Big Dead Brother Comics
Disease is a symbol and a major metaphor for the whole world. The "SARS Storm" of 2003 and the current "Wuhan pneumonia" brought people back to the metaphysical contemplation of the disease. One can clearly see that from plague (syphilis) and tuberculosis to Chinese pneumonia, aesthetics has gone through a long and thrilling process. In the face of the wave of SARS or SARS-like viruses, people feel the tension of narrative and the shortage of discourse...
The plague is the most painful upper body memory of mankind. The Greek word for plague (i.e., "plague" or "Black Death") is "a disease of all people", and this name shows not only its invincible infectivity, but also its unique mortality: those infected can die in as many as four or five days or as few as a few hours, and almost no one can escape its bloody pursuit. Plague bacillus rodents and their rodent fleas as the host, through the blood and widely spread, the patient from the cough, fever, diarrhea, coughing up blood, coma, hallucinations, subcutaneous bleeding and there are large areas of blue-black spots, the "Black Death" reputation is derived. The name also recounts the horrific and ugly images of death. Death inscribed the most terrible "blue-black ugliness" on human skin.
Three famous global plagues in history have resulted in the deaths of 140 million people. Death swept across the earth like a flood, turning villages and urbanizations into cemeteries. The plague also gave rise to three major cultural terror movements in Europe – the Whiplash Movement, the Anti-Semitic Movement and the Witch Eradication Movement. The "Black Death" convinced Europeans that the last judgment prophesied in the Old Testament was coming, that the atonement complex had fueled the whipping movement, and that millions of Europeans were drawn into the vast ranks of self-muggling and self-destruction. At the same time, anti-Semitism was in full swing. Both the Latins and the Germans believed that it was the filthy life of the Jews that led to the condemnation, and the church and secular regimes began a massive campaign to exterminate the Jews, and after a century of purges, the Jews of Europe were almost slaughtered. It was also believed that witches colluding with the devil to cast spells on livestock was the cause of the plague, and that this rumor sparked a long campaign to kill "witches", with large numbers of "problem women" burned to death after torture, their cries and tears igniting the flames on the cross. This collective hysteria of masochism and his abuse, of being killed and killed, is the dark nature of the European Middle Ages.
The true semantics of the Renaissance were twofold, and it not only revived Greek civilization, but also counted on Europe to crawl out of the ruins of the Black Death. In Boccaccio's novel Decameron and florentine frescoes, under the ornate finishes of all the art, courtyard life and great writings, the vast shadow of the Black Death lingers forever. In cologne cathedral, built in 1304, Christ on the cross cried out with a painfully twisted expression and uttered utter horror at the plague. 500 years later, Camus's novel The Plague once again opens up memories of the pain of the plague. In this way, it constructs a general allegory of disease, death, inhuman worlds, mechanical civilizations, and decaying bureaucracies. Kamo's position undoubtedly represents the basic view of humanity that the plague is the first symbol of all the ugly forces in the world.
Medieval Black Death oil painting
Syphilis is the closest brother of the plague. It does not have the vicious appearance of the plague, but it adds the semantics of lasciviousness and meanness, and becomes the spokesperson for the "lower body", which coincides with the plague of the "upper body". Baudelaire gloomily inscribes this disease in his long poem "The Flower of Evil": purgatory scenes, the face of the god of death, the human being weakened in lasciviousness... All these fragments of discourse aimed at exposing the ugly nature of syphilis as original sin.
Because of the ugliness of plague and syphilis, people were keen to label them as contempt for countries they despised. Europeans insisted that the plague came from China, while the French called syphilis "Italian disease", the Italians sneered at each other, calling it "French disease" or "Spanish disease", the Germans called it "Polish disease", and the Chinese called syphilis "wide sores", meaning it was a specialty of the Cantonese, just as the "Hong Kong foot" (athlete's foot) was falsely accused of being a specialty of the Hong Kong yankees. In the late Qing Dynasty, because the British East India Company sold opium in large quantities to the two Guangdong regions of China, this drug, along with syphilis, became a double label imprinted on the Guangdong people. This is an example of disease ugliness, demonstrating the cultural narrative function of syphilis as a label for ugliness. Blind Ah Bing, blinded by syphilis, created the most tragic music in Chinese history. It celebrates syphilis like a death mass and pushes the aesthetics of syphilis to unprecedented heights. Not only that, but we are also told that syphilis is a pathological marker from many great people such as Beethoven to Nietzsche.
Tuberculosis comes from the bottom of poverty and is a sign of social malnutrition, but it shows a noble temperament and thus fights against the "blue-black ugliness" from the plague. The history of tuberculosis (tuberculosis) is a history of celebrities. Du Fu was suffering from tuberculosis and wandered in his homeland; Chopin became a figure hated and feared by the local residents because of tuberculosis; the great British poets Keats and Shelley both suffered from tuberculosis, and Chekov contracted tuberculosis in his 20s and finally died at the age of 44. The gloomy-looking Kafka died of tuberculosis, and his anti-life imagery became the label of human destiny in the twentieth century; even the political celebrity Ho Chi Minh himself, Hitler's ex-wife, had suffered from tuberculosis, and their intimate relationship with tuberculosis made the disease shine with a deformed and eerie aesthetic luster.
Passionate romantic poets, talented musicians, sharp and intelligent beauties, and floaters living a bohemian life are gathered around tuberculosis, both its praisers and its fragile sacrifices. The sick redness of those pale cheeks, the white handkerchiefs and the coughing up blood are strange manifestations of the unbearable passion of life. The beautiful writer Xiao Hong of the Chinese literary scene died of tuberculosis, and Lin Huiyin did not get rid of the lifelong entanglement of tuberculosis, but the red halo on their cheeks provided a charming ornament to the history of local literature. No disease in the world can be as a source of human imagination and passion as tuberculosis.
The Black Death and the Dance of Death
In the era of tuberculosis, we have seen the fall of countless red faces. Miss Zhu Yingtai's boyfriend Liang Shanbo is said to have died of tuberculosis; Lin Daiyu, the heroine of China's chief romance "Dream of the Red Chamber", also died of tuberculosis, and the scene where she burned the poem manuscript calling for her lover's name and breathing has become an immortal memory of Chinese literary history; hundreds of years later, a male writer named Lu Xun died in the entanglement of tuberculosis, like a reversed mirror image of Lin Daiyu; the death of the Traviata Woman Lin Shu translated Duma's "The Relics of the La Traviata Woman", which once caused a sensation in Chinese society, because the heroine was also a beauty with tuberculosis. Her mournful fate is like a French version of Lin Daiyu; the English female poet Mansfield is also a pulmonary beauty, Xu Zhimo recalls the short time with her: "I sat with her on the blue velvet bed that night, the quiet light, gently enveloping her wonderful whole, I seem to be hypnotized, just obsessed with her gods' wonderful eyes, a wave of her sword-like light, a wonderful sound wave, a frenzied rain pouring into my spiritual house ... Xu Zhimo's feelings confirm to us the existence of "tuberculosis aesthetics" or "red halo aesthetics". It lingered for the long years before 1950, bringing the illusory light of a disease utopia to humanity.
As Susan Sontag points out in The Disease as a Metaphor, "As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, tuberculosis was associated with romanticism. The lust of a beautiful woman and a heroic man is the spiritual trigger for tuberculosis, and they both become fascinating protagonists in disease mythology. Coughing became a quirky singing and line for tuberculosis, and Romanticism was its cultural echo. At the same time, the "decorative, lyrical and noble death" constitutes the dramatic climax of the "red halo aesthetic".
Susan Sontag's so-called "popular myth of disease" also suggests that there is a certain intimate relationship between poverty, the proletarian and tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was almost the preserve of the proletarians and petty bourgeoisie (petty bourgeoisie), and in the years of the Revolution, tuberculosis had a bullfly-like justice, and it became a revolutionary disease, embraced by the ethics of rebellion. Its ghost floats on the paris commune barricades, as if it were some invisible spirit, outlining the indomitable figure of the insurgent.
The aesthetics of tuberculosis dominated almost the history of literary writing in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, and even modified the bland style of folk herbalism. The tranquil orchid is a beautiful medicine to cure tuberculosis. Use its root mash juice to add rock sugar to stew, fresh and sweet, can become a life-saving potion for tuberculosis beauties. The orchid soup is filled with the fragrance of plant spirits and also illuminates the patient's heart. In addition, folklore also attempts to prove to people that steamed buns dipped in human blood can cure tuberculosis and greatly replenish vitality. Hua Xiaotuo in Lu Xun's novel "Medicine" ate "human blood steamed buns" due to tuberculosis, which became a literary public case that has been controversial for nearly a hundred years. The aroma of roasted steamed buns echoes through teahouses in small towns across the jiangnan province, creating a major metaphor for the politics of tuberculosis. Even Lu Xun could not escape his own rumors: he died of tuberculosis like Hua Xiaotuo, and his blood became the main paint for Lu Scholars to make discourse steamed buns.
Tuberculosis beauty Lin Daiyu
In literature, pneumoconal poets always associate tuberculosis with romantic imagery in autumn. Autumn and falling leaves are both cosmopolitan images of dying life. The epileptic poet Shelley's Ode to the West Wind begins by calling the west wind "the breath of autumn life," and he describes it as "dead leaves... Yellow, black, gray, red like tuberculosis...", and this is the romantic image of tuberculosis. It is also the red halo that floats on the face of a patient with tuberculosis, radiating the last passion of death. However, the emergence of specialized antibiotics in the 1960s ended the era of tuberculosis utopias. The red halo of romanticism from the 19th century faded, and the aesthetics of disease went into hibernation, waiting for us to reawaken it.
SARS is a combination of tuberculosis and plague: coughing like tuberculosis, maintaining the dignity of the "upper body", but dying as quickly as the plague, SAS is a mixture of beauty and ugliness, romanticism and realism. This duality and ambiguity of Sars prevents it from being fully sublimated. It staggered to the end in front of the mask.
Let's briefly review the history of masks. We are told that it was the plague of the 14th century that inspired doctors in Europe to discover that bloodletting therapy could improve the blockage and alleviate the condition of the patient's blood vessels, and that wearing particularly thick clothing could protect themselves from the disease, but the greatest contribution of the Black Death pandemic was the invention of the medical mask, a derivative of the handkerchief that improved the dangerous situation of the doctors at that time and later became the shield of the mouth of the Sarsian guard.
The first public health equipment that emerged during the SARS pandemic was masks. It is used to block droplets and viruses. But soon after, the function of the mask changed dramatically, from a guard of the mouth to an aesthetic object, an ornament for the face, to replace the facial features (nose, lips and cheeks) of the expression. A variety of fabrics, patterns, drawings and masks with cultural slogans appeared on the streets, completely beyond the limits of white gauze. The mask fashion contest for girls in the north has driven this trend. But this new aesthetic has yet to penetrate deep into the heart and spread throughout the body. It simply stays at the lips of man, delivering a feminine smile to the world.
Choose the right way to mask
Mask aesthetics are not a patent of SARS or other diseases. Back in the 1960s, masks and military cotton coats formed the focal point of winter street aesthetics. It is infinitely rustic and does not go beyond the level of bleached gauze. Under the control of the proletarian idea, no one dares to turn it into a magnificent costume. It was initially just a piece of equipment to defend against the cold, and then tended to be a covered aesthetic. Hiding the face in a large, tight mask had an unexpected effect, which aroused people's curiosity: what kind of face should it be under the charming eyes?! This is actually the eve of the birth of aesthetics. From the mystery of the mask emerges the passion of inquiry, and it is this mysterious and unknowable thing that ignites the fantasies, daydreams and adolescent turmoil that take place on the streets. Looking at each other at the moment of passing shoulders, a bright hope flashed in their eyes, floating on the upper end of the large white mask, and then fleeting with the other person's back. This is not the dislocation of man's urban space, but the consequence of the soul losing time.
The contemporary evolution of mask forms has shifted our interrogation of Sarsian aesthetics. Masks are just an upward extension of the body's clothing system. It fills the gap between the hat and the collar. It did not go beyond the fate of ordinary clothing, that is, it did not exceed the popular culture limits of fashion and imitation shows. It even cuts off the traditional aesthetics of disease (ugliness) from the skin. In the days of SARS, mask aesthetics murdered our love for the body in this way. In the face of the crazy virus, the soul seems so faint and powerless that it can only masturbate behind a mask and warm each other.
Wuhan pneumonia 17 years later provides a new place of observation. The N95 type medical mask with filter is becoming a hot commodity everywhere. It is cold and temperatureless, even with the ugly characteristics of technicalism. Although its protective effect is dubious, it is the only option for Chinese leeks. The Spring Festival will provide a terrible opportunity for the rapid spread of pneumonia in Wuhan, and in the next long spring, many people may be killed by the virus. In the face of this serious life crisis, in what form will the aesthetics of disease make a comeback? Is it the various satirical passages popular in weChat friends, or the image parody of death threats, or a mask mask hanging on the face? No one can accurately predict this. But we know that history always repeats itself, from the last tragedy to the new.
The pictures in this article are from the Internet
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