hegel says people want to see their lives on stage

something about how xicheng lives in the aftermath of violence, in the tender hollow space of grief, the smallest space of solitude that lan xichen carves out in seclusion. Ixc's post-canon seclusion as the place where he curls up into this very very small corner against the great enormity of a collapsed world, of an unrecognizable world. the absence that hangs ever-still in the air of the hanshi, the sucked-out vacuum of seclusion is also the fantasy of a world that is still grieving the way lan xichen is, in that walled-courtyard with the mist-shrouded little garden out back / jiang cheng is, i think, someone from that collapsed outside who has nursed the thick silence of seclusion in his ribcage for so long that he's taken that space as emptied out. in a sense, then, i think about his disturbance of lxc's seclusion as a sudden collapse of boundaries, where the world is no longer outside. in jc's body, that hollow space has become a stitched and scarred part of his flesh, a core that rings a little offbeat as if to signal that there's something wrong about the world still. to me, post-canon xicheng is, i guess, mostly about this—about the enduring forever of grief, the resilience of the body that continues nevertheless, the small tenderness in all that silence. all these things that are very ordinary.