Regarding the Pain and the Happiness of Others
Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds.
Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others
My mother has walking problems due to seriously deformed joints, and hooking up to the internet has become part of her daily ritual. The following is the content of my chat with her one day:
I am watching TV – or, in fact, listening to the TV -- at the same time as I am playing on the computer, this has become a habit.
Daddy is already asleep; he generally goes to bed around eight o’clock and gets up around six in the morning. He doesn’t watch much TV. He boils water after getting up in the morning, in an electric kettle.
I generally go to bed around nine o’clock. Lately, I have been using a digital camera to reproduce old photos, which I find quite meaningful. While doing this, I have also learnt something about photography, and have remembered the days gone by, and had a lot of pleasure.
As we get older, our life also gets more difficult. It was after that operation that I began to feel the “difficulty” (note: she had an operation for breast cancer). Sometimes to get to places not too far away, Daddy can still manage it; as for me, I have hardly gone out lately except to go to the hospital. I move around a bit at home, and spend some time on the computer; my main concern now is to make sure that I don’t fall down, that I take care of myself, to try to avoid trouble for myself and my family.
At the end, she said:
Daddy and I are doing well, don’t worry!
Telling each other that all is well is the ending she and I often use.
Living in different cities, communication between us is done more over the internet; she keeps in touch with the world through the internet and TV.
Talking of TV and the internet, I remember an email that my poet friend Andrew Brewerton sent from Britain in July 2005:
I was in London last Thursday/Friday in the immediate aftermath of last week's bomb incidents, and my hotel was within one of the police cordon areas. The street was closed, and I was escorted to the hotel by a police officer. In the hotel bar I was watching the BBC news reporter speaking to the camera on the TV screen, and through the window I could see the back of the same reporter talking to the BBC camera outside the hotel.
On the morning of January 2, 2007, on board a flight to Bangkok, my wife and I watched the news report about the six explosions that had taken place in and around the city. The day after our arrival in Bangkok, while we were passing by a high-class shopping mall in the eastern part of the city, a body of policemen sealed off the area. It was rumored that an unidentified object had been found in a telephone booth nearby, that it was suspected to be a bomb.
Every day, we are surrounded by too many news reports about violence and pain.
And yet, as the individual’s living experience becomes increasingly abstract, these reports all become like background music in a restaurant—it is almost a tough question of daily life as to how to react to the reports about other human beings’ pain.
We see people fighting wars, and houses being consumed by fire, but we only have the strength to worry about our backaches and pimples.
The famous Taiwanese variety show host Kevin Tsai has converted our embarrassing situation into “entertainment” this way:
We watch others playing football, yet we ourselves just sit in front of the screen, being couch potatoes.
We witness people of all races and of all countries engaging in obsessional and long-lasting love relationships right in front of our eyes, yet we ourselves can be terribly lonely.
Television is nothing but the crystal ball on the Gypsy fortune-teller’s table; through it, we see some things about others, and that’s it.
Other people’s lives are like songs in Karaoke bars: they are all other people’s.
If the joy transmitted through the media always looks conspicuously cheap and becomes a lifeless revelation – it is converted into, so to speak, “entertainment news”, as Susan Sontag has pointed out: “in the rich part of the world, (…) news has been converted into entertainment” – with regard to the reports about pain, what can we do if not ignore them?
Coming back to my mother, I always forget that the physical pain she has to endure every day is something I cannot imagine, because she never complains about it. Only from time to time, when I myself feel pains in my joints from head to foot because of a cold, do I remember that this type of pain is actually part of her daily life.
Chinese often say: It can be called life only when all of the five basic taste sensations (sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and salty) are there. Bitterness is part of life.
With my mother, I know that there is always optimism in her will to survive; thus, pain and happiness are only within thoughts.
If human beings’ painful experiences today can only be known and shared by people more and more through the presentation by the media, while news reports about pain are ever more related to audience ratings and their eye-catchingness, by the same token, we are also removed from authentically joyful experiences, and we even forget that pain and joy have always been mutually interchangeable.
Nobody can decide beforehand whether someone is agonizing or happy.
Reality does not equal the reality shown in the media. Reality is “reality”, rather than “the portrayal of reality”. We need the world seen through the eyes of the media, but it doesn’t mean that the world only exists in the form of “media reality”.
Touching, feeling and acting are the ways to reestablish a normal relationship with the world.
“Man, the measure of all things, speaks here through my mouth and narrates in my own language that which my eyes have seen…,” these are the first words of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Dairies. These words will once again kindle our longing for high-speed sensual life. Although we were once fed up with too many T-shirts printed with Guevara’s head portrait and too many restaurants and bars named after him, Che Guevera has always been the person who constantly grew from the trials and tribulations of travel and illness, who brought together philosophical theses and humble desires such as simply wanting a bowl of soup, who was an asthmatic explorer and his own grave-digger. He is the “I” that we once were – the “I” who was wide open and direct that we have gradually forgotten.
However, We are constantly going back and forth between one company and another in the city, between one office building and another where the companies are, between one shopping mall and another near the office building, and between one article and another displayed in the shopping mall, until one day when, looking down upon all living creatures through a glass-panel wall from a hundred meters up, we are suddenly conscious that we have already become a “traveler” in our own life and that we keep a perfunctory safe distance with life, as the meaning of life is being removed from this line of sight. It seems that our eyes long to see different things, but very soon, this impulse will disappear from the safe “travel route” of everyday life.
Do we still remember when the last time we had this strong impulse to throw ourselves into life was?
If he works only for himself, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man.
… If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.
A friend sent me these extracts from Karl Marx’s “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession”. This friend worked at the Party’s newspaper in the past, and is now a freelancer. He didn’t want to disclose his name, and didn’t make any comment on these passages either. Did he want to express his nostalgia for the revolutionary utopia of the old days, or his critique of the loss of values in China today? Or did he simply want to have a dig at me?
Just as what the film director Krzystof Kieslowski said: how necessary and how difficult it is to tell a moral story today!
In one of my novels, I have created the character of a film director, and he comments on his struggling with the conflict between imagination and reality this way: “I feel that the situation of a filmmaker is like a person who is enjoying the pleasure of making love on the couch and who suddenly sees an SOS appeal for sick children that appears on the TV screen. Life is full of metaphors, but it is very difficult if you want to spell them out clearly. Very often, because of ego, budget or desire, we lose the courage to act.”
Without any doubt, the same perplexity will also extend to virtual life because it is also a world created by men.
Some younger friends have been talking about Second Life with great enthusiasm lately. Through playing this game, you can do many things that are possible or not in real life, for example, having a meal, dancing, shopping, singing Karaoke, driving a car, traveling, making friends with the opposite sex, going across a strait, buying real estate, etc. You can design your own image, and choose your sex and social status however you want. There is an internet currency called the Linden Dollar, and this virtual currency is even exchangeable for real currency: 250 Linden Dollars can be converted to one US dollar. In addition, through the virtual life on the internet, you can communicate or trade with residents of Second Life throughout the world. The world of Second Life is strikingly similar to and has a close relationship with the real world. A poor musician friend of mine bragged to me how he had started to buy land and to possess virtual currency in Second Life. He believed that the Second Life game not only simulated life, but also allowed him to do things that he was not able to achieve in life. For him, it was the real life. As a result, I was enticed into visiting Second Life’s home page and registered a new name for myself: China Tracy. I picked up a wild girl who looked like the offspring of a Chinese and an American couple. Ha-ha, my adventure in Second Life was just about to start. The first thing I saw was that I was flying in Second Life…
There is nothing odd about the fact that so many people are joining the Second Life that Cao Fei described to me. Nevertheless, I think that Cao Fei has understood well that virtual life as another reality is now penetrating the shrinking imagination of artists, and forces you to respond to it. At the same time, I am also touched by what Zheng Guogu declared: people don’t die in a game, but they do in reality.
It is the one-timeness of life (life cannot be repeated) and the irrevocability of time (even in virtual life!) that fascinate me.
If we all agree that existing cities are not the destination of human life, and it is only by chance that we make encounters with the world at certain moments and in certain places, perhaps we will see a moment such as this:
I see the pastoral countryside shrinking rapidly in the setting sun’s rays,
Like the healing these past two days of the inflamed and ulcerated wound on my shin.
Bright windows, humans’ ardent melancholy.
A young mother-to-be hanging out clothes, arms akimbo.
An old couple walking through the living room, supporting each other by the arms.
And you, hiding in the shadow of September, are never original.
I took notes quickly: poetry flashes and disappears.
This is a moment that my poet friend Ling Yue revealed to me. I know that at this moment, he is working as an ordinary teacher at a school which fosters talent for the state machine. But who knows? Perhaps amidst the intense flows of the inner heart, every thinking man finds himself on the battlefield of daily life.
In that split second, I saw the transparent relationship between quick note-taking and the movement of reality; this transparency will transcend all of the preset gulfs that exist between pain and joy, between us and the world in the same way as invisible sunlight and air do.
Guangzhou-Vienna
February 2007
Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007, pp 225-229
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