Burning

The other day something quite stupid happened to me. After I filled my Zippo with cleaning naphtha, I lighted it up for a test and accidentally introduced the fire to the small tissue paper I used while filling the lighter. A disaster thus got its start. I was surprised by the burning tissue paper and dropped it on the ground of my research room which is paved with wooden floor. I almost panicked by the imagination that the floor would be set on fire. Then I calmed myself down to put out the fire which, to think of it retroactively, was in fact a pretty small one. Stepping on the fire on and on and being cautious to not getting fire on my slippers, I turned on the fan to ventilate the air in case the fire alarm might be triggered for the smoke thus caused. a few seconds later, the situation was well under control and I had my breath back again. A pretty stupid incident it is. Can't believe that I myself can be so careless and without caution. If the room gets on fire, it would be a total disaster and might even endanger other people's lives. What an imbecile I was that day!

A Challenge?

Today the head of department offered a chance of opening a course on Taiwan literature. Only one course for one semester in the following three years is in need from me. Not a real burden, to tell the truth. Yet the challenging part is that the course has to be taught in English as it is part of the program for international students in our graduate school. I know my spoken English is not so poor as being incapable of handling the situation. Yet my concern is that my expertise is never on the field of specifically Taiwan literature despite my being an avid reader of the literary works here for a long time.

Cannot help wandering in what way will be my thoughts on the literary texts written in Chinese conveyed in English to others? Yet I have to admit this is a chance for me to focus on, for example, a few poets whose works have for long been my favorite and a chance for me to start working on some poetic studies. From a perspective of vocational advancement, this may also be a chance to wade into a study that may grow into a promising field for international recognition. At the same time, my own ideas of and attunement to that which is literary pure and simple can be put into a test on works in Chinese, my own mother tongue.

I don't know. A challenge indeed, in terms not only of the demand for language skills, but also of a requirement of professional disciplinary training. Need time to think it over. Might take the challenge. Life needs to keep going, going over boundaries to break a new ground, to sail into terra incognita for self-test as well as self-transcendence. A self that needs and has to open to the immortal, the infinite.

The Ring

Changing the place I wear the ring from the index finger to the rope on my neck. The other day I slapped on the head of Tiger and the ring's metal hardness caused him quite a pain that should have been entirely unnecessary. I watched his painful expressions on face and felt terribly sorry for my doing so. He is so cute, tiny, and weak that one would only want to hold him tightly in bosom. From that day on, I decided to change the place of the ring. Now I wear it as part of my necklace and wish with all my heart that my little Tiger will never suffer from that pain, that stupid pain, again.

Dr. Koto

Finish watching the Japanese drama Dr. Koto's clinic. An elite doctor initially working in Tokyo comes as a (self-)exile to an off-land island to be a local physician, attempting a personal redemption making up to the wrong he has done that held responsible for an accidental death of one of his patients. In the island, he devotes himself whole-heartedly to taking care of both the body and the heart of the islanders.

Though a bit too much sentimental, the drama in general is quite heart-moving in many episodes where the meaning of life and the intimacy as well as mutual contact between human hearts is illustrated. After watching this drama, one cannot help feeling that one particular thing becomes more than clear. No matter how brilliant one's career or vocational skills are, and no matter how advanced a working environ one may find himself in, what deems the most important is none other than finding a place, a locus, however local, provincial, or even under-developed it may be, where one can have this abundant sense of belongingness, the sense that one is needed, that one's life is not trivial and expendable.

Everyone needs this place to feel his or her own life, his or her living practices, worthwhile. As one female character in the drama tells Dr. Koto, "you are the happiest (or the most felicitous) doctor in the world." Indeed. Yet have I found such a locus?

In Memoriam

Start to play the game in memoriam. Fabulous and fantastic. In a mystery-thriller scenario to solve the puzzle to track down a serial killer who is responsible for missing persons.

The feeling, however, upon playing the game, is about the intriguing and captivating character of knowledge. As the puzzle involves several branches of esotericism, the search for relevant knowledge and information on the net comes across several pages written in languages other than English. This experience only reinforces my eagerness to recapture my French study which has stopped for quite a long time.

Human knowledge is always appealing to my love. Yet one gets only to know that knowledge cannot be reached without certain skills in languages. Reading those arcane letters either of Greek, Latin, or of non-English languages, I cannot help feeling helpless in not being able to get down to the facts recorded there.

Got to give myself some time to learn a language other than English. Though I'm getting older and busier with mundane and career chores, I just can't ignore my love for knowing more of human pursuit after something in the yonder. Got to put myself together and work something out, thus making myself feel that my life is not entirely meaningless.

Regain

Almost a year from the time I created the blog, now I finally have time to get its template done and am ready to start writing my blog. Maybe this postponement is not entirely meaningless. I was at NDHU when creating my first blog account along with a course blog. My time then was all spent maintaining the course blog at the cost of my personal blog. Yet now I am transferred to NCTU and start a new teaching job and academic life at a new place. Here I start thinking of going back to my personal blog as my life here is for the most time in solitude which, interestingly, does not look repulsive to me. I almost welcome this new solitude of mine as my age is approaching to the mid-point of a general life span. It is at this time and in this solitude that I feel the urge to keep a record of my thinking and feeling that catch me by surprise from time to time. I would like to imagine that one or two decades after I can have a chance to look back at my life in this period. I am writing here, maybe, for a future unknown to me. And by this writing gesture I might want to render that unknowable-ness foreseeable at least a bit.

Death

As for death, I personally doubt if anyone could ever be ready to die. Philosophically speaking, death is that which manifests the possibility of the impossible. In other words, it is our ultimate and final possibility that, once realized, annihilates all other possibilities we should have possessed. Because of the infinity of possibilities, we can be said free. Yet equally because we will never realize that infinity (like when confronting death that brings to all our unfolded possibilities an abrupt stop), we will always already die too early and too soon. Everyone, by nature, by the human nature as freedom, cannot but die with uttermost regret. No salvation, no redemption, only hard and cold revelation. Death, who can deny, is the deadly serious issue every young person should postpone to later days. Who knows, maybe the so-called peaceful death belongs only to those who deny, or choose to become ignorant of, the signifying effect death has already imposed upon human existence.

War

Why people always want to go to war as the final solution to all the problems, be they caused ignorantly or intentionally? Maybe human beings have been implanted in the very first place with a drive to a duel to death with one another. Isn't it one sign that humans, by nature, are always already a forsaken people by whatever god or gods high above or down below? What is worse, people like to justify the cause of wars by that very beyond where the godhead is supposed to be. I somehow believe that such a beyond does exist over there. Yet I too believe that humans are way off from ever meeting the requirement to get into or get at that beyond. As for what or who, if any, actually is present in that beyond--I firmly believe it is the question humans are neither allowed nor able to answer. To mistake ignorance as knowledge, frenziness as belief, and faith as justice--that is the very human problem that has been causing so much suffering, misery, and death in the not very long history of the pathetic beings (how can we not feel pathetic?) that assume a human form. Sometimes one cannot help holding a strong doubt that exactly because we never know what love or hope really is or even because we are born insulated from love or hope, we always treat them as the highest (read, the impossible) value worth pursuing. pursuing, yes, after shadows and illusions all the time. To believe in something or some being higher makes us pathetic, yet to discard the same belief makes us trivial. We are always at odds with ourselves. conflictual, confrontational, and antagonistic that is as we are (wo)men. Woe men.

Missing

Sexual drive (or simply desire as it is) will never be satisfied any more than love. That's the very point making desire desire and love love. Without that forever delayed, postponed, and missing encounter, there will be no love or desire. And simply for that, there will always be that strong nostalgic aura circling both. Yes, therefore we miss, miss all the time. Something or someone is always getting off our hold even without our knowing. Therefore we miss, always miss something or someone in some place and at some time. A missing person we all are. That's why memory is always sweet. Knowledge, yes, always comes too late. Because.....? Because we cannot but keep loving and desiring.....till the day we die.

SETI

The latest analyses of the S.E.T.I work-units by my computer center on the area around the constellation Boötes (the herdsman). For those who are a bit well versed in reading the night sky, Boötes is fascinating for at least two reasons. Its alpha star, Arcturus 大角, with the magnitude of -0.04 is the fourth brightest star in the sky (as u might already know, the brightest one is Sirius 天狼 whose magnitude is -1.46) and "only" 36 light-years away from earth in distance.

"Only" means "not very far from," if compared to the globular cluster NGC 5466 within the Boötes boundary which, well, is 47,000 ly in distance. The nearest star to earth is alpha centauri: 4 ly. Of course, this "only" is still far away because with our technology today, we can't even have manned travel to alpha centauri. Light travels in one year 9.46 x 1,000,000,000,000 km. Quite stupendous!

Another reason Boötes interests star-gazers is that, as its name and story suggests, the constellation leads hunting dogs (Canes Venatici) by its side, keeping the two bears (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) around the pole (north pole, of course). As u already know, the Great Dipper of Ursa Major is the famous Chinese 北斗七星 (天樞, 天璇, 天璣, 天權, 玉衡, 開陽, 瑤光), while the Little Dipper of Ursa Minor has Polaris rested on the very north point of the celestial body. Since the magnitude of Arcturus is much much brighter than all those stars above, this Herdsman becomes kind of a guide that easily directs star-gazers from Dubhe (天樞) to Polaris, that is, to north.

Arcuturus, by the way, is from the Greek arktourous, "guardian of the bear." Bear, in Greek, is Arktos. Since our Boötes is closely associated with the northerly constellation Ursa Major, arktos gradually came to bear the meaning "north" (as witnessed by the word "arctic").

Listening intently to the area deeply into the sky around Boötes is the radio telescope of Arecibo of the S.E.T.I project. Hissing monotonously in continuity in the silent deep night is my computer processor busy calculating the data chunk ripped from the telescope ear. Who knows, maybe there's really someone or something out there waiting for response. Yet the reality is no more than a technological materialization of people's belief in the "beyond." yes, only beyond. And never ask or attempt to know what the beyond is or is about. Never put into that beyond whatever we think we know should be its contents.

Just beyond......

The truth is we simply don't know. Of that beyond we never know how to think, and in that beyond we will never be able to think.

Sol

No sun today. Eager to see light, to feel warmth. Drifting like photons in the vast sea of data to the hotshots. Sunburn. Eye inflammation. PDF IT.

Origin

This is the time when I first set up my blog. After that, I did not have time to maintain it. The post is kept here to witness the start of this personal weblog.