Fantasia on Entropic Sea Songs
1 / 16
This novel is for
those who have helped me from this magnificent journey
for my family, friends, tutors;
and Nico,
I can't make this happen without you.
for Cornwall,
and the Journey ahead.
I seldom sleep on beds. My bias considers the bedroom as a space for rehabilitating from hard labour; it only allows the entrance of a purpose that has no purposes at all. But I, usually thinking about preserving a delicate state constantly. It is like a filled cup, on which the surface tension creates a dome over the rim; I hold the cup, uncontrollably shaking, trying to maintain the balance. This state is, I believe, not unfamiliar to creatives. Although it might sound ridiculous, sometimes this meditational self-adjust injects emotions that are more resonant than usual into unfinished works. Meditating is tricky. I froze very still; I even dared not to think it too hard, as if a tiny movement would sabotage what this is all about — the delicacy of that balance. Until the surface tension reaches its threshold, which indicates the perfect timing for creating the most touching output, then it’s time for another run. I think this at every moment, and I am ready to jump to the desk at every moment; hence I don’t like to sleep on the bed. I was lying back against the couch in a posture that was particularly harmful to the cervical vertebrae.
2 / 8
The lighthouse in Newlyn has been flashing the harbour. I have been imagining the second perspective, how the amber beam casts a shadow over the other side of my face. The bedroom has no such view of the faint light belt that connects the townscape, the lighthouse and Mount St Michael in the twilight.
This living room is perfect for love-making. It has a dining table under the skylight, which sits oppositely to the semi-open planned, ocean-view kitchen. A large coffee table is placed in front of the couch, facing the balcony, which views the bay as well as the castle. I cannot find a word that is more suitable and beautiful to describe this space. It is built to be flooded by my reckless, instinctive desires. Each surface is designed to hold orectic activities of two merging souls until they dissolve in the surrounding, gradually descends into an invisible sea surface. Rationalisation about how to own this beach, with whom, when, and what happens the next never occurred to me. Primitive animal desires ruled my thoughts. Maybe I will just occupy the space, and humanity disappears tomorrow somehow, so that I will not have to think about the £90 daily rent, which was still expensive in the touristic offseason. But with whom I am gonna make a company? I thought, there must be someone that could be found when the necessity is imminent.
Half of the artists think rationally, the others think emotionally. It is not fixed. However, their logic often irregularly switch to the opposite side. This always annoys me; I was also upset by the dispersed grand narrative. “If I travel to an unpopulated Cornwall after I die, to paint her jade-green seas in the endless time, so be it, I shall die”. Undoubtedly the imaginative death wish is also “the last man” sort of adventure. The only satisfactions I wish are the occupation to space, and admiring the encounter of another
free will.
Under the wind-shattered grim curtain that made of rain, the visibility rendered Longrock like an alluvial plain after seawater recedes. The pale sky reflected on the soaked sand; howling storm overwhelmed the sound of tides. The rain weakened, Longrock looks like an otherworldly wasteland. My doe! My wasteland! I shouted for an invisible doe. She has round hips and bright eyes, sparkling feeble lights; she jumps gracefully. She was running in the distance, and she belongs to the distance. She paused, projected her clear sight towards me.
3 / 16
I turned around as her line of sight went beyond. Images flashed: I walk down Abbey Street to stairs; what lies beneath is the coastal road outside the Dolphin Tavern. I was sure that there was no need to turn around again, back to her, because I remember this sense of unreality. What the coastal walk suppose to be established upon is now replaced by cliffs that are three times higher than Land’s End’s; the cold, jade-green seawater that embraced Minack Theatre was moved here.
Occasionally, in the rhythmic triple metres, wind mutes the sound of rain that drops onto the plastic canopy for a few seconds. I understand the infinite monkey theorem. In the precipitation that lasted for two and a half million years, upon the gloomy earth, there was a glass greenhouse that shaped like those old fruit cans, cylinders, completely transparent. I was marooned there, archiving the sound of raindrops and tides of the Carnian Pluvial Event, until a complete Rose from the South is heard. It was fine, my ideal thing to do. I enjoyed spending twelve hours on writing and reading, and another twelve on monitoring the rhythm of rain. I don’t like kids; It sorely depends on the cautiousness and empiricism regarding the definition of uncertainty; therefore, I cannot patrol the mountain gap in the warmth of the sun, watching two hundred and fifty thousand kids that are running in the rye. They seem confused but stray resolutely to their end of time. This grand image is as meaningless as two hundred and fifty thousand plus one lives, until I rose groggily from the impact of two hundred forty-nine thousand and nine hundred ninety-nine swarming kids. The last one holds a sickle in the right hand and a clump of fresh wheat sprouts in the left hand. I imagined how angry the parents would be at this innocent gesture of friendliness, but this is rather touching to me. The only kid I accept before met,
meine Rosen aus dem Süden.
1 / 4
As I stand on cliffs, using five hundred words to describe a feeling of two seconds. Late Cornish summer breezes the rolling grass that is at the calf-height, as well as paintings laid flatly on earth. Every day after lunch, I dress on a heavy pea coat, wetting it again by painting seascapes in the stormy rain.
While the bus climbing the slope beside Market Place, it provides a platform to look down the entire Mount’s Bay that is dissolving in the mist. Regardless only one living being is supposed to be here; I still believe the selective yellow that occasionally flickers down there is lighted by another soul unknown. The vehicle proceeds the journey in between continuous Cornish hedges that heights to the upper deck, to Minack Theatre, Land’s End; then it turns, back to Penzance. Dirty windows barely constraint the feeble heat supplied by dying radiators, becomes the only filter in a road film without a destination. The road never existed in road films; narratives are but the selected connection between two identified patterns in the sea of entropy, and road functions as the process of possibility. I strongly agree that free will is an illusion; if it is real, then I shall push for the imaginative celling.
Hills and slopes directly introduce the destination to passengers while we are tricked into ignoring the surroundings. Isn’t it interesting? The well-refined narrative structure has just been visualised as worldly terrains. I love the bus that leaves for Penzance at dusk. It gently roller-coastering through hills, like a flight, like Lanyon and his glider, like everything within reach. Precisely it is my attachment to this land that makes the physical detaching a way for a conquering gaze; precisely it is my fear of a failed seizure, I choose to cross-reference The Rose from the South from my memory for two million years. I hunt images in a sunset safari; my prey is a flagrant addiction, it enslaves all of us.
5 / 16
As for the “distance”, or “the theoretical destination”, it is also a conceptual seduction. Our wishes merge into a colossal, skyward beam on the sea, ablaze like a beacon; this rationalised non-rationality attracts pilgrims of a journey to verify their dreams which ultimately ends with the sense of completeness — the endpoint that is defined subjectively. On the other end of the continent, when cruising in the moist south, Yu Dafu phrased such motivation as Sehnsucht nach der Ferne; its other name is much more known today, Fernweh. His cry for a successful flaneur has lingered across the century that he had to silently contemplate Heine’s poems to cover such animal instinct and fantasy. As the steaming journey becomes industrious, even the trip mode started to decide its characteristics. Narratives accumulated on the road construct experiences that are considered “way more meaningful than the result”. A random gaze seldom fulfils one’s expectation, unless constant adjustment and construction caters to the idealised state. Changing landscapes are used for anaesthetising those who are upset about the discrepancy between idealisation and reality, but the vertical drop still needs to be compensated, perhaps by embedding fantasies onto their companions. Characters of fatalism helplessly nudged observations into illusional images of free will, but fortunately, the authenicity of feelings is always real.
Indeed, without a display plaza, sexuality, sexual orientation could be too vague for discussion. Perhaps the meaning of space is determined by desires. The purposes of makers who created artificial space are assigned as meanings; so what is the purpose of nature? I have till eternity to think this through, and extend the discourse into a nonexistent grave. That selective yellow is still flickering, paler the sky is. “Wash”, rain has been washing my sight; seagulls cry beneath tides.
3 / 8
Maybe — maybe, I am seeking a closed logic loop, a model of thinking, a stable system. Eureka! Despite stability might suggest the derogatory sense in Art and Humanity, so, perhaps we can re-summarise this with a visualised image: on the sea of entropy, there is an island.
A chalk-white mosaic wall rises from the water with a lasting sound; then translucent blue glass windows enclosed with brown frames float up, form a basic architectural component. The structure duplicates and extends like chemical bounds until a castle is illustrated; load-bearing columns are hidden within, upon which a huge platform establishes; piled residential buildings crowded the surface, while knifing alleys and decorative plants suggest the meticulousness in floor-planning. Many flowerpots are placed on the edge of green belts. Instead of decorations, they grow spring onions, peppers and garlic. Fig trees stretch from yards on both sides of the main passageway, which divides the platform in half. This…well, street…is big enough for parking. It ends with a statue, with two blooming peach trees at the front. If I reach this compound, I will no longer need to salvage rations, supplies from the southern coastal town. I actually have no idea what the architectural compound supplies, but the clustered shops and stands seemingly covered enough demands. I suppose this is a projection of self-supplied autonomy that additionally decorated with the obsession to land and to hard labouring. Wheat barely grows in the southeast, so it is rice.
Another gargantuan silhouette rises in front of the compound, the upside-downed Alhambra palace, composited like a mirage. What it supposes to face should be el Albayzín, another kingdom on the hill. But the grotesque collage reveals no inharmoniousness; after all, they are my projections; they are images of my subconsciousness and subconsciousness that I have not yet recognised. Olive fields! Wheat Fields!! Olive fields! Un reino entre olivares! The olive field is an ideal image. British castle often sits near coastlines, hence I figure Spanish castles should be within the embracement of olive fields. I don’t understand the song Olive Tree back then; the rhythm that barely fluctuates bores me; confusing lyrics is, personally, obscurantist. It came clear to me one day. I realised she sings about the olive plantation the finally appears after a muddy trudge in rice fields, and pasty-baking in Tennessee.
7 / 16
In one of my childhood, or shall I say, it is likely in all of my childhoods, I have developed interests in drawing. But in that specific one I am talking about, my best friend and I were obsessed with drawing a hotel. We started with a coconut tree on the left bottom corner of the paper, a room with luxury chandeliers, a wooden rocking chair locates on its right half. The room is tiny but well equipped. A trap door is installed on its celling, connects the common area with a kitchen. Barbecues are always fresh, and cuisines lay out on a long dining table, like those American cartoons of the 40s that deliberately exhibit the life of the middle class that is rich in material. Reasonability didn’t last very long; everything became exaggerated after the starting point: the high-speed train that commutes between west and east wings of the building; a glass greenhouse that occupies an entire floor; a computer room as high as clouds that always has pop soda on the desk — the best video gaming imagination we designed to avoid paternal control. Alas, the vaguely noticed competitive relationship that sealed in our gene gradually revealed between two juvenile male younglings. We wielded our imaginations tooth and nail, projected the contest onto creations for defeating the other fraction. Our classmates would swarm to us the very second we took out drawings after classes, asking where they could be living once the hotel somehow becomes a reality; we, in order to be the king of the hill, have been immoderately enriching each inch of the space. Later the contest revealed a masculine character of a volunteered slave to imagery fantasies: bigger! Higher! More aggressive! After the summarisation of programmed techniques, the mind wrestling was replaced by the search for a bigger paper. I read about criticism of tower structure which describes our unconscious solution as phallicism. On the second thought — well, fine, you got me there. Words like “filled” sometimes could be commendatory terms in the male gaze; newly constructed skyscrapers are often described that they “filled up the public sight”, “filled up the horizon”. (Meh, it goes more smoothly in Chinese, the language I use for literal thinking, but you know what I mean) Interesting, I guess the essence of stimulation input is the utilisation, or in this case, the manipulation of space.
One day, I found an A2 paper; one day, a classmate tore my drawing when he was fucking around.
I knew how to make a same illustration, but memories and meteoric primitive alpha identity has been shredded. Physically speaking, I never possess advantages throughout my whole life; hence I demonstrated the most horrible and vicious image that should not be behaved at that age, or to be honest, at any age. It was also my first time realising that there must be some invisible qualities that image carries, and how my creations enslave me.
1 / 2
Space…brings us illusional experience…it is space, space…until I was resurrected.
9 / 16
I died on a Thursday.
I just recollected this, that I did die on a Thursday of the millennium. I can clearly recall how the sun shined through that stained window, casting light onto the blackboard. I recall the smell of summertime, the noise of cicada, and the depressive atmosphere in the classroom. I raised my hand up, said that I feel dizzy. The teacher looked surprised but agreed to send me home. I would have an entire afternoon walking down traditional stone towpaths of a small rivery town, regardless of being judged by elder idlers; willow branches touched my face; narrow boats with black awning nimbly slid through arched bridges; boatmen paused paddling, sat down to dodge drooping Boston ivies that wrapped the bridge; the sunlight became dazzling white, the unique smell of steaming canal pushed idlers into shadows along the street. “After I cross this bridge”, I thought, “then it’s the declining residential area that smells like moss; then there are vegetable stands, fruit stores and slaughterhouses; then it’s my granny’s house. Whenever I push that door, two kind smiles and a tasty feast always waits for me on the other side. I can have the computer for the afternoon without concerning being hopped on. Because I am sick; for sick people, many exceptions are allowed and are reasonable.”
Then I fell down on the floor, made a horrible scratch, pushed a few desks in the exclamations of the class. I had an ambiguous vision of strange lands. The coastline of Cornwall, grassland of Bayanbulak, Córdoba’s olive fields. I was not reconciled to the fact that I have not even made it to Cornwall.
….But wait, this cannot be right. Whose memory is this? How come I remember Cornwall? However, everything stopped before I figure this out. People are eventually dying; obsessiveness fakes the purpose of living. For those who faded away, their obsessions are what people sigh to at the funeral.
5 / 8
It is like sudden enlightenment, and everything became crystal clear; my brain works swiftly, countless memories flood like high tides. I see infinite possibilities, uncountable possibilities in the infinite time are extending beyond imagination. I see a pebble beach of seventy miles; dilapidated concrete buildings are struggling to stand against the weathering; thunder strikes without notice, inflamed my clothes. I see the sun shrinks to the size of a pea, radiates a dying temperature; the tenné light barely outlines the ferny plain; outside the unpopulated village, there is the last tree on the earth. I see wind sweeping through a valley, stirring layers of Moso bamboo clock-wisely into many concentric circles; then dark green mondograss that carpeted the land were stirred counter-clock-wisely. I see a man who cannot be hit by raindrops, constrainedly playing a song on a piano that is being bombarded by rain and hail. I see snow-covered mountains with no end to them; a lonely road stretches from my feet, up to the horizon; at distance, there is a memorial archway, which seemly as far as mountains. These are my experiences, those had happened and those await.
I don’t know how long it has been until the bridge I stand on became a ship. It lengths infinitely; in one direction, there are people moving towards me; I cannot reach outside the bridge to give a proper look at what is happening; as a geometric line, this bridge/ship is, I feel no necessity to try walking to one end. Shapes of people are enlarging in an annoyingly largo manner; as for me, I can only wait in silent anger. Too many things that demand repair has come to my mind. The feeling is beyond words, but I can sense that the ending differentiates by choosing an unattended path at the crossroad. Perhaps I should talk just two hours after my birth, to persuade my parents that selling
the real estate after twenty years was an idiotic idea; perhaps I should focus on books on the study’s shelf, without giving a shit to how upset teachers were when I deliberately ignored them. Explained answers undoubtedly come with the privilege of reshaping my worthless life, but I dare not to nudge it too much. “If I jumped on the previous train, I could avoid many tragedies, but those loving memories will neither happen. I will spend this infinity self-regretting until the kingdom comes; then the voyage repeats, until the kingdom comes again.”
Regardless I have until eternity, waiting is not my thing.
11 / 16
It is a concrete-casted bridge, with a lion sits on each handrail pillar; stone balls are somehow placed into lions’ mouths, moveable but unextractable. This engineering work cannot be more familiar to me. I am sure on one unseen side of it there are red-painted incised carvings that read “Victory Bridge”; on the other side is the same inscription but missing an edge on one of the characters — some idiot threw a rock to it. Hence there is nothing I can examine for killing time. I lay on the bridge, watching the night falls.
The invisible sea surface is mirroring the reflection of the rising milky way. Everything is in a horrifying silence, but it comforts me.
I think I hear a hollowed whistle travelling in the air, like a desperate shout out of a dying city that begs the last salvager who’s leaving to stay. Whoever blew that whistle, it must be the fear of that city who loses its functionality and degrades into a bizarre sandstone which is even less than empty space. The milky way illuminates a calming atmosphere, and more memories are coming: I recall Ursa Mino blinked, and suddenly flashed splendid purple light before the Big Chill like a martyr who sets oneself on fire; ever since that, there will be no more light in the universe. I recall a four-level factory established on a flint land that being eaten by grass; a typical 80s’ building that often seen in rural China it is, a heavy wire entanglement blocks the basement entrance; a fox doll limpingly climbs on a bell tower, but the giant bronze bell seems unreachable; a gigantic cube prison flips on the Nordic Sea for every twelve hours, waving hands of those who unfortunately dropped into the sea are like hairs on a fur; the last standing flag breaks in the middle, what breaks also is not a meaningless grand narrative or a manifestation of high hopes. The moment its breaking end touches the ground represents the vanishment of the entire race. Never more there will be living beings that bother to prove whether human ever existed for a pathetic period of time.
The crowd keeps walking toward me. Fireflies! I reach out, try to seize a naughty specimen. But I find that these little yellow dots can pass through my hands. They are indeed glooming dots, photons to be more precisely. They travel on irregular paths, as if someone planted a pollen-riches lily at the bow.
The darkness slips away. I can vaguely recognise the faces of the crowd. The ocean reveals its shape too. Landscapes are gathering around from afar. I just noticed that I can reach out my head to check those four characters. But what I saw is a mist of seventy meters’ thickness. A desire for detaching calls for water.
3 / 4
The crowd shows a vacancy of expression on their faces as well as gestures. They look empty, numb, like a marching army of puppets. I can, of a sudden, recognise each character, where we have met, where we are going to meet. Although the linearity of the narrative is scattered, merging into a lake of time now, the space forces the marching crowd to follow a linear sequence. As a matter of fact, I indeed cannot talk to all of them simultaneously, but I have already done so somewhere, somehow. The reforged linearity is but a projection of my attempt of rationalisation, to locate an anchor point in the comprehensive review of all realities.
At the two hundred fifty thousandth time, an approaching me said this to me:
“I support fatalism. Or should I say, I lean more to fatalism. Until it is scientifically proved, I am afraid it shall remain as a theory instead of a theorem. God bless those who cannot understand basic physics and mathematics so that they chose to devoted their lifetimes to literature; they have interpreted fatalism rhetorically as an idealised philosophical pattern of thinking. Since there has not been any victor in this match, the advantage and wit of sociology has been demonstrated; I cannot admit the chance that free will does not exist. I believe that human are elegant machines; we behave because the received stimulations that determined by matters projected from the singularity where fundamental forces disunited into four; and after the half-life of a god-chosen atom, the material universe formed; then it was the principle of it, macroscopic and microscopic; then it was conditioned flexes, hormone secretion and feedbacks. But all of these had been settled, what we have been through and what it is going to be.
But thinking about the ultimate ending is always meaningless; we have to respect the presence with the most optimal moral, and it is the true respect to the meaninglessness of life, the second principle of thermodynamics and the inevitable oxidisation of our mortality.
But what if free will exists? We often label our motivations as autonomous initiatives; while we are proud of conducting and enjoying its process, we hypnotise ourselves with rational sophistry and idealised romanticisation, writing anthropocentric odes for everything. But what I know for sure, is that we are devoting to make it count, making it productive, enthusiastic, graceful, más y más hasta “plus ultra” por nuestro amor fatal; hence when the kingdom comes, and the answer of measuring our oeuvres reveals, prouder we would be as the articulation of embedded beauty and invincibility within this bound sounds.”
I agree with me; despite it is verbally self-contradictory, I cannot endure deconstructing the two hundred fifty thousandth attempts with a morbid rationality.
13 / 16
At the two hundred fifty thousand and one times, I supplemented: “perhaps familiarities, the nature of things and images caused many deja vu, misadvised us that we were doomed to repeat it over and over again; what we failed to realise that, the most painful experience could as be an advancement; it is the effort we put by not surrender to the meaninglessness of life and the linearity of time; no matter how insignificant it is, it worths praising!”
So I look myself holding to the handrail as him(I) gazing snowy mountains being rendered out of the fog. He is, seemly, waiting for specific timing, then he jumps off, quickly disappears. I can make it to the mountains! I thought to myself. So I walked down this lonely road for many moons and suns, and at last, I reached the memorial archway. My journey ended here; the dazzling contrast prevented me from reading its engraved title, but that drooping, hanging stuff looked particularly like a hand.
At the twenty-five thousand and one hundred and thirty times, the meaning of the road occurred to me. It connects the idealised destination beyond my sight, guides me to believe that I will set foot on the snowy crown, but that archway, at the random spot on this road, lack of the indication of milestones was, perhaps, the ending. I realised that I was not persuaded by the logic; I was persuaded by the inertance of thinking; I believed a vague, grand rationalisation. I stepped off the road, and all of a sudden, my perspective was not constrained anymore; every single corner of this arid plain is within my reach.
But this is a wilderness. Flints, pebbles and alkaline soil, nothing more; they formed complicated shapes, implying that there might be a pattern. I examined them countless times on the ship, but until it voyaged past this crossroad, I have gained nothing.
At two hundred fifty-three thousand eight hundred and seven times, I still cannot walk on the circle whose radius equals many moons and suns. The wilderness is a chaotic sandbox, without any pattern; we summarised its chaotic state and invented the name “wilderness” to regularise this irregularity.
I was frustrated, so I suppose the pre-determined road trip should be the true logic; once again, I walked on the asphalt that veined with cracks. The archway has filled my mind, that I cannot stop thinking about it. It curtains known death and strange, unmet death. I have till eternity to do something stupid, and to walk towards the fatal narratives along, to be enslaved by linearity. I am a slave of many things. Fortunately, no one else is forced to experience this never-ending torture with me. Scapegoat is the salvation of those who suffer; the inner richness is the salvation for him who suffers.
I imagined the first step on the other side of fate; perhaps it comes the odour of Acadia? I am convinced the one who lighted bright yellow in Mount Bay is there. In the sea of entropy, in the linear fate, my wish of isolation has been smashed by this tiny imagination.
At the two hundred and sixty thousand times, I have made one step beyond the archway; two hundred and sixty thousand and one times, one more step further; two hundred and sixty thousand and forty-two times, when I was killed by exhaustion, I turned around and saw a giant carved Omega on the stony architecture.
Hope is toxic.
The terrain softly rises, until a small hill stands before me. I believed there is a panoramic view of mountains and wild fig trees that scattered over the earth when I cross it over. At the twenty-ninth thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times, I was only two steps away from the peak. It was not very different in the thirty thousand times until the moment that I prepared to accept my fate and to start over; my doe turned her head around, responded to my subconscious call. She looked still healthy, agile and faithful; her fur was brown and shiny; silver light spots bursted out, hoovering around and embracing her, as if she was luminous; she is sacred. She stood on the hill, looking down at me sympathetically as I felt an immense pain spread out — a burning agony which feels like the integration of pain from all lives; every sound within my brain was screaming, my soul was burning, crying, then roaring, begging to give up this dauntless expedition.
Without applause and cheering, I conquered the hill in absolute silence. On the other side it was still the forlorn road, full of cracks, but its surface hasn’t been polished like the part I walked; countless archways arrayed above it, stretched beyond the sight; on the closest one there is a carved Alpha, looking down on me swaggeringly.
7 / 8
An angelic face walk passes me with a swift peak; she continued to the end of the bridge like many familiar faces. They merged into each other and became the crowd.
At the three hundred and twenty thousand times, I chose to land on a vineyard. Lush plantation offsets trellises, grew riotously as tall as my chest; an easel with a canvas on was placed at the centre of the farm. So I painted with hand and juice. When I almost finished, one girl squeezed through rows of vines. She was in a grey coat and a cardinal beret. I have no idea in which language we communicated, but we did. She walked at the front, implied me to follow; I walked behind, with my head down. A small town rendered out from nowhere, stony streets, stony houses. November rain was dripping from eaves, coalesced into streams that flew in cracks of the paving. Across the town, there is a dock, one sailboat moored at the end of stairs. “Get on!” her eyes commanded, so I did. The current brought us across the channel, to the warm continent, free of navigation. I have indulged in fishing and crab-catching, I hummed songs I hadn’t know. The mist on the sea eventually vanished, an insulated box appeared on the deck, full of iced beer. The mirage-like outline of the distant land implanted an idea to me, “Cádiz!”. I never known, till today, how come I recognised a land I have never been to, at least had not been to. Then curtains fall in the warmth of a dreaming palette. No regret this time.
Hence I begin to select moderate landing grounds. As strange faces approaching me, experiences in timelines have become well-rounded. There are always things that cannot be familiarised by repeating, even if the resurrection occurs on one-second progression. Suffering is a choice; perhaps, after all, it is us that assign distinctive meanings to suffer and its antonym. I have seen abandoned grey mining buildings built alongside the rail track, I have ride buses in a nameless black cityscape. I have been to Edinburgh! At least I thought that it was Edinburgh. I lost count of how many times I re-stepped on that sailing bridge as the repetition bores me. Each possibility only brings the difference of one second; comparing to the infinite time, the freshness is relatively insignificant. It lacks the move “leap” of “leaping over difficulties”, so the sense of achievement weakens. Suffering is addictive, which seduces us to imagine the abundant positive feedback helplessly; sufferings are but roads that shaped distinctively. The ending is pre-determined; its enigmatic principle beaconed a dark plain with luring bonfires.
The last movement has been introduced. I have, of course, witnessed the gravitational force failed to tackle the expansion of the universe, where the heat death and a great motionlessness lays. I can still recall Ursa Minor busted a purple wail, how glorious and loud it was, but materials are doomed to be in a great silence, the end of all possibilities, the end of the temporal track.
Crowds on the bridge are gradually vanishing into the darkness. The last figure comes forward. She wears that familiar red beret, grey coat; her stocking is messily snagged a little higher above the left ankle, as if she has been the soul that spent the infinite time for an outlook of a single second. She walks past me, then stops, holds on the handrail and commands: “Down!” Where else could I be? So I jump after her, with an unwillingly look to the empty bridge.
15 / 16
One day I woke up, lit the cellphone screen
a breach to my world in a card box .
The girl whom I took a crush,
engaged, without a sign
smiles like the Cornish sea in summer;
My friends forgot to
Wave goodbye
to me and to others
My family,
started to count the years they have lived,
satisfied, smile and sigh
A spotlessly organized desktop
but everlasting
I am still chasing a vague wish
as if a period of my life shall never
Ends
Out of nowhere, why,
have we built not seven gates but Thebes
the earth have they still rammed,
salt spilled.
One day I climbed up the ridge,
For an outlook of a second,
For an outlook of
Castles, array to horizon
Colossal, fire in its palm
“I shall ride on the wind of cosmos,
travel to Mars, voyage to Luna”
On the top of the world,
For only an outlook of a second,
and I am at peace.
Then, downwards the Northern slope,
through clouds, through the fog
Surprised by things I have been though
until the time is explained.
I love you like I love those spruces
And the grass between rifts
They appear for granted
The moment you wish to glance back.
We fall in a space filled with dying light and land on soft sand, moist but easy to walk. The darkness swallows us and becomes impenetrable. It is the true kind of infinite time that lays ahead: the void after the depletion of all time. Her voice becomes much softer, in which she tosses a question: “You have idled long enough, have you decide in which you love and believe?”
I am stunned. Suffering has reshaped my personality, it is now hard to have any fluctuation. I am like a useless chime hanging in a cemetery, sounding the song of irregularity, a rhythm determined by entropy, patient and bearing; the wind may disturb a song, orients it towards edginess and unsettlingness, but I will eventually play the only known piece.
Rosen aus dem Süden
Rain-drops, I guess, the falling moisture in the medium which occupies the void. I cannot help to distract myself by imagining those two and a half million years. However, stalling is definitely not problem-solving; awkwardness has all the soil it needs to be flourish. I really hope not to behave anxiously in this eternity as the only two trapped spirits who can move and think in this universe.
I cannot give the answer immediately. I love art, I love painting, I love exploring unknowns, I love materialising images in the real world, and travelling through strange lands like a self-determined missionary, for bringing a little comfort for an inexistent soul. This is my summary after experiencing all possibilities. I don’t know, to be honest, every time I think about art, it ends infinitely close towards the three ultimate questions. I guess this is the curse of humanity after eating the fruit of wisdom. Life is meaningless, the universe is meaningless. What do memories and experiences stand for when the universe loses its meaning? The mightiest palace could be established on rhetoric and speech; the vastest plain could have its principle on a larger scale. It is because of our arrogance and insignificance, we decide to conclude it with a few syllables. Authorial element weaves concept, concept generates image, image enslaves the only liberty in fatalism: our thoughts.
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly, like a stone threw on cotton. She remains silent, I am feeling a burning line of sight interrogating my shameful ignorance. “Bring it”, I think to myself, “I have till eternity for a debate. But what’s the point of that? Being right or wrong, conquered and conquering. We are stuck in this companion. This is fate, there is no free will.”
“That is good enough for me…”, she mumbled, “at the last time, nothing manipulates me, I am free”.
Yes, indeed, we are free now. There is no curtain, so there is no other side; no destination, no determination; no determination, no structure; no structure, no narratives. There is no light and other lives in the first place, which obstructs the first image. Only two lonely souls, defining our useless thinking as meaningful free will by self-persuading sophistry.
She laughs, “I have been through the endless time, just like you. Every time I was on that bridge, I thought, whose imagination this is? So tedious and vulgar; boring, arid, and barren projections. Not until I accepted my fate, these projections have become interesting; I started to explore, or should I say, I started to deconstruct your memories, your brain, your subconsciousness through space.”
She paused for a few seconds, “For you, every time you stepped on the bridge was a travel back to a few seconds before you jump; but for me, it was Penrose stairs, a circular queue. I had to travel to the end of time over and over again until I set foot onto the bridge. Time works differently for us; when it counts by infinity, it takes me an infinity to reach the other end of the bridge, and so I start over, I jump, I walk, I wait for another infinity. Each time I approach you, it was only the blink of an eye in your perspective.”
“This is the universal suffering; I just, coincidently, became the scapegoat.”
I cannot sense any emotional fluctuation in her voice, but a silent pause follows. For how long? It doesn’t matter. Time does not exist here in the first place.
“But in my time, you were in the same position.” I looked towards the direction of her sound, with cold sweat dripping down my hair. I just realised that she had been forced to walk to the heat death for each fatal encounter, but I have been experiencing fresh memories tangled by Penrose stairs’ cirrus. I have tasted all “new” possibilities, and it ends eventually. But in her perspective, this perhaps only lasts for a second in one of the circles. I don’t know how long she has walked alone, and I don’t know for how long until she can witness her final darkness.
“Perhaps the encounter of two souls make it meaningful…Our conversations, our thoughts. In a world where the function of heat loses necessity, only us can produce new things out of nothing, and assign meanings…perhaps.”
I raise my head again, and she’s gone already.
“Good enough for me..” Empty words linger.
But something marvellous begins to happen. Firstly I see a slightly brighter direction, and seven colours of sunshine are being rendered. A doe jumps across the horizon, laying out rosy dawn like curtain draws. The light reflects the shape of a small town; a church is especially recognisable, a landscape I cannot be more familiar with. I cannot figure out what is happening until I illustrate a Penrose stair in my mind. Like an ignorant child touched an ice block in a sultry afternoon of Latin America, I am enlightened. I no longer hate the linearity of time, I realise that what I hated is the lack of a second chance. I believe the projection of infinite possibilities is determined by my greedy obsessiveness of possession.
Everything is crystal clear now, including the sky. I don’t have to think anymore; I gaze upon this beach thoughtfully, it is my wasteland of doe.
The end is near
So I land on the mathematic line again. A newborn sun expels all the darkness and coldness, as vivid as it shined through stained windows in that long-lost, and unarrived afternoon. Landscapes pass in the original sequence, the bridge sails through infinite possibilities. I see the school in which I was supposed to die; it is obviously maintained better than I expected. The bridge sails pass stone towpaths, old arch bridge, relatively less dilapidated residential buildings; then it is my grandparents’ house, my granny is vigorously barging with a bric-a-brac dealer for toys; flower beds, street trees, the ancient city moat, then it sails back to where it belongs, and stops moving. I know she’s coming.
But something attracts my attention. I see me cuddling a baby who is in swaddling clothes — oh wait, that is not me! It is my father! We look alike. “Dad!” I shouted, regardless I am perhaps in another dimension to the reality beneath the bridge.
“Dad!” No reaction. The man is still gently rocking the baby, cooing him. I want to tell him from my heart, that I have felt the cosmic wind, I have seen the end of all time, there is only fate. It is the answer.
“FATHER!!!”
So he quickly raises his head in shock, I don’t think he heard the voice of void, but something told him that his son desperately called for him. He follows his own sight, newly painted “Victory Bridge”, with no edge missing, is greedily absorbing heat from the last sunshine of 96.
She’s finally here, at the moment I gave up calling my father to strangle the younger me. I cannot help to be desperate regardless this scenario has been played for infinite times. I shrugged helplessly and looking at the teasing expression on her face, but more I feel is a reassuring future.
“Where do we begin this time?” I ask,
“Everywhere.”
She takes my hand, and faithfully examines me from top to bottom, they are the doe’s eyes. “We have…till the kingdom comes, again, and again, and…”
We will, alas, walking in the lake of time again, in the chaotic, never-ending repetition; we will eventually forget about all of this, return to this mirador above the lone road. But we have found an anchor point, and with it, irregular becomes regular; a coordinate system establishes; abstract concepts are invented for describing organic chemistry and waves in parameters. Possibilities linearly extend on a geometrically defined line, but now, we remember the companion of each other, proceed to locate the other side of Möbius band. Centred on a water-drop within the lake, solitude ceases, fatalism just received its biggest praise. Time has lost its meaning again, not because it counts by “infinity”, but its endlessness is no longer frightening.
So the grotesqueness re-started writing a Fantasia on Entropic Sea Songs after the rest. What can we do with our meaningless lives, in the countless alterations? It is, maybe, not about free will nor fate; we can only treasure companion souls in the irresistible tides of the entropic ocean. Rationalising unexplainable things irrationally is a pre-determined path, and its irrationality has assigned meaningful values to unconcerned matters; these invented, self-deceiving values has made life sufficient to be great. Two wandering protons ceased their journey, entangled, affecting the reality in all dimensions. In the area that I am familiar with, the entropy decreased, simply because two lost fireflies have found each other, and becoming one.
Once again, I have written my stories. I shall close the book now. I won’t use numbers to mark new chapters. So this is (16 / 16), which is also 1. I think the Greek Alphabet will be suitable this time.
