At the homeless camp in Arizona, an old man by the campfire mentioned his dead friend, and when he left, the newly bought sailboat was still parked in his driveway, "He missed everything, and my sailboat was in the desert." I suddenly remembered that I was seventeen, and wrote in my diary, stroke by stroke, "You know, New Mexico is a dry and desolate desert. But I also want to buy a boat in New Mexico, and I also want to be a thinker. Someone who can really do anything." The happiness and dashing that I wanted to pursue at that time and the difficulties and complexities I was willing to endure are almost impossible to empathize with today. I just sat and watched it, and my heart was full of chaos. The kind of violence that people break through the window when they are unprepared, escorting me step by step to today, as if I have no choice. But only today can I understand the goodness of this movie. She is avoiding those overly skilled gestures. Her characters have been stripped of their public attributes and all external attachments, but they are preserved in this seemingly exhausted wandering. Pure and precise, naked and diaphragmatic.
I love that when Swankie died, as she wished, everyone was sitting around the campfire, saying "she likes rocks the most" and throwing rocks into the fire, and then the camera followed the rising spark to the night sky. I almost read Emily Dickinson's poem, I felt a funeral in my brain. It seems that everyone is also concerned about the fate of mankind and the reincarnation of the universe, but the so-called romanticism is to magnify those small and trivial things, and the so-called surrealism is to cover up the pain with absurdity. At midnight last fall, on the overpass in Chaoyang District, we talked about Bolaño, we talked about the Fermi paradox, we talked about death, but those unsolvable topics made it seem that the universe is more made of sensibility than of rationally motivated. We return from the most distant topics to each other's most delicate perceptions, everything is vague and gentle, and the ground is also far away from us. And today I fell into that perception again.
Later, she met a love affair, like a ring made of a can pull ring. It's a stone with holes, it's the flat ring of Saturn, it's the silhouette of a huge dinosaur in the desert at night, and it's gone without saying goodbye. I think of my wonderful encounters, the good and bad dates that were worth it, the naked lovers on wet nights, the regrets and the people and things that I can never get back. Seems like I've lived with Fern for a while.
I think the dinosaurs in the desert are also a huge metaphor. Teacher Lan Jiang said that it is not that we took the initiative to walk out of the Anthropocene, but the immune devices that serve a few qualified lives today, making most of us less than human beings, No longer human, we are expelled from the warm and cozy Anthropocene. The so-called aesthetics of life belongs only to those who are qualified, and they are worthy of the name of "human". The vast majority of people are biological beings, only worthy of breath. The naked life of the nomads of the land. With Deleuze dead, Foucault dead, even Agamben and Esposito dead in this land of nowhere, we need a new intuition to see through the desolation of our time.
In 2021, the world is sinking, and we, we are like travelers in quicksand, like eggshells in a stream, like Sisyphus, like outsiders. We are emotional and cold-blooded, tolerant and anger-loving, and that makes us complex people.
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