JianShui

A maroon teapot rests on a small square cloth, which sits on a smooth rock. The rock sits solidly on the beige cloth that spills over the long ends of the table. The top of one side juts thinly out. Three small, thin glasses stand on the cloth. One faces down. Corresponding white teacups face up on the table. Vestiges of 綠茶 remain at the bottom of one of them. Two cylindrical woven-basket seats sit by the table. A couch with more of the beige cloth and a blue pillow leaves a little space to walk in between. Sunlight makes its way in through the clouds, tall trees, and screen windows, reflecting on the white floor tiles to illuminate white pieces of paper clipped to boards set up around the room. Black, gray, hints of brown and blue lie splattered in each rectangular door into another world. I saw a stick soldier in one, holding his spear. Another: an arrow, from which the smoke-explosion arises and the energy spirals and swirls like smoke.

Somewhere, somehow, a slow cockroach crawls on the floor. His antennae twitch alternating up and down. The fridge in the room behind contains soft 奇異果. A bag of 石榴 sit in on a wooden stool. A long blue cloth hangs down concealing the bathroom door.

A bald man stands facing away from the 茶道, working at his table. He wears glasses, a black loose sleeveless shirt, and loose pants of orange, purple, and perhaps green. His sandals curve upward at the front. Children talk or laugh or shout outside. Water bubbles in a plastic teapot. Cardboard boxes on the table are full with paintbrushes, pencils, scissors, miscellaneous found objects.

The stairwell, sunlit by day through the diamond pattern in the wall, is dirty with scratches. In a room on the floor below, teenage girls leave their door open, yell to one another. Outside, water has collected into a puddle in an indentation in the cement ground. Traces of rainfall are all over the ground and in the smell of the air. Kids sit in the grass under a tree. One says “Hello.”

We enter a white car, where the seats are covered by that beige woven pattern. I listen carefully to the voices in the seats in front of me, speaking quickly, lackadaisically, and politely. I lose focus, and my eyes shift to the activity outside the window. As the 很難聽的說話 drifts by like clouds, I study the faces on their scooters and in the street. Mostly, I feel the traffic flow like swarms of ants carrying their prizes into the hive. Vehicles speed in all directions impatiently like a fish darting from one side of his aquatic cage to the other. Lights change, the sky gets darker, and everywhere I hear the irascible noise: BaBa……………..

巴巴………………………..巴巴………………………………………….巴巴………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Calculating the Mean

[Some notes from Fall 2014, watching the WenXin Road (文心路) MRT being built]

Forget for now that you ever heard the word man, or woman, or boy, or girl, or tree, or animal, or robot or computer or ship or brain or consciousness. Just remember this concept: organism.

Trees grow in a forest, and a city is a forest. Creatures, some like us, are made of cells and bacteria and host parasites, attract mosquitoes, fruit attracts flies. Organisms grow in environments, and cities and towns are environments. So are space stations. So is at Atlantis under the ocean. It grew there like trees grow out of the ground. Living things grow from organic material, and machines are made by organic beings like ourselves. But who can say what the difference is? When I use the words your mind comes up with pictures. ‘Organic’ makes you think of something green, maybe vegetables, maybe lush forests, gorges by a waterfall, extraterrestrials who float through space in fungal vessels that breathe like Buddha under the Bodhi tree.

When I was eighteen I listened to a young professor with gray hair and a Slavic accent argue that when we eventually do upload human minds to computers they won’t be truly alive, because they won’t be acting out an existence. But not so fast responded another. “The reason I know it’s possible to make robots that are conscious, is because they already exist. They’re us.”

Even to me, who spends most of his waking hours up in the clouds somewhere (and a few of them on the roof literally looking down at the processes of small every-day commercial transactions) the idea that evolution will continue only as Artificial Intelligence and leave us organic humans behind is somewhere ‘over there‘ off to the side. The cliché “you never know what you can do until you try” would have been a lot more inspiring to us when we were kids if there were sincere promises that we would be the ones to personally create humanoid robots and flying cars. Not just to consume colorful 70’s sci-fi art and make believe, but like Prometheus with his torch steal the fire from the Gods and terraform the universe.

But technology doesn’t grow unbidden in self-replenishing gardens. It is a feature of postwar consciousness to assume endless social and technological progress. Science fiction movies and TV series depict a space-travelling future made up of modern-day Westerners. In that same room with the professors three years later, I remember another student saying “…we get better and better stuff.” By stuff he meant superior technology. Better computers, better smartphones, self-driving cars, new medical equipment. But if technology was an assured continuous process, why aren’t we on the moon? Whence came the dark ages? The collapse of Rome?  The Chinese dynasties? Question: How does one know whether something is possible? Answer: First look to see if it has happened before. Smog and drab ugly modern structures encroach the Sphinx and the Pyramids. I know that hyenas can dance over the gnawed bones of the king of the Jungle, because I have seen it.

The organism is the thing made up of many parts working in synthesis. If I can take apart a human and examine the elements of his character, if I can de-personify him and picture his energy that of a ball of light or a fire or the ocean, then I can personify any object. Any group of objects. Any environment. God is the sum of experiences of all objects. I want to take images of a half eaten-through log, a termite-infested attic, moss growing on a crumbling castle, the underwater city, the empty temple, wrecked mosaics in Mosques turned-Cathedrals. The idea of a big fire going out, that one candle in a dark room we were told was Jesus in the mortal realm. A network of living people forgetting what enabled their predecessors’ greatness.

Black ink lines on a white page is what most of my drawing has been reduced to. Crossing over one another, horizontal and vertical but in varied lengths and positions. They are just forms, they are before material. They are the space in the sky before the monument gets constructed. They are the form. Take apart the organism; peel back through the animal kingdom, the man, the character, and slice the apple until two elements remain. Yin/Yang (阴阳), Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, Eros (ἔρως) and Thymos (θυμός). When cracks finally work their way through the castle walls, which of the two principles does the organism require? When a man sits on his couch in the dark while the sun sets, and sleeps while it rises letting history go on like a wound-clock…is it more love he needs? He has progressively better distractions with which to entertain himself. More options than ever for a synthetic experience. Whatever force makes leaves grow on trees again is what makes this pathetic twenty-first century man stand up and pretend he’s the archetypal soldier, worker, explorer, sage, until it’s no longer pretend. Until the organs of the ruined castle start rejuvenating. Until the machine’s processors activate, and it consumes and burns fuel. It grows again. It expands through space using all the matter it can consume. It doesn’t think about growing. It just breathes.

“For men are good in one way, but bad in many. Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.” -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 

Tradere

I watched an old woman cross Zhonggang Road in busy traffic

hunched over

holding her cane,

while others (younger) reached out on the other side waiting for her.

Motors revved their impatience for the impending change of light.

How old would she have been when the white modern arch above her gray curled hair was constructed?

Or when I was born? When this island,

Ilha Formosa, passed hands from the Japanese to the Chinese, and then to Chiang Kai-Shek?

The airport, all the cars, the enormous structures around her? And what kind of life?

How old was she when the languages in the schools switched, and then again?

Or the importation of telephones, televisions, computers.

And finally, the shadow of American imperial dominance and the Sign of the Dollar?

What, if guised in young semblance, would a man look like if he were a thousand years old?

Two thousand? Three? Four?

And what if he saw the entire history of the West? Pagan to Christian,

to whatever we have now. Europe, America, Australia, the world, and the heavenly bodies far away?

Would he stick to his grade school lectures and boyhood stories? Would he follow whatever he was taught, whatever the age?

Or would he learn to accept every new dogma as if it were the absolute Truth without question? Would he say:

“This era must be the last one. This time they got it right” every few revolutions of the Earth?

We know how the latter would look already.

As for the former, more stubborn one,

he too, is already here.

Alive in the recently born, and yet to be so.

Reading the secrets in books and hearing them spoken far away

while the mass disregards them

only because they could never guess at the magic that hides away.

The combined fury of the archetypes reminds him

even when cloaked in the body of a child.

Obsequiæ

In the teacher’s room

there’s some Kuaizi in a pink and red package,

a red bi, a beige Yokohama pencil, old flashcards with

hong and chang jing lu on them.

“Successful FCE – 10 practice tests for Cambridge English”

A blue mug of room-temperature shui,

an empty BeMo’s bag where a burrito once dwelt.

Ripped tape visible through the glass wall.

K-class attendance 2/25-5/20.

K is for Knight.

It’s on top of the Fitzroy readers,

on the GEPT book,

on a thin yellow book,

on a thick white booklet,

on the ka fei-stained table.

There’s a red United Kingdom flag Sha En bag from promotion day,

reading comprehension;

on a blue book…

on an orange book.

I’m sweating from the walk from the gong che stop.

In my ears are:

Obsequiæ,

and when I hear the harp,

my thoughts travel back to the Cathédrale in Provence;

the baptistery, always facing East,

with the story about the king who asked God for a son.

There was the room where children sang Swedish carols.

Derelict columns.

Paintings who didn’t look down at you,

but called you up to look yourself.

Next door was the cloister where the monks circled

and chanted.

I’m walking before I know I’ve risen,

so that the ends of the hall approach me

and I oscillate between them.

The phone rings, and it’s

that same abbreviated classical tune

I’ve heard so often

all I hear is the flat

drone.

Over Bridge and Under Bridge

Under the bridge in the sprinkling snow

I walked back from the train

under the bridge along the way before

Ludlowe High, and by

the great big houses and the leaves

and the short stone walls,

and all the pine trees that protrude over the edges

where the white flakes accumulate

and make slush by the cracks

in the black road up Black Rock.

And a year later I press down into the snow

and make note of the snow on the branches that lean out

into the road, because I’m going to melt along with it.

And always looking down,

as cars drive by and kick up the water on the wet ground,

this is a place that’s always the barrier,

the unnamed and unexamined space in between

going to and from:

the town, the City, the school, the track, the home.

But what would happen if you just sat

on one of those uncomfortable gray rocks that

almost want to say keep out

and just watched

for seven semesters and I think you’d witness

an eighteen year-old who panicked and ran in the dark

under the bridge and to the train

and two rootless minds;

one in a familiar black coat dragging a suitcase,

and another in old church shoes

on the same cracked, paved sidewalk

and a tight green wrinkled colored shirt,

waiting, hoping, hustling back, under the bridge,

past Ludlowe, past all the trees and the stone and the SUV’s and the white cylindrical testament to wealth and comfort and safety and we made it and we kept it back to the Regis Hall freshman dorm, where,

a nineteen year-old with a black flower in her hair,

gently kissed the forehead of a sad young man as I watched, leaning back against the empty frame of a bed

and learned that apologies are made just so you can crawl back.

Before I left, we’d been talking about death.

I never got to hear how it ended.

Beach Road

[Draft #1 of another short nostalgia-prompted poem]

There should be that moment of hesitation—

wherein the moving cars are caged behind the lines,

itching to lash out in front. And yet,

that perfect moment nearly always comes

even if you have to hold out your hand to an invisible

mother, father, worker, master,

and slip by the metallic objects in space…

through the urban layout

past the uneven stone graveyard wall

…and onto the beach road.

Sand spills out onto the asphalt,

and small waves crash in just over the wall of sand

and short wooden bridge.

There’s a dim purple in sky that hides just beyond the eye’s reach.

It’s concealing childish memories

along with the primordial infant self

that just wants to melt languidly

and lie down in the grass in the vestige of sunlight

and try to find the comforting past, hiding,

beneath the piles of leaves

rustling on the passing lawns.

Descending Words

[Draft 1, from December 4, 2014]

Wrought————————————————————————————————————————————————-

———-Forged—————————————————————————————————————————————–

——————Grown———————————————————————————————————————————

—————————-Entombed——————————————————————————————————————-

—————————————Carved———————————————————————————————————–

————————————————–Chained———————————————————————————————–

————————————————————Risen—————————————————————————————–

——————————————————————Smitten——————————————————————————–

—————————————————————————Eaten————————————————————————-

———————————————————————————–Beaten—————————————————————-

——————————————————————————————Bruised——————————————————–

———————————————————————————-Bloodied—————————————————————

—————————————————————————-Lit—————————————————————————–

—————————————————————Returned———————————————————————————

—————————————————Called————————————————————————————————-

—————————————–Swept———————————————————————————————————–

————————Unearthed———————————————————————————————————————-

—————Earthen———————————————————————————————————————————–

Dethroned———————————————————————————————————————————————-

————Lost——————————————————————————————————————————————

——————Forsaken——————————————————————————————————————————

—————————Forgotten——————————————————————————————————————–

—————————————-Struck————————————————————————————————————

————————————————-Heard—————————————————————————————————

————————————————————Hewn—————————————————————————————–

——————————————————————–Sought——————————————————————————-

——————————————————————————Sent————————————————————————

——————————————————————-Spent———————————————————————————

———————————————————Buried——————————————————————————————-

————————————————Crushed————————————————————————————————-

———————————————————Birthed——————————————————————————————

———————————————————————Born———————————————————————————

——————————————————————————-Torn———————————————————————–

————————————————————————————Scorned————————————————————-

————————————————————————Horned————————————————————————–

—————————————————————Pierced———————————————————————————–

————————————————————————Devoured———————————————————————–

—————————————————————————————Scoured———————————————————-

—————————————————————————Scourged———————————————————————

———————————————————–Submerged———————————————————————————-

——————————————-Drowned—————————————————————————————————–

—————————-Deflowered—————————————————————————————————————–

———————Flayed——————————————————————————————————————————

———Neutered—————————————————————————————————————————————

Bound—————————————————————————————————————————————————-

———-Jailed——————————————————————————————————————————————

———————Impaled—————————————————————————————————————————–

———————————-Scaled—————————————————————————————————————–

—————————————–Worshipped—————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————-Shot—————————————————————————————–

————————————————————————-Fought————————————————————————–

276

The cupboard perfect for hide-and-seek,

by the gray small bathroom up the steps,

behind gray-blue painted doors,

next to the sink where I’d washed the white paint

out of the brushes,

the white paint for the garage with its dirty paint peeling,

the spiky mat  by the shaky cellar door,

the black tank,

the wooden boards on the ceiling

with the six spraypainted white names,

the curious white foam

and the dirty cracks in the white walls,

the soft green and white Celtics ball,

the small windows high up sitting just above

the flat trimmed grass outside,

the fixtures with bingo and the penny roller,

the metal columns, the dusty lightbulb,

and that old unstable dark brown wooden desk,

carved up,

with the name Bill confidently scratched in.

The adults talk upstairs,

and the cousins play,

while one sits behind the old wooden desk,

opens it up,

and goes to work dreaming.

Leaving the Counseling Center

[This is a poem I wrote on January 27, 2014, during a time when I was expected to produce a relatively large amount of material for a class. It was on a day I remember sitting in my chair in my apartment, staring at the food in the kitchen, feeling my stomach eat my entire body from the inside, wishing I could just go to sleep and stay that way. It was winter…]

Jim sits with his spindly legs crossed,

next to his yellow Sigmund Freud coffee mug,

photographs of pinetree-laden hills and a lake somewhere,

With his Harvard Medical School certificates.

The little fountain on the side table is still there,

And the branches out the window encroaching on

the gray sky, tinted blue by the window.

The window faces the afternoon’s light,

And it’s a devious tactic, because you have to walk into that light

in order to leave.

Jim spins in his chair reaching for his pen.

His elbow sticks out behind the chair when clicking,

seeking to revive his memories.

Anxiety and Sleep are on the names of two new books facing the red chair.

He clicks his pen on and off,

squinting and making his eyebrows appear pained when he looks up.

Back out into the cool air,

where soon pine tree walls and snow hint at vague memories

just beyond reconquest.

A nervous-looking blond girl passes to my left,

and two hooded men, boys, dragging their long legs,

displaying to the world that they don’t care if they get

to where they’re going.

A red van angry that it has to stop for the crosswalk.

From a near-empty building

to one full of gossiping, excited, stressed people,

but there’s still no center, no place where people convene

for any reason besides hurrying to their next class,

meeting, meal,

or…

appointment?

Refractions

Great oval suns’ spikes focus when my right eye fixes

on the pattern of waterdrops on the lashes.

I examine it for the first time: puddles

of gasoline, yet spaced out like raindrops.

The other circles are gray, dim, dancing into one another

as the lens shifts.

Of the two stars I can see,

one supernovas, and other other

pulls me eye.

The slithering chain of droplets constrict and release

and before long I pan out,

surveying the masses of plant leaves

under the oppressive light ray.

They assemble their color under the shade, and

a father shouting to his young daughters

beyond the woodpile below echoes up.

The thin stretched skin under my foot

crushes the red pine needles,

and then find the generous moss

on what once were stairs.