dispatches from a typhoon

I am marooned in my apartment at the moment on account of a typhoon named Marakot that entered with the clandestine overtness of a pickpocket that might engage you in conversation while he takes your handbag. Such does one trip upon meteorological phenomena in a land with no delineated fall or spring. Walking through a park waste this past weekend I came upon a rope suspended from a tree whose end cleared the ground by 2 ½ meters. I could just barely reach to catch it. When I did I climbed to the point my friend had expressed doubt I could reach and then quickly descended. A drunk looking man in shabby clothes came over to congratulate me and told me he was a tour guide in Tainan and an authority on local customs and well-versed in the histories surrounding the city’s famous monuments. I asked him why Tainan seemed to have such an impressive number of lesbian women within its border and he answered “燒悶,” which combines the ideas “to heat up” and “stuffy.” Though I’m no lesbian, the same two words are well fit to describe my current state in this little apartment. No gaskets to let off the pressure which accumulates under our collected thoughts and desires. When I think about the seasons of this country, I can’t help but picture the old one-roomed colonial schoolhouses you learn about in history class. It might just be that I associate a lot of things with those old schools, having for them a queer Civil War-reenactor’s nostalgia; there was something very performative about schooling back in those days, the recitation of long bible passages, the dunce-cap public ignominy, a kind of civic attitude that lingers even today in quaint primary school assemblies where the children dress up like Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln and the principal delivers a stern-faced address whose authority is nevertheless belied by the basketball hoop above his head and the fingerpaint turkey prints on the wall behind the podium. I also remember having once spent the night in an old schoolhouse that had been renovated and made into a second home sometime in the past. It was on the ridgeline that opposed the hill on which my college was built to the East and though it was nearly two miles from there you could see it at night because it sat under a flashing yellow traffic light that warned cars to slow down at the crest of the ridge. When you were inside the house you could see the light flashing in from the street; there were an extraordinary number of windows and I remember thinking that this must have been a great relief to the schoolchildren suffocating in the log-smoke and bound by their puritanical creeds to look out and see the boundless fields, their order erased by the blowing wind and snow. The night that I stayed there I remember being in love and getting in a kind of strange mood after listening to a whole Janis Joplin live album. Later in the night when the covers had been pulled over the emotional extravagances of the day I remember being convinced an angry man was banging on the door, though the wind was also very strong, and that no one would find our bodies. Something of that house’s former spirit still lingered unascended in the old creaking floorboards and low winding hallway, a spirit whose moltings we had dawned and which I’ve yet to cast off. This is indeed the character of my memory, strata of bone, a heavy exoskeleton which I carry and carry until I’ve forgotten it, but who nevertheless drags a print on the ground and reflects its shadow on my surroundings, so that the real and superimposed seem to occupy the same space. Picture this for a clue: when a typhoon comes, it washes the streets clean but leaves the subtle canals and underground births running turbid. There is a severe lack of water for the running rapids and flooding streets. The orderly division of life into its emergent tropes – the workaday, the arbiter straining the plausible from coincidence, the lights and sidewalks and walls and bridges infrastructuring the pedestrians – which is the cities memory erased by an inversion, by a sudden inability of the predictable to act upon doubt welling up through the drains. One finds oneself suddenly (such did this season arrive) and nearly inexplicably gathered at a city fire hydrant competing with neighbors for a chance at the spigot, or drawing water from a pool where little children are splashing and laughing at the newly bred lunacy of their elders. Now the hapless doorman is holding a wrench, and the tall flimsy drink of water that mans the Laundry is hauling red buckets up the emergency stairs, the office ladies are giggling, emerging from the bathroom with dirty plungers and the elevator bulletin advertises a fictitious “official water offering” on the following day that one resident when asked deems “variable.” This is a modern kind of confusion that comes from approaching all phenomena as comedic post-ironies. That is, the situation is not other than it seems, but rather is as it seems and is other, the distance there is what constitutes now our common humor. If there were three stances, an authentic stance, an ironic stance and a post-ironic stance, the post-ironic would be an emptied inflection of the authentic. Having gone through an epoch of irony, a situation could never now be just as it seems, but must always contain the suspicion of it being otherwise, so that part of the content of any experience is its negation. This in short, is Sartre’s Bad Faith made flesh. Memory is the great refugee of this all-engulfing suspicion. It gathers and gathers despite all the conflicts of rationality with experience, despite post-irony, and occasionally it offers up some veritable phantasm of the past fully formed. Something clear and peaceful in the whaling tempest of experience, an oasis, a root, a perfect fifth, something to shake you from your conviction that life is a series of barely visible incongruities, that the future is the random, double-blind result of their compound geometries. There is an idea in Malthus that all of these typhoons and earthquakes and tornados are necessary checks on growing populations and that war is a kind of human created natural disaster to achieve the same end. Likewise, there is an idea in Oliver Sacks that a migraine is a kind of natural disaster of the mind to check all the wayward strainings of a modern personality on a structure built for poor simple bartering folk and hunters. If humans hibernate, and I think that they may in the way that dolphins sleep with one brain at a time, and in the way that a man can awake from a dissassociative fugue, I think that it might be for the sake of memory, to cool in the forge of an unconscious state, unassailable by the confusion and non-being of a waking life. Here in the shade of the unrecognized and foreign a part of me rests and the old things in me float to the surface, verities and old chestnuts to be gathered one-by-one.

on the occasion of two particular chinese characters 飛 and 悠

飛: fei
ㄈㄟ
1.to fly
2.[Informal] to disappear through evaporation or sublimation

悠: you
ㄧㄡ
1.long-drawn-out; remote in time or space
2.leisurely
3.[Informal] to swing
4.sad; pensive; meditative

curious to hear what may be said about music to an eastern ear, there language being an agglutination – the continual clumping of these particles into bigger and bigger edifices to their smaller beings – so many unconscious parts in the brownian whole, waiting to be perceived into being, a kind of congealing without so much as the forward progress of interrelations to drive its abstraction further and further – take this character ---- 飛 ---- it is an ornamented character this verb of rising increasing being put aloft on a wind and the horizontal line of it this: 升 : being extended with a biological flourish of what, but a kindofmosa ic embellishment of it having been prior to this翅 the whole being what has often been said of the toucan looking at its art, this erotic wild extension of the beak.. or perhaps the homunculus, this notty twist of ganglion and nerve and blood reaching with his fist across the surface of the eye, beyond which border, the untenable and unimagined, to his palette through a seesea of sameness mapping man on to the bland papered feverishness of our circumferences. taking this the indexical the unembodied and raw pre-priestly first for the crane opening her wide wings in some suspended audacity fanning out (翻) over the pages of a condensed stop-motion history of our ages.

take this one for an understanding of music: 悠 the arched woman against some perennial fence post and the shadow she casts on the ground below her three pumping valves and the rush of blood between them being her heart at a distance or more specifically a destination – this together expressing length and extension as one looks or thinks down the extent of a long empty tunnel, remote in time or space, the isolation of space in an empty tunnel and the isolation of time when a car enters heading your directions, the swelling headlights --- the excess of it, the act of casting and being flung forth, a personified kind of momentum that agglomerates over centuries ---- “to swing,” in one case and then “a leisureliness” then in some monastic and truncated era “a sadness and pensiveness, meditative” each peering through analogy to the slumped woman and the projected shadow of her pulsing heart, the protracted emptiness between beats. take this in combination with 揚 where a hardened hand clutches by a radiant sun its sack of wheat, winnowing --- a sowing of distance that is “melodious” (悠揚) one sees it in the movements of the guqin player, the vast dip of his fingers towards the fretboard like a diving crane like the careening of so many of these motes of intention across the imaginary landscape of the listener, the imitation of the perfection evoked distantly in its many symbols.

the curse of the peripatetics

We rent a plot of land 130 ft. above Taiwanese soil. it is hard to distinguish this as land, feeling more like a holograph, a certain dependence on the angle of refraction and the happenstance of the viewer having turned suddenly and without any particular motive. all this no less on an island floating in the south pacific on a loose tether to the mainland -- none of it more determinate than the position of a mirage hovering above a desert highway. as electricity moves freely through groundless conductors so does the insipid through these shadows and sillhouettes, these nameless and unaccounted, crowded together as living aberrations.

"we're held in place by this only, this huddled communion - look behind you"
startled brick buildings in the first sun
"it has no commerce with that world, being
built of thin air and invisible wisps of breath, only”
3 plastic chairs and a plastic table a spotted sidewalk
"insofar as any one of us continues to speak, can we even"
in the early morning the people of our tomorrow look
with creep and clot upon their yesterday
“refer to it, and in the first silence we’ll float away to
our separate oases, among illusions, grasping blindly at
the familiar” and Wittgenstein said it himself
there is no such thing as
“grasping, grasping, take these drunks emerging from the
pub at daybreak clouded with the night’s effusions, spent
from chasing phantom romances, the beached whale of their
night thoughts asphyxiating in the sharp-edged quotidian of
daylight. they wake slowly and improbably to the call of fishmongers
from the impromptu street market that barricades the entrance
to the pub. in the slow sacrament of early morning they are half
to their heads with swill and gargle, through rows of flayed meats
and barrel fires. In the night all you can see through a window is your
own reflection surprised to see itself where it had sought an escape
as in daylight the hardened crystal of the fishmongers eye returns
your broken and tired visage where you had sought communion.

they’ve decided upon a sinewy fish with a Velcro skin

“this one here – ’
“this one, what’s its name if I could ask?”
“you wouldn’t understand if I told you”
“no I speak Chinese actually, I assure, can’t you tell? Well, I’m speaking Chinese right now sure enough…”
“no I just mean you wouldn’t understand anyway, even if I told you”
“well I’m quite familiar with the names of fish, I eat here quite often you see –”
“next customer”

he watches her brandishing a large butchers knife cutting along the fascia
making fine separations between fat and muscle casting the detritus in a
slumped pile he sees the penultimate death flop of a small mackerel
and he thinks of all the dogs who dream of the woods through the night
how their legs never reach the ground.

we won’t recognize ourselves for the strangers we’ve become, a bloodline of settlers whose virtue was to forget quickly and take to the place where we awake with spray-on grass and sprinklers. a gorilla can learn to love a milk-dispensing plastic mould icon of its mother and the propensity for abstraction in humans has not distanced us from these behaviours but taken our acceptance of these adumbrations to ever-more far flung extremes. in daylight the residents of this once rundown enclave can’t see themselves in the windows of their old homes where the souvenir shops now stand, their cameras in hand, can’t see themselves tourists to their ancestral homes, mistaking the longing of displacement for the collective nostalgia of an era.

the waywardness of this age is in the shallow belief that our loose memberships and conscriptions, passive participation, cohabitation in vast cities or digital networks amounts to a kind of illusory community. Increasingly capable are we of capturing these relationships even as they spiral to incomprehensible levels of abstraction. something will emerge from all these terabytes we believe. and so we wait.

sometimes it’s best to get in your car and drive out from the neon cytoplasm of the inner city to a large trucker highway dark but for the fluorescent lights pulsing out into the visible distance, drive until your eyes are weary and your muscles sore and the speed of all the vehicles around you is as irrefutable and constant as the blood running through your veins and when you’ve gotten there you should pull out onto the breakdown lane and get out of your car and let the dust of the road be blown across your face by the oncoming traffic, look out at the unfathomable corn fields and the blood red moon. only there for a moment on the pitched asphalt can you believe yourself to be standing on a cold dead rock, a boulder hurtling through inhospitable space in spite of which we are alive and alone. knowing this, one know its obverse: all the withering sacraments of intersubjectivity, shared experience, touch and the earthen warmth of home.

a sleepy place

It's a noisy world beyond my window, and the sounds that filter through are an apt montage of the greater city. The foreman outside got a translated copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and now all the laborists are acting out "eternal return," caught with the same jackhammer and the same dust in perpetuity. Or is it that when I awake in the mirk of early morning these sounds are indistinguishable from yesterdays. In this city of repetitions, I often fumble for a point of reference.

In the rising tide of voices at 5pm there is a comfort like the creakings of a house on an early monday morning as parents prepare for work, its a passive sound that you let in unguarded because it's as familiar as your own heartbeat. so what is this feeling of dissonance, this animal moment of cold regard? It dawns upon me that the fuzz of chatter below is composed of tiny little inscrutabilities, the chinese of schoolgirls in sincere blue skirts bussed in from the countryside - a current that is both mine and beyond my imagination. I remember on new year's eve in Providence the explosion of fireworks and the concise movement of their soundwaves through the city in the aftermath - I pictured it like the shadow of a high cloud bounding from road to rooftop in quick successions. Here is the dull thud of firecrackers richocheting in alleyways like a tired voice in your head, latent as the word you reach for in the darkest recesses of your memory. the slow walk of youth in brightly lit nightmarkets, or in circumscriptions of small bare parks where the elderly assume blank stares and the middlers chew a nut wrapped in a leaf coated in lime which turns their teeth red as vampires. on odd days the humid density of the tropics is a contagion, people looking cross-eyed and confused, you're bound to see little girls on teetering bicycle fugues, and three or four seconds into the blare of a scooter horn, a grown man snapping to in a crosswalk. germany has its zeitgeist, taiwan's is sleeping beneath a palm tree.

the pied piper of hamelin is a phantom who appeared before historians and mythologists on a stained glass pane in the middle of the last millenium. the pane succumbed to some or other unlikely catachlysm, but the image of those sullen-faced white-cloaked children following an unhinged flautist through the hinterlands of german imagination persisted and a story gathered around it. a young dishevelled looking foreigner enters a small village named Hamlin with nothing but a flute in hand. the foreigner casts about for jobs in the local farms and markets but finds nothing save for the hoards of rats skittering under crates, in the drippy shadows and refuse of sick homes. they were growing in number every day, one felt the slow crescendo of their collective sqeakings, the manifold twitching of noses and the blood red eyes - it was enough to strike a kind of fear, no, mania into Hamelin's youth, the moral fibre of the community gradually unwound, dogs howling, a conflagration. to all this, the flautist brought his panacea, a song so beautiful it would entice the snittering masses from their hollows and down, eventually, to the river where they would meet their demise. having secured the townspeople's approval and the promise of a fee upon his success, the flautist commenced his song. rising and falling in imploring thirds and compound asymmetries, the melody communicated a kind of protracted longing that became manifest in the sea of rats trailing behind the foreigner as he made his way down to the water. this the profound and tragic innocence of their animal torpor, like the snake and his prey sleeping away the winter in the same lair, a matter of the mind relinquishing its individual nature. then, with the litter of rats floating inanimate at his back, the stranger made recourse to the hills where he was owed a debt.

the vigor of his sweaty climb, the joyful anticipation of his reward well-earned, all of this gave way in a moment: the silence in the streets and blank stares of the attending indicated what he would have feared. there would be no money forthcoming for his pains.

one traces back through the drift of particulars to the nebulous Fact of ancient history, a frayed document with the words, "it is 10 years since our children left," what gruesome details succeed these words, the frail, hollow-cheekbone endurance of the child caravan drawn on by the music in unending verses, along ridgelines and swampy pits destinationless. what of all this can be recovered? the structuralist would say look to the immediate, the facts unravel in the mythic present. and sun-ra in long-drawn improvisations sought the precise moment of his forefathers, those floating sarcophagi, the horrid stacks of cotton picked from long rows, the feel of the blistering sun and the whip, his attainment. the locals say the garbage truck song that unfolds beyond my window in daily repetitions is the very same that the pied piper may have played. the sleeping masses in orderly lines drawn by the same longing, the flautists unfilled tonic refrain.

for broghen on his birthday

past lives



Once a feral dog
Whose fangs coaxed
The juice of carnivore and berry
Root, and howled for
Strange things afoot
In thoroughgoing turbid
bush feverish
padded soft
an Indian
whose hair
in silken knots
fell on feather bows
kindred to the fox
maize in ample rows
kill hung in rafters
drip dried nude betrothed
or look across
a cold colossus
whose blinking eye’d
crunch in a cold frost
victims bloodied and besot
reviled the hand of man
their petty thoughts
and inbred lust
a sense of sylvan justice
the majesty of trees
he’d be crowned, august
and finally – freed
from mandates and decrees
who’d meet his fate laughing
hold the tears of a sister
in a broad-armed embrace
a year older
thicker and thicker his carapace
under humble shelter
stored the salt of lovers
viscous brine to remember
a centuries quarter
infinite time
by sidereal measure.

in unending equivocations
a promise lost in translation
the huddled homeless
expecting death below
a railway station
palimpsests
are open invitations
or less,
I'll drink to that
drunken humans
spent breath on
homonyms
boundaries we've relinquished
the declension of decisions
but what surgeon hadn't determined
more with his first
incision

introducing: the om-cake!

you had probably thought, like me, that all possible breakfast flour-egg combinations had long since been exhausted, but then, you probably hadn't thought to cook a pancake inside an omelette. the name is still not finalized, but om-cake won high merit for its subtle new-age overtones. any suggestions are welcome.

siddhi (I)

I was not long in that liminal captivity before the opportunity came to make for the hills. An hour's trainride north took us to a small buddhist monastery in a country laden with betel nut and tobacco plantations called Jia-yi. I was looking forward to the trip as I thought it would give me the opportunity to unravel some of my thoughts that had been knotted in the city's density.

I went under the auspices of a Taiwanese girl whose boyfriend rarely emerged from our old dorm: the often cooking, praying Pei, whose name can mean to spirit along, a name she quite often lives up to, as now. she reserved her chinese for punchlines and held to long disjointed english expositions. she came once a month, she told me, for the prostrations up and down a busy road. I thought this was not the brand of buddhism I had anticipated. her first time, before the callouses, the equanimity, the monk-like reserve had been difficult. her boyfriends mother had been at her side, looking hard, weighing her devotion. her knees had purpled from continuous impact, palms and nails encrusted with pavement and dirt. the praying, she said, helps me to clear my mind.

拜下去！拜起來！　

go down praying! rise up from prayer!

那無阿彌陀佛.

not without the fullness of the boddhisattva.

in prostrating, the knees give out in act of weakness first feigned and then, eventually, felt, internalized, believed. crouching head lowered, the forearms are overturned revealing the palm.

in regret, in sorrow. request the buddha's mercy.

then the fingers make a fist and turn over again to hoist the body back up. rising and falling ad infinitum. like the siddhi standing on fresh legs, later crumbling and decrepit, then rising again, in myriad lifetimes recapitulating the same devotion.

the nuns sang in droning perfect fifths of the buddha's travels:

"take one piece of each and all of the different kinds of vegetation - including grass, trees bushes rice hemp, bamboo and reeds - and one part of every kind of mountain, rock, and dust-mote. Then let us consider each piece and part to be a separate Ganges river. Then, again, take one grain of the sand in all those inconceivably great number of Ganges Rivers as one chiliocosm, and afterwards, take each mote of dust within each chiliocosm as one kalpa (lifetime). Finally, consider all the dust grains accumulated in each of these kalpas to be, themselves, converted to kalpas. Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha has endured one thousand times longer than this vast length of time since he realized the ten grades of accomplishment."

dogma and prayer: perhaps there is some resonance between the eye's dilation in fear and darkness and the dilation of time in the face of the inexplicable.

(牛) year

I sought some repreive from the city's insistence. the ox's epoch: air dense with the smoke of new years offerings, the streets plastered with totems of fortune and prosperity. he'd cast his bloodshot eye, dug his heel, bowed the coil of his horn. and now a foment roiled, you could hear the hiss of a million crackers from the rooftops. a city suspended in kitsch and confabulation. a week of projected shadows. but what good was all this to one who hadn't held the red envelope in his hand before he knew what all of it meant, hadn't passed below the spring banners first as an animal (child) on his mother's back? I could see the real world giving way to a latent redolence, but one for which I was blind and anosmic. on holiday, I suppose, the foreigner and the amnesiac become mutually indistinguishable.

winter baptism

There seems to be no darkness here that the luminescent sign posts of shops and hotels do not expose. No furthest extent, no haven in the trees, no center, no terminus. The city aggregates in all directions and the further one walks inside of it, the more one is convinced of its concrete infinitude. The maps here present a fantasy of mobility that the streets choke. The iterative swell of traffic from dawn to mid-morning intimidates. If only the grinning visages of the crouching locals would betray some secret - like the secret of their entrenchment, of all that they take to be mundane. A vacant stare is not but a mirror, and so we have only our reflections to see in the eyes of the oggling Taiwanese. A word of Mandarin is an entry, but it is Ta-Yu in muffled whispers, in close confidence, sung out in seven tones at the ancestral night markets.


I am certain of the edge of my map. Inland the street of my mind's eye and the memory of the still, color-coded grid whirl about in unruly concatenations. There is a reason why that bank of symbols is called a legend and not fact. But I am viscerally aware of the edge, and so, of late, I've endeavored to sniff it out. I head west with the sun and the diminishing line of buildings and the canal-fingers of the harbor. The best I can find on the first attempts are sparse liminal passageways. Fisherman's huts, graveyards, bridges to further landlocked settlements, listless dogs, vendors with no particular motivation to sell and shoppers with no money or desire to consume. A land of indecision, in-between, the vertigo of forboding, of a secret that I know lies somewhere near. I can smell it, brine, it's been on my mind since day-1 but no amount of searching has yielded its source.

So I assemble a small group to cast about with me. and we take a map. Still, we find nothing, just parks, not even an intimation of the ocean, it looms mythically in our minds, behind our words. We ask, is the beach far?
Oh yes, very far from here, and cold, too.
Could you show us on the map?
-inept fumbling, vague gestures-

We push on, on our own. Now we've found a tall bridge to further land, hopeless. As I crest the bridge however, I see that unmistakable shimmering. I race down as fast as my bike will take me. There is no sign welcoming, no entrance - just a shady waste of palm trees and would-be dunes, the smell of fire. The beach is deserted, it is winter for these people after all, but the sand is pristine and the waves are tall. The sun is setting so I take the opportunity to dive in: the water is refreshing and warm, I feel as refreshed and new as I have in months.

On the way back, riding along the canal, there is no rush, the city feels incredibly small and warm. For once, there is the distinct feeling of heading home.