Groomed In Fine Dirt

If you leave off heading out for a bike ride till the afternoon, beware.  There isn’t much of it.  You’d better be off and on your way by 4:00PM these days or it will all fall dark on you.  My younger daughter asked of help on her paper today around 3:00PM.  Well, of course.  And as I read it over, I confess I grew tired.  My eyes started to fall.  But I stood and I strode and sat back down again and finished off some corrections, which I sent back her way.  And like a toxin, that taste of sleep lingered in my shoulders.  Should I allow for that nap. Obviously, I need it.  Certainly, it will have done me well by later this evening when China’s up and the calls start coming.   But it’s three thirty.  If you don’t head out by 4:00PM you’re ain’t gonna do that ride.  The coffee cups half full.  The bed, the pillow.  I decided to let myself lie down.

 

Glad I did.  Next thing I knew I was moving fast and suddenly it became clear that I was going to ski down this slope I was on that was groomed in fine dirt.  But it didn’t matter one bit because tis was some sort of magic mountain dirt that operated for all the world like fresh powder and I turned here, and cut over there, have the time of my life on these bare, open dirt trails down some agglomeration of all the slopes I’ve ever sped down.  And then up ahead I cut once and twice but realized I wasn’t going to stop in time before I plowed hard into the chairlift disembarkation spot and I did, but I didn’t because that’s not what my unconscious mind wanted to have happen and somehow my conscious mind, who was never entirely absent up and pointed out that you weren’t going to really hit it, because this was a dream and then I was awake and it was 4:05PM.  I laughed and got ready.  What a wonderful way to legitimately rest, journeying off to an insane run down a dirty mountain on magic skis. 

We had a good reading of Kang Younghil this evening.  I read aloud ten pages in a sitting of “East Goes West” which is regularly a remarkable read.  He’s sizing up Puritans and Chinese in America and African Americans and he tells us more about the sad aesthete character of Mr. Kim.  The other night Mr. Kim referred to a Chinese poet in a Su Tung P’o, a.k.a. Su Dongpo a.k.a Su Shi. 

 

“In this poem a friend tells Su Tung P’o:  ‘You  and I have finished and gathered fuel on the river islets.  We have consorted with the fish and the prawns, we have befriended the deer.  Together we have sailed our skiff, frail as a leaf; in close companionship we have drunk wine from the gourd.  We pass through this world like two gnats in a husk of millet on a boundless ocean.  I grieve that life is but a moment of time and envy the endless current of the Great River . . .’  Listen to what Sun Ton P’o replied, ‘Do you understand the water and the moon?  The former passes by but has never gone.  The latter waxes and wanes but does not really increase or diminish.  For if we regard this question as one of impermanence, then the universe cannot last for a twinkling of an eye.  If, on the other hand, we consider it from the aspect of permanence, then you and I , together with all matter, are imperishable.  Why, then this yearning?”

 

Later, when I was back at my desk I searched for Su Tung P’o on Amazon and added a selection of poems translated by Burton Watson to my cart.  I have a few more books to go through on my current consideration of books on the natural world.  But then I will return for ritual China steeping.  It’s coming. 

 

 

 

Thursday, 11/19/20