The Role of Art and Music (3)
Lately I experienced what it means to be '凉了' or the fizzle out of enthusiasm as I waited a couple of months before writing the next essay on this subject. I waited because I was hoping to learn new things about the these artists and the entertainment industry, but as time goes by, the level of my energy dropped and I am finding it harder and harder to learn new things. That is why young people should seize every opportunities to learn and work as much as they can while they are young because it is harder to get a second chance to do that at a later stage in their lives because of the drop in their vitality and the ability of older brains to learn new knowledge.

However, maybe things are not meant to end half way, in early December, one of the 浪姐3 （刘恋） published her new song '生生不息' and this title happens to be related to some of the matters I worked on in my previous essay. It formed a common point with my essay and created impetus and a sense of connection (交流) to motivate me to continue writing. The whole experience felt like the blurring-the-line effects of reciting poems which I mentioned in the previous essay. 
In my previous essay, the poetic line of 'comparing the strength and hardiness of male to the mountain and the beauty of female to flowers' was actually from a song's lyrics instead of a poem. It was from the song '高山青' which I heard in another Mango TV's program, '声生不息', and it goes like this '阿里山的姑娘美如水呀， 阿里山的少年壮如山'. It is a classic Taiwanese folk song which I heard when I was a young boy in the 70's, and that was the first time I experienced the metaphoric sensation of literature and it made me wonder why did literati like poets, writers and lyricists need to compare human to nature? 

Around ten years ago, I came across another program made by a Chinese tv station where the presenter revealed that Chinese in the 70's and 60's did not have too much entertainment and material posessions. Despite of the harsh standard of living, they managed to keep themselves going by spending their leisurely time in the parks and public spaces telling stories and reciting poems in groups. He said that reciting a beautiful poems felt just like love, kinship, friendship and peace, and I believe this flow of energies was achieved by blurring the lines or the removal of preconceived ideas (执着) such as 'woman' and 'flower' to enable the two ideas to interact (交流). The interaction of the ideas itself will produce the energy flow that felt like love and peace among, for example, woman, flowers, man and mountains. Buddhist called the removal of preconceived ideas as the removal of '执着' and it is vital for achieving good fortunes like wisdom and compassion. Taoist explained that the removal of these barriers allowed the '阴' and '阳' to interact and mingle in the '中轴线' in order for energies and good fortunes to be generated.

The importance of meaningful interaction '交流' among people was also echoed by another '浪姐3', Kelly 于文文, in the variety show,'时光音乐会 2'. In episode 9 she mentioned that '我不孤独，不过我很寂寞'， which essentially means that she is not alone because she was constantly surrounded by people in her work place and social life, but despite of all that interaction, she can't experience the connectedness and goodwill in her circles and thus she felt lonesome even when she is not alone. 
What Kelly went through was not something new, people already had these feelings in the early 80's. Back then I moved from my rural home to live in an urban flat/apartment to further my studies, and I often heard people say that residents in these housing areas may be living close together but they hardly interact with one another unlike in the rural places.

I thought about the whole thing while I was vacationing in Kathmandu lately, and the thought reminded me of the western hippies who loved to visit Kathmandu in the 60's and 70's. In those days, the world was plagued by cold wars, hot wars and civil rights matters, and all these confrontation caused much unease and conflicts in people's hearts which could block their energies from flowing smoothly. That was why the hippies need to gather in groups and communions as an alternative way to create the peace, connectedness and love in order to bring back the energy flow that was lost due to the conflicts mentioned above. They indulge in music, arts and literature because the harmony in music, the coherence in literature and the proportion of beauty/art can help them defend the sanity destroyed by the fragmentation of human conflicts. Please refer to the previous essay regarding energy circulation for a clearer description.

The hippies were evolved from the beatniks in the 50's and romanticism in the 19th century Europe which was formed as a reaction to industrialization and the age of Enlightenment. It was recorded that a segment of the society felt science had killed emotions and the industrialization which arose from the Enlightenment destroyed the natural landscape with their ugly factories and pollution. To counter these changes to the lifestyle and environment, the romanticists also sought solace and refuge in arts, literature and music.

My understanding is that science and logic has the tendency to cause fragmentation in our thinking because logic specified that, for example, 'man is man, mountain is mountain and man is not mountain' which blocks or segmented our thought pattern. Similarly, logic also organised the way we work and live in fragmented ways, for example, in the pre-industrialised world, a carpenter who wanted to make a chair will need to do everything from begining to end. He will need to look for the right design and the suitable timber; then he will need to saw and chisel them to the right sizes before carving, fitting and lacquering the finished product. But in an industrialised society, jobs became highly specialised, the entire process of making the chair got separated into specialised activities or departments such that each carpenters are required to do only one specific activity all the time, for example, the carpenter in charge of painting will just do painting and nothing else. As a result, people's mind became more fragmented from the compartmentalised way of doing things and caused the mind to lose its coherence. Things got exacerbated with the creation of more industires and trades because new rules and standards got created to regulate the economy and further restricted the way we think and act.

Similarly, industrialisation also brought along urbanisation where people are increasingly made to live in flats and apartments because it is the most space-saving and efficient way to create living spaces. This living environment is also a form of compartmentalisation which separates people and made human interaction a lot less compared to the living space layout in rural communities. 
So all in all, industrialisation, urbanisation and human conflicts caused our minds to be fragmented and it created blockages to our minds which then affected the flow of energies in our bodies. When our thoughts are fragmented, we can only process the idea of 'female is female and flower is just flower', and ultimately, '你是你 我是我'. This is the root to why Kelly于 felt '我不孤独，不过我很寂寞'.

However, without industrialization and urbanisation, the vast majority of human would still be living in poverty. I was told that in the pre-industrialised China, people who could wear clothes that were sufficiently warm during winter were considered very lucky. Today, almost everyone can afford to have several warm clothings hanging idle in their closet during winter. Such is the immense material benefits brought by science and industrialisation that we must treat it with respect and learn how to contain its harm as mentioned above.

I find it wise of China to contain these risks by reviving the traditional Chinese cultures and the Confucius values of '仁耻礼恭敬爱孝忠' , which have the effects of bringing people closer together to reduce the fragmentation and blockages that are detrimental to their wisdom and health. The revival was carried out through the many teaching materials, public inculcation and a good mix of modern and traditional entertainment programs on CCTV (China Central Television), Mango TV and others which I enjoy watching. Other geopolitical initiatives like the 'One Belt One Road', is an earnest effort to bring peace and propel civilization by deepening interaction with other countries through cultural exchanges, skills transfer and trade.