Yesterday I touched the barred doors of your letters, wondering how many. Wondering, are you nameless to me now or not, is your name in fact Guasco, was she truly your sister? Did you come “with her from Moncaliere, and the others died, was that family you wrote of really your family or is your mind in some kind of fever?
So many cage doors: “from the beginning they kept our names secret,” “my fear I would somehow,” “something inviolable, untouched.” The light’s dimming fast, it’s too late to continue—I’ll tell you more about Baoyu tomorrow—
aosta jan?/march/?june?
her face on the other side of the trellis. How does a face bring harm to another what can it possibly inflict on another why did I think, that even a look from me would hurt her that the touch of my skin the thought of my skin on her skin could make her worse? Have I told you her lesions were mostly internal? Some on her torso and arms but almost none on her face. What is silence what is fear? Every now and then words from a song we’d learned as children XXX her eyes always lowered so why did I worry why did I need to turn away XXX she lived as though alone as though she’d never had a brother and shall not and shall not nor shall they betray or utter She in her part of the house I in mine or in the garden. In her notebook: “In my sleep I hear myself laughing, and the laughter grows redder and redder, a fire made of sound, and spreading.”
Clerval writes quickly these days. Though he’s thin and frail-looking, his hand seems vigorous, the one part of him that isn’t withering. As if his hand’s a mind and that mind is traveling, filled with a secret, mysterious determination like Baoyu’s.
zhengmian, the surface of the text,
he writes. Then,
fanmian, the meaning underneath. Inseparable, yes, that’s how it is.
Then:
Her face, her red laughter, but how will I ever understand? Do I need to understand, do I even have the right to?
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 12th note:
Red Inkstone would chastise me for dreaming of him. “Too many dreams in your book,” he always says, though we haven’t seen each other in months. But maybe this is my way of drawing him close. Or is he here and it’s just that I can’t see him through my fever? Am I ill at all? I don’t know if I get up each day and work and write or if I’m sick in bed and only dreaming that I’m working. In my latest dream he’s wearing a green silk robe like Baoyu’s, but the cloth’s turned into pages. I don’t know if I’m Baoyu, Daiyu, Red Inkstone, or myself, or all of us at once. I don’t know if the monk ever came and handed me a sheaf of pages. I’m struggling to read Red Inkstone’s robe, I need to put the pages in some order. But the characters keep changing, moving insect-like in circles, then they’re still as twigs, then withering, blooming.
My Friend,
Baoyu’s arrived at the examination hall, determined to do well for the sake of his family The narrator says, “Let us leave Baoyu and his cousin Jia Lan for the time being.” So we don’t see him take the exam; we don’t know how long it lasts, what he’s asked or what he’s thinking. This is how I often feel with you—I’m almost with you but a fissure opens up and I see nothing. Still, I write to you of doors and cages. And though there’s a wall of time and space between us, it’s a peculiar wall that attacks itself at its core.
XXXXXX XXXXX
XXX The characters for “fake wall” are “jia qiang”
XXXXX The Emperor Yuandi was told “Once you build a wall behind yourself all will be well.” But a wise man said to him, “Your wall can never be solid enough.”
Aosta, Jan 15
My f Friend,
I’m very weak. now.
She wrote in her notebook, “What am I if I can’t be of use?”
“all these years behind walls” ”but what am I if I stay here useless?”
Wrote, “as if I myself am a wall and crumbling. No, I’m not a wall at all. I’m so tired of being kept behind these walls. How can he love his walled garden, how can he stand to walk there, does he walk and tell himself stories, pretend that he’s free?”
Wrote, “The red laughter’s come back again. A whole night of it spreading.”
It’s harder to get to her room now. Th My legs increasingly distant from my mind. I tell them “move” or “feel” and sometimes they do, but from a place unknown to me and to which I have no definable access.
She wrote in her notebook, “He keeps planting and transplanting. Some days I think I’ll go mad.”
Wrote, “His hands among the flowers. My skin as if pressed to a wall and eroding When I walk the wall walks with me. When I sleep it sleeps with me.”
“Is there some way to be of use? If not, then what am I?”
Sometimes I hear Claire’s voice in the shore’s stunted trees:
“Mary says she’s a shadow now.” “The hazard of my eyes.”
The wind stopped as if suddenly blinded. Seabirds. Rain.
I touch:
ulceration, magnesium sulphate, trophic disturbance,
a hurt, unclosing eye. Touch:
“my legs increasingly distant from my mind.”
The sister feels each wall move with her.
Allegra was surrounded by walls. And Claire and the sister touched so many walls.
And shall not and shall not and your leper’s dress… must not utter … must not betray …
“There is no settled version.”
I wonder how many times she heard the red laughter.
My Friend,
Baoyu’s done “with the exam but no one can find him. Not even his nephew, “In the hostel we ate and slept beside each other. At the examination grounds our cells were close by. We even came out of the exam together. But I lost him in the crowd at Dragon Gate.” And your sister (but was she your sister?) felt the walls walk beside her, move, wake, sleep beside her. Her face lost to you, and her thoughts, where she stood on the other side of the trellis—as you are mostly lost to me, though you send me so many things—Issogne, ruined roads, red laughter.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 13th note:
Each day I grow weaker. I don’t think I’ll be able to complete my book. You’ll find all my notes in the green cupboard. Everything’s sketched out, though nothing, as you say, is “settled.” I think often of the calligraphers who spend their entire lives practicing. Only at the end do they find their mind’s and hand’s true wildness. A wildness that’s disciplined, severe. If my book is wild, contradictory, at odds with itself, I hope it’s honed to its raw, unsettled core. The red dust is dry and astringent in my eyes.
I dream, though you’ve warned me not to: a traveling salesman brings my manuscript to a bookseller in Peking. Asks him, would you like to buy this, it’s called The Story of the Stone. But the bookseller, Gao E, says the price is too high, sends him away, eats his lunch at his desk, does some paperwork, sells nothing, goes home. The next day the manuscript’s on his desk. He reads it, then takes it to his friend Cheng Weiyuan, and says, “You should publish this.” “But where does it come from, who wrote it?” “I don’t know. A man left it the other day when I was out, I’ve no idea who he was or where he came from.” Cheng Weiyuan reads it, says “It’s good but what are we to do, it’s not really finished, too much is rough, unsettled.” “I’ll polish it. Just give me a few months.” The air turns red, and it’s hard for me to see the two men talking. I can’t hear them at all. Cattle walk by, red dust on their skin and in their eyes. Even the rice in my rice bowl is red. When I wake I think about Baoyu, how he never belonged in this world. I remember the abundant delicacies of my childhood— lotus-foot cakes scented with osmanthus, dumplings filled with crab. Our chopsticks were made of ivory inlaid with gold. All this while the peasants stooped and walked bone-thin in a namelessness I never questioned. I’m cold all the time. The heat cold, my fevers cold. I’ve left the green cupboard unlocked. There’s no reason to lock anything.
Aosta, Jan 20
My Friend,
Why should the lamp not disinteg
rate as I look. at it? Why should the floor hold? Each moment is a threatened net of touch and sight and sound. I’m very c tired now. I
I marvel at the mind’s trust and linkages, how it believes the walls won’t fall, how it waits for one sound to follow another expecting they’ll connect to form words and those words will make meaning. It all seems suddenly so effortful, precarious, unlikely, even odd.
I write this slowly, wanting to make no mistakes. The garden’s gray and brown.
There are sentences whose lesions are internal, as hers were largely internal (and yet she wouldn’t show her face).
Is it true what I’ve read?—that a Chinese scholar’s garden should take on an appearance that’s “simple, emptied of desire and striving”? I wish I could have read Wen Zhenheng’s “Treatise on Superfluous Things.” I found only this sentence: “If one indulges in extravagant planting and colorful effects, a garden becomes a fetter, a mere cage.”
(Her face hidden behind the trellis. Even her voice mostly hidden, and her hands.)
She wrote in her notebook: “He never leaves the garden alone. What if he didn’t touch it for a week?”
Wrote, “When I look at the garden as though I’m already dead and nothing, it becomes more beautiful, more distinct”
“My eyes want to control what they see. But if I were dead and nothing…”
Wrote, “At first the red laughter was fierce but then it simply washed over everything.”
“What is the color of laughter that’s no longer afraid?”
I believe I mostly forget to sign my letters these days. I am still—
Your Friend,
… Your face red dust, your laboratory table red dust… your notebooks, your instruments, my face, your dreams and fevers, this body you gave me, this shore, these waves, this waking, this sleeping, red dust…
red laughter red dust as if she were a wall and crumbling
Goddess of Crumbling Goddess of
My Friend,
It’s the fourth watch. The welcome-home banquet lies untouched. When word arrives that Baoyu’s placed seventh among the thousands of exam candidates, his family thinks surely he’ll come back. “Since Baoyu was fated to pass, he’s bound to turn up.” “Now that Master Baoyu has passed we’re certain to find him.” “You know the proverb—a successful candidate’s fame spreads throughout the land.”
Only his sister says quietly, “People shouldn’t have anything unique about them. We thought it was good he was born with jade in his mouth, but such mysteries can’t be understood. Maybe we never knew him at all.”
On the page I’m now translating the narrator says “Honorable Readers, certain things are predestined and cannot be helped.” He doesn’t say this in a mournful way. I suspect you would be more skeptical.
Meanwhile, the Emperor restores the family’s fortune. Their confiscated property’s returned, they’re reappointed to their official posts.
I hold your remaining letters—the stack so thin, not even a stack now, hardly more than a frail layer of skin. This frightens me.
In Shen Fu’s “Six Chapters of a Floating Life,” he explains that near is far and far is near. The landscape must create this illusion. “Thus do you suggest something which is not there,” he says of placing low balustrades along the top of a wall to suggest the presence of a nonexistent roof garden. And “Thus do you conceal what is there,” he says of a garden’s bamboo trees and few rocks set just so to block the further view. The unreal lives in the real, and the real in the unreal.
As your voice lives in mine and mine in yours. As your sister’s red laughter moves through me, though I don’t know if she’s your sister or if her clothes still smell of sun. I don’t know if you’re even alive—
Aosta, J, Feb 7
My Friend,
and cannot XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and cannot and
—the burns
I don’t know how or why she died what caused her death XXX sodium hydnocarpate soft infiltration so many years and we went on and on the two of us just living XXXX discomforts yes fevers lesions sleeplessness yes but why did she die what happened and why do I grow weaker? Infected burns on my right thigh but how did I get them how long have I had them I don’t know XXXXXXXXX bone pain nerve pain XX elbows and knees tender when they bendyXXX peripheral nerves swelling under skin glycerine borax gold salts excision of histology of I still wonder about the Chinese gardens Qi Biaojia wrote, “where it is level I introduce a little unevenness, where it is too diffuse I tighten it. It is like being a good doctor” XXXX and what is a “landscape window” it is said Li Liweng had one installed in his Mustard Seed Garden but I don’t understand I don’t know what it is XXXXXX I remember her white sleeves divided into diamonds by the trellis
She wrote in her notebook “He works in the garden but he must see it’s enclosed, doesn’t he care that it’s enclosed?”
“but even in the most closed system might some freedoms still exist?”
Wrote, “irreducible core”
Wrote, “Very tired today. I don’t want to watch him weeding. I don’t want to see him bending down among those tall red flowers.”
Clerval pushes his translation work to the far side of the table, sits for a long time with the pages of his friend’s still-unread letters. Doesn’t pick them up. Sometimes he rubs them lightly with his fingers.
Soon there’ll be no more letters left unread. I learned to live within that kind of quiet, I know about such things. Then Claire came to me, and Clerval, though never you. Or was it I who went to them? I couldn’t touch them or be touched, couldn’t speak to them or listen to them speak. Even so, a kind of tenderness began. Something within the harshness broke and opened.
Clerval eats his noodles, drinks his tea. Washes his pot, his cup, his bowl. Sits down again and reads about gardens, takes notes on gardens, as if he could send his notes to his friend.
NOTES ON GARDENS
Ji Cheng in his “Yuan Ye” (17th c) The Craft of Gardens, writes that a garden “should make your thoughts travel beyond the confines of this world of dust” (my friend, has your garden done this for you? I picture you planting, weeding, bending)
∼ ∼ ∼
there are no fixed rules for garden design, only the essential principle that such a place must touch one’s deepest being
∼ ∼ ∼
a gateway functions as a surmountable barrier (imagine, my friend, something surmountable, after all)
∼ ∼ ∼
a moon gate offers the sense of distance no space within a garden is too narrow to be shaped, thought about, used
∼ ∼ ∼
different eras bring different fashions—windows shaped like caltrop flowers give way to windows shaped like willow leaves, yet each has its own particular beauty
∼ ∼ ∼
one should feel a sense of motion within it yet be far from worldly concerns (did the scholar take care of his own garden, or did his servants do it for him?)
∼ ∼ ∼
a garden is the larger natural world in microcosm all paths must lead to quietude, humility (my friend, where has yours led you?)
∼ ∼ ∼
let there be no single vista, no central point of view, all aspects will reveal themselves over time and from differing angles
(Red Inkstone, again: maybe there will be no settled version)
NAMES OF GARDENS
Master of the Fishing Nets Garden this includes the Pavilion for
the Advent of the Moon, also
the Ribbon-Washing Pavilion
Garden of Harmonious Interest
Green Vine Studio
Lingering Garden
The Humble Administrator’s Garden
Garden of Perfect Brightness
Warm Garden
Outlook Garden
Laurie Sheck Page 25