Three Lost Films

1
The cube-shaped theatre building in the temple grounds at Penglai: a small building
where we’d crowded into a ground floor room to watch this continuously-rotating
video of the mirage phenomenon seen out at sea from this spot for thousands of years.
The video is from three or four years ago, not very good quality, and it shows excited
crowds on the seaward ramparts. The temple complex is quite high above the sea on
cliffs it follows with a restraining rampart but otherwise crowds up to at all angles, so
when the camera pans there are constant profiles of curving roofs with their green
tiles and rows of mythical beasts on the eaves, each following a combination first seen
in the Forbidden City: eagles and dragons and a triceratops-like creature, and lastly a
figure on a horse the locals call ‘No Hope’. All the heads of all the witnesses (and
apparently the dragon-beasts, who must have seen all this before) are looking out to
sea and whooping with a genuine surprise.

The camera keeps turning to what looks like ink or sand pouring from an invisible
tray into the sea in horizontally-distended hourglass shapes you gradually grasp are
huge. Whoops continue as these separate out and form three colossal shapes and you
remember the conversation with Lian on the night bus to Wansongpu: the three
floating mountains of the gods of Taoist legend. Supposedly a voyage in search of
these islands ended up discovering Japan. Then the camera cuts uselessly back to the
faces by the Puzhao light tower. They’re still attempting to control their sense of the
random luck of this happening now and their surprise, because they do seem to be
wondering how this thing works – it must be some mirage, but now it’s changed: the
camera flicks back and there are cities out there. It focuses on what appear to be
rectangular, dull-windowed buildings and almost minaret-ish towers or possibly
lighthouses. Everything looks sandy but there’s an edge before the water as though it
could be St Mark’s Square, the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile – can we almost see
contradictory cars, some people? No, it seems deserted, the camera behaves as though
it doesn’t understand and wobbles back to a long shot of the pouring sky, then, for
reassurance, to the faces on the walls as though comparing realities. Then back again
to one of the gods’ islands. It’s dry, there’s shimmers to it like tarmac at a distance
when you know it’s dry, it’s floating on the same water we will go to soon and look
out at and see nothing at all.

But before I get there, I look back at the sugar cube of theatre because above, in an
open curtained area I can’t quite analyse spatially, I hear the sliding twangs and long
slow notes, the sudden shill of woodwind; and I’m told ‘the orchestra is warming up’
– and it’s that I film on my phone for forty seconds or so: no figures, just the sliding
notes emerging from a building I still don’t understand.

2
We were still somewhere in the temple complex and I’m not sure whether it was a
Buddhist or a Daoist temple. The layout of all the temples is so similar: you enter
through a porch passing between scary purple or green giants; then you’re in a
courtyard flanked with buildings – from the one on the left people buy massive
bushels of incense, light them with some difficulty, then place them to burn in a
central ash-filled stand. The inner temple building is straight ahead up a few steps
where you approach the main deity past two lined-up crews of immortals or
intermediaries, all life-sized at least and containing winsome women, smiling ancients
and stern warriors. The God or Buddha is always flanked by two attendants and all
this happens in a building with roof-timbers, columns and assorted beams painted in
blue castellated patterns in shades that create recessive 3-D patterns that confuse any
eye that isn’t drawn to the God of the Sea or Avatar of Maternity – the one with a
massive painting behind him, half-storm, half-grisaille dragon; the other attended by
maidens, one of which holds a giant eyeball; all with money strewn at their feet in
abundance.

Wherever we’d reached at this point in the tour, we were within box after box of
temple, holiness inside holiness but somehow without growing holier – neither
ourselves nor our surroundings. An equality of spirituality had been achieved, an
ecumenical democracy was shared between tourist and believer, guide and temple
official, priest and, in this particular courtyard, poet. Because here there was a large
stand hung with every level of souvenir from pencils to costumes, from postcards to
huge rubbings of the calligraphy committed to stone at this site, some of which dated
back to distant dynasties. And it was a sheet of this calligraphy hanging like a peeled
blackboard pelt in the shadows of the awning that had attracted Lian and Xiaodu: an
inscription by Su Shi, who had stayed at the temple for a matter of days more than a
thousand years before, scarcely long enough to commit these ‘Notes on Reading Wu
Daozi’s Painting’ to paper. They were remarking on how proper and perfect the hand
was, almost a platonic example, until almost at the left hand edge when, suddenly,
after the date, something more occurs to the poet, and he begins to write again.

They’re reciting it now, almost in harmony, though Lian breaks off to explain Su Shi
had almost certainly been drinking, but it’s hardly necessary: the shift in their voices
as they pass from the ideal to a wildness, a wilderness appended to the rational city of
what was written first, is perfectly evident. I know now that what Su Shi was drinking
was not the ‘wine’ of my translations but the báijiŭ of our own drinking sessions, too
potent to describe as merely alcohol; and I know too that this liquor has no more
changed than the characters these two poets are able to read after the night of
centuries, the static frenzy of script obliterating time. But it’s not this I film, but their
subsequent discussion – I miss their two faces chanting: Yang Lian’s long black hair
whisping around his Genghis cheekbones; Tang Xiaodu’s rounder features and
hesitantly-blinking eyes: one voice stronger and the other more melodious, its slight
stammer gone, both of them lost in the text.

3
The third film was in Beijing when Antony and I decided to hit the hutongs one last
time on the morning of our departure for the airport. We were staying in a swish low-
built hotel, itself a hutong on a grand scale with rooms around two squares: the first a
space where taxis could pull in, but the other a miniature garden complete with
opium-boothed bar and a little massage hut where I’d been dressed in pyjamas,
methodically pummelled and given medicinal tea to drink. (At lunch the day before a
waiter had wielded a kettle with a spout an ell in length, always getting the tea in our
tiny cups from a distance of several yards.) We turned left and left again into lanes
full of bicycle repair shops, usually advertised by a single stirrup pump, and what
seemed like spontaneous markets formed on wiggles in the road by two or three
minivans and their sparse, fresh contents. Tight corridors between grey concrete
houses were hung with washing, walls repaired with plastic, doors decorated with
posters. We passed men in singlets, a boy who sat on a doorstep covering his eyes,
mothers slopping out buckets. We crossed a sudden busy road, a man whose T-shirt
said ‘Hello Boby/yesterday you are…’ – and some third line we forgot immediately
on plunging back into the grey labyrinth, then emerged into what seemed to be a play
park by a lake.

The green area of swings, climbing frames, and standing stones decorated with
incised characters, gave way to a walk around the lake taking in trendy new bars,
boating areas (little gunboats in green with red stars on them were peddled past), a
peculiar crannog of miniature houses apparently built for ducks, and another playpark
where small children were pushed back and forth in swings moulded into the forms of
giant goldfish. But where we first happened upon the park there was a man sleeping
on the grass on a spread-out newspaper; children watching (very disparately-sized)
dogs copulate; and a gathering of men gambling in tight little units around cards and
mah jong sets. And in the play area, using the bars to stretch themselves, were some
trim older people, perhaps in their sixties.

As we leaned on the railings by the water, we saw one of them set up a tape recorder
on a picnic table, and the group resolved itself into couples, a few of them woman and
woman as the old unselfconsciously, silently do, in the absence of sufficient surviving
males. A switch was flipped and everyone began to dance. It was a sedate, swing-
based form of music, vaguely pop, vaguely oriental, and so was their dancing, full of
elegant little twirls. It wasn’t clear from their expressions whether they were learning
or rehearsing. The music would get switched off abruptly, and – while a debate went
on as to what to play next, and the tape was jammed on fast-forward or rewound in
search of the start of something – the dancers would languidly practice some more,
discussing and repeating their steps before embarking on another jazzy waltz about
the play park. And this is what I recorded, not the moments before or after, in which
we went for a bottle of cold beer on the decking of the boat club, or jumped in a
rickshaw in order to dash to the hotel, catch the taxi to the airport, then lose my phone
with all these films on it – none of that peace or panic, just the short whirling slow
distracted moment of their dance.

Sri Ganesh Tyres

As the taxi is shouldering its way between mustard-coloured motorised rickshaws,
mopeds and other sleek bulbous white Ambassadors, I see a man rolling a huge tyre
down the main street. It’s as tall as him, and he’s rolling it past a wall covered in
faded scripture in blue and red writing, one section in English, one in Tamil. We pass
too quickly for me to recognise the text, but something sufficiently religious
sufficiently deep inside me acknowledges it. Later I work out it’s the Thousand Lights
Mosque.

The man looks as though he’s leisurely pursuing a large vehicle which is somehow
continuing with only three wheels; he looks as though the truck he was once driving
has been eroded over thousands of miles, leaving him only this remnant to complete
his journey with. I keep seeing this man and this tyre, or this man with a different tyre,
or this tyre with a different man, or some other combination, till in my sleep I imagine
one man rolling another man down the street, or large tyres strolling around in pairs,
like the bases of giant phantom motorcycles. Their tread is made up of dark
acknowledged scripture.

Later I am driven round the corner, and pass Sri Ganesh Tyres, a little frontage piled
high with circular rubber ziggurats like the sloughed skins of bathing elephants.

Kapalishvara

The splay-wheeled juggernaut
is parked down a sidestreet,
its turquoise pillars supporting

a thirty foot pyramid of gods,
though its wood-slat tiers
are dwarfed by the gopura

over the temple entrance –
that mound of holy termites,
that technicolour hive of deities.

Shoeless in the courtyard,
I hardly notice
the lingam in its gate

till a family come through,
the women’s ankles chinking
with little chains,

and proceed to worship
what I’d just gaped at,
my feet in a warm puddle.

An old man takes me round
the low bepostered shrines –
we stand, considering

the old tree where
Shiva turned Parvati into
a mayil or peahen because

she’d been distracted by a
peacock from her lord –
except of course, he explains,

this isn’t the original site
so that can’t exactly be
the original tree.

The wooden animals from
the annual procession are stacked
like carnival creatures

in a shed-full of shadows
their painter comes out from
hot-chested and chatty

about me scribbling as
my guide extracts rupees
and sterling for

narrating how santhome
cathedral had claimed
this temple’s prime location

on the ocean front
but how easily it has
rerooted itself here.

I retrieve my shoes but am
reluctant to put them on:
something more has been displaced.

An Informationist is Shown Around the Government Museum

‘Hand of a Roman, heart of a Dravidian’

00000000At the start he runs off to get his laser
00000000instead of touching the darkened stone

between the feet of the female statues
is the shape of the temple gate

00000000his wife and daughter hover in
00000000the first room as he indicates

the hand and the joints of the fingers
dictate the proportions of body and face

00000000I don’t need to copy this down
00000000I can use his website later

the eyes are the last to be carved
so God doesn’t see the carver

00000000forty years old, a Ph.D. student in
00000000Archaeology who gets by as a guide

sixteen knots protect the secrecy
of the wealth of the family

00000000his son appears between the sati stones
00000000and the slab depicting the Buddha’s stupa

everything in fives or sevens
indicating deeds or virtues

00000000outside, between the crumbling red-bricks
00000000cotton is blown through scaffolding

the mnemonics of
the encyclopaedic eye

00000000before the Chola bronzes
00000000in 101 degrees he flags

subduing evil by dancing on a dwarf
Nataraja bestows grace on the world

00000000and drinks from my water without
00000000letting the bottle touch his lips.

General Epistle of Thomas

‘He had a garland on his chest,
a strong bow in his grip,
arrow already chosen,
and he asked which way
the elephant went
with an arrow buried in its side.’
Kapilar, trans. A.K. Ramanujan

Thomas Didymus, apostle of doubt, to the strangers
who may be living peaceably or at war throughout
the hills and forests, plains and wastes and seashores
in Mylapore, Mamallapuram and in Gingee,
in Kanchipuram, Tiruvannamallai and Pondicherry,
those unelected through any foreknowledge
of the Lord, nevertheless, Grace unto you.
You have your faith as I lack mine;
you have searched out the Spirit diligently
as you have searched out the honey and the mango
and the jackfruit, as you search out those clouds that
like the lips of angels suck rain from the sea
to succour you, and you have waited
with the patience I could not muster when my Lord
was reported found, green in the desert as the palai tree.
I, who have arrived among you like the fish
caught up in the cheeks of the angels and spat forth;
like the weed which springs up between the toes
of the fishermen waiting for their tide, patient as
the neytal, blue lily of the shoreline; I am like
a living stone which cries out to the pilgrim
in the desert’s rage; I am like the grooves
worked in that stone by the thirsty at prayer;
I am like the cross cut in that stone by one
who would mark his desolation with a scar: here it is.
Let me ask you, Poet of the Fingers Round a Bow,
how can I come close to Him whom I have doubted,
his side-wound like a lotus in the water
that I drowned with one bloody hand? Let me ask you,
Poet of the Ploughman With a Single Plough,
how long must my heart wait, frantic for him?
My followers say the rock gave birth to water
and drink from its dirty spring, but I have heard
that in the hills where hunters go there is a flower
red as my Lord’s blood and rich in honey. I will go
where the kurinci blossoms and hide my hand.
And therefore I leave you to love one another
without faith in the life or lives to come,
love one another in the only moment in which
we know our failings make us loveable to God.

In the AC carriage

A boy, the size of two rupees,
clutching a packet of chocolate biscuits
and wearing sandals with a squeak in each heel,
is snatched by parents from the path
of chai and paper chanters.

Lemon Tea Kabitika

small plastic cup and not
the clay ones shattered in
their orange hundreds in between the rails
like brittle fingernail goodbyes

lemon sweet but salty too
as thick as tears
the tongue-imagined flakes as big as teeth
dissolving in a dragged-on urn

cha lemoo cha

Santiniketan

Dark on the concrete porch with Debanjan’s professor
in a deckchair chatting quietly beneath
the increasing silence of the trees, but not so dark
I couldn’t see the high branches and the bats’
darker blue blades against the welling blue milk
of the silent starless sky, the space between
each word and its neighbour growing longer
like a town becoming countryside until
we were walking home along the avenue
of huge trees and I saw someone
smoking in the field, so dark now it was just
the cold tip of their cigarette just beyond
where the tailor had stood with his table below
the branches to repair the passers-bys’ clothing
but there was another, dancing perhaps
or waving lazily becoming my first
fireflies and then there were
uncertain constellations of them, fireflies all the way
back beside the broad canal until
we came upon a crowd with ropes
taut by the bend where the truck had slipped
and fallen on one shoulder spilling all
its earthy rubble on the lawn and
it seemed as though we too should haul on
the wrist-thick ropes in pitcher darkness now
until we couldn’t tell but felt the poise
of the almost-decided, half-right truck
and then it thudded back with such
determination that it threw us all
back in our separate directions and
Debanjan and I went on to Prantik
never knowing that the broken-necked poor driver’s
ghost came blowing back with us and drank
molasses whisky and listened to us chat
and lay upon the spare bed in my room
and watched the ceiling fan’s brown blades
spin slowly to cessation.

Santhal Shop

‘A little juice collecting in my pen-nib this free morning
Like a slit made in the bole of a date-palm.’
0000000Rabindranath Tagore

Spun on that slow wheel of generations’
knack and nous and never glazed:
the blue-striped cool round interlocking
houses and courtyards of mud
that one clan fills precisely;

ovens rising like lava bubbles, cut
to admit the copper skillet, cook
and architect arranging
heat and shade in demilunes;
set by the proper palms up which

a son offered to collect the sap
brewed into the drink we were
too busy finding to wait for fresh,
so drove past scattered easy huts
in the growing dusk;

past tattered straw goddesses
they’d fished out from the rivers after
Bolpur’s Tushu Porob
and set up under trees to view the sunset.
And in one courtyard found

an amused grandma whose sleepy child
fetched the cloudy white taari
much diluted for the city boys
who sat beneath the palms and trees
conjoining in the glowing dark;

and I thought of the cave of shop
where we’d stopped to ask
for our elixir: how it seemed
a tilting wall of jars, two insect wings
of glass with the shopkeeper’s head

shaking between them; how
there seemed to be no contents in them,
the more I tried to remember
their dusty little globes
grew emptier and emptier

as though containing air
from further and further north,
higher juggings with cold stars,
small mountain peaks of ‘Breathe Me’
I found myself exhaling

in the dark courtyard with
the grandma and the child and my friends,
all of us drinking in and breathing out
the distances between tribe and town,
city and continent and star.

Air Sibir as Shamanic Flight

Direction doesn’t matter – taiga’s
relentless ringworm forests; lakes
we cross for hours, beside which tigers
with phosphor coats await their Blakes;
east, west, up, down – are each negated
by this old plane’s decor: belated
ill-fitting tan wallpaper fills
it to and from its windowsills;
families perch their weekend shopping
on knees amid the flopping seats,
the frequent vodka and boiled sweets –
and if you take to Ural-hopping
or not, this flight’s a long strange trip
that takes us all from blip to blip.

In which I see the way I travel
is equal to the way I live:
inept, withdrawn, and half-unravelled,
too full of neediness to give;
barely witnessed seeing fiercely,
never heard or very nearly.
To such a shaman still belongs
all partial and irrational songs.
The purview that the travel purist
obtains through months of rooting down –
all well-earned insights – I renounce.
I am content to be the tourist
who finds home in that other place
with cyphers crawling on its face.

That we approach our destination
is clear from shudderings and groans
as though the plane gets premonitions
now that we near the spirit zones.
Instead of donning psychic armour,
I’m thinking I’d once claimed the glamour
of unknown cities hits your brain
with first love’s force. ‘So you’d regain
your youth by travel?’ asked that devil’s
advocate AKA a friend –
not what I’d thought of as my end;
but neither is this far from level
half-swoop, half-swooning down through air –
as threatened hearts applaud, we’re here.

In retrospect the shack for baggage,
the cage and then the carousel,
should each have served as grinding presage
that all indeed might not be well.
But such relief at such a landing
had addled keener understanding.
The runway filled with evening light:
that orange chill, the fading flight,
the brief belief we’d reached Siberia –
conspiring to dismiss those fears
the time zones crossed were deeper: years
of jumping to a jammed interior
of thought, not just a continent.
So this was what Siberia meant.

The Grumbling Box Problem
 
A television shows me its most intimate cartoons, the ones in which the ages and the
genders of the somersaulting participants mutate constantly, pinning me to the
bracken carcass of the hotel’s best shoddy furniture. It’s very late somewhere in the
world my inner ear can’t place; even how high up the building this is is unsettled by
the jetlag. I appear to be in a narrow pod being shown rage doilies, Rorschach
upholstery, wallpaper lingerie. I gaze at them for a long transgressive moment not
following not only a single word but a single note of the accompanying plastic
balalaikan timpani-eats-piano soundtrack. After a while I realise I am in bed and all
the lights are out apart from the dirty snow light at the centre of the continental night
and I also realise I am being muttered to. From some point in the room the dancing
dots of vitamin-deficient vision prevent me from making out, someone is muttering to
me in a voice so indistinct I can’t even establish whether or not it is Russian or an
aboriginal language: Chuvash, Khant, Tuvan, Yakut. I lie there for another of your
Earth minutes. The voice drones on, apparently exterior to my fizzing cranium. I
check I have not left the television on. I pull the plug from the wall like a rotten tooth
on string just in case. The muttering is replaced by an indistinct snatch of music: one
of those frozen blocks exported to Phil Spector to construct the Wall of Sound. No
single instrument is distinguishable, but the noise draws me to a sort of cabinet by the
head of the bed. I don’t remember seeing this before but it looks like a giant radio. It
has clacky controls apparently for stations and frequencies, a dial possibly for volume,
and a number of switches, bulgy lights (off), and grilles of indefinite function. The
voice has resumed, but when I clack, twist and flick, nothing appears to happen. I put
my ear to one of the grilles, but cannot confirm that the grumbling is actually coming
from this machine. I speak into another one of the grilles, ‘Please stop this incessant
noise.’ I stare at it as though it’s the TV and some message will be displayed on it.
The lights continue not to flash. I try to move it to find the power source but either it’s
too heavy or it’s attached to the wall. After a while I lie down again, whereupon there
is another short outburst of music, possibly the same as before. The voice continues to
grumble into my wax-encumbered ear, apparently telling me all its problems, or
perhaps telling me all my problems, or possibly all the problems that have afflicted
this floating city since it was founded in the middle of absolutely nothing a little over
a hundred years ago. No, it is not like Middlesbrough. Perhaps I am listening to the
groaning complaint of the countless exiles and prisoners whose camps’ remains
remain around us in the vast coldness of the night. Perhaps if I concentrate I will be
able to distinguish Dostoevsky muttering from Omsk, or Mandelshtam on his way to
Kamchatka, or someone whose name I do not know, whose crime even they did not
know, whose next thought is completely unknown, whose only recourse is this word
and this word and this next word I still cannot make out. Perhaps I am listening to the
ground itself, grudgingly defrosting for the spring that begins tomorrow morning
wherever that is. Perhaps this will go on all night. It does.
 
 
 
Tissue Remains

Too many hands were pressing on
my breastbone and my brow in
the great marble sandwich of the state museum.
We slid like sliced meat about the Thracian room
filled with so much gold as though
Midas had beaten up a rose garden
into this dinner service full of slurring rhyta.
The bas-relief horsemen insisted
on cornering their boars with always
one hand flung out behind them
not clutching a spear but letting the reins stream
through their casually tugging long fingers
which would only take a millennium
to rearrange themselves into
the next door icons’ serpentine blessing machines
of still more hands. But for now
all the faces were Alexander clones
so that was never where my eyes could rest
till the skull-bulb helmets drew us,
their tight-lipped spaces that hold
exact absences, to the case in which
earth-coloured armour propped on perspex shoulders
and shinbones. And the greaves,
that word that’s almost a wound,
had their own card that told us
what survives the centuries’ ceaseless fingers
is less than the step I couldn’t take away:
‘Bronze, traces of leather straps, tissue remains.’

rhyta—drinking cups