scruta

[It’s the afternoon. Li is working away alone in his office. Zhou walks in. He has a white bandage across the bridge of his nose. His left eye is swollen a bit, and it looks as if he will have a black eye. Li stands up immediately in shock.]

Li

Zhou! What happened?

Zhou

I don’t want to talk about it.

Li

Okay. Well, do you need anything?

Zhou

No.

Li

Okay.

[Li watches Zhou as he walks to his desk and sits down. He pauses for a moment, sighs and then speaks:]

Zhou

I was buying perfume for my wife.

Li

Okay.

Zhou

There’s this shop she likes near Wangfujing. I thought I’d go after lunch.

Li

RIght.

Zhou

I bought the one that she likes and I started walking back towards work and I had to walk by all of those goddamned policemen standing there.

Li

There are a lot of them. I mean, you know-

Zhou

Of course, I know! It’s just hard to get around it all. So I was walking, and then somebody jostled me pretty hard and I dropped the bag of perfume.

Li

And then?

Zhou

The damn thing shattered, and I told the guy that I was sorry. The guy was pissed, but he eventually said it was his fault. The next thing I know though, this perfume starts wafting through the air. Somebody next to me says it smells like jasmine, and all these people start pointing at me. Next thing I know three big guys are beating the shit out of me and dragging me away.

Li

Zhou, I’m sorry.

Zhou

I kept trying to tell them that I was just picking up some perfume.

Li

Didn’t you know it was jasmine?

Zhou

The damn thing is called “Essence of Sensuality.” How the hell do I know what it smells like?!

Li

You never noticed that your wife smells like jasmine?

Zhou

My wife always just smelled like my wife. I never thought about it.

Li

Well, what happened after that?

Zhou

After that I had to convince them that I was just buying perfume for my wife. They called her and confirmed it and my party membership and my employment with the propaganda bureau. Plus, I had to call Wang to vouch for me.

Li

You called Wang?!

Zhou

I wanted to call you, but it made more sense to call him. He’s not in my department, and although he’s a twat, he could at the least vouch for me.

Li

That’s awful, Zhou.

Zhou

Stupid sons of bitches.

How does one escape feelings of inadequacy? Self-loathing? Terrible, grinding guilt? That blackness, so black it erases even the ability to perceive it?

When a dim light fights its way through, you’ll see mazes within mazes. The only way out of them is to learn the way they are structured. Lay a line in the dim light so you learn the passages, the traps.

Those who do not know these mazes see them only as the absurd amusements of a soul not yet grown. They laugh to themselves, but wonder how a mind could be so rich with distraction.

Those who know them well, curse their mention. Their eyes scream as they blink, suddenly aware of the darkness. Grasping as you do, they offer you consolation that asks for consolation.

[Ferret is having drinks with friends in a super-chic bar, full of Chinese antiques. A woman plays the erhu behind them, weaving her ethereal tunes together with a pumping house beat. Beatnik, Witch, and Ferret are talking.]

Beatnik

Man, I think you’re ready. You’re really ready man.

Ferret

What’s that?

Beatnik

To know about the real shit in China, man. It really all comes down to three things：

天下乌鸦一般黑

天下没有免费午餐

天下没有不散的筵席

Witch

Haha, yeah.

Ferret

Wait. What was that? I got something about a free lunch.

Witch

No, that’s the second one.

Ferret

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Witch

Yeah, but the first one is about 乌鸦 (wūyā). A crow, you know?

Ferret

So there are only black crows?

Beatnik

Yeah, like all crows are black, man. Shit is just shit everywhere. Evil people are everywhere. You know, man?

Ferret

I get it. A black crow is a black crow no matter how you look at it.

Witch

Yeah.

Ferret

Yeah, and what’s the last one? Can you write it for me?

Witch

[speaking as she writes the characters in his notebook]

天下没有不散的筵席.

Ferret

[pointing to the end of the phrase written in his book]

Those last two…

Witch

筵席 (yánxí), it’s like a big dinner.

Ferret

Like a feast?

Beatnik

Yeah, man. It’s like – it’s like you can’t just have feast that never ends, man. It’s got to end sometime. Now you know about China, man. That’s what it is: All the crows are black; there’s no such thing as a free lunch-

Ferret

And the feast always comes to an end.

Musicians afire

Audience still

No one moves

Everyone is moved

What gives one pause is not how the universe is, but that it is.

What moves you forward is thinking not that one is, but how one is.

A waif of a girl, she was walking in the road, letting her heels click upon the asphalt, completely avoiding the sidewalk. She did it not because she wished to prove anything about herself. Nor did she do it because she wanted to save time. For her it was simply the way that one walked, inches from death at all times.

Taxicabs whizzed by at a clip, most of them only flashing their lights to acknowledge her presence, if they did that at all. Electric bicycles announced their arrival with a high, piercing ring. Trash trucks hustled past, groaning as they swerved around her.

She gnawed nonchalantly on a processed bread bun as she walked through an intersection, oblivious of the traffic lights, walking straight through the middle. I stood there waiting for the light, wondering what possessed her and where she was going. I tried to follow her across the road, but the cars were coming too fast and I didn’t have the intuition to navigate them. I’d lost her.

A minutes later I found her again, standing at a corner for a moment as she threw the wrapper of her bun at a trash can. It didn’t make it in, but she was unconcerned. The trash can was the token of a world that she participated in only as an afterthought. She was already off the sidewalk, shuffling down the middle of the street.

The following is a translation of a poem by the 20th century Chinese poet, Xu Zhimo. What intrigued me most about this poem is its representation of the descent into nihilist despair that extreme pessimism induces. It’s a descent that inevitably goes so deep that it destroys itself or it destroys the pessimist… It’s the speaker’s interjection at the end, 休！休！Stop! Stop! (or perhaps, Rest! Rest!), which brilliantly illustrates this eventuality.

《悲观》

徐志摩 作

一

青草地，

牛吃草，

摇头掉尾，

天上的青云白云，

卷来卷去。

二

登山头，

望城里，

只见黑沉沉的屋顶，

鳞次栉比，

街道上尘烟里，生灵挤挤。

三

教堂前，

钟声里，

白衣的牧师，

和黑裙黑披的老妇女，

聚复散，散复聚。

å››

歌舞场，

繁华地，

白的红的，黑的绿的，

高冠长裙，笑语依稀。

五

庙堂中，

柴堆里，

几块破烂的木头，

当年受香烟礼拜的的偶像，

面目未朽，未朽！

å…­

战场上，

壕沟里，

枪炮倒在败草间，

到处残破的房间，

肢体，血痕缕缕。

七

天灾国，

饥荒地，

草木尽稀，

小儿不啼，

黑灰色的空气。

å…«

心死国，

人荒境，

有影无行，

有声无气，

深谷里的规子，见月不啼。

九

噫！

噫！

十

幻想破，

上帝死，

半夜梦醒睡以尽，

但这黑昏昏，阴森森，

鬼棱棱。

十一

这心头，

压着全世界的重量，咳！全宇宙

这精神的宇宙，

这宇宙的宇宙，

都是空，空，空……

十二

休！

休！

----------

Pessimism

By Xu Zhimo

1

A field of fresh green grass,

A cow eats the grass,

It shakes its head and swishes its tail,

Clear white clouds in the sky

Spool together and fall away.

2

Climb to the top of a mountain,

Look at the city below,

All you can see is the sinking black of roofs

Row upon row of them,

On the streets and in the dust and smoke

Souls are squeezed tight.

3

Before a church,

At the ringing of a bell

Priests in white frocks

And old women in black skirts, black shawls

Come then go again, go then come again.

4

The ampitheaters,

The areas of great prosperty,

White and red, black and green,

Tall hats and long skirts, vague smiles and speech.

5

Inside a temple,

In the piles of incense,

Several pieces glow as they burn,

This year receives idols worshiped by incense,

Faces that shall not be forgotten, not forgotten!

6

On the fields of battle,

In the soggy ditches,

Guns and artillery lay on the fields of defeat,

In the crumbled wrecks of buildings,

Limbs, covered in bloody scars.

7

Kingdom of calamity,

Land of famine,

Grass gathering around the thinning trees,

Little children who do not cry,

The air of soot.

8

Kingdom where the soul dies,

Land of ruined men,

Shadows without form,

Sounds without breath,

The cuckoos in the deep valleys,

Do not call at the moon.

9

Oh!

Oh!

10

Phantom destroyer,

God of death,

Being awoken from midnight dreams is enough,

But this persistent dim, this forest of darkness

Demons sharpened on demons…

11

This heart

Pressed by the weight of the entire world, ack! The entire universe

This spirit of the universe

This universe of universes

Are nothing, nothing, nothing…

12

Stop!

Stop!

Technology is not progress;

It is amplification.

I do not speak.

I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly

Like it’s the middle of winter

Watching my breath dissipate into the air

Lit with the glow of a million fireworks

Taking to the heavens in unison

Banging on the dome of the sky

With the hopes of a million people

Shuffling through the streets of vermillion

Kicking up the ash and empty mortars with their toes.

Gonfalon

Finial