—— Nightmare Box Chuck Palahniuk
This afternoon, when I read the latest novel HAUNTED by Chuck Palahniuk who was the author of Fight Club, I was fascinated by his dark but significant personal style, especially this piece named Nightmare Box. The story told about the strength of a magic box through a mother who wanted to find the truth of her daughter's missing. She found each person who had once seen through this box would lose the previous self and became demented or suicided. When she got closer and closer to the truth, she became afraid of this truth. She realized the truth of her daughter's missing was also the truth of life, this virtual world. Nightmare box was the approach for people to realize that their "preening and struggle and worry—it’s all pointless.", and writer also said "All your problems and love affairs. They’re an illusion." That's the key point of this short novel, the world is a nightmare, all our endeavor for the better life (especially in Material Dimension) is useless. Everything will change, will flow, will back to earth eventually. Everything is the illusion.
The moment I saw the end of story, I reminded myself of traditional Japanese painting Ukiyo-e. Now the new show of Utagawa Kuniyoshi is at the Royal Academy of Arts, which retrospects the main masterpieces of this significant ukiyo-e master. Ukiyo-e is always said to be the origin which influenced the post-impressionist and abstractist. Coz it is no longer to be the representation for the real life, in stead of that, the intention of Ukiyo-e is more closer to describe the world in people's mind, an imaginary world. Trace back to the meaning of word ukiyo-e, it comes from Buddhism which means the illusory status of human realm. In another word, everything is nothing, heaven is also hell. In this kind of meaning, we can explain why the colors in ukiyo-e are so dreamlike and why the figures are all bizzare though they really exist. The answer I can get is the painting itself is the dream of the world. Taking a look at Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Young woman who looks like an old lady, c1847, the woman's face is painted some human bodies as like wrinkle. And another painting Octopus games, 1840-42 uses the octopus to instead the real people, and the octopus are all dressed like normal Japanese villagers.
Ukiyo-e is not just the equivalent of mythology paintings, what embodies in it is the abstruse philosophy of Buddhism. Just like what Chuck Palahniuk wrote in his book, "Our world is a dream. Infinitely fake. A nightmare. "
Young woman who looks like an old lady, c1847,by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
Octopus games, 1840-42,by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
No comments:
Post a Comment