| Hear the dog's retort and smell |
See
Moti My Friend
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| The
Dog's Retort -- Lu Xun (April 23, 1925) I dreamed I was walking in a narrow lane, my clothes in rags, like a beggar. A dog started barking behind me. I looked back contemptuously and shouted at him: "Bah! Shut up! Lick-spittle cur!" He sniggered. "Oh no!" he said. "I'm not up to man in that respect." "What!" Quite outraged, I felt that this was the supreme insult. |
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I turned and fled.
"Wait a bit! Let us talk some more....." From behind he urged me loudly to stay.
But I ran straight on as fast as I could, until I had run right out of my dream and was back in my own bed. [The End]
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Epilogue --
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Joseph Lai, 11 Dec 2006: There is a stench in the air much worse than death; a stench much worse than decay. It is a stench, I think, of decadence. At least, life was there before death and decay. And from decay, springs forth life-renewed thereof. It is the law of earthly matter. Decay is good and life is made useful again.
There is only one place where there is no decay: The land of the living dead.
Where can there be decay from the dead to the dead? There is only, I think, decadence. No dust to dust (as it negates returning to the earth); no dreams to dreams (for rising it will not to the heights of thought-noblest). The metaphysical-being do not exist in the land of the living dead.
In decadence, the living dead is deader than dead. It disowns everything and owns everything. It is destructive.
Smelling the stench is easy for the weak -- it reeks of the strong. Smelling it is good. It means the walking-dead you are not.
Did you not smell it when someone (as enlivened as Lazarus brought back to life) comes up to say he is seeing "dolphins, snakes, mullets and red snappers and monitor lizards and sea eagles" around his new utopic home which he has verily built over what was once a viable habitat teeming with marine creatures and which is now smouldered over and dead?
Was the stench not apparent when someone -- having just buried a sizable chunk of a thriving marshland to build his golf course -- saw a single grey heron swooping down into his water hazard and took the instant cue to proclaim that "nature has returned!"?
Nature's death, it seems, is justified by a second death: the death of logic and truth. This is precisely the kind of "accountability" that can be found in the land of the living dead. It accounts for the death of the weak, even of our own kind. 'Preemptive strikes' and 'collateral damages' claiming their deadly spoil.
Each and everyday, the air is filled with a foreboding stench. Where is hope for our children? I fear the die is cast and of hope, I have none.