Full moon last
night. Driving along the road heading
north it looked enormous. But when I
parked the car and faced another direction it was dwarfed somehow by buildings
and distance. There’s a Mid-Autumn moon
festival. There has to be some
recognition of the next time the full moon returns. Chinese farmers must have celebrated the moon
goddess Chang’e on a monthly basis, didn't they? Quick check on line, a question to the wife,
it doesn’t appear that there is any blistering significance in the Chinese
lunar calendar to the “moon after Mid-Autumn-moon.” But she is undeniably beautiful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang'e
I had to get up in the middle of the night to get my
daughter some water and, walking around, the whole house was lit up. Everything outside could be seen. And this could only happen if the sky was
clear and there was no pollution. Chang’e must have had a hand in this. All is 明月清风[1]
Late night walking in the ghostly light, rising, sleeping,
rising again I happened on some bizarre dream recall. I’d sent my wife some postcards that had only
just now arrived. There they were all
there on the marble top. But I don’t
have a marble top. The sturdy brown
marble-top is back home at my mother’s house.
Here, see, I wanted to show you I was thinking about you on the first
day of this trip that never happened. Pink and lavender pastel photos of some
Italian villa set in Indonesia. I
haven’t been to either place in twenty years.
And then the postcards become a series of photos with a band playing and
it is very important to consider this, the beginning of a trip that never
happened.
Later, I was up in some loft with Lawrence Olivier as
Crassus from the movie, Spartacus. We
had some kind of a duel where threw darts at one another. He got me.
I gallantly suggested I’d pass on my second toss. What’s to be said? I’m sure a dart is just a dart. I watched that movie nine months ago with
the kids. What’s Olivier popping up for,
here, tonight, for this full moon evening? Crassus channeled to me on the night illumined by Chang’e?
Now I’m just back from a drive of my daughter off to school
again in the morning. Six-thirty it is
we roll. En route we laughed about a
trip her school is planning to send classmates to live with a families in
Florida for two months. She thought
about going. But wouldn’t it be silly? “Hello.
Welcome to America. So you’re
from Chi - Na?” “Nah, I’m from New York, but I was kind of
born in San Francisco, I live there, but like . . . ” “Hey, this kid isn’t from Chi-na!”
She was a few minutes late and she ran up to the gate so
swiftly. I always wait and watch till
she makes it in the door. And she always
waves just before she does. The little
girl, taller than her mother at the age of twelve, running. A young woman now.
I rode home and played Thom Yorke’s new effort Atoms for
Peace, and their ‘Amok’ album. The song,
I had on was “Dropped” and now that I was alone, I played it very loud. The post, post-modern production rattled the
speakers and it seemed appropriate early morning full moon music. I’ve a few friends who speak about the songs
reverentially, but after six months, I still find myself trying to enjoy it. Sometimes the lyrical cliché’s are just
impossible for me to get around. The
song “Default” keeps repeating “the will is strong, but the flesh is weak”,
there’s a song called “Executioner, Judge and Jury” that repeats this phrase
over and over. And another “Black Swan”
that repeats “cause this is fucked up, fucked up” over and over. I recall one of George Orwell’s, six rules of
writing was to avoid cliché.[2] Of course the sixth rule is that you get to
break any of the first five whenever you want, but not every other song. Well, not to my two ears.
By the time of the return ride the heat was finally blowing strongly
out hot from the cars’ vents. Turn to
the main rode and wow. There was Chang’e,
off to the right again. She’d arced the
sky over night and was dropping fast in full, irresistible, morning glory. I pulled the car over to watch her disturbing
progression toward the horizon. What
else can you do? I tried to snap pictures,
but the moon looks silly and small, dismissible, there in the small glass frame. Looked up back from the screen, over to the
trees, and she's too big, like the view from another world, with perhaps more
than one moon. There’s nothing you can
do to capture this or stop it from happening.
Off in the distance I could hear morning bugle music. A familiar sound in China from twenty years
ago. The sound that used to play out
from every Chinese work unit and every Chinese campus. A ubiquitous call to arms. A nation, on alert. Another example of the ‘modernity” I’d
written about two days back. Every
person indoctrinated then with the same morning taps. No one
a civilian, in that world.
Some where, today, at 6:45 AM some group was being called to
rise with this shrill demand. Was it a
local work unit? A team of migrant
workers somewhere in a dorm? Kids at
some school?
Home, typing, and the moon’s light is no longer relevant in
the bright morning glare. Chang'e is gone. People rising now, at this hour, didn’t even
know she was here. I’m going go out and
talk to her again, in about eight hours time, when she returns.
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