Impermanence, impermanence is suffering, suffering is not me, and what is not me is not me. If you are a viewer, the name is true and righteous.
- The Miscellaneous Ahan Sutra
In the blueprint of the modern way of life, we want to become better people, but behind the blueprint is an accelerated world: things are fleeting, and everything seems uncontrollable. It's a divided world: on the Internet, people talk about the environment and dance, but beneath everyone's life, there are different scars.
We strive for money, love, security, happiness, and the best version of ourselves, and if we don't get anything, endless disappointment follows. Even if food and clothing are worry-free and life is more colorful, modern people are more difficult to satisfy than ancient people. On a spiritual level, we are always anchored by a sense of scarcity: everything is not good enough. So we turn to a variety of inspirational books, success studies, psychological self-help books and courses designed to improve ourselves, to fill them with desire, to cover up scars with scars, and to protect commitments with commitments.
When a person goes to the world, what is the purpose? A few years ago, a phrase from the Korean movie "The Melting Pot" went viral on the Internet: We fight all the way, not to change the world, but to prevent the world from changing us.
Is the world a "non-self" being? Is there really a difference between "the world" and "us"?
What exactly is the "world"? Where is the "far away"? When is it called "history"?
It is generally believed that we live in a whole of our own small universe and consumer society, and the main content is matter and symbols. But in fact, there are other strange things that cannot be expressed in words, can only be shaped by experience, cannot be written into a guidebook, and must be entered into an anthropological investigation to see deeply. They are full of unknowns and mysteries, belonging to the earth and the sky. We invented a vocabulary to distinguish between the two: "the present and the present," "the poetry and the far away."
But in the world, is there such a difference?
When a newborn child lands on the ground, the concept of "self" cannot yet be formed in his or her cerebellum. From the perspective of developmental psychology, children before the age of 3 are in the "pre-concept period", when all the truths are useless to them, in a sense, the self and the world are the same thing at this time.
As we mature, gain knowledge and reason, we learn what "my spoon" is and what "someone else's toy" is. Through knowledge, a barrier arose between the world and us. Epistemologically it manifests itself as a rift between "subjective" and "objective," but deep down we want to be one with the world, but reason does not allow it.
The world is not something that this mind constructs, it is more complex and more basic. The way back is not untraceable – we can "return" to the origin of the world through art, to experience the truth, to rediscover in the ordinary life, to rediscover the moment before life separated from the world and cause "eternal pain", and to pick up the meaning of life.
In art, we temporarily forget ourselves and enter the "world of the other," occupied by characters, exchanging souls and bodies with them. We enter that world, living in it with a new sense and judgment, lamenting and weeping for fate, planning a way out. At this point, we are one with the world.
Art breaks down the way we think of others, affairs, and objects as objects in everyday life, which is the root cause of uneasiness and insatiability. As the German philosopher Martin Buber put it:
"Man is life, and his life is not a collective and material verb. It's not a specific activity about what to target. I noticed something. I felt something. I thought of something. What I want. I sense something. I was thinking about something. All this, or something like that, is not the kind of life in which man becomes human."
But today, art is also gradually abandoning the function of taking on the real thing. It is far away from people, far away from the earth and soil, reduced to a game of symbols, a shadow of evidence.
Humanity has forgotten that art should arise from the creative impulse to tell the truth of life itself. Today, however, we are afraid that even real life itself is about to be lost.
Directed by Taiwanese director Wang Tong and written by Wu Nianzhen, "The Hill Without Words" won many awards such as Best Feature Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 29th Golden Horse Awards that year. Together with Wang Tong's "Scarecrow" (1987) and "Banana Paradise" (1989), the film forms a complete "trilogy of local films" in Taiwan, presenting the "scars" that cannot be forgotten in Taiwan's modern history in a realistic way.
The story takes place in the middle of Taiwan's Japanese occupation (1927), when the gold rush in the Jinguashi mining area attracted large groups of farmers who had nowhere to go. The film is divided into two narrative lines, one is the "gold panning dream" of the Yilan tenant Asuke brothers, and the other is the tragic story of the brothel near the mine.
The film shows a kind of "reality" that is difficult for modern cinema to reach. Characters grow up in this land, in this history, there is flesh and blood, there is lust and lust, their world, that is, their lives.
And can we, through them, return to ourselves and return to the earth?
attach:
The Hill Without Words - Huang Pinyuan
(Movie theme song)
Mountains and rivers and seas wind and rain Day and night, morning and dusk
Sweat, blood, tears, and pain
White clouds accompany the tired sun
Drift to the other end of the sky
The mountains carry the crimson sunset on their backs
Wait for the unknown hope of tomorrow
Do you and I have the same dream?
Meet in this wandering direction
The roar of the earth's rebirth of spring thunder
Thousands of miles away singing who is singing
Beautiful flowers bloom splendidly
When it withers, it is buried everywhere
Mosquitoes for a hearty dinner
Risk death to the palm of the relentless hand
Are you and I still for the same dream
Drift in this place without a chance
Why endure the pain, why the heartache for whom to rush
Is there anyone whose heart is hurting for you?
Silent tears, ruthless heaven and earth, you and I, who have no luck
Godless eyes, unrepentant choices, wordless hills
Viewing time: Sunday, October 24, 2021 14:00
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Beam neutralization
Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Sichuan University
Teacher of the "Philosophy of Life" course group of Sichuan University
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