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