scruta

Gonfalon

Finial

Li

Did you hear about what’s going on in Egypt?

Zhou

Yeah, it’s happening all over the Middle East. You know, after Tunisia…

Li

I saw the New York Times.

Zhou

It’s a horrible paper.

Li

I agree. It’s well-written though.

Zhou

Maybe, if you want to practice your English. But it’s so biased…

Li

I saw the pictures of the tanks. All the people marching towards the square-

Zhou

Oh.

Li

Where were you then?

Zhou

六四？[June 4th?]

Li

Yeah.

Zhou

I saw some tanks. I wasn’t in the street.

Li

Me, too.

Zhou

The crowd pulled a soldier out of one. He didn’t last long.

[They sit in silence.]

Li

This business in Egypt.

Zhou

It’s a terrible business.

Shanghai was a blueprint that I unraveled on an endless table.

As I scanned the surface, the renderings began to warp and bend, suddenly destroying one building with the presence of another. Some areas changed so quickly they seemed to be black holes, maelstroms pulling the surrounding schematics into their tightening whorls.

The labels of many sections coalesced into a strange patois – not Chinese, not English, but something else, pointing to a semantic region boiling with activity.

I spent days poring over the blueprint, trying to reconstruct in my mind a city that I knew could not be constructed. For as soon as I had an idea of it in my mind, I found it had already changed in the blueprint.

I comforted myself in what seemed a futile task with the consolation that maybe, for a moment, as I had the idea in my mind and looked again, I had envisioned a piece of Shanghai.

[Ferret is sitting in his room, despondent. Depression talks with him.]

Depression

How’re you feeling?

Ferret

Are you serious?

Depression

How’re you feeling?

Ferret

Awful.

Depression

Good.

Ferret

You’re pathetic.

Depression

No, you are. That’s the point, you see?

Ferret

I’m not going to listen to you.

[Ferret stands up, grabs his guitar, and begins to walk out of the room.]

Depression

Do what you want. Fill the air with sounds! Fill up the blank pages of notebooks! You’ll only be surrounded by nothingness in the end… and you know how close to nothingness I am.

Ferret

I’ll take the risk. It’s all better than talking with you about it.

[Ferret gets up and walks out of the room.]

Depression

[shouts at Ferret as he walks away]

You’ll be back! You don’t stay as long as you used to, but you’ll come back. You always do, at least for a little while…

[Fer-mas and Ferret are talking. It’s late at night, and he’s about to take a shower and get ready for bed.]

Ferret

I just can’t take it.

Fer-mas

Don’t worry about it. Before the operation tomorrow the surgeon and the anesthesiologist are both going to come in and talk to you.

Ferret

That’s what I worry about. They’re going to walk in all confident and unnerve me.

Fer-mas

Look, it’s not that bad –

Ferret

Of course, it’s better than if they weren’t confident at all.

Fer-mas

Haha. Right. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Ferret

[smiles]

Yeah. Nothing to worry about.

My heart, my soul, my subconscious – they are all the same.

They are no longer of interest to me.

Is it because I have come to terms with them? Or rather, come to terms with constantly coming to terms with them?

Or is there some part of it that I have shut out? Neglected? Something left to be awakened? Something I see in others that I – in all of its delight, all of its horror – see in myself?

For anyone who considers themselves the slightest bit a poet, these are the questions that haunt you.

Heliogabaline

Sesquipedalian

Pornography has to be the biggest in the US.

What other society in our age could shine a light so deeply into these darkest, most personal, most individual moments?

Further, what society could have felt such optimism when it realized that these moments were not personal at all, but manufactured and all too predictable?

Further still, what society would then have the audacity to think that this archetype lying naked before them was something that could carved up and MADE individual after all?

Did I see it there?

Did I see the future of China

At the empty Expo site

Going over the Lupu Bridge

In the bright morning sun?

The pavilions of pleasantries were exhausted.

All commercial viability had been extracted from the shells

Of buildings, now crumbling like exoskeletons

Shed off in the promise of something new.

In a vacant lot beside the remains,

I saw mechanized infantries parading through parking lots.

The future was coming, rolling in with the morning sun.