北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
西 New York 2012 - 10
20
The Next Day at the Museum of the City of New York
2012
She remembered once upon a time, that new year came with regularitys determined by the clock, even though this did not make sense. Our strange clock system will declare with false precision that it is the new year in 4 and a half hours. She once dreamt that they changed the system to declare It in a normal physical way. But then New York City would not be the place where everyone looked towards. However, the architecture grabbed hold of her attention – a five-story building with columns of the ionic nature robed in paper white, set between layers of red brick. It was called the Museum of the City of New York, but it was what the elite wished their city to be like – both proud of its heritage, and ashamed of what they could not hide. There were only a few people who walked up to its building tinted white façade and towering windows with cornices which of course had dentils in the way in which they were built. Both the man and the woman knew that they would procure images that elucidated their minds, but that was not the point at all. They would roam around the long halls and rooms, each with the lower half white, and the upper half a solid color. Each room was devoted to pictures that described some feature of the city, and what the elite thought of it in the present. Some were exalted, some were despised, each one was put in a context of more than 125,000 images that created a collage of what The City should be like – and some were in the deep distant horizon would be like if only there was the will. But of course, what the city should be like changed dramatically, from Daniel Burnham through Robert Moses to Jane Jacobs and beyond. Each one of these personalities laid a stamp on what the City of Tomorrow would be like – and thus made the city of today a welter of different cities of tomorrow living side by side. Ya can’t touch this.1
Exhibits were lined up, each one against the blue background which was the theme of the age – from an age where Discourse used to consist of third-rate minds pointing us to the best glosses by second-rate minds of first-rate minds. At different times different wall coverings were in vogue, in this age they like to think of themselves as grand and massive. This was not the case, but it had an aspect to it - because almost all of the poor people were out of lower Manhattan, and driven to upper Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn, or perish the thought to New Jersey. Lower Manhattan was the preserve, almost exclusively of the well-to-do, the rich, or those who wanted to be thought of as such.
It was she who spoke: “Someday there will be a building like this in Shanghai or Beijing, telling the tale of how this city became the greatest city in the world. History's stage, often has unmarked exits, unwritten lines, and the audience is in every direction, including time.”
He turned to leave but she clawed his jacket. He stopped and left the path that led me to that place.2
He spoke: “Perhaps that is true, only it will be in Chinese. But first, it needs to dominate the world, and there is no consensus that it will be so. There is too much pollution, and many people flee. And that is a problem because the billion and more stupid people will not rule the world. I do not know when this era will fall, and I do not know who will take over.” Walk like an Egyptian.3
“If not China, then where? The truth is, you don't want to hear the truth. Let's start there.” He heard the line which was spoken by an actor - Truth, you can't handle the truth.4
Long exegesis about how China was both the pinnacle of autocratic manufacturing, and the nadir of environmental destruction, every little detail was accounted for – from the great leap forward to the Cultural Revolution, and beyond. He would have gone on longer, but the corner of his eye glanced across her face, and he knew that she was not interested in the whole country – but in a point about her relationship to him. It was obvious that she wanted to know not what China had in store for the world, but what she meant to him. And, truthfully, that was much the harder of the two questions – he could expound endlessly on China and the world, but asking him what she meant to him, was a struggling instance of silence. A pause loomed up in two his face as if Faulkner held his ground and produced words which in the whole amounted to void in grosse fuge.5 With his real hand, he was searching on a virtual shelf for the exact book that would describe that sweet nothingness that he so firmly felt. Inside her mind, she could imagine the sky was quickly clearing and the sinking moon was shining brightly.6
“I do not think you want to hear me talk about China. There is something more personal that you have in mind, and I would wish you to say more than have – because while I can talk about things in the distance, things closer up I need more guidance from what you want.” at that moment the corner of his jaw slackened, and he went from talking to listening to what she had to say. There was, in fact, a complete relaxation of his body – though it was hesitation because he did not know if what was about to come out of her mouth would be a retort with brutal askance, or a subtle reminder of what she wanted which would only be obvious to him in retrospect.
Thus, she began hesitantly, because to her was obvious what she was going to be talking about, as a hand would be hanging in place to drop a cube of sugar in to a cup of tea – but she realized that for all of his erudition, simple things seemed to slip out of his grasp. In Shanghai, she thought it was a faint in his conversation language, in Beijing she gradually realized it was not intentional, but actually the way his mind worked. There was something odd about his speech which she was addicted to. He was not an ordinary man, fumbling his way across the fields of conversation – endlessly reciting vague happenstance which amounted to nothing. Nor was he like her brother, with a subtle interchange, which when she understood it, was not too hard to explain. It was as if it came from some paperback psychology book, which assembled details, to explain the author's point of view – and then fell apart in the half an hour since she read it, with 1000 holes in its argument. There was something both luring and disruptive about him. But still, she would not come out and say what she meant, it just was not done in Chinese or English conversation. Even though he wanted her to, even though she had wished – there was something deeper that stole her tongue and would not let her say in plain words what she felt. The lights are on, but she is not home.7
“Do not you know?” This was almost the exact opposite of what she had intended, she almost spat the words out, almost as if they came from another person's lips. She had not intended the guttural reverberations that came out, and she was immediately sorry. But regaining the poise which her mouth always had, and which her body had just begun to acquire: “I am sorry I did not mean that to come out the way it did, please forgive me. What I meant was that I want you to tell me what you intend for our relationship.” This was a good deal more forward than she had intended, the exact opposite of her first proposition, and inwards she winced at what he was going to say, as if she had told it to her father. But it was not her father who replied, and it certainly was not her brother – her much older brother who was closer to an aunt-uncle, than a brother – instead very slowly and almost affectionately he began to explain that he did not know what he wanted, and in back draft, he wished for more time to reflect on what he wanted. This, to her, was unacceptable – and a shock ran down from her neck to her spine, leaving behind it a mask of terror on her cheeks, lips, and eyes. But don’t tell one about this.8
“I have been waiting for more than 11 years, and I cannot wait any longer.” than the terror subsided, and she was completely helpless in her despair. On his part, though a little bit too late, he realized that the number of “I” crossing her lips was a clue to how deeply she wanted an answer, any answer, but most particularly the right one. He did not know if there was time to salvage this, but he would have to try. He tried to come around and draw her chin towards her and begin again.
“Let me try again because it is clear to me now that this must be the conversation in which we must have an answer. The answer. The final answer.”
Nodded she by the tum-tum tree, it should have happened back in Shanghai, according to her. And he should have offered an answer at least in Beijing. But it was not London, or Shanghai, or Beijing – it was a dimly lit day in New York, with the sun not shining, but no trace of precipitation. But then as if some clock unseeing chimed, they went back to looking at the photographs, with her leaning into him, and their hands locked around each other. It was, it seemed, the final answer, approved by TS Eliot, as it were. What would Hu Yaobang do? The future is a different country, and America doesn't even have a passport. All come to look for anxious America.9
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Purple Wall Paper
“Purple wallpaper gotta him,” said Det. Nimitz.
1 M.C. Hammer “Ya Can’t Touch This”
2 Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”
3 The Bangles, “Walk like an Egyptian”
4 Spoken by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men
5 With all apologies to Beethoven.
6 Tolkien, The Two Towers, Helm’s Deep
7Reference to Robert Palmer, “Addicted To Love”
8 Qián Zhōngshū’s (钱锺书) Fortress Besieged Chapter 9
9 In the fine script, Ardelle Li observed:
incarceration by mass-style prevarication
prejudiced Anxiety sujatha baliga
Restorative decarceration
Out and out
Abolition binary processes traction
circles