“So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places’ in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away … forever.”

This is self-explanatory. Joker’s going mad is a half-conscious act to deal with the reality: instead of changing the world, he changed himself by manipulating his memories. Since the process is a rather conscious act, the interpretation is more close to existentialism rather than psychoanalysis.

The following page in the mentioned in BKJ actually moved me when I first read it:

Once a victim of contingency, Joker is the vanguard of contingency (could be regarded as a philosophical hero or antihero). He is so fanatic about his belief he doesn’t hesitate to risk his life showing (not proving) it. I find Joker very fascinating in this aspect.

Another example of dramatically changing oneself is Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento. (I wrote about this movie before, here) It’s hard to say whether his medical condition, anterograde amnesia, is his conscious choice, which is very unlikely. He does in some sense exploit his condition, his facticity in the terminology of Sartre’s existentialism, to deal with his reality, his profound loss and sense of guilt.

Even the movie Black Swan can be read in this light.

Next time when you think of the motto “Change yourself instead of changing the world”, please think of Joker, who is an excellent speaker for the very motto.

Every year in the past I would condemned Valentine’s Day. This year is no exception. Instead of condemning it outright, I will try some creative ways. Here we go.
Without the prospect of romantic love, the world is crap.

I cannot help noticing that God is forever-alone, from the beginning of time to the end of it. And he deserves it.

By saying that the world is crap, I mean the world is meaningless, and all things in the world don’t quite live up to the values they claim to have.

On the cover of my notebook, it says “7mm. 25lines. 70 sheets”. It looks like a specification for bullets. It inspires me to write every line as deadly as a bullet.

Lie down and let sadness consume you. What a great way to welcome the new year!

Life’s irrationality will lead you to suicide for stupid reasons just as it will keep you alive although there is not a single reason for you to live.

To show (not prove) my point, I would cite the Argentina movie, The Secret in Their Eyes, as an illustration. I have wrote two articles on it (they are not reviews) (links: 1,2). The protagonist, Benjamín Esposito, has gone through many craps, fears, craps, fears, craps, craps, craps, craps… and some romance. Having gone through all these, Benjamin decides to write them down as a novel, but he doesn’t know how to link all his terrible experiences up. Once he writes “I fear”, summing up all his experiences as a disaster. Later he is inspired to take a whole new perspective: in the perspective of romance, to restructure all his experiences in the light of his romantic encounter with Irene. This is an example of romantic love as meaning of life. Here, “meaning” is generalized as the main principle of life experiences.

Valentine’s day is the only holiday when you should not say “happy xxx’s day”. At that day, people are either so happy that your wish is unnecessary, or they are so miserable that any mention of the day will drive them furious.

Imagine a young man named WT (a fictional character), who just broke up with his girlfriend. He is complaining about the bitter feelings to WO, another fictional character, who is quite indifferent because of frequent insomnia. WT tells WO that there is a tree where he and his girlfriend used to be together, and before they broke up, every time when WT pass by the tree alone, he was surrounded by a feeling of sweetness, as if the tree was producing honey.
WT says, “but now”, WO guesses he is going to say something like “the tree is making me sad” or “every time I see the tree I feel sad”. WT continues,
“It’s just a tree! I cannot put up with that.”
What WT means is that the tree is neither making him feel sweet nor making him sad. He realizes that the tree is indifferent to what he feels and thinks. It is just there. It is thing-in-itself, which is the synonymy for meaningless. Before, the tree was covered by the sweetness, which is the meaning of the tree given by WT.
Of course, in many situations, people will not go as far as WT. The tree will still retain its meaning, though the tree is making people sad.

I never say “happy Valentine’s day” to anyone because it is very hard to imagine myself saying it without at the same time cursing the one I speak to.

My friend, coming back from Yunnan, told me that a rock hill there, a tourist attraction, carries a romantic story. I looked at the photo and it is so awkward that you cannot make any sense out of it. I can imagine that people who visit that place found it so awkward that they tried to give some meaning to it. Romantic love is surely a good way to make sense out of the rock, and … the world. Hence without the prospect of romantic love, the world makes no sense, awkward and … crap.

My sadness turns into dissatisfaction towards everything, which in turn transforms into rage. What a relief!

I wish I were born 9 days earlier, i.e. born on Valentine’s day, so that not only it would be a sad day to me, it would also be ironic. Faced with such a monstrous irony, I would be stunned to silence. That would be the only way for me to stop complaining.

So far the only effective way for me to get rid of my bitterness is to think about death, not the death that will only be present in the final moment, but the slow, painful and hopeless death like the one accompanied by terminal cancer. Thinking of this, everything lose appeal;nothing matters. Even the bitterest tears have no taste.
In fact, Hypochondria patients have an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious illness. The fear of dying partly offsets the bitter feeling of not having something that they think they should have.

Imagine a potential suicide, who keeps postponing for he does not know how to write a satisfactory suicide note.

I don’t understand why a masterpiece like Canon in D need a romantic back story. Isn’t it enough that it is beautiful itself? I guess this is yet another example that the world is meaningless, even when it is beautiful, and romantic love is a way to make sense out of the world. It is the meaning.

“Unfulfilled love is the cancellation of his being, a destructive plunge into meaninglessness.”
– the quote I mentioned to DBB

I rarely read comics, let alone Batman comics, but Batman: the Killing Joke (BTKJ) is one of the rare exceptions, as well as Watchmen and V for Vendetta comics. Should you ask why this one is special, I would prompt you to notice that the writer of this one-shot Batman comics is Alan Moore, who is also the writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Should you don’t know Alan Moore, Watchmen, or V for Vendetta, I would say that this short story provides the clearest and deepest description for the motivation and the mentality of the famous Batman villain, Joker, and that in this book Batman is revealed to share much similarities with Joker. The movie, the Dark Knight (TDK), featured a Joker which has been highly influenced by the one in the Killing Joke.

Among all the villains, obviously Joker possessed a demonic charm which other villains lack. He is not some random lunatic whose madness is just induced by accidents or the result of an evil plan. Instead, his madness is existential. The justification he gives for his crime cannot be ignored and is highly related to the things that drive him mad. His frightening vision of the world is so unbearable that not much sane people can live a normal live while being aware of it.

Batman is also a very dark hero. Who the hell will dress up like a bat flying in the dark… Considering the way Batman goes out from the dark and attacks people, he is deliberately inflicting both pain and fear on his enemies, i.e. he is explicitly exploiting the fear of others. Bruce Wayne feared bats, and it is tempting to think that he discovered the power of fear from its childhood trauma.

The story of Joker’s going mad has several versions, but they should share the same nature. In TDK, there is no much hints about Joker’s becoming mad except some very vague sentences (How do I got this scars?), but Killing Joker offers a much more elaborate story. Before going mad, Joker was a lab assistant in a chemical plant, but later he thought he had talents in telling jokes and he quit the previous job and decided to be a stand-up comedian. His new career turned out to be a disaster and made his and his wife’s life very difficult. Under tremendous economic pressures, Joker reluctantly agreed to act as an accomplice for two other people who planned to steal from the chemical plant where Joker worked before. Just before the real action, while Joker was not at home, his wife accidentally got a electric shot and died. Sad as he was, he still had to participate in the action. The plan went wrong and Joker fell into a chemical pool, leading to his insanity. The genuineness of the story is surely in doubt, and in fact Joker himself admitted that sometimes he remembered one way sometimes the other. Anyway, all the points are there in that story. As Joker put it, “all it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy”. Joker’s wife’s tragic and arbitrary death, along with the depression inflicted by his unsuccessful career, was so unbearable to Joker then that he couldn’t live with it anymore. He went mad. He is one victim of contingency.

It might be helpful to elaborate on madness in the existential sense. Some experiences are so traumatic that the integrity of the self is in threat. When the self fails to incorporate the experiences in ordinary way, it undergoes dramatic changes at the cost of losing some grips on the reality. In Joker’s case, he cannot recall the genuine memory of the time before he went mad. This is madness.

Bruce Wayne is also a victim of contingency, or “one bad day”. His parents died of robbery and the subsequent murder. The worst part is, had Bruce not demanding early exit, his parents would have been saved. This demonstrates Joker’s point, “life is random injustice”. Suffering without meaning. How can people live with such a vision!

Both Joker and Batman, after experiencing their horrible bad days, became obsessed with their sufferings. Normal lives are impossible for them. They are searching for meanings of their sufferings. Both of them have a point to prove, though the the points are quite different. In some sense, a meaning is a perspective on an event. Batman sees the injustice he suffered from as a preventable incident, so he fights against every villain to prove his point. In contrast, Joker sees his going mad an inevitable consequence when facing with the reality, so he is always busy setting up a drama in which people will go mad under some extreme circumstances. In BTKJ, he shot and tortured Barbara (commissioner Gordon’s daughter), and later put the naked Gordon in a cage in order to drive him mad. In TDK, Joker successfully drove Dent mad but failed to have the people on the two boats blowing up each other. By the way, in light of the BKJ, the point of the two ships set-up is to drive the survivors mad as much as to horrify the public.

One last question is why Joker, as well as Batman, is so obsessed in proving a point? Especially, in the two ship set-up, why didn’t Joker play some tricks on the bombs or the ships so that one of the two ships will blow up whatever the passengers do? In that way Joker could have inflicted maximum horror on the public. It seems that Joker also wanted to prove it for himself. Logically, to prove his point Joker needs to driving everyone in the world to madness, but in real life we just see that many people are so convinced of the inevitability of their personal experiences that they don’t bother discussing them with other people. Why is Joker so apparently unconfident about his point so as to go a great length to put so much people to madness? If all other people who go through the suffering of Joker all go mad, then it is fine. However, if some of them survive, then it is possible that Joker’s going mad is not so inevitable as he claimed and that to some degree he chose to go mad. Now we touch the thing people are afraid of: our own freedom. When we choose we are aware of that there is an alternative and hence the transcendental values of our situation which many of us are accustomed to depreciate. In other words, the feeling that our situation has a solid meaning will be gone if we realize that we can choose and hence assign subjective meaning to our situation at the cost of the transcendental one. Joker is surely afraid of that his madness is chosen by him and that his meaning of suffering will flee from him. This is Joker’s deepest fear. The thing that is more unbearable than one’s suffering is the awareness that his suffering is meaningless.

Most importantly, my story is BORING! I would tell the story if I find a way to wrap it around black humor and irony, so that it would be as fun as Catch-22, so that it is highly enjoyable without diminishing the bitterness. Only then would I tell the story.

Out of fatigue, and other reasons, I found the following a good rule to follow:

“Wouldn’t it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.”

– E.M.Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

That means, I shall not complain… explicitly. Why should I tell you I have a chronic tension-type headache that is present in my every wakeful moments since 2 and a half year ago and no pain-killers help?? Since I am not able to hold my bitter feelings completely, the subsequent articles (and a lot of previous articles) are likely to be bitter. Even my smile is wry. Again, I will use black humor to alleviate the bitterness.

The publishing period will be shortened to 6 days. Next time we will take a detour and look into Gundam.

From time to time sorrow still strikes me. I am glad that the situation has not resulted in any hatred towards others, otherwise it would be too easy for me. The irony lies in that this is perhaps the first time (or the second time?) I felt like fighting. Not that I fight to gain something, for what is there to be gained from this world? I fight so that I will not devoured by sadness; I fight because this is the only way I can live after such an experience. This is a fighting with no hopes. Fighting becomes an attitude of life, the end itself rather than a means to an end.

I am not sure if it is sad that, at my age, I am still hopelessly lonely in two senses. There is no cure nor hope for it. Why not going down this path further, to a point that no one knows who you are?

If I were to cure my sadness without any considerations of risks, I should have gone into a battle-field. But I cannot. The number of ways I can fight is rather limited. I cannot just take a year’s leave and go around the world. I cannot train myself to be a Gundam pilot and drown myself in the intensity of battles. But I may drink beer during the course of my presentation. I may complain my life in a creative way. I may write that novel I planned all these years, whose genre changes gradually. I may wrap my reality around black humors and irony. I know these are not decent ways of fighting, but this world is so crappy that it does not leave me much choices.

I have no much expectations for future. I may die early. If I would survive, every year in the future would be just as boring and miserable as now, and even worse.

The loss of this kind of life-style is obvious. It is just like cutting off my limbs, but I find that my life is a little bit better. I cannot go through this trauma. I am changed. I may never be able to go back to the normal state again. But I don’t miss the self in the past. This whole thing is ironic.

“There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.”
“We are so isolated from everything! But isn’t everything equally inaccessible to us?”
– E.M.Cioran from How Distant Everything Is!, On the Heights of Despair

How Distant Everything Is! is one of my favorite chapter in Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair. The first time I read it, its explosive use of vocabulary moved me to a point that I was almost bursting into tears… of course I have no tears since 13… Then I didn’t understand what the author meant when he wrote down “distant”, “isolated” and “inaccessible”. Recently I skimmed through his biography (Searching for Cioran) and found the following paragraph that is equally touching:

Never before had his loneliness and his poverty weighed so heavy on young Emil as when he looked from his library window at the happy, careless world of the boulevards below, so close yet so inaccessible to him. To make matters worse, like all adolescents endowed with a robust nature, he was beset by a powerful sexual drive which had no outlet. The unappeased flesh tortured and humiliated him. Friendless and penniless in the alien city, what was he to do? Who would want him in his thread- bare suit, with his threatening expression, his small body? Certainly not the elegant city girls parading on the boulevard; even the prostitutes thereabouts were much too expensive for him. Only a servant girl might be willing to be taken to the theatre or an exhibition. He had not forgotten the Cella incident and once again solemnly renounced all frivolities, flirting, and amorous adventures, throwing himself into his reading with redoubled, pent-up energy.

Reading through this, I couldn’t help citing from How again: “We are so closed to each other!” So everyone can guess that here begins my story, but my story is a paradoxical term. My story is a non-story: Nothing really happens; nothing really matters. I am living like a ghost, having left no trails, shed no tears, broken no hearts… The defining incidence happened like this:

Weeks before the university entrance exam, on an afternoon, this one friend of mine and I were leaving school with a girl. We separated before the school gate. I was walking home, and they took the sub-way. Months later, I happened to know that they kissed in the train station. Considering that I was also interested in the same girl, this is a perfect experience of “so closed yet so inaccessible”. My life is just like that, but does it even qualify as life? I am on the fringe of everything.

WT told me that he is afraid his life would be fixed as he is working at a nuclear power plant and has remote prospect of a job change. I said more or less I have the same feeling. All these years I have been seeing my possibilities closed one after another. Recent experiences lead to the loss of all my hopes. There are not much things I can do now so I would just like to devote most of my energy to just one thing, to read all I can read, just for my curiosity.

I write with the tears I have never shed.

I really should not write too much details about my recent experiences but since they are so important in my life that I cannot get around them. I will just ignore most of the details.

Since the last weekend, I have been riding on an emotional roller coaster. There were multiple causes to my condition. The annoying cold that had lasted for two weeks. Having eaten slightly rotten breads for weeks. The mild depression that had lasted for years. And other causes.

(Saturday — sad-day?) First I was overwhelmed by a fit of sadness, which destroyed all my interests in daily activities. Unable to work or study, I spent the night watching Crimson Pig, the movie, but sadness still dominate. Probably because of all kinds of drugs I had taken for the cold, I felt physically very weak but still could not fall sleep that night.

The next morning I did not even have the will to get out of my bed. I was quite sure that I had depression before, but, compared to the feeling at the moment, those experiences of depression just looked like jokes. In the afternoon I mustered enough courage to go out of the dormitory to have an afternoon tea. Sunshine helped, but it didn’t last. Still having no mood to work or study, I turned to read E.M.Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair and his biography. I came across the book Despair in high school time and am always aware that, though paradoxically as it might seem, this gloomy and intense book talking about sufferings, deaths and suicides, actually can be a temporary cure for emotional sufferings. I was meant to write about it in one previous article, but had never quite made it. I loved the gloomy style of the book, though at that time (high school) I couldn’t link what the author wrote with my personal experiences. But this time, it looked like a reference to my personal experiences. Same as the author, I cannot cry even at the moment of emotional crisis. Torture! Tears that fail to make it through your eyes will burn inside. I was so touched by the book as though it was a revelation.

The logic of the cure is, by metaphorically committing a suicide, for example by writing a book whose main character committed a suicide, a real suicide is postponed. As Cioran put it, a book is a postponed suicide. Anyway I was not that close to suicide at all. According to the Cioran’s biography, the German writer Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther to deal with his personal crisis, following perhaps the same logic. I cannot help thinking that Wuthering Heights was perhaps also a cure for its author considering its intensity.

On Sunday night the sadness was slightly relieved. Unfortunately again I ate two pieces of slightly rotten breads, leading to the subsequent sickness and insomnia. The feeling of physical sickness temporarily dominated the night of insomnia. The next morning I was so sick that I spent the whole morning on bed. When I was about to eat the last piece of the rotten breads, I suddenly realized what contributed to the sickness. At the time, an odor of gutter came of my stomach. In the afternoon, I felt I was on steroid that finally I was temporarily back on my feet. Sadness still dominated. Reviewing for the exam at this kind of mood was almost impossible.

On Tuesday, there was a brief moment of surge in my mood at noon. I felt I was strong enough that not only am I able to make it through this, but also I can take more hits and still maintain goodwill towards the world and other people. At other time, sadness ruled.

Sadness was the first to greet me when I woke up on Wednesday morning. Again at noon, the mood surged, but surrendered to sadness subsequently. At the evening, the sadness built up to a point that I was desperately searching for anything that can lead to the shedding of tears, without success. Around midnight, Suddenly I felt emotionally detached. For quite a long time I had not felt that good. I didn’t feel sad about bad timing. Also I was calm enough to think about abstract concepts. Cioran’s works lost some of its appeals. This is referred to, in the biography, yet another temporary cure for despair, to immerse yourself in abstract thinkings that bear no connections to your inner self.

In fact, I am always riding on an emotional roller coaster, but the recent one was exceptionally great. Sometimes I am just mysteriously trapped in melancholy and cannot get out. Some gloomy articles were written at times of melancholy. But don’t worry, I will eventually get out of that.

This also raises an interesting philosophical question. The decision of writing this article was made at a mood pleasantly emotional detachment. My mood now is slight melancholy (it’s not very appropriate to call it depressed), which means had not been the decision I made before I wouldn’t have written this article. Is the emotional detached me the same as the melancholy me? How should I regard the decision I made in a very different mood?

At the time of editing, I felt sad again.

For me, dreams can be wonderful, but sometimes they can be extremely frustrating. In fact, frustrating dreams impress me more than wonderful dreams do. One major recurrent theme in my frustrating dreams is being late for school. This is intriguing because I cannot even recall a single instance of being late for school in my real life, excluding undergraduate time of course.

There are two major variants in my being late dream. The first variant is that many things happened to me, preventing me from even getting out of my home, let alone going to school. All kinds of annoying things could delay me, such as not being able to find the textbooks. In the second variant, the situation was ridiculous. The bus I took (in real life I didn’t take bus to school, I always walked) did not arrive at the right station. There were a lot of things on the way distracting me. Sometimes I could not recognized the correct routes to school. Sometimes, the whole city was restructuring itself to work against me! This is plainly absurd! When I read Kafka’s novels, like the Castle and the Trial, I was amazed that the frustrating situations encountered by protagonist resemble to the situations in being late dreams. The short story the Metamorphosis, also by Kafka, provides another good example. The protagonist woke up one day and found himself transformed into a insect-like creature, but he still tried to tackle the situation like he did before. At the end he died.

Those dreams also reminded me of a philosophical concept, the Absurd. While there are many versions of the definition for absurd, I prefer the one used by Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. (Translated loosely from the Chinese version) The Absurd is the conflict between man’s desire to understand the world and the world’s silent refusal to be understood. This silent refusal sometimes may resemble a invisible hand preventing you from achieving anything significant, like I being kept from arriving on time for school in my dreams. I also like the way Sartre phrased the Absurd. He said, (also translated loosely from the Chinese version) Absurd is a state that there are no sufficient reasons for everything in the world to exist in the way they are; everything is contingent.

The second kinds of frustrating dreams can be roughly described in the following sentences. In the dream, I remembered there were something interesting, such as things and books, in a particular place and I was going there to buy it. When I arrived at the destination, I could not spot the thing I desired. Then I discovered something similar but less desirable, so I continued searching for something better. As I searched, the interesting but less desirable books or the items started to transform something mundane. In the end, everything at the place lost their appeals. I cannot find a word to express my frustrations at that moment. The interpretation of this type of dream is actually quite ordinary. It is just the reflection of my hesitation when facing potentially important decisions.

I just checked the site stats. It is still in the well of gravity, so I offer a bonus to my readers who took pain to go through the paragraphs above. I will describe my most frustrating “spring” dream. I will skip the offensive details. So there were me and another female. We were going to have some action. As I stripped off her clothes, her breasts transformed to a flat male chest before I could even touch them. Similarly, the female genitals transformed into male genitals. Could you imagine a situation which is more frustrating than that?

I complained a lot in the early days of my blog. The first few articles in this blog actually did quite a lot of damage. In an article which was deleted long ago, I complained about my life in the primary school and claimed that some of my classmates should be held responsible for my misery. I forgot what I wrote until one day I invited one of my former classmates to visit my blog. Immediately she expressed her anger because she was one of the classmates I resented in that article. That was really unexpected.

So these days from time to time I will check my previous articles to see if there are anything damaging, including comments on former classmates, or teachers. If any article was found inappropriate, I will edit it or just directly remove them.

In the first year of my university life, many of my former classmates didn’t seem to understand the difference between UST and any ordinary universities in mainland, except that the tuition fee of UST is much higher. While in some middle schools in GZ, graduates who were admitted by UST, CU or HKU were treated as “celebrities”, I didn’t get any treatment from my middle school. I was so upset then and after some former classmates repeatedly shown interest in the amount of tuition fee I paid, I went so far as to verbally attack them. I don’t want to mention the results. Why did I care about these? After all, I was a person who would go after vanity.

In retrospect, this is really unnecessarily damaging. In fact, I could have done many things much better…

Don’t you think Sunday night is a bit depressing?

Though my major is physics, I seldom wrote anything about it, nor did I write anything about science. Mostly I wrote about philosophy. Not long ago I realized I didn’t and still don’t know much about philosophy. I will avoid writing philosophy from now on and will only write things that I am familiar. These days I rarely had the urge to write, which is a symptom of mild depression.

The reason why I care my blog so much is that I was not popular and I am still not popular. If you think this reason is a bit shallow, I will immediately provide you another one: my world is always small. I don’t know why but I am always ending up living in a small world, so small that sometimes I felt suffocated. My blog should have been a door to a larger world but my blog has failed me.

So frustrating… so depressing…