The power of writing

The last week of the summer, before the fall term began, turned out to be the most productive and surprisingly enjoyable week for me, in a strange way. Throughout the week, I dedicated myself to the final writing of my prospectus draft, a goal I set up for myself at the beginning of the summer. That sounds barely exciting, doesn’t it? We all have the painstaking experiences of writing research papers in their various forms. Especially for a non-native speaker, this exercise is all the more daunting. I agree entirely. Writing is never easy, even for a native-speaker. And I have plenty of memories of finishing up term papers in a short period of time, memories of squeezing out the right words, being stuck by one sentence, or creating a prose that was both articulate and elegent. Indeed early in that week, that feeling did occur to me, perhaps due to the pressure I gave to myself, a feeling that was immediately familiar and unsettling.

But as I proceeded with my writing, something started to change. If I can take the liberty of anthropomorphizing my writing, during the early stage I was pulling her with great force to move forward. Yet as the time went on, the power relation inverted: I felt being pulled with great force by her. This sense of losing control of oneself was quite marvellous and indeed intellectually rewarding. My mind was occupied with the writing all the time, to the degree that I even could not sleep very well. New ideas popped up constantly and all I did was to keep the rhythm going. I can only remember two cases in Ann Arbor, both on a much smaller project, that brought me the similar experience. Yes, the writing could be enjoyable.

That is why I found writing a mysterious enterprise. We all know that we write in order to express our ideas. Plato emphasizes the paramount importance of the precise definitions of words and the proper use of them to articulate thoughts in our minds, or to be more exact, the intangible yet illuminating soul inside each of us. That is why writing is a fundamental communication tool for humans. But my experiences, as many other writers, tell me that there is another creative dimention of writing, that is, writing seems to have her own agency to initiate and propagate ideas of her own. Put it in another way, writing sppears to have this peculiar power of reorganizing our minds and surfacing our subconcious thoughts to a tangible form. How strange!

Writing could be powerful and enjoyable because it mediates our conversation with our inner self. “Mediation” is the key word here. For Plato, the ideal of writing, or speech or any form of language maneuver is to make it like a mirror, a crystal clear mirror so that it can perfectly reflect our soul, a stable, unchanging entity within us. But other philosophers, especially those in the continental vein, would argue that neither writing, or language in general, is a passive exercise nor our soul can be degraded into something concrete and stagnant. There is no mirror, just as there is nothing to be reflected onto it. Instead everything is mediated; everything undergoes constant flux and metamorphosis. Our world, just as our selves, is forever chaotic, forever unstable, forever transforming.

This is not a place to contemplate continental philosophers’ thoughts on writing and language, but I do appreciate the unpredictable aspect of writing as they point out. This unpredictability, the peculiar process of indentifying our inner selves in the most unlikely corners, is perhaps the most fulfilling part of writing for me. Eventually the power of writing resides in the power of our minds, with their manifold manifestations in our world. It offers a window through which we can peek into a space that is at the same time puzzling and galvanizing. Of course most of the time we don’t find writing so edifying especially when we do it under external restrains. But occasionally when it happened, as what happened to me during that week, it was a surprisingly wonderful experience.

When I was in Michigan, one friend of mine gave me this quote: “When you write, always follow your pen.” I resonate with that. People might say that it is more of a technique for novelists and creative writing, but how can you draw the clear boundary here? Of course as historicans, we are confined by historical sources and cannot write down things based on our sheer imagination. But I think that if we properly make use of this creative aspect of writing, certainly involving lots of skills and experiences, we can make unexpected connections and bring illuminating discoveries to our audience, and also to ourselves.    

Boston Summer and Tanglewood

As the summer approaches its end, a melancholy sentiment gradually surged from my heart. I don't remember what was the last time I had such a peaceful summer as this one. My summers in the past few years had been busy and full of activities: graduation, language studies, traveling, emotional roller coaster, etc. They were rewarding experiences, but a bit hectic and overwhelming. This summer, on the other hand, has been truly serene. I stay in Boston, set up my own life routine, see some old friends, and explore the New England area from time to time. Some moments, though seemingly commonplace, are quite memorable. For one, every time when I finished swimming at the Blodgett Pool in later afternoon and biked back home, I crossed the bridge on the Charles River. As I turned my head toward the river, I saw the sunset lightening up the water creating myriad of sparkles on its surface. Canoes and sails slid elegantly on the river, with everything tinged with a golden color. To find beauty of life, you don't need go afar; it is right next to you, as long as you have the eyes to see.

No wonder I began to like Boston more. I didn't like it when I firstly moved here. It had less to do with Boston than the metropolitan life in general. I found the traffic nauseating, people intense, and the rhythm of life faster (of course this is in comparison to Ann Arbor, a mid-Western university town). But now after two years of living, I realized that city life has its own appeals, especially for a historical town like Boston. When I was in Kyoto last summer, my mentor K told me this wonderful Japanese saying over a dinner: Wherever you live, it is the capital (of your life). [住めば、都] There is also a similar saying from Analects that goes "Since you have come, settle down at the place." (既來之，則安之) I think I am making Boston the capital of my life at the moment.

That is probably why as the summer is getting over, I became a bit anxious. The busy schedule of fall is looming large: teaching, course taking, prospectus writing, lots of other academic activities. Although I still have work to finish by the end of the month, I found somewhat difficult to concentrate perhaps due to melancholy derived from nostalgia for the fleeting summer time. Nonetheless, I hope the rhythm of my life will continue.

Yesterday, as part of the summer activities, I went to the Tanglewood Musical Center to watch a performance there. The center is located in Lenox, a small town in western Massachusetts not far from the border between MA and NY. This is the summer arena for BSO (Boston Symphony Orchestra), a prestigious orchestra with 130-year history. [Interestingly, Tanglewood was named after Nathaniel Hawthorne's work Tanglewood Tales.] I have to admit that I am not a crazy fan for classical music, though I listen to them from time to time largely because of their beautiful melodies (so let's say, pieces from Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky are more accessible to me). Back in Ann Arbor, sometimes I went to see a classical music performance not because they were good (I couldn't tell anyway) but because they were famous. This time, I chose a different kind of show: a pop musical event; a performance on Hollywood movie soundtracks conducted by the legendary film music composer John Williams, who made music for Star Wars, E.T., Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, among others. In addition, Morgan Freeman also showed up, narrating an episode written by William Faulkner accompanied by John Williams's music. His voice was quite magnetic as people usually say.

Perhaps it is worth two and an half hours driving to participate such an event. The atmosphere was festive. The arena is oriented to family gatherings; behind the regular seating is this huge lawn where people can bring food and drinks, and enjoy the show under the sky. As the performance started with the familiar soundtracks and a collage of movie clips shown on the big screen (similar to the opening of the annual Oscar Ceremony), people became excited and exclaimed delightfully. The old lady sitting next to me seemed to be very emotional when she saw some familiar images on the screen. I understood the sentiments well. As everybody else in the audience, I came here primarily not because the content of the music (it is euphonious for sure), but because the memories connected to the music and the movie-watching experiences. The whole generation of Americans grew up with watching Star Wars and Jaws, which have become an important part of their identity. I can easily imagine the lady next to me is one of them. Although I myself don't share the same experiences (for one thing, the Star Trek or the Monty Python references still elude me), I resonate with them how memories and life stories intertwine with music and movie-watching experiences. My stories are too many to recount here (perhaps save for a future episode), and indeed they have shaped my identity significantly. So I sat there, enjoying the familiar tunes with flashes of memories in my head, some more fuzzy than others. I felt greatly contended.

The Kids are All Right

“The Kids are All Right” is one of those make-you-feel-good movies. Although it tells an unconventional story about how an alternative family deals with a mid-marriage crisis under quite an unusal circumstance, the primary premises it holds are nothing but conventional. Nic and Jules raised a happy family with their two teenager kids, until one day, out of their curiosity, the kids met their biological father Paul who pulled the family into a whirlpool. It is a familiar story: Nic, played by Annette Bening, is the commander-in-chief of the family, capable, ambitious and having a promising career. Jules, played by Julianne Moore, is sensitive, full-of-heart, and somewhat timid, staying at home taking care of the kids. One day, shortly after the family met Paul, Jules is fed up with her boring life and her “unappreciative” wife; she began to have affairs with Paul. The rest of the movie is about how the family deals with the crisis. Will the kids be all right?

Surely they will be, as the title reveals. Perhaps this certainty, and the simplistic optimism implied in the title and permeating throughout the movie are what prevent it from a more profound story. We don’t even need to enter the discussion of the plausibility of a gay person initiating a heterosextual affair (one of gay community’s protests of Ang Lee’s “Happy Banquet” is precisely this issue, and that movie was made almost twenty years ago.) Just listen to Jules’s speech at the end of the movie, in which she proclaimed, with full emotions, the hard work of maintaining a marriage. And that speech, perhaps more than anything else, pulled the family back together. The take-home message of the story is simple: there is nothing special or abnormal about a gay family. Just like any other family, they cherish the same values, go through the same ordeals, and come up with the same strategies to solve problems. A marriage is a marriage, no matter who is involved.

I agree. But I also feel that by emphasizing the universal values, the movie ignores, if not erases, the uniqueness of a gay family. Well, did Tolstoy not educate us long time ago: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way [from Anna Karenina]. In this case, a lesbian family should have its unique issues to deal with. For one, how did the kids grow up without a father? What kind of psychological impact, I mean both positive and negative, this situation has on them? The kids’ effort to find out their biological father at the beginning of the movie already suggests something deeper, yet the story does not develop that dimention further. For another, what about the social pressure on the family. Toward the end of the movie, the drunk and upset Joni (played by the wonderful Mia Wasikowska) yelled at her moms: “What do you want from me? I got all As. I got into every school I applied for. I have shown everybody how perfectly normal a lesbian family is. What more do you want from me?” This rant says something about how much of the extra work a gay family needs to do to make them appear “normal.” Ironically, the movie ends there. The hard work gets reward. There are some down moments, but they eventually get through OK. The kids are all right.

Too easy a solution, to the degree it is not realistic. Even for a straight family, I doubt things can be that easy. Let’s think about another movie, “Little Children,” directed by Todd Field. It runs a similar story: two people, both are in their own marriage and have kids, fall in love and decide to elope. Yet the movie explores much deeper and darker waters about how such a relationship develops against all conventional bets. It honestly portrays a dilemma for the lovers, and for every one of us, a dilemma between responsibilities and personal happiness. For “The Kids are All Right,” they can be easily reconciled and even merged as one. For “Little Children,” far from it.

Finally, let me go to one scene in “The Kids are All Right,” which touches me a great deal. At the end of the movie, the family drove Joni to the college, which was far from home. As Nic and Jules helped Joni move all the boxes into her dorm and tried to unpack things for her, Joni stopped them, saying “I can do it myself.” So the moms left the room. As Joni began to prepare her bed, and enjoyed her rare moment of freedom, she suddently wondered where her moms went. She became flustered and quickly walked out of her room to find them. Eventually she found them with a relief (of course they didn’t leave without saying goodbye.) That little scene betrays something genuine about a teenager’s relation with his/her parents. The kid wants her freedom and independence, but emotionally she still has tremendous bond with her parents, which is all natural. In fact I have a similar experience when my parents sent me to my college. After they helped me organize all the stuff in my dorm and set up everything to their satisfaction (I didn’t say no), they eventually took off. I remember this moment when, upon saying goodbye to me, they slowly walked away from me, with the late afternoon sunlight on their backs, I suddenly felt sad and lonely, standing there by myself watching them disappear around the corner, watching them moving away from my life.

Peabody Museum

Last time when I was in Salem, I did not have enough time to visit Peabody Essex Museum there. The museum has nothing to do with the witchcraft trial. Rather, it connects to another aspect of Salem’s history: its maritime trade with Asian countries since the 17^th century. Consequently, PEM houses over 10,000 Asian export products, witnessing a period of increasing cultural exchanges in the global context.

That was the impression when I visited the museum early today. Most of the exhibitions are in the Asian context. PEM even reconstructed a certain Chinese house of the Huang family in the region of Huizhou (徽州) named Yin Yu Tang (蔭餘堂). Meandering inside the house, I was perplexed with a strange feeling of loss. The reconstruction appeared to be a collapse of time and space: it aimed to preserve the original settings and configuration of the house, yet a house is a peculiar form of art because unlike painting or sculpture, it changes along time. Hence I saw a piece of 18^th century furniture, an early 20^th century textbook, and quite a few portraits of Chairman Mao on the walls. Perhaps the juxtapotion is a sober reminder of the vicissitudes the Huang family experienced in the tumultuous past. As I walked out of the house and entered the main hall of the museum, with the sunlight piercing through the glass ceiling of the modern building, I had a sudden, odd sense of dizziness and realized that how much our perceptions could be altered once we moved things out of their contexts.

In the PEM, I spent quite some time in an exhibition about Man Ray and Lee Miller’s partnership in Surealism. I did not know the two until I walked into the exhibition, and was rivited by their story and their art. Both Ray and Miller were American expatriates in 1920s Paris (yes, the legendary circle of artists and writers including Picasso and Hemingway). Ray was already an established avant-garde artist, while Miller was a young, pretty, model-turned photographer. They fell in love, collaborated extensively in their works, and after a few years, broke up. Miller came back to America, leaving Ray agonizing over their relationship in Paris. That was the period when Ray produced some of his most powerful and memorable art. In one piece, he painted a huge pair of lips, undoubtedly those of Miller’s, floating in the sky with a tiny image of the observatory in the background. The work, titled “Observatory Time,” seems to reveal that there was no other time but the time set by Miller’s luscious lips that mattered to Ray. Another body part of Miller that Ray was obsessed with is her eyes. Here is a piece of ingenious device by Ray: he attached a picture of Miller’s eye onto the pendulum of a metronome, and set the pendulum in motion with Miller’s eye swinging back and forth. If a viewer thinks that this was the way Ray tried to remember Miller forever, he/she is surely mistaken. Because Ray intended to eventually demolish the whole apparatus as a decisive way to exorcise Miller in his life. Nevertheless, Ray was unable to execute his plan until one day he was “helped” by a group of radical students in Paris. As a gesture of protesting the deterioration of modern art, the students stole the metronome and smashed it right in front of Ray. Furious but unwavering, Ray made a hundred copies of his original and distributed them to many places around the world.

Whatever the means Ray took to struggle with his relation with Miller, he eventually got over it and developed a genuine friendship with Miller, which lasted for the rest of their lives. Later Miller became a war journalist during the WWII, reporting its devastating cost on humanity. The painful experience tossed her into a swirl of depression after the war ended, and that was the time when Ray produced many art works to cheer his friend up. At the end of the exhibition, I saw a fascinating juxtapotion of two pictures of Ray and Miller. The first picture was taken in Paris in late 20s when the two were lovers. Ray was using his toy rifle to aim at something in the direction of the viewer, while Miller was watching with a gentle, nonchalant smile. The second picture, taken half a century later when the two reunited in a conference, shows the two fragile elders looking at each other with amiable smile. Of course they had lost the vigor and playfulness of the youth, but deep in their eyes I saw something truly caring and touching, something only time can create and attest.

Salem

I have noticed that my previous posts have strong philosophical orientation. I figure if I engage another discussion on the meaning of life or human mind, I myself may begin to roll my eyes. This piece gets back to history, which I have deep affection for.

Last Thursday, I went to a small town near Boston called Salem. Salem is famous for the notorious witchcraft trials that took place in 1692. A simplified story goes like this: In early 1692, several girls in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem villiage began to have fits that could not be stopped by regular medication. A physician (named William Gribbs) was called in and pronouced that the girls were bewitched and nothing could alleviate their symptoms except that the source of witchcraft was identified. An extensive search ensued and a special court (the court of Oyer and Terminer) was established for the trials of the accused. Eventually nineteen people (fourteen women and five men) were executed by hanging, and one was crushed to death by stones (Giles Corey) because he refused to show up in the court. The Salem witch trials is the largest of the type in American history (still dwarfed by the European counterpart).

When I visited several museums in Salem, this is the basic story that was repeated with vivid narrative and sensational details. The executed were portrayed as innocents, or even heroic martyrs, who were the victims of an age of ignorance, intolerance, and great fear. I was a bit disappointed that almost no artifacts were left from the tumultuous event: the original execution site, called Gallows Hill, has become a baseball field, and no relics of these victims can be found. Instead, these museums offered artificial props, with wax figures and imaginary settings, and tours that explained the story to a curious audience. The commercial atmosphere was manifest; they always ended the tour with the giftshop. And after visiting the first museum or two, I found the story began to repeat itself and become hackneyed.

But this does not mean there are no interesting things. There are plenty. At the Salem Witch Museum, I found a display of a potpourri of herbs that were used by witches at the time. The labels explain the medical and magical property of each of these herbs. For example, daisy helps headache, and also brings luck. Another example: basil can ease stomach cramps, insect bites and fevers. In the magical realm, it can banish negativity and help keeping in love. Interestingly, I found another herb called star anise, which can ease stomach disorder and ward off the evil eye. Star anise is called daliao in Chinese, a household spice in Asia. How come this commonplace spice in Asia turned into a magical herb in America? I have no clue.

When I was at the Witch House (the name is misleading, since this house is only tenuously linked to witchcraft), I found an intriguing object that the witch presumably used in the 17^th century to cast spells on a target. It is a stuffed human miniature made of cloth, with a needle on the site of nose. The idea is that the witch used this miniature, in the form of sympathetic magic, to exert injury to her victim. Again, this is a form of magic that is not unfamiliar to a Chinese audience. For one case, in the famous novel The Story of the Stone, the malevolent Ms. Zhao employed a certain Lady Ma, a witch type of figure, who taught Ms. Zhao to write the birth date of Baoyu (the protagnist of the novel) on a human miniature made of paper, and together with five ghosts (also made of paper) hide it in his bed so as to cast curse on him (chapter 25). Wherever its origin, which can be traced back to antiquity, I believe this particular kind of witchcraft has wide currency around the world.

Final anecdote. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous 19^th century writer who wrote The Scarlet Letter, was a Salem native. His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the executors who participated in the Salem witchcraft trials, and never regretted his actions. Because of this, Nathaniel added a “w” into his last name in order to distant himself from his infamous ancestor.

So many tidbits of information. But let’s go back to the original story. After all, nothing left to these days except this story. Obviously, what happened in 1692 in Salem was terrible and unfortunate, another familiar story in human history in which the weak and the unorthodox were unjustly crushed by the powerful and the conventional. Subsequently, the modern narrative tries, somewhat hastily, to rectify the mistake and reveal the truth, that is, to emphatically show the innocence of the prosecuted weak. Surely there is a sense of redemption here, by getting the story “right.” After all, the people, who gave me the tour or worked at the giftshop, are the descendants of the people who initiated the trials 300 hundred years ago. In a way, the Salem story not just reveals, but also acts as a redemptive trope for these people to absolve their collective guilt. Perhaps.

But let’s go to the next level. What can we learn from such an event? A tour guide at the Salem Witch Museum proposed the following equation: fear + trigger = scapegoat. She further elaborated that this equation recurred in our history, unfortunately. In recent time, examples include McCarthyism, blaming of the gay community for AIDS, and the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists after 9/11. This is a fine comparison. At least it brings up an interesting issue – the perenial fear in humans, fear of the unknown, fear of the dissimilar, fear of each other… But if communism, AIDS, or terrorism is the concrete origin of fear for the 20^th century Americans, what was the origin of fear that trggered the whole Salem trials? Not so clear. You may say witchcraft. But witchcraft was a common practice in the 17^th century New England, not unlike the current fad of alternative medicine. Something deeper, I surmise. Surely there was a component of misogynism and racism in the event. Tituba, the servant in Parris’s house who was one of the first accused of practicing witchcraft, was a black slave from Barbados. The gender difference among the executed manifests an overwhelming prejudice toward women. But these are no surprise to anybody, given the general social context of the 17^th century New England.

Several pieces of information is relevant. The first person who was executed, Bridget Bishop, was by no means a conformist. For one thing, she remarried four times. By the contemporary standard, she was an incongruous oddity, if not a sheer lascivious evil. Moreover, that poor guy Giles Corey, who was stoned to death, was a man of rebellious nature and with explosive temper (his execution was a testomony), often associated with fights and misdeeds. No wonder he was an easy suspect. Although we don’t know an aweful lot of the Salem victims, except the saintly Rebecca Nurse, it is perhaps plausible to speculate that these people were victims of the community long before they were executed for witchcraft. Their unconventional behavior, non-conformist way of life, and sometimes previous misdeeds made them a dangerous existence that fomented fear in a suspicious and intolerent society. Hence they were marginalized, maligned, and if necessary, eliminated. Sounds familiar? Yes, the anti-Semitism in the early 20^th century Germany. In fact, in both cases, we see a dark side of democracy: if the popular sentiment gets off the rein, astray it can go.

Finally, let’s go to the other part of the equation, namely, the trigger. In Salem’s case, the trigger was a few girls from Parris’s house who had bouts of fits. Most of people arreasted and executed were the ones these girls pointed out, sometimes by spectral evidence (that is, imaginary vision). It was not until these girls pointed out the governor Sir William Phipps’s wife as a suspect of witchcraft did the whole farce come to a speedy end. Later evidence indicates that these girls were not sick at all. They may just play a game to entertain themselves, perhaps imitating what was shown in a witchcraft manual, to which they had access in their house. A play with devastating consequences! As I suggested earlier, the popular prejudice towards the weak and the unconventional may play an important role in the event. But what about these kids? What about this “trigger,” without which the whole event could not unfold? Of course, the Salem narrative does not highlight this part, since kids are always depicted as immaculately innocent, as if they belonged to a different species (just listen to how President Obama ended his touching speech after the Arizona gunshot early this year). But after all, I think children are just part of us adults. Any criteria to separate these two categories are superficial. We can be as good as kids be evil. Of course I don’t want to hold these kids responsible for what they did, but to get them completely off the hook in our historical thinking is somewhat unsatisfactory and unsettling to me. To explore the historicity and mentality of children is another grand topic that I cannot tackle here (the recent movie “White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke seems to be quite relevant, which tells a story of a group of children who were ritually suppressed in pre-WWI Germany), but when I looked into the eyes of those evil-kid dolls displayed in the gift shop, I could not help contemplating what were behind those mesmerizing eyes.

The pendulum of weight/lightness – From Kundera’s book

When I was doing biology in Ann Arbor, I had many interesting conversations in the lab with my friend Martha, who had a degree in English.

“You should read Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is such a beautiful book.” She once said to me.

I heard of the book, as well as the movie, and knew what it is famous for. Intuitively, I put it in the same category as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The eternal appeal of the exotic literature. As a movie buff, I checked out the namesake movie (directed by Philip Kaufman) during a Thanksgiving weekend, but never had the chance to watch it. Perhaps it was not the right time.

A fast winding of time forward. A few months ago. Cambridge, MA. I was sitting in K’s office discussing my generals readings with him. We were in the middle of a conversation about the history of medicine. Then suddenly he asked me:

“Do you know who Milan Kundera is?”

“Yes. The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

“It is a very good book.”

Although it was typical of K’s expansive thinking, I knew there was clear logic why he brought the book to my attention, and he only explicated it implicitly. Since I hadn’t read the book, I was clueless.

“Perhaps it is the time for me to knock down this one.” I thought to myself.

I did after I finished my exam, and I love it (as you can see from my previous post).

True. It is a beautiful love story. But the underlying philosophical insights are what fascinate me the most. The key issue Kundera contemplates is the dialectic of weight and lightness in our lives, as “the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”

Yes, the heaviness of burdens could crush us, but is also “simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

“Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

“What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

This is an eternal dialectic. Because it is a dialectic, there is no black-or-white answer for it.

As the title of his book implies, Kundera does not regard lightness as unquestionably positive, despite his distaste on the suffocating homogeneity of the force of “the grand march.” Tomas, the protagnist in the novel, made a decision to forsake his promising career and comfortable life (a life of lightness) in Switzerland and come back to his wife Tereza in Prague. Why?

“Es Muss Sein.” (It must be.) That is from a musical piece of Beethoven, who viewed weight as something positive, and believed that “the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.” Beethoven’s hero is “a lifter of metaphysical weights.”

How could Tomas gauge that it is the right decision for him to follow his passion and go back to Tereza? How long could it last? He simply could not know, because he has only one life to live and cannot test his hypotheses as what scientists do in the lab.

A while ago, I read another book, of a completely different kind, titled A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism by Lee Braver. Explicit from the title, the book surveys the evolution of continental philosophy from Kant to Derrida in the anti-realism tradition. To summarize it in a simple and simplistic way, analytical philosophers, those who embrace realism and follow the path of Plato, believes in the metaphysical existence of a mind-independent reality, be it the concrete objects in the world or the general principles that organize these things, that human mind can approach to and with effort, comprehend. In contrast, continental philosophers, following the Kantian tradition, claim that because everything in the world is mediated by our mind, there is no existence of a separate reality apart from what we perceive. Everything is “a thing of this world,” a world created by us.

How does it relate to Kundera’s novel? Perhaps we can equate realist perspective with Kundera’s idea of weight, and anti-realist perspective with that of lightness. Throughtout the development of continental thoughts, philosophers have been trying very hard to progressively eliminate the realist components in their system. And they are largely successful - Hegel’s complete dismissal of noumena, Heidegger’s development of phenomenology, and Derrida’s play with language. But in the end, even at the time of Derrida, who seems to deconstruct everything and create a system without any attachment - we have nothing to lift! - he still could not entirely eliminate realism. After all, even if we are able to reject the concept of a mind-independent reality, it is much harder to reject the idea that there exist some realist principles that organize our thoughts and act as a platform for our basic communications. Without that, we might very well be completely lost in a chaos.

In this sense, the lightness is not just unbearable, but impossible.

Let’s go to the other direction. In E.R Dodds’s classic work The Greeks and the Irrational, it cites a wonderful quote by T.H. Huxley in an appropriately named chapter “The fear of freedom.”

“A man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.”

Freedom could be the worst nightmare of humans. In fact, Dodds shows us that in the Hellenistic Age, especially the time of Plato and Aristotle, rationalism flourished in Greece, but only ephemerally. This was followed by a long dark age, and not until the Renaissance did Europe see the light of rationalism again (of course this is an over-simplistic point of view.) Why did Greek rationalism fail to persist? Dodds’s answer is that too much freedom, fostered by competing schools of thought and an open intellectual environment, created a deep psychological anxiety for the Greeks. They desired things that were more stable and palliating, even if they entailed illusion. That is why they resorted to the irrational such as magic, divination, and various cult practices. I am not going to elaborate the psychological impact of religions here, but it seems that deep in our psyche we all long for something that we can lean on. In the final pages of the book, Dodds claims that we live in a similar era as that of the Greeks, with the rise of rationalism and the impediment it encountered. He then optimitically predicts that modern man, equipped with proper instruments of modern science and psychology, will eventually overcome his fears and successfully take the decisive jump to rationalism. I wonder whether this could be the case given the eternal dialectic of lightness/weight. Quite on the contrary, since the book was published (in early 50s), it appears that the pendulum has swung to the opposite direction, with the rise of post-modernism (continetal philosophy has played a significant role here).

Pendulum is the key word here. The OED offers the following explanation for the word: “A rod, cord, wire, etc., with a weight or bob at or near one end, suspended from a fixed point so as to swing or oscillate freely under the influence of gravity.” In my discussion here, the rod is our thought; the fixed point is our sense of truth; the gravity is something deep in our mind that I may feebly call “human nature”.

We oscillate between wight and lightness, rationalism and spiritualism, realism and anti-realism, modern and post-modern…

Now I become to understand the initial idea of K to bring up Kundera’s novel. We were actually discussing a similar dialectic in the evolution of medical thought throughout history. Hippocratic medicine (5^th century BC) stresses the harmony between the body and the environment, while Galenic medicine (2^nd century AD) highlights individual volition. Medieval Europe witnessed the rise of astrology, which correlated the human body to astral events. The pendulum then swang back from the 16^th century when modern medicine focused on the pathology and physiology of the individual body. We see a similar oscillation in Chinese context: the Neijing stresses correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, while Song physicians (10^th-13^th centuries) perceived the body as an isolate entity immune to external influences.

Yet perhaps pendulum is not a precise metaphor. For the history of thought, every time it swings back, it does not go back the same point, but instead reaches to a different position. Perhaps it is better to see it as a three-dimentional picture: a pendulum swings in a spiral along the axis of time. We have history on our back, and presumably that has made us more intelligent to make our next move. Hopefully we can learn from history and progress. (In the postscript of Ray Huang’s book 1587: A Year of No Significance, he conceptualizes a similar spiral dialectic between our moral ideals and everyday practicality.)

“What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” Kundera’s voice rings back.

We are in the web of multiple pendulums in our lives. With that prescience, perhaps we can better cultivate ourselves to achieve a balance, a golden mean that would render stability, fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction.

Mirror, dissection and desire

Contemporary art is something that I cannot appreciate a great deal, since its conceptual frameworks and means of representations are usually not immediately accessible to an uninitiated viewer such as me. But I have been trying to understand it more nonetheless. The reason is simple: Art and humanities are inseparable. As a historian sympathetic with post-modern approach, I think there should exist common grounds between historical and artistic views of the world. Indeed that is what I found.

Early today, I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston (this is the third museum I explored in Boston, besides MFA and the Gardner's Museum). The museum is located along the seaport. With its vast glass walls, it offers a spectacular view of the sea (there is an awesome computer lounge in the museum where you can sit on a stair-type structure, with a huge window facing the sea, creating a visual illusion that the lounge descends to the water.) Overall, the museum is not very big, with a few galleries on the fourth floor. My first impression was that there are almost no paintings in this museum. Instead, multi-media production, photography, sculpture and performance art prevail. This perhaps bespeaks the current fad of western contemporary art, a strong sensitivity toward materiality.

Although most of the works did not appeal to me (not surprisingly), several pieces in the sculptor room attracted my attention. One piece presents two wooden boxes with hollowed centers. Along the inside walls at the centers are a series of lightened bulbs stretching down to the floor, where a mirror is placed. Viewing from a distance, I could only see the exterior of two boxes, which were rather non-descriptive. Yet once I approached the items and looked down through the central hollows, something nauseatingly spectacular happened: I saw lines of lights extending infinitely to the abysmal! In other words, the mirror created a visual effect that expands space infinitely. How fascinating! The work is created by Ivan Navarro and Courtney Smith, with the title "11 Upside Down." In fact, this visual gimmick has dark message to convey: the artists intend to use the visual vertigo to mimic the psychological terror created after the collapse of twin towers, and more generally our psychological anxiety derived even from the most mundane things.

There is another piece in the room created by Mexican artist Damian Ortega called "Olympus." The artist meticulously dissembled an Olympus camera into multiple layers, and hung them within a series of glass chambers. Here Ortega acted as a surgeon, skillfully using his scalpel to dissect apart his "eyes" -- the camera. It reminds me of the confocal microscope I used in the biology lab, where a laser-camera scans through a sample and re-constructs a 3D image from a series of 2D images. Ortega's approach is the reverse, that is, he flattens a functional 3D object into its minute constituents. There is ineffable beauty in it. Somehow I found some tiny pieces from this dissembly resembled the appendages of the insect specimen that my friend made. Perhaps it is proper to contemplate further the relationship between art and science in history, at the focal point of dissection. When Andreas Vesalius published his On the Fabric of Human Body in 1543, he was particularly meticulous on the anatomical images of the body. Indeed, he hired a professional artist Jan van Calcar to illustrate his book, and paid out of his own pocket to employ the most reputable print shop in Basel to publish his book so as to guarantee the high quality of the art work. His effort paid off: On the Fabric of Human Body became the foundational text for modern anatomy, with its many "accurate" illustrations of the body. Coming back to the present, we can view Ortega's work as a continuous fascination and perhaps a modern subversion of this conjunction of art and dissection.

Another piece by Josiah McElheny also plays with mirror's effect. Here the artist positioned a group of shiny, beautiful decanters in front of a mirror. Similar to Navarro and Smith's work except a different dimensionality, these decanters infinitely extend toward the posterior. Yet since there exists a glass window in front of the decanters, I could only see one reflection of my face. In other words, the viewer by no means could catch up with the speedy, and seemingly infinite extension of these desirable objects. Surely we can regard this piece as a revelation of the psyche of modern consumerism; the customers' insatiable needs, seduced by modern materials' never-ending allure, are doomed to lead to disappointment. The glass window even resembles the one in the shop, which separates the costumer and the object he/she desires. But I think that we can even go beyond the layer of consumerism, and take this piece as an exploration of human desire (yes, "that obscure object of desire"). Isn't it true that deep in our psyche, we all desire things that we cannot get? Isn't it also true that we ourselves create those never-reacheable objects, not unlike the infinite shadows of the decanters in this piece, so we can satisfy this basic need of us? But can we truly be satisfied, as the process undoubtedly entails disappointment?

Randomness

This may not be the best time to open a blog. On the contrary, the time is in fact quite inopportune, given the following incident that occurred to me early today.

In Georges Remi’s comic series The Adventures of Tintin, there is an episode called “The Seven Crystal Balls,” in which members of an excursion group who recently explored an ancient Peruvian tomb were mysteriously killed by crystal balls. I myself got such a ball.

Yesterday was the day of the annual Antrim Street Yale Sale. Despite the lousy weather, my neighbors still enthusiastically put up quite a display of their old stuff. As I was meandering around, I found a mini-globe with a magnet in it, hanging down from a tablelamp kind of frame. The globe could even spin when I pushed it a bit.

“50 cents.” A middle-age woman said with a smile.

“I’ll take it.” I always wanted a globe.

Early this morning, as I was sitting in front of my computer and staring at my globe behind, an idea, a rather random idea came to my mind.

“It is quite dirty. I should clean it.” I thought.

I did. But right after that I accidentally dropped it on the floor, and it sounded that something fell off inside the globe.

“Does my little-thinny still work?”

With that thought, I placed the globe on the keyboard of my labtop, for one second. Perhaps even shorter than that.

Clearly the globe worked fine, as it was tightly sucked to the computer. Yet, for that one second, the globe killed my computer.

A lethal magnetic ball!

But friends, think about how random the whole thing happened. Had I not randomly placed the globe behind my computer, I would not have stared at it this morning. Had I not taken up this random thought of cleaning it, I would not have dropped it afterwards. Then had I not dropped it, again quite a random event, I would not have tested it on my computer. Surely my lack of knowledge on the destructive power of magnet on computers contributed to the disaster, but think about how many random events had to accumulate before that!

How much of our lives are constituted by such random events? How much of these random, seemingly trivial events shape the trajectories of our lives?

This is not a passivist or a fatalist perspective, because in those cases events are pre-determined, the opposite of randomness. Here we are enmeshed in the labyrinth of probability.

In the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s namesake story, we see a series of scenes showing how Benjamin’s lover Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett) was struck by a car. It was a series of mundane and random events that led to Daisy’s accident. It did not have to happen to her; it just happened to her. It was not what was meant to be; it was an outcome of an accumulation of many random events. If we do the math, we will conclude that the probability of what happened to Daisy is less than a thousandth of one percent. It is infinitesimal, yet it is a solid infinitesimal.

In Milan Kundera’s magnificent book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we find a similar story, this time the outcome was good, about how Franz and Tereza met. Again, their initial encounter, which triggered the following love story, derived sheerly from randomness, or fortuities in Kundera’s word. Here is Kundera:

“After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessary, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress… it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

Kundera’s acumen and wisdom are at his full strength.

In the movie Run Lola Run, we see another way of portraying fortuities. Lola ran three times in the movie for her boyfriend, with slightly different speeds. The difference was slight to the extant that Lola passed the same spot only a few seconds later than her previous run. But that tiny difference got quickly amplified into the difference of life or death at the end of Lola’s run.

In our lives, we only run once.

Here is Kundera again:

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all… History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

Perhaps that is the way I should think about the incident early today. It occurred only once, therefore it is unbearably light. Because of its randomness, there is a dimension of beauty in it.

More on Kundera’s book in the future.