北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
Accident - 04
4 May 1989 – Thursday
草木皆兵1 – I eat the brain because it is my enemy.
Towering over, under, up to the Goddess of Democracy levels a crying for the universe to feel. Bricolage befouled in profusion. A collage of compilation to hodgepodge ne reproduction of an assortment. The collection doomed copy. Imitation and paste-up patchwork in potpourri. It is a synthesis, a mishmash of reappropriation. Wasai of hen mang.
5 May 1989 – Friday
This is a dreamscape. It means nothing to anyone. Where is there a genius without a genius to read 他2 work? The first thing you must find in the world of things.
6 May 1989 – Saturday
川流不息.3 Wrapped up in a locket of infinitely regression. 马不停蹄.4
All these moments will be alive once I am Dead.
7 May 1989 – Sunday
什么地方什么时候如何和谁？5
Solution, traducian, volution, aqueous solution, Chinese Revolution, conjugate solution, pseudo-solution, electrocution in a can can-can. World of Legs in the financial institution, United States Constitution. Face the flesh writ of execution, pseudo-excision.
8 May 1989 – Monday
开门见山6 – there is nothing there except a mountain hanging in space. 别具一格.7
9 May 1989 - Tuesday
It is almost inconceivable that anything could radically alter our concept of classical literature, especially if it did not involve a new manuscript or an archaeological find. Yet in 1928, a young man woke literati out of centuries of complacency with discoveries whose relevance is only now fully appreciated. Milman Parry, hailed as “the Darwin of Homeric scholarship,” was among the first men to conceive of literature not merely in terms of genre; but of media.
Until the publication of this volume, Parry was known mostly through footnotes and the effusive acknowledgments of the many scholars his work inspired. Few have read his actual papers. All know that Milman Parry died at 33 in tragic accident.8
10 May 1989 – Wednesday
I wish I had no education. Nor been born as smart as I was – to know the outer reaches but able to climb them. 攀登乞力马扎罗山的高度9. 醉酒写——清醒地编辑10 The creeping larder of five-tone heptane cold. One more than the gang. 期期艾艾.11 Ask not what your country can do for you.
11 May 1989 – Thursday
专心致志12 because it is my whole existence.
12 May 1989 – Friday
Several days before, my father said that his first class had only a few missing, but as happenstance had it, the last class was sybaritical in its absence. Dans le téléphone «perdu.» Et quelles femmes ont printemps.
Ghost slips by on the street, it is the one and only etched in my subconscious again. Slipping among the tin pots and glass baijiu. Profile in blue.
13 May 1989 – Saturday
I sat, and by not by not doing so I rested on the difference and slippage between the signified and the signifier. "Cogito et histoire de la folie." My parents are philosophers at BU at they expect to score well-enough to study there. 高考是全部13. And so, I rest, shamed the I am not bright enough to score so well.
14 May 1989 – Sunday
It was, of course, Sunday. And every day was Sunday because you could see the sun. Even if drabbed over. Someday we’ll find it. The rainbow connection. And a tearer is shed. A girlhood kiss goodbye. If only we could continue the hunger strike. Would any in the Party believe it?
15 May 1989 – Monday
大惊小怪 and a comedy of errors – mine included distinctly. Obsessing over every move I made to ask why the Communist party made such mistakes. Could it be the at last gasp that would leave ruin?
16 May 1989 – Tuesday
层出不穷14 I don’t know what to say. This morning, by chance, I saw him distantly in the crowd. And then I saw him touch a young woman’s backhand
17 May 1989 – Wednesday
Have you been half asleep? People from across China gathered by the million. 无与伦比15. But it should be Monday.
18 May 1989 – Thursday
Decisions Decisions Decisions all at threes and fours.
自相矛盾16 What to do? What to say?
久而久之17 To his face or in a note?
千方百计18 Hardships on through thousands of Tiao.
With thousands of troops right behind you. 千辛万苦19
What would Hu Yaobang do? 一帆风顺.20
Conclusions Conclusions Conclusions三三两两.21
19 May 1989 – Friday
Trine. Space, space, space.
20 May 1989 – Saturday
Martial law declared. I sit in my bedroom. I am in the existential café. Drowning in Being and nothingness to poetically dwelling on the primrose path. It is pathetic. 素不相识.22
It is an outbreak of Grave turmoil. I wait for martial law and the ban on our threats to public order. Orders give, orders give, orders give. To the Flying Tigers in Cries for Democracy.
21 May 1989 – Sunday
无论如何23 Whose to care?
平心而论.24 It is a pause that refreshes.
I motorize I stilt my zaftig my ample body. And still, I am not seen in the drab clothes in Tiananmen Sq. 我轻踏虚空.25 A trolley with the birds. Again. But there is the matter of storage. 出人头地.26
22 May 1989 – Monday
Monday Monday. I can’t write that day. 默默无闻.27
23 May 1989 – Tuesday
Today I dawdle. Yesterday too, but today I admit it. And who are you to judge, Ardelle? As a poet once said:
湘驿女子 题玉泉溪
红叶醉秋色，碧溪弹夜弦。
佳期不可再，风雨杳如年。28
24 May 1989 – Wednesday
I walked by the leaves on my street, looking back away at my high apartment. 息息相关29
25 May 1989 – Thursday
半路出家30 Should I change my career? Find one where snowflakes hang on satanic verses.
Who am I to judge a short sentence delivered from a short shrift with June just around the corner? 兴致勃勃.31
26 May 1989 – Friday
All a wild to the call of Cthulhu. In the Chicago Manual of Style, whatever version is current.
27 May 1989 – Saturday
Fall of a plan in Traveller quiescent. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.
28 May 1989 – Sunday
The player’s handbook of life. It is the Structure of Scientific Revolutions en brief. To drink of beer and ruminate. Belch till the air goes rancid.
29 May 1989 – Monday
Playing at the world and pitching the shells at the sun. Demesne in the breeze. It is an infinite jest. 唇亡齿寒.32
无论如何:33 We are on a road to paradise, tonight’s the night we’ll make lots of money. 广岛我的爱. 34 When will it be so?
30 May 1989 – Tuesday
A thousand little mouths to feed and silence from the National People’s Congress 川流不息.35
Foo. báiyún qiānzǎi kōng yōuyōu.
Where is he? Rìmù xiāng guān hé chù shì?
And who is on his arm? Yānbō jiāngshàng shǐ rén chóu.
Burrow into his chest, and smell tea eggs, durian, and lanzhou lamian.
And sing praises to our hero, dust of dust. Very god of very god.
Quizzicality, quinquennium on the half-shell, I come not to praise Caeser but to bury him - unsex me here and fill me with direst cruelty with hearts. Clubbing the curve to diamonds.
Call me - finish the quote, Tachygraphically in spades. No trump - redouble.
No books, no movie, no television screen will capture this. Autocracy yielding to bliss de bliss in calligraphic ink. 三令五申.36
Absolutism in form, absolutism in style, totalitarianism in grace. A dictatorship in all but name. Despotism Sinitic style, with a touch of tyranny. Dystopia, a brave new world, my imperial 妾. One character, alone. 义无反顾.37
How I want to be one, to him. 深入浅出38.
1 Panic stricken.
2 He/She
3 Easily solved.
4 The horse does not stop its hooves.
5 What where when how and who? (Shénme dìfāng shénme shíhòu rúhé hé shéi?)
6 Open the door and see the mountain.
7 Unique style
8 In her fine script, Ardelle Li wrote:
Eigen of Symmetric Matrices
Abiogenesis in a vacuum
adenosine triphosphate torus soap-bubble
agglutination divined with albedo alkanes
no carbon multiple bonds
amorphous amphiphilic amplitude asthenosphere.
Bacteriophage disintegration or dissolution
binomial black-body radiation
Boltzmann constant h Boltzmann constant.
Calcareous calamity unsourced unknown
cathode explode centrifugation
centrioles eukaryotical organelle
chromatin histones amuck.
conchoidal fracture concentration gradient membrane.
Coulomb cytokinesis cytosol
Fibrous transduction intracellular
de Broglie wavelength decomposing
down to deoxyribonucleic acid.
diffusion coefficient mathematical framework.
Ductile diorite by any other name.
Eclogite metamorphic mottled subducted
endomembrane system endoplasmic reticulum,
Golgi apparatus, lysosome, vacuoles
epistemology eigenvectors by eigenequation.
9 Climb the height of Mount Kilimanjaro in Zhaoyang Temple
10 Drunk Writing - Sober Editing a version of Hemmingway.
11 An idiom for stammering with a pun for love.
12 Concentrate on.
13 The college entrance examination is everything
14 Emerge in endlessly
15 Unequaled.
16 Paradoxical a pun on Mao Dun’s name.
17 over time
18 Do everything possible. A pun on Qián Zhōngshū.
19 Countless suffering, innumerable hardships.
20 Smooth sailing, unimpeded progress.
21 Three Three Four Four.
22 Never having met someone before.
23 Anyway
24 In all fairness.
25 I tread lightly on the void.
26 To succeed
27 Unknown to the public.
28 Anonymous, 8th century.
29 Mutually related as one breath is too another.
30 Become a monk late in life
31 Full of life and enthusiasm
32 Literally “When the lips are gone the teeth are cold” but it means “closely related and sharing common concerns”
33 anyway
34 Hiroshima, my love.
35 Continuous flow.
36 Literally: ‘Three orders five explanations’ but the real meaning is something like ‘issue orders repeatedly.’
37 One should not hesitate with one’s obligations.
38 Explain profound things in simple language.