawling on the floor, him hammering down nails and knifing off carpet edges. In the whole time, he never stopped talking about Jesus and the Gospels! The Underground Man struck me in somewhat a similar way: since I was listening to an audio book on the bus to work, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the late evening. There was always something on my mind. Then suddenly the voice of a retired, grumpy Russian civil servant, full of anger and spite, rose up in my ear buds and condemning the tyranny of mathematics or lamenting the lack of free will.

3. My Existential anxiety, if there is such a thing, I came to realize, is that how to live with the Irrational. I am a Renaissance Man in many ways, and being a devotee of Reason perhaps defines me more than anything else. Yet that is not how the world operates, nor the history developed or the future is heading. Not long ago, having given up on the Main Street, I still hold on to the thought that Wall Street is a place where reason triumphs. Then the financial crisis hit. Now that the crisis is barely over (but before the European debt crisis fully blooms), the very people who live on mathematics everyday, whose fortune depends on cold-hearted calculation of facts, suddenly refused to recognize what happened and started to become politicians.

4. Suli wrote about Beidao. I did some Googling and was stunned to find several stories about Beijing No. 4 High during the Cultural Revolution. One of the guys died for the ideal he held true in the jungles of a forsaken land (fighting for Burmese Communist Party). His last letter to his brethren back home was an extraordinary mixture of self-denial and self-consciousness, each with the kind of clarity that can be ascribed to a martyr or an Existentialist. He seems to marvel at the fact that he’s able to face death everyday. And I marveled at the fact that this very choice of his (i.e. facing death everyday) is sustained by a faith he’s willing to test, with his own life and he knows it! Apparently, he’s never read Kierkegaard. (keywords: 张玉海，四中，缅共)

5. I also wrote to Suli about my own ambivalence toward “universality” of humanity. There is nothing specific to that thought since I don’t even know how to articulate either way. But a conversation with a lady in her mid-50s (about 10 years older than us) really changed a lot of my thinking. It is a long story about her living with her university professors parents on a bug-infested island during the Re-education Campaign. Not sure I can write everything down. But what struck me was how “humanity” takes different shapes in different places. In China, for example, people did find all kinds of ways to “process” absurdity imposed upon them. They didn’t internalize the absurdity as some assumed a docile Chinese People would under a suppressive power. Nor did they reject it. They just found ways to live with it, however ridiculous a situation they found themselves in. In so doing, they created subtle and non-subtle ways to express themselves: being creatively conforming is in itself an art of living. A some kind of “humanity”.  It is getting late now. And I am sure I will get back to this topic sooner or later. It is one of those most recent revelations.

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