Prague 13.5/12: Becoming

-06.01.2025-

What if I never need to justify or explain anything ever again? What would that life be like?

It’s such a great question I cannot answer and, to some extent, dare not answer. (And yeah, my best friend can’t either)

Back then, when I was still doing poetry, I had two modes of expression. In poetry, I encode everything as much as I can, leaving the slightest possibility for anyone else to decipher the author’s intention. And in the rest of the scenarios, I “explain” everything as much as I could - by pouring out my flow of consciousness (and obviously in those case the actual message, if any, would also be hidden in the whims, resulting only a “job’s done” sense for myself) or contemplating on each word to minimize the possibility of my words to be misunderstood or imply any undesired meaning. 

While I must have discussed this somewhere in one of the posts, it is worthwhile to look at this thread from time to time, especially when it was poignantly pointed out. They are parts of my protection and defense mechanisms, for sure. In those encodings, protected was the actual meaning as well as the duty to express (met by that tiny little possibility of being deciphered). In the pouring, the latter was emphasized by bluntly attempting to present everything in my mind. And in the contemplation, the protection was more of a precaution to block any potential incoming challenges.

To be honest, I somehow had already accepted that as a part of my expressive nature, and, at the same time, consider myself already better at that. But I guess to consciously counter a habit that, to some extent, forms one’s core behavioral system is indeed a hard task.

Another rationale or blame I use a lot is the necessity of justification and explanation. For most of the non-personal writings, what we’ve been trained to do is exactly to provide better justifications and better explanations. And even in my personal writings, I also sense some need to leave a clue for my future self.

Anyhow, challenge accepted. I’ll try to make this the last set of heavy justification and explanation in this journal. (Appended after writing: challenge incomplete. But I’m actually fine with it. I am who I am. And I may change, and I may not. We will wait and see.)

“Puppet show; community; trojsk chateau Chinese error; take something from you; opera/concert experience; gobstopper; waves; project 2; marionette - specialization/history lineage/family puppet theatre as a binding/revolution; prague fringe 2: beyond my age but theatrical excels”

What you’ve just seen is the raw-raw sketch I jotted to “reflect on” later. I’ve never tried to do this before, but this feels like a good starting point (although this particular sentence is also some sort of justification and explanation). Some of those are already covered in my archive for Project 2, and some I feel there’s no need to amplify. Still, some may be interesting topics to walk through, especially at this moment when I’ve already left.

I like Prague, in general. Despite the incidental exclusive or racist-ish events I experienced and was reminded of after seeing my classmates’ artwork, it seems to me a city I can envision myself dwelling in for a long while.

Let’s start with that: exclusion, discrimination, and racism. I feel like there is no need to discuss the common sense good-or-bad, and I’m surely in a position of somehow discriminated but mostly privileged. So maybe some alternative perspectives here: 

I’m usually a very poised person, not only from the outside but also inside. Of course, behind that is a relatively comprehensive and resilient self-protection/defense mechanism, just like when dealing with expressions. When I walked right into some weird sound directionally made by a middle-aged male in the street, the second day in Prague, I was literally more curious about what he just said/did than being offended, until we had the related discussion in class, and suddenly I had the realization.

Was that happening to me, some sort of discrimination or racism? In many senses, it was. At the same time, the postponed realization I had made me wonder to what extent the harm could come from the social-theoretical construct as well as the events themselves. What if there is no reminder? Will I not realize it at all? What if there is no such concept? Will we still suffer as much as we did when we relate or not our personal experience to some broader social-cultural and theoretical construct that we learned to be discriminative, suffering, cruel, grievable, and so on?

Of course, I’m all for the collective awareness, efforts to eliminate discrimination, acknowledging the historical atrocities related, etc. What I wanna think critically about is the option for people like us who live in the “present” to choose to be “awakened” or not. In fact, I guess this is a much more disruptive topic to discuss than what I did in my Project 2. My project 2 is a conjecture and a hypothesis. But this is real and present, especially in this era of identity crisis/politics and political disturbance. 

People who are susceptible suffer, for sure. People who are awakened suffer, for sure. And, people, in general, suffer, for sure. 

But is there a way to reduce such suffering among and within people during the chronic combat we’re in? Is it also our right to save ourselves, individuals, from suffering in our own ways? Or is it escapism or even passively joining the other side?

Those are difficult questions, and talking like/about this is difficult for me. As the same time, this is also my way to cope with it. But a similar question to the opening one of this journal may apply: What if we never need to and are never obligated to put ourselves in such difficulties? What would that life be like?

Okay, maybe we should take a break and get back to some more Praguey things. Aka. the theatres.

The S here matters. It is true that we had a very tense schedule that probably contained more frequent performances than a regular Prague life would. Still, what touches me the most is the collective city culture that is pro and for the cultural life, theatre, cinema, and music in particular. For a “small” city like Prague, the simple number of performance venues on the map amazed me from the first day, and it kept revealing itself to me as one and another underground stage was discovered. 

It makes so much sense that this city would be able to produce so many excellent works - its ground entails that from the bottom of its heart. Coming from Shanghai, a city also filled with concert halls, theatres, opera houses, cinemas, and so on, I was still very touched by the Prague communal nourishment. And the reason behind that was the accessibility. 

Shanghai is a city with such a developed performance industry and, of course, regulations - everything, everyone, and every time are so much organized. There’s nothing wrong with efficiency and officiality, I would say. But there is indeed a tug-of-war between those and the spontaneous, scattered, and sporadic emergence of creativity I saw in those small underground stages I witnessed, I guess.

It also makes so much sense to me why this soil of nourishment is available in Prague when we learned about (a part of) the history behind marionette and family puppet theatres on the second-to-last day of class.

As for my personal experience while attending those events, I found myself in a much enjoyable state, in which I was both more analytical and more emotional in a peculiar way, and thus I’m further convinced that maybe I shouldn’t consider them as opposing each other anyway. Thanks to the nature of our class, I found myself feeling less guilty to be analytical during the performances of a part of (typical) “active learning.” And with that in mind, I believe I even saw more from the analytical perspective.

On the other hand, at the same time, I found my emotional engagement in those events also widened. A part of the reason was also the class. We intended the events as “artists” and “art creators.” This shift of identity from an average audience to “art-related” roles indeed liberated me a lot in terms of how to behave during the performance and to what extent I allow myself to respond to them. But was there a real difference between an “average audience” and an “artist”? Maybe not, I guess. That difference seemed to be buried in my mind and revealed only.

Another similar reason was the “stranger” and “foreigner” role I had in Prague. With a similar mechanism, those roles seemed to entitle me to jump out of the social norms I assumed usually and to behave a bit unruly.

Anyway, the last thing I wanna touch base on a bit in this journal is Waves (2024 film). The most heart-gripping element to me is the brotherhood arc between the protagonist and his younger brother. As a parallel to the heroic storytelling of the radio news room (which, after some fact-checking, I learned to be a bit dramatized), the relationship between the two brothers was even more empathetic and stunning to me. In such cases, we may not have the heroic moments, but we will surely still have our own life as a person and as a family. And that’s also why I found the ending much pleasing compared to a possible skimming through the “normalization” era to the Velvet Revolution - that every day back and forth is even more real to every household during that time, and to some households somewhere on this planet now. 

And from a subjective point of view, my feelings after the film were, in fact, very ignited and complicated. A part of me was resonating with the happenings in the film as an extreme case of some mechanisms still present this day; simultaneously, the other part of me was having a lingering fear that what’s happening to Czechoslovakia could also happen to my country. Unlike many notions, the China-USSR(and, similarly, today’s Russia) relationship was not always “that good.” And, in fact, that’s why there was such an event called Nixon’s visit to China, 1972. 

Subsequently, the back-and-forth between the two feelings as a combination swung in my head in the next few days as I gradually adjusted my attention back to the nowadays context. If there is one thing that I’m very much sure of at this moment, it is that in this current era, the one and only equipment we at least need is the adaptiveness and persistence within that adaptiveness. 

Patriotism, nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, capitalism, communism, anthropocentrism, naturalism, and so on. The big words are everywhere, and their variations of interpretation are everywhere. A teacher I admire a lot wrote recently in his article that we (he himself and every potential reader) are, in a sense, the same generation, a generation that is still naive/immature enough in this society to habitually rely on the ups and downs of the surroundings (external locus of control) and habitually resort to the big words and labels, using intellectualization to cope with our daily matters. 

But who we are is always a question that can and should only be answered by ourselves. And I feel more than ever that this is the time that actively answering this question is becoming a necessity and necessarily a responsibility for each in this world. 

l’enfer, c’est les Autres. Whether it’s true or not, let’s become ourselves, more than ever.