对流失的时光道歉

 

是真的希望

已经摆脱了

始于心里的小小困扰

可以明亮惬意地直面整个世界

 

怀抱里搁浅的那么多美妙的会面

眼看已经要散落在天边

只好耐心等待

因着想念

 

 

 

 

 

From Simon Barnes{The Times}

I don't wish to be ungrateful, but it may not make the journey home to Suffolk. For you will gather that I have already reached a place where such images must be believed in. Why? And is the place in question Olympia, the home of wherever the Olympic Games happens to be? Or is it the People's Republic of China?

For the two places have something in common. Both feel a need for certain comforting fictions: namely, that the world they have created is a good world and that everybody involved in it is happy. Since this is manifestly not the case, a further fiction is required: that the only possible danger to happiness is people who are wrong, people such as Americans or drugs users, Tibetan separatists or corrupt officials.

It is the vanity of both the Olympic organisation and China: to maintain the fiction that we are all living happily ever after; to insist that now is precisely what our story was for. And it really doesn't fool anybody; it just suits the organisations in question to hold up the pretence.

China is not a place of achieved perfection, any more than it is a place of unrestrained oppression. It is a country going through vast, high-speed traumatic changes; intellectual and political changes are lagging behind the brutal pace of economic advancement, but change is what is going on here - and much of the process is out of control.

The changes are marvellously told in Zhu Wen's uncompromisingly titled book of short stories, I Love Dollars. It reminded me a little of James Joyce's Dubliners in its portrayal of a society ill at ease and caught between two times. The title story concludes: “All I'd done, inside the vacuum that had been the last 24 hours, was to take to its logical conclusion the most logical thing you can do with a 34-year-old woman.” And no, they didn't seem to be living happily ever after, do they?

But this is not to say that Chinese society is wrong, just that human life is hard and that there are times when everything is out of joint. That is true of our own society, no doubt it was true in Mayan or Pharaonic civilisations. In the West, we are used to that idea. We mostly accept rampant individuality, chaos, a million different opinions, a million ways of pursuing happiness, a million more of finding unhappiness. Life is not simple and lovely, and the British Government is not going to make it so, nor does any British Government seriously try and pretend to.

It is different in China, where such fictions must still be upheld, even in a dizzyingly changing universe - that is perhaps the fundamental difference between our two nations. And it is odd to note that similar fictions are upheld in the Olympic Movement, in which we are encouraged to believe that all nations and all competitors are here to compete for nothing but love and peace and harmony ... and then we will be furious when the next drugs bust comes along, or the next vulgar patriotic excess.

There is no point in believing any of these fictions. They do not help us to understand the world; all they do is make people unhappy when they turn out to be wrong. The truth is that life in China, like life in Britain, is full of people striving for greatness, fighting despair, some without scruple, some with a glorious generosity, and it is also full of far more people seeking only to rub along and reach at least a few personal satisfactions.

And the Olympic Games is just the same, whether they are held in Beijing or London, Athens, Atlanta or Sydney. The Games is full of good things and full of bad things, because it represents humanity. Not an idealised, fictionalised version of humanity, but all of it, the real thing, in all its mess and chaos and corruption and glory and beauty.

And that's why I love the Games: not for the flower-clutching children, but because it brings us humanity, in nobility and corruption, in triumph and disaster, in ugliness and in beauty, in the most vivid possible way.

Neither the British nor the Chinese people, nor the billions of us who will be involved in the Olympics Games, are living happily ever after. We are all in the middle of our stories, not the end. We are the story, and I look forward to telling it again and again over the next three weeks.

People make places come alive

A stroll around the Olympic Complex to examine the local architecture. It's not much, really, just another magnificent (all stadiums are magnificent) stadium that looks like a bowl of crispy noodles and a sort of plasticky thing that's apparently the Aquatic Cube. Architects make these things because they can. Round the outside, a procession of people enjoying the day off by taking photographs of each other with the Stade de Noodle in the background.

Inside the complex, a lot of empty space and heat. Well, at least the damn thing is finished; in Athens, I was tripping over builders' junk at the closing ceremony. But the place I looked at yesterday was dead; it will not come alive until Friday, when the people come. It's nice for a building to look nice, but what matters is how it functions as a place for human beings.

Until people get in them and claim them for their own, stadiums are just an expression of national ambition. A sports stadium without sport is a meaningless thing. The truth of sport is not in the architecture, but in the action. The bigger the event, the truer that is.

Beijing does service with a smile

At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 it took me four hours to collect my accreditation; but then I was lucky. In Athens four years ago, it took me two hours to get out of the airport and half an hour to find my accommodation in the media village from the place where the bus dropped me. I stepped from the plane in Beijing at 11.20am, ten minutes later I was accredited, five minutes later I had my bags, five more and I was on a media bus, within the hour I was in my room overlooking the Stade de Noodle.

And I was already the receiver of a thousand smiles, although the real miracle was that the would-be helpful young people actually knew how to do the actual helping.

And when I think of those bloody rednecks manning the gates in Atlanta, genuinely believing that we were all so damn lucky to be in the You Ess Ay, and why didn't we stop complaining that the buses had failed and fall on our knees with thanks?

But this place wants to be loved. The instruction to be lovable comes from above, but the action comes from the heart. Already I feel that these Games are something to do with the commitment of at least a billion people.

       日子就這樣一無對白的過去。
　　我們不約而同的耽擱著，心照不宣拖延著，直到一段足夠其久，幾乎已可稱為漫長的時間，你來了信，似有若無責備了我的疏懶。
　　
　　這看起來相當故意的疏懶，倒像是你我合謀的一項觀察，用來測量兩方心意的長久，或腳力的健碩。
　　但我們仿佛也終可凴此而驕人了——誰還能以如此謹慎姿態，背人耳目的交好？誰又能做到，以如此緩慢速度與“來日方長”的耐心，鋪排了一個過程儀式都如此繁瑣的靠近。
　　
　　其實，所謂衷腸，需不需要傾訴呢，所謂心跡，需不需要告解，這個命題我們似已討論千遍。
　　我的沉默，是界於需、與不需要之間的，那點猶豫。
　　而每當我覺得可說、亦可以不說的時候，縂會因爲看到你寫下的什麽，而勾動了再次開口的願望。
　　就當是，你手勢很輕的、嫺熟挑開了一個你素來善解的活扣。
　　
　　大概，就是在看侯孝賢的時候吧，漸漸我知道了對白與對白之間，空白時間的意義。
　　承受如岩層蝕刻，鈡乳消融一般徐緩綿長的進度，一寸一寸投入看進去，以至後來再看他人影片往往覺得“飄”，不堪忍耐其間的絮叨、嘈吵。臺詞縂是太多，畫面總是稠滿，人物一來即有二去，開口便説完整場。
　　一切令我極度渴靜，嚮往在侯孝賢的默片中，長長的空鏡頭裏，徹底的靜。
　　
　　你愛那首rain and tears，我也曾翻來覆去聼不倦。此刻因你寫信來，我又找了來再再小聲播。
　　其實我想，侯孝賢從不曾冒失對時光濫下所謂“最好”的定語。
　　時光不言好與坏。你問我過得怎麽樣，雖是自己的事情，我也一向說不上來亦不願妄斷的。無論是細説從頭，或是長話短説，我都會是最笨拙的講述者。
　　而每一段緣份，我不去偵測它的盡頭。不到終局，不須清算。
　　
　　是的可可，有時我覺得自己的一生，都要像你形容的那樣，輾轉于“陌生又熟悉的城市里，陌生又熟悉的瞬间里，穿越國境與國境”，並且同你一樣會在“雷电暴雨过后的空气里，还有某个暴晒的十字路口的车里，或者是一个人在深夜安静的机场”才能允准自己趁虛而入的去想念誰。
　　
　　暑日的溽熱當中，我歡迎有閃電的雨夜。且盡量以清涼的心境，調兌不清涼的日子。
　　有句話我看了很好，想必你也是喜歡的。“一個人會突然面對他的桃花源或深淵”。
　　那麽乖女你別擔心我的，就像我亦不怎麽擔心你的，因爲我們終須分頭妥善面對自己的。
                                                                                                                                                                      ——匡匡