A Sunday of Faith

Sunday here in Beijing.  But it isn’t really Sunday.  I was up early to take my kids in to school.  The nation has decreed that Saturday and Sunday are workdays, to justify the prolonged vacation provided as National Holiday, next week.  Weekend snatching happens regularly around here, throughout the year and it always disturbs me more than I would otherwise think it should.  It’s logical enough.  Move the days around a bit and provide for a contiguous, uninterrupted period of rest.  But don’t mess with Sunday.  Sunday is, sacred.

Certainly all Abrhamic faiths and the moderns they’ve spawned concur on at least one day of rest a week.  I don’t want blue laws or special plates to eat off of but mandatory work for all on Sunday summons up the seventeen year-old subversive in me.  It feels clumsy and all-too human, perhaps like Day Light Savings, which never makes any sense back home, or official Beijing Time three time zones west in Urumqi.  Mind you, I want my Saturday too.  Like the bumper sticker said: “Unions:  the people who brought you the weekend.”  Sing it brother.  “Rise, ye workers from your slumber . . . ” Back off from my weekend.  This is something I ascribe faith to.

“Ultramarine” a deeper, more enigmatic shade of blue, from the 1957 Hank Mobley session “Hank Mobley and his All Stars” with the less than flattering snap of Hank on the cover, sounds out now, unassailable, on my sacred Sunday at home.  Milt Jackson’s mallets grinding away confidently at the semi precious lapis lazuli bars, releasing all that painful, irrefutable pigment.  The dust from the Sahel and the malarial warm waters of the Bight of Benin squaring off for ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio there in Hackensack on January 13, 1957 which, my Google search tells me was, (no shit) a Sunday . . . Brothers were working.

I’d tried to establish a crossroads yesterday of tawny silt settling in perpetuity beneath the salty spray of Pacific breakers.   And 尘埃落定.  Source civilization indisputably in the center and its tendrils certainly reaching but unable to clasp the resilient periphery.  My contention: that before we reckon with hegemony we’ll first confront regional harmony.  How to orchestrate a regional reconciliation?  Spare me the fumes that it is all impossible.   Complicated things will become clear in the end.

Reading Cormac McCarthy’s  “Blood Meridian” on a friend’s recommendation.  Cruel, dry, soporific, there was a scene I read in a noisy setting last night.  A cast of Mexican jugglers and Spanish tarot cards.  Black cowboys, young white loners and everyone armed.  No one save the juggler with much to say.  And it brought to mind Dylan in Juarez peering out at Desolation Row, wary at the homicidal big top.  McCarthy’s got a dry, sandy world.  The Apache and were a yellow, arenaceous people, swamped and diluted by peoples from across the sea.

“We left out with the first light up the little wooded draw.  We were on the north slope and there was willow and alder and cherry growin out of the rock.  Just little trees.  The judge would stop to botanize and then ride to catch up.  My hand to God.  Pressin leaves into his book.  Sure I never saw the equal to it and all the time the savages in plain view below us.  Ridin on that pan.  God I’d put a crick in my neck I couldn’t keep my eyes off of them and they were a hundred souls if they were one.” [p. 133]

Half way through it appears most assuredly to be a continental novel.  No ocean in sight.  But New World Americans of whatever stripe found it hard to forget their people’s seminal journey over the water.  Pushy Americans, unerringly pushing themselves across to the other side of the continent.  And with ‘only’ the Rockies and the Sierras to contend with, not the Himalayas, so she stands today, sea to shining sea. 

Qin Shi Huang was chalky fellow from the loess interior of Shaanxi.  In 221 B.C. the final independent kingdom of Qi with its capital near modern day Zibo, fell to the overlord.  The peninsular turtlehead that is contemporary Shandong, including the soil that my wife hails from, made up the former Qi kingdom. Having conquered all the known world Qin Shi Huang went about touring his realm.  He climbed Mount Tai as Mao would do some 2200 years later.  But it was the sea that truly impressed the tyrant’s tyrant.  He apparently stood and stared dumfounded when he first confronted the boundless water lapping. 

Somewhere, out there, beyond what is conquerable, lies the elixir of life.  Three missions set off to find the mystic Penglai Mountain.  No one was brave enough to return and hip the emperor to the eternal verity: there ain’t no magic potion and sooner or later, time’s up.  Some say a captain Xu Fu and his crew of hundreds made it all the way to Japan.  What did they find?  We don’t know because unlike Ulysses they never made it home.  And the continental epics, depicting continental battles came down through the ages, journeys traveled to the west, not the east, following threads of great learning that even the celestial kingdom could not explain. 

And if we believe Mao’s bodyguard, Qian Yanchi the helmsman himself, unable to sleep, high on barbiturates, waded out into the breakers at Beidaihe to do battle with the Bohai Sea one stormy evening, much to the consternation of the praetorian staff.  Did he have his predecessor in mind when he stood there flailing, yelling at the salty surge?  Did he think the sea would bend to his will?  Perhaps it was enough to know that the sea wasn’t going to take him down.  I planted my feet in the Atlantic this summer and held my nephew in my arms and dared the sea to knock us over too.