One short sleep past, we wake eternally

In my life I collect two things, one tangible one not, equally half-heartedly. Cause favorite LPs are bound to be worn out by the needle of the turntable, just like unused references chipped away by the tide of time. But when you collect enough references fortuities are bound to happen. I stumbled upon that Proust quote when I was writing about my memories of rains in Chengdu. And yesterday I read an article in New Yorker about the play “Wit”, and only the day before I was shown a clip of the movie version in which the punctuation of the ending of “Death be not proud” was discussed. So I watched the movie last night. A cancerous John Donne scholar pondering upon her own death in her last days, I know, too “convenient”, too “obvious”. But Emma Thompson gave a powerful performance. I always like her and she strikes me in many different ways, elegant, wise, and strong. For the first time I found her beautiful, at the beginning, with a baseball hat on her shaved head, no eyebrows. Morbid, maybe. But thus the features of her face stood out, completely unhindered, and I found them to be sharp, well-defined, while the weariness and mockery in her eyes added a soft tint to the edges of her nose and lips. So yeah, she shined. In a very pale and dark way.

It’s adapted from a play but I think the monologue works. Maybe monologue is not quite the right word, because you really feel she was talking TO you, a woman who had no relative or loved ones and died alone in the hospital, somehow managed to form this intimate bound with you from the get-go. Maybe it’s the topic, when someone who’s about to die is telling you about it, you tend to pay attention. How many times, in my sort-of writings, I broke the fourth wall and found the seats to be completely empty? But I digress.

The first feeling the movie aroused in me was fear. You would think there is none better mentally equipped than a John Donne scholar to face a surprise and imminent death. But when she lied there motionless in the chaotic hospital aisle, like a big pit on the surface of a highway, as the camera slowly pushed in, you realize she’s as defenseless as anyone. Living people cannot KNOW death, all the metaphysical rhetorics and deliberations have nothing to do with the real thing. And everyone will have to experience it first-handed and unrehearsed.  As the flashback progressed, I picked up an unuttered sense of futility, although, I guess it’s probably hard NOT to feel that way when everything is about to come to nil. She said, “words are my only defense now”, but how can you argue with someone who remains absolute silent. All these living moments wasted on the rhetoric of death.  It’s like delivering what you believed to be a winning argument, but the other side just looked at you, absolute still and no expression. After a pronged silence you eventually crumpled under the unyielding gaze, and swiftly added something as if trying to buttress the argument which you no long had confidence in.  So laughable and off-the-mark now. But what is one to do? More to the point, what is a literary mind to do? Yes, we learn by this example that it is Hubris to spend waking moments engaging in the thoughts of life itself, only God can do it cause He has eternity. But if not that, what else? If we don’t write about life and death, if we don’t sneer or fear them pretending we KNEW what they are really about, then what else do we write about? LOVE? The “no resurrection” scene was moving, but it is a total surrender to Death, the blunt rejection of the boastful “wake eternally”, so in the end, we die, Death lives on. There, metaphysical conceit.

That night I had a dream. When it began, or in the first part I remember, I was making a mad dash for a class between two rows of juniper in Yanyuan. I remember thinking in the dream, “it’s strange I’m back here again given that I have zero attachment to the place.” And when I arrived it turned out to be an organic chemistry class. The teacher laid out the stick models on the table and said, “I want everyone to write an essay on childhood memories.” I remember thinking, “right up my alley.” Without any hesitation I took out a pen and bended over the legal pad and began: ”‘Listen’, my dad said, ‘closely. Put both your ears to it and you’ll hear it.’”

Like a desert misses its rain

“For often in one we find a day that has strayed from another, that makes us live in that other, evokes at once and makes us long for its paritcular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in the process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of Happiness.”

–Swann’s Way, Place-Names

Isn’t there always a time, winter time mostly, that suddenly we miss dearly the rain? Last night I was reading by lamplight, with curtain drawn, when the rumbling of some potent firecrackers from a distance slipped in between the tedious lines which, for a moment, I mistook for thunders.  I put down the book and listened tentatively for a moment, but there was no more. It reminded me the dinner table conversation, only a couple of days ago, in which my aunt told my dad to walk more slowly on his way home, as the narrow road of stone slates leading to our building were covered by a thin layer of moss after it rained over the weekend.  I opened the window and the spell broke — the night was cloudless, unambiguous, as a matter of fact, sharp as a knife. Instead of drops I smelled powders, nitric, arid, fully oxidized and tightly bound, now occupying the air with undisputable presence. It then occurred to me that isn’t wintry thunders a famous metaphor for impossibility. Wouldn’t it be beautiful though? The rumbling of thunders rolls across a December sky that is lying in repose, deepening its expectant silence before the evening snow.

The rainy winter nights during the vacation at home has been pressing on my mind, fresh and vivid, and with each day that passed since I returned, a vague smell or a muffled sound, not sensed then but nonetheless retained subconsciously,  now gradually awakened instead of fading away, adding a little weight to the impression, until finally it cracked open the flood gate of memories, memories which had been lying dormant for so long a time, frozen by the 20 years of life in the north, blistering cold against which oblivion of happy memories of the south is so essential a defensive mechanism. Those memories, now gradually thawed, dribble into the days that I’m away, yet again, adding moisture to a parched life. I watch their vapour rising and disappearing, swiftly before my eyes, their ethereal beauty a telling sign that they are not part of my current existence. I’ve changed, and formed, modeled myself after any one of the Nordic figures. Presently those southern sensations have to be internalized, wrapped up and insulated from surface, from the alternating heat and cold, equally punishing.

Beijing, for that matter, is a terrible place to rain upon. It is largely, when standing in the rain, drizzle or pour no matter, just an expressionless concrete face that reflects nothing back. There is no leaves that ruffle, no puddles that ripple, not to mention anything ephemeral like a waft of coolness that swings in the air. It’s not that it does not appreciate the blissful relief, it just does not know how to react properly in front a guest that is so rare and whimsy, coming unannounced and overwhelming the host with such exuberance. So in the cheerful sound of firecrackers I closed the window, taking a deep breath of the air in the room, artificially warm and now increasingly stale as the night progresses.

On Borges (2) — The City of Mad God

By the recommendation of a colleague, lately I came to discover the wonder of T.S. Eliot’s literature criticism. Among the few modern poets that I read, T. S. Eliot is probably the one that I came to appreciate most, but I haven’t really moved beyond “The Wasteland” and “Prufrock”. His criticism is of a total different character, lucid, concise, dead on point. I read “What is Classic” three times and then an idea leads me to read Borges again. I’ll probably lose the train of thoughts again before I can put it down coherently, but there is at least one particular thing in “The Immortals”, namely the City of Mad God, which has brewed in me for a while and I think is now detailed enough to be recorded. Here is the excerpt:

“I emerged into a kind of small plaza—a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself. Its patent antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of immortal artificers. Cautiously at first, with indifference as time went on, desperately toward the end, I wandered the staircases and inlaid floors of that labyrinthine palace. (I discovered afterward that the width and height of the treads on the staircases were not constant; it was this that explained the extraordinary weariness I felt.) This palace is the work of the gods, was my first thought. I explored the uninhabited spaces, and I corrected myself: The gods that built this place have died. Then I reflected upon its peculiarities, and told myself: The gods that built this place were mad. I said this, I know, in a tone of incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse—with more intellectual horror than sensory fear. The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality. I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured—even in the middle of a secret desert—pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other—those might, perhaps, be approximate images.”

　 I remember literarily having to put the book down to take a breath after this paragraph. It’s amazing how, after I took a step away from it I then realized, this short paragraph manages to depict a scene that’s so totally alien and mystical with such precision and clarity. The economy and efficiency of language stands in drastic contract with the power of impact it exerts, and the level of awe and horror it invokes. I closed my eyes and I could instantly see the terrible structure springing up around me and engulfing me with a sense of menace that was both familiar and foreign. Familiar cause I seem to be able to clearly visualize the structure, its terrible shapes and terrifying magnitude. It’s like I’ve seen it somewhere before, if not in reality then in nightmares, something not invented, something I KNEW, suppressed and lurking in the depth of memories and only now called forth again. Foreign because it’s a terror that is brought about by gods, not devils, the terror of creation rather than the terror of destruction. You realize being stripped of what you know is not so bad, compared with being subject to what you don’t.

But then as I mustered up the courage to pick up the book and read on, I found it odd　that　this paragraph is not really connected to the rest of the story in any logical sense. Like the City of Mad Gods itself, this narration is magnificent and startling in its own right, but it serves no obvious purpose in the context of the story. It was not built by the Immortals, and it’s not even clear if the Immortals were even aware of its existence. It’s as if Borges thought about it, fascinated by it but realized he could not come up with a sensible story in which he could fit it in. The chaotic nature of the scene has taken on a life of its own and got better of its creator. So he simply slipped it into a story that was only tangentially related cause he couldn’t just let it go.

So the image of the City of Mad Gods stuck with me for a long time but eventually it started to fade with time, blissfully so. Then by pure chance I discovered H.P. Lovecraft as I was looking for free downloads on Kindle store. It all made sense after I read “the Call of Cthulhu”, it’s highly likely that Borges got the inspiration from Lovecraft. I’m probably using the word inspiration politely, as I became convinced that the City of Mad Gods is a carbon copy of what was originally devised by Lovecraft:

“Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity…

It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.”

I went back to read the Borges paragraph again and in comparison its expressive power seems much less impressive. I came to realize that a great deal of terror in Borges’ paragraph was delivered by pretty explicit nouns and adjectives: remorse, horror, horrific, sensory fear, oppressiveness, irrationality, dark, repel, troubled, monstrous, hating. This paragraph was overloaded with thesaurus and derivatives of the word “horror”, basically. The Lovecraft passages use similar words too, but are more refrained in its appealing to the readers’ emotional reaction. They employ the usual tactic of horror stories, by drumming up the horror through third-party recounts first before revealing the horror itself. He invoked the terrible city, planted the seed and then quietly stepped back, leaving the readers to use their own imagination freely to spook themselves, so to speak, as the third paragraph is almost nothing but matter-of-fact descriptions of the structure itself, without any adjective or commentary.

But apparently Lovecraft himself was not yet done with the image. Five years later, in “At The Mountain of Madness”, a very similar structure was conjured up again:

“The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.

　The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause.”

This time the narrative seems to have reversed, which I think is even more effective. The first paragraph concentrates on a detailed description of the strangeness of the structure, again refrains from emotional appeals until the last sentence, which leads in the second paragraph. The second paragraph is also very brief, but the emphasis is on the phrase “desperation of mental self-defense”. Without piling up words that are packed with emotions it brings home the direct assault of the vision on the witness’ mind. Though appeared to be ruinous and dead, the structure posed a danger that was vague but sinister because, as Borges eloquently put, what we did not know “polluted” what we seemed to have known.

Largo

Let nonchalance see me through these gray, selfsame days.

The Sun came out at 2p.m. amid an air that was milky white. It hangs there deferentially, and looks more or less apologetic, not knowing how to stall the precipitant fading of an autum afternoon. Pale shadows of the blinds on my desk, press against the spaces between inky lines on the scattered printouts, a slightly slower tempo, a different shade of gray. The butterfly palm has been mellow today, just standing by the window looking out, without a word, as if vaguely expecting someone. And there is certain stillness in the room, slanting towards a pre-matured night fall, deepening with every second  that ticked away toward 4 o’clock. Outide the window the city lies in silent repose, shrouded in gray smog and its own blissful ignorance, of late hours, shortened minutes, stolen seconds unaccounted for. It waits. Obligingly, for time to lead it out of this gap of seasons, away from the forgetful autumn, into an obliterating winter. It waits. Like a breath in between strings, a note perching on the bridge, a shadow to be released through the F-holes. 

 Saturday morning there was rain. At breakfast table I watched my dad flipping through a magazine with intense absent-mindness, setting his day in motion. And I  thought, I must be growing old too. All day long I listen to his life, an endless Jazz number set adrift on an unhurried motif, when he pours tea, plays violin, or pauses on stairs, on his way back from market carrying groceries. Tomorrow I would be going away again, and his music would be drown in time and distance. Until we meet again.

104 pages of bliss on mortality

I guess this is as close as it gets to an autumn afternoon in Beijing. I sat at a pool-side cafe reading “White Noise” over tea and cigarettes, mildly enjoying myself, as patches of sunlight moved over me onto unspecified far away locations. Among the limited means of making myself happy, the most often deployed is probably sitting in unblocked sunlight chain smoking, as I have figured long ago that my mental and physical health are in inverse (or reciprocal) proportion, a downward-pointing curve that smoothly sliding down the axis of longevity and creeping along the horizontal one that stands for either blissful numbness or pure trance. And the multiple of the two elements gives One, the wholeness of my being, so to speak. The beauty of this system is that it stays in the first quadrant, where everything remains positive. I can get infinitely close to zero on either side of the axis without having to worry about accidentally crossing over to the cold and darkness of negativity. A fail-safe game of chicken with Death — at this rate, I’m going to live Forever.

Speaking of which, after the rather dreadful experience with “Infinite Jest”, Don Dellilo has been quite a pleasant surprise. I say “pleasant” because the book does bestow upon me constant pleasure, it’s not a sarcastic reference to the fact that it is mainly about mortality of human being, almost obsessively so. Dellilo writes with a quiet, unhurried desperation that’s only possible to a man at his late mid-age, when vigor of life, concurrently with the hair line, starts to recede at an alarming rate, like the sea retreating from the beach at sundown, revealing mortality that was lurking under the surface like cold, smooth rocks covered in dead seaweeds. Like an ebb the waves of life keep coming back, momentarily cover the unwavering gaze of death, giving out hopes in small doses, a salary hike here, a pat on the shoulder there, but the overall trend becomes painfully obvious, as each second mercilessly ticking by. I would say I appreciate (well, “enjoy” would be a more fitting but all too morbid word here) the first part much more, where he quietly feeds the fear of death with the banality of everyday life. It’s masterfully done, how he cultivate the sense of estrangement and desperation out of a seemingly normal, well-to-do family. The kids, without saying anything out of ordinary, hovering around the living room like little Grim Reapers who keep wary watches over their aging (respective step-)parents, waiting them out, in a game they know for sure they’d win in due time. As each page drew on my admiration grew, I became more and more interested in seeing how long he could sustain this magic act of growing a sprawling tree of dread out of nothingness. Turns out, a happy (here I go again) journey of 104 pages. I got almost instantly disappointed when he conjured up the toxic cloud. It’s like, watching a horror movie that does not live up to the great expectation its beginning calls up. The smoke and mirrors of the first half sets up the suspension so masterfully, the haunting music, the remote footsteps where there should be only silence, the glimpses that only suggest what’s lurking behind. But when the monster eventually comes out, what a let-down, it’s nothing more than just another variation of the cross-breed of an alligator and a certifiably disturbed. Strangely, the catastrophe instantly diluted the menace of mortality he had been so convincingly worked up in Part I, it’s a lesser tragedy if one died by a drastic chemical accident, as compared to simply withering away under the constant dread of an unremarkable check-out.

Plot execution aside, Dellilo writes with a style that’s eye-opening but also immediately familiar. A colleague of mine said that he writes in “an almost Haiku-like style”, which I think is a rather keen observation. Each chapter is no more than 3 pages long, usually, and full of sentences like “He disappears not only here and now but retrospectively.” He writes on a metaphysical level that’s instantly accessible without sounding cheap, the way he conjure up analogy is reminiscent Pynchon at his best, which, I think, firmly occupies the other end of the modern American literature.

“Plastic! A**holes!”

 August. Is the time I finally turn around, in its alternating rains and heat waves, to face the other end of the year. Odd-numbered years make me antsy. But even-numbered years are usually debilitatingly uneventful, lulls in a vexing way, like how kids are put to bed for mandatory siesta in a kindegarten.

    The sky in Beijing has been, this August, largely a monsterous dull mass, vast, shapeless, defying definition. The air is usually so soiled it seems to materialize into a veil of smog, a cataract over the ailing eyes of an aging sun. It diffuses direct sunlight and infuses it with a strange hue of gray, the kind of gray that hints at an uncertainty that’s typical of a nightmare conjured up in an uneasy sleep in a humid afternoon.  Looking out of the window I can’t imagine that autumn is coming. Or maybe it’s all for the better if it does not, least the crisp deep September be dulled into a dry and rough chill by the dust-filled air that rubbed against everything in it like a piece of sandpaper. Autumn will be the last ritual to close the circle for me, so to speak. One more month and half I’ll be back in Beijing for a full year.  The winter I remember nothing but a silent sleepy afternoon repeating itself over and over again, and not so much as a hint of snow. The spring didn’t seem to happen at all. The summer is not so much a season as a pile of humid days and sultry nights, strung together by some invisible hands in an uttermost random fashion. It could be three identical cloudy mornings in the middle of July followed by a bright but joyless late June afternoon, before time was jolted into the last day of August, and nobody seemed to notice, or care. It surely rained a lot. It’s like through some bizarre time-space mix-up all the snow the December so rightfully deserved, and needed, got shifted to August, melt and poured down by the sky with a mirthless smile on its face. Cause Fuck December, you know?

   When I think of my nearly-first year in Beijing the first and probably only word that comes to mind is gray. Or grayness. It’s not even the color gray, per se, but a particular state of things, the Grayness, a sooted blankness, if that makes any sense. The Grayness and its effacing effect. The quality of Grayness of the air seems to smear on everything and eradicate their individual details. It’s a sea of Grayness. Except on July 1st when everthing was bathed in a glorious red. Uniformity. That’s how Beijing likes it, I guess. I naturally wanted to fit in, didn’t think I need to make an effort but here I am, clumsily fumbling at the personal experiment called “join the crowd”. Cause the stuff I Used to do seem increasingly ridiculous in this new Grayness. I digged up a 10-minute clip by the Great Late G.C. and I must have watched it 20 times in a matter of 20 hours, laughing my ass off. “It could be the answer to our age-old philosophical inquiry: Why are we here? ‘PLASTIC! Assholes!’ ” But needless to say I felt a guilt afterward knolted in my stomach that refused to go away. The Non-Grayness is morphing into a Substance that I abuse for quick fixes that are becoming less and less effective.

Saturday afternoon reminiscence

I remember walking down 42nd to Bryant Park in the afternoons, crossing Vanderbilt, Park, Madison then 5th Ave, where the light is always red upon arrive. But the memory is vague now, slowly turning from imagerial to symbolic. Details are graduately soften by the erosion of time, become fluid, and start to seep through the barrier of the respective days which they initially belonged. What I have now then is a summary, or rather, an average — various imageries of 42nd added up, all mixed together, then implicitly divided by the hundred times I walked down that street. All the people I saw on those trips, hobos, cops, street vendors, an old guy in gaberdine suit, girls in fleshes and bones, Chang Won Choi or Andrew Shepard hardly matters now, all are treated to a mathematical equal, morphed into each other, their thousands vivid facial expressions merged and mixed too, until they are all reduced to phantoms of 42, pale ghosts floating around with utter detachment, like a cliche scene in a cliche sci-fi movie pretending to be deep shit.

After a few months even the seaons started to get mixed up. In this weird dream I had a couple of maybe weeks ago, I was walking in the genral direction of Byant Park between Lex and Vanderbilt where the street was leaning against the 4 p.m. shadow of the Grand Central. On the farther side where the street was still half-bathed in the slanting sunlight, people were looking vaguely happy in their trunks and short sleeves, going about the respective businesses they might have on a June late afternoon. But the side I was on, in the shadow, outside the the Grand Hyatt Hotel and under the Park Ave bridge, it was already getting dark, with that damp smell of a winter evening, hushed, solemn. People were moving silently in heavy layers, with their head bowed and face hidden. All of a sudden I was not sure whether I should keep going, not knowing which side of the shadow Bryant Park would fall on when I arrived.