What slashes did your leaving make in me?
If all thought’s insupportable and wild, is it a ladder that shakes like Claire believed? Is it a skin that can’t heal? Once I believed you could have made it otherwise for me, but of course I was wrong.
Morning now. My eyes find Clerval’s slender hand, graceful over pen and paper.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 11th note:
If the monk hadn’t come to me those years ago … But did he really come? As it is, I’ve rewritten everything at least five times and arranged it into chapters, but so much was obliterated from the start, so much blurred or worn away, I often feel lost and worry I’m doing this wrong. Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet reassured me but now they’ve both gone. Sometimes I lie awake and feel that jade still up in the heavens all alone, shape-shifting and suffering, waiting for the monk to pick it up and inscribe its story on its body. It’s as if it has eyes all over its stone skin and all of them are watching. I want to ask it, what will the world give you? What do you want from it? Are you sure you want to come here? Maybe you shouldn’t come? Sometimes I think the stone is me, sometimes not. When I write it’s as if I’m only making more slashes into what’s already been slashed, burned, scattered. I wonder where Red Inkstone is.
WORKING NOTES FOR DRC:
∼∼ “zhen” means “real” and “jia” means “imaginary” In this book neither exists apart from the other
∼∼ the Octopartite Composition, or Eight-legged Essay, was the core of the Chinese educational curriculum and the most important part of the official examination for over 500 years. This is the exam Baoyu takes in an effort to restore his family’s good fortune.
∼∼ There are at least two titles for this book. “Hong lou-meng” and “Shitou ji.” Cao Xueqin kept changing his mind. I wonder which to use?
XXX
My Friend, when I blink I think of what you wrote, how disruption and refusal are built into the very core of seeing. (are they also built into the core of thought?) To live so uneasily in XXX and we XXX
I once knew a man who after an infection could no longer discern except by sight if he was sitting or standing or lying down. When he closed his eyes he couldn’t FEEL himself in space, that he existed as a body in space. If he closed his eyes he simply crumpled to the floor.
Such quick darks I go into again and again. And you, who can’t close your eyes—
Ae XXXX
and the hands for example and the eyes I wonder what touch is a tenderness that suffers such distances crossed and re-crossed what is touch when there’s no skin to receive it She walks in the garden she isn’t there but my eyes that won’t close touch her my lips touch her always I’m here among these walls the smell of sun on her clothes my memories of blinking and my touching violates her doesn’t it this touching I do with my mind she would turn from me if she could as she turned from her brother stood on the other side of the trellis and no brother or sister shall divulge the secrets of their house nor shall they pass beyond the bryde nor utter nor betray no brother shall take his meals with a sister no brother may loiter nor linger near a sister and I forbid you henceforth to go out without your leper’s dress I forbid you to wash your hands in a stream or ever touch another
but my eyes wander into her XXX there’s not even blinking now to shut me in the dark and stop my looking no spasms of refusal in my face my eyes on her skin which she believed a place of shame in her notebook she wrote “face beyond the face.” Wrote, “this feeling of tenderness so strong now, so what’s a suffering that doesn’t suffer?” “How can I suffer yet not suffer all the same?”
What’s touch when there’s no skin to receive it… It seems much of my life has been this question. And the sister’s “radical joy”—what did she mean? And her “suffering that doesn’t suffer”?
When the Goddess of Consolation came to Boethius in his cell, didn’t she speak of a suffering that doesn’t suffer? Would radical joy be one thread of her torn robe?
aosta, dec?/jan? if I could feel my hand hurt I think, she must have been afraid but how can I know she was afraid what is the mind of another the actuality of the reality of XXX and not in tranquility XXX and tenderly harshly this numbness a presence in itself the arch was left blank, remember? no inscription at all in China they carry stoves in their sleeves to keep warm whereas in Gloskar cattle walked on snowdrifts high as roofs XXX the patients uprooted the juniper bushes for firewood until there were none left “my service in frost and cold” but I have been to neither place have seen nothing much past my garden XXX her face through the trellis the actuality of the reality of I call you My Friend but look out on these mountains the actual the real window/horn of snow
Cao Xueqin, you end all your chapters with sentences like this: “To know what the outcome was read the next chapter.” “To know how he made out, read on.” “If you want to know what became of her continue reading.” But you also wrote, “In the end, neither author nor transcriber nor reader will know what to make of this book.” As I translate, the pages turn to vapor in my hands.
You called your working-place “Mourning-the-Red-Studio.” I wonder why you called it this. Is this also where I live?
You wrote that in your book the real (zhen) and imaginary (jia) can’t exist apart from each other. (each time my eye blinks it creates separations)
Soon Baoyu will head off to take the official exam. He’s studied hard for months. If he does well he’ll salvage his family’s ill fortune.
Daiyu’s dead. Miaoyu’s been raped and abducted, all her hair shorn off. (I wanted to believe in “The One Outside the Threshold” and now I can’t think of her and the notes she left without thinking she’s come to harm)
Why did you paint pictures of stones onto stones? What did you think you were doing?
Over time you crowded your characters so close together it was hard for the red-inked comments to fit in. They migrated toward the margins, unsigned and undated—
Always before your birth date a question mark, and after your death date a question mark.
I spend all this time with you, I wait for Red Inkstone to come, even for Odd Tablet to come …
You wrote that the real is unreal and the unreal real. I spend all this time with you in this world whose existence you questioned and which you called Red Dust—
Clerval looks tired all the time. His back must hurt from so much sitting. He never gets up to look at the smoke trees, or nod to his neighbor, or buy melons from the melon cart. Papers are strewn over his table like all that snow Claire looked out on for so long.
Dream of the Red Chamber
A Dream of Red Mansions The Re Scarlet Dream
Story of the Stone
TRANSLATION OF RED INKSTONE’S NOTES:
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “every phrase forsees the true way ahead, every word saddens one’s heart. Reading this passage, I almost don’t know what I am.” (my friend, reading your letters I almost don’t know what I am)
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “Cao Xueqin, I visited the garden. Its terraces are nothing but piles of broken tiles now. Here and there pines still stretch out their branches; below them, the ruins of the vegetable beds.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “I have made five copies of the pages you gave me. This one is for you, I will keep the others here for now. The end of the chapter seems to have been broken off or lost. Since you’re ill, I have seen to repairing it as best I could.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “but how will we come to a ‘settled version’?”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “There are many irregularities and chronological problems. I will fix what I can. I know you are weak now and in the end they are not so important. In the Nine-fold Spring of the other world, no one will care that, when Baoyu is 19, Chia Yun can’t be old enough to be sold off as a concubine. What your readers will care about is her suffering. I hope you’ve gotten some sleep and that your fever has improved.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “I have made five copies of these new
chapters (my suggestions are few this time, and in red ink, as always). If you don’t live to finish the book I promise I will see that it is finished.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “and what if you don’t ever come to a ‘settled version.’ Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
My Friend,
In between words and in the margins Red Inkstone writes his commentary for Cao Xueqin. He writes of the ruined garden, of “irregularities,” and “problems,” that there’ll never be a “settled version” of this book. I hold no settled view of you, of anything Baoyu slips through my fingers. Meanings build and crumble. I see your hand in numbness and in flame. The properties of. The reality of/the actuality of. And in faithfulness to what? How can I XXX and finally. How are your eyes now? And your face, has it greatly changed since we last met? (you wrote of a tenderness that suffers). Ink, red and black surfaces, skin. This trying to take hold, but slipping. Cao Xueqin writes into the text the word “pian”—”to deceive.” “Do not be deceived by the author”—this phrase recurs often, I don’t know why he does this. Words, crumbled bridges, vapor, scars. No grammar for this. Thought’s odd ferocities. I drink my tea. I listen to the crickets.
This cold wind’s a ripped robe as I walk, or certainties dissolving in my hands if certainties could materialize and be touched. Red Inkstone wrote that maybe there could be no “settled version,” and that maybe this isn’t such a bad thing after all. Always I feel this, that there is no single angle or story to belong to. Your face and others’ drifting from me, changing.
I don’t know if Claire stands at her window in the snow, or if she dreams of Allegra (but how could she not dream of Allegra?). Does she stand on a ladder of ash? And you—I don’t know where you went or what you thought that night you left me. Even my own skin’s mostly alien, mysterious. The hidden cells inside my brain opaque and changing. And even though Red Inkstone wrote in the margins, nothing of what he said solved the questions left open by his friend Cao Xueqin.
My Friend,
This place I live in, I think it was once called Mourning-The-Red-Studio. So I write to you from a place of mourning and redness. Here your words revolve in planet-like obsession, a gravity that tugs and binds me: “acid tartaric,” “atropine sulphate,” “there have always been captives,” “why should I be an exception,” “spasms,” “refusals,” “a tenderness that suffers.”
“Disruption and resistance built into the very core of sight.”
What can I tell you? Baoyu’s fallen into another coma. His teeth are clenched, his skin’s cold, but his mind’s traveling, vibrantly alive. A mysterious monk leads him to a desolate region where he comes to a dwelling with twelve cabinets, their doors partly open. These are the same cabinets he saw years ago in a dream (as you repeatedly return to her white room, her clothes, her notebook). Inside are twelve albums, but the writing’s blurred. Only “pity” and “sighing” come through clearly. He doesn’t know what to do with all those pages when he can only read two words. When the monk reappears he asks him: “Did you pry into any secrets here?” “Yes, I saw some albums. I tried to read about people I know, the ones I love who died and suffered, and those still alive, but I could only understand two words.” The monk replies: “All earthly ties are bewitchments. Now you must go back.”
As you and I in our own ways are turned back. The albums inscrutable, the print blurred.
What is blinking?’ A pulling away. A pulling back. Flinching built into the central workings of the face. Absence making its quick claim. Everything partial. Beneath the skin, whole tracts of hiddenness. The beggars on Beggar’s Bridge at once visible and hidden. The sister’s skin was shame to her and visible but what of the rest of her that wasn’t visible?
I don’t know if Cao Xueqin lived to finish his book. I don’t know if you’re alive. I write from this place of mourning and redness. I see your face through red light like the smoke trees in autumn.
I think of Red Inkstone’s words to Cao Xueqin, “perhaps there will be no settled version.”
Last night I saw Claire. She was standing at her attic window in Moscow in the snow.
“I don’t want to be back here,”
she said,
“I liked it better under the walnut tree in Aosta. And why all this dwelling on what skin is, what blinking is? Do you think the Northern explorers would have stopped to worry about that? That Parry would have dwelled on that? They waited their snow blindness out when they had it, that’s all. Waited and didn’t complain. Though I suppose I dwelled on walls and ladders, so I’m as bad as anyone. Allegra’s been dead a long time now. And Shelley.”
“Why do you never think of Mary?”
“She suffered over you, but you hardly ever mention her.”
“I miss writing in my notebook. When I speak—as I’m speaking now—I sound more harsh than I feel. I feel little freedom when I speak. I don’t want to speak.”
Waking, I felt lost. I remembered looking into your eyes when I first opened mine, how you flinched and turned away. I felt a coldness dry as dirt. No “tenderness that suffers,” no walnut tree, no movement of a hand across a page. No album, no leper’s dress, no marginalia, no red mourning, no name.
Aosta, Jan 3
My Friend,
XXX but nothing can prevent XXXX XX and I’m glad you can’t see me, that I don’t have to deal with your kindness or pity or whatever you might feel XXX atropine sulphate distilled water XXX when they first brought us here from Moncaliere I was frightened. I believe she was too. First our father died, then our mother and brothers. Just the two of us left and I forbid you henceforth to go out without your leper’s dress XXX Do you think, there’s a place of calm in the skin no matter what, something inviolable, untouched, and nothing can despoil it? So many years of not speaking The mid-day bells at 11, not 12, as is the custom. Her footsteps on stone. My fear I would somehow make her worse. In the study, pieces of mica and gneiss from the hills. I lined them up on the table, pulled back the curtains, watched them glint. XXX But I was unable to XX and ever afterward XXX from the beginning they kept our names secret XXX packages of books and food on the doorstep XXX “should not be in proximity to towns” “water supply should be adequate” XXX “tenderness of nerves/presence of bacilli” XXX I watched the unchanging gray in the distance: slate, gneiss, serpentine, schist XXX
Mourning the Red Studio The Stone’s Story Story of the
Stone Mourning the Red Dream
WORKING NOTES FOR DRC:
“zhengmian” indicates the “surface of the text” while “fanmian” indicates the “meaning underneath,” but why believe the two are separable or even distinguishable from each other?
Red Inkstone: “It’s true my commentary is unsystematic. I’m sure many of my comments contradict others I’ve made in the past.”
Red Inkstone: “Reading this, I’m reminded of the painter’s technique known as ‘bemian fufen’—whitening the background to bring out the foreground.”
Red Inkstone: “Cao Xueqin, are you the stone? Are you transcribing the text that was written on your body in script so minute no one could see it?”
My Friend,
If I could reach you … Baoyu’s mind is traveling… When he comes back to the world he knows what he must do. All thought is approximate at best, he can see this. Yet he studies his books day and night, readies himself for the imperial exam. He remains in his “quiet room.” He “never leaves the compound.” (I think of you in your stone tower, alone.)
“Today is the first time you’ll be entirely on your own,” his mother says as he and his nephew leave for the exam. “Come back as soon as you’re done and set my mind at rest.” But even as she’s talking, Baoyu’s remembering a line from a poem: “He breaks through the first door of his cage.” Then he wonders, How many doors does a cage even have? Do the first, second and third look just the same? Why would a cage need more than one door?
Laurie Sheck Page 24