purple china diary - the novel one

7 January 2008

Night Train – The First Seeds Of The Novel

There is a book called The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

The memory keeper: The central character keeps memories as people can no longer keep them – the opposite of constructed memories as portrayed in Bladerunner – people are under stress like the loss of memory in Gabriel Marquez – there is not a loss of general memory as in One Hundred Years Of Solitude only a selective memory – a memory of certain things – this person travels around the world- travels as the angels travel in Hertzog’s Wings Of Desire – the person cures people by replacing ‘untrue’ memories with ‘true’ memories – she is the opposite of the communist collective propaganda and the Western propaganda of fear – her own history has to be very special – with a tremendous struggle for a zen moment which occurs in a very special place – Taoist stories could be used as a modern metaphor of the journey- it is a story of zen enlightment but not as pop as murikami – it is all about memory – loss of memory – cultural memory and the regaining and democritisation of memory – the liberation of being given the seed to grow again – each section could be marked by a chinese character with each character gradually making a poem – the enlightment of the poem thus ends with the enlightment of the novel – the novel can actually be constructed around the poem and characters – thus the need to go to china on writing scholarship – or other countries for that matter – a china/japan conjunction would be very interesting ! zen meets tao - the spiritual conjunction of the good cultural memory of each Nation – I can put everything that I have read and learnt into an individual knowledge and picture ‘trying to make my own melodies’ – Miles Davis – Mao says ‘crossing the river by feeling stones’ and Zhan Taiyan, the man who dismantled the peoples commune in 1980, said ‘practice is the sole criterion for testing the truth’