The Carousel

When my daughter was young, we took her to various amusement parks. After all, in non-holidays, adults and children rarely come out to play together, so there is such a strange phenomenon: entering the park in the morning, leaving the park in the afternoon, queuing for two hours, in order to play for ten minutes, at the end of the day, you can only play two or three projects.

But there is one place where you never need to queue up, and that is the carousel. After all, in the amusement park, this is like "infrastructure", which must be available in every park, but it is not the first choice for tourists, and it belongs to the bottom game project.

There are at least one carousel in every amusement park, and the difference is in the degree of luxury. I remember when I was living in my father's school dormitory in junior high school, our school gate was facing East Lake Children's Park, which at first had only slides, swings, seesaws and carousels. Swings and seesaws can never be grabbed, and my sister and I can only stand and watch others play and envy. The slide and the Trojan horse are so tired that the Trojan horse has no horse head at all, it is a wooden plank for the butt and two iron handles for shaking hands - the most rudimentary carousel in history.

As an adult, I saw the luxury version of the carousel, which is really a lifelike wooden horse with different postures, different postures, and colorful patterns on the body. The entire canopy is extremely intricate, draped in red and green, and exquisitely carved to create a "sense of magnificence" and "princess".

The so-called "princess feeling" is to create the ultimate gorgeous and dreamy, so that people riding a wooden horse, in the bumps and trances of the ups and downs, feel that they are treated like a princess, and realize the "princess dream" buried in the hearts of many people.

I carefully sat on the wooden horse and held its colorful neck, and indeed, there was a sense of security. Ding Zero, the crisp bell sounded, the wooden horse around the central axis, began to rotate, from slow to fast, from clear to blurred, it felt as if it was above the clouds, floating up.

The Trojans spun faster and faster, and I began to lose sight of the people standing on the periphery of the railing, their faces becoming more and more blurred, and finally turning into a fast-pulling color film, like the kind of "pull piece" I made for my sister when I was a child and used to trick grapes into eating. The noise of the noise also became no longer clear with the increase in speed, and everything was contained in a cloud of colored blur, and I felt as if I had become a sweet little white sugar in the marshmallow machine.

Dizzy, want to vomit, close your eyes and just beg to stop quickly, completely without the beauty of the princess dream.

I'm really not a girl who sits on a carousel.

My daughter also didn't like carousels. Our daughter was also less able to enjoy the crowded and lengthy queues and had to opt for the carousel. Ask her why she doesn't like it? She said that it was strange to think that these horses were passed through the body by a shaft, like a barbecue skewer, and it hurt to look at it, which was a new and peculiar perspective, which I had never thought about before.

I don't like the carousel, first of all because it repeats itself like a whirlpool, a bottomless pit. In this whirlpool, people do not need to think, or they cannot think. Losing the ability and motivation to think, he was numbly driven to spin, dizzy, and addicted. If repetition can make people move forward, it is worth it, but this repetition will never have a beginning and an end. Repetition without thinking is to return to zero again and again, to stand still again and again.

The second is fixed position. When you sit on a wooden horse, it is like sitting on a crucified cage, no matter how you rush, you will never be able to catch up with the person in front of you, because this is planned, you can only be a guinea pig on a pulley in the crucified cage.

No innovation, no progress, lazy thinking, cycle after cycle, covering up boredom and tedium with flamboyance, masking rigidity and sluggishness with dreams.

When I see an adult sitting alone on a carousel, I don't think it's a comfortable sight, and whether she's laughing or having empty eyes, it's not a normal thing. Is it psychological immaturity or inner loneliness? Is it really happy or really sad? Is it leisurely boredom or escape from something? ....... Maybe even she herself didn't bother to think about these questions, all she had to kill was a certain emotion, and time.

When the world's first steam-powered carousel appeared at the show, a reporter described it this way — "impetuous and strange"— and even stranger, this simple, brainless, dizzying game has swept the world for centuries, you say, what makes people have such an enduring love and dependence on it?

It has mesmerizing music, colorful lights, dizziness caused by acceleration, up and down, high and low shaking, and extremely fancy painted mounts, all of which are creating a dream, dragging you into it, dragging you into a soft, foggy dream, where you don't have to work, don't think, just happily circle around, you can get away from all troubles, forget all your troubles. Even if there is no emotion, no companionship, only one person can enjoy it – living in a dream of self-anesthesia, a soft and clingy dream.

Over time, the people who ride the wooden horse have also become part of the wooden horse.

Great white horses, green mule horses, red brown horses, flower zebras, glittering rainbow horses... With music and lights, it is bright and dark, far and near. Some people laugh without heart and lungs, laughing out of tears; some people are sluggish and silent; some people are playmates, some people are alone; some people are looking forward to love, some people are fantasizing about getting rid of...

None of this matters, because in the carousel game, you just have to pretend to be happy and circle around.

2021.1.19

【Cloud Original】

(Image from the Internet)