北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)

西 New York 2012 - 12

25

An Apartment on E 102 St, 10 Floor,

Early in the Dimly Lit Morning Twilight

New York City

2012

Yesterday they visited the museums along Central Park Avenue, and for a while, both of them slept through the evening hours. For her, it was because she was tired and still had her internal clock set to Beijing time. As for himself, he slept because she did, he did not need to slumber of his own accord – it was the comfort of being next to her that was important. But in the morning for the sunlight had awoken, they both awoken at the same time. In the blackened room there was only a night light which could not be seen from the bed, it was an oddly green tone, but in no other aspect did it stand out. What it did do was allow the couple to peer into the other ones eyes, which became more both of them kind of staring grace, as if a cross of silver erected itself over their heads. They both conversed with each other, all in English and Chinese, till the man got up and went over to the window and looked southward over the enormous range of Manhattan. Then he turned his head backwards, and in English spoke to his lover. Two households, both alike in dignity.¹

“I know that I have been wretched and have wasted all of this time that we have been given. So, I understand if you would want to leave me. I know that I have been absorbed in my own thinking, whether it was ready fiction or nonfiction. It was the writing that gripped me, and if I looked up from the writing, it was to engorge that satyr wickedness which was the only thing that sex meant to me. All of this was wrong, and I did not really know how wrong it was until tonight. Which makes me ashamed, in a myriad of ways – a feeling of grace – known not grace but a revolution stings my face such as the deteriorated influences that come from, I know not were. From the bottom of my – as we say in English – heart, please allow me to ask forgiveness, and more than forgiveness, resting on some word I cannot describe.”

This was not something that she expected him to say, even asking for forgiveness was not generally part of his nature, except brusquely and in professional circumstances, not personally. Before she was cold, into the depths of her spine – as they would say in Chinese – but with this glaring act of his, she warmed from her cheeks all the way inwards, and, without her conscious mind, an easy Absolution formed on her lips – more than an exoneration or remission of guilt, but an indulgence of clemency and mercy. She half smiled, and for a moment she became like Guanshiyin – known primarily as the Bodhisattva hearers of the cries of the world and is then as the personification of compassion. Thus, she put her head up upon her arm, while she searched for a clinically white robe. L'amor che mouve le sole.

“In most of the times that I have known you, it would never have occurred that you demanded any form of forgiveness. What happened today which changed your mind? Was the in the daylight hours, or was it a dream that came to you in the middle of the night? It seems so radical a move on your part, and abrupt about-face, which seems to come from deep in your spine, and without any provocation.”

“It is both daylight and nighttime combined that has made me think anew, because for a long time, there was only myself to think of, and only very rarely did I think of you – or anyone else. I am sorry my words are not like the writing I have done, I am sorry that they carry no eloquence – but that is because the ridiculousness and expressiveness come from repeated regretting until the words are finally perfect. With only one go, I do not have the capacity or potency to achieve the effectiveness which I so often desire.”

“What would you say in prose – or in a poem – which you cannot say right now.”

“First, I would take some phrase, which is ordinary and common. Then, I would attach my glance at the first common word, and look for one which was more precise, and had a more gracious meaning, and then do this again and again, until the line was perfect, and then I would start out with a second phrase and do the same thing with it. It would take me a long time to reach for the quintessential meaning, rising up from the flawed meaning that the sentence begins with.”

“How long would this take?”

“I do not know, because I never had gotten to the pure essence, the exemplary best that I can relate to. This is why I search for music because in polyphony there are chords which is sound more fluidly, even though the individual parts may be plain, in and of themselves.”

“We think in terms of the lyrics. But it cannot be that that is all there is to do it, almost anyone who has the … what is the word?” Eagerly she watched his face as he mouthed out the word “tenacity” - which though it was not exactly the word she was searching for, was good enough for the present purposes.

Then there was a pause as his face looked thoughtful, “It is enough to get a novel published in a small publication, and I mean very small. It is not enough, however, to get something larger published – by which I mean a publisher who gets notifications in the various places where things are reviewed. That is many steps up from here.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Be younger and fairer than I am - my novels will die, though they may take on life when I am long dead... that is a distinct possibility. But it does not bother me much, I am writing for myself and a few people who read for the joy of reading, as opposed to the joy of talking about what they read. And there is a distinct difference between the two.”

“Do not think they are good enough?”

“I do not know, but I think not, at least not yet, but I will continue trying in my own way.”

“By trying to make your prose better? Or do you need to market more?”

“I suppose I could market, but my real objective is what Debussy called the 'arabesque', the moment that something other than the melody elucidates the form. I know how to do this in music, but I still do not have the gift for words.”

“But your music is not well known either.”

“That is because there is no one in music who wants to sleep with me, and in music, there are at least 300 years of excellent music, whereas in the long history of writing, most works are forgotten, or translated. We read Dante, but very few of us read Petrarch – though I have, most people have not.”

“It is the same way Chinese, there are only a few classic texts which survived that long.”

“Whereas Bach is still fresh after all this time. But do not worry, it does not matter whether anything I have done - fiction, nonfiction, music – will be remembered at all.” Then he paused – it was clear that he changed course - “Took a Tea Party person out to view the stars. Pointed out Vega, Deneb, Altair, Rigel, Betelgeuse. He asked what language that was, and I told him 'Arabic.' He said 'My god! The terrorists have us surrounded.”

They laughed – as much to clear the air. Then he began again:

“Everything is lost in time.”²

“Just as you’re not lost to me.”

“That will remain to be seen, and whether it is healthy or not. At least ‘Tirez’ still means ‘pull’ in French.”

“It is already been a long time since we started our chats not even knowing what the other one looked like. There was a magic to knowing that somebody out there wants me, and in London - though you may deny it – I felt that there was a connection there, and at that time the words had not come into being. Sparrow for only you, I remember how you came up with that word for me, though I did not think you knew what it meant at that time.”

“Mao placed it on his list of permitted pests, though sparrows were not really a pest. In my mind's eye, thinking of you hopping along a road keep me pleasure in those dark days when I could feel the minions of the law closing in on us, and it was no use to telling my elusive bosses in the company as to why it was so. You were the only thing keeping my life together. And if nothing else, I should thank you for that.”

“That could not for now, though there were four pests – and only the sparrow came out of the dark heart of the Leader heart – because he could not stand the site of them.”

“You will have to tell me the story, in detail, sometime.”

“There really is much more to tell, what is important for us, by the way, we both knew what Sparrow meant, though we did not talk as to why. We just knew it, and that, to me, was very important. I admit I had had several lovers – all of them Chinese – but something reached into me and said that I wanted something else – though I did not know what it was.”

“Most people want someone who looks like them – only 20% of us want someone different. I think it is genetics, but no one has found the exact causes yet.”

“Is it genetic?”

“At least in part, but it changes all of each one of us who is different and forces us to enjoy things which otherwise we would not even deign to consider otherwise.”

Dimness that was becoming light, he went on about how this question of genetics becomes a driving force in an individual's life, as more and more of one's being was wrapped up in the question of how to make someone different from ourselves, truly, like us – and then love us. Because it gripped us with the question - “What is love? My whole life has crashed.³”

Internal pit in the back of one's head came the reply: “You do not know until someone else says it to you. I only wish a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”⁴ and that is not good enough, so one tries to search even harder, though in the end that is all there can be. Reaching out on a precipice, and hoping that if you fall, someone – somewhere – will catch you. Someone who looks different. Who is different in so many aspects, that one cannot count, even if one wished it. Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.⁵

Drifted off to sleep, with their hands intertwined, and a gentle look of bliss on their faces. Even in slumber, they finally looked as if they were in peace. For the last time, they looked as if they had found what they were looking for, with chords out of The Well-Tempered Clavier, later labeled BWV 846–893.

In every romance, there are scenes - some it is where they dined, such as Tennessee Williams, that about the memories of having eaten, the pleasure of consuming the pleasant repast, and the fligements⁶ of glorious talking about remembering the smorgasbord in its place. With them, it was of books and films, flicks, movies they consumed, in a seated position, and regurgitated on command, as if everything was a glorious lecture, never to be repeated, to be devoured and minutely reasoned from. It is the child miming the reason for existence from parents to a lover. Consommé’s good today, what is your order?⁷ She dreamed of eating his brain.⁸

26

A Story, Begun but not finished

Piano was the sound that she began the story with, and in a minor key. At first, she thought of it as a broad Steinway, but then she thought about a concert she had attended at noon, on Tremont St. in the church called King's Chapel, in Boston – a church without a steeple, crowded by much newer sheened buildings. Being at 12 PM, it had only one selection – but by Beethoven! It was one of his violin sonatas, and she had never heard it on a pianoforte nor with a violin strung with gut strings. It was the old way of playing this music, looking backwards at Haydn, and Mozart. The two players were not known to her at first. There's never any room to breathe.⁹

There was a sound, at once tinny and growled, that was anything more than pleasant. But it grew on her - until she could not hear the music any other way. She remembers the last name of the violinist – Ogata¹⁰ was a strange name to remember. It had occurred to her to go up and speak with them, but there came a very common hesitation and shyness. What would she say to the violinist or the pianoforte specialist who accompanied her? As a special note, she reminded herself that the piano-forte, of light dexterity and amazing facility, was named Watson – remembering both were important.

Instead, she walked out the front door - not realizing that the two instrumentalists would be wishing attendees well in a few minutes – and she felt a grasp of sunlight on her face amidst the tall glass towers. Then began to walk to the Park Street Station and begin her work – or such it was called, though, in fact, it was truly mind-numbing in its gloriously set boredom. It largely consisted of transferring handwritten notes to keyed-in comments in a database. Why anyone would do this, in fact no one really was concerned with their content. But she girded herself for an afternoon better spent on other things – and wishing that she had a gift, any gift, which would allow her to sit at the top of a faded white-walled and red-carpeted ambo, reciting from her words. Alas, the scratching of her pen – and she meant this, rather than typing the way most writers did -but never came up to the standard. Oh, to have the gift of words, or anything else, which would draw in even a dozen people. Let alone be a musical gift that the two artists had in drawing out from flat print and conducting a chancel in notes. Her thoughts turned to the icon that the two performers made, and how out of their almost stone-coldness came out a beautiful sound.

To be at once the congregation and the nave, and hold fast to some forgotten reading, or perhaps music unheard of.¹¹ But back to work, the story would have to be finished later, as if it mattered.

It was her that he imagined. But he did not describe her, because he wanted each person to view a perfect female. For women, it would be herself as she imagined, for men, it would be the perfect woman he would dream of. Or at least that was the plan for heterosexual people, but there were other forms who would dream a different dream entirely.

Instead of acting, he listens to Beethoven, playing 10 violin sonatas straight, on his computer. And again. By Ogata. As yet unreleased or unrelated.

27

How the words suffocated and enclosed, and then reached upwards to that limit that even the sky could not suffuse. Each time again she wanted to have her life back - but only so long as she could spend it with him. Not to him of his face, not to him of his expression - but the word, and on that state of grace we are someone quite like the state of God spoke to him and he, amanuensis-like, only scribed it down with pencil in hand. Everything else is just a fantasy, even though it is hard flesh. But this fantasy is the realm of real, tripping like a literary exercise employed by a benefactor who has no name, whose hand leaves behind no trace of its author. What would Hu Yaobang do?

∞

Revolution Revolution Revolution

we need a revolution revolution revolution

not the kind that they can proclaim on video video video

but a revolution in our hearts and in our minds

that will not stop until it is one, it is the nine,

not the kind that was proclaimed by Republicans and Democrats

who mouth the lines as if their race religion or creed

will be what matters in its time

we need a revolution revolution revolution

and we need to know this from the inside out,

outside in, middle ground in both directions

as if Gödel told us in his famous indeterminacy prove

with Turing as is witness, meditations by Nash,

and proven by Auden in a tome that no one reads

but the nidicolous in JoFoWo.¹²

we need a revolution not evolution not permutation

never mind what tense it is in, because of Creole languages

never have tenses in mind when they are created

and do not have the name Creole when they start.

and someone pours for through Google, and Twitter, and Facebook,

and Pinterest - and all the other words that it has not yet formed in its vocabulary.

suborned by perjury on Kerouac's lips

with endless profits saying endless songs written by Dylan

recited in a monopoetic way of speaking learned from rolling stone,

which at that moment was not capitalized because it was not cool.

and if you elder statesman tells us that O'Neill foretold

and Ernest Hemingway told in monosyllabic words

which F Scott Fitzgerald would later make arabesques.

and Ishmael was hidden in plain sight because it was spelled

Ismael soumare.

while others watch on their telly

we must do that thing which no one knows what to do

as in the 30s they marched in lockstep

and in the 60s they crowded around.

with no end in sight.

a gift for the eye to see them endlessly paraded.

why do we need a revolution?

because everyone is selling one, but not delivering at all

in any way any word in any context

there is only silence to be had.

On the model of poetic with a snow aureus tone of voice, which is not what I said, nor even close, as I try to explain what I am saying. I wish I may I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight. What thronging is I when I is no longer uttered until this page. And then it streams forth as if to say that it is really all that I wish for is to express the ideas of “I.” That every thought begins with how to I express the eye that I have in mind without expressing the one syllable that I wished I could get out of my mind. It was a future past, feature present, future eternity. Each phrase exists to complement the wishing text which has no time at all where the streets have no name.¹³

It futures without any understanding of what that means, because, in the mind of the person residing these words which were spoken into a microphone, there was no past, no present, no future at all.¹⁴ You can tell when I am reciting a near and future – because in their time words like eschatological were in vogue, and they used them to prove to themselves that they are parents would not use them except in the secret of the woods, where signs were drawn up featuring the raging sun or a sadly bent across. Why not Kerouac whatnot Faulkner why not Steinbeck? Why must I recite James Joyce? Even though I know why. He was first, and though many others would hide in the backdrop, such as Kafka, he was the one who put it all together. And that was ghastly from Woolf's position because she wanted to be first and knew that this ugly brutish clod had gotten there first. This would not due.¹⁵

It was then that I truly needed a revolution, but none came. And I wept. James Joyce was ecstatic in Ulysses, the author of this is not. Because he does not have a female character to say yes yes yes and call out the name which he forbids. Where is Nash when I need him the most? Probably in one of his dark moods, where he roomed with his former lover, and former wife. And he did not know what was real and what was imagination, though you probably would want to form a word that was in fact and fiction both and proclaim the ends of the sun by emperor’s decree, in triplicate. Nightsong of the Distaff Drums. GNU.¹⁶

It is that I am like a character in Ulysses, thinking of myself self-watching someone else, but delving that I am not myself – which is the point of the urinal day. When speaking of the camera, I slip and utter that sense of self for all eternity, and then some. But beyond the eye, there is something that I must admit, though it is truly terrible to contemplate. I left her in New York, beneath the sign that pointed to Connecticut, letting her drift without a point, a reason, a plan. Because I knew that we could not be with each other – and it was entirely my fault. Even though I come from an age that imagines the terrorizing madness of King Henry VIII, or King George III. But this was anointed and announced by different Angels. The extinct inner voice which dies – and the outer voice which lives, beyond its time. Follow your dreams. There is still a history in the future whatever Fukuyama says. All is death, and we are the victims.¹⁷

If rage was the most anointed expression of the 19th century, and lust was the pinnacle of the 20th century, I have to say that neither one expresses the inner light of madness that I now feel, so away with the rage of Goethe's transparent cousin, away with the transfigured I, and let me grope into a new day, where madness is the sun. gleaming bright as the first English man took his cap off and turned to face the inner stage, which transgressed with mere players on which they trudge mindlessly until ready to applaud with Richard's, Henry's – and all of their ilk. And now the chorus pleads with them to applaud this matinee and inspired by some form of amusement, goes triply on the town, to show what he imagines he will pass off by amusement as is his gift to Ragtime. Out of the darkness, into the light.¹⁸

Exit chorus comedia. With the sheep swelling ranks of the vegan canines’ movement. A Farewell to Kings.¹⁹

1 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet L. 1

2 Peter Gizzi - Beginning with a phrase from Simone Weil

3 Annie Lennox, “Walking on Broken Glass”

4 Camus, L’Etranger translated Gilbert

5 Milton, Paradise Lost I.263

6 Nouveau Dictionnaire François-anglois, p. 139

“Prudemment , fligement , avec délibération ; à dessein, de propos délibéré…”

7 From a B/W Daffy Duck Daffy’s Southern Exposure

8 Dante, Canto XXXII, L. 124–29,

“Noi eravam partiti già da ello,

Ch’io vidi due ghiacciati in una buca

Sì, che l’un capo all’altro era cappello;

E come il pan per fame si manduca,

Così il sovran li denti all’altro pose

Là, ove il cervel s’aggiugne con la nuca.”

9 T’Pau, “Heart and Soul”

10 Ogata, Susanna

11 In the fine script, Ardelle Li scribed:

Riot unheard

language uprising

curfews declared

horrific history

image injustice.

composition Supreme paper

saddened appalled

Famous future

Dream nightmare.

Screw.

mellow chopped.

possession aggravated incarcerated.

pandemic shutdown

impossible revulsion heedlessness,

rhymes impossible

ballot limits.

Life.

Shocking darkness sin committed.

12 September 1, 1939

13 Reference to U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”

14 In the fine script, Ardelle Li wrote:

"contact tracing"

Divagate anesthetist plateau

Ebola cropped winter

pediatric coronavirus Monrovia

declared decaying epidemic

protective C-section

Hotzone reëstablish

wet diarrhea hemorrhaging orifices.

persuading contagious possessions

transmission Berkshires ventilator overwhelmed virus

clinical nihilism Wuhan infrastructure

voluminous coördinators

contact tracing,

promise the world.

15 Pink Floyd, “The Trial”

16 Gnu is Not UNIX.

17 And in the margins, Ardelle Li wrote:

Malgré les interdictions

nouvelles violences

Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Limoges, Poitiers, Marseille

déjà Manifesto

comité de soutien

Homme noir mort

Interpellation des gendarmes

Champ-de-Mars

devant l’ambassade

Des familles de victimes

solidarité contre l’impunité

amplifier des forces de l’ordre

également à travers le monde

Des accusations de racisme.

18 Billy Joel, “I Go to Extremes”

19 Rush, “A Farewell to Kings” You must realize that his body has died and left the pages to the only one who can read them. This is his footnote to history.