Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur

This week in the stacks, I stumbled across two pieces of Chinese graffiti different from those I’d encountered previously. While most Chinese graffiti has been written horizontally, these pieces gave the impression of being written vertically, in neat rows.

Peter Behr, a UofC alum, identified the first piece as a notable passage from Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦), one of the Four Great Classical Novels (四大名著), “which posits a cyclical relationship between concepts that can be construed as meaning emptiness (空), perceived reality (色), and actual reality (情).”* For someone studying alone in the stacks, spending hour after hour in silence, perhaps exploring postmodern theories of this and that, I can imagine how those ideas might resonate.

Peter, furthermore, notes a typo: “our rushed artist committed a small typo in the upper left hand corner, 由 instead of 自.”

Matthew Felix Sun kindly translated this passage:

Through emptiness, one sees lust
Because of lust, passion grows
Conduct passion to lust
Out of lust, one learns emptiness

The second piece, written on a different wall above the same study desk on the 4th floor, reads as follows (once again, courtesy of Matthew):

[On top of the page, a very large and light character:]
Mountain
[then]
The benevolent love mountain(s)
The wise love water

I can’t help but wonder what the author would make of those who love graffiti.

* Please also note a postscript from Peter, in true UofC alum style: “The problem with those words I defined is that their meanings are quite diverse and have shifted heavily over history. Indeed I believe 色, as it ‘grew up’ so to speak, came to mean physical desire, and now is ‘lust, sex,’ in addition to ‘color.’ 情, which is ubiquitous as the component to words such as 情况 (’status, situation’) and 事情 (‘thing, matter, event’), also means ‘feeling’ or ‘passion,’ as in 感情 (‘emotion’) or 情爱 (‘love, in the sense of relationships’). So if we take 空 to mean not physical emptiness but lack, loneliness, or emotional solitude, the cycle also works. I’m not a scholar of the book, and haven’t even come close to reading its entirety. But I will be cavalier and guess that Matthew’s rendering is immediately borne out of context (it is a love story, after all), while mine is an interpretation of subtext (and so again, caveat lector).”