the “ghost,” in many ways resembles Michaux’s famous creation of
“Plume” in his Plumesequence. Within the space of eighteen poems,
Gu Cheng establishes a file for Bulin ranging from his birth to his var-
ious adventures, which are at times outrageous and at times humor-
ous. In the postscript entitled “About Bulin” (Guanyu Bulin), Gu
Cheng explains that “Bulin is a character like the Monkey King and
Don Quixote, and had been disturbing my mind from the time I was
very young. His inborn eccentricity and love of skipping school fasci-
nate me” (Gu 1995: 757). Gu Cheng further says that the sequence is
“reflective and antilyrical” (fansi, fanshuqing), and that,
in terms of form, it is very much like a modern fairytale; in terms of
content, it is extremely realistic, but it’s not a reality that we have been
accustomed to. It is a Latin American style of magical realism. In sum,
what it exhibits is the human world, not an ideal heaven floating on
hopes. (Gu 1995: 757–758)This “reflective and antilyrical” style, which “is extremely realistic”
and oriented to “the human world,” may have directly originated
from Gu Cheng’s disillusionment in the wake of his early ardent social
enthusiasms. And this disillusionment is in turn a reaction to his
encounter with recent history, namely the Cultural Revolution:
I cherished this fervor until the end of 1978, when I saw a large number
of Red Guards’ graves amid weeds and trees in Sichuan. Then I realized
that too many people have already had too many naive impulses in
history. That first calling and blood were beautiful, but what finally
emerged was the dispassionate vault of Heaven—Heaven has no mercy.
(Gu 1990: xiv; slightly modified according to the Chinese original
adopted in Gu 1995: 920–921)By the realization that “Heaven has no mercy,” Gu Cheng now makes
a decisive leap of faith and turns to Zhuangzi in All Things Are Equal
(Qiwulun), appropriating the idea of “no inhibition” (wubuwei) in
contrast with “nonaction” (wuwei):
His “all things are equal” was not meant to bring human beings down
to the same level as all other natural objects but to enable them to
obtain greater freedom in their position between Heaven and Earth, to
“roam beyond the four seas driving the clouds and riding the sun and
the moon.”
This tradition is called “no inhibition,” which means that a person
might do nothing and at the same time do anything, alone in coming,
alone in going. “Where he took his stand could not be fathomed” (lihu136 Yibing Huang