晓竹天下 文创空间

The coffees were long cold, and they, mother and daughter, stared at the cold mugs placed on soft pads on the table, tired and speechless. A car, turning around the street corner, beamed its headlight into the dim-lit coffee shop. Their faces were illuminated and receded into shadow again.

The next morning I woke up in the middle of a broken dream. It was something about a unique Gong I obtained through practicing standing. The Master who had so taught me called it Vertical Gong. You have to stand sleeping, eating, doing everything and never lying down.

"Then," he said with a mysterious smile. "You will be a vertical man, forever upright and fearless."

If a professional writer tells you that on average he spends less than eight hours a day clawing the keyboard, he is either lying or not doing his job. He has to be a hard nut before being anyone else or anything else. This is indeed a tall order for anyone who is able to enjoy and make a living in other professions.

In the broad scheme of things he was less a statistic than a polar bear in the society he lived in, and the people who knew him regarded him as on autopilot 24/7 and barely wasted a thought on him. He simply performed as millions of working bees do in a bee society. Indeed he was aware of the time moving on for he was growing older. But would it make any difference?

So Mr. Pei got married. The marriage status certainly mattered among his friends, for before they had called him Little Pei and now they called him Old Pei. Man is not a man until he got married and then he turned into a dray horse--this of course was uncovered to him later. At the this moment Mr. Pei was quite happy with his family life.

My life so far had been most simple and most ordinary, like a chill wind from Siberia constant and never ending. It pierced my bones and frozen up my brain. I didn't know why one could call it life. Its continuation towards eternity would be most terrible. Indeed the horrible. But people seem to believe death to be most horrible.

The evening I came out from hiding, I remember, was exceptionally hot. For four hours I walked slowly and tentatively on the bustling Beijing Street where everyone seemed to know where to go and went with an air of dogged determination. Funny. Were they really so sure?

AT three o'clock in the afternoon of a fine spring day in 2008, a young man of about twenty was toiling up the staircase of a six-story building. He was shabbily dressed, shuffling his down-trodden leather shoes at each turn of the flight. At last he reached the very top floor, breathless and perspiring. On his right, a door half-opened to a small, dark passage.

Dinner was almost done, and the final round of nice pies and fried fish virtually untouched. My stomach was full, my eyes still hungry, and my soul continued to savor the dishes I couldn't devour. Then came Xia Ren, the house cook to ask Old Shang, my host, what he would like for tomorrow's dinner. The cook was a women in her forties with a pretty face and long narrow eyes.

A writer is either a copy cat or a revolutionary, but the best write is always both. Everything between a copy cat and a revolutionary is filled with block and more blocks. So the trick of the trade is to copy cat when revolution is unlikely, and to start one if copy catting becomes boring. No kidding, boredom is the father of creativity.

How time flies. Need to get this thing started before the year ends, before nothing is left. Remember Joseph Conrad: the horrible! the horrible! So stop thinking, start experimenting, if not with plot, mood and character, at least with language. Guess I missed lots of fun. What a waste! Why? Because you take it too serious, pal. Try something, and try it everyday.

In a social context, you find people to be either good or bad or ugly; and in a linguistic context, you find words to be either moral or immoral or amoral. Moral words do right and immoral words do wrong, but most words are amoral, neither good nor bad, but simply do or exist. They are uninteresting and likely to make me soporific as a lot of food would do in my stomach.

I think I have developed an affinity for words; they come from everywhere, from dictionary, from reading, from mental images, and from everything I set my eyes on. They are not yet properly tagged, but like children who swarm the beach on summer weekend, while the tide of consciousness rises and smashes under their feet. In short, I wallow in words. But when can I swim in them?

Achievement is an aggregate of daring and hard work. You would mix them together just as your grandma combined meat and beans to make chili. Or, to put it another way, life is like driving somewhere, requiring both energy and integrity. Energy with no integrity is like reckless driving that would end in tragedy, but integrity with no energy is going no where.

I think people should abominate government censorship on free speech as much as they abhor raw chicken livers. But they don't and that puzzles me. Perhaps humans are not as serious as I think them to be over life situations; or perhaps I derive too much levity from them while they too little of them.

Everywhere in the world there is poverty, but few poverty is considered abject. Only when poverty is conditioned by servility and a total denial of human dignity can it be said to be "abject". Then property beside poverty becomes no less abject for both the rich and poor share an common abhorrence in their milieu. Therefore they are equally disgraced.

The wind abated in the evening and I took a second walk. I walked into the dusk and returned in the nightfall, feeling somewhat refreshed by the deepening darkness. It had been so blustering in the afternoon that I changed my mind and walked instead to the library to check out some books and bought a bottle of whiskey on the way back.

Nothing distresses me more than watching a crummy movie, especially when I realize it is a hopeless one toward the end of it and find it too late to balk. After you have invested more than one hour of your life on it, you can't just walk away without knowing its conclusion in spite of the wretched fact that the whole thing is a ballyhoo. Well, at least I can't.

Bacchanals are those who worship Bacchus by way of holding Bacchanalia once in a while; and by doing so they turn themselves into bastards. Still they are probably more humane than most humans under many of the precarious circumstances in modern life. Thus I would rather see a man in Bacchanalian stupor than in an intoxicated state induced by power and ambition.

【ab ovo】 \ab-OH-voh\, adverb:
From the beginning.

I will begin ab ovo -- at the very beginning.
-- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The performers do not have to discover these techniques and processes ab ovo; they learn them from the previous generation, who learned them from their predecessors, and so on.
-- William L. Benzon, Beethoven's Anvil

emolument: the wages or perquisites arising from office, employment, or labor.
palindrome: a word, verse, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward or forward.

Chapter One

A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
A maid of Dian’s this advantage found,
A man in hue all ‘hues’ in his controlling,

A third, nor red nor white, had stol’n of both,

A torment thrice three-fold thus to be cross’d:

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all,
Admit impediments. Love is not love

If anyone tell you to be a writer by writing other than in your mother tongue, he is up to no good. And if you believe what he says, then you are a fool. Thus I tell myself and believe myself in order to embark on this literary adventure in which only errant fool may dive into. To be sure, I don't know where I'm going except I will have some fun along the way.