tendency to contrast a stoic and individualistic gesture against a fluid
external reality and history. Gu Cheng’s “city” could have similarly
served as such a site to restage the willful play of the displaced and
deprived poet, in the guise of an ultimately individualistic child-ghost.
One might even argue that these enigmatic verses are like riddles or
even koans, provoking meaningful yet unexpected answers. For
instance, one might see in the title “Peace Neighborhood” an allusion
to death, which is directly related to the action of switching off the
light, as presented in the second line of the poem. All these ambiguities
and obscurities make an uncanny text such as Cityenduring reading.
But instead of resurrecting it from a “pure” aesthetic standpoint, I
would view Gu Cheng’s “city” as, more importantly, a tribute paid to
the twentieth-century history of Beijing and China, no matter how
overly private or idiosyncratic such tribute might appear at first. Gu
Cheng says that “I don’t want to say words such as ‘history’ and
‘culture.’ But I know that the dead don’t just disappear. The ghosts
melt into the air, the dusk, the lamplights and the bodies of all the
people.” Here the “ghosts” can be, in fact, a muted cry of the repressed
history.^9 Perhaps only in this light can the analogy Gu Cheng found
between Berlin and Beijing be fully grasped—not just as a mere coin-
cidence, but rather as valid evidence of some hidden historical connec-
tions.^10 Gu Cheng’s seemingly whimsical and spectral vision may in
due course be credited for having preserved a phantom refuge for the
ghosts that have been possessed and dispossessed by both modern
Chinese history and Chinese modernity.
Possession and Exorcism: Gu Cheng’s
“Natural Philosophy” and the Specter
of the Cultural Revolution
We can come back and further explore the duality of “child” and
“ghost” as embodied by Gu Cheng in his metamorphosis. Most stud-
ies have very conveniently drawn a comparison between Gu Cheng
and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, as Gu Cheng himself has
many times acknowledged his debt to Lorca.^11 I believe, however, more
appropriate is a kindred link to Henri Michaux, the modern French
poet who had been profoundly influenced by Eastern (particularly
Chinese) traditions of mysticism (Daoism and Zen). In his poetry,
Michaux also seeks a liberated inner space by wandering through
nonexistent lands of imagination and fantasy. He claims that one of
134 Yibing Huang