Ep 11: Rereading Hong lou meng 紅樓夢, Chapter 7 part 1/2

Chapter 7 is a beautiful chapter, a perfect microcosmic portrait of this novel, a self-enclosed small dream 小夢 from which to glimpse the greater whole. We follow Zhou Rui’s wife on a tour of the Rong compound delivering fake flowers to Jia-adjacent beauties. Kevin presents his new “every chapter is itself a dream” theory, explaining for the first time on the podcast the meaning of being “wuxing 五行-pilled” from a materialist, secular, social-scientific perspective, incorporating insights from Bataille’s famous short essay “The Language of Flowers.” How does one experience flowers, and how does a flower experience this experience? Are these matters elevated or base? Are they on the level of language, nature, or the spaces in-between? Support the show