A Nameless Woman

 

"I" am a biologist studying transition ecosystems, a hypnotized explorer, a freshly infected person.

  a woman, a “widow”, a nameless creature with dark, cold memories.

This is the person we focus on. Our knowledge of her is quite limited. She may be a bit paranoid, indifferent, occasionally harsh, and have an abundance of untimely perceptions. She liked a deserted swimming pool and turned it into a pond. Her husband died of cancer of the whole body. One night, she saw him opened the refrigerator and drank a carton of milk, and so on. None of this prevents us from treating her as our friend. Like us who just intervened in the story, she has no retreat and can't restore the truth by tracing back the information flow that was cut off, so our situation is similar: it has no "name" and is waiting to be "named"; It has no answer, waiting for the outside world to respond to various questions.

It's like the setting of a puzzle game: The leading role woke up in a strange place, drunk, drugged or just knocked down, dazed, and with amnesia (it even uses the name of an enemy or the beer logo as its own name). We are on the same starting line as "I", or our speed is sometimes a little faster-but unfortunately, the front is still unknown. There are not only hypnotic words of psychologists, but also in-vivo transformation of text spores. The experience collected by "I" for us may be canceled at any time. We have to stand on such an unstable foundation and endure the inexpressible and lingering "nameless" state.

"Non-linearity" is the first word I remember in the book, which can be used to describe the imbalance we feel about the whole story.

As a member of the exploration team, my task seems to be to explore and exhaust an active/passive isolated closed environment. However, in the process of pushing outward, we found that the colorful jungle vegetation and the crying like animals are too thin (just like some perfunctory stage scenery), which cannot provide a deep and exploitable space. So we can only look up or down for extension. The sight seen in the underground tower has an unreal surreal feeling, while the sight seen in the lighthouse is clear and real. The underground tower is in the darkness of the ground, and the lighthouse is on the ground by the coast. Up and down, bright and dark, real and virtual constitute two fulcrums, and the characters in the book swing back and forth between these two fulcrums. "

  What secrets can be hidden in my barren and desolate memory? Maybe all my memories are secret-maybe all these are delicious.

The "crawler", the spokesperson of the X area, probably feels this way. It has a human body, and then turns the consciousness and memory it swallowed into "words", like indigestible seeds daubed the walls of the underground towers. Those disorderly and chaotic sentences give us a horrifying experience, like the plague, like nails, withered hands, and slices of the heart, like the fanatical sermons of the red-eyed monks. They themselves seem to have a dark ritual sense, belonging to a certain religion that is destined to be unsaved.

 But "I" is like a small piece of bait or, more accurately, a "God" tied to a string and thrown into a cage.（The other end of the string was in the hands of the southbound bureau. The vibration of every tooth rub makes managers who hold their breath to listen shudder.）The savage animals in the cage eat my body respectively because my blood and flesh are holy blood and holy communion, which contain spirit and consciousness, as well as the basic functions of words……

Therefore, one exploration team after another is a group of edible and undeveloped enlighteners, who unconsciously contribute mature brains and cultivate civilization in the enlightenment stage——Wait. We have not yet confirmed whether the X area is "ignorant". Perhaps its expansion posture is only "defiled" by the observation of external low-level civilization, which means that it wants to teach us something we don't know; It is also possible that it is more "ignorant" than we thought. It will cut a hole in the belly of the world and drag all people into the filthy torrent.

Impermanence

Impermanence

For thousands of years, due to the great differences between the eastern and western civilizations, when civilizations began to blend, some people who wandered between the two cultures felt interesting, but others felt frightened. In the 20th century, after the world was connected by Westerners after the industrial revolution, Koizumi Yakumo was such a traveler who wandered between eastern and western cultures. Through his novels in which the Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods are narrated in the East, what I see is not the cultural differences, but the common breath of Eastern civilization. Many of the stories in Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods actually borrowed historical stories, including Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio 500 years ago, and Extensive Records Compiled in the Taiping Years a thousand years ago; Even in the Tang Dynasty, which can be traced back to 1,200 years ago, Japan has studied the culture and system of the Tang Dynasty for a long time in history; but the Japanese have added their own culture and style to the stories they have borrowed from. Those familiar stories show the living conditions of ancient Japanese ministers, warriors, businessmen, farmers, and other classes, and the books are full of their emotions and various living conditions. The talented blind pipa artist in Hoichi the Earless was almost taken to hell because of his amazing pipa skills；The lactating mother exchanges her life to pray for the recovery of her child. The "cherry blossom tree" that blooms on February 16 each year is a manifestation of this maternal love；There are also snow girls, raccoons who become faceless women, mermaid, spring water that can rejuvenate people, and greedy wives greedily drink spring water and finally become a baby ... To sum up, among ghosts and gods, people in the East have faith in reincarnation and karma in the impermanent world.  

Aside from all the horrible or strange stories, the short stories in the Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods are like dark red camellia flowers blooming in the shade, giving off mysterious, mysterious, delicate, and mournful beauty in the shade, like the flowers on a dark kimono, showing impermanence through ghosts, gods and monsters.

The reincarnation of human nature

  All human history can be summed up as a vast history of human nature.

Through the fog of vicissitudes, the author takes us back to the Age of Machine 18th century, where billowing dense smoke rises everywhere with damp haze. More somber than the weather is the vampire Louis' memories of his first half of life.

Lester, Claudia, and Amadio—all three, like Louis, are key figures in the book. The life and death entanglements, love, and hate between them four for more than two centuries showed us the mutual alienation and interdependence between people. Sartre once said, "Others are hell." Darwin, however, insisted that man is a social animal. So under the above kind of estrangement and dependence, different people repeatedly read this story with tragic color and each one of readers has their own unique insight.

The vampire described by the author is transformed from people with profound humanization feature. For them, all emotions are amplified, everyone pays attention to different affective factors. Different emotional concerns also cause them to have different thinking, therefore, contradictions and conflicts arise. Everyone wants to change the other to make the "whole world" going on for his or her own needs: Lester wants to change Louis' "useless" sympathies so that each killing will be less disturbing; Louis wants to change Lester's love of killing in order to save himself from suffering from compassion for human; Claudia wants Louis to abandon Lester so that he can be fully her own; Amadio wants Louis to give up Claudia and always keep her company. Each one of them has their own mind, nobody never said a word but they seem to reach a tacit understanding.

Finally, in order to escape the harm brought to him by the repeated killing of Lester, Louis chose to leave Lester. For retaining Louis, Lester turned five-year-old Claudia into a vampire and made her their common daughter. Meanwhile, in order to change Louis' compassion for human beings, Lester trained Claudia to be a "natural killer"— put Claudia up to play with the prey ferociously and then drain their blood in an attempt to corrupt Louis. As she grew older, Claudia began to resent Lester for ruining her whole childhood. Of course, she also hated Louis, but she needed someone to take care of her. So Claudia killed Lester and took Louis by herself. But when they arrived in Paris, they met Amadio, where Claudia was extinguished by the sun and transformed into a statue. Louis, who filled with remorse, set off with Amadio on a journey to find their same peers.

We read about the selfishness, arrogance, cruelty, and greed of human nature in this book; in contrast, we also see the desire for love and good, discontent, and melancholy with the status quo and the wish of go-beyond-oneself, even the care and love of others from vampires. Throughout history, human beings have gone through many disasters caused by greed. But the more we witness the kindness and love in human nature, the more glory of human nature we look forward to seizing in the future — even in such an endless cycle and reincarnation.

The Frankenstein

 

People made machines, but they couldn't dominate the machines. Instead, they were bitten by the machines. 

  

Until recently, after reading the full version, I didn't know that this novel, known as the mother of science fiction, contains infinite connotations beyond scientific and technological issues.

Frankenstein ambitiously created a very ugly giant, hoping to win admiration as a life maker. But the created monster did not obey Frankenstein's wishes. Instead, he killed Frankenstein's relatives one after another, causing Frankenstein, who was bathed in happiness, to be severely injured physically and mentally, and finally died of anger. This seems to reveal a major theme in the development of Western society to modern civilization: human beings conquer nature without scruple and desire to change the laws of nature, but opposing nature is destined to be punished. The world we currently live in is surrounded by machines. The machine seems inanimate, but it is not completely under our control. The machine we invented is like Frankenstein's giant, with its own, unconstrained will. Cars have brought convenience to transportation, but they have also brought about car accidents and deaths; mobile phones have broken the barriers of space, but we have since been overwhelmed by harassing text messages, advertisements, and spam. Air pollution, genetically modified foods, test-tube babies, and cloned sheep are constantly torturing us. Technology has brought about an explosion of productivity, but it has also brought about massive unemployment, making people's labor repetitive and mechanical. When we are madly asking for technology, technology is constantly retaliating against us like Frankenstein's weirdos.

   The greatest machine resistance in human history is the two world wars. Thanks to high-tech weapons, global wars have become possible. A ten-year war swallowed 50 million lives, which is simply unthinkable in the era of cold weapons. The more advanced the technology, the greater the danger we face. With the development of technology, we find ourselves living in an increasingly uncontrollable world. This uncontrollable extreme is that the homeland of mankind—the earth—is destroyed by mankind himself, just as Frankenstein was destroyed by the giant he created. At this point, I have to admire the great foresight of the author Mary Shelley (this should be the reason why great novels are great-beyond the limitations of the horizons of the times). After all, the age of the industrial revolution is just the beginning of science and technology. Rampant to the point of destroying mankind.

Another question in the book is what is the ultimate fate of mankind? In other words, what can make us truly happy? Fromm mentioned in "The Art of Love" that the difference between humans and animals lies in the consciousness of transcending instincts. We are aware of the existence of ourselves and others, we are aware that we are going to die. To some extent, human beings are separated from nature and therefore face uncertainty that animals do not. So humans feel lonely and fearful. Unless we realize the union with others, we cannot eliminate our fear and loneliness, and we will eventually go to madness and destruction. Fromm puts forward a short and powerful summary in the book: Without love, we can't live for a day.

   The encounter after the giant was created confirms this point. After being created, the giant slowly realized his existence. But he doesn't know who he is, and he doesn't have any sense of belonging. Therefore it desperately desires human love. But because the giants are huge and ugly, they scare humans away no matter where they go, and they are even beaten repeatedly. Although the giants are kind-hearted, they have rescued drowning girls.

In order to communicate with humans, to gain the care and dependence between people. The giant hides outside the window of a family, learning human language and knowledge day after day. In this process, he learned about the process of human history, the establishment of the Roman Empire, the discovery of America, and various basic skills. But can all this make giants happy? Can't! All this is to make the giant's self-awareness and loneliness continue to strengthen, and the desire for love becomes stronger. Because it took the initiative to communicate with that family and was beaten up, the psychology of the original kind giant went to extremes. It crazily wanted to retaliate against Frankenstein, who created it and eventually killed Frankenstein’s relatives one after another...

   Frankenstein's experience is the same as that of giants. The ambitious acquisition of knowledge eventually destroyed his peaceful and happy life, and he was surrounded by fear all day long. The story of Mary Shelley seems to be the same as Rousseau, anti-intellectual,
and anti-rational. This view makes us panic. After all, without the ever-developing intelligence and brain, we cannot enjoy such a splendid civilization and abundant material conditions today. But anti-rationalism, after all, raises deafening questions about our spiritual fate. In fact, the ancient Greeks had already tortured this question. The story of Prometheus stealing sky fire in Greek mythology can be interpreted as Prometheus bringing wisdom to ignorant humans, or it can be understood as Prometheus violating the laws of nature and being punished by the gods.

   Human beings have developed rationality and self-consciousness in the struggle for survival. But with the development of civilization, it is increasing inequality that machines continue to take over the role of people, eroding our culture and spiritual home. Mary Shelley was writing the novel at the beginning of the 19th century, which was the peak of the industrial revolution. Before that, there has never been a period in human history where development has been so rapid and the way of life has undergone such tremendous changes. Machines replaced the labor force on a large scale. Man becomes a slave to the machine, a screw on the big machine of society. Individuality, initiative, and creativity have been stifled like never before. The rule of the machine has also caused the social division of labor and large-scale migration to cities. The original stable rural communities were destroyed and replaced by atomic individuals who were strangers to each other in the city. In this process, social productivity has snowballed, and knowledge has increased like a nuclear explosion. But the emotional bond that humans rely on for survival has also been destroyed as never before. Our age worships wealth and personal achievements crazily, and the accumulation of material wealth is unprecedented in history. But all that rewards us is the deeper and deeper estrangement between people, the increasingly powerful values, and the exponential increase in alcoholism, depression, drug abuse, and suicide. This seems to be a ruthless mockery of the value of reason and material wealth.