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2006/07/18 通知2006/05/06 The God of Small Things CHAPTER ONEBy ARUNDHATI ROY
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.
The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.
She was Rahel's baby grandaunt, her grandfather's younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn't come to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grandaunt labored under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. "Dizygotic" doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha--Esthappen--was the older by eighteen minutes.
They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chasted, wormridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual "Who is who?" and "Which is which?" from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem House for donations.
The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.
In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for instance (though she hadn't been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches--Estha's sandwiches, that Estha ate--on the Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the small things.
Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They'd be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the winding tea-estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha and Rahel's father had to hold their mother's stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.
According to Estha, if they'd been born on the bus, they'd have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn't clear where he'd got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.
They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest town, but they'd seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was a two-hour drive away.
The Government never paid for Sophie Mol's funeral because she wasn't killed on a zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha and Rahel's cousin, their uncle Chacko's daughter. She was visiting from England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was almost nine. She had a special child-sized coffin.
Satin lined.
Brass handle shined.
She lay in it in her yellow Crimplene bell-bottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi's thumb from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the coffin, and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled at babies the way they did on usual Sundays.
The long candles on the altar were bent. The short ones weren't.
An old lady masquerading as a distant relative (whom nobody recognized, but who often surfaced next to bodies at funerals--a funeral junkie? A latent necrophiliac?) put cologne on a wad of cotton wool and with a devout and gently challenging air, dabbed it on Sophie Mol's forehead. Sophie Mol smelled of cologne and coffinwood.
Margaret Kochamma, Sophie Mol's English mother, wouldn't let Chacko, Sophie Mol's biological father, put his arm around her to comfort her.
The family stood huddled together. Margaret Kochamma, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, and next to her, her sister-in-law, Mammachi--Estha and Rahel's (and Sophie Mol's) grandmother. Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses when she went out of the house. Her tears trickled down from behind them and trembled along her jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof. She looked small and ill in her crisp off-white sari. Chacko was Mammachi's only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.
Though Ammu, Estha and Rahel were allowed to attend the funeral, they were made to stand separately, not with the rest of the family. Nobody would look at them.
It was hot in the church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died in a coffin flower. Ammu's hands shook and her hymnbook with it. Her skin was cold. Estha stood close to her, barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like glass, his burning cheek against the bare skin of Ammu's trembling, hymnbook-holding arm.
Rahel, on the other hand, was wide awake, fiercely vigilant and brittle with exhaustion from her battle against Real Life.
She noticed that Sophie Mol was awake for her funeral. She showed Rahel Two Things.
Thing One was the newly painted high dome of the yellow church that Rahel hadn't ever looked at from the inside. It was painted blue like the sky, with drifting clouds and tiny whizzing jet planes with white trails that crisscrossed in the clouds. It's true (and must be said) that it would have been easier to notice these things lying in a coffin looking up than standing in the pews, hemmed in by sad hips and hymnbooks.
Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner. She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, barebodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky.
She thought of what would happen if the rope snapped. She imagined him dropping like a dark star out of the sky that he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret.
By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Thing Two that Sophie Mol showed Rahel was the bat baby.
During the funeral service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma's expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a "Whatisit? Whathappened?" and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.
The sad priests dusted out their curly beards with goldringed fingers as though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them.
The baby bat flew up into the sky and turned into a jet plane without a crisscrossed trail.
Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol's secret cartwheel in her coffin.
The sad singing started again and they sang the same sad verse twice. And once more the yellow church swelled like a throat with voices.
When they lowered Sophie Mol's coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn't dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol's behalf) the softsounds of the red mud and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dullthudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priests' voices muffled by mud and wood.
We entrust into thy hands, most merciful Father, The soul of this our child departed. And we commit her body to the ground, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can't hear screams through earth and stone. Sophie Mol died because she couldn't breathe.
Her funeral killed her. Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus. On her tomb-stone it said A SUNBEAM LENT TO US TOO BRIEFLY.
Ammu explained later that Too Briefly meant For Too Short a While.
After the funeral Ammu took the twins back to the Kottayam police station. They were familiar with the place. They had spent a good part of the previous day there. Anticipating the sharp, smoky stink of old urine that permeated the walls and furniture, they clamped their nostrils shut well before the smell began.
Ammu asked for the Station House Officer, and when she was shown into his office she told him that there had been a terrible mistake and that she wanted to make a statement. She asked to see Velutha.
Inspector Thomas Mathew's mustaches bustled like the friendly Air India Maharajah's, but his eyes were sly and greedy.
"It's a little too late for all this, don't you chink?" he said. He spoke the coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Ammu's breasts as he spoke. He said the police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn't take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children. Ammu said she'd see about that. Inspector Thomas Mathew came around his desk and approached Ammu with his baton.
"If I were you," he said, "I'd go home quietly." Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn't. Policemen have that instinct.
Behind him a red and blue board said:
Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courtesy. Efficiency. When they left the police station Ammu was crying, so Estha and Rahel didn't ask her what veshya meant. Or, for that matter, illegitimate. It was the first time they'd seen their mother cry. She wasn't sobbing. Her face was set like stone, but the tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her rigid cheeks. It made the twins sick with fear. Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real. They went back to Ayemenem by bus. The conductor, a narrow man in khaki, slid towards them on the bus rails. He balanced his bony hips against the back of a seat and clicked his ticket-puncher at Ammu. Where to? the click was meant to mean. Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the steel bus rails on the conductor's hands.
"He's dead," Ammu whispered to him. "I've killed him."
"Ayemenem," Estha said quickly, before the conductor lost his temper.
He took the money out of Ammu's purse. The conductor gave him the tickets. Estha folded them carefully and put them in his pocket. Then he put his little arms around his rigid, weeping mother.
Two weeks later, Estha was Returned. Ammu was made to send him back to their father, who had by then resigned his lonely tea-estate job in Assam and moved to Calcutta to work for a company that made carbon black. He had remarried, stopped drinking (more or less) and suffered only occasional relapses.
Estha and Rahel hadn't seen each other since.
And now, twenty-three years later, their father had re-Returned Estha. He had sent him back to Ayemenem with a suitcase and a letter. The suitcase was full of smart new clothes. Baby Kochamma showed Rahel the letter. It was written in a slanting, feminine, convent-school hand, but the signature underneath was their father's. Or at least the name was. Rahel wouldn't have recognized the signature. The letter said that he, their father, had retired from his carbon-black job and was emigrating to Australia, where he had got a job as Chief of Security at a ceramics factory, and that he couldn't take Estha with him. He wished everybody in Ayemenem the very best and said that he would look in on Estha if he ever came back to India, which, he went on to say, was a bit unlikely.
Baby Kochamma told Rahel that she could keep the letter if she wanted to. Rahel put it back into its envelope. The paper had grown soft, and folded like cloth.
She had forgotten just how damp the monsoon air in Ayemenem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on Baby Kochamma's dim forty-watt bulbs. In the daytime their crisp, incinerated corpses littered the floor and windowsills, and until Kochu Maria swept them away in her plastic dustpan, the air smelled of Something Burning.
It hadn't changed, the June Rain.
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent.
Further away, in the wind and rain, on the banks of the river, in the sudden thunderdarkness of the day, Estha was walking. He was wearing a crushed-strawberry-pink T-shirt, drenched darker now, and he knew that Rahel had come.
Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.
Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
After Sophie Mol's funeral, when Estha was Returned, their father sent him to a boys' school in Calcutta. He was not an exceptional student, but neither was he backward, nor particularly bad at anything. An average student, or Satisfactory work were the usual comments that his teachers wrote in his Annual Progress Reports. Does not participate in Group Activities was another recurring complaint. Though what exactly they meant by "Group Activities" they never said.
Estha finished school with mediocre results, but refused to go to college. Instead, much to the initial embarrassment of his father and stepmother, he began to do the housework. As though in his own way he was trying to earn his keep. He did the sweeping, swabbing and all the laundry. He learned to cook and shop for vegetables. Vendors in the bazaar, sitting behind pyramids of oiled, shining vegetables, grew to recognize him and would attend to him amidst the clamoring of their other customers. They gave him rusted film cans in which to put the vegetables he picked. He never bargained. They never cheated him. When the vegetables had been weighed and paid for, they would transfer them to his red plastic shopping basket (onions at the bottom, brinjal and tomatoes on the top) and always a sprig of coriander and a fistful of green chilies for free. Estha carried them home in the crowded tram. A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise.
At mealtimes, when he wanted something, he got up and helped himself.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.
When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel decided to stage a miserable, long-drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow depended on it. In the last months of his life, Khubchand, who had the best of intentions but the most unreliable of bladders, would drag himself to the top-hinged dog-flap built into the bottom of the door that led out into the back garden, push his head through it and urinate unsteadily, bright yellowly, inside. Then, with bladder empty and conscience clear, he would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his grizzled skull like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leaving wet footprints on the floor. As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across. To Estha--steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man--the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog's balls. It made him smile out loud.
After Khubchand died, Estha started his walking. He walked for hours on end. Initially he patrolled only the neighborhood, but gradually went farther and farther afield.
People got used to seeing him on the road. A well-dressed man with a quiet walk. His face grew dark and outdoorsy. Rugged. Wrinkled by the sun. He began to look wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him.
Now that he'd been re-Returned, Estha walked all over Ayemenem.
Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils.
Other days he walked down the road. Past the new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks, who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. Past the resentful older houses tinged green with envy, cowering in their private driveways among their private rubber trees. Each a tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own.
He walked past the village school that his great-grandfather built for Untouchable children.
Past Sophie Mol's yellow church. Past the Ayemenem Youth Kung Fu Club. Past the Tender Buds Nursery School (for Touchables), past the ration shop that sold rice, sugar and bananas that hung in yellow bunches from the roof. Cheap soft-porn magazines about fictitious South Indian sex-fiends were clipped with clothes pegs to ropes that hung from the ceiling. They spun lazily in the warm breeze, tempting honest ration-buyers with glimpses of ripe, naked women Lying in pools of fake blood.
Sometimes Estha walked past Lucky Press--old Comrade K.N.M. Pillai's printing press, once the Ayemenem office of the Communist Party, where midnight study meetings were held, and pamphlets with rousing lyrics of Marxist Party songs were printed and distributed. The flag that fluttered on the roof had grown limp and old. The red had bled away.
Comrade Pillai himself came out in the mornings in a graying Aertex vest, his balls silhouetted against his soft white mundu. He oiled himself with warm, peppered coconut oil, kneading his old, loose flesh that stretched willingly off his bones like chewing gum. He lived alone now. His wife, Kalyani, had died of ovarian cancer. His son, Lenin, had moved to Delhi, where he worked as a services contractor for foreign embassies.
If Comrade Pillai was outside his house oiling himself when Estha walked past, he made it a point to greet him.
"Estha Mon!" he would call out, in his high, piping voice, frayed and fibrous now, like sugarcane stripped of its bark. "Good morning! Your daily constitutional?"
Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet.
Comrade Pillai would slap himself all over to get his circulation going. He couldn't tell whether Estha recognized him after all those years or not. Not that he particularly cared. Though his part in the whole thing had by no means been a small one, Comrade Pillai didn't hold himself in any way personally responsible for what had happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics. The old omelette-and-eggs thing. But then, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was essentially a political man. A professional omeletteer. He walked through the world like a chameleon. Never revealing himself, never appearing not to. Emerging through chaos unscathed.
He was the first person in Ayemenem to hear of Rahel's return. The news didn't perturb him as much as excite his curiosity. Estha was almost a complete stranger to Comrade Pillai. His expulsion from Ayemenem had been so sudden and unceremonious, and so very long ago. But Rahel Comrade Pillai knew well. He had watched her grow up. He wondered what had brought her back. After all these years.
It had been quiet in Estha's head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade and light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat. The world, locked out for years, suddenly flooded in, and now Estha couldn't hear himself for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The stock market. A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in a swirling. Comets, violins, parades, loneliness, clouds, beards, bigots, lists, flags, earthquakes, despair were all swept up in a scrambled swirling.
And Estha, walking on the riverbank, couldn't feel the wetness of the rain, or the suddenshudder of the cold puppy that had temporarily adopted him and squelched at his side. He walked past the old mangosteen tree and up to the edge of a laterite spur that jutted out into the river. He squatted on his haunches and rocked himself in the rain. The wet mud under his shoes made rude, sucking sounds. The cold puppy shivered--and watched.
(C) 1997 Arundhati Roy All Rights Reserved ISBN:0-679-45731-3
2006/05/04 假想敌批判 刚从曦园回来。
这两天生物钟紊乱，跟往常一样，一到精神疲倦的时候，就发现自己特别敏感。估计自己还保留了动物的本能，在疲倦或病痛的时候担心外界对自己生命的威胁，惶惶不可终日。但我又实在不清楚究竟有什么怪物要威胁我的生活，所以每次都是这样来试图结束我的荒唐的想法：不断地仇视假想敌，到后来就成了真的敌人。这还有一句解释：“刻意形成的挑衅性的细节助长令人厌恶的东西成为事实。”，这一句话还能给许多我碰到的令人避之不及的敏感型的人一个注脚。幸好我还没完全走进他们的行列。如果这时候突然被问到，你难道不知道敏感出真知吗？我的回答是，上帝太公平了，他给了你这个方面多一点，就必然给你那个方面少一点。 现在我要列出给我制造假想敌的罪魁祸首，以便避免悲剧的发生。这里的“假想敌”不仅仅是指对立的对象，它可能包括触及现实雷区的不稳定和不安全的因素。
一，我的回忆。初三之前我总是对明天感兴趣，后来听了王力宏的一首歌，里面唱到：爱一个人就不要给她回忆。初三之后，我开始慢慢变得更加怀旧了。这些东西慢慢成长，直到我开始关注几乎每一件我正在经历和已经经历的事，而差不多已经丧失了关于明天的想法。这些事情后来堆积如山，就把它们的根须扎进了我的意识深处，到了夜晚就像水一样从深处不断冒上来——我开始夜夜做梦。做的梦无奇不有，战争、红色的大海、丛林奇遇、各种奇怪的动物、突然间和某个人做爱……我很少梦见熟悉的人。久而久之，我已经习惯早晨起来先回忆一下昨晚的梦，然后觉得，自己应该找上帝谈谈，或者，晚上跟某个鬼魂碰碰面，彼此交流一下看看能不能帮对方解闷什么的。今晚我去打水的时候，一个中年男人对着一只猫，神情简直像极了通灵人。打水要经过的地方没多少亮光，周围静悄悄的，风低吟着，树木后面的围栏后，一个孩子坐在后座对骑车的大人说话，很清楚但没听懂，路灯昏黄正把这一切装进一个奇妙的场景中。也许有一天你可以拍一部自己的电影，没有观众无所谓，只要你自己导演。不知道鬼魂对这个话题有没有兴趣。不管如何，回忆若隐若现，它以某些片断给我提供了追寻生活的证据，但是这些片断都是支离破碎的玻璃，拼不出一幅完整的东西。但是经过几年时间的发酵，回忆总归多多少少提示了几个原则，靠着这些原则，我为自己立下了边界线，这些边界线外面的东西不可接触。亚当和夏娃偷吃了智慧树的果子，于是人类需要生生世世为自己的原罪坚持信仰上帝，才得救赎。回忆给我的假想敌就是——原罪，不可饶恕的罪。现现实情况是，我每天背着沉重的罪生活着。
二，我的幻想。我常常想是什么启蒙了我？是幻想，无边无际的想法，不切实际，但是乐此不疲。我很少从现实生活中寻找真切的愉悦体验，现实对我来说是一件工作。我只能在幻想的时候，发现自己幸福的身影。你知道我最早最大的幻想是什么吗？我小时候经常在上学的路上陶醉在我的王国中，我一直幻想自己是一条巨蛇，在丛林中呼风唤雨。后来这个幻想的主角变成另一种漫画式的角色，一个主宰冰雪的北极之神，夏天的时候，因为他血液冰凉不觉得热，冬天的时候，他的血液冰凉又让他不觉得冷。这是我第一次发现同一种方法能解决完全不同的两种困难。当然这位神英俊高大，善良勇敢，充满神秘而又无所不能，他经常要与另外六位天神组成一个拯救世界的七神组合，他们的力量伟大到不能再伟大。其他的六位神中只有一个掌管天雷地火的黑皮肤的神能与他相匹，而他们是同父同母的孪生兄弟，兄弟之情特别深。可现实是我的弟弟一直坚持他不想做这样的神，李小龙也许是他的偶像。现在我经常幻想，但是对象已经很多很多，并且从来不那么认真，间谍、省委书记、刺客、娱乐明星、一个冒牌的医生、甚至一只猫……我经常在一个人走路的时候想这些东西，反正我的大脑从来不停歇。这些东西给我了我很多体验，虽然我这辈子听到的第一句比较有分量的教训是：幻想导致犯罪（那是一个美国片，当警察的丈夫和妻子因为女儿争吵大叫道：那些堕落的女孩子犯的第一个错误就是幻想！），但是我宁愿在一个适当的范围内幻想，幻想的目的也许就是从现实中暂时解脱。我实在想不出那些一天到晚脑子里只有现实的人是怎么活的，正如他们无法理解并嘲笑我的幻想。现在，我除了体会到偶尔的幻想带给我的灵感和超乎寻常的愉悦，也开始体会到那位父亲的话，比如当幻想是一只猫时，在接下来的时间我会践行作为一只猫的想法，比如夜里不睡觉，或者避免和人打交道，或者像观察飞虫一样观察周围的人的言行当作消遣等等。我认为幻想要蘸一点现实的酱才更有味道。但是这种味道会上瘾，于是我不务正业了。
今天就反省到这吧，因为第三个就是——我太擅长反省了。
2006/04/30 A DAY THAT TO WRITE好久没到我的SPACE上乱涂了（本想把“乱涂”写成“放屁”的，因为一，释放；二，道在屎溺间，虽然我觉得很多搞艺术的都喜欢打“屎，尿，屁”的算盘，比如有个《异形》里，调查人员进入了超级大蟑螂“犹大”的地下洞穴，结果看到的都是它们倒挂着的大便；《锅盖头》打扫厕所，用柴油燃烧，结果逼得他准备杀人；《惊声尖叫》就更不用说了，集集都拿大便说事；还有一个北京地下的朋克表演时公然拉X；最近偶然下了一首歌，名字叫亲嘴歌，内容居然是上马桶了，没草纸了；又想起初中时候的一个笑话，巨恶心，巨搞笑，前面几句是：拉完X了，没草纸了，用手一X，抹在墙上……算了不讲了，有人已经惊讶董刚是不是最近遭遇什么了，打住，我还是穿上我的教养的外衣好了。其实，我在高中的时候就写过一篇文章，想必大家很多都看过了，只不过我讲的是动物，现在想起来，人有何异？ ）前一段时间，SPACE恐怕吃屎了赛得太多，结果我就搁置了．加上本来也不想写什么，韩寒说刘墉打个喷嚏，拉个屎上个厕所也有一堆感悟，我比不上刘墉，所以没什么感悟，不过我小学某年级蹲茅房的时候，拿树枝在地上算数学，居然自己发现了“各数位数字之和能被三整除的数也能被三整除”的定理，后来学到这个定理时，很是不爽，想自己准备宣布的成果居然已经被别人捷足先登。既生瑜何生亮，一代数学天才沦落了……今天是4月30号，无论如何，我一定要从头到尾感悟一下：凌晨0点至3点，看电影《锅盖头》。寒假看《看电影》上说这是一部“平庸”的电影。没觉得，感觉不错，有点美国人的无厘头，把你训练成杀人的人，结果就是不让你杀人。满片子的对话除了“FUCK”就是“SHIT”。有几个片断很喜欢：燃烧的油井，一匹马向幽灵一样出现，然后走开；主角走到洗手池，看到女友在镜子里，结果吐了，吐出的一盆都是沙子；记者来采访，结果军队的士兵都疯狂了。这绝对是一部愤青电影。凌晨3点30，上床睡觉。早上9点半，手机闹铃响了，关掉，继续睡。中午12 点起床，一点半去买了一袋牛奶何和四个“栗饼”。回来，室友擦洗电扇，今年第一次吹风扇，天气开始热了。下午２点左右，看黄仁宇的《中国大历史》，第一二三章，看得时候很高兴，在美国的中国人写的，看完后，记住几句话，“我不是哥伦布，我没有发现新大陆”；“商代兄终弟及，周代父位子传”；“无父无君，禽兽也”……不知所云。途中，室友谈及欧洲旅游，因为他们拿了欧莱雅市场策划大赛中国大陆区第一，所以，不久即将飞赴巴黎。他们的路线，巴黎西班牙意大利瑞士荷兰巴黎。跟我无关。４点５０，出去体锻，慢跑，跳跃，俯卧撑，一个小时。身材和肌肉要保持，回来洗澡。６点３０左右，请室友吃饭，什么泰式套餐，日本套餐，都是咖喱米饭加肉片加番茄糊，欺世盗名简直，还有人管吗？是不是这两天太热了，开饭馆的脑袋也热坏掉了？数钱的时候怎么眼睛跟三百瓦的灯泡似的？今天骂人不厚道了，打住。回来买了一堆零食，结果没吃多少，难吃。上网，写博客。最后一句，今天是我的生日。2006年4月30号。昨天妈妈打电话让我自己过一下，我说十年一过。明天是五一了，劳动节，就是人民群众给旅游商和百货大厦老板劳动的日子。2006/04/08 Walter Schels瓦尔特·谢尔思（Walter Schels），自60年代在纽约开始艺术生涯，出版过多种画册并在许多国家的美术馆办过展览。其中最著名的有《音乐家肖像》、《动物的灵魂》等。
他是摄影家也是思想家，几乎他的每一个系列作品都在思考一个哲学问题。比如他拍摄的动物肖像是探讨人性与动物性的问题。他的儿提时代在家庭中与动物的关系比人来得更亲密，所以他会每晚抱着小猫上床睡觉。当今西方社会人与人之间关系越来越疏离淡漠，许多孤独的人与他们的宠物相依为命。他的动物肖像流露出许多人性，他要拍出动物的尊严。最近两年完成的"死亡肖像系列"，有一个非常诗意的名字："死亡之前再活一次"。为拍这个系列他常常通宵哭泣彻夜不眠，为这些在那种"临终关怀"的慈善医院里等死的人，也为一种人类不可能抗拒的可悲命运。他本意是想通过拍摄而克服自己对死亡的恐惧感，最早的一张死亡肖像被拍的人是平躺的，因为他自己还太过恐惧。后来他与比他小30岁的女友一起每天陪这些濒临死亡的人谈心、交友，然后在第一时间内赶到停尸房为他们像活人一样布光，拍摄坐姿的肖像。他的年轻的助理在几个月后拒绝为他在暗房内放大这些照片，因为精神承受不了。他自己也许久不敢拿出这些照片给人看。在欧洲有句俗话：世界上有两样东西人们不愿提它，但没人不去想它，"性"和"死亡"。若不是因偶然机会被发表到《明镜》周刊而引起轰动，他的这组作品也许永不见天日。但他仍会坚持做他的事情，直到自己满意为止。他拍的大部分肖像中，死去的人比活着的时候脸部更安详、更静谧、更美，有种神圣的接近天国的感觉。
(上面文字属转载 有删节)
2005 october 的《vision青年视觉》有一篇比较完善介绍walter schels的文章——《I DO IT BECAUSE I'm AFRAID》，看了之后想搜些资料写一篇博，但是网上的图片资料太少了。下面我摘录一部分内容，本人觉得非常好的部分。
很多人拍动物，是把动物大拿当作人之外的对象来拍。比如拍马，会拍的皮毛光泽，马的俊美外形，最后看图的人会得出“这是一匹好马”的结论。这马的好，马的美始终是要被人赞美或者被消费才是有意义的。这马只是一个物质的存在，它没有思想，也没有灵魂。可是Schels的方式截然不同。面对他的动物摄影，你会有一种张口结舌的尴尬。并非无话客可说，而是无法用寻常的拍摄方式来对待照片中的那只动物……那些似曾相识的神情如此严肃，不可被人们想象所扭曲，每只动物都有自己的尊严，在用自己的方式表达个性。那样直接、坦白、专注，不可思议。
"我想在我的摄影中找到这样一个瞬间——你不必思考未来，你遗忘了过去，你不会再有疑问：我看起来怎样，别人会如何看待去我。在那一刻，就产生了我的所谓的美。那绝对不是微笑，微笑只是一歌动作，一种交流语言。放松你的肌肉，然后真是的你就会在脸上浮现。"
“我们每个人有个孩子在我们的心里，这个孩子从来不会长大，它一直是个孩子。他会哭。他也会笑……这个孩子很诚实……可是…… 太多人的心里，这个孩子已经死去。” “If you show the child in yourself. we all have the child in ourselves. the child never grow up. to show them ,they can cry and love. when the child appears, i catch it”
“绵羊和山羊同死，没有任何人可以给予必死的多几个小时的生命…… 因为死亡是聋的，当死亡敲我们的门时，它时常都会很急忙，不会停下听祷告或挣扎……”
“you have to defense yourself .you always need to ask youself what you want to do. if you gave up a little, and you will loose and at last do what they want”
"一旦你尝到了金钱的权力，你就会沉溺不已。"
“the world is so complicated, but we are so stupid.”
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