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.

Today is coldest day of the year in Taiwan, so today we eat starch balls.

I changed the name of my blog. The other was kind of a place holder until something less pedantic and more experience-based came along. Let me explain.

Today I made like a situationalist and endeavoured to get myself lost to find the "real city" at the heart of Tainan. I was actually too tired to even get lost let alone find my way back again - I went to a dance club in Kaohsiung last night and didn't get home until 6 in the morning - but I did find some interesting stuff. First I was biking around and I saw a sign that said "Beetle Store." Beetles and other insects are of personal significance to me for two reasons: first, Carl Jung was inspired to develop the theory of synchronicity based on an experience he had with a scarab beetle and then also Gretchen, whom you all may know, is farely enthralled with insects and has drawn my attention to them where before they were only good for crawling in my mouth while I slept 6 times out of a year on average. So of course I went in there and they had some really incredible beetles and grubworms that you hoped for the sake of the insect were in the larval stage of a much nicer looking creature. The beetles were all busily jamming their outsized probosci into these tubs of gelatinous goo that reminded me of the cheap grape jelly you can smear on your toast at a diner. They were all so stupidly big that I began to wonder if someone along the line hadn't just made a small mistake along the evolutionary chain. There's a lot of talk over here about what pet you're going to have when you get one and I think I decided right then and there that I would get a pair of the shiny-backed japanese beetles if the opportunity ever arose.

I was riding home along chenggong road, the road that leads to my university, and I kept seeing these prominently displayed banners hanging from lamp posts and street signs all up and down the road. I finally stopped to take a closer look at one of these banners and it said "2008 is the year of health and safety." It made me wonder if the previous year had focused more on senescence and violence, but it seemed to me a concept worth pursuing. It turns out that the mayor of Tainan has, of late become particulary worried about these two key issues and so has decided to make them the focus of his current tenure. He gave these comments to a local newspaper: " Mayor Hsu expressed that the 「Health Center」had to include physical and psychological advise, and emphasized that health was the most important for people.

Everyone should take good care and adjusted if any problem occurred in body and exercise more to maintain the better physical status. Meanwhile, he also hoped that every staff would be healthy because the biggest fortune is health. And 2008 is the year of health and safety in Tainan City, every staff in Tainan City Government would manage well to implement the concept of the healthy life and propagate for all the citizens.

Furthermore, Mayor Hsu said the high-density development especially in the industrialized cities would produce the social, sanitary and ecological problems which included high-density population, crowded traffic, tense life, unlicensed drinks and foods, polluted ecologic environment, violence and trauma…etc. These problems would progressively become the important factors that threatened the human health.It is settled up the milestone of the concept of the sustained city development in Tainan City to create the 「health, ecology, technology, culture」as the developmental objectives.

In the health aspect, we would promote the healthy life, improve the prophylaxis and health care, strengthen the sanitary education and propagation, and make effort in disease controlling as the objectives to check on the health status of the Tainan citizens."

I think I just found my new favorite public servant. It seemed a good omen to me rename my blog after Mayor Hsu's initiative - if I do nothing else, perhaps I can at least be healthy and safe.

It's been ten days since I've arrived and according to Dad, I've only three more days until my suprachiasmatic nucleus decides to pick up the vibe of these haunts so I can have a proper night's sleep. I suppose that may mark a kind of rite of passage on the long and fateful road to taiwanese immersion. To celebrate, I thought I'd share with you a few comic and surreal things about my experience so far.

Gretchen, whom you all probably know, has a fear of scuba-divers so pronounced that she will not swim if she sees any nearby. I've always been a little bit perplexed by this phobia, but this perplexity was often overrided by the ensuing self-congratulatory dialogue I would have with myself concerning my lack of irrational fears. Self-congratulatory dialogues no longer - upon arriving here, I found I was thorougly afraid of all the people in their funny gas-mask things they wear. The pollution here is not bad, but most people here are very health conscious and do not want to risk exposure to exhaust from adjacent scooters in the open air. Yes, yes, it's all very understandable, until you actually look at these people and realize you can't read their facial expressions or hear what they are saying. Most people don't say anything when they put their masks on, they just become these quiet, withdrawn, vaguely threatening presences all around you while you're just trying to get a snack at the local food stand.

I was troubled by this for a time, but eventually I just decided to let it go and assimilate as I could. My friend recently bought me a face mask and now I quite like it, but I still try not to look at myself in the mirror if I can help it.

A few other random little things: it is the garbage trucks, not the ice cream trucks, that play music on the streets and it's strictly western classical music.

The most popular tea in Taiwan is called Boba Naicha, which means mama's breast milk tea. Apparently the consistency of the black tapioca pearls explains the name.... This is really going to be my most freudian post (as you'll see below) I promise.

The kind of mindless way of greeting someone in Taiwan is chibao le meiyou? It is the "what's up?" equivalent but it literally means have you eaten/are you full? This always trips me up, because I know it's not meant to be meaningful but it just seems like such a specific question, that person must be interested. But it is often perfect strangers who ask me this, so I begin to wonder if they want to go to eat with me and I end up like a stammering fool, or one of those people who tells you their life story when you ask them "how's it goin'?"

Finally, a vaguely serendipitous thing happened to me today while I was secret santa shopping for my friends from our apartment/dormitory this afternoon. As some of you may know, I was, for a while after taking a class called "Darwin, Einstein and Freud," farely fascinated with psychoanalysis. One of my favorite bits of psychoanalysis was Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method. This "method" developed by Dali involved taking seemingly mundane situations, images, objects and animating them with the force of your own subjective interpretation. Thus, Dali, perceiving two coffee mugs next to a coffee pot, came to envision the image as a depiction of mother-son cannabilism though the connection is vague and "poetic" as he calls it. His most famous example of the method is in his book The Tragic Myth of Angelus, which is a whole book he wrote about a single impressionist painting called "Angelus" by Jean-Francois Millet which features a farming couple bent in prayer at dusk after a long day's work. Dali took the stillness of the painting to be a "static tension," the manifest content of the woman's subtle dominance over the man. The pitchfork stuck in the ground is taken to be an indicator of violence and the wheelbarrow of sexual brutality. I'm often attracted to inexcusably pedantic writing, and this book is no exception, so imagine my surprise when I went to a poster store looking for presents and in among vanities of Japanese pop stars I find, low and behold, our "Angelus" quietly, or perhaps passive-aggressively, tucked away! You can bet I bought two copies straight off, one for myself and one as a present to I don't know who yet.

As you might be able to guess, "Angelus" is the painting at the top next to yours truly.

As you might be able to see from the cityscape below, Tainan is not a city of high-rises. My friends tell me it is a "comfy" city, though in my red-eyed, world-weary state this is a bit hard to imagine. I think I am, however, beginning to grasp their sentiment.

It is a welcoming place. Yesterday, I happened upon a little tea store near my apartment. The owner invited me in and I inquired after some cheap oolong tea, which is my particular favorite. He said he had just what I was looking for - a variety grown in his very own plantation - and only $7 for two heaping cans of the stuff. I was already reaching for my wallet when he told me I should really try some first, so for the next 30 minutes we sat in his store drinking the tea and speaking about my first few days in the country. He introduced me to his family and told me that should I ever wish to share the ceremony again I should only come by and say hello.

If I had to compare it to a city, I might say Brooklyn. First off, people are about as fashionable as the brooklynites - everyone has those tight, angular haircuts that you see the Japanese youth sport in the U.S. Then, also, walking through the streets at night is a bit like walking through an american apparel ad - formless shirts and leggings, short skirts and plaid t-shirts. I always feel scandalously unfashionable, especially when dawning my much beloved long underwear to brave the 65 degree tainan winter nights. Beyond the fashion likeness, Tainan is also almost all little mom and pops and roadside stands - it has the organic feel of brooklyn. Think of ferns growing out of decomposing trees or birds recycling human hair for their nests: it is like that, life bursting at the seams, discombobulated but peaceful, qi-gong on busy sidewalks, temples in bicycle repair shops. The organismal nature of the city presses you to engage the intuitive and visceral faculties of understanding as much as the analytic. Perhaps this also has to due with my poor language skills, which I am more-and-more painfully aware of, but I suppose those will come.

anyway, I thank you few people for the comments you've posted - it is very rewarding to get feedback and to see your writing. I would also appreciate requests for certain topics and advice, as I am still trying to figure out how to approach this writing. ok, time to study food words so I can stop eating at 7-11 altogether (it's not just me, everyone does it).

"you've landed on your feet,

perhaps that means this is where you're meant to be right now." This from a 20-year old australian girl named Natasha, as she spirited me along to the immigration center in her friend's scooter. It has been a truly auspicious landing - "seemless" as I described it to my parents and very lucky I must remind myself.

With everything falling into place so effortlessly, I've gathered the confidence to peak out from the safe haven of the apartment complex and venture through the surrounding streets by bike and by foot. The warmth of this country allows for everything to occur in the open air - cooking, bathing, worship, etc. My gripe with being a cook was that you had to be inside all day and you never had any commerce with your customers, but here the cooks are really living the dream - open air kitchens right in the front of the restaurant, curbside, receptive to the chatter of pedestrians and the squawking of pidgeons.

The pictures are from the top of my apartment complex and also of a map that my landlord gave me. They are fairly indicative of my experience - this constant casting about for a point of reference, fighting the sensory overload for some semblance of order and balance.

til' next time,