A friend of mine nearing the middle of her life found herself waking up late in the night, crying uncontrollably. Her husband was unable to console her, her four-year-old daughter slept peacefully in another room. Their house sits on a slope near the bottom of a small mountain, near the edge of the woods. For over two weeks this had been happening regularly, something T– had never experienced before, a recurring dream, she told me, that left her totally empty, with a deep feeling of loss and sadness. She looked exhausted; her eyes forlorn, shadowed beneath.
We were standing on the sidewalk, outside the two-room public library of the town we live in, upriver from the city. Autumn was about to turn, leaves drifted along the streets and trailed into piles shaped by the wind‘s whim.
It was a long time ago, she said, when B– and I were in college. You know we‘ve been together since we were sixteen, met in the summer at a barbecue in Missouri. We danced together. For a while we liked to drive up to Nova Scotia and camp by this lake. It was so beautiful and pristine, so quiet. It‘s been years since we‘ve gone but in this dream I‘ve been having I‘m there at the lake. Nothing happens. I‘m just there again, and for some reason I wake up crying. But it‘s so vivid, the air and sunlight on the lake, so calm like a mirror—the pines and spruce trees. We were so free and happy... not that we aren‘t now. It was a special place—I haven‘t thought of it for a long time.
The day before, at work in the middle of a meeting with new clients, T– almost burst into tears. She excused herself to the restroom and breathed slowly in front of the mirror. She said the memory of the lake was so overpowering, she could barely control her emotions. She even joined a vipassana meditation group with a friend, but while sitting in silence she would be overcome by the same overwhelming sadness in the vision of the lake and break into tears. Like a watery abyss, I suggested. For sure, she replied, and laughed, adding, I‘m a wreck.
If the keys to the mysteries of our psyches can often be traced to our childhood I wasn‘t about to bring this up as T–‘s childhood was more or less horrifying. Instead I told her there was a book I thought she might like, and so a few days later I passed it to B– to give to her.
It was a book of poems by the Suriname-Dutch poet Hans Faverey, translated by Northumbrian linguist, Francis R. Jones. I had tagged one section for T–, “The Pond in the Lake,” with a post-it note in place of a bow. Considering it now, perhaps my recommendation was a little hasty and presumptuous, mainly the result of associative synapses firing and not knowing how else to respond to a friend‘s mysterious suffering. Nor did I know if she was in therapy. Perhaps I simply felt that she might relate to something in this other lake made of words, that intuitively, unconsciously some unfathomable correspondence could be forged between the lake of her dream and the lake of the poem, the lake in her memory and the lake she visited those many years ago.
The mind is a dark forest, a pond in the lake. The mind translates.
Hearing about T–‘s dream, I recalled reading about a different dream, one the poet Hilda Doolittle (pen name H.D.) recounted to Freud when she was in her mid-forties. In 1920, she and her companion Bryher were staying in a hotel on the island of Corfu when she saw a series of ―"dream-pictures of shadow or light” on the room‘s wall, “like colorless transfers or ‘calcomanias’.” One of these dreams or visions was of Niké, the winged goddess of Victory, back toward her, floating up from the last rung of a ladder, and between the ladder and the actual mirror-frame above the wash-stand in her room appeared a series of broken curves, an S-pattern, opening up toward the angel, “like question marks without the dot beneath them,” and then Niké “about to move into and through ... a series of tent-like triangles.” This dream she described as a kind of “writing-on-the-wall” and could be understood, she thought, “as a suppressed desire for forbidden ‘signs and wonders,’ breaking bounds,” or perhaps ―as an extension of the artist‘s mind, a picture or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or daydream content and projected from within (though apparently from outside), really a high- powered idea, simply over-stressed, overthought, you might say, an echo of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a ‘freak’ thought that had got out of hand, gone too far, a ‘dangerous symptom.’”
Thirteen years after having this dream, H.D. became a patient of Freud‘s and moved into a hotel in Vienna. Nazi propaganda drifted down from planes like confetti, swastikas were chalked onto the pavement of Berggasse where Freud lived. H.D. underwent two series of sessions with “the Professor,” the first lasting between three and four months and the second for five weeks, one hour per day four days a week. For reasons unknown to her, Freud picked out the Corfu writing-on-the-wall as the only “dangerous symptom” from the many strange experiences, dreams, hieroglyphs, events, and tendencies she related to him. In her meditation of this time with Freud, Writing on the Wall, H.D. says that the Professor translated the Niké dream projection as “a desire for union with my mother.” She leaves this an open question and goes on to wonder if it did not signal the coming of another war, the “tents” of a future war, that upon “completing itself, rung by rung” in Victory would free her to “go on in another, a winged dimension.”
Writing on the Wall was written in the autumn of 1944, ten years after H.D.’s time with Freud. Its eighty-five sections range in length from two sentences to a few pages and were published by a London periodical in monthly installments between 1945 and 1946. In 1984 it was included as the first of two parts in her book Tribute to Freud. The second part, “Advent,” backtracks through the journal that she had kept during her psychoanalysis. Backtracking is how she proceeds from the start, tracing beginnings, a remembered event, tragedy, myth, or song, then reformulating a thought, an idea, a reverie, reiterating, reaffirming, renewing links, reassembling, digging and digging, then galloping through the next open door.
Questions arise and confront us: Facing the catastrophes of the near and distant past, living through those of the present, seeing the signs of a future catastrophe and further on, still, a Victory to come, how does one live on?
A few weeks or more passed before I saw T– again. Eagles circled the ice; my daughter took her first steps. T– stepped off the train, sun conflowing into river, afon merged with uweyv’i, her hair threads of sunlight swept across her ravishing face. She didn‘t see me as she passed and I followed her down, then up the tunnel steps. I paused at the top of the concrete landing, watching her walk with the trickle of commuters into the parking lot. I finally called out to her and she turned on the mulched median, waved, and shouted,
I‘ve been wanting to talk to you!
I called out again, asking if she had read the book. A man in a suit sprinted to his car; cars sped without pause through the crosswalk. The ferry waited at the shore.
Yes! (she replied) the pond in the lake! (Someone honked, another cursed.) I don‘t... (She flung out her hands in front of her, palms to the sky, her lips moving, syllables carried off by the wind.) ... I‘m not having the dream anymore! (She shrugged.)
I smiled as she raised a hand to her ear in the shape of a telephone and mouthed two words in the clear, orphic silence.
We haven‘t spoken about the lake since.
*
On the cover of Faverey‘s book is a solarized black-and-white photograph I had taken in a cemetery in Shaolin, where pagodas built as tombstones date back over a thousand years. It is a self-portrait but the figure among the forest pagodas is indistinguishable. The strange effect in the photograph was actually an accident as a hairline crack in my camera I would only later discover had exposed a few frames of the film and turned the image grainy and blurred, my shape in the center a ghostly presence, a double exposure. I had used the photograph out of both pride and laziness as at the time it was the responsibility of the respective editors at the publishing house where I work to come up with an image for the designer to then manipulate into a book jacket. Usually this process happened in a rush of deadlines and conflicting opinions, resulting in a cover that could be simple and avant- garde, or cheap and hideous. Objectively I can say this cover was a mixture of both: cheap and avant-garde, though unsettling, as if Lewis Carroll had taken the picture. The image itself I had recalled upon first reading Faverey‘s detached, wounding lines that seemed to circle around one question, like moths around a flame: How does one stay death?
Only when someone in a photo
stands as large as life
waiting for his death
is he recognized
Faverey is buried in the famous Begraafplaats Zorgvlied in Amsterdam, on the west bank of the Amstel River. I‘ve imagined myself walking through the garden cemetery on a path of white stones, the late autumn light glinting between the brilliant red and yellow leaves and clusters of bright purple berries, past the ostentatious monuments of the superrich before coming to the plain, upright stone block of Faverey‘s grave, a white rose bush as if shooting up from his buried body still in bloom. There is no epitaph etched into the stone, but the late afternoon light spreads as the astronomer Christiaan Huygens once observed it over three-and-a-half centuries ago, as Sound does, by spherical surfaces and waves, a stone thrown into a pond rippling circles through the water, successive curves from the candle‘s liquid flame, each wave upon wave of light emanating from its distinctive center among the graves, the light and wind silent witnesses as death stares out at us from its iron mirror. Huygens, adapting the tools and language of the Geometers, goes on to describe in his Traité de la Lumière, written while he was ensconced in the Bibliotheque du Roi in Paris under the patronage of the Sun King, Louis XIV, some of the differences between the movement of sound and light, the marvellous phenomenons of the strange properties of double refraction in Icelandic Crystal, the infinite number of tangential rays upon reflexion and refraction, which through the heterogeneous Ether and the aqueous vapors rising above the rotundity of the Earth cause one to see the apparent place of the Sun pass above the real Sun. For nature operates by artifice and there is no greater artificer than the eye, opening the world out for us, defining our perceptions, so that what can be called apparent (translation, fiction, dream/memory) and real (original, documentation, reality/fact) can coincide in poetry, a perfection of sound and meaning, light and measure, the pond in the lake.
*
One warm autumn day not long ago I knelt in the grass beside Hilda Doolittle Aldington‘s grave in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not to pray but to make a charcoal rubbing of her tombstone. The faintest drizzle hovered in the clear air as if suspended, at once falling and not falling; no one was present save for some crows and squirrels and one or two groundskeepers here and there who appeared as suddenly as they disappeared. When I had arrived at the cemetery, I first stopped by the quaint stone office that looked like an abandoned cottage from the outside, but inside was an older woman with glasses hanging around her neck bustling about with a stack of papers in her arms. She turned to me and pointed to her left ear, saying that she was hard of hearing so I‘d have to look directly at her and speak loudly. When I told her I was looking for Hilda Doolittle‘s grave her expression didn‘t change. She asked if I worked for a television station, and when I repeated for the third time, at almost a shout that, No, but I do work at her publishing house, she replied with a smile, Oh, is that so? We chatted some more and she handed me a crude map, showing me which paths to follow, and ended her directions with, People often leave seashells and things on her grave, you can‘t miss it. I thanked her and was about to push open the screen door when I turned to ask her if I might make a charcoal rubbing of the stone.
Just don‘t ruin it, she said flatly.
I laughed and assured her I wouldn‘t. I asked if she had read any of H.D.‘s books.
Only one, a wonderful memoir she wrote about her childhood growing up here in Bethlehem called The Gift.
The Gift. About a third of the original manuscript of this book had been excised by the publisher to make it, I was told, a more straightforward childhood memoir. We had published it two decades ago, forty years after H.D. wrote it in London at 49 Lowndes Square during the Blitz, the fear of being burned alive by the falling bombs ever present in her mind, drawing her back to the actual world of her childhood, her memory-haven ... to give life or save life opening with the story of a girl in a crinoline who had burned to death at the seminary where H.D.‘s grandfather was the principal. The Christmas tree was lit; the girl‘s ribbons caught fire. The book was published many years before I had started working at the press, but the paperback edition was still in print with a preface by H.D.‘s daughter who wrote that “the judicious cutting” made it “a better book,” an assessment impossible to agree with after reading the complete text.
I wandered around the cemetery lost and lost in thought, wondering why the deaf woman had stopped at The Gift, a marvelous book even in its abridged form, of friendship passing beyond the grave, of the peace that bound the early Moravian settlers and the indigenous Americans, of the child- life bridged with the war-torn present, and yet the vision and wisdom of her War Trilogy, written during the same time, sears even brighter, its music of a sacred order. I thought of the poet and artist David Jones in London, too, at the same time, the balloon barrage very high in the sky as though the battlements of London were in heaven, he wrote to his family, the Blitz paradoxically lifting his long-recurring depression as he spent the diminished times with two close friends, going to Mass, telephone lines down, no gas, the naval guns like music to him as he painted his Aphrodite in Aulis, horrified by the blazing lunacy the human race has embarked upon. I passed a blank, open book of stone that marked an anonymous grave. The damp, colorful splendor of maple leaves and pine needles hid many of the stones and I could see no seashells peeking out among them. Dream escaping consciousness, is perceived, is how Doolittle describes the flash of understanding within the four dimensions of a dream, opening out through the contours of memory, like the lake in T–‘s vision, released outside into a realm of crystallized emotion and mystery, water beckoning, de vijver in het meer:
Inside the lake
lies the pond, ready and waiting.
At last I found it, her name engraved, and upon the large, flat rectangular stone a palm-sized elliptical rock and a single dried white rose. I gently lifted the rose, the cup, the hazel wand, the rock, and placed them on the grass, then spread out the large kraft sheet onto the stone, my mind emptying as I swept the stick of charcoal back and forth across the page, the soft sand-scraping rhythm of friction and resistance filling the silence, my fingers blackening, and slowly, miraculously, the writing revealed itself in negative space.
I had just finished one rubbing and had started another when my reverie was broken by a voice:
That‘s very interesting what you‘re doing there.
An older man who could‘ve been the brother of the deaf woman stood in front of me on the path—casual clothes, glasses, folded umbrella—his face wunnerfitsich. I smiled a thanks, and as I continued he continued to talk, the words flowing effortlessly, “gristmill,” “balledicks” and “tongues” mixed with phrases like “General Economy” and ―security for all, poverty for none‖ and “Unitas Fratrum.” It sounded like Mário de Andrade‘s embryo of oral harmony in the flesh, keeping time, the unending stream trickling out of the elder‘s mouth scattered with pebbles and broken glass and chestnuts. Sunlight was starting to break through the billions of invisible droplets suspended in the air and from beneath the earth the himmelschüssel keys of heaven sent forth their roots, chimes echoing in the wind, rainbows breaking, the faintest shadows of branches on the paper swaying to and fro.
I looked back up at the friendly figure and heard him say, Well, you really must go see the Moravian cemetery in town, God‘s Acre, all the gravestones flat on the ground, all equal in the eyes of God: bishop, plowman, tanner, Mohican or Mohawk, seamstress, spinner, slave, missionary, miller, choirmaster, locksmith, dairymaid, nurse, organ- or spinet-maker, shepherd, baker, bell-maker, Beata and Beatus... my wife‘s there right now giving a tour.
God‘s Acre, where planted seeds awaited to sprout once more and the graves indeed even and symmetrical, like dominoes on a green baize cloth as H.D. had written. I imagined heaven as a plotless cemetery with the dead dancing around a maypole as I spied around for Chief Tschoop, adopted father of Hawkeye, but instead found what appeared to be a used condom by a brick wall. The original Moravians sought to incarnate a spiritual music through their daily lives so that even in death there was no mourning but music, music for all occasions, songs for crafts songs for harvests, hymns to the hours and the oars. Even their children were communal, marriage by lot. The flat grave markers they called “breaststones” instead of headstones, though I‘ve heard that Japanese monks once called the warmed stone they held against their chest to fend off hunger during meditation a “breaststones,” this word “kaiseke” also signifying a simple temple meal served in a tea ceremony that today can actually be quite expensive in restaurants. Kaiseke is written with the Chinese characters huaishi, which is said to refer to the jade stone the mythical philosopher Laozi says is hidden beneath the coarse cloth of the sage. This stone can be understood as a gift of wisdom and vision and peace restored, passed down through the ages.
*
I sit inside my pond
and ford the river which
swears me to silence
Ling, what you had written though addressed to no one, our memories undone, my failures an open wound.
A fog obscured the other shore after you were gone, after you had left and departed but did not disappear, after the demons won, the twins filled with sorrow.
Another soul superimposed itself onto mine, as I rode on and on, entering a ravine, its walls slowly narrowing till I was enclosed in a mountain, like the haughty prince who had sought the water of life.
At your grave, Ling, temple gate, zero moon, spirit or cipher, year after year of your haunting absence turning fiction, pushing out toward some other presence. Through its practice of non-acceptance. Through its artifice where I suffer to know what cannot be known and am cast back down onto the wandering plains, chariot in flames.
History a fiction of facts, fiction measured against facts. Facts felt to be unresolved, in poetry, himmelschüssel, the supreme fiction
down, till nothing remains of
what you were dreaming of
*
About an hour-and-a-half walk north from the Begraafplaats Zorgvlied, west of Centraal Station at the end of a canal by the De Bloem Windmill, is the Begraafplaats Vredenhof, overgrown with vines and wildflowers in the summer. There Little Hans played with a stray orange cat among the gravestones while his mother Sibylla sat on a bench beneath the poplar trees, listening for a falling leaf with her book on her lap, her heart drifting back to the life she had left. They were new to this country, having taken a ship across the ocean from her other home, Paramaribo. His mother had left his father after discovering Little Hans‘s half-brother, and though Little Hans‘s father vowed to follow Sibylla all the way to Neder Land, war had spread and the Unterseeboots had abruptly cut off the sea-routes and Little Hans would never see his father again. In another lifetime, Christiaan Huygen‘s father, Constantijn, was an accomplished lutist, while in his lifetime Little Hans‘s father, Antonius, was an accomplished classical guitar player, considered by many in the fields and schools and seashell streets to be one of the greatest musicians in the land. Though unlike Constantijn, you will not find Antonius in any history books, his music echoing through the viscous heat from other strings, heard in the leaves and in the flutter of ten thousand Psyche wings.
Antonius was a Djuka, and Little Hans‘s half-brother was a Djuka, but Little Hans was half Djuka, half Dutch. Not long ago Sibylla would have been a slave owner in Paramaribo, and in another lifetime another Sibylla on a scientific expedition had visited Suriname five years after Voltaire was born. Like other colonists such as the English and the Sephardic, she had benefited from slave labor, though unlike these others she was not there for the rice or cane juice or cocoa or gold or bauxite or balata, but was there to study the metamorphosis of insects and share her findings through her pigments, burin, copper, and quill. In this land once used as a mass burial place for countless subjugated others as the Atlantic once was, this rich land of guava and cassava, coati and sloth, beetle, caterpillar, and chrysalis, where the Labadists failed and the Moravians sustained slavery, where the Surinen once lived, where the Arawak, Carib, Warao, Macushi, Awawaio, Ajurios, Wyanas were named, where indentured Hindustanis, Afghans, Creoles, Maroons, Javanese, Chinese, Hakka arrived tide after tide, along with the Lebanese, Brazilians, Peruvians and on and on in this land of the Americas, ruled by military force and profit in accordance with the past, Little Hans was born.
After his fifth birthday he was gone. He remembers his father‘s parting words:
You going to think of this country a lot ... You never going to forget it.
In the pond is the lake‘s absence.
In the middle of the Begraafplaats Vredenhof was a pond Little Hans stared into and knew he was elsewhere. No one knows where Sibylla‘s grave is anymore as she was buried in a cemetery, perhaps a pauper‘s grave that became overgrown with bitter tansy weed, now long-buried beneath a school or the busy Leidse Square, packed with cafes, theaters, street performers, nighttime revelers.
Little Hans sat on a manmade sand dune beside a clump of marram grass, watching the orange cat watching the tiny fish in the pond. He traced some words in the cool sand; a dragonfly paused above some flowers of alum floating on the water. The night before his mother had told him a story of a traveler who discovered the source of a river high in the Himalayas. Thinking it would lead to the sea, the traveler followed it from the ice and clouds down past ravines and valleys and woods but the river only grew shallower and shallower until it turned into the desert so that when the traveler finally reached the river‘s end, the dunes were damp and nothing else was there. A sound caused the cat to freeze, its tail flicked. What helps
if grief, as foreseen, comes to a dead
end. In his house next to his house
sits Spider; Son pays him a visit:
they will never see each other again.
Antonius, said Little Hans to the cat in taki-taki, what do you hear?
Antonius‘ opal green eyes moved from the pond to Little Hans. She stepped over and licked his hand, the taste of salt spreading over his tongue like a sea. A shadow stretched across the vale as if a solar eclipse quickened overhead. High above them, among clouds and rays, an enormous luchtschip floated slowly across the sky. A light rain started then stopped. A frog splashed into the pond; the reeds rustled in the gentle breeze and the leaves turned.
Where are you from, Antonius? Mamma said some disappear into time like Girolamo who left only some ricercars and canzonas behind. Or like Ningal, mother of the sun.
The cat licked herself; her left paw froze mid-air. Little Hans poured a handful of sand into a mound then flattened it into a pie before piling it up again into a tower.
Home is faraway, faraway. The fishermen still cast their nets into the black water ... Mamma‘s garden is flowering ... Papa sculls the rivers. The birds, Antonius, you would love the birds, the woodcreepers, the rainbow Toucan. Kinds of light, what else is invisible to us that is visible to birds? Snow, I would like to see it snow, though, has snowed, grow snow, know snow, row snow...
She curled herself into a nest to nap. Little Hans softly rubbed her nose, deep in memory. A bank of bluebottles at the edge of the pond formed a porous border between nature and humanity. The moon rose over the walls of Sacsayhuamán. Her purring lowered to quiet breathing.
Kepler once imagined that a race of homeless serpents wandered the moon‘s dark maria surface, hiding in caves or underwater to avoid the scorching sun. Through his tireless telescopic innovations and observations, Huygens thought the moon a waterless realm of champaigns, valleys, and mountain tracts, no visible atmosphere, though elsewhere in the universe, he thought, there was the prospect of life, each planet possessing its “Dress and Furniture, nay and Inhabitants too,” as the Book of Nature dictates. For Huygens, the spirit suffers in doubt (le doute fait peine a l’esprit), and the world holds on to any pretense of certainty in order to escape this suffering. As he lay sick and dying in his bed for half a year, his brother Constantijn wrote in his journal that Christiaan had declined to see a minister. Faith needed to appeal to reason, more sense bred fewer scruples, and death was no tragedy but rather a relief from suffering, Huygens‘ feelings in this regard recalling Montaigne, or the second-century Syrian Lucian of Samosata, who mocked Homer in perceiving the absurdities of mourners (coin in the mouth for the ferryman, beating of the breasts, funeral feast)
”to spring from the vulgar error that Death is the worst thing that can befall man.”
And the soul, Ling?
An absence at the center of our being that draws us together like the gravity of a planet, our motions elliptical until the final moment of collapse?
The soul that dies with the body while the wandering-soul lives on in your absence, drawing me closer to the abyss, the orchard... ka... ba...
Antonius, can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you.
Surrounded by butterflies and moths, the sweet suiti smells of the forest.
Asleep by the pond, surrounded by water.
I kept a caterpillar in a bamboo book-box, a blue morpho fluttered out like a dragon. I knelt at the feet of the ants with my expanding glass, their bodies never at rest, swarms of them with their jaws full of food, rushing in and out of Loko‘s bark, or Akantamasu‘s yellow hill, like a gourd full of water. And a gourd without water? Papa once asked. (Silence.) A cat! Fiofio buzzed through my brain, the awara tree on fire. Mamma told me that if you are true, truth will be your friend, and Tigri will not eat you.
Or consumed by desire into extinction, Little Hans.
It was while visiting the famiri upriver, the air sticky as a tamandua tongue, making everything still, even the corial floating by the Dagowe eddies. I carried a jamjar with a katydid inside, built a nest of twigs and leaves, stray bits of silver thread and kankantri silk. Our friends the scarlet birds, curved bills rippled the water. Mangrove roots anchored their secret fingers into the mud, reaching beyond the hidden life beneath the dark manatee waters.
Leonardo said there will come a time when we will no longer be able to discern the distinctions between colors—all will be black, like the water. My dream, your sleep.
Your smile, my being-so. Pineapple whorls, the generations from a single crown. Anchored ashore under shade, we splashed and danced and ate salt-fish and corncakes. Smoke from the huts gave the winti floating shapes. Papa in his white city clothes sat on a log with his guitar. Lupi showed me the drums... apinti cloud-swirls, the tumao, the stately tallagida he hit with a stick. I tried the rattle, the irons, the kwakwa bench. Meli threw a guilder into the fire. Everyone clapped. A kingfisher dove into the sun in the water. Brother was there but we didn‘t know then. I followed a shadow into the dim blue light of the forest, over rocks and roots followed its light chalk trail that turned away from the river. I passed oysters dangling from tree limbs as the greenheart called out, Pi-pi-yo, pi-pi-yo! Anansi looked down from his thorny-palm perch; abrasa vines shed their ocular scales. Day turned to night but I wasn‘t afraid. The insects and frogs sang a madrigal lullaby. Before us a lake rose, lit up by a grain of corn, beyond the valley of white sands and the werehpai caves. Until I lost the trail and the back of my neck cried out, the song repeating itself in memory...
Walk softly, walk softly, Little Hans, what did you see? The cat sat up straight like a pharaoh. A million hinged mirrors reflecting, reflecting, invisible to the naked eye, transformed bits at the speed of an instant. Wings fluttered from the pond and evaporated.
I saw Tigri, black with white spots, its face in the leaves. I stepped slowly toward it, but then in one breath it arced toward the lake, like a shadow fleeing its projection. I ran to the edge of the shore, of the water, of sky, the stars burning patterns in my mind. I looked out, alone. Listened for the buffalo, the laughing owl. Salt filled my loneliness, sweat formed tiny pools on my skin. Hid away the stone left behind. I saw Papa reading his book by the hissing lamp‘s flame. Things vanish, return never-the-same...
that the walls of the nameable
collapse and the open fields,
beyond that which can be uttered, de-
create, till nothing ever remains
of whatever you were dreaming
*
Huygens was a teenager when the writer Li Yu witnessed the Manchurian conquest and the fall of the Ming. Li fled to the countryside with his family where he wandered naked in the summer and washed his inkstone in the running brook. If he wanted fruit, fruit fell from the trees. Beneath tall pines he reclined, oblivious to the monkeys and cranes passing above him. His three years of leisurely exile he considered the happiest in his life. All of this Li wrote about in a rambling guide to the art of daily living, where he contemplated such questions as: What hobbies and activities enrich the spirit? What pleasure boat windows evoke the most comfort? How can the poor secure happiness? If sex is the key to self-fulfillment, when should one have it, or not have it? What is the proper way to prepare rice? Of animals, herbivores he considers more intelligent than carnivores, and the tiger “the most stupid animal of all. How do we know? Because from books we learn they won‘t eat small children. Why? Not because they don‘t want to but because they think children are brave, since children show no fear of them."
While Huygens turned the telescope to the skies, Li Yu turned it to fiction. In a story set three-hundred years before his times, a “western thousand-mile mirror” is found in an antique shop by a young scholar who uses it to see “far and near” and find himself a bride. From high up in a rented monastery room he pretends to study and peers out into countless courtyards until he finally spies upon a “peony among lotus flowers”—the peony a girl of unmatched grace and beauty, daughter of a retired official; her students, the lotus flowers, naked in a pond, splashing around and “comparing their treasures.” Eventually with the help of the telescope‘s powers and through his own insight and ingenuity, the scholar outwits the protective father and wins the daughter‘s hand in marriage. It is only on their wedding night that she discovers her husband isn‘t really the incarnation of an immortal but merely a normal human being. When he reveals the marvelous object that is the secret of his omnipresent knowledge, she isn‘t angry but astonished, strengthened in her conviction that their union was fated by heaven. They set the telescope in a sacred place in their conjugal tower, prostrate daily before it, and consult it regularly as an oracle. “Where the mind is focused,” the narrator observes, “objects of clay and wood can work miracles. The worship of gods means worshipping our own minds; it doesn‘t mean that buddhas and bodhisattvas really exist.”
Have I ever heard
a chestnut-leaf fall in my head?
Or did I ever fall there
headlong into a pond?
*
A small press in London first published an edition of Francis R. Jones‘ translation of Hans Faverey. A copy was given to a friend who then carried it across the Atlantic and passed it on to our publishing house with an enthusiastic recommendation. I turned to “The Pond in the Lake” and read the dedication: for A.Th. Faverey (1905–1981). I learned that Faverey was fifty when the poem was published in Amsterdam, forty-five years after he had left Suriname with his mother and brother, his father not surfacing in any of his other work, before or after
The yearning
which had known itself within him
till then, went out.
Facing the wall from which I bleeds.
Breathing exercises. Or, exercises in detachment, is how Faverey once described his poetry. And H.D.: But symptom or inspiration, the writing continues to write itself or be written. Toward what Garden of Remembrance? Or as Mignon asks of H.D., of Goethe, Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn? Do you know the land where the orange-tree blossoms?
It is winter and the pond is still frozen. I stretch out my gills and breathe, into words that shroud the living shroud the dead, gazing out from the lake toward some form yet-to-be.
Jeffrey Yang is the author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium. The poems in this issue from "Langkasuka" will be published in his forthcoming book Line and Light.