tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29562316958791276892024-02-08T10:33:33.846-08:00Buddha with a Black HeartBuddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-90060414991351695122016-10-29T13:59:00.001-07:002016-10-29T13:59:33.500-07:00The test of ambiguity
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>...man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he
must want beyond what he knows.</i> </blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1a1a1a; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why do you run away? What is hidden there – beyond the blurry
images frantically moving, obscuring the view? Stand still and look past them,
look into the centre. There what do you see?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1a1a1a; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You see only ambiguity. Neither good nor bad, it’s only the feeling
you have when you climb to a great height and you look down. Vertigo. You are
dizzy. You want – in the most panic stricken way – to stay alive but at the
same time you want to jump. You dream about it, you obsess about it and you
can’t look down because of it. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">You want
to stop fighting, stop trying. You want the ambiguity of whether you can cling
onto the surface of that high tower to end - and you want to do it in a way you
can be certain of. Anything is bearable if it’s not a surprise. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1a1a1a; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this is the lesser known test of life and it will not
leave you alone. What do you do with your share of ambiguity? Make no mistake –
as Beauvoir sets out in her Ethic of Ambiguity – it comes with freedom. They’re
one indivisible package. You are free to create the meaning of your life and
the meaning is unlimited. And yet you start in the mud as a worm, struggling,
wriggling, turned blindly towards the sky but not knowing what you are reaching
for. You do not know that ambiguity is the same thing as freedom and freedom
the same thing as responsibility. And so you put it down. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1a1a1a; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Its unbearable, the ambiguous depths you can fall into, just
like the dizzying heights from the top of that tower.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-32736860735537913782016-08-26T10:23:00.000-07:002016-08-26T10:23:05.140-07:00Into the emptiness<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The feeling
of emptiness comes and goes. Don’t fight it, don’t analyse it, don’t act on it.
Just be still and sit with it. Hold it. Accept it and it will go away again after
a while. And then sometime later it will come back. The thing to do is, again,
sit with it, stand with it, lie with it, roll around with it and accept it. Allow
it to be there however long it needs to be there, until it goes away again. It’s
a cycle – don’t you see - that will go round and round. As long as you stay on
the ride you can carry on with your life – as husband, father, dentist, brother,
Jew, immigrant, non-immigrant, American, writer, fictional character and
whatever else you happen to be.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some though
wont’ or can’t ignore the emptiness. And here’s what happens when you run into
the emptiness in search of something – you run up against Roth’s Counterlife.
For those of us who are self-destructive enough to have to explore what is
there just because it’s there, the reward you get is a tangled mess of identities
– what you are, what you’re trying to escape, your attempt at rewriting it or
being rewritten by someone else and the totally alien one you’re trying to leap
into – each one just as unsatisfying as the first, the one you would have had
had you just stayed on the ride.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yet we –
the selfishly destructive curious ones – know there is something in the
emptiness and the dissatisfaction. It may even be the dissatisfaction itself. It’s
the universal constant. Anytime you try to define something by giving it an
identity trouble bulges at the seams – whether that’s nationality, ethnicity,
religion, or marital status. It is begging our pesky human need to rewrite
things – and that’s where Counterlife gets so interesting and so clever –
because all these bulging dissatisfactions are examined in parallel with the
writer’s neurotic need to write and rewrite the narrative. The author who is
trapped by his own fictions and the process of writing, the fictional characters
trying to escape the author, the real characters trying to avoid being fictionalized.
We are all of these things. </div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-63018235618355278442016-06-13T12:28:00.001-07:002016-10-29T13:59:38.471-07:00I've been published!My first complete short story: <a href="http://www.weareawebsite.com/nancy-zhang.html">Telephone</a>Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-5807392901874796152016-03-28T10:18:00.000-07:002016-03-28T11:19:44.628-07:00Circular ruins<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Gradually, in this way, she came into possession of what was
already hers. </blockquote>
I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convey. Maybe it was the
ceaseless aroma of eucalypti in the gardens of a villa of infinite symmetry;
maybe it was the humid garden saturated with time that forked, time that
diverged, converged or ran parallel to each other, unawares, for centuries;
maybe I was trying to capture the invisible persons of all times, busy in that
saturated garden in their multiple forms. I know I wrote about someone who woke
from sleep and wasn’t sure if she dreamt, while the day and night turned above
her. She mistook dusk for dawn. I know I wrote about someone who had arrived
with no past and no future in the ‘unanimous night’, dragging herself nauseous
and bloodstained to the circular ruins.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know there are no new metaphors –none that matters I mean
– so I am only a mirror, reflecting back in a slightly different light what has
been said already (and will be said again). We spend most of our time repeating
things. That’s why it’s possible, for Borges in this quote to form time into a circle
in a sentence – with no awkwardness at all in grammar or tense. That
possibility was always there, in the language, in our psyche. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But inside that labyrinth, at its centre, what I really
wanted to convey was the depression, the mourning that we are all engaged in,
constantly, because of the selves that die every minute we are alive. You yearn
most for the things that were once intimately yours, you crave and you search
but you cannot come into possession of what was already yours; you cannot catch
up with the selves you’ve already lost. They are always ahead of you, in a
circle, in earth’s gravity, in orbit, falling away from your grasp. So you fall
together continuously. You mourn because there is no way to change that fate, you
cannot escape time’s progression. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Except in dreams. They discovered that the brain doesn’t just
respond, it anticipates and it creates a world for our selves to inhabit before
that world has had a chance to intrude. It is its own mirror. So in dreams you
are reunited with your selves, the things that were already yours; big vivid
dreams that take up the whole day – or even a whole lifetime. But then you wake
up and have to actually live again. Wouldn’t you be exhausted? Wouldn’t you
think, you had lived two lives? And which one makes a deeper impression? There
is a part of me that can’t tell the difference.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-9325121818257268182016-02-20T04:36:00.000-08:002016-02-21T09:19:46.059-08:005. The procrastinating writer<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The procrastinating writer had quit her job in order to
write. Such a radical move she (the procrastinating writer) reflected, with more than a little secret satisfaction, placed her perhaps among the 1 or
2 percent of the population that did not follow, sheep-like, conventional
norms. This was a promising sign already of the unforseeable leaps in form,
structure and perhaps even in the very etiology of word construction she would
pioneer - without yet having written a word. The very blankness of the clean,
white, pristinely untouched sheet of paper in front of her was promise of that,
more than any scrawling black letters could have been.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Though she had, for the past 22 years, worked at an
insurance company where she processed claims for workplace injuries and wrote,
for that whole duration, nothing more strenuous than sentences such as, ‘likely
cause: whiplash to the lower spine’, finished work at 5pm and had evenings and weekends
entirely to herself (having resolved to ‘marry’ her calling, i.e. writing,
rather than a man), she had saved her creative genius entirely and unreservedly
for the day she would be able to fully and joyfully, surrender herself to it,
rather than insult the idea of what it could have been by plonking down
half-baked sentences in her 19 hours of free time weekdays, 48 hours on
weekends, 120 hours of bank holidays and 600 hours total annual personal
holiday (which was generous at the German firm she worked at) in case they
turned out, in hindsight, to be hideous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Instead she had, during those 19 hours of free time
weekdays, 48 hours on weekends, 120 hours of bank holidays and 600 hours total
annual personal holiday, prepared thoroughly for her pending writing career by <i>talking about it </i>with a select group of
creative individuals in her ‘milieu’. These creative individuals were sourced
carefully from a wide range of extra-insurance activities which she had
researched, trialed, then selectively invested in, at great personal expense,
energy and time, as a sign of her commitment to the craft. In addition to being
in-touch with their ‘inner creative fountains’, which was of course
non-negotiable in this select group of individuals, she had painstakingly
sought out a more elusive and indescribable quality: that is, an unreserved
support for and faith in that which is yet to be realised, since what is art if
not unrealised - as every piece of art was at one point - particularly those
truly pushing the boundaries, because they could not have been conceived by the
limited and plebian imaginations of the prevailing zeitgeist.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Nancy%20Zhang/Desktop/Writing/The%20Procrastinating%20Writer.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This (the accumulation of her select group), of course, was
a subtle pursuit, requiring great tact and delicacy on her (the procrastinating
writer’s) part and it took much of the last 22 years to identify and bring into
her ‘milieu’ those individuals with the right ‘understanding’ to whom she could
really and authentically <i>talk about</i>
her prospective writing career. This spiritual support was particularly crucial
given the un-affirming cruelty of her family. She had four boorish siblings including
a doctor, lawyer, banker and engineer, respectively, who at various family
gatherings never failed to make a show of supporting her dreams, making lavish proclamations
of wanting her to do well, offering financial and other forms of help, such as
introductions to their successful publisher friends, and plied her with various
tired, clichéd tropes about ‘reaching for the stars’ etc., together with
regular, annoying, insensitive, wholly unnecessary, hurtful and counterproductive
proddings about when she would start. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But - she was sure - behind her back these materialistic brutes
(i.e her siblings), who could really see no further than their next six-figure
bonuses, saw her as nothing more than an insurance clerk and was delighted at
this pathetic, tangential and largely accidental path she was on, as it made
their own achievements that much more (conventionally) impressive by
comparison, and so secretly wished she would fail. She refused all their help.
She would show them.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Nancy%20Zhang/Desktop/Writing/The%20Procrastinating%20Writer.docx#_ftn2" title="">[2]</a></span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Nancy%20Zhang/Desktop/Writing/The%20Procrastinating%20Writer.docx#_ftn2" title=""><!--[endif]--></a></span>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">TBC...</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br clear="all" /></span>
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">[1]</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Indeed, it could be argued
(and she often did argue) that even art that was seemingly finished was, in its
most important aspects, mostly unrealised and unfinished. Anything that could
be said to be truly, completely finished was, to those with less limited and
less plebeian imaginations, definitively mediocre.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri light" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Nancy%20Zhang/Desktop/Writing/The%20Procrastinating%20Writer.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-size: 9.0pt;">Then there was her cruelly unaffirming father who
laughed openly a few years after she accidentally became an insurance clerk and
told him of her dreams of being a writer. Over one particularly miserable
family dinner he, with his mouth full of food, had burst into a (for her)
catastrophic fit of laughter, finishing after only what seemed like five, full
minutes with comments to the effect that she had never written a word and had just
about more aptitude for taking up space as a shapeless blob.</span> <span style="font-size: 9.0pt;">She would show him too, when she was published and rich
and famous and her book had been made into a Hollywood movie.</span></span> <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-87550533240828918562016-02-03T01:32:00.002-08:002016-02-21T09:22:38.611-08:004. Fragments: yellow ochre<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">He stepped off the plane and onto the yellow earth. Yellow
was the colour of the East. Yellow was the colour of dragons, who passed it
down to emperors, their representatives on earth, who only wore gold. Now
though it was the colour of an unnatural fog, heavy with industrial pollutants
that mixed together and was added to year after year. A yellow ochre veil hung
over the lowering sun, dragging it west down its long descent.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This could have been a cowboy story. Our hero is a young American
in his early twenties. He comes from the Midwest, where the big country was wide
and empty, and there was nothing in the way of riding hard and fast all the way
to the horizon. Our hero is adventurous:
being a mixture of Irish and Jewish descent (with even some Arabic genes in the family tree). He loved languages and had spent time in France and a
kibbutz; he had boundless hunger for the new. More than that he was possessed by
a demon he didn’t know who could paint a door in a blank wall and make it open.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But our hero had stepped into the East, and so the story shatters
into different possibilities; incandescent, all but one of them would burn out
and disappear. China, newly re-emerging, was by far his most exotic adventure
and he was drawn to its improbable transformation. But this big country was dense
with not just people but history - a back story that had already carved tiny paths,
walls and hidden valleys into every inch of ground; China’s newness was
deceptive. And then everything is not as it seems with our hero, either. With
his thick blond, almost red, beard and dressed, always, in a neat buttoned down
shirt and pants, he seemed much older than his years. His eyes, which remained still
and cool even when the rest of him was animated, were the only part of him that
looked tired. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-45722873968572353252016-02-01T16:25:00.000-08:002016-02-21T08:49:55.020-08:004. Fragments<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">D </span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-indent: -0.25in;"> He had worked in that job for six months. At first it had
seemed like a good deal. G had landed in a foreign country with nothing - no
skills, no experience, no money – and managed to talk his way into a sales job
at a carpet company. But having lived for six months on $500 a month and sharing
a shambolic two bedroom flat with four other people (two of whom squatted in
the living room together with the only washing machine) he decided it was time to
change. He wanted better; he needed an upgrade.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> B</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was Wednesday night and time for the mid-week drink. A new rooftop bar was opening that night in a rundown part of town that was
becoming suspiciously trendy. First straggling groups of artists had moved into
the narrow Shikumen buildings, happy to live without running water or
electricity. Then some buildings were bought by two Swedes who had had the
vision (and the funds of unclear origins) to makeover the skeletal warehouse
and 19th century slum dwellings into flattering, young, post-modern/post-colonial
versions of themselves. A ‘concept bar’ it was called. G knew the Swedes, he
had sold carpet to them. In return he was in on the vision, the dream, of
hacking back the virgin urban jungle to reveal their fortunes. It came with
perks too: VIP tickets and free rounds of drinks for him and his party. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">C</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Saturday – but it was no day of rest for him. Even though he
slept in til noon and had no intention of going to the office, G was still
working. As he slept his phone was pinging, sparkling, twirling on the bedside table;
star of the show, it received messages like flowers on a stage. As soon as he
opened his eyes, he reached for it and scanned them. Lunch for five, then
coffee with a potential client, followed by a bike ride with new contacts he
met Thursday (who might become clients), then pre-dinner drinks with old
friends, followed by dinner for ten or so. He struggled to remember who the
dinner the party were, most likely colleagues, clients, new friends and randoms
he had met the past week; they were merging into an unfocused blur. But then,
ah, well, then the night was open.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">D</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">G was in the other room sleeping. In the past two days he
had spent only three hours in the flat: he crashed through the place - going
there just to sleep - before crashing out again. She sat on the sofa in the
living room as his roommate made dinner cheerfully, leisurely; whistling and occasionally
changing the music on his ipod. The bland, warm smell of steaming rice started
to fill the room. The roommate was excitable and naieve about her reasons for
being there. Under the coffee table she saw a French textbook; she picked it up
and leafed through the pages which were carefully marked up, interesting vocabulary
underlined in G’s neat handwriting. It was the work of a diligent student. She
smiled as she thought of him, with his love of languages, spending hours on the
book by lamplight, opening a new world. Then she noticed another book that had
been hidden underneath the textbook: ‘Surviving Suicide: A Family Guide’.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">F</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">He stared angrily at the screen. The email was sent, it was
done. It was their fault, they made him do it. He was too good for a carpet
company, too special, too <i>destined</i> to be following their rules. G saw further, higher.
He knew that the man who came home at 4pm to play with his children would never
amount to anything. He knew that the man who trusted the system was like a
blind, plodding horse: doing all the heavy lifting just to stay exactly where
he was, while others got on its back and elevated themselves. That’s why, to hammer the message
home, he created some other email addresses from a login that he had copied on
the sly (and with foresight) from a client last month. And from those fictional
clients he splattered his former boss, and his boss’s boss, with messages about
the way he was treated and how he was irreplaceable. That was a neat extension
of something he learned early in his sales career: feeding tidbits of praise,
or otherwise, up the management chain eventually filtered its way back down to
him, and to his kickbacks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That would show them the truth. By the way, he added, some
unethical practices had been noted in his colleague: that slick guy who wore
shiny suits, who did no work but got all the credit. Nice guys always finished
last, like his father. Finally, he cleared out the account that the company had
prepaid for his expenses, and which also contained seed money for a venture he had
persuaded six business partners to invest in (though he, being the ideas man,
had invested nothing). Now this was a decent return, he thought, and enough to
buy a ticket home. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">E</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">G saw her there, at the party, between people aimlessly
drunk and revolving round the room like washing spinning in a machine. She saw
him too, her eyes blank, she was already dead. ‘Hello,’ he said. He was on home
turf. Three whiskies down already and plenty of distractions, plenty of ways
out. ‘Hi’ she replied. She stared. She was nothing like the girl just seven
days ago, who had cried in the café as he refused to order and sat there
teetotal, telling her how little he had to offer. He had arrived 40 minutes
late and then left early because he had to catch a flight at 8am the next
morning. He left her to finish her melting ice tea, and she had been on the
verge of saying it, trying again, reaching across the divide to touch him. He had
an answer ready: ‘the richest man is he who needs the least’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But he never had the opportunity. She had turned on him – she
of all people - and accepted his thin excuses at just the point where they were
least true. Now, confusingly, as the too-loud music pounded the senses out of
him, he found himself shaking his head illogically, saying, ‘I made mistakes, I’m
sorry’. Now it was her who seemed to be looking for a way out. Her eyes blank,
they looked behind him and around him. As he stood there still nonsensically
shaking, all he could remember was when he didn’t turn up, the day he was going
to tell her how his brother died - and she had told him to come later. ‘I need to
tell you.’ ‘I know’, she said, and squeezed his hand. ‘I’m leaving in June’,
she said, ‘I’ve decided’. June? He felt the machine churning and the music
garishly louder. All the exit options shut at once. He felt the doors lock from the inside. She had planned it three months in advance, so as to have plenty
of time to say goodbyes and have good times, ‘you, me and all our friends’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">He had failed with her, just as he had failed with his
brother, to prevent later from turning into never. He saw for the first time,
what he had not allowed himself to see: his brother's car a dark grain of dust in the lonely
vastness of an interstate highway, driving between two of the flattest states
in America, somewhere between where he was and where he wanted to be. They had found
him there, for the last time, stranded. G decided then on failure, even as the remaining
time with her stretched a good way into the distance. After that it was easy.
Then it made sense. Why, the mistakes practically repeated themselves, and they
unfolded reliably, in just exactly the same way as the first time. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-69319282324215069722016-01-13T16:25:00.001-08:002016-02-21T08:47:32.862-08:003. Fragments: edge<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As still as seeing eyes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">from the smoke</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">y haze as the wind is</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">loud as the edge</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">is loud and as sharp</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">as long as I</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">walk along it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Down to nothing in particular</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">from the midday sun</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">worth staring at</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">in shadows as in life</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">where I have the best</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">of things</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">or maybe just not the worst</span>Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-6165404904387887202016-01-13T16:20:00.000-08:002016-02-21T08:47:58.544-08:00Infinite sides to every story<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Imagine you arrive at your destination late at night. Your
destination, you thought, is a castle. But search as you might when you ’arrive’,
you find no turrets, no towers, nothing that looks like a castle. No matter
which path you take – and you take many, this way and that - you get neither
closer nor further away. You begin to wonder and are disappointed by the
thought that the ‘castle’ is just the loose collection of buildings you are in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What would you do? How would you cope? What if the ‘castle’ is
not a castle but your dreams and goals, and the journey to ‘arrive’, your
assumption that the years are well spent, planning, doing and hopefully getting.
You expect a beginning, middle and end, but it turns out: there is only a
middle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is the disconcerting world Kafka creates in The Castle
and his character K responds with an odd mix of emotions that do not obviously
fit together. But that’s not the point. The point is that their meandering
logic lead to an irrational defiance, a determination to see things through to
the end, though he doesn’t even know what ‘things’ might refer to.</span></div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">‘...they knew all about him at the
Castle…they had weighed up the strengths and weaknesses and were ready to do
battle with a smile. On the other hand… it showed that they underrated him...
And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror with this
lofty acknowledgement… they were mistaken.’</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s a hard book to read. The experience of reading it is
like K’s fraught search. He finds nothing except that there are infinite sides to
the story. Every character has a story to tell which sheds another, different light
on the unfathomable situation. He pulls
off veil after veil from its opaque face, only to reveal a more and more
complex picture, one that pushes meaningful understanding away into an
explosion of details.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some people get bogged down in elaborate interpretations. In
the end though I don’t think it’s hard to unravel, it’s just hard to accept.
Impossible in fact. The fragmentary world of The Castle where there is only a ‘middle’
is a lot more realistic than our insistence that things should make sense, that
we should be able to <i>understand</i> and
therefore have something to strive for, or hope for or search for. This means
we prefer only to see one version of events out of an infinite sided circle and
so, our grip on it is fragile - dangerously stretched by every other side that
comes into view. We react to this threat with rage. We hold on.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-69167756336319469392015-12-04T07:28:00.000-08:002016-02-21T08:48:21.322-08:002. Fragments: The attractive outsider<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A
woman had come to save his soul and he wasn’t sure he was ready. Afterall hadn’t
he, for the past decade or so, found plenty of ways to put readiness
off to just around the corner, while convincing himself that he was closing in
on it? Isn’t that why he had volunteered for this transfer to this forsaken
place, beyond civilisation, in the third world where it was others who needed
saving? And he… well, he could be exactly as he was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He
had reached a kind of happiness – or if not happiness then a compromise - between
who he was, who he’d like to be and who he really was. This required a complicated
balancing act that he would never have been able to explain. And it was all
possible because he was here, living the life of an expat in a foreign country,
in a tiny sliver of space being part of it and not being part of it, both
inside and out at the same time. It was all part of the magic that this, paradoxically,
gave him a much more luxurious lifestyle, with more privileges and more status,
than the locals could ever dream of.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This
woman now, with her simple, straight and annoyingly unshakable sense of what it
means to be saved – or not saved – threatened to cast a different light on the
whole thing. Like when you find out the trick in an optical illusion. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-75484482594311544962015-12-04T05:13:00.000-08:002016-02-21T08:48:55.519-08:00The universal substitute<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The door swung inward noiselessly, and I found myself being
looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He rubbed his eye with a finger, as if he had just got up.
He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and his ribs stuck out like that
of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly
colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were
bare, he was only wearing a pair of old Khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by
a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were
obstinately melancholy, as if he was assuming the expression on purpose. </span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He must have been equipped with a kind of science fiction extra
sense, a third eye or antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he
couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, ‘I can tell you’re admiring my
febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an
invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.’ He was
looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. ‘You might do something destructive:
hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.’ </span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What is character? Maybe we know them only by the dent they
make in our emotional landscape. Some are so odd in shape you are left
wondering for years afterwards what difference did they make? What did they
change? Like someone who came into your house when you weren’t around and
rearranged, ever so subtly, the things on your shelves. You are compelled to go
back and back over anything you can hold onto to find an answer, but like a
seed that refuses to grow, the dent gives you no answers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is a character from a book I read years ago who won’t
let me go. The character is an aimless graduate student called Duncan from The
Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Aimless, thin, unattractive, sly, manipulative
and selfish, he was completely, smugly and self-consciously comfortable with not
conforming to expectations. He was calculatedly deceptive and so he often
pierced through to the truth. It’s not clear if he brings redemption or
destruction – or just nothingness - as he (metaphorically) devours the heroine
at the end.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I feel like I’ve received the occasional long
distance phone call from a ‘Duncan’ over the years. I hear the ringing mostly
when I’m asleep and have slept so long I can hardly wake up. I feel like I’ve
met many ‘Duncans’ over the years, he keeps reappearing in different guises. Sometimes
he even feels like a permanent fixture, there at the back of my mind, being his
sly mocking self, making things uncomfortable, offering no answers. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">***</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The long time she had been moving through…had been merely a
period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no
real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an
event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy
of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future… Duncan was
irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He didn’t seem to care about what
would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present.
She found it comforting, and she didn’t want to know why.</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">‘I don’t want you to think all this means anything. It never
sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really, to somebody else.’ He kissed
the end of her nose. ‘You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’ </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Marian wondered if her feelings ought to be hurt, but
decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. ‘I wonder what you’re
a substitute for, then,’ she said. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">‘That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the
universal substitute.’</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his
elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater,
like a turtle’s into its shell… He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have
been talking to himself. I leaned
forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting
of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his
skin was even more unearthly. </span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and
an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around
and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment
stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow
sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence…</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">‘Hello,’ a voice said.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure
seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees.
She walked towards it. </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing
between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had
settled on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she removed
her gloves to touch them, was cold and wet. </span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*** </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His ringing jolts me from my sleep. But that's it. I wonder what he would say if I ever picked up the phone? I imagine it would be something like this: 'hello, sugar,' he'd say. 'It's me.'</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-79151604869105618892015-11-18T12:06:00.000-08:002016-02-21T08:50:42.147-08:00Identity is an endeavour we can fail at<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not just our bodies that die - it is our lives that we lose, which is why we experience hope, despair, longing, regret and the like. In the chronological passage of time, we grapple with phenomenological time: the past, present and future; time that flies and drags; and time that can be made up or squandered <span style="text-align: right;">- Kim Atkins. </span></span></blockquote>
<div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I don't know yet if there is a philosophical question at the heart of all writing. I think it might be true but I'm not sure. But there is a philosophy that suggests a sense of self - an identity - is a sustained effort to tell a story, a narrative. Like all narratives, it is subject to revision and retelling as new evidence emerges to make it all add up. <span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This story links past,
present and future. We look in the past to understand the present and project
into the future.</span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We can cope with most things, including new information and contradictory evidence, through this process of retelling the story. That's why none of us are truthful: not to ourselves or to others. But there can come a point when, if the incoherence is too extreme, the story breaks down and the narrative ruptures. This means that identity is really a verb<i> and it's an endeavour we can fail at</i>. And then what happens?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Crow, a native American tribe that was assimilated by the US, famously answered as follows: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">'And then, nothing happened.'</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wonder if all the developing nations are trying to answer this question, in response to the spread of Western culture and the fact that modernity is synonymous with Westernization.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wonder if my answer would be the same (i.e., 'And then, nothing happened'). I'm not sure; this one will take a long time; but I don't think so. </span></div>
</div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-79454144601972796192015-11-18T11:21:00.001-08:002016-02-21T08:52:11.468-08:00Endings<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Reading Li Yiyun is like dancing a slow two-step, cheek-to-cheek, only to be stabbed in the heart at the end.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following." A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders when she stopped being one of them. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What is there to say about modern China? After death and the birth of money, after the lights and dust refuse to settle, when frenetic energy and escape is exhausted, what is there left of us that is still human?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs Fong's blabbering and walks to Beibei's bedroom. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white with a bluish hue. Mrs Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei's hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, grey and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents' garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Can you feel you lived at least - and acted - even though through its entirety, you suspect, you were a blind mole doing the wrong things in the right context - or was it the right things in the wrong context?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But on second thought, I wish that Mrs Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang's clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">- Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.</span><br />
<br />Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-63966555173944529312015-11-01T17:00:00.002-08:002016-02-21T08:52:47.185-08:001: Outside the window<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The house where I grew up has long been dismantled. Removed
to make way for a new generation of shining towers in Shanghai, an ancient fishing
village born again as a gleaming metropolis, all brittle glass and metal.
Nothing could have stopped the city’s inexorable march towards modernity, even
if that meant selective amnesia. This included the rickety concrete buildings in
Teacher’s Village No. 2, Putuo district, which once housed me and my family in
my most wide-eyed and vulnerable years. On the scrap heap, it was, like the
other remnants of Communist era housing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Since then, my path has been long and winding. Not as
confident, nor as strident, as the journey my native city had taken - to become
the new financial heart of a new superpower in the East. But I had done some
selective amnesia of my own. I had forgotten everything about that rickety
concrete building, set in a small communal village where everyone knew each
other; where women called down to their neighbours as they hung their clothes
out to dry on bamboo poles; where children played together and parents took
turns to babysit; and my mother put bags of rice out in the sun to chase out
the bugs. I had forgotten those things, until they were gone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But these are not the memories I want to tell you about. No,
because their disappearance is not a surprise to anyone anymore. Yet some acts
of forgetting catch you out and stop you in your tracks, even after they have disappeared
for years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I want to tell you about is simply one scene I saw year
after year, season after season, from the study at the back of that rickety
concrete building. That’s it, nothing complicated. The study was badly built
with the same thin and flaking walls as the rest of the house. It had a
corrugated iron roof and unreliable electric wiring. The neon light, the only
ones my parents could afford, flickered and sometimes went out and it was not
soundproof at all. But what it did have - to make up for all these injustices -
was a large window along the full length of the back wall, and, outside it, a
small garden filled with tall swaying bamboo, leafy pomegranate plants and our
share of the mature beech trees that lined the whole compound. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I could sit there for hours, watching and listening to the
mysterious way nature worked outside. Most of the year there were birds to keep
me company. They flew high above us and visited us simply because they could, or
sang only when they were happy. Then there was the gentle rain in spring and
autumn, that made a pitter patter sound on the iron roof and drenched the
bamboo, which would bow and weep in gratitude. Afterwards, the world always
seemed cleaner, clearer. And finally, in the monsoon season, the rain would
shower down in great torrents that pounded the iron roof and deluged the world
outside, fraying and flustering the normally strong, proud beech trees. I
thought then that the heavens were saying something important, that I could
not, nor put my finger on what it was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Many years later, I can see that, in other places, and very
different situations, I always found a way to keep an eye outside the window. Like
from a silent and well-insulated bedroom, many floors up from the earth and its
inhabitants, on a narrow bed facing away from the window – a small slit in the
wall. I watch its reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall, 12 inches
square. Still, I think I hear the birds sing and see the trees sway with the
burden and the gift of rain. Even in that narrow aperture, they seemed to tell
me, not all those who wander are lost.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-55005690186967892802015-11-01T16:21:00.000-08:002015-11-18T10:35:41.681-08:00I don't eat, I don't sleepI do nothing but think of you.<br />
<br />
What's the difference between love and obsession?<br />
And the difference between obsession and desire?<br />
I don't know.<br />
<br />
This is not clever, or bashful, or exuberant or playful. It doesn't hide too hard. It's just good writing:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Nadir right at
this moment, all lit up and
steaming north, in the dark,
at night, with a strong west
wind pulling the moon backward
through a skein of clouds-the Nadir a constellation,
complexly aglow, angelically white,
festive, imperial. Yes, this: it would look like a
floating palace to any poor soul out here on
the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not
even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating,
treading water, out of sight of land. - DFW</blockquote>
with sound punctuation. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-20448719502993529122015-11-01T16:02:00.002-08:002015-12-04T05:17:44.228-08:00Cleverness is endearing if it comes with bashfulness and exuberant playfulness (otherwise it's annoying). This may - or may not - be an example:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px;">The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. - David Foster Wallace.</span> </blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px;">Anyway I like it. Or rather, I can't get rid of it. The pointlessness of the recurring words keep ringing in my head, banging around from one wall to the other like a bad echo. It is strangely similar to obsession. </span>Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-5159583158729839522015-11-01T15:48:00.001-08:002015-11-01T16:52:59.377-08:00What we talk about when we talk about love<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
<span style="color: #333333;"> </span>L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
He said, “I just want to say one more thing.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
But then he could not think what it could possibly be.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
This is the ending Raymond Carver's editor forced on him, after cutting a romantic, lingering, uncertain five paragraphs off the end. One of which was this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 23.8px;">It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn’t place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.</span></blockquote>
<span style="line-height: 23.8px;">I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this ... except that I like the idea of radically cutting even vaguely good paragraphs. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Or maybe it's this - I like the desolate feeling you get after too many Raymond Carver stories, like everything has been stripped of its meaning. Maybe that's <i>liberation</i> (at least for the writer). </div>
Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956231695879127689.post-26036699098097255762015-11-01T15:24:00.001-08:002015-12-04T08:13:48.364-08:00A concise summary of everything I've learned so far about writing Non-fiction is about making everything crystal clear and taking all the work out of it for the reader. Creative writing is the total opposite of the above.Buddha with a Black Hearthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12238850462387636879noreply@blogger.com0