Life of Unknown Origins

In Wei Bai's opinion, anything that is living and capable of movement is an animal, perhaps his former role as a medical practitioner is the reason for this. For Wei Bai, this is by no means an anthropomorphic artistic technique, but an objective reality in the eyes of a doctor. It is virtually impossible to understand Wei Bai's poetry and its meaning without understanding this point. In his poems, Wei Bai wrote about extremely mixed animals, and he intentionally broke down the boundaries between them. However, it might be a good idea to divide the various animals that wander through Wei Bai's poems into the following categories for the sake of analysis: the real animals, the downgraded animals, and the quasi-animals. According to Wei Bai, the real animal bears a symbolic meaning. In Wei Bai's poems, human beings are always represented as animals, contributing to the non-moralization and non-aesthetic character of Wei Bai's poetry; in contrast, non-animals are elevated to quasi-animals, and robots, which are both rational and human, embody partly the fate and prospects of human beings. As a former neurosurgeon, Wei Bai has a certain understanding of the deconstruction of the body (i.e., anatomy in that primordial sense), that is, the cutting and sewing of body organs. Such professional characteristics contributed to the same precise, meticulous, calm and restrained style of Wei Bai's poems. After all, whether anatomy or medical treatment, in the final analysis, it is all about eradicating the foci of disease and keeping the human or social muscle healthy. In this sense, the healing spirit and the critical spirit are also effectively combined in Wei Bai's poems.