Weltschmerz

Well Germans are very wise and intellectual and have very nuanced words such as this to accurately depict emotional states...
alternatively I could have titled it 这种屎一样的人生生无可恋(which really is doubly offensive coming from a Christian shrink -_-|||)---------- I still need some face and German sounds way smarter.

I have been feeling first very paralysed and then very very mad about some recent developments in that very long and ridiculous saga. in fact I have given up praying that inappropriate prayer years before when it first happened... after many years, I have given up hope that there is a chance I would be mercifully chucked into the sea as it is not going to happen and I will be made to endure through all this, as the saga goes on... and on... and on.

I guess I will talk a bit more about my imaginary friend instead of myself then, so that the narrative doesn't cut so deep close to home and there can conveniently be a bit more projection to facilitate the release of negative emotions. My imaginary friend has threatened to leave me for years given my dwindling investment in this imaginary relationship and frequent unscrupulous endeavours to recharge emotional energy from him for purposes elsewhere. I don't know how much it had to do with shrink training, or the never ending paralysing saga, or much more likely my own worsening acopia by the year with this toxic world in the context of various predisposed vulnerabilities. Things remain tenuous somehow despite my attempts amending things this year by going PT... T_T I have been contemplating whether it really means as one grows old and has more important priorities in life to attend to maybe its just not appropriate to want to play with one's imaginary friend anymore...

The other day I made an incidental discovery that there has once been a biography written about my imaginary friend...in English... @.@ Not translated, but written by a white dude in the early 80s. feeling surreal and somewhat still in disbelief... I now have this very book in my hand -- accessed from a library 15mins away when there are only 6 copies in worldwide library collections... more @.@

I think I am more than a little envious of the white prof who clearly loved my imaginary friend much more than me, to be able to research so extensively and put together so much facts and translated all the poetry, while attending to his various professorial posts, and while the whole of China was preoccupied with cultural revolution... God knows how he managed to get past that mad persecutory government and access all those obscure records to complete this book!
Seriously, it was academic work but every single page was exuding love... and I am touched. T_T

In short, white people are awesome. T_T (that still sounds racist and not quite right doesn't it? -_-) It has been a very enjoyable and invigorating exercise working through the English translations and trying to work out which poems they are in Chinese... and picking out prof's own personal interpretations in them all...

Although the more I read, the more uneasy I become of the fact that my imaginary friend no longer serves as a hero who steps off a manga book, and that more and more of his experiences and struggles start to echo mine... which is frightening.

Prof found this obscure record that all his Chinese biographers omitted - in a casebook about contemporary administrative law, which recorded  his mismanagement of a case when he was a provincial police commissioner, via a file audit by higher powers -- two people called a guy out of his home and kicked him to death. one principal malefactor did most of the damage, but the accomplice reported he did not take part in the assault but tried to dissuade the principal malefactor from violence. Eye witness accounts confirmed this but the dead guy's wife protested the finding and refused to sign the proceedings so the accomplice was kept in prison for more than 60 days while the dispute was going on, and the accomplice despaired and took his own life. Higher powers decided that the accomplice was unjustly incarcerated which resulted in his suicide. Officials involved, incl. imaginary friend, were dismissed from office.
So there was a suicide, there was some higher powers, there was a file audit, there was a root cause analysis, and blamed was attributed and punishment dished out. legal systems in my home country are not very humane and extremely far from perfect even today save hundreds of years ago, I can only say WTF that while there were all kinds of other horrible shit going on, such a matter was pounced upon and then recorded as an example of mismanagement.

Behind it all, my imaginary friend, who was only 21 at the time, took his responsibility, documented records as they were, and probably relied too much on his own belief that he did nothing wrong in an unfortunate case as such and didn't try to explain away his involvement, and had too much pride to bluff through things, or involve his very influential father and uncles to sweet talk the higher powers and dust the records away.

Out of curiosity I read through some of the other cases in that volume of the casebook, his case was listed amongst numerous other overtly dodgy conducts by overtly dodgy officials -- torturing prisoners to death, keeping innocent people imprisoned till real criminals caught, and coercing witnesses to make false statements... etc etc etc.

from this lovely article - “We are all three days away from being tabloid news. And most of us are on day two.” along a similar vine, my imaginary friend got named and shamed on some official tabloid news, with records that would survive for hundreds of years.
That casebook was actually published during his lifetime, perhaps 1-2 years before his death.
By that time he has already left politics and all administrative posts for years and wandered around, away from his family too, in the capacity of a wealthy vagabond.
I really wonder how he felt about it. He probably felt he's never going to get away from it all.

There is way too much projection going on. think I am just going to have a good cry about it. T_T

well, my imaginary friend is still my friend for now, thanks to super awesome white asian studies

prof.

and that serves adequately as a reason why life is less shit and 生有可恋 for now too.