Re-creation of Mean Tools: I Read "Time May Never Be on Our Side"

Mar 20, 2021

Merleau-Ponty: "All great prose is also a re-creation of a signifying tool, from which we can then use new syntax. Mediocre prose is limited to the use of established symbols from an established culture. Great The prose is an art that captures meanings that people have not yet objectified, and thus provides access to people who speak the same language.”*[1]

Photographed in Hong Kong on June 15, 2019.

Zhong Yaohua's "Time may never be on our side", as a nearly chronological diary, contains various essay styles, and runs through 2016 to 2021. In my opinion, it is the kind of "meaningful" . Refers to the re-creation of tools" work.

Born in 1992, he experienced the Umbrella Movement defendant, and his first breath came to an abrupt end at a turning point in the fate of Hong Kong. His fate also changed dramatically, like many Hong Kong youths we know well.

"In five years, any disobedience or disobedience is outdated today. Everyone is disobedient. I'm sure I won't be able to write anything like this again. .

These few sentences were written in the book "In Hong Kong, the rain kept falling" on June 30, 2019.

I remember that 15 days ago, as a social activist, I rushed to Hong Kong eager to be "present" and saw extreme "disobedience". Then I asked each of the interviewees, "Do you think the struggle is useful?" The loud answer has disturbed my perception frequency so far. In fact, the days after that were overwhelming.

Almost two years have passed, is time on your side? Is time on our side? Or as the book says, "Time is the product of light, and in a fallen world there is no sun, and there is no time."

Reading such a long collection of articles spanning five years, my mind fills up with all kinds of plots that Kishi witnessed simultaneously from then on, as well as seemingly personal life processes such as protests, defendants, public speaking, job search, writing, self Questioning, Rewriting, Fiction and Nonfiction, Reading and Practice.

what can we do?

In this book, the brushstrokes after the Umbrella Movement in 2016 were melancholy, sometimes empty, as if to see through; to the realistic daily sighs in 2017 and 2018, making a firm accusation; watching the protesting youths in 2019 continue to break their thoughts, only in a dream Through the flashing shadows of nature and species, sober, facing the hopeless future, and marching forward, it describes the struggle against the extradition that our readers are most afraid of and are most familiar with; A sharp turn in style, a serious note on political theory and ethnography of "No Country".

As a Taiwanese reader, watching "Your City" in Hong Kong, being reminded that you must live out your sincerity is a very low obligation. We can be too comfortable to "reflect the country", and more often we just need to "reflect (our) country" in the process of co-creating a community, look directly at the annexation intention of "another country", and realize shockingly that Hong Kong people How no to think of plural countries.

If it is quoted in the book, the ability to "perceive" in a few seconds when the situation changes on the court: with perception, can predict and make breakthroughs. In the dojo of perception training, then, as people who benefit from the same language as its signifying tool, I may be the "companion of perception" referred to in the book.

In this book, there are several paragraphs written at the beginning of this year. The excerpts are as follows:

"When everyone, including myself, thought we were bound to go to jail, I was given a suspended sentence. Just over a month after my trial, I experienced a movement against extradition—pain, despair, hope, strength, the light of humanity, and evil intertwined , if there is sanctity, why is she silent about atrocities? If there is no sanctity, why do people tirelessly persist in resisting?

Literature presents a world, but it must rely on people's understanding of the present world and some laws of human interaction and operation, otherwise we cannot write down every intricate entanglement of the world into words in detail, and readers can't understand it from zero. Make sense of a completely fictional world. The question is, to what extent should we draw on the world? …

I want to know how poor or rich writing is before the killing world, where is its limit, what writing can be in the face of pain. I want to know, if we re-observe and write in different ways, this world or whether it can become another world. "

Let’s excerpt this sentence again, in the context of the dialogue between Hong Kong intellectuals:

Stir fry? and then? "It's not just about living a solid life."*[2]

The last time I thought of the word "Lanchao" was after reading a Hong Kong film that was not necessarily related to the anti-extradition campaign, fiction and non-fiction, association and brain supplementary interpretation, and then after reading a Hong Kong writer in the anti-extradition campaign. After the diary written in the time period, see the understanding and derivation of this vocabulary. So I want to get closer to it. "Lanchao" detonated in the struggle, and its use was always between "life/death". However, if the vocabulary can be continuously generated and evolved in the discourse, it can also be advanced from the level of "living life steadily".

At the end of the book, "Won't Think of the State" cites "Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance" and "The Art of Domination and Confrontation: Hidden Texts" that all social science apprentices may have heard of. I remember reading these two classic text fragments for the first time, and the image I imagined in my mind was to speculate on the behavior of the farmers at that time; after reading this book after many years, the actions of Hong Kong people have naturally emerged.

Therefore, the meaning of "living life steadily", if it has a sense of fate consciousness of "Effort-Luck Distinction", realizing that we are "in" a momentary aspect that can still be close to time, and exercising relatively safe and open politics in luxury At the same time, the resistance should be to "understand the subtle and complex life and create a diverse soil community" together. And literature does provide this soil.

"Communication in literature is not just the author's simple appeal for meaning. . . A writer's thoughts cannot be free from language, and the writer himself is a new idiom, constructing himself, inventing expressions, and diversifying himself according to the meaning of his body. ”*[3]

The so-called life is subtle and complicated, and I thought again that in terms of personal experience, there is a passage in the book that made me smile. The author wrote on August 20, 2017, that he and his movement partners protested outside the courthouse before the trial against the case of black collusion between officials and merchants in the northeastern New Territories.

"As long as it's close to court time, these actions have to be done, whether people are there or not," he said. "Some people on trial are always late, and they always show up right after these voices of solidarity have been dealt with."

What does the lateness of the trial person mean? Actually, I figured out a lot of possibilities. I was a trial person (in the Miaoli Yuanli Fan case) and a supporter, and I can imagine what it means or doesn't mean. Thinking of the Hong Kong sports youth coming to Taiwan after the Umbrella Movement, they talked several times about their internal relations in the social movement field, or about unity and differences. Although it is difficult to make an equal comparison between Taiwan and Hong Kong or between cases, the situation of people will be wonderfully shared.

My understanding of time is not profound. But often (perhaps too hasty) bring in "points in time". Also born in 1992, I, who participated in and wrote about the Taiwan protests, had to use this book as a syntax to approach meaning. During the "Hong Kong 228 Prosecution", I wrote this reading note.

The same world, different dreams. Time passed, and the river flowed. He asked the lost love and devotion of the river, and the river responded with silent waves, and the wind did not stop. The sky is full of stardust like broken dreams, broken promises, sparkling in flowing tears, piercing vision. - "Time may never be on our side"

[1], [3]: Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). The prose of the world . Northwestern University Press. Editor's Preface xiii.

 The Chinese quotation on the opening is my own translation from English. The citation concept comes from Deng Xiaohua's "The Edge of the Mode: The Preface to "Floating Clouds and Razors: Selected Prose Volumes of the Decades of Words and Flowers", page 19 of which has some sentences translated, but I still choose to retranslate. Hope there is no misunderstanding of the original text, if there are any mistakes or omissions, please correct them.
Note 1, in English as follows:
All great prose is also a re-creation of the signifying instrument, henceforth manipulated according to a new syntax. Prosaic writing, on the other hand, limits itself to using, through accepted signs, the meanings already accepted in a given culture. Great prose is the art of capturing a meaning which until then had never been objectified and of rendering it accessible to everyone who speaks the same language.
Note 3, in English as follows:
Communication in literature is not the simple appeal on the part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori of the mind; The writer's thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself, inventing ways of expression, and diversifying itself according to its own meaning. Perhaps poetry is only that part of literature where this autonomy is ostentatiously displayed.