北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)

无 Void 2016 - 2

2

PostScript¹

The real kind, not the Language

Upon her arrival from New York City, she was between the high of hoping to be with him and the low of not knowing whether he wanted her. But then came a phone call, in synchroneity though extra-sensory, and the news was extremely bad – he had a stroke and died in the emergency room, apparently an artery attached to a vein without the interconnectedness of a capillary system. They had tried to save him, but no one knew exactly how long he had been unconscious. Since she was the only person who was remotely connected to him, the woman on the other end packed everything that she could find in two pairs of boxes. He had enough money to do this and be hospital did not want to take on a more extensive search, his mother was dead, and his father did not want to be concerned – having left his mama some time ago right away. They were in fact, divorced. She had the feeling that his father did not even talk to him.

In three months, various packages arrived, including what looked like a novel – or what looked like something like it. There were stories and papers interwoven with a story that looked a great deal like theirs – but with some facts missing, they had been together much more in the real world than the novel, which is why she thought it was, in fact, a novel, taken from images that he selected, and arranged – but with huge chunks of narrative which offered a different perspective. Though they could be separate, it was clear that he wanted them together – forming a core picture of his imagined world, with climate change, economic crisis, and deleterious effects from long ago. It was not clear to her why stories from the civil war were important, but they were. In a couple of cases, she had to guess where each indurative would have to be settled, and she was certain that she guessed incorrectly. She tossed out a few long tracks from others’ work that did not attach to attach in the main story, such as To the Finland Station², which was amusing but was not anything he had granted to the page – it was purely Edmund Wilson. Then there were fragments, such as David Foster Wallace³, which belonged someplace, but she did not know where. DFW encompassed a foreign land that was distant in its memory.

Then there were some parts that she had to look up because she did not know the language. It happened to be ancient Greek, written by Euripides⁴ – it told the story of Medea. She also had to look up Russian, finding that it was Dostoyevsky in a series of short stories. ⁵ What he wanted from these, she did not know, in so she decided these, because there was no clue as to how they would be conjoined. But it was painful not the less – every word that he had written was precious to her because she would not see his real face again. She looked at the last paper – deciding whether it belonged.

In her mind’s eye, she could see him shaking and the cough he could never get rid of. She ignores them both.

She realizes was talking to herself, but was it about a man? She thought: “Sometimes I'm tired, sometimes I'm shot.”⁶

3

The master sat.⁷ But it was different from the great master, who, of course, was serene rather than stung. Instead, Ihara Saikaku⁸ was dreaming – not that he was a butterfly, but something more earthly and yet serene and cover-up. But he was emphatic that a single day and night would encompass a story that would link to lovers, or would-be lovers, in a tête-à-tête across to visions of this world of philosophy. It was 1683, and the world of Japan was immersed in the floating world – where training rather than birth is the key to one's success. This was wise. And, as he said, “The ancient simplicity is gone, the people of today are satisfied with nothing but terrifying finery”. And at his feet were some of the younger men, who drank up the wisdom of Saikaku, including poets and painters. They folded a break.

Indeed, one of those painters was dipping the pen brightly and began to imagine the welter of images that his master had conjured up in each one of his stories. And so, he began to rapidly paint one of them, the story of a maiden who wanted desperately to sleep with a man and a monk who desperately wanted to sleep with a woman of the flooding world while tearing off the limbs of the two of them. One of the secrets – and open secret, if you will – was that the ritual was for the younger men would take on the feminine role as a jellyfish, while the older men satisfied themselves in hibernation, and the younger painter had a desire for the master to find the young painter’s fault. It was a desire that was unrequited and frightening because the master did not like something about the young man, though he did not know what it was perhaps because there was something too feminine about his face.

Though it mattered not at all because still, he drew as the master was talking. What talking it was, first as he set the scene – in a grand way, with a wooden house that was laid out in Rosewood and teak, a very expensive building arrangement, though it was not large in any way. If one knew the type of structure it was, one would understand that it was owned not by a samurai, but by a wealthy merchant. He had money, of course, but not enough stature – thus he could not build beyond a certain limit, as described in the perfect limits - which were strictly enforced; most strictly enforced.

But there were certain flaws in the rules; while it laid out the ground size, it did not specify the height of each room – thus in the long room, which would be where guests would sit partaking of music, drama, and poetry, it could be as high as one could wish in the ochre color walls with Geraniums. And in the story that the master told, the lavish merchant – with a beard and hair that was neatly cropped – entertained the monk with an amusing set of tales, each one was built in a maze-like structure, and each one would be stopped as a character would recite a different tale while the carp looked on. Thus, it was like the Thousand-and-One-Nights Tale, where it spiraled with different tales stopped as new ones were started over Zhejiang. The merchant and the monk were both amused by the sweeping story– or rather, stories – and mulberry fruit, that they did not notice the eldest sister creeping up to listen underneath the creases.

If only she had been listening, that would have been fine. But her hearing mixed in with a feeling that was inside of her, and the mixture grew inside her and attached itself to the monk – with a definite feeling of more than attachment. In short, at that moment she loved him desperately and dearly, she could see no other man but him. His smooth cheeks contained a swelling reticence that she thought of as pregnant with a tender bashfulness, she had never loved anyone before. In her heart, there was a meeting in that she had never known before. Her glance had peaked out through the sheer doorway, and at that moment he had looked up and caught her eyes.

But the monk was not interested in her, despite her long hair – flowing and silky though it was, or her dress – which was Imperial red and Sheening white, and tastefully showed the back of the neck and her feet – as was the custom in that time and place. No, such charms did not all allure him at all, but rather he looked at the merchant with delight, and, he thought, it would be a secret delight. At that moment, however, the daughter saw that the monk was not interested in her, but in her father – and she resolved to speak to him and show him that she, not be, would be his lover. Because, after all, the monk was prohibited in that time and place, from partaking of either of them, man or woman.

The monk bid his goodbye to the merchant, standing up as he did, without talking to the girl – for so he thought of her – and immediately left liking sugar cane. This made her desperate, and her face, as depicted in the painting showed that as well. He was out the in the door, but the woman – as she thought of herself – ran after him. Out the door, and far away – trying to catch this man, this monk. But the monk was to break for her and rapidly dwindled in the distance, frightened. Far away, through the fields, with not a cloud in sight in the ruts. Thus, was set in the first panel, which the master spoke, and the apprentice with rapid strokes. The apprentice then set aside this drawing and started another, he felt that it would be not one panel, but two. Because he knew that Ihara would recount something startling, though he could not guess at what. Was it weapons on the sides of the chariots? It might even be shocking, even repugnant. But it was still young in the story, and in the second frame, he waited to depict what the master was one to do like a partridge. So, with the brush in hand, he waited and was waiting. Think on this.

//

Presently, the Chinese woman wondered how much reality was present in this low story. Could it be that the man she had been obsessing over, was attracted to men? How sad.

Or was it simply a story, with a deeper and hidden relationship between the two of them? She carried him on her back. She had to know, and had to know intimately – what was the connection? A cup of kindness on a European beach.

Settling down to read more, and thereby divine what meaning there was. It was an obsession of hers, which she admitted – was the telling the story about the monk, or about the painter, about the master? Or was he telling the story from his point of view, relating the fevered tail with detachment, as one would relate the story secondhand, with an ironic detachment that comes from a joke between the reader and the writer – a joke that was unfunny to the actors in the scene? She looked once more over the great room, and the bay it overlooked, that it was placid and serene, with two small ships painted in the distance. She thought for a moment that this was the master, and the story was something that he had observed, not created. But still made her wonder whether he was an actor, or the painter, or the master, or looking on from above – talking to her, and relating to a humorism that she did not quite understand – as if all of the dogs and the birds made flesh of the ruined heroes. It was the synthesis of the conditions of pure thinking.⁹

Long time before, the red Symbols which were at the bottom of the silk-screening, were there to indicate which direction the album leaves were to be taken. Many people, especially Westerners, would not know that the pictures should be right to leave, and this would confuse them. Colophons would only work if someone knew what they stood for: nidicolous. If not, these inscriptions would not mean anything, especially because it was only very late in the 19th century that Westerners mixed images and words. The glyph that formed this tale was very spare, as was the custom in Tokyo at the time, for ornate structures would be both earlier and later. But not now. This was a time of images, not words because there were suggestions that could not be discussed – a man making love to boys, a woman desiring a monk, the changing from a boy into a man are just three of them. And in the present, she still did not know what her American boy wanted to say: it was a picture of the picture, set to words with that reason. She preferred the graceful branches that were set among poetry, herself. The world of Spirit breaks up into two.¹⁰

Two crows flying up overhead and wondered what they were chattering to each other, whether it was bird talk, or it was translated so as to be understandable – as the speech of humans given another form. One of them called to the other, and she could almost understand what it was saying, but not quite. But crows were intelligent creatures, and it might be that each reader would have to decide whether the language was of crows or people. She decided that they were talking as people did, over the building that the merchant had laid out. Then in the distance, out over a bay, she saw two sails of a great ship. She wondered what this meant because obviously, the painter had wanted to say something, even if tangentially. But no meaning came to her. Something About This Mysterious Fossil Graveyard Was Fishy.¹¹

Looking at the merchant's daughter, again inflamed in a kimono of red and silver, with an intensely focused expression, she pondered why it was the daughter who was inflamed. It was a longing for the monk, that echoed in her way, for this man who came over the sea. And she did not know why either the merchant's daughter – or herself – would throw her heart into this quiet, almost theoretical, intense application of desire. In this second frame, there was no trace of the monk at all. This had precedence: she was alone, and she often wondered whether the man loved her in return. In her mind's eye, sometimes he did, and sometimes he did not. This mingled with the constant prattle of the birds, and the relentless mind of the merchant's daughter – until finally, it became a fugue. Everything calling at once to each other – in Chinese (in modern, in classical, and ancient), and English, and Greek, and in words that did not have languages yet, made of sounds that were strange to her. Perhaps she would need a Milman Perry to guide her way through the thicket, ¹² at least this is what her man said to do. She realized that it was in the manuscripts which she felt with him the most, not in other ways – not even in making love or other trysts. It was in his mind that she felt most akin to him. The burden monument doubling higher in multiplication which she could never do.

Perhaps that was his gift to her, a mind that she could love while straining to hear the G minor lift in a short fugue. A sparrow of Beijing. It was disobedience yet she prepared to cast forth a comet in perverse exhaustion. Then to dry over a fire in the wolf tail of summer.

The second frame was what held her gaze, looking at the daughter's feet, and upwards to her torso, and then to her human face. There was no trace of a monstrous psyche yet, though she knew that was going to be coming after all this was a tale by Ihara Saikaku, and usually, that meant that something was going to happen, and she felt something out of magical folklore had been implied as a necklace. Perhaps it was the crows that signaled it on the shadowscape. Chongqing’s new cakes on the red billows martial.

Then she realized that it was both the master, the painter, and the subject, mixed with the watchful eye of the American which sparked a light, and this light was a ghostly premonition of what was to come in a bulb, even though it had not happened yet under a blanket. Even though the pine tree had graced itself over the doorstep, with an intent that was foreboding, decidedly so in fact like a collage. Obviously, it had been intentional that it was clipped so as to be broad, rather than tall, one could see this if one looked at the branches, which were an indicator that the pine tree, left to its own devices, would skyrocket up like a valuable - rather than spread out in a generation. The pine tree was the first thing planted when a house was selected in a feudal state.

Their finest hour in barium.¹³

//

Just behind her, were three wanderers who were talking among themselves – pointing the way to the town, and all that was in it. Injustice mostly. There were no trees to bear a grudge against, and the abyss was not to be shown – it was almost as if she ignored the parched nature and put herself on the trail of the monk which she surrounded. The monk, monk, monk, it was an obsession for her like the larva of a mosquito. As if all of the beginnings of every work of literature were set here on a kite and repeated with a Mandarin Duck. The Analects¹⁴ of the past, in great storms of fury firebird, or calling to the gods for divine inspiration. East and West, the Chinese woman asked them to reveal themselves, whether Chinese, Greek, Latin, or English first in the raw. It was all the same to her because she wanted to catch the American boy as a member, but he was not with her – but dead, even though she saw his face in a garden – and understood in a circle what he wanted, though too late to give back to him. She was at the wall. Beauty forlorn by too much time to be the empress. An unknown aid would not come slurping on a huge rough lemon.

The fruit of a river in Szechuan. It was heaven gentle and affable to the citizens with their jade-like stone. But deep inside, they were ill like a cord or string of coins tapping each one with the multitude of scrapes. Pity them all and sympathize with their pursed up lips but make a face that is strong, robust, and vigorous with a keen eye to obliterate the next shallow container and weep with compassion for a toad.

Even as the daughter threw herself into obsession, she too was weeping for the loss of the roots– now that she understood that it was the mind that intrigued her, even conjured her. She wept with white 4 petals on a lawn. Wet were her tears, now that he was beyond the grave. Beyond the grave and consciousness. But it was no use looking backward but forwards as if he was a goat driving onward. She needed to pen the words which he left behind, even though it needed some description, here and there, to make clear what he was talking about in reason, in many strange details, and many strange tongues engorged from a fire-bellied newt. That was her mission on his grave. Chopin: Marche funèbre: Lento. No Ped or locust without wings.

She could still see him turning over in his sleep in some distant memory. Asleep a yet wild as a chestnut horse or sea turtle.

Blame herself for her blood pressure was too high. This she was sincerely willing to do. Even officially.

From the beginning of written language to talking about economics, and infinity, there was a threat to them which she only grasped intermittently. But she was sure that such enduring fulfillment was enough to grant the reader a touch of the demonic force that motivated both the daughter and herself. To race towards the divine, even though it was reticent to take a touch. Because she understood now, that it was the touch that was important – the natural touch, and understood, deep in the skin. The hero with 1000 faces, needed to be caressed by the other-self, assumed in natural faith by the other sex.

Oh! For a muse of fire¹⁵, to change the direction of the course of history swinging like a monkey among the bamboo. What hot things could be said, which would only be understood by a language which had caught out the primonomal words that described time and place and rooted down to the nominal verb instead? What gripping things would be upgraded, like English or Putonghua? Mature Michelet¹⁶ is a strange phenomenon. He is in many ways more comparable to a novelist rather than ordinary history if history were to tell an ethereal tale such as this. And still, the blooming pen scribbled past two keep up with the master. Master who sat, who considered, and then plot on to his next plot point, giving only enough time for his anger to etch finally with analogy actuallmente.

Then a new sheet was drawn forward, and it had a tree, deciduous in its nature, with knots at each program, that made it known that this was a tree that described a turning point in the story because the daughter had horns and a decidedly changed face. No longer was she serene, but ghastly and unearthly in her form, and the nondescript silk had been transformed into a dragon's tail. She was getting longer, and deadlier. She no longer wanted to love, but to destroy the Anjin, instead. She reached down and growled, because she wanted to consume the monk, to the bitter end. The Chinese woman did not want to admit it, but she too wanted, in part, to consume, because the American man had deserted her, leaving a wastrel form to wonder what her new purpose was. For in truth, writing his words down was a precocious wandering along a river. Rushing to the root to lead one.

The holes in the wood had secrets inside them as if the daughter's new form was transfigured by them – darkness swallowing up any goodness which might have been attached.

Next sheet of paper, she was transformed completely into a dragon, face form, and feature, with the whole of her body, transfixed in two the weaving form that had appeared so many frames ago. She looked at it and tried to reject it, but it was formed and had a magical hold upon her – the daughter had become a dragon – and standing there be Chinese woman was conflicted in her feelings for the dead man. She wished at once to throttle in a cart and to worship him as a place.

Penultimate silk, there was a ruckus – for a monk came to report that the Dragon was coming, and the Anjin¹⁷ knew well that it was coming for him in a park. With a large jade ring.

Pens were scattered over the courtyard, parchment was upended, everything was out of joint. A hope of editing.

//

Heat closing in Hilton, out there making their moves sitting up their dental doll stool pigeons and immature locusts - I have secreted my way of the martial arts the two heavens one style¹⁸. Though, Kafkaesque, it was a gathering storm¹⁹, wrote Churchill, of The Satanic Verses - to be born again sang, Gibreel Farishta from the south.²⁰ A study in the writing and acting on history chimed into the Finland Station, though mumbled in repetition because that is the way that males do things. As if population genetics and molecular evolution were intimately involved in the neutral gene in a country from the East. Even if the planet was Hârn²¹, rather than the earth, middle²² or otherwise, with a faun wondering down the path²³, trying to remember the key attributes of Hitler studies²⁴, for this afternoon's lecture. Frankly, the task makes him stand in awe as a problem grows to an evergreen with a straight shaft. But sadly, he was imagining thumbing his way through the watchmen imagining how Rorschach²⁵ would tell the story of I, Claudius²⁶ this and the other, surrounded by heads and bodies, consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. Medea, you are whispering that there is no Greek, and that should be a sin of all sins, to Avalon²⁷ mists and Empire again. There was lost a little boy named Aaron Swartz²⁸ for stealing works that could not be stolen, as reminded to us by Jacques Derrida, in Speech and Phenomena, and Immanuel Wallerstein²⁹, in The Modern World-System – which pointed out the serious implications of seeing banditry as a form of traditional futile blush: a position to state authority distress.

Creeping over, now his hand is on your shoulder, never mind, I will remember you this way.³⁰ With a bell and a dragon, with a tail that extends longer than her body. She roars and spits fire – though there is no background anywhere on the page. Nowhere was the kinsman see sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the victories in the Alameda gardens, yes, all the peer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the Rosecrans and the just and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar has a boy. I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all programmed yes and his heart was going mad and yes I said yes I will yes.³¹

This was all said in On Language³² or in Sense and Sensibility.

A last thought: “Scented with the moist earth and the jasmine blossom, play gently on her cheek.” ³³

Tell others to close an ancient spoon that resembles the hidden flesh that men seek and women disclose only rarely because they know that a force compels the other sex like a water chestnut or a Gogol’s nose.³⁴ That causes the chairman to be in every hand like a dagger cleaved through a deceased mother worse than before like a skin disease as if the grain were not fully grown but left as a pencil in a low rustic sketch. Though it is fragrant as if to match the ramparts in anger over a slave girl who is treated as a favorite with coins to protect her in a little belt house from harm that will certainly come even if it is certainly assisted by her frivolous and rude melancholy. It is a perverse and ruined thing to die violently with the hand clenched in bamboo strips. Even if the murderer was placed in the Stockade on an ox yoke. Take care to be near this careful secret place that is used as a house and then collapsed to die violently. Because today came his shunned from an ancient place name to a wicker barb obstructed by the bright bee. This is a half-truth to flatter one’s progeny.

1 The Language of printers, based on FORTH.

2 Wilson, Edmund (1895 – 1972)

3 Wallace, David Foster (1962 – 2008)

4 Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BC)

5 Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881)

6 Billy Joel, “I Go to Extremes”

7 Standard opening for Kǒngzǐ.

8 Ihara Saikaku (1642 – 1693)

9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A 397 Translated Smith

10 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 487 Translated Miller

11 NY Times, 25 December 2022.

12 Milman Parry (1902 – 1935)

13 Winston S. Churchill’s first volume of the Second World War, in which he kept secrets.

14 Kǒngzǐ (551–479 BC)

15 Shakespeare Henry V, I.1

16 Jules Michelet (1798 – 1874)

17 Pilot

18 Miyamoto Musashi ( c. 1584 – 1645)

19 First of The Second World War

20 Character in the novel

21 N. Robin Crossby (1954 – 2008) - Fantasy World

22 JRR Tolkien

23 CS Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

24 Don DeLillo (1936- ) White Noise

25 A character in Watchmen, by Alan Moore

26 Robert Graves (1895-1985)

27 Many references

28 Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

29 Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930- )

30 ELO, “Mr. Blue Skies”

31 Joyce, Ulysses Ending

32 Chomsky, Noam

In her fine script, Ardelle wrote:

Bernie

Outsider House

Fourth term

Coke-bottle glasses

establishment, but not of it

progressive democratic socialist

frustrations successes

quixotic weakest planet reëlected

United States Senator Chomsky.

33 Holst, The Cloud Messenger

34 And this you can look up on Google.