Lost Horizon

At the moment I saw this photo, 16 days had passed after its appearance on the NYT to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Edward Ruscha, who took the picture in 1961, remembered 'forlorn and empty' financial district skyline, lamenting the city's vastness, exuberance and fast tempo of living.

'The delicious place' that Ruscha visited is vanishing away in the centre of the picture, but several seagulls are still lingering around freely. It seems that there is a kind of gravity stemming from the horizon, invisibly attracting those tiny creatures to its centre.

The kernel of that illuminating horizon is accentuated by the knowing that it's no longer there. Just when I nearly fell into a solemn and even melancholy state for the void, the scissor-gate would protrude into the vista and the space of imagination, separating the past from the presence.

The beauty of the loss, innocently young but irreversibly gone, that's what Ruscha has captured in this wonderful temporal frame. Marvelling at the impeccable composition of the photo, I can feel sheer sentiment for a lost Utopian world, nearly overflowing but wisely being contained by the scissor-gate at the foreground.

Such an implication might never be revealed at the moment it was shot. Isn't this pure apres coup effect a perfect eulogy for the ground zero?

Invisible writer

Occasionally, one would encounter a rare piece of writing, so rich and so deep, that it enters directly into your soul with its magic elevating force.

Writing, a lonely silhouette at the dark night, talking to no one but by yourself, these acts and image juxtapose with each other, speaking loudly from Cynthia Ozick. I barely know her before this rendezvous, symbolically through digital media, and her family name sounds jarring to me. She must be very strong, mentally speaking.

It puzzles me a bit as I encountered another story about a female poet Bachmann yesterday. Intuitively, I guess they are the same type, extremely rare, with probability I guess less than 100 million to 1, but it just happened in this virtual world.I was moved by the story of both, although one is written in the form of a speech, another one is simply a report on a new biography.

Such a coincidence is worth writing down something, to capture this delicate disturbance of a peaceful mind of mine, which has absorbed too much information without truly being moved. After swallowing all these plain journalistic writings, reading the sentence like 'Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer – lauded, fêted, bemedalled – plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure?' suddenly gives you a refreshing literal sense, poetic and challenging, with a control of tempo and nuance of fine words.

Nabokov, Henry James, Rilke, all probably fall into the so-called 'the madness of arts', just like Ozick's insurmountable madness drives her through 7 years' austerity as an invisible writer. I don't know how such a life experience has changed her view, but her self-righteous feeling has been voiced loudly.

'Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.'

While a true writer is invisible, a fraudulent writer on the contrary is 'the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck.'

How bitter Ozick's tone is! How unapologetic! What kind of solitude she has been living through before uttering such a strong feeling!

That was the moment that I thought about the tragedy of Celan, his complete and hopeless defeat in facing his lover's dedication to writing, the madness of self-devotion to poetry, which once engulfed Rilke.

The literal and poetic consolation I once retained from Rilke and Nabokov hasn't lasted long, someday I suddenly realized that all that had happened in my mind was just an illusion, since their flesh and blood had been long gone. The idea continues to inspire, like what it has done to Ozick. Its magic but dark shadow will cast spell on a writer until the moment the deadly solitude captures his/her soul, transforming flesh and blood into cold words, and waiting for some readers to pick them up, and being transfixed.

Chilling, warm, disenchanting but moving, Ozick's speech is marvellous.

V for Vendetta

It's quite rare that nowaday a mainstream film could tackle such a subject as big as liberty, and is full of metaphors and metonyms that are quite relevant to the current world. The experience of watching V for Vendetta is accompanied with the reflection of some hot topics recently emerging from humanitarian fields, such as emerging empire, i.e.in what Antonio Negri would say in Empire, preemptive measures against terrorists, as what Bush administration would justify any causes of war against terror, or the end exceeding the means, as what have been accepted by the democratic regime to justify the torture of illegally captured prisoners in Guantanamo.

Wachowski brother's return to a more realistic world from the futuristic concern about the human being in the trilogy of the Matrix is a welcome sign. It inspires me to think what the real meaning of liberty is. And for those who are familiar with Slovaj Zizek's works, it's not difficult to tell that the filmic narrative embodies some key elements of about the political struggle and the Lacanian psychoanalytical notions such as double death, death drive, and traversing fantasy. One of the most stunning segment in handling psychological twist is about V's conspiracy to torture Evey, as a kind of path for Evey to the self-emancipation. Its ethical indication is not so clear and the demarcation line between what is the right and what is the wrong is blurred. This of course can not be considered as a flaw in the film, but rather, the key to disentangle what the liberty means, and what prices one has to pay to achieve absolute freedom.

First judgement: the masked V in the film is not a real man but as a specter or a personification of the abstract spirit of freedom. So, if you, as a spectator, dwells too much on the logic about whether V's undertaking to torture Evey as the path for her enlightenment is illegitimate or not, you are still fooled by the appearance of the filmic narrative - a kind of confusion between the Real and the movement from the Symbolic to the Real. In fact, what has been embodied by V and his action constantly changes as the situation or setting in the filmic narrative changes. At the symbolic level, V as a liberator is actually identical to the person that always appears on the big screen to command as an absolute authority – a dictator – from the perspective of power structure; however, at the level of the Real, there is a thin line between a liberator and a dictator, and this thin line couldn't be detected unless one to look awry from the perspective of the mass, i.e. from Evey or from those being executed and oppressed.

In fact, there is one episode in the filmic narrative, which is treated as a kind of comic subversion that is made by Dietrich – Evey's boss- to caricature the dictator. In that embedded segment of TV comic show, the dictator is identified as the man behind the mask of V. When his identity is revealed to his guards, one couldn't tell who is the real V and who is real dictator. The transgressive effect of this episode couldn't be ignored as it exactly shows the identical characters of a liberator and a dictator at the symbolic level of the power structure that both of them seem to have absolute power and to do whatever they want. There are fairly amount of depiction in the film about how both of them can control mass media, and how V is the only one in the narrative free from the restrictions of night curfew. Even the naturally made butter is only consumed by these two guys; albeit for the dictator the supply is a privileged one, and for V, he has to steal. Isn't V's treatment to Evey – a test to her in the cell – exactly the same way that the regime in the filmic narrative treats rebellions? No wonder the moment Evey knows the truth, she couldn't bear it at all and nearly suffocate. However, at that critical point, Evey is reminded by V to recollect the moment she is ready to sacrifice her body for something higher, and she then regains the strength. Since this episode is so short, but it reveals the key element of enlightenment, so it's worth to expand a bit further here.

When Evey realizes that she is cheated by V, her emotional reaction is hatred, and she accuses him of an evil. From psychoanalytical perspective, it's quite easy to tell such a reaction derives from the subject's fantasy being traversed – the process of subjective destitution. If it stops there, which means Evey would maintain her hate feeling to V, since her trust to V has been betrayed, the transferring process from V to Evey would never happen, and the Real of the liberty would never be revealed. However, when V confesses his intention to Evey, and guides Evey to recall her decision to sacrifice, Evey starts to forgive V. It's worth to emphasize that such a forgiveness couldn't happen unless one is bestowed to the power which is beyond our grasp of the world. Here lies the difference between V and the dictator at the level of the Real. Even though they share the same power structure from the positive side and from the negative side respectively, just like the two sides of the same coin, the reception from the mass is completely different. For the dictator, the obedience of his subordinates and the mass is from the fear for being persecuted by the state machine; they are forced to obey. However, for the liberator, Evey and those who put up the mask that voluntarily gathering and marching to the Parliament Building, are self-motivated; their obedience to wear the mask is not to V but to something higher which makes them free from fear.

What that power is and where is it from? The answer of course is the spirit of liberty, the God, or the Thing – something beyond the grasp of the Symbolic. When Evey stands at the roof of the building receiving the shower of the rain, one shot is from the low angel POV just like Evey undergoing baptism from the God. The following cross-cut sequence shows that Evey's gesture to receive rains – blessing from the God - and V's silhouette with the backdrop of the fire – a kind of reincarnation or nirvana coincides with each other. The underlying meaning of the sequence is that something strange – the Thing – has entered their bodies and makes them indestructible. The revelation of this cross cutting is that what has been experienced by Evey is the same as V when he survives the fire of the concentration camp. Until then, the transference from V to Evey has been accomplished, and the process of the creation ex-nihilo has empowered Evey just as it has done to V. This is the reason that I think V in the film is only a personification of the specter – the spirit of freedom, and Evey's love for him has undergone the movement from the love to a person, albeit at the symbolic level that V is always behind the mask, to the passionate attachment to the Thing - the spirit of freedom. Exactly for this reason, Evey is empowered to forgive V for having cheated her that she is no longer bounded to any worldly attachment. The thin line between a liberator and a dictator therefore lies in such forgiveness. Since V is forgiven by Evey, he is to her a liberator, or a messenger to enlighten her on the path to the self-emancipation. Otherwise, V would be in the same category of the oppressor, just like the one that always appears on the screen to command the obedience of his subordinates and mass media in the name of social stability.

After the transference from V to Evey is accomplished, V is ready to die, or in director's subjective treatment, can die. The underlying reason for such a movement in the filmic narrative is that the spirit of freedom has found its inheritor - Evey. In another words, the specter of liberty has found a body to reside, so its eternality is guaranteed. Here comes the second death of Guy Fawkes, which coincides with V's death, bodily. In fact, there are two deaths in the film about Guy Fawkes. In the opening sequence, the real Guy Fawkes is garroted; near the end, V in the mask of Guy Fawkes is shot to death. A standard account about Guy Fawkes is that he is the Britain's most notorious traitor against the ruling master. The tradition of firework day is to burn the effigy of Fawkes on the November 5th each year to celebrate the foil of the Gunpowder Plot and the safety of the King. The film actually opens with this historical event in 1605. I guess anyone familiar with this historical story will see the spirit of freedom in the motivation for the Gunpowder Plot, so the firework glorifies such a spirit rather than celebrating the safety of the ruling master (be it a King, a dictator, or a ruling party).

These two deaths of Guy Fawkes reveals the emergence of what has been called the death drive – the Thing that makes the subject fearless and completely free. The Freudian death drive is quite obscure and has been criticized a lot; the film however, presents it in a very neat and understandable way. Simply put it, death drive is something that drives the desiring subject to abandon completely all attachment to the world, something one could sacrifice one's life, in order to defend something inexplicable – the Thing that could be symbolized in all sorts of religion, but actually is the Void. According to Zizek, its real face can only be seen from looking awry. Just like Evey, she can't see the real spirit of freedom when she knows being cheated by V; only when she is reminded of looking at it from another perspective does she start to realize what she has been though. Looking awry means the self-negation that denies the subjective perspective, and such a psychological process is enabled by the subjective destitution.

Evey goes through such a subjective destitution in a prison cell, and the sequence about her path to the enlightenment is a psychological climax of the filmic narrative. When she's not afraid of losing her life anymore to defend V's existence, she actually defends the spirit of freedom. It's like a chain reaction: the story about a dedicated love against the oppression is written with the unyielding spirit of an oppressed lesbian, and her message about striving for the freedom is conveyed to Evey through a hidden note. The message is clear, that what is immune from the disease of the oppressive regime is the Idea. It's bullet-proof, as V says before he dies, so as long as such an Idea could be inherited generation after generation, it will not disappear.

Having said all these inspirations I have drawn from this marvelous film, I must admit that I don't think the director tries to claim that such a subjective destitution is the precondition for revolution, since the overthrowing of the dictator in the film is accomplished by his subordinates, i.e. Creedy's coup, not in the name of defending the spirit of liberty, but stemmed from the fear of being persecuted by the dictator if they fail to prevent V from executing his plan. So the final scene – the gathering of the mass in which everyone wears the mask of Guy Fawkes is the artificial rendition of the people's power. This is irony actually, since the successful explosion of the Parliament Building - the fulfillment of Guy Fawkes' desire - is not achieved through the people's power, but through a kind of personal arbitration – Evey's choice to give the mass hope. It would be a bit too much to say that the director intentionally shows the factor of contingencies in the historical process, but it does has such an indication. Isn't Evey's uttering of 'we need to give them the hope' a word rather from the God than a common woman? Of course, it can only happen after Evey is transubstantiated. This is the real flaw of the film which betrays the director's idealistic tendency.

If there is any evidence that the film is not subversive at all, this subjective treatment from the director about how the people's power goes nowhere but being nullified, is the most obvious one. Exactly for this reason, the film should not be elevated to a social critique, but rather a fantasy about the revolution that might happen elsewhere.

Notes on Michel Houellebecq and The Elementary Particles

First impression:

He has observed keenly the malaise of contemporary society, and writes the story patiently and sharply. His unfathomable frankness and courage to confront the engulfing predicament of modern man is unprecedented in the art of novel. He has extended the boundary of novel writing to the forefront of biological philosophy, and touched the hardcore of the real problem a modern man is facing.

Philosophical Ponderings:

Metaphysical mutations, in Houellebecq’s words, are the global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribes, and they are currently ongoing. One of the characters of such mutations is that philosophy is no longer considered being of practical significance, ‘an age that men live out their lonely, bitter lives, and feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared'. He describes this as the third turn of western civilization, in par with the emergence of the Christianity and the dawn of modern science.

The logic of such a third mutation is represented through the story of twin brothers – Michel and Bruno. If there are some words to describe the character of these two brothers, we might say Michel is an extreme rationalist, who believes in scientific certainty, while Bruno an ultra sensationalist, who only finds solace in sexual pleasures. Both characters are searching for the solutions to their own problems, but only Michel reaches his goal by accepting his own metaphysical mutations, at the expenses of his love and life. The central idea however is conveyed through by prologue and epilogue.

It has been largely agreed that something radically different would happen in our history with the development of genetic engineering, but nobody has presented a clear paradigm for an individual to localize properly in such a shift. In the fictional world of Houellebecq, Michel’s proposal at the end of his life to this problem is: mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which is asexual and immortal, a species which has outgrown individuality, separation and evolution.

Asexual reproduction with the help of genetic engineering might be realized soon, so this problem is actually not a worthless fantasy, rather it is urgent. It’s understandable also that such asexual reproduction is discordant with the religious doctrine of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because it undermines ‘human dignity in its unique relationship with the Creator’. ‘Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.’ (p258)

Sex, de-sublimation, spiritual struggle, endless chase of pleasures, love, desire, banality of life, and problems thus caused, when all these elements are woven into a novel and widely acclaimed, it surely will catch the attention of Zizek. His critique titled ‘No sex, please, we’re post-human’ is a typical Zizekian one - sharp, brusque and majestically rational, but is it too dry to go such an extreme reasoning, which has been portrayed sympathetically by Houellebecq in his depiction of Michel?

I’m more and more convinced that such a critique doesn’t work, although I was once an avid follower of Zizek. Something is missing in such an analytical certainty, which will alienate readers further. Hedonistic Bruno and rational Michel, they are the parts within one subject. They should not be treated as a separate individual, but the split from within.

3 Categories of Man

The idea Houellebecq tries to convey through the character of Bruno seems to be that confusion the passion for life with the endless sexual gratification would definitely leads you to the state of sadness, depression and mania. This actually is the fallacy that man is prone to be trapped. Interestingly, Houellebecq seems to blame an individual’s downfall to a consumerism driven society, especially the mass consumption of sexual pleasures, initially started in States and swept France and other European society in 1960s.

He categorizes individuals into three kinds, namely, the symptomatic who leads uncomplicated live in the mainstream of society and remains at ease as long as they are in part of it; the precursor, who are ‘well adapted to their time and way of life on the one hand’, and ‘anxious, to surpass them by adopting news customs, or proselytizing ideas still regarded as marginal’ on the other; and the last one – the revolutionary and prophet, who has the power to break down social norm and impose a new direction on events. (p20)

What if these three states are lived through by one person? It seems that Houellebecq is approaching to the status of a prophet, if not a revolutionary.

There are some keen observations regarding how a man would be influenced or symptomized by sex that I couldn’t imagine anything nicer than “having clitorises all over your body.” Houellebecq’s remark immediately reminds me of an anecdote of a monk on the way to the spiritual elevation. In his meditation, he is constantly bothered by an image that he’s surrounded by countless clitorises yearning to be satisfied. He has tried many ways to eliminate such an illusion, but all are in vain. After several days, he suddenly has a solution.

When the time that image appears again, he imagines himself becoming countless erected penises, penetrating clitorises one-by-one in his mind, satisfying their needs. After a while, everything is gone, and he thus enters a state of tranquility. Since then, the image of clitorises stops appearing in his meditation.

A very rewarding reading experience indeed. It's a pity that it's still not translated into Chinese.