It is not that obvious to understand that when I was reading Yukio Mishima's
Before opening
s Yes I know that I actually see the world with my mind, my biased mind that is under the deception of eyes at all the time. Everyone perceives this world differently, and the difference of your world and my world are called creativity. It maybe art, it maybe literature, you can even find in the daily talk. But if the world is different for everyone, is there any common world that encapsulated all of our worlds, the Universe, an Allah's world? Could we find the formal and metaphysical mode of thought of the ordinary understanding which begins with a fixed definition of a thing according to its various attributes?
If the individualism and the Universalism cannot be reconciled, is that still possible to find the consolation from the acceptance of your deeds by the 'others', say achievements? If not, what could distinguish myself from the 'others'? To me, the distinction between you and me may reside in the knowledge, or in the actions. But the knowledge that I possess are all from the others, as 'Olive' says, '
'To know is to remember that you've seen. To see is to know without remembering.'
In one word there is nothing new under the sun, there is nothing special in my mind. Whenever we think we know anything new, it is from the memory, thus the 'knowledge' is rather a fuse to ignite the inner fire, a joint to connect the different nerve cells. As the result, my memory is not the records of my past, it is 'myself' till today, and as I will live tomorrow, so will it. What's the thing that distinguish myself from the others? The different people that I encounter in the past, the different events that I happened to come across before, were my knowledge, were my memory, and was me.
Therefore I might say Allah's memory is the ensemble of all human's memory. In the group theory, it might be open, which means it can be approximated by a series of people's memory and which also means there is a omnipotency ever existed somewhere above us; it might be closed, which means God does not possess a form, it is rather a symbol of all human being power. One person being ever existed, being ever seen the world, part of the memory was selected and was encapsulated into one's flesh, one's blood, one's mind and will pass through his genes till his descendent. I would like to borrow one sentence that was used to appraise the great sacrifice by the heroes during the revolution: memory will last, the Hero will never fall.
But if we are merely a pod with a mixture of memory inside, what is the essence of our emotion, our desire and our will? Those things are generated deeply from this shell, it is creative, spontaneous and self-aware. To some extent, those ineffable things are what we could call individualism, they are comparable to Kant's a priori cognition, they are the engine of new style and the creativity. To find my real existence is to find those intangibles, yet to which extent those intangibles are indifferent and independent to the outside world including the past? Could I confirm my own existence when I feel happy to be loved by someone else, say my mummy, in spite of mummy's love is hers therefore by definition, has nothing to do with me? Again as I realised for longtime ago, whenever I clarify something, I drop into a greater confusion. Materiality dialects says it is exactly the second step of change of the form of motion: the continual conflict of the opposites.
Some similarities are shared by Olive (the murder in My Name is Red) and Mizoguchi (the pyromaniac in The Golden Temple of Pavillon); both of them are quiet, pride, introspective, tortured by the chase for beauty, and obsessive to the pure self-existence. Olive is quiet, he wanders around without cessation the infinite and winding streets of Istanbul, gazing down the dark of the roads which had been abandoned to jinns, fairies, brigands, thieves , to the grief of fathers and to the sorrow of snow-covered trees; Mizoguchi is a stutter, and his stuttering placed an obstacle between him and the outside world, and his pride made him refuse to make himself understood. Being not understood, they can confirm they are different from others. Both of them have dual personality. In fact, I believe each of us has dual personality, one is for the outside world and the other one is for ourselves. The personality towards outside constitutes the sociability of the human being while the personality towards oneself is what we may called individualism. As Olive says, 'at these times I remembered the holiday celebrations of my childhood during which I was able to be myself along with my kith and kin. Despite all these jokes, kisses and embraces, there was still a silence within me that left me suffering and isolated in the heart of the crowd'.
I often 'find' myself in the crowds. Submerged in the sea of crowd, do I have the same facial expression, the numbness or the tiredness as the man stand besides me? Do I flip my phone or my book in an unconscious way as the lady sits in the corner of the same car in the tube? Crowd is the enemy of the style, the creativity and the richness of the life. I often 'find' my inner spirit fleeing from my body like a bird escaping the cage. My splitt spirit regards my outside spirit as if looking at a show. Submerging in the crowds is like dripping a water-drop in the sea. How might a water-drop demonstrate that it ever existed? Mizoguchi solved it by taking actions, he burned down the golden temple in order to establish a new order of the world. I could peep his puzzle through the Zen story that he mentioned several times in the book: 'Nansen kills the cat'. One day at Nanquan's the eastern and western halls were arguing over a cat. When Nanquan saw this, he took and held it up and said, "If you can speak I won't cut it." The group had no reply; Nanquan then cut the cat in two. Nanquan also brought up the foregoing incident to Zhaozhou and asked him: Zhaozhou immediately took off his sandals, put them on his head, and left. Nanquan said, "If you had been here you could have saved the cat." Killing a cat resembles solving the dilemma by an abrupt action, cutting through the truth and the false by a sharp knife, but he cannot swipe away the existence and beauty of the catty.
They say the motive of Olive's murder comes from the acute conflict between following Herat's old master's way of painting and surrendering to the Frankish style. Old Herat master follows the older master, I have no chance to look at their work, but from how the Chinese old master paint the emperors, I can feel that all emperors are the same! You cannot recognise them if you encounter them on the street. The Venetian painter and the frankish painter do the opposite,. Being old and connective, Istanbul is a melting pot of the East and the West, one cannot help being influenced in this fusion, in keeping himself believing he is still loyal to Allah and the Sultan. Olive could not bear any doubt about his commitment. So he killed Elegant Effendi and Esther Effendi, and he hide his style when was requested to draw the horse, but the real conflict inside him is can people identify him by his work, or by his action? Has he been ever existed before?
When one water-drop dripping from the sky, it refracts the colourfulness of the world with the aid of sunlight, the image of the world was twisted by its own shape, and the world it presents is different from the worlds reflected by another water-drop. The world realises itself from the reflection or the seeing of one single water-drop; furthermore, being seen by millions of the water-drop, the world reproduces and enrich itself for millions of times. It is just as what I mention at the beginning, everyone perceives the world differently, the way he twists the world is determined by his ancestor's and his own memory, and the twisted world will be returned to the origin, together with the time, changes the orbit of the world. And it is the same as what Olive says about the painting:
ALIF: Painting brings to life what the mind sees, as a feast for the eyes
LAM: What the eye sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind
MIM: Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in out world what the mind already knows
When Mizoguchi first glanced at the Golden Temple, he was disappointed; he had poured too many expectations towards this pavilion under the influence of his father's admiration, so that the physical existence of the Golden Temple could in no means satisfies him. However, just he is obsessive stubbornly of the eternity, he is obstinate on the beauty, and the Golden Temple becomes a symbol of the beauty and the eternity. Afterhe found the beauty could not last forever, he would like the beauty to die at its most beautiful moment, he would not endure any decay of the beauty. When the docile friend Tsurukawa died from a truck crash, he thinks it is the best way to disappear, for the purity of Tsurakawa's spirit could only suit the purity of the death, and without doubt it wsa only by such a drastic method that this strange, shadowless young fellow could join both his shadow and his death. Is it also the conflict between the world of concept and the world of the realisation? I don't know, but in the end, both of the two criminals struggles to live. They want to live.