Weekend Concert 40: The Spirit That Is Neither Essence Nor God

2007/7/14 17:02:59

Tomorrow morning I'm going to visit Peking Man, so the concert is moved up.

Chinese culture doesn't know what the sublime is -- that's a bit hard to hear, but it's probably the least slanderous of all the calumnies against Chinese culture. This ID has never felt that Chinese culture holds any supreme position, just as this ID has never felt that Western culture holds any supreme position. Those who use the West to negate China are traitors, and those who use China to negate the West are equally traitors -- all nothing but specimens of the same category of human garbage.

The world is merely your footnote, culture merely your raft -- so what culture is worth betraying yourself over? Most who invoke culture to make their case harbor some unspeakable agenda. Behind every monolithic unified culture lies nothing but the naked enslavement and oppression of one person by another. The world has no universal mold, whether it's Chinese-made, American-made, British-made, German-made, or French-made.

And having no mold is itself the greatest mold -- this is life's own karmic burden. Life itself is that greatest mold, and the greatest music confronts life head-on, challenging this greatest of molds. Only by breaking through life does true life emerge, does spirit emerge. This spirit is neither essence nor god -- it has nothing to do with refining essence to nourish the brain, nothing to do with transforming spirit into the void. Zhuangzi's "Free and Easy Wandering," before this spirit, is nothing but a lump of rotting flesh's fantasy. All gods, deities, Brahman and Dao, before this spirit, are nothing but fantasy's rotting flesh.

Today's program features two works by Beethoven: the No. 9 "Kreutzer" Violin Sonata, and the A Minor String Quartet that, from life's perspective, is not the last but feels more like the last. The former is his first time confronting life through music; the latter is the last time in his life he used music to confront life. Music is for listening, not lecturing -- so please, just listen.