The Kite

別以為我們的孩子們太小他們什麼都不懂
我聽到無言的抗議在他們悄悄的睡夢中
我們不要一個被科學遊戲污染的天空
我們不要被你們發明變成電腦兒童

Don't ever think our children are too childish to know anything
I can hear their wordless protest in their hushful dreams
We don't want a sky polluted by the games of science
We don't want your invention to turn children into computers

《未來的主人翁》(Master of the Future) 羅大佑

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Dear Kate,

How strange it is, that I am listening to Mandarin protest songs from the 80s, all because I am working from home, working a job I couldn't in my wildest dream imagine myself working a year ago.  Who could have prophesied this turn of events, turn of life, to me, back then?

Stranger still, now I look back, not just at the past year, how it all makes sense, that this life story should have taken this particular turn.  And that's what a true prophet usually does, not to predict the future or outguess the less visionary, but to point out the obvious next chapter that anyone with an honest eye could have "foretold"---but would rather not be told, not now, not today.  People wouldn't be angry at the prophet if they find him/her incomprehensible or merely laughably fantastical.

Being prophetic is about being honest and audacious.

We hear protest, now and before and shall always.  Protests, many, all about, true as claimed, issues "systemic."  What, then, is the "System," the totality that offers itself as the only alternative? 

"I have come to the conclusion that the prophets can only be understood, if you understand that their context is an ideological totalism that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities. That totalism always wants to monopolize imagination, and it wants to monopolize technology, so that there are no serious alternatives that seem on offer. "  So says a true, and truly great prophet of our time.

If the monopolizing of action and thought is so total, is one still able to step away from the Self and consider one's own voice of protest and see if it isn't, too, the product, a mouthpiece of the giant, totalitarian mechanism?  That we can speak about and against a System as if it is the perfect villain with a discernible shape distinguished from the right side of history from where we speak speaks about the totality of such System.  The deception is so thorough that a mother would feed it to her firstborn from her own bosom.

If a prophesy is true it would arouse in us, first, anger, before anything else, at ourselves, for our own complacency and complicity to silence prophets, and then, always, mourning, lamentation, jeremiad (a word coined after you-know-who).  A prophet is in the business of funeral rites, and a contrite mourner would often wear something black, subdued, seldom, if ever, with slogans printed over the chest, find the human tragedy unspeakable before knowing the right word to speak against anything or anyone.

Lo Ta-yu, the Chinese "Godfather of pop music," in my book, possibly the greatest pop-song writer of his or any generation, in any language, prophesied in the early 80s about the invention of "Children of Computers," among many other "predictions" that have since come to pass.  His songs do what only great literature can do, to weigh you down and lift you up at the same time, that you are grateful for feeling sorry at all, shaken by how close you were to missing the last chance to hope.  To listen to his songs is to wash my face with tears.

The song above ends with a dirge, an elegiac chant of the same line, the same image of a kite "floating" here and there, and Lo makes sure it's long enough that you are given the chance, a last chance, one more chance to repent and join him to fall on your knees.  It's as angry, devastating, and powerful as anything I've heard in my life.

And what is this "kite"?  Slogans flying in the air, hovering over our future generations, speaking about how things should be and orders they must follow.  And this song, too, it suggests about itself, should float endlessly in the air, protesting, lamenting, prophesying, now and always.

Yours, Alex