8.8.2008
Waves of time permeate across Beijing’s darkened sky-scraped horizon. A warm wind blows upon our bodies, tracing our skin with an invisible effigy. A light flickers upon our naked figures, folding and unfolding with time. I trace the length of Marguerite Donnadieu with the efficacy of a surgeon, so that I may open her body to mine, so that I might pry open the perfect creation of an imperfect creator.
We are but outer shells intensely lost within one another, our minds, given, gone to the catacombs of history. There is no context, no ghost, no learned experience; merely the surface of two caressing bodies, as if we were an image of all lovers, mummified carcasses, anxiously looking, kissing, touching and feeling our ways in the darkness and up the banks of the primordial ooze, eventually surrendering ourselves to an impossible immortality or an inevitable finality.
A television broadcasts a light upon our flesh, a distorted montage of the Opening Ceremony, the blueprints for some intoxicated dream of patriotism and globalization: Manchu bannermen, Shaolin monks, a veiled salute to the godless idol Mao, a giant panda two hundred children wide grazing in a sea of red, the smiling Hu Jintao coddled by a whitening Bill Clinton.
All this history laid out, naked, on the flesh of my lover, like a bountiful feast. I want to eat time, to be nourished like a god, on the ambrosia of the universe.
The world’s politicians, celebrities and athletes, one-by-one are imagined on the curve of my lover’s breast, a nipple to nurse the ninety-one thousand representatives of the world, to teach them, as a mother would, about pain and pleasure. Humanity’s mythologies, its psychologies are retold through the shadows of her sinews and echoed through the cage of her ribs. I imagine four billion eyes, gathered in between the crevices of her skin where her ribcage protrudes, gazing at the grand narrative of humankind projected upon her breast. To kiss her breasts would be to suckle the world.
And so on the curve of my lover’s breast, in the midst of the Middle Kingdom, on the 116th parallel, that imperial axis from the heart of which two successive dynasties ruled the world, finally the Chinese promise, two-thousand-two hundred and twenty-nine years in the making, of all-under-Heaven, at last.
To kiss her breasts would be to nestle all-under-Heaven in the arc of my lips.
Across the horizon, a flash of light. A silent thunder splits the Beijing skyline, followed by the echoing roar of a dragon. A dragon along the north-south axis, that same axis upon which ascended and descended the last Ming emperor, Zhu Youjian, hanging from the rope that his eunuch had tied from a tree just outside the Forbidden City. Two hundred and eighty years later, it was Puyi’s turn, the last of the Qing, expelled from his throne whilst his palace was ransacked by Feng Yuxiang’s warlord army. Did he notice the tree, whilst being escorted out from the Gates of Supreme Harmony for what was his first and final time, and think to himself of the impermanence of all things? Was it the possibility of immortality or the inevitability of the end?
The Maoists uprooted the tree, to replace it later with another – a gesture to man’s struggle against the impermanence of all things, particularly dynasties.
Something must be said for time and space, for time and place are essential to the aberrations of Chinese pseudo-psychology – a limp cocktail of Taoist methodology, folk-cosmology and Marxist paternity. On the eight-hour after the sun’s zenith, of the eight day, of the eighth lunar cycle, of the two thousand and eighth year of the anniversary of the birth of someone else’s lord and saviour, we are present, struggling against the impermanence of all things.
On the same celestial axis that the Chou, some 3000 years before, had outlined the canonical layout for all dynastic cities, the Olympic Green stands cosmologically in line with Zhu Youjian’s noose, Puyi’s ransacked palace and a grandiose mausoleum dedicated to another prince of fate, Mao Zedong, tyrannically sitting on the south side of Heaven’s gate, Tiananmen Square.
That is the beauty of the universe – the patterned quilt in which the German poet Schiller weaved his philosophy – that a thread can be traced from the innocent musings of the two year-old Emperor Puyi to the earth shattering terror of Mao’s guilt-ridden Cultural Revolution. It is thus the vocation of the philosopher, the theologian or the rain man to weave-in the patches of the quilt and sew up the holes of the universe. Beijing is but a microcosm of man’s imperative, to align time and space in accordance to the infinity of the stars. With so many stars, so many places to navigate, one can never be at a loss. And just as the heavens unite us cosmologically, they do chemically, for we were all once just dust and matter, awaiting time and space to emerge, to merge, like the treads of Zhu Youjian’s knot.
It was the memory of Mao, the godless idol that they wanted to resurrect in the spring of 1989, to pull his trace from out of the netherworld and into Heaven’s Gate. They wanted to channel the great leader, the people’s Chairman, the rightful inheritor to the Marxist Tao, in order to resist, as he would, the Chinese Communist Party’s capitalistic reforms. Instead, they were given his successor’s tanks; ears and mouths crunched to the ground, they were still not heard.
Now the tanks have gone, to be replaced by rollerblading children and Kazak tourists. But still their ghosts remain, unremembered, but not forgotten, like Marx; like the Party’s official policy on Mao, unremembered, but not forgotten. As the French poet filmmaker Chris Marker had once said – who would have spent an entire lifetime in search for the machinations of memory – ‘History throws it’s empty bottles out the window.’
On this hour of history, on this day of China’s grand opening, like those tanks in 1989, we are consuming flesh.
Today more historic than the eight hundred and fourteen thousand days since the first Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the first imperial son of China, for whose indefatigable determination to unite ‘all within four seas’, China is named. The Chinese promise, all-under-Heaven, in the arc of my lips.
In the arc of her hips, the television projects its phantasmagorical tattoo, cemented in the embrace of our bodies. On Marguerite’s skin, the amassed history of China, a red moon, its celestial paradox of waning and waxing, of wanting to be both opened and closed. The dream of red mansions, the Middle Kingdom and her lovers, all together for a cataclysmic orgy on this day of days in the wake of natural and manmade calamities. This French woman and a half-caste man, two sets of bodies: China and the world, simultaneously inhabiting one another, all-under-Heaven. Our limbs, for better or worse, an impossible tangle.
If scars will not heal, then one must learn to love them, to fetish over them. And so my lover pulls her hand back upon my shoulders, cupping the tendon from which, for some, in all men angel wings had once grown. Pulling me tighter, closer, she cuts her nails deep into my back, glaring into my eyes to watch me resist, to witness pain silenced, so that she may comprehend that which we all practice our whole lives to withstand. That is, the pain that forms the existential scar for some that holds the same value as God does for others. It is the same pain Zhu Youjian amassed his courage against as his eunuch tied that final knot, connecting together the threads of the universe.
On a fateful day in 1924, did Puyi see the scar on the tree left by that grave knot? Surely the story had been lamented to him on dozens of occasions as an omen to his own dynastic decline, an era the imperial tutors were surely aware of. Did he learn to love his own particular brand of the anxiety that fills the being of all men? Did he learn to love the inevitability of the end?
At the threshold of pain and pleasure, when the heart beats at an irregular pace and the anxiety, which from my pours emanates every day, blankets my entire being, Marguerite pulls my sex close to hers.
Heavy drops of rain pound the window.
[to be continued]
