Tehvitan Ibele

To which the old man replied

Eternity is short when love is destruction; moments expand, but not by much.  Flares and sparks, fires and flames, but time tempers all things.  The strength of love, then, is not to be measured by intensity, but rather by patience. 

When two souls breathe together, the earth does not shudder--it sighs.

As for the quote, I believe it is, "What is it that a lover cannot accomplish when resolution is on his side?"

And the young man said

It is a terrible thing to be in love.  When lovers are together, the romantic may speak of harmony and counterpoint, the sound of two souls breathing, forming a sort of gestalt perfection.  When they are apart, he may speak fondly of longing, but the reality of separation is far worse than mere dissonance.  A tamer word is passion, a truer one is fire.  It lives and breathes to burn and consume--in the darkest hours, it binds and suffocates; love is a many-tendriled thing. 

At the very least, it varies in its torture.  At times you feel the strands of your sanity unravel, inch by eternal inch, until breathless, mindless, you pray for sleep.  It is little wonder that lovers are mistaken for madmen.  It is as a wise woman asked, "What horror is a lover incapable of when he acts in the name of love?"

Shadows

Near the end of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Chihiro and her floating friend, No-face, board a train to a far place.  I say “far,” and not “faraway,” precisely because the latter, through its sound and rhythm, gives a false sense of lulling comfort, rocking, and swaying, while the former is truer—it mimics the reach of a sullen gaze, a length that stretches just beyond the bounds of the familiar, and just before the realm of the mystical.  The rest of the patrons are shadows.  Shades identified solely by the outline they carry (briefcase, hat, cane).  They are remnants of their former selves, now wandering in the shape of long-forgotten memories, etched into existence.  Echoes.

 

At the lowest point of arguably the most hopeless week of my life, this scene sprawled before me on my way to campus.  I laughed.  I find, in the darkest moments, it is all you have left.  I was on my way to a far place, a place that inflicted torture in the subtlest ways imaginable, five days a week, and I was paying them to do so.  It is truly rare to find an analogue that approaches even a semblance of Humbert Humbert in terms of implicating an audience.  I laughed.  And when I was sufficiently satisfied, when even the last of my laughter had run out, I found myself at the correct stop.

 

In the depths, the dark seems eternal.  It is not. 

Clarity

It is the quiet

gazing of the ancient moon

        in the cold, cold night

Surrender

"If it please the court, I wish to read a passage from the decedent's journal on the day of his disappearance."

Heads nod.

"Entry.  As she spoke, she remained composed.  I had walked out of the dimness of the library just moments before, and the glow of her face was quite like pale sunlight on tired concrete--a measured optimism tempered by experience and time.  She was a dancer.  You could tell by her dress and her height.  Her slender movements mimicked her figure which now formed her manner--not coquettish or shy, not loud or assuming, but rather a sort of controlled tension, waiting.  But when she smiled...it was a smile that would make you surrender..."

A chuckle from the stand.

"Yes?"

"A bit melodramatic for my taste is all."

"Hardly--it's simply a matter of thought and retrospection."

A heartier chuckle.

"Enlighten me."

"You were once a boy, I take it--no need to look so cross, merely rhetoric, merely rhetoric--but as such, you followed those that knew better.  And just as my father taught me by rote or example, I am sure he taught you: do not cry, do not show weakness, protect your own, and when you have grown enough, protect your family to the end so that one day your sons might live on to do the same.  An old virtue for an old time.  However, the idea still remains.  What men as our fathers see in the world is not far removed from a time when battle was glory, and glory, eternal.  The armor, the weapons, the arena, may all have changed, but the idea--the idea has not.  I cannot pretend to know precisely who the decedent saw, or what it meant, but it is clear that his conception of surrender is not weakness as our fathers imagined it; no, it is something else entirely--it is solace."

The school of law

I have lost any last semblance of capacity to socialize normally.  Well, it is important to qualify that anything that passes well in the realm of normalcy--weather, mood--should be vigilantly guarded against with every fiber of your creative being for the sake of productive and meaningful conversation, at which point my prior statement with which I wrote to intend an unfortunate state of being is in fact a transcendence to a higher plane of all things apt and fine and please let there be someone behind me, ready and able to end me.  Well.  As I was saying.  I have finally realized why marriage, or the seeds of...um, spark of marriage, tends to be found quite readily within graduate schools--you are physically unable to communicate with anyone outside your advanced field of study.  The other day, an innocent classmate of mine crossed my path to speak to my neighbor, and before she had started her second sentence (her first consisted of "Hi.") I stopped her.  I pointed at her ring and from the tip of my tongue burst forth, rather loudly, the name of a case that we had recently studied in Property.  Now, I expected, as a person of reasonable expectation and understanding, that she would turn to me with fearful eyes, hands thrust out to protect herself from the perfectly evil spirit that had clearly possessed my body that now threatened to pull her from reality into its own circle of hell where aspiring law novices spout statutes and precedents in an effort to scare each other out of their respective ivory towers into the comforting lava of demise below, but I was disappointed.  She smiled.  And we began a discussion of the case, the name of which I had essentially just yelled at her.  Though, from my sample size of one, I would say that this could be an isolated incident, except reason--yes, I have a bit left--would suggest that it would not be unlikely for this to be the phenomenon across the board, in any discipline, at any institution, between any two people. 

Or I am odd. 

Yeah, that's actually probably it.

A story from Yangzhou

So this fucker gets on our boat right. Sorry, let me establish a bit of context. My mother and I, after coming back from Beijing, set off on another train toward Yang Zhou, the place where my mother's family is originally from, where beauties and geniuses are bred—no seriously that is one of their ancient proverb cemented trademarks—for a two-day stay to visit her half-brothers and half-sisters. We have a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards the eldest sibling in the group of eight or so says that we must go on a river tour of one of the most famous waterways in Yang Zhou.

As we walked to the tour area, I noticed something haphazardly that would become important later—a middle aged man was clutching the hand of another middle aged man, saying that though he was poor, the next time they went drinking, he would buy two glasses of the best alcohol in the restaurant, saying that he could afford at least two glasses. After we boarded the boat for tour, we still had some thirty minutes left before it started, so we secured the window seats for better viewing.

So this fucker gets on our boat right. I didn't know it at the time, but he was a bonafide douchebag. Twenty minutes pass. As the staff is getting ready to embark, the lights go out, and with it, the air conditioning. As a collective wail forms from the crowd, our hostess, a pretty young thing of about twenty or so, tells us that it is due to the lightning storm over our heads (oh yes, I had forgotten, it was raining heavily). A man yells out that our money should be refunded if the conditions do not improve. Laughs ensue, followed by sarcastic agreement.

As time goes on, the heckling grows, until finally the lights come on, but they say that they lack sufficient power for the air conditioner, and we leave a few minutes after our posted time. An argument breaks out on deck, indistinct, impossible to hear from the inside—but a fight is brewing between the captain of the ship and a customer while the latter's friend trying to stave off an actual confrontation. The captain comes in, followed shortly by the two men, and it is then that I realize that those two men were the ones in the conversation I noticed forty minutes prior—the huskier of the two was not only the instigator in the potential fight, but upon hearing his voice, I realized he was also the one who was heckling the staff from the outset.

Our hostess begins her commentary for our boat ride. Immediately, the husky fucker starts yelling through his hands at her, yelling that he is going to complain to her managers and such about the maltreatment he suffered on this tour, in order to obtain a full refund and words of apology. The hostess ignores him and continues. Now. The fucker stands up and wrests the microphone away from her, and yells, “EVERYONE MAKE SURE TO LODGE A FORMAL COMPLAINT IN ORDER TO OBTAIN A FULL REFUND. WE HAVE NO AIR CONDITIONING BUT WE PAID FOR AIR CONDITIONING, SO MAKE SURE TO CALL TOMORROW, FREE OF CHARGE.” The hostess tries as calmly as possible to tell him that he is not allowed to do that, that she is in charge of hosting this tour, and that if he wants to make a complaint, he should and not bother the rest of the passengers.

This husky drunk is a child. At every comment she makes regarding the history of the river, or Yangzhou itself, he interrupts her and yells for her to sing for us, and other undoubtedly equally sexist and crude things, because in moments, she is crying between her sentences, attempting to continue her tour. He goes up and snatches away the microphone again, repeating his previous request to the audience.

At this point, I was ready. I mean, absolutely ready. Though my distance from the front was longer than ideal for an immediate effect, I had it planned out. The next time he would try and grab the mic, I would walk up, take the mic with my left hand, and push him with my right against the nearest wall. I would tell him that nobody wanted to hear him speak anymore, and that he must have had a poor education to be acting this way at forty or so, and that he should show some respect and sit down. If I saw any movement of his hands towards his pockets, I would knee him in the stomach and break his right wrist with my left foot against the ground—chances are he was right-handed. If he tried anything else, I would wait to see what he would pull out with his remaining hand. Given that he was drunk and rather slow, and at that point would be reeling from the pain of broken things, I could easily take whatever weapon he would draw, and present it as evidence for self-defense.

But he never got up again. As the trip continued, he sobered, and even apologized to the hostess for his behavior. As we disembarked, I placed my hand on the hostess' right shoulder and told her that I was sorry for what she had gone through, that she was strong to be able to finish the tour, and that the husky fucker had no sense of manners, respect, or decency. She wiped her eyes, thanked me, and asked me for my number for a counter-report in case the drunk actually did file a complaint.  Easily the worst boat ride I had ever been on.

Grandfather

I tell people I am fluent in Chinese. I can carry on a perfectly normal conversation with a mainlander for twenty minutes or so, but soon after, it becomes painfully obvious that it is not my first language. This is frequently pointed out to me by my relatives in China who also make sure to liken my capacity for writing and reading to that of a sophisticated high-schooler. These limitations rarely present themselves when I am in the US, but as one might imagine, they become readily apparent in the motherland.

 

Today I found a further limitation. My mother and I had woken early from a restless night after having taken the new high speed railway from Shanghai to Beijing in order to arrive on time to visit my grandfather—my maternal grandmother's third husband—who had been in the hospital on dialysis for the past year or so. As crass as this is going to sound, I know how to be comforting in English. I can speak on several different registers, switch readily between them, and add modifiers to produce a spectrum of tones. Standing in front of my grandfather, I found that my choices had become severely limited. For the first few minutes, I stood at his bedside, watching his eyes that seemed to plead for me to say something, anything, at all. Before I could oblige, my grandmother helped me, asking if I had remembered that winter many years ago when I visited Beijing and asked to sled on the frozen lake. My grandfather rented a sled for me and pulled me across the ice—it was one of the most beautiful winters I have ever experienced—we must have been out there for hours. That was ten years ago, when the inner rings of Beijing still had run down buildings, half-built skyscrapers as monuments to empty pockets and a lack of investors. Now some square meters in the fourth ring sell for up to one-hundred and thirty thousand RMB each, but that is another matter for another time. Of course I remembered—it was a memory that stuck. For the sake of my loving to hear myself explain phenomena, well, here goes; there are moments, frames within any given scene of our lives, from our past, that become imprinted so heavily, that they replay, repeating within daydreams, idle thoughts, reminiscence in the dark of night, constituting an active visceral conscious recollection. We can say that these memories are special, but truly, who knows how we choose these moments. Anyway, this was one of them. As I stood in silence, nodding at my grandmother's words while gazing half-sheepishly, half-longingly at my ailing grandfather, I could only come up several questions that I would utter a minute or so later—“are the days getting better?” and “does it hurt?” were met with “a little” and “not much.” As my grandmother beckoned me to sit, she told me how handsome I had gotten and began to tell us stories of her life during the era of Mao, as she is wont to do, while my grandfather smiled and watched. Those stories are perhaps for another day, but in-between each segment, she never failed to ask me if I remembered that day on the lake, one winter many years ago, when my grandfather took me sledding, pulling me firmly and steadily across the perfect ice.

 

Yes, of course.

 

It is surprising

how greatly a few simple words can affect us.  Perhaps it is merely a sign of age, or perhaps, lack of contact with those very few that make you better than you believed you were, but things get old.  I do not mean with the passing of time, but rather the passing of cycles.  It is words like routine, repetition, and grind, that seem unthreatening at first, but should be feared the most--"This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  Time.  Or more explicitly, the passage of time.  There are these moments that we remember in our childhood, certain scenes seemingly randomly chosen from a multitude of others, that play in our minds at random intervals, that we remember with increasing clarity.  Yes, the loss of memory is very likely due to age, but this illustrates an important point, which is that the passage of time is fluid, compressing and expanding depending on the number of moments that define us within any given timeframe.  Perhaps all of this leads to the incredibly loaded concept of apathy.  But this is not about apathy.  This is about how several words can reignite the soul.  Several words, wonderfully timed and almost lost in this old old world, that can give one of the rarest things in life: purpose.

Darkness

As he felt the darkness wash over him, the light draining from the cave walls as he moved forward, a simple understanding came upon him--he was alone.  Within himself, he slowly built up this single idea, that he was not only alone in the cave, but that he was alone in the world.  The thing about fear is, it is at its worst when you accept its pertinence to your current situation.  An example: if I sit with you on one of the many flowing meadows of New Zealand, staring into the infinite blue of the sky and the Pacific, enjoying a nice large drink of strawberry and crushed ice--also imagine a flock of sheep wandering nearby bleating almost inaudibly--and when we gaze longing at the one long cloud strewn across the vastness of the heavens after exchanging a quiet smile that bonds us deeper than we care to explain or tell, I turn back to you and tell you that you will die alone.  You probably have some living relatives, perhaps a happy family of your own, maybe a domestic animal or two.  You have probably fulfilled a number of ambitions and in doing so made a few lifelong friends in the process--perhaps that is how you met me--but you will die alone irrespective of how many people you surround yourself with.  "Well," you might say "that's all very much for a lovely afternoon then," and frown slightly, half-smiling since our surroundings still take the edge off, but that is precisely it--you can handle it because it has no immediate bearing.  In the darkness, when you are alone, you ruminate, brew, and extrapolate until you can think of nothing else but how true it is, that you will die alone, and maybe here is the place, and perhaps soon is the time. He stretched his eyes open as wide as he could.  It made no difference in the belly of the cavern.  Soon, he became so absolutely engrossed with this single idea, he felt that he was on the verge of madness, clinging so hard to it until it cut--until he bled.  The great irony of his situation was that in the sole scrap of knowledge he now held, he was mistaken.