An Easy Life

Why aren't the things I like about this world concentrated in the English-speaking world?  That would have made my life a lot, or if not "a lot," somewhat easier.  But an easily life?  No, thank you.  Yes, thank you, but no.

I am Longing for William Inge's Plays

Faster than the wind,

Greener than the wild evergreens on the plains,

Distracted as we may be,

We make a stand

Against thin air

Giving Thanks

Stars, I have not seen you for months

I can barely imagine your presence.

Do you exist?  Do I?  Surely we do.  But how?

Heavenly and banal thoughts, all well-mixed, on this Thanksgiving Day.

A Note to an Aspiring Academic or Artist

You cannot become an academic (or an artist of any kind) if you cannot stand other people pointing their fingers at you and calling you a failure.  You are not, in fact, a failure (as long as you are alive), but in some people's eyes, you have unquestionably failed at life, and you should be okay with that.  You should even be able to befriend those kinds of people.  If you are not okay with people calling you a failure, and if you are unable to befriend even the people who really believe that you have failed at life, then maybe you should start looking for a different path.


No, do not start looking for another path.  If you have fallen into this path, it is your path.  And it is, as the old saying goes, what you make of it.

A Dance

Darkness

You do not understand me

To Complicate

"Simply, simply," someone said or wrote.  I do not want to simply.  I refuse to simply.  I would like to complicate instead.  Once I wrote somewhere, "Complicate till you drop."  There shan't even be any "till" from now on.  My island's name stands for complications (and never completeness).  What does your island's name stand for?

I would like to create a set of complication tables.  What will it look like?  I do not yet know, but trees in the wind know.  They know that air is never empty; it is usually very full of things.  They know that the sky is never blue; it is almost always a combination of blue and some other color.  For them, today is not a day; it is a date and only a date.  A day is something much more complex.

I know now that I do not yet know what the process of complication actually involves or means.  At this time, I still have no other choice but to drop.

An Anti-Alphabetical Phase

Full of longing, and the alphabet cannot express all that I am feeling.  The alphabet forces me to leave all typography behind, except for a bare minimum, which is egregiously far from enough.  How the trees sway, and yet the letters are not adequate to capture the sunlight glinting and glancing in ways no human or animal eyes can.  I pray this be just a phase.  The alphabet is, and will be, whether I like it or not, my last straw.

Change

Unable to read or write, or

Remember pain, I float

In mute silence

Unable to sit or sleep,

The days leave me behind, while

Fatigue and forgetting take their toll:

Flowers, petals, and tongues.

Seven Lines of Cascading Ambivalence

In the dwindling spaces of stars

Lost to the wind

Trees stand still, leaves dark and sparkling

From across a distance,

I am watching the abandoned balloons

Disappear

Vacuously, anxiously, tremendously

On OWS

New York, New York:

The Guggenheim Museum is a spiral or two away

On the Waterfront, there are no ducks; just vividly blue waves crashing

A few blocks down, a leafy garden in the sun,

And a dry-cleaner with lots of pastel-colored wire hangers hanging from cacophonous, metallic racks.

Do the crowds really know what Wall Street stands for?  I don't think so.  I think they are clueless, to be exact.  For one thing, Wall Street doesn't stand for greed.  It stands for dishonesty, period.  Even if greed might characterize Wall Street, that isn't the problem.  Greed can consume and destroy the greedy person by bringing him or her incredible amounts of stress, but it usually won't harm others.  Dishonesty is the real culprit.  The financiers who are responsible are unwilling to take responsibility not because they are greedy, but because they are dishonest.  And you know what, dishonesty provides a defense mechanism to those who practice it.  That's what dishonesty is for.  No human being inherently likes to be dishonest.  It is only out of the need to protect oneself.  So don't point out their greed.  That's superfluous!  Point out their dishonesty.

Also, don't say "Occupy" blah-blah-blah.  What a weak and negative word they've chosen for themselves; I am so full of contempt for them native English-speakers.  You can only occupy a toilet or a colony.  Why not "Overthrow Wall Street"?  In modern history, aristocrats have been overthrown; kings and queens, too, and colonial governments as well.  Their grounds, palaces, estates may have been occupied by revolutionaries, but that was just a means to an end.  Overthrowing was the goal.  The word "occupy" boggles my mind so much that I am beginning to wonder if this movement is being backed by Washington and Wall Street banks to allow the poor, poor masses to vent their anger, and to mislead them into scapegoating a toilet that doesn't exist.  That way, Washington and Wall Street will never take the real blame.  How smart of them, if this is what they are actually up to (which I doubt, but still - there is always a possibility).

With deepest love and admiration I say: America, you are such a silly country.  You talk so fondly of the Arab Spring, and yet - how many dictatorships have you supported throughout history in the Arab world alone?  But I do not blame you.  Victors never have to repent.  Even if they have to be dishonest.

Travel in Images

Compri's ten Seoul pictures, for the sky in you.

Swirling in Mint

Longing for mint tea, I return on the Square

Searching for lemon drops, I gather my tea cups in the rain

Fly away, tear drops

Till the hour you return

A Snail's Day

A snail made its way across the window pane and it was content.  There were no rainbows in the sky--just clouds.  It had stopped breathing in fumes long ago.  Its house was covered with leaves, just leaves.  Old leaves and new ones, mixed and tossed.  Water was everywhere, and the earth was a soft bed.  Then it began to pour.  A mudslide swallowed the house with all the leaves.  Seven hours later, the snail emerged from under the mud alone, just slowly, and the sun was shining.

Plum Wine

Gramange sang:

"Nothing is pure

Nothing is barren

Life has a way of effectuating change

So don't give up"

A ripe plum fell off a branch and smashed into the earth.

Rain, Far and Near

Popping away in dreams

The sounds, the waves, people's faces

Strike a chord, in a warm fuzz

Rain covers the ground in three droplets

Coating the grass with translucent chalk

Leaving day and night behind

Trouble

* Exegesis: "Trouble" (Cat Stevens)

I think I know exactly how an establishment, an organization, a person's conscience, degrades itself.  It is by a toxic mixture of hubris, ignorance, and false reputation.  But it is largely through ignorance, which often is largely innocent in nature.

It is hilarious when an ignorant person pretends to parse out wisdom, and deeply troublesome when two people who are barely conversant in a topic congratulate one another on their feigned intelligence.  It is disappointing when parents do not let their children grow on their own - it is more cruel then bending the stalk of a growing lily and trying to tie it into a knot.  It is embarrassing when teachers do not know their students.

Tears flow freely from the two unseeing eyes set deeply in my heart, but perhaps this is nothing more than the effect of a fast-approaching autumn.

Myopia Alert

Lorraine sang: "Perhaps you will not understand how ponderous my heart gets, and how glazed my eyes, at the thought of my own future, and just thinking about myopia."  But her song went largely unnoticed because of its muddled message.  Lorraine changed her name and was gone.

In another corner of the globe, Terrine said: "Today I received enough myopia on my skin to turn it bright purple."  Her color did not seem to change, but the terribly exhausted tone of her voice made me feel sorry enough to mutter, "Terrine, oh Terrine."  And someone ate Terrine the day after!

Outside the Solar System, myopia had its own kingdom spread over four point three six seven light years.  It had over a million colonies universe-wide.  What if the kingdom itself expanded to more light years?  Horror!  Myopia kills.  And it seemed to be infecting the entire universe.

But perhaps, I was dreaming.  Was I?

Anti-Exoticism

Before I go join an anti-nuclear power protest parade,

I would like to take part in an anti-exoticism march.

Exoticism is a mode of thought that overemphasizes distance, most of all.

An exotic place is somewhere very far away;

An exotic thing has come from afar;

An exotic person was born in a faraway land;

And an exotic scent has more power to transport than a normal scent.

As if going as far away as possible made one superior.

It doesn't.

What matters is precisely where one goes; precisely which routes one takes.

Far or near, the exact location counts.

Exactitude is a precious gift.

Remember: distance is always measured from a reference point.

And that reference point could be placed anywhere and everywhere.

Zebra Colors

"All of this is all too foreign to me," I cried out, staring at the rows of Chinese characters which were extremely pleasing to my eyes.  They, the characters, were like music, but even grander.  Yet perhaps it was so because I did not comprehend them entirely.  I saw them as droplets of sheer magma, exploding with a curiously warm and silent glare.  At other times, I saw them as pure ice, glinting under the weak sun, and wavering like black leaves.  If the alphabet is organismic, Chinese characters are geological.  Caves and mountains, you name them.  The galaxy.

A Batik Painting

There is a jungle above my computer screen

It is green and red

The fronds of foliage turn and turn

And the sun is nowhere to be seen

Gender Trouble and More

Never say "you're not girly enough" to a girl, or "you're not manly enough" to a boy.  What is "enough," anyway?  But regardless of what people say or don't say, the most horrifying thing is for a girl to think, "I'm not girly enough," and for a boy to think, "I'm not manly enough."  What use is it when one strangles oneself with a preconceived rope of baseless assumptions?

Pink is not for girls, and blue is not for boys.  A quiet person is not anti-social, and a loud person isn't necessarily social.  Not all birds fly; not all flying birds are the same kind of birds, although their differences also do not follow any black-and-white patterns.

What?  This is the world.

Grins

Sometimes, I am sadder than sad.

Despair is a boundless feeling.  It is akin to an incredible sense of security.  Not comfort, but security.

And I am afraid of being too busy, and becoming a headless robot.  By now, I have learned that one misses a whole lot when one speeds up too much, or spends too much time torturing oneself.

English Is

My two favorite expressions in English...

"Good for you."  A positive statement, without getting cloying.  It's far superior to saying, "That's great." or even "Good job." (the latter never really exists as a spoken expression anyway, except in children's talk).

"Why is there so much crap on my desk?"  I have always thought that "crap" sounds like something tasty.  Like "crab."  And being the little Japanese person that I am, "crap" almost always reminds me of "clap," or something festive like that.

Poplar Avenue

"I hate it when people think popularity is everything.

It's not.

It is not nothing, but it isn't everything, either.  Didn't we learn this in high school, or even earlier?

This is why I dislike votes, most of all.  What are votes?

Votes are never individual; they are never about you.

Your vote is always about everyone else, except yourself.  How could this be?

No matter how much altruistic elixir I force myself to drink, I will always die an individualist.

Who cares?  I care,"

Compri said.

Day's End

At the end of the day, all I want is laughter.  All I am looking for, ultimately, is laughter and music.  Even I knew that, but I dare not admit it to anybody, lest I be thought of as decadent.

However, I did say, "At the end of the day."  Before the day's end, there will be toil, unhappiness, and discomfort--plenty of them.

Because laughter, once it has burst open and is in the air as vibration, is universal, like music....  Even plants, especially plants, will feel it, and rocks and water, too.

Fear

Dearie and I were talking, and Dearie said: "Is it solitude, or just an overwhelming sense of fear?  Solitude is beautiful, but fear is uncalled for!  Fear is still different from caution, and helplessness a much more benign sensation than fear.  When do you experience fear?  I, for one, experience it when I know for certain that the person in front of me, whom I believe to have known very well, begins to act unpredictably.  It is, most likely, a sign of my own weakness.  After all, I am so weak, and I cannot be proud of that.  And yet, sudden bursts of fear are not just about my own weakness.  They also embody what I might call the world's total potential for misunderstanding --and alienation.  It's in the air, and is also in my head - oh yes, I can feel it - and it frightens me so much that I begin to feel as though everything was a flat pie."  I asked Dearie if she meant a "lie," not "pie."  She was sobbing so hard now that she did not respond, yes or no.

In the Night

In the likeness of a quiet mirror,

I sing

Silent songs that are but flashes of light

In the darkness of a moonless night,

I travel

Across plains lit up by the still, crystal air

Dare You, Dare Me

O masters of the universe,

Who complain, very kindly, of Tapan's cultural insularity

Have you ever thought that the very insularity of

Your own mind

Is also partly to blame?

O global citizens,

How willing are you

To listen to what the insular culture is truly saying

And to listen

To what your own glob-insular heart tells you now?

Summer

The sounds of cicadas do not leave my ears

I must tire myself tirelessly

To forget

But the sounds of cicadas cannot, and do not, leave my ears

A Didactic Moment

What is self-confidence?  Or just confidence?

Humility ought to serve as the root;

Gratitude as the leaves;

But in the end, what makes the clouds billow and the rain splatter

Is mirth: o mirth, the Muse of all things!

The Past-less, Living We

Sometimes we cling onto our past too tightly

But the past never becomes past within a person's lifetime

So keep building

Until that day when our past, present, and future

Finally pass into the realm of stones and fossils.

Change

I believe in change

And I have always believed in change

But what needs to change

Is for everyone in the world, each in his or her way,

To realize that the world may never change, for better or for worse

So that we can begin to hope

Over and over again: in cycles.

The world has always been changing

And the change is not getting any faster

Than what our faulty and ignorant histori-meter tells us.

What dealing with change means, at least for me,

Is coming to terms with the fact that we cannot change

And drawing a big picture in order to see that fact.

Remember: change is relative, and subject to whims of the skies.

A Snobbish Song

The Aha-moment comes and goes

Like carousel seats

Or the flashing silver in mirrors

O le trompe-l'oeil, time, and philosophy

(Courtesy of Art Effects)

(Photo by Compri in Iwate, Japan)

Morbid Dreams

Does art flourish particularly in times of collective crises, especially when the collective crises have psychological, non-empirical dimensions that are somehow more significant and pressing than the purely materialistic demands?

More unrelated than related to the above: I have been to Oslo and am shaken by the news of all the violence the city experienced on Friday.  All of us need to be confronting the violence within each of us - constantly.  (Ah, well, some of Munch's paintings may have lots to teach us.)  As much as I despise the perpetrators of any violent acts, we have an imperative to trace and understand, very carefully, why and how the perpetrators chose violence.  We do not need to sympathize with them, but we also do need to put ourselves into their shoes - because none of us are truly innocent.

Pigeons

I parted with humbleness a million years ago, when my fifth ancestor was born.  But tomorrow, I shall be reuniting with humbleness.  Will it forgive my very sporadic e-mails and my excuses for not writing?  O humbleness, I have missed you terribly, and yet I cannot believe I have lived for so long away from your side, in corners of the globe that are not particularly humbleness-friendly.   But o Earth, you are not a humble planet, are you?  Your skies are too clear, and your water too good to taste.  Tomorrow,  I shall return to the muddy pool and reunite with humbleness, but I know the muddy pool is only sold on Fifth Avenue, Ginza, and Orchard Road.  (Why, you may ask.  The muddy pool is a luxury!)  I will most likely be too lazy to head out to any of those places, and two of them are beyond my empirical, if not imaginative, reach in any case, at least for the time being.  So is my reunion with humbleness to be postponed to a day after tomorrow, or even later?  Only the pigeon knows.

Letters

A world filled with letters, just letters.  Letters as in letters in the alphabet, but also as in thank-you letters, love letters, and such.  Will there be envelopes, too?  No!  There shall not be any envelopes.  Only letters.  Just letters.

Puffs

At a later hour, at this late hour, as at any late hour, but no, at this particular late hour,

The quenching humor that meanness - o flashes of anger mixed with explosive laughter - can inspire

Fascinates me beyond measure.

Music can do that, but words, o stinging words, and violently waving arms

All combine to stage a theater after theater of cruel shows of verbal acrimony:

At this later hour, all combine to explode in a puff of sugar and salt.

Nachtmusik

In the blank corner of my eye, a feeling of doom resides

Helplessness without pain, choking without panic

A moon, the moon, creates a halo above the forest, a forest

As I face a baby, a cat, or both, and their moonlit eyes

Muddy Path

Fumbling for anger

I stop short:

My being teeters on a balance, and the balance keeps sliding

In favor of an almost unattainable ideal.

But this shall be how I live

And breathe, at least for the time being.

Solilo-kwayteow: Hunger at Midnight

O narratives, they do hate me so.  Or so I thought.  Memories, o memory, thou art in fragments, or even worse, in shards.  Rags and shreds: non-recyclable, except as rags and shreds.

Will you sustain me, o memory in shards and shreds, will you remember me?  You are not a person, though; you are a region in the universe where dust comes and goes, va et vient, o traffic!  No lights, please.  Only sounds, and only sounds of grass shaking, and of roots speaking underground, under the hills.

Hungry for memory, and memories, you do comfort me so.

Rain on Hold

Transformative light is all my muted vocal chords can pronounce

At this late hour

When flower petals sink to the bottom of a bottomless pit

And still they rise:

Mist and rain, wind and thunder.

We have forgotten to walk

Instead we speed past, we speed past

Ever more slowly than we can ever see

Game Theory

Jurong said: "It takes more courage to do something badly than to do it well.  In America, I would never have dared to do anything badly.  Never on purpose, at least.  But now I wish to fail all I can.  Failing is the sculptor's chisel."

Turong said: "Now you're talking.  But actually, you are hardly alone.  The excitement of failure is incomparable and compulsive.  This at least partially explains the proliferation of contests, competitions, man-made challenges, oh games!"

Jurong said: "Ho-hum.  But games are games.  Perhaps you have never experienced a real failure?"

Turong said: "The real failure is when one fails to recognize the levity in all failures - and realize that failures are never final, and that games are, in theory, never-ending."

Silences

The beginning of poetry is song

And poetry the beginning of song;

The end comes with the breeze

When the breeze stops, the song ends;

But the music never stops

In the shifting rays of silence

That surround us

"En sourdine" (Muted) Verlaine/Faure/Souzay

Tomorrow

Exodus and ecstasy are one and the same thing

Before you have left, you have already arrived;

The excitement of arrival always arrives before one actually arrives.

Moss and pepper, you, too, are one and the same, though just for tonight and tomorrow.

Transparent Light

Happiness gapes at me from behind a watermelon rind

Sleep awaits, but here, a little sweetness

Pupal

Deep in my throat I know a pupa lives and breathes

But that pupa refuses to stand for transformation, growth

I don't know what it wants to be or do

No idea at all;

I only know it likes the sound of rain and the smell of wet leaves

On a cold-warm night

Belonging and Language

In the tight, tight space of my unruly mind, I have always talked, to myself and to others, at times out loud but often voicelessly, about what belonging, or a sense of belonging, could mean and do. And I knew, or thought I knew, that language always stood in some relation to one's sense of belonging and its opposites, which may or may not include various kinds, and modes, of drifting without end.

When you have decided to drive your stake down into the soft, brown earth of a language - notwithstanding my incredulous belief that a singular "a" can crown such a divisive word-concept as language - the world takes on a certain new form. You begin to dream that the world has become multipolar, with you as one of its many minor, but integral, poles. The world is not one, as it never was and will be, but as a preserver of one language out of thousands, or millions, that exist now and have ever existed - and to clarify, albeit in an abstract manner, a language is not a bounded territory or necessarily a community, but a rolling wheel, or perhaps a pair of rolling wheels, that can travel over distances, far and near, and make crisscrossing marks on the grass - you know, with the spokes of your language set close to your beating heart, that you are verily close to being able to participate in the construction of a polyglot world, where understanding will necessarily almost always take place in something other than the language, or languages, that you have adopted as your own.

The Imperative to Rehearse

Talking to a wall: you know the wall will not respond to you. But first, you will need to know that it's a wall. The wall is an inanimate object, and as much as it could protect you, and as much as you might look at, caress, think about it all day and all night long, the wall will not reply to you, nor will it think of you in any way. But you know, too, that you are rehearsing when you find yourself in front of a wall. Right now, you may be talking to a wall, and only to a wall, but soon enough, you will be talking to live things and people, who will, in some way or another, respond to what you are saying and have said.

It is always both too early, and too late, to give up.

In a Strange City

Meandris said: "Get used to solitude. Now."

Meandris continued: "Or else, how will you live?"

Oreo asked: "But is life necessarily so lonesome?"

Meandris did not reply.

An Intercepted Message

(The copyright rests with Compri.)

Dear Friends,

I've consciously chosen not to think about the nuclear situation too much, for my own mental health...but perhaps this is a bad sign. Maybe I should be protesting in the streets to demand that Tepco immediately borrow the robots from France AND bury the reactors under a giant concrete dome immediately (Tepco will go bankrupt, but who cares! it deserves to go bankrupt). Hmm..it's a thought.

I'm actually going to Vancouver tomorrow for an ACLA (American Comp Lit Assoc) conference, planned long before. I'm still on page 3 of my paper/presentation...and it's hard for me to concentrate but I'll need to finish this somehow tonight. I will be back in Tokyo next Tuesday. When I'm back, I will think about taking it to the streets (I'm half-joking, half-serious...) and let's have a meal together.

Warmly,

Compri

Three Lines

Illuminate, in the name of a candle

Surround, as a leafy afternoon might

Run, in the happiest moments of life

To Hope

to hope

In a time of crisis

Spilling Dua

Have you not heard of the compass, or seen a weather vane

On a roof?

Let us not ignore the thousands and millions of people who have traveled

Before us, eastward and westward, between north and south

In search for another world, old or new.

Their travels have shaped, whether you like it or agree with it,

The various connotations to which the compass needle must submit.

There are also eastward and westward winds as well as ocean currents,

That have defined trade routes and many a

Romance.

Alongside nature, there is history that spills out

Into our unconscious: footprints in the rain.

Spilling

How can you group together all the jostling and almost exploding

Nations within nations within nations into a hollow concept such as

East Asia?

Where is east for you? and west?

Up and down just mean sky and earth, for me, and

East and west just mean sunrise and sunset, for you, too

Because everywhere, there is sunrise and sunset.

Why, the milk spills over and over:

No time to cry.

Spring

Am I allowed to blame the pollen allergies for the fatigue:

Eyes glazed, phone uncharged, and incredible boredom?

Until the day I met you, pollen,

Boredom, I knew I had never experienced.

The reeling, lilting fatigue feeds my unfounded reluctance

For medical treatment.

And there, again, the headache makes me spin

Until I am so unsure of myself

I have just barely enough strength to sit and stare

At cold and unflinching spring.

Varnish

Drops in the ocean:

How many e-mails did I compose today?

émail : enamel or varnish, in French.

Did I manage to varnish my life, with my e-mails?

O useless questions, you are multitudinous

Like stars in the universe times the number of my e-mails

My backbone aches under the weight of bits and pixels

Lighter than dust, but so bright my eyes can never rest

Swing Dua

His whole being teeters

From sunset to sunrise

The swing in the park remains empty, though

And what teeters is just the invisible pendulum of timeless time

His whole being is never whole; it is simply full of being

No single swing can hold him - he is much too restless

Only amorphous things, such as time and being

Are allowed to teeter-oh-teeter

Fruit Opera

Mr. Lime sang, jovially: "How much you identify with a tangerine is a matter of taste. Tangerines, squeezed for juice and color. The tangy tangerines, which may be less ubiquitous than oranges, but for that reason, more precious and personable - la la! My computer's name is 'Dancing Tangerine.'"

The orchestra broke into a lilting, almost inaudible waltz.

Mrs. Orange interrupted the waltz with her deep, androgynous voice: "Oh Lemon, thou art great. You bless us with your scent, most of all."

A tumbling of drums.

Right away, Ms. Lemon, in a distant soprano voice, responded via Twitter: "Dear Orange, you are the king and queen of fruits. We submit to thee."

The orchestra rushed to a climax and suddenly fell completely silent, except for a lingering oboe.

When Tangerines A and B began a quiet and sinuous duet without words, the rest of the wind players joined in, mumbling together like doves from my childhood, your childhood.

Soon enough, a tangerine-like sun rose to shine on the city of oranges. It was early morning and most of the city was still asleep. Meanwhile, a glass of lime juice materialized in the nearby mountains and was quickly gulped down by an old lemon.

Proofreader's Pain

Intensity knocks on my door. What is this, what is this sound? I have lost most of my grammar. No words can say. My worst enemy is authenticity, and my sweetest friend honesty. Authenticity dictates; honesty loosens. When the grammatical universe falls apart, there is nothing but debris and oily water. How unsure of herself or himself can a person be? That must depend largely on the shape of one's linguistic universe. They never told me America, France, Togo &c. did not exist except as faceless egos jostling against one another in tears. I do not feel betrayed, but do feel bad for the globe, whose fate is to misrepresent continually the shape of the world and at the same time keep silent about its own fatal errors. Where art thou, proofreader(s) of the globe?

A Happy Wallflower

I am looking at an ongoing party from behind a doorway.

And I am happy that way.

The Urban Dictionary lists the definition of wallflower (with the most votes) as: "a type of loner. seemingly shy folks who no one really knows. often some of the most interesting people if one actually talks to them. cute." A charming definition. I was called a "wallflower" once, in high school. If only I had had the guts back then to say being a wallflower made me happy: not sad, not lonely, but content.

Please excuse the unsightly drawing.

Turtle Characters

Pippa said: "I wish to suggest that, fundamentally speaking, Chinese characters function much like the Greek or Latin word roots in English. But the crucial difference is that Chinese characters can theoretically bond with each other in an infinite number of ways, and thus it is simply impossible to come up with an exhaustive (or near-exhaustive) dictionary, especially for words in Classical Chinese, which is a for-writing-only language with lots of ellipses. There can only be reference books on the characters, which can only serve as compendia of etymologies, and vastly incomplete ones at that.

"A hyperbolic demonstration: 'It would look like this' would look like 'Quasi visus wolde' (that's three characters) or something like that in Classical Chinese. But the problem is that the same sentence could also be interpreted, depending on the immediate context and on the various historical and literary allusions surrounding each of the three characters as well as the particular text in question, as: 'I would appear almost visible to you' or '[Her face] used to look as if [the summer sun had burned it thoroughly - an obvious literary allusion, completely elided because every reader is assumed to be familiar with it].'

"Well, of course, I'm exaggerating, but do you see what I'm saying?"

Poppo yawned and said: "Maybe, maybe not. I'm going for a swim." Poppo jumped into the pond, startling a turtle and her school of fish.

Sarcasm

Sarcasm grows on you like a tree

Or a mushroom;

It rustles itself upward in noiseless sixty days

Topless

Topless: I am not referring to the nudists on the beach. At least, not for the time being. Instead, I am thinking of the way in which the world where some of us live somehow ends up equating striving for one's best with trying to reaching the top of something, whatever that thing may be. Top, in comparison to what, and according to whom? We may choose to ask, question, and argue, or not argue, but faith in stratification still exists and will exist worldwide, regardless of what we may think. As such, we have no choice but to go topless, rejoicing in being able to appreciate, at high noon, the beauty of clouds, whose stormy underbellies - the very bottom layer of the stratified ice and dust - watch over us with so much serenity and wisdom, that they sometimes come very close, extremely close, to bringing us to tears.

Feathers

Let me write you a song

On the back of a bulboa leaf

With jet-black ink

Seishonagon's Pillow

Before going to bed, I think of all my favorite people in the world, dead and alive, (many of them whom I have met only between pages in a book or through other media). Then I find that there are too many of them, and growing more content by the minute, I finally fall asleep, hoping to see at least one or two of my favorite people in my dreams, if only for a fleeting moment.

A-Mixing

I mix the young and the old, the high and the low, the sacred and the vulgar. I mix teh and kopi, mix chicken with rice, with chili and egg. I mix blue and white, vinegar and soy sauce, dirt and mirth.

Spring forth, flowers, spring forth. For time is short, but sunlight and water abound.

Early Summer

Silenced beyond words, stars fall, in the manner of tears, on a white field.

Ghoulish clouds fly, mysteries trickle down a pot's cheek, and an old flower arrangement sings, "Tomorrow will never come."

Despair floats in the manner of pink blobs, like a flock of sheep under a warm, but cold, sun.

Lettering

I keep waiting for a letter to arrive; I keep looking inside my mailbox, clattered with just old leaves; but perhaps the letter I am waiting for is a letter I must send and yet have not written.

A Restless Bee

A restless bee said: "I listened to Schumann's Liederkreis sung by Hermann Prey. I listened to the whole thing, in one go. Then I listened to Sena Jurinac's rendition of an aria in Eugene Onegin, an opera by Tchaikovsky/Pushkin. And then I suddenly remembered, not surprisingly, Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind - not necessarily the film, but more the novel."

The restless bee began to talk: "In the 19th century, in Russia . . . in the United States . . . but what about the Sinocentrism and its critics in Korea and Japan? Well, the Romantics . . . the center-periphery knot . . . why, Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism were never the same. But the process of nationalism . . . the hunt after the universe went awry . . . it began, not ended, with a deadly explosion. Who knew, that the world . . . had no fixed center . . . ."

The bee began to talk, but dusk was falling, and it had to go home. So it went home, and dusk fell.

Incertipede

Happiest thoughts for the new year, I say

But incertitude inches its way across

My windowsill;

I am happy the incertitude is moving

Like a centipede, it will grow into a butterfly

Bluer than the Blume flowering in Schumann's garden