The world is densely packed with
railways, highways and flight routes, countless days, nights and autumn/winter cycles, I live in a corner, a drop in the ocean, calmly chewing on a street corner of beef minced meat skewers, usually holding a knife for peeling apples, and watching highly simulated digital images of blood bursting out of the flesh when the blade cuts into the flesh in the movie theater. It's better to be nothing than Caesar. It's a great saying that many things don't really contradict each other, many plausible phenomena, coated with the venomous juice of lies, reality defined by all sorts of babbling and arguing theories of white-water perspectives that become so truly realistic, the world and its reflections defined by our artificially cowardly and self-deceiving acceptance of the world and its reflections by habitual acceptance of ill-intentioned words. The fact that the bloodshed occurred in the bright springtime would have revealed the truth of the world's true nature, and I didn't want to and couldn't afford to think too much about it, sleeping peacefully every plain night, and going to work the next morning as a matter of habit. But isn't it? The absurdity of the moment is omnipresent, like a vast lake drowning us, making us feel like floating puppets, looking at beautifully decorated magazines and surfing the Internet after tea, and one day in 2011, I wrote these words, with the restlessness of my thoughts and the tossing and turning of the music in my earbuds. There is no more Lucretia in the world, only a myriad of replaceable women and their healthy, voluptuous flesh, an impotent bestiality of thoughts and passions that crisscross the brightly lit and shadowy subway with coins. I wore tight pants and my body was the result of multiple scars from encounters with a wide variety of women, scars that ached when the weather was cloudy and rainy, scars from the emotional bondage of possession and hatred then left behind. But I felt an inexplicable pleasure in my weariness, because, they too have scars, and they too ache on rainy days, and their husbands and lovers can't change that fact. Better nothing than Caesar.
History is written by the victors, and the birthmarks of history inscribed on us are a mixture of blood and cruelty and intrigue. Putting an internal lens inside us, one would see countless faces twisted by smiles in the midst of swords and poisons, flesh folded in interlaced folds in shadowy castles and claustrophobic city sewers, and beams of material irradiation focused on one spot would see the ecstasy and loneliness of orgasm accompanied by the hissing of all the plants of that fading African jungle. Plants have pain too, but the cries are inaudible to other creatures, so let's extract our sex organs from between a woman's legs and sit calmly alone in a corner somewhere to think about it. One of the paradoxes is that human beings cannot eat inorganic matter to sustain life, must be extremely hypocritical to escape the fact of bloody killing between visions of gastronomic delights, and must compile all sorts of myths and legends traditional histories, etc., to deceive themselves in order to sleep peacefully. The entire civilization of the earth, of whatever color, is the self-record and literature of murderous criminals, and all philosophy, history, science, art and its countless archival volumes, dead or alive, is a crime, which must be confronted with the fact that it is the most basic act of nature, and that without which mankind could not live and survive. A basic fact is that the lions in nature completely blindly follow the inevitable blind laws of nature, will not consciously abstain from killing, in order to maintain a good ecological balance for better survival; and human beings beyond the natural place is that they will be using modern ideas, computers and the so-called civilization, to elegantly maintain a good ecological balance of killings and rapes. Seeing the elegant dresses of women, we should not forget the dagger on the outside of their thighs, which is a sharp weapon made by human beings, and the difference between it and men is that it is not as blatant as men's guns that they carry in the marketplace, and it is labeled with the word of justice and attached to a variety of historical and cultural explanations, and this dagger, which has been, is now, and will always be stained with the blood of both animals and human beings. It is better to be nothing than Caesar. In the modern streets, restaurants and movie theaters is Caesar? Borgia's swords whistling past the remnants, the shadows of the chi spears that stabbed him in the spine, realistic but highly unreal, and what remains is the Cantarella poison concealed in the ring worn by the inferior Lucretia, the inferior poison is not real, and that makes us weak. The archetype of not being Caesar, rather than nothingness, has faded into the vast archive of volumes and files of the post-Renaissance, where fire and sword, lust and killing, honor and immortality have been discarded and thrown in a modern-day warm and fuzzy whorehouse bathroom, and flushed clean with a gallon of water. I've fallen into books and polemics, wandered the edges of many cities and villages, like a lone beast in the jungle, through different symbols of erotic violence, all absurd and wrong. In the open space of a university college in the south, I once saw a sexy, beautiful older girl, her full, long thighs exploding out of her shorts and exposed to the hot southern sun, playing on a small motorcycle toy car I hadn't seen before, with loud laughter and the clear sound of burning fuel. She was followed by a young man riding the same sleek machine, and I looked at her for a long time then, while calmly telling myself that the sword and poison and loneliness in this college girl's eyes would, in the near future, be chipped and worn away by the handsome young man who was behind her and would likely become her husband, a cozy piece of flesh in bed and a numbing machine in the kitchen. There's nothing to it all, it's okay, there should even be a vicious pleasure in it, who cares? The stench of everyday life rotting in the swamp, the odor of a banal henhouse, the body of Caesar dead in the swamp long gone, the world without Duke Valentino, what I hear in my ears is the pathos sharp and hoarse music, remembering the countless nights in bars ruined by madness, ruined by madness of the mind. Not for Caesar, rather for nothingness. I think, if necessary, Caesar? Borgia would have killed his father, for the sake of power and fame and love of his sister, and transcendence and immortality, and the turbulent soul behind the cold mask would have hung the head of Alexander VI on a spike in a piazza in some brooding Italian city, and the complexity of the extreme emotions, of his father, of his family, with the Renaissance as a stage backdrop for what may be the world's most unprecedented love-hate relationship of a family, is open to the The ultimate in gaudy, malevolent flowers, unprecedented splendor and elegance, the Greek gods in this garden of nothingness, drunken revelry and laughter, and the deafening sound of the clash of swords and iron bars in the shadows. Not for Caesar, but for nothingness. Trying to write this essay as a stirring and reverberating movement, under the narrow polluted skies of this South, in the cloisters of my old home where the scent of my ancestors echoes, rationality is sexually impotent and apathetic, and can only be barely expressed in these fragmented words. The world and everyday life, the paranoid and schizophrenic gaze, either transcendent or humble, skimming above the subtle traps and sweet lies that carry the stench of decay from the neighborhood sewers, are the mundane funerals of lost courage, haphazardly delivered in a couple of painless and hypocritical eulogies. Intimacy, carnal gratification, timid vanity, art and drugs, tourist pastimes and fashionable clothing have all become natural and sinister anesthetics to dissipate the fatigue and disappointing emptiness of our deadening toil. All kinds of cultural history or culture and art, in fact, is the echo of the sword of each nation or individual battle, or the self-compassion after defeat, is the gorgeous and dirty music of genetic struggle, is the poison of mutual conspiracy, there is no other truth, must admit this point. But that was in the past, now there are only timid conspiracies and petty struggles, the bourgeoisie in control of the world, the bourgeoisie, full of brass, once heroic and turning the world upside down, but destroyed by its own incorrigible and fatalistic mercenaryism, mediocrity and philistinism, the search for so-called laws of history in the absence of contingency, the futile jests and the feeble anesthesia of the self, the middle-class middle-class passions and adultery. And then there are mobs and rabble like plagues of locusts, with all kinds of manifestos or impostor theories full of envy, cowardice, and claims to equal happiness, chattering and clamoring, but in reality it is earthy greed and corruption, stealing and self-enrichment in the name of righteousness, and under the stones of the rabble the last aristocrat disappears into the nothingness of time. The aristocracy is corrupt, I know, but this flat, powerless world of fried chicken wings and backstabbing prostitutes just lacks that aristocracy, Caesar? Borgia is dead, dead with a cowardly spear, and now, the intrigue is the same, but with less courage passion and grandeur. All the history that passes, the history that my own mind organizes, all the imagery and the flowing winds of the aftermath, it's my despairing impotence that goes wild and unbridled in daydreams, isn't it? After the vacation, I will be like everyone else, well-dressed to go to work and work by the book, and the nauseating mettle of calm, the anesthesia of spring flowers, autumn and moon and Tang and Song poems. Depression, depression's glass of water always trying in vain to break on the hard concrete floor, in the illusion woven intentionally or unintentionally, in the chance to see a figure with a sword sprinting by amidst the roaring sounds and clamor of airplanes, stirring music and lust, outdated capes hissing in the wind, falling into the traps of language. It is better to be nothing than Caesar.