on the road

 

以赛亚书4：25-26

 

你的男丁必倒在刀下

你的勇士必死在阵上

她的诚门必悲伤、哀号

她必荒凉坐在地上

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Gentleman, I've got a tale to tell. But before any narrative officially commences, it has yet a legitimacy to establish --- one that we have so far never been lucky enough to bear witness to in any fiction, democratic or undemocratic. "But those founding fathers have," you'd say, "and our job is just to thank God and be grateful." Alright, alright. An essentially ungrateful being as I know you know I am, I'd grant you the privilege, at least this once, to be just as ungrateful --- yes, you've got me right: you are not obliged to dwell in my story. Dwell within only when you'd reflectively endorse the regime; or, even better, when you co-author its constitution with your own eloquent quill--- my invitation, gentleman. What? You said you could not because you were currently on exile --- in another regime --- within another story? I am so very much triste, then. Multiple citizenship would be too modern an invention for us old folks and I knew you woundn't like it --- that's why I didn't even bother suggesting it. Poor fellow, respect my story for its arbitrary sovereinty then, as I respect your allegiance for the same contingency and arbitrariness. The tale is a simple one (Nowadays you don't hear simple tales so often). It begins with a foregone kingdom, with the Queen of Scots sent to the gallows and small children playing with the genealogy of morals. At courtyard and poker table alike, these young rioters murdered the king, executed the queen, imprisoned the knave and released the joker. But the trick of the game is: this trump did not secure a win. On occasions it even led the entire round to doom. At such moments, the cleverest child of them all ( by this I mean you, gentleman) would immediately leave with a solemn look. Of course, he never told anyone that he'd very much prefer a game of chess. In other words, he'd rather play on his own. But then --- remember, the story was set in a foregone kingdom --- he hated Mary as much as he loved her, but she died and left him alone. This made him weary of gun powder, treason, plot, and fireworks. But the world was drained of everything else except these four elements. What was worse, small children fed on them, played with them, and when, in cases as in this one, they left them and found that they could go for nothing else because there was nothing else to go for. So what? You may stop me, as you seem to have a taste for putting your weariness in this way. I know this may not be an interesting story, and I myself clearly a poor storyteller, but it is my tale --- and I was just about to tell you why. What? You don't take the slightest interest? You said you'd dream of your own and wake up into it anyway; you said my story is some alien soil which you couldn't care less to tread upon. Fine, fine, all very fine. Since we are still where we were --- remember, the story was set in a forgone kingdom, with the Queen of Scots sent to the gallows and small children playing with the genealogy of morals --- he who refused to join the game would be sent to his bed and we are not allowed to invent a Mary to kiss him goodnight.

 

 

 

 

Re: Unclassified.

 

Allusion to Mann's ascetic interpretation of Nietzsche may well be a handy way of prosecuting the Baudelairean dandy, the biblical temptress, the disenchanted yet incurable romantic, except that the defendant should be given the benefit of the doubt: doesn't Mann himself, this melancholic, over-excitable poet with a grave, exhausted heart, bear far more affinities with bleak pessimists such as Conrad, than with our abyssal master, whose vehement intellect transfigures itself through an affirming flame into the genuine, healthy contempt towards the sick and degenerated? See if she could discharge her evidential burden of proof by raising the following issue: Mann is no more a caricature, a forgery of the hero he erects for those on his side to follow, than a mirror is of the deep deep sea, or, than any craft, or sullen art is of men's deep deep life. "Art, understood as personal experience, too --- is life raised to a higher power. It gives a deeper pleasure and exacts a quicker toll. It etches the real traces of the imaginative mind's adventures onto the face of its servant and produces, though that servant may lead an external existence of monastic calm, nerves that in the long run are over-indulged, hypersensitive, exhausted and perenially craving, such as a lifetime of dissipate passions and pleasures can hardly equal" (Death in Venice). Doesn't it then follow that Mann's self-inflicted inquisition, his bitterly depicted irony of the artist being simultaneously moral and immoral, shall be better appreciated not despite of, but because of his priestly asceticism? Indeed, Mann has almost been too (self-) aware of the dubious role of the artist that his favourite leitmotif takes on the relentless mockery of the artist being some sort of subterranean demonic monster who does not pluck from the laurel of art without paying dearly with his life. Your Lordship, if you are hitherto satisfied, allow me to amuse you further with this typically modern scienario: The dark legacy of the  project of Enlightenment has been unveiling its Janus-face through men's panoptic consciousness --- a relentless self-critique always already being symptoms disguised as diagnosis, a reckless and later compulsive severing of subject and object, an Odysseus chaining himself against falling for the song of the Sirens, a modern ego at once strengthened and rigidified, liberated and mutilated... Despite the unabashed proclaimation that the autobiographical Aschenbachian protagonist embodied "a kind of intellectual and youthful masculinity, gritting its teeth, proud in his degradation, standing firm as swords and spears pierced its flesh", despite of it all, Mann's laborious investigation into his own inner labyrinth proceeds, overloaded with his conscientious sarcastic overtone, to notify that "composure in the face of destiny --- grace under fire --- involves more than just endurance: it must be actively achieved, positively won ... the sort of elegant self-control that kept its inner decreptitude and biological decay hidden from the eyes of the world until the last possible moment". Lost in negation and impotent for the same affirmation our hero nonetheless allegedly imitated, the ego succeeded in making a fool of the alter who subsequently died a tragic-comic death --- from a love for a Phaedrus, or from that Venetian cholera, more literally construed. Your Lordship, such being my feeble case, please --- spare me your Hamletesque lethargy and absolve these petty lines --- absolve this flippant attempt of mine to show how the otherwise Nietzschean has been distorted and squeezed into the straitjacket of the classical age --- by the descendent of the protestant ministers, apprentice to the most sensitive of all Victorian moral masters.