Philosophical Imagination, Aesthetics, and Creative Writing

Author: Lou Hsienhua

  • Soul-searching Reflections on Culture, Resistance, and Our Voice

    By Tome Loulin 娄桦林（笔名）

    Also known as Hsienhua Lou, Tome Loulin lives in Hubei’s Qianjiang city and is currently a graduate student of translation studies. Email: letters@zhexuezhe.com

    Exclusiveness, it occurs to me, is the nature of culture. This trait has so far in our documented history shaped and redefined the way we live now since everything sophisticated enough to be taken seriously involves cultural elements. Thus, a radicalization of our cultural imagination in this digital era, whose power of shaping our views about other groups of people seems so powerful, may itself seem like a romantic defense of our right to reclaim our cultural identity, which defines the meaning of our life, because many people do see culture as a imagined home that harbors our dreams, ambitious or not. And home means being free, free to truly see ourselves as what we are, free of malicious attacks from those intolerant of what we value, love, and cherish. And sometimes, the yearning of a home, it holds, reflects a sense of insecurity inside us. Living is, overall, like a journey to find that home, one that’s ideal, free, safe, and accepting.

    A harmonious in-group experience, we tend to believe, exists. And it does only when a specific kind of cultural idealization is backed by many inside of that cultural home. But this identity is truly a fleeting thing and its survival depends on the very values we hold. That’s where the generational gaps started and kept accelerating because a moral standard deemed widely accepting and normal may appear horrifyingly limiting and flawed. Time flies and people change their minds so fast that its process is sometimes unnoticeable. The notion of an inclusive community where every specific way of life is respected and accepted is usually filling up our growing discontentment with this rather dysfunctional and dystopian social reality. That the narratives told by those self-proclaimed cultural supremacists aim at defining moral righteousness demonstrates why certain talks about contemporary culture and society have been largely dominated by those intolerant of cultural equality and diversity. Our spiritual existence is, you may agree, constantly under threat from political-motivated hatreds against other groups because of their very preferences for certain ways of life or, in certain cases, of their biological features.

    The time I started noticing certain reports posted on serval internationally influential news media is a time of recognizing how far this ongoing cultural alienization could go. Truth be told, rarely would there be a writer whose creative power wasn’t influenced, in some ways, by the anxieties posed by the geopolitical tensions occurring at the his/her time. The cultural scenes dominating today’s news media are, indeed, aimed at being ideologically, culturally correct, meaning what we see now is merely a controlled representation of how should this world we share be viewed by countless eager minds. In his ‘1984‘, Reality, Orwell wrote, exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Yet, to concretize his phantasm of an internalized cultural and political dystopia, it appears, proves to be tormenting. Human imaginations–or idealizations–of a fixed, permanent home are indeed an expected universality whose meanings we should, as expected, have no difficulty of comprehending. But why—given this century’s rapid advancement of information technology and our expanding knowledge about a swath of cultural terrains previously unknown to us—are the misunderstandings about people from different countries gotten deepened?

    Public opinions are prone to manipulations. There comes this new experience of living in this culturally radical era and of being immersed in a sea of phenomenal misunderstanding of what does the concept of being ‘the cultural and social Other’ mean. ‘People’ as a concept widely used in journalistic and cultural talks to get certain manipulators’ agenda done is a cliché whose power to make us feel home would hardly subside for this imaged cultural home is so much in need at a time characterized by social indifference that impacts the way we live now.

    There have been so many opinion pieces warning us about the danger of certain countries as it turns out. Also, there are war talkers whose ‘analyses’ or ‘opinions’ published or deliberated on mainstream media impact the way the readers make sense about the perceived ‘enemies’. Theirs was a way of ceaselessly warning about the threat from an ‘enemy’ usually out of the reason that its political system is different or not rule-based. It’s since when that the notion of protecting the values become synonymous with boundless hatred and violence inciting? Warmongers often believe in order to have peace kept, wars are inevitable or, in some extent, worth waging as long as it is good at achieving their agandas. Those who voice their concerns about wars, any war, are often attacked and labeled as apologists.

    War of any kind is a selfish act as its impact on the displaced, wounded, homeless, affected could only be the worst thing ever thinkable, something not only hard to behold but to experience. Yet, on certain newspapers, there are opinion sections full of pieces telling, or warning if you will, readers how dangerous is a perceived geopolitical competitor or the threat from it. It will, some may argue, disrupt the way of life as we know it if we don’t take critical actions against those perceived enemies.

    “Sooner or later, an explosion will occur. Yet substituting confrontation for engagement is reckless and futile if the west is not prepared to put its money, political muscle and ultimately its armed forces where its mouth is.” the opinionator, Simon Tisdall, lamented in his piece published on the Guardian in July, warning that there will be ‘an explosion’ occurring between the two countries he mentioned. What kind of an explosion? How damaging is it?

    “Confrontations, political muscle, armed forces, explosion, and futile” these words, it turns out, have the power to get the least political-sensitive person shocked if it didn’t seem crucial for the reader to see the evidences required to prove the urgency of taking measures against the described and perceived ‘threat’ before reaching out to a conclusion. Since it is always the cautious ‘analyses’ about other countries that come first to readers before facts, it is no exaggeration to say that now despite recognizing that ideological one-sidedness and partiality defined the characters of today’s news media, holding a more friendly and positive attitude towards another culture different to ours becomes unlikely. War-wagers are praised, in many instances, as guards, fighters whose precautious talks about war are to be widely disseminated from one era to another, compulsorily learned by all members of the society’s young. Often forgotten are the horrors experienced by so many who were displaced, resettled, homeless and died during various wars.

    There is a photograph by Carl Mydans—first published on LIFE magazine—captioned: ruins of village near Penghu in Chinese civil war. Framed in the black and white picture is a woman, her head turbaned with traditional Chinese headwear, simple-dressed, in despair, helplessly and heart-brokenly kneeing in front of what appeared to be her hut that was ruined in the war, perhaps, by fire. The ruined hut that was almost unrecognizable with only some brunt pillars remaining standing. With Mydans’ photography, this framed painfulness becomes eternal. One even without prior knowledge about photojournalism would know how hard and heart-rendering it is to experience war, indeed, any kind of war, whether firsthand or second.

    Yet photographs, overall, do not provide us a visual experience that had them taken in the first place; instead, what photography does provide are various visual spaces it creates in our minds, leading us through the scenes similiar to the original ones that led photographers to press the shutter. The looking of photographs, it appears, always suggests a secondhand, alternative reality whose psychological significance brings us to a limited area of subjective imagining. But after seeing Mydans’ pictures, one could only get more uncertain about the war than about the sufferings immortalized inside the frames: where had the woman affected by the war gone? And how was she?

    There were no answers.

    It seems confusing perhaps for—if the horrors of war suffered by those silenced, wounded, killed in wars remain disregarded—such photographs, indeed, will be innumerous.

  • Extraordinary, Critical Seeings

    By Tome Loulin 娄林桦（笔名）, also known as Hsienhua Lou, he lives in Hubei’s Qianjiang city and is currently a graduate student of translation studies.

    There are many different ways of seeing, all of which picture us as something other than ourselves. Seeing, as the saying goes, is believing, perhaps, because the power it has on our belief system seems too powerful to resist. And the cognitive authority of seeing that makes people believe whatever comes around them is prone to abuse. For seeing as a way of interpretation, there are ordinary seeings, biased, partial, undesired seeings, free and imaginative seeings, critical or uncritical seeings. Here, the exact types of seeing I wish to discuss are critical and imaginative seeings from which our self image comes to shape.

    What follows are some points of view on the very happenings around certain places whereto I have for years stayed close at this critical era whose characteristics, it’s occurred to me, are a fluid and puzzling mixture of radical thinkings. These thoughts whose spreading around world has, at least partially, helped accelerate an ongoing process of social degeneration, can be seen in some ways as a salient form of resistance under pressure from the irresistible force of time to a haunted experience of cultural invisibility, misrepresentation, and ignorance. What was left untouched in this complete washing of our dreams along the bank of meaninglessness may be our already dimmed hope about a spiritual and personal betterment. I see, through the reflections of myself, strangers, concretes, and other things tedious, dull, beautiful, noticeable or ignorable on the dark grey window glasses I passed by in the streets of Wuhan and other cities in Hubei. It is our senses that, you may agree, shaped our very idea of what it is like for a person to be alive in this world and of what this world should look like physically. This should-look-ness provides us with the constant fresh flow of critical idealization of our spirituality and takes our imagination home.

    What we see or don’t may, it appears, set the boundary of our artistic imagination. Here we are, seeing ourselves in glasses, mirrors, other people’s eyes, and any other reflective surfaces. These ways of seeing generate images that are said to be reflective of our characters, appearances, preferences whose core representations we, in the seeable and sensible world, try hard not to be distorted by the means of external seeings, perhaps, out of the fear that every image of us generated by other ways of seeing may critically threaten the survival of our very ability of seeing ourselves in a more sublime light ever imaginable in our otherworldly-defined spiritual sensation.

    Seeing, it occurs to me, is essential to our ability to interpret who we are and defines the boundary between self and other. But what matters regarding different way of seeing, you may agree, is that the power to believe what we see is so strong that false impressions or stereotyped images we have formed about others or others have about us may threaten the freedom of our self-imagination. To be seen by others as something other than what one thinks oneself of is the reason why knowing oneself is a lifelong task. If we let other person’s imagination about ourselves dictate, we will lose the way. The purpose of this learning-driven kind of seeing is, perhaps, to make sure that what we see stays true to our beliefs that we are, overall, special for it is our own self who can see the potential and possibility of a self-transcendence that could hardly be seen by others. And it is we ourselves who have the ability to cast inside of us a new light whose uniqueness may determine the way of our becoming. In different cultural systems that shape how in-groupers see themselves collectively, seldom will there be no sayings emphasizing how important it is to realize the fleetingness of the images or the impressions we formed inside about certain things. Things whose change, for instance, may appear so transformational that if we don’t pay attention, we may lose our ways. Resisting it may risk us to see others in distorted lens, creating inaccurate stereotypes about things and people we thought we know.

    Interpersonal seeings, which in many ways inter-influence people’s attitude towards others, are usually critical, unloving, unflattering in many different social settings. The most pronounced feature of this over-industrialized era may be that the treatment certain people could get in certain societies may be decided by their social occupations, origin of birth, age, or, in some cases, physical appearances. There are upward seeings, and downward ones. What your image looks like in others’ eyes has been, you may agree, determined by how well you fulfill the idealized or normalized standards widely accepted by a society such as the prestigious-ness of the university one graduates, the number of houses or cars one owns. Those sleeping outdoors, homeless, low-wage earners obtain only a friction of this society’s critical attention perhaps, out of the reason that if we see to much, there will only be more unbearable scenes to be discovered. It’s, you may think, endless.

    What happens when I told someone who asks where my home is that I don’t know where to specify. Oh, you must feel many places home, the questioner may think. But the truth is otherwise. For many people, there may be little or no difficulties to answer questions about where we come from or where we feel home if the places one feels close to or home happens to be Beijing, New York, London, Shanghai, Quito, Rome or anywhere else whose cultural and imaginative significance created and shaped by various popular artist, authors, photographers, film directors, and journalists appears to be a spontaneous immediacy. But mine is somewhere that rarely have some people heard even in my own country, let alone in others. Geographical locations are destinies. I come from small places whose overlooked-ness also reflects a partial seeing that has been favored by our culture that uncritically instills a belief that in today’s world, the point of seeing is to make a point. A point of seeing is not a judgement, or is it?

    The fact that seeing can provide us pleasures if we focus on certain things we deemed to be worth seeing indicates that our self-image, overall, is the product of our own idealization of how should we be seen; the point is how should ourselves be seen by ourselves. Am I good at this or that, or have I been fashionable or cool, people may wonder if they wish to appear more like their imagined selves. But there are certain occasions one could not even afford to take proper care of how other people will see them.

    It was a breezily hot summer evening and I was sitting inside of a Starbucks in Hankou of Wuhan this year, not ordering anything but waiting a friend of mine to finish his shopping at a Sam’s Club nearby. Because this friend’s home is in the outskirts of Wuhan where getting anything after the nearest convenient store closed at nine pm appeared impossible and he had to buy groceries and ready-to-cook food almost in bulk, the time spent on waiting for him to finish the shopping was going to be long. Directionless, I was, as always, immersed in my own imaginative way of seeing the world by looking outside of the window at whatever would appear before it. A bit confused, an old man perhaps in his sixties in a white T-shirt well wore came into the cafe, looking aimless and trying to appear fine as he went across the tables to sit down on a sofa.When he sat down his gaze looked determined, contemplative, but also sentimental. Nobody, including a little boy who asked me what I was seeing outside, apparently out of his wonder that I seemed attracted by something else that he didn’t see. I wasn’t, actually, seeing anything that boy might have missed but the old man sitting silent and looking saddened by things I might not know and he might find hard to disclose to others. The man looked so sad that his eyes were, like, tearful. When he left the cafe, nobody seemed to notice. Why didn’t he, I wondered, stay inside longer for the outside was so hot and full of indifferent gazes. But what a difference could it make to stay a bit longer inside as the old man seemed to have seen enough of what he couldn’t bear to behold. Perhaps, the temperature inside of the cafe, I thought, was too cold to stay.

    Seeing, I think, is not an illusive re-imagination of what we have seen, or is it?

  • This Tranquility, Long Missed

    By Tome Loulin

    From a very early time of that summer, I come to imagine that it would only be a matter of time before we again walk together, only to realize that a thing that comes along easily doesn’t necessarily walk away the same way. Everything, it occurred, comes and departs in its own preferred way.

    It was about time for me to go home just as you were ready to work when the summer sun whose light glistened through the window of your room was in its prime near Hankou’s side of Yangzi. Seeing my worried face, and voice lowered, you said the watch lost a day ago when we strolled together around a lakeside really wasn’t that important. “It just isn’t.” you assured me, rejecting the offer I proposed to buy a watch for you.

    Pinned on the wall of your room were postcards and letters of gratitude you received—from individuals you encountered before in the different stages of your life. In one of such photos appeared a couple in their middle fifties squatting beside a dog before their house near–if I didn’t remember it wrong– Nashville, Tennessee. Before your vivid and detailed recounts about your life in Nashville many years ago, your experience of working there as a K-12 teacher of Mandarin Chinese, the room you rented there, and the beautiful pictures about you and the students you taught, I knew almost nothing substantial about Nashville other than it being the heart of American country music, let alone any intimate imagination about it. In one of these photos appeared houseplants placed on a wooden desk in your previous room; besides a nightstand was a black iron single bed covered with white beddings. And when you talked about Nashville, your voice was like, I felt, filled with ineffable liveliness that was lovingly touching to me as if all of the things that you recounted—green plants, your students, and the days you spent in the States—were emerging afresh from your memory, rippling across mine.

    On the windowsill were potted plants you took care of thoroughly; beside it several lucky bamboos in vases growing with time bigger and bigger. Such is the delicacy and sophistication of the way the room was decorated that so much was said, I thought, of your carefulness of life’s beautifulness. After we saw the sun set and biked along the lake of Donghu together, the electronic watch you wore was lost, you, astride the bike seat, said, leaving me several meters away from you speechless because I didn’t expect such thing to happen in a time when all I was thinking of was how could I maintain a happy memory for us and a good impression of me to you. And it was the first time we set our feet together to walk in a park where trees were everywhere though everyone who came here looked indifferent to the issue we encountered.

    There was like a sea of people waving up and down on the road by the winds coming afar when I tried to bike as fast as I could to go back to where the watch could perhaps get lost. “If this is truly lost,” I thought, “this evening would be a very upsettingly remembered one.” So, losing almost no time of searching and lying the bike on the ground unlocked, I checked bench after bench near where we had sat around of the evening but found no clue of its whereabouts.

    “Why this worried,” you said to me, “it’s truly unnecessary for I could buy another one.”

    But somehow, aware of your voice lowered, though still touchingly soft, I felt that until the lost thing be recovered, our sentiment towards each other would never be the same as before. I insisted to buy a watch as a gift to you but very determinedly you refused. So it occurred to me that your sentiment is perhaps that if it was truly lost, so be it. I was not this prepared for this suddenness of change occurred during that evening walk.

    Life changes fast. And it truly does, I think when reading the opening lines of Didion’s the Year of Magical Thinking.

    Life changes in the instant.

    And I start to think of the way we think about each other.

    As we walk around the lake and try to know each more, the way we thought of one another exists no longer.

    Sideways were bikers speeding toward another way after we got our way back to the room you rented but I wasn’t attentive as was before. Of course, the feeling I had that evening after the event was a travail matter of personal tranquility compared to other life matters but what challenged this sense of triviality was that a parent of the student in your class contacted you and asked whether the watch picked by a stranger in the park was yours thanks to the phone numbers you saved in the watch. I was in surprise, especially after my doubt that there would be zero possibility to find the lost watch given the current social reality characterized by radical indifference of social connections.

    Away summer goes and comes back.
Along the lake bank
Over the water was the reflection of the sun
Setting westward back. 

-Loulin

    “Believe in the goodness of people.” You had said then. And it was then I was to wonder whether there was such thing as destiny. And from a very early age, immersed in Chinese cultural environment while growing up, I knew destiny is a concept widely believed by many and it was not until the turn of the century that the concept was to lose some of its attractions to younger generations.

    But I knew, in that moment, the coincidence couldn’t be more demonstrative to me, which is, you were like the sun whose light shone through the heart of the wounded. It occurred, like what you had already been doing, that to see the positive side of, if possible, everything is how can we better regard the pains we felt while growing up.

    Though I lost your connection due to my own carelessness, I tried hard, if not helplessly, to imagine that I didn’t because that experience was just too cherishing to lose.

    In trying times like this when everything reported or described on newspaper appears horrifyingly intentioned and purposed, I start to think of the time I spent with you in the very evening, perhaps years before. And it is healing.

    This memory, though certain details of it are blurred with time, still seems so close to me that my tears well up when I look back to the pictures I took then or anything related to that memory.