[EN] love and cryptids / 爱与珍禽异兽
（and some unpopular opinions about “Decision to Leave”）
1. “/imagine”
When playing with text-to-image generators, I often start contemplating how imagination works. Does the GAN-based model “imagine” differently compared to human minds? (Yes.) If so, how do they differ and resemble each other? Out of curiosity, I prompted MidJourney to imagine some cryptids from The Classic of Mountains and Seas, a compilation of mythic geography and beasts. Since the 4th century BCE, many artists have illustrated mythic creatures based on textual description. I thought it could be fun to compare the generated outputs with the illustrations created during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Here we are. Below are four cryptids, I will include the original text, translations (in modern language), illustrations from Ming- or Qing- dynasties, and the very fictional nature documentary picture generated with MidJourney.
1. 烛龙/烛阴（zhú lóng / zhú yīn）
《大荒北经》：「西北海之外，赤水之北，有章尾山。有神，人面蛇身而赤，直目正乘，其瞑乃晦，其视乃明，不食不寝不息，风雨是谒。是烛九阴，是烛龙。」
Chapter of the Great Wilderness - The North: ”Outside Northwestern Sea, to the north of Red Water, there is Mount Zhang-wei. There resides a god who has a human face and a red snake body. Their eyes grow vertically. When the eyes close, it dims the world; when the eyes open, it brightens the world. The god doesn’t eat, neither do they sleep nor breathe. They feast on winds and rain. They can even light up the darkest abyss. This is Zhu-Long.”
Interestingly, there is another deity similar to Zhu-Long recorded somewhere else in the book.
《海外北经》：「锺山之神，名曰烛阴，视为昼，瞑为夜，吹为冬，呼为夏，不饮，不食，不息，息为风。身长千里……其为物，人面蛇身赤色，居钟山下。」
Chapter of Regions Beyond the Seas - The North: ”The god of Moutain Zhong is called Zhu-Yin. When they open their eyes, the world turns into day; when they close their eyes, the day turns into night. The air they blow out brings winter to the land, while they exhale, summer comes. This god doesn’t drink or eat, and neither do they breathe. But once they breathe, a storm will come immediately. This god is around a thousand miles long. They look like a snake with a human face, and the body is all read. They live at the foot of Moutain Zhong.”
2. 鯥（lù）
《南山经》：「…又东三百里，曰柢山，多水，无草木。有鱼焉其壮如牛，陵居，蛇尾，有翼，其羽在魼下，其音如留牛，其名曰鯥，冬死而复生，食之无肿疾。」
Chapter of the Southern Mountain: ”Another three hundred miles to the east, there is Mountain-Di, full of lakes and rivers, but no grass or trees. There is a fish, Lu, as strong as an ox, which resides in hills or mountains. It has a serpent’s tail and its wings grow below its front limbs. The fish growls like an ox. It dies in winter and returns to life later. If one eats the flesh of this fish, they will not suffer from swelling any more.”
3. 相柳（xiàng liǔ）
《海外北经》：「…相柳者，九首人面，蛇身面青。不敢北射，畏共工之台。台在其东。台四方，隅有一蛇，虎色，首冲南方。」
Chapter of Regions Beyond the Seas - The North: ”Xiang-Liu is a serpent with nine human heads. It does not dare to face the north, because it is afraid of Gong-Gong. The serpent’s body is covered with tiger-like pattern and its faces are blue-ish green.”
4. 蛮蛮（mán mán）
《西次经》：「…有鸟焉，其状如凫而一翼一目，相得乃飞，名曰蛮蛮，见则天下大水。」
Chapter of the Western Mountain: ”There is a mallard-like bird with only one wing and one eye. It has to fly as a pair. These birds are named Man-Man. When they appear, there will come great flood.”
Generated outcomes more or less deviate from the original descriptions. For Lu, you may vaguely some high grass far behind it, and the position of its wings is not exactly below its front limbs, moreover, we can’t even tell if its tail resembles a snake’s tail. For Xiang-Liu, it apparently grows too many heads - this terrific creature looks more like a pile of skull-head serpents than a serpent with nine heads. For Man-Man, they seem like a pair of egrets instead of mallards.
But my intention is not to prove the incapability of artificial imagination. Throughout the text-to-image generative process, human minds (here, my consciousness) still have to make several decisions, such as the prompt phrasing, the strength of variation, the adjustment of details, as well as the subjective evaluation of “absurdity,” etc. All these decisions affect the final representation. At the same time, human intentions (still mine here) are often powerless during the generative process: no matter how I rephrased my prompt, the model seemed unable to comprehend that I aimed to create “a snake body with nine human heads at one end.” If I use any sketched outlines for ControlNet, the results will certainly become more controllable, yet it seems to diminish the initial purpose of comparing the imagination process between artificial intelligence and humans.
2. (love are) catastrophic floods and mythic creatures
Among the four cryptids above, I was interested in Man-Man the most.
There are two records of birds that share a pair of wings to fly in The Classic of Mountains and Seas. The one that is literally named “Bi-Yi-Niao (Wing-sharing Bird)” appeared in the Chapter of Regions Beyond the Seas - the North. It mentioned that they always fly as a pair, while one is blue and the other is red.
In literature afterwards (and even in ordinary life nowadays), the birds that share a pair of wings to fly together are often used as a symbol of love in literature. Yet, their habit of “being inseparable even after death” only appeared in some later books. Instead of romantic love, The Classic of Mountains and Seas described their appearance as a portent of catastrophic floods.
This association creates an oddly romantic sense: love is just like floods. It is powerful, unstoppable, and in some sense even uncontrollable and unpredictable - moreover, its power is capable of destroying: the lovers and sometimes anything in between and beyond.
Park Chan-Woo’s movie Decision to Leave also tries to construct an association between “love” and the ancient book about mythic creatures. The cinematography is fairly romantic, yet the story and its reference to the classic book are somewhat ridiculous. Because of the literal meaning of the book title, mountains and waves keep appearing in the scenes either figuratively or metaphorically. In the first interrogation, Seo-rae quoted the chapter Yong Ye from The Analects to prove her innocence: “The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills. I am not a virtuous person, I prefer the sea.”
Thus, the romance began from this dichotomy between the mountain and the sea. Such a division summarises the dynamic of the whole story: a struggle between conflicting interests. Hae-jun versus Seo-rae, the detective versus the suspect, “you” versus “me,” in a heteronormative relationship, maybe that is also the expected relationship of the man versus the woman - the static and the dynamic. The two parties are initially opposed to each other, but the wrestling gradually blurs the boundary in between. Eventually, the conflict ceases and the romance comes to an end - the lovers stay together in peace (or part ways).
Yet, the saying of Confucius did not propose a dichotomy between “the wise” and “the virtuous.” With the rhetorical device applied (互文, “intertextuality”), the meaning of the sentence should be interpreted by combining its clauses. Similar to the verse in Du Mu’s poem Mooring on the Qinhuai River, the river and the shoal are not separately enveloped in the mist or the moonlight. After all, how can you separate the moonlight from the mist? Instead, that night when Du Mu briefly stayed by the Qinhuai River, the mist and the moonlight were softly veiling the cold river and the shoal.
Hence, the quote from The Analects is probably not the MBTI equivalent in 551–479 BCE. Wisdom and virtue are not mutually exclusive; one can freely enjoy mountains and seas without the obligation to settle for only one. Using the quote as a metaphor to hint at the tragic destiny of the love story seems like pushing romance into a false dilemma.
It is indeed quite absurd to witness the appearance of The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the movie. Seo-rae's mother left her an ancient book, and ever since Seo-rae has been obsessively reading the book. Even when she worked as a caregiver, she read the book to the elderly. A mysterious ancient book about mythic creatures may seem charming in a very "oriental" way, but this aesthetic quality is often only for the eyes of a cultural outsider. In reality, the writing in The Classic of Mountains and Seas is actually quite fragmented, as it records a large amount of mundane details of the partially factual and partially imagined geography. For example, in the Chapter of Regions Beyond the Seas - The South, the writing summarizes four distinct archaic states in one sentence. Although the records contain rich details of these states - people who have a big hole in their chest, people who own a pair of twisted calves - all this information is covered in only 78 characters. Imagine reading all this to an elderly person - the information switches as rapidly as an archaic TikTok.
Nevertheless, what The Classic of Mountains and Sea and love share in common may be their enigmatic nature. There have been several hypotheses about the purpose of the book. It appeared to be a geographical documentation, but it also included a huge portion of fictional content. Some claimed it to be the annotation of "The Book of Odes," while others suspected it to be a collection of sorcery and ritual practices. Maybe love is pretty much like this. It is partly facts, partly lovers' projection of their imaginations - to reason certain unknowns with almost irrational beliefs. It can be poetic yet mystic at the same time - a mixture of romance and horror.
- the end -
2023.12.02
Resources
《山海经》/ ”The Classic of Mountains and Seas” https://archive.org/details/classicofmountai0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up
《论语》/ ”The Analects” (”Thus Spoke The Master”) https://ctext.org/analects/ens
《诗经》/ ”The Book of Odes” https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry/ens