Transparent Things

The new Haruki Murakami novel won't be translated into English until at least next year, but I saw the Chinese translation in a store today. I wonder if I should buy it; I have a feeling it might be better to read the guy's recent work in English. That suspicion was reinforced when I flipped open the book and one of the first scenes was the narrator watching a girl hang out at Denny's late at night. It would make things easier to explain, anyway. I might still buy the damn thing before I go back to Baltimore.

Yesterday I went to the National Palace Museum. That's the place where they put all the artifacts and treasures the Kuomintang brought with them from the mainland when the Communists took over. Call it theft, but a lot of stuff was preserved from the Cultural Revolution that way. Half of the place was being renovated, but the other half had samples of culture from the Paleolithic down to the late Qing; jade axes through bronze cauldrons to glazed porcelain vases of just a few centuries ago, already showing Western influences, and the first signs of a trend that would persist to the modern age: using foreign characters (in this case, Arabic and Hebrew) as decoration. A side room on the first floor devoted entirely to Buddhist statues, as well. The obligatory Ming of course, but to be honest, I felt that a lot of the blue glazed ceramics from the period got rather formulaic--perhaps due to the relative prosperity following the turbulence of the Sung and Yuan Dynasties?--a trend that I felt also extended into the Qing, if in an outwardly different form. I was particularly fond of the Sung Dynasty porcelain works; the displayed artifacts from that period tended to be the most elegant and uncluttered, with a greater range of subtle hues in the glaze. Not that I know anything about visual art of any sort.

I was rather amused at how the entire history of China seemed to be able to be traced through just a few mediums: jade, bronze and iron, and ceramics. I suppose there weren't any watercolor paintings on display; I rather like those. I was also interested in the way visual symbols manifested themselves in the pieces through the ages; in the very early works (immediately following the era of pure utility), they were everywhere, in the form of abstracted birds and beasts shaped with contours as inscrutable and primal as the forces of nature they likely represented. Then they sort of fell out: inscriptions replaced illustrations, and virtually none of the Sung Dynasty pieces had visual imagery, except one bowl which had a barely visible impression of two swans--and that was more realist than symbolic. But going into the Ming and Qing Dynasties, they came back again; but in a different form, in illustrations of dragons, chimeras, and other clearly fantastic beasts which represented concepts such as longevity and good fortune, but the illustrations were much more concrete (compared to Neolithic works), and corresponded to their symbolic meanings in a much more systematic way. Cultural fetishism? Maybe. It's interesting how a lot of classical art--whether the dragon-adorned vases of the Orient or the medieval-to-Renaissance religious scenes of the West--is formulaic, as in being easily dismantled into their composite symbols and images. I wonder what Adorno would've had to say about that.

But yeah. The Frankfurt School ripped on me hard.

I've been reading a J. G. Ballard novel. Super-Cannes. This is probably what I should have read instead of going on that half-hearted de Sade kick a year and a half ago. It's about a husband and wife (mostly the husband) who move to an ultra-civilized corporate megapolis, only to discover that the entire complex is overrun by a plague of excessive sanity, and the prescription is controlled lunacy. Which of course raises the question: which is more perverse, the occasional spurts of violence and depravity which keep the people from total meltdown, or the mindnumbing repression which necessitates those spurts of violence and depravity? Again, Messrs Adorno and Horkheimer would've had a fucking field day, had they been alive in 2000, when the book was published. Probably one thing drops out of all the Alice in Wonderland references, the Hatter quote: "We're all mad here." Anyway, I quite like the book--read a third of it in virtually one sitting this afternoon. One thing I've discovered about Ballard is his incisive and positively lethal description of character. A couple lines sweep by, and suddenly the character's standing right in front of you just how you like them, and you know them inside and out, both the aspects that attract you and the ones that appall you--Ballard makes absolutely sure you don't miss either. He sort of reminds me of a more Western, subtly less aloof, more deranged version of Murakami--Wind-Up Bird with a Vonnegut cackle. Even the damn narrator comes from the same genealogy as Murakami's: male, unoccupied (debilitating injury), alienated, suspicious. Lighter on the sentimentality, though. It wouldn't've fitted with the oh-burn wit, anyway.

Plus, I won't deny that, being myself a self-consciously repressed individual, I've always had a strange fascination with situations where all composure just goes to shit. The lockstep works, but sometimes it kills you; being civilized is what I want, but it drains me sometimes. Meeting my own standards kills me. Always one eye on the underside; I think I first realized this just over a year ago. Still, the damn bodhisattva-on-acid I met in the woods could've been right: I don't know how to let it go. Problem being, it's not within my person; as of three weeks ago, I guess I can be relatively certain of that. Maybe that's the real reason I'm always wanting change. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense: I can't look away from a darker condition that I'm convinced is underlying everything, including myself, but I can't ever connect with. I just catch glimpses from the corner of my eye the traces of a ghost I cannot exorcise. Doesn't make sense, to be split into precessing aspects that can't reconcile themselves with each other, but it happens. Doesn't make sense, to be anxious about never being able to be the things I probably don't want to be in the long run, but it happens.

A year ago, I wrote a story. It was called "South." It was about buildings that move like glaciers and a photographer who was having an affair with her otherwise-married employer. It was, and still is, pretty much the best piece of fiction I've written to date. A month or so ago I read a slightly revised version of it at the Writing Seminars undergrad reading that week. (I'm always sort of in and out of that whole group--the writers--I always feel like an interloper somehow, even though I'm getting a degree. It's probably because I can't attend their get-togethers at the pub, and I'm not high-cultured, and I've never been to Europe nor will I probably go in the near future, though I'd like to.) The week before I came back here, out of sheer boredom and eager to flaunt my recently-earned leisure, I decided to follow Patrice, Vijay and the folks to happy hour at the Charles Village Pub. On the way, Brooke, one of the Writing seniors who co-runs the whole shebang, asked me about the story; I guess she had been drinking already. She asked whether the story was based on any real-life relationships I had had. "Isn't everything?" I responded, probably a bit more sarcastically than the question deserved; she said that the story dealt with a lot of mature concepts, and wanted to know if they were taken from my life in any way. Even if my life made good gossip fodder, I wouldn't let it, but anyway it doesn't, so I told the truth and said that the story was largely experimental, that I simply wanted to see if I could write a female narrator, and write (implicit) sex scenes, among other things. Thus, thanks to the mystique of seeming eloquence, the logic was once more concealed of how the frustrations of a 19-year-old virgin translated, in a roundabout way, to those of a late-20s photographer sleeping with the married editor of her magazine. (Something about that common moment, of realizing the onset of glacial change, whether within or without yourself, the nature of which remains unclear but the consequences of which are desperately obvious--separation and distance, and the one last blind push to reach out and hang on to whatever is being lost without even having time to make sense of it all. I was not good at convincing people to come back and stay. Still am terrible.)

Lord knows why, but I thought it was funny, and in fact, I still do.