Was · 2019.1.10
About writing I have said a great deal before and will say more later. This past year I said very little, and next year may be less still. The pains and pleasures of it I can only keep to myself, like a jar of home-brewed wine — not opened for guests, only for time.
Where the water ends, the clouds rise; you sit and taste it alone. There is always a certain kind of person for whom this is the fate.
Was · 2018.5.30
A rainy afternoon.
Curtains drawn, the rain outside going on and on. A sad key filling the air.
I woke into a heavy dimness, and something else woke with me.
Most of my dreams are built during afternoon naps — vivid as film, true and bewitching. If I could, I’d stay a hundred years in a dream like that. Then you wake, and the millet still isn’t cooked.
Even the ones that aren’t especially pleasant are real, and intoxicating.
Today’s was strange enough. I’d been asked to record a song for someone to produce and release. The song, it turned out, was written by Jay Chou, and the man in charge was one of Jay’s people, who had recorded for him the same way before. Only, when this producer came for me, I wasn’t ready, and I had to finish it on the spot — learn the score right there, record it, hand it over. Stranger still, it was all happening in my old classroom, Class 1 of the ninth grade, and the sky was the color the sky used to be on those junior-high evenings. A crowd of junior-high kids had gathered to watch, full of expectation, clapping now and then, and I couldn’t get a single note. Jay had even shot a demo video, and in it he looked the way he did ten years ago, a black cloth cap on his head, a trace of stubble at the corners of his mouth. I was nervous, cheering myself on inside and cowering at the same time, sure the whole thing would fall apart in my hands. The bell rang; the whole neat roomful of kids ran out into the corridor for break; the man in charge waited and waited; I hesitated — my roommate came back from class, turned on the light, shut the door, and I woke up.
In dreams every mood you have is returned to its original shape, for you to see and to face. Only when you’ve stopped pretending and are still composed can you call yourself strong.
Was · 2019.1.11
I woke from a nap to a darkened room, not sure whether it was raining outside, but night had certainly come.
John Lennon may have known this state. He woke, chased the scraps left in his head, and a melody flashed up; it became a song. That is where “#9 Dream” came from.
Lennon loved the number nine; he thought it hid the workings of fate. After “Revolution” came out he wasn’t satisfied, so he made “Revolution 9” — seven minutes long, no melody, just a collage of countless sound fragments — and it became immortal in the history of rock.
Paul couldn’t stand it and, almost out of spite, made some strange songs of his own, “Rocky Raccoon,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”… but however you listen, something is missing. Which is no surprise. In worldly life, even those who live it to the limit can never quite understand the ones who live above the sky. Let alone imitate them.
Was · 2019.5.26
The forecast said heavy rain today, but when I woke in the afternoon it was clear. There seemed to have been a great storm in the night — lightning, thunder, wind and rain braided together — and looking now, there really was water running on the ground. All of it while I slept, the world shut out beyond the window.
In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, when he pulls the curtain and lies down, the rain begins to fall outside, and Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is playing on the radio.
Anyway, by the time I went out, everything was bright. A golden world, with a thin, weightless freshness spread over it. I rode a circuit around Luojia Hill, trying to shake off that heaviness you wake up with. In my earphones was Mayday’s History of Tomorrow, their ninth album.
They say it’s a tribute to the Beatles — that they’ll only ever make ten albums, which would make this the second to last, and precious. The album it answers to is Abbey Road.
It · 2018.10.19
Lately I keep thinking of the life I had in high school, unsurrounded by screens and the internet: monotonous, but pure. Even looking back, I didn’t spend much effort on those useless things, and yet over the months and years a great deal accumulated. Back then I could stay inside one stretch of time — one album, one book, one paragraph, one sentence — and even make time slower: the grooves in the wall during afternoon naps could be imagined into all kinds of phantoms, drift into wandering thoughts, turn into the plots of dreams.
Two years and more later, everything is much faster. And much more careless.
It · 2019.3.26
Talking about high school with my roommate tonight, I remembered the iPod Touch 4 I had then. It was my first Apple device, and for a long time my only one. I listened to music on it, wrote on it, took photos on it, did everything on it.
It’s still lying in my drawer now — it stopped working after high school, so I bought an identical one and put it beside it, for the sake of some feeling. Turn it on again today and iOS 6 is still there with its skeuomorphic interface, pixels hopelessly coarse, and you even have to load songs in from a computer.
But someone still loves you.
It · 2019.1.14
Only back in familiar surroundings, with something to compare against, do you know what you had. At home you can do anything you like, without restraint — take a good long forty-minute shower, damn it — unlike at school, where you only dare take ten and still think it’s expensive.
Li Bai wrote a hundred poems on a jug of wine; the words came out of him drunk. I wonder, if he’d tasted the yellow wine we have at home, whether he’d have downed three big bowls of it to see a fine night through. Whether it’s the afternoon after a long dream or the small hours when night lies thick as water, the dust of dusk and the gauze of dawn bring nothing but peace. As for the ten thousand solitudes of this world, they only seem to pester you in daylight.
Back in Xiangyang there’s only an empty city left, and the memories scatter. You can take away these collections that live inside the years, but you can’t change anything else. I remember writing my last essay of high school: I ran out to the sports field during evening study, lay down, looked up. Tonight I came back to the same place, and the sky was the same as then — that red-bean red spread out to no edge — only without the sky lanterns drifting down beside me. Three years gone, and everything as it was.
All of it will become history. What I hold onto tonight, what moves me, what I’m used to — none of it will escape dispersal. Time is only the vessel that carries these things; it neither has them nor lacks them.
The night is deep; I put down the pen in a hurry.
It · 2019.1.15
Last night’s entry, written here, was set down on a good night, carried by high spirits. There was yellow wine on the desk; I drank it all, was promptly dizzy, and the handwriting is as scrawled as that — proof enough.
Wine is a strange thing: a little raises the spirits, a lot brings on illness, and somewhere in the blur you’re already drunk as a crab, unable to tell little from a lot, knowing only that nothing your eyes fall on will obey you — so you topple into bed and sleep, as if pillowed on clouds and mist.
In other years snow always fell at the end of January, as if keeping an appointment. This year, at the end of January, the snow seems to have stood us up. Idly tapping a chess piece until the lamp-flower falls.
Just · 2019.1.10
Something Jay Chou posted on Instagram yesterday has, for whatever reason, bounced to the top of Weibo’s trending list again. The gist was a comment on the “In the Name of the Father” video: “Why do I so rarely listen to other singers’ songs? Because the songs I wrote sixteen years ago are still in fashion now.”
Honestly, if I kept a ranking of Chinese-language albums in my head, Yeh Hui-mei, from sixteen years ago, would be at the top forever. I went back to QQ Music to listen again and saw a comment: “However I listen it doesn’t sound good, even though I’ve heard plenty of Jay Chou.”
The way I see it, wanting a song to be merely “good to listen to” belongs to the same aesthetic tier as wanting a painting to be merely “a good likeness,” a film merely “a good ride” — and, of course, a book merely “a good read.” It’s the customer’s position, and a brutal demand on the supplier: you serve me, and nothing else. But it’s precisely the other way round. For anyone who makes things with any artistic ambition, the first aim is naturally self-expression — to convey a state of mind, beautiful or ugly, through the work. Whether they choose to present it beautifully or uglily is their own business. Only beyond that layer does the audience come into consideration — and even then, first to educate the public, and only second to satisfy it. Every masterpiece in the world works this way.
Of course, you can do it the other way round. Then your integrity as an artist becomes rather a problem.
Just · 2018.12.5
A basic rule when reading: anyone who tosses off “everyone says” would do better not to say it at all. And yet “everyone says” is all over the street these days.
Some chicken-soup writers have prose like pork belly — pale, doughy, and one poke leaves your hand covered in grease. All they can do is pile up hollow concepts and repeat what others repeat. Take the word self-discipline, which turns up constantly: they say “the whole reason you’re weak is that you aren’t disciplined enough” and call it a day, without ever telling you why, or how, or where the measure lies. As for whether self-discipline really is the cure for everything, that gets mumbled past and fudged, and the logic won’t bear a second look.
It’s a bit sad these days, watching the soup-sellers foul up words that used to be good ones. How you draw the line between the tide and the vulgar decides your stance when the tide comes in. When interesting turns tedious and refined turns common, too many people fancy themselves riding the wave while swimming naked in the crowd. When the tide goes out, even they must find it awkward.
Same as ever, friend: be a little more punk.
A · 2019.1.9
I’m in the habit of setting my own path inside its era — a way of thinking these last two years seem to have steeped into me. The small stuff of daily life, drop by drop, looks flat and ordinary; then time passes, things change, and all of it becomes something you treasure.
2019: another turn of the wheel — days and months, spring going and winter coming, year upon year. Everything is just a few marked points in the cycles of the sun’s rising and setting. But that isn’t the whole of it either, and I have never liked using cyclic recurrence as the final explanation for everything in this world. Because 2010, or 2014, or 2016, or 2018 — each is only a human convention, a virtual ruler for counting. If I wished, I could of course declare today: at the instant of writing these words, I, sovereign over myself, establish the Calendar of George, to replace the Gregorian and every other calendrical rule now in use.
Today is Year 0; this moment is minute 0, second 0. And if you have read this far, then I’ll take it you’re living in this calendar with me.
A · 2019.5.27
I rarely comment on current events anymore, though the thoughts are hardly few. The world walks its orbit along the line between morning and dusk. As one of the unremarkable, overlooked multitude, how are you supposed to foresee anything, or judge it? Close by, you feel the gears turning; everything seems to have been pushed onto rails, changing slowly and in order. Whether what lies ahead is a plain full of hope, or a swamp without end, or a chasm with no bottom, nobody knows. People just laugh and chatter and go straight on.
The rain outside really is striking the roof. The fire is burning strong, but you can still feel the howl. Old friends are on my mind. I don’t like to assume ill of others — I never have — while some people do the opposite. And there are those in whose eyes the values you’ve treasured all your life, the creeds you’ve guarded, the convictions you’ve held, aren’t worth a cent.
I have never believed in absolute good and evil, right and wrong. Regrettably, good and evil, right and wrong, are absolute all the same.
Dream · 2019.5.28
On the rooftop I’ve rigged a hammock for myself.
A clear night. I go up onto the roof alone.
Behind me the silent ridge of the hills; ahead, the lights of the busy town.
No dust in the night air. I lie alone in the hammock, waiting for two or three hallucinations to come rushing up overhead.
Years from now, on some night without a name, I’ll think back to days like this.
Or perhaps I won’t.
Dream · 2018.5.22
To all of it.