Feng Huang Shan Video Series

A Cloudy Day: Taiwan

Ho Ho Ho

Hiking 鳳凰山

So far as I can tell the Chinese word for both "climb" and "crawl" is the same. When Fiona and I went hiking a mountain last weekend, the distinction made little difference, for half the time it seemed we were crawling up slippery rock, or wobbling cross rotting bamboo-and-nail bridges, or pulling ourselves up difficult paths by knotted ropes.

It began simply enough, passing through campgrounds on paved roads, then for a short time on a logging trail. But then, turning abruptly into the weird mixture of tropical forest, bamboo, and black rock we began a more direct and rocky ascent. Our group consisted of a very fine mixture of folks--some authentic, experienced hikers (you could easily see it in their careless grins) a family with a teenage girl, a very unhappy looking twenty-something girl, Fiona and I, and a 75-year-old man, who looked like it might be his first mountain hike (yet maybe not his last). I was too excited taking photos at every turn (the only person so inclined) and since we were in no hurry, we were mostly at the back of the pack with the unhappy twenty-something, the man, and a guy with very serious knee supports who every once in a while stopped stock-still as if listening, his front leg perched upon a rock, heroically. At first I thought he might be listening intently, or simply consuming nature with his senses, but I think it was just that he was taking breaks, every now and then.

A bamboo forest is odd. Like a pine forest, it admits only its own kind and its own ecosystem, completely contained and in an equilibrium of silence so deep that it extends and permeates. I've heard before that bamboo may be thought of us a reminder to prudence, or diligence, as it never extends so far without first putting another support. And yet, as I gazed high above, these crazy reeds have grown so tall that their very weight pulls themselves back into lovely curves that are easily, freely tossed by the winds. And then again, should we not reflect on the human result of prudence?

As we climbed higher, mountain mist began moving past us, sending a chill not dissimilar to that winter fragrance of snow, a sensation of cleanness and spiritual cold. When we finally reached the ridge of the mountain, we were already surrounded by a mist so thick it just as easily could be called fog. And as we walked I could not help feeling troubled and lost, as if this were a mythical land. Sounds just around the bend were lost, yet those sounds from the town below could, at times, be distinctly heard. Also distance and perspective collapsed and were confused. It was hard to tell how far we had gone, whether we were still had to go up or go down. And when I looked off either side of the trail, the most troubling thing yet (especially on these wet rocks) was an interminable near-drop. When the fogs parted sometimes you could see for a long distance straight down and yet not see the bottom. On the other side a misty bamboo forest that also receded almost vertically away. It seemed we were walking upon a series of rock platforms unsupported by earth of this world, and it continued on, and on, and on, until the ennui of the situation completely overshadowed its complete mystery.

We met finally, all together at the top, drank some cheap oolong tea, and descended again, a journey that seemed twice as long as the original.

Look at my photo album for photos of the trip.

Dream 10/01

(Note: original copy mislaid elsewhere.)

It was a day above and beyond to linger upon the sidewalks half-way sighing at the sky, wander down the Plinko streets to where long grasses swayed near the seashore, boarding this useless and picturesque town. There was a cool way to the light and of breathing that suggested spring instead of troubled fall (the days we have been having—it’s been enough—like corpses slowly rotting, blotting out the sun and getting down on all of us). There were a group of four people—at first I thought they were men—but actually at least half of them were women. Most of them were carrying black diving suits with masks, and tanks and flippers and they too were going to the shore.

We tarried on together and though my interest was idle, theirs was a freakish calm of anticipation. Only when we looked past the dunes did I too get infected with their thoughts: below me the sand, the water rinsing out and churning and then in the distance like I’ve never seen before these ancient, volcanic islands, this morning so clear as I’ve never seen, and now I knew truly the effect upon these people. This was not one rare day in Fall but one rare day in a decade. But while comparing decades one might as well be prepared to say that it was a rare decade among decades, and so on. A day like this might never come again. Or if it did, one might sleep through it next time.

We got on a boat and I got to know a little bit about my companions, though as I did I grew less and less at ease at our tight group and wished to be alone. One lady with stringy red hair embarrassed me when I tried to strike up a conversation by blurting out she hadn’t spoken English in twenty-three years. Perhaps she had forgotten most of our important syntax, pronunciation, and usage during that time because her English was horrible, enough so that it justified us not attempting to speak again. Another lady I saw was captured in spirit. I questioned her as to what it was. When she replied—satisfactory to anyone else—I said, “Why is that?” When she reweighed her thoughts she responded with another adequate suggestion but I persisted, “and why is that?” “Why it’s God,” she cried, finally. I said, almost triumphantly, almost swelling at the climax, “and what is that?” She said, annoyed, “It’s just a feeling, okay?” And that was all and we all wished to be parted from each other.

That was not the worst part. Upon one of the splendid islands, I searched for entry onto a secret beach. On this side there was a fence, and so I retraced my steps back up a long hill to where a road was. The road was gated, so I retraced my steps down the hill again to where a house was and where other people were lingering. Someone said, angrily, “There’s no way to get to the beaches.” It looked to be a tavern of sorts and a lady was at the door, black hair and quiet to the reproaches directed at her and pretty in this specific way. We knew that the only way to the beach was through this woman’s house and yard and to be blocked by a wire fence was just unacceptable. “It’s private property,” she said. But no one really owned the islands did they?—and who was she to put down markers upon such a perfect day? “It’s not fair,” someone cried, “it’s just not fair!” The crowd became more and more angry at the injustice. I thought they might do something violent, and, in fact, I started to run away. I stopped when I realized what I could do. “What is wrong here,” I cried, mightily, “is not to be solved like this, here by you—but later in a court of law where it might be properly judged. What are you going to do—kill the lady because you couldn’t have a swim?” I thought I was clever and perhaps I was. I ushered some people away and I thought I saw the lady smiling at me, warmly, or was it with self-satisfaction?

She had slid free, and another set of sea washed-up warn-out city dwellers had dissipated and wandered away. Such verdicts are never gained, for these islands melt into the fog, lost for unendurable ages, this woman, her smile and all.

The Pied Piper

Lucky Jumping Water

Today I touched a student's booger`

I don't mean to interrupt my intrepid investigation of my Chinese studies long. I only write to say that today I touched a student's booger. It was Gary's booger. He's new and slightly loose-hinged. Because he is exceedingly naughty one of the first days I told him to stand up and put his hands on his head. He did this until he cried that he had to go to the bathroom, so I told him, grumpily, to go. Twenty minutes later, at the very end of class, Gary slips in with this slightly bemused look upon his face, sort of like a raccoon that has just crawled out of a garbage bin. I was not happy.

Today I told the students to crowd around Ol' Uncle Joe because I was going to tell them a story. As is the case, half of the kids make a mad dash toward the front blue line, and the other half look disinterestedly at the ceiling and I'm not sure if they don't care or if they didn't understand the summons. This time Gary squirming in the front-row looked up shocked. He held his finger aloft with a mysterious golden-brown substance on the tip. "Teacher Joe!' exclaimed, and then he spoke a word that he repeated twice that I thought sounded like the Chinese for "dirty." I guess I wasn't really thinking a darn thing, but my mind didn't associate the glistening substance with anything. I thought at first he had been stabbed by a floor splinter (of which there are none in my classroom) for his face was so stammered and astonished--entreating. I bent down and tried to examine it, which in practice meant plucking it up. Only it didn't come off. Instead, a golden strand of moisture joined my finger.

Of course, it was a booger. I told him to go get a tissue--which had probably been what he was entreating me for, and I followed him. As he walked away, I heard him chuckle, bemused, and say, "Teacher Joe touched my booger." And I had.

A Word on Chinese

Recently I have taken the opportunity at lunchtime to learn a few phrases of Taiwanese, a language I’m not necessarily interested in learning besides the fact that it is commonly used here and very distinct in utterance. I’m a little confused, but it has no written counterpart of its own. Rather, it shares the Chinese characters, using different sounds but otherwise sharing syntax. In this way, it’s rather not too hard to get the hang of—one simply has to learn a substitution of sound for any given meaning. The phrase for, “I don’t understand” for example is the same in both languages, “listen/not/understand.”

In these short language sessions with our mostly Taiwanese-speaking cook, I discovered that I rather enjoyed it more than I ever thought I would. The reason for this joy was simply that I had never expected to learn ANY Taiwanese in my stay here (rather choosing to focus entirely upon Mandarin) and that learning anything was a lot more than I had ever expected to do. Furthermore, this off-handed inclination to learn another language on the side seemed to validate, not diffuse, my capacity in Mandarin. Learning a second sound to any given meaning seemed to reconfirm the first, and push it further back into the recesses of my mind, fortifying it with one more layer of complexity, making it a stain that much harder to remove through the years that might come of not speaking any Mandarin at all.

These discoveries and considerations led me to observe more thoroughly my progress so far in picking up Chinese, my methodology, and my discoveries along the way, which have been, prior to now, taken for granted. As I would have found these things interesting from the outset, knowing little of the language, I thought it profitable to set down a general sketch of the characteristics of the language as I now find them both as a object of interest to those who may have no understanding of the language and as a record of my progress to this point, as I may look back at a later time with some curiosity as to what I thought with still such an incomplete perspective.

Most people know that Chinese characters are only obliquely pictorial in nature; that the language evolved from a system of pictures and that there are some characters that still evoke in their form the object that they represent in meaning. These forms as we now receive them are only vaguely suggestive to the ancient pictographs that they might have one time actually represented. Indeed, the vast majority of the characters have no dimension this way at all (the vast majority of words in any language having no visual correlation anyway). But in some cases, the romantic or creative mind will find suggestion in shapes 日(ri) and 月(yue) to represent, respectively, the sun and moon. And occasionally a rare word does a superb and intricate job at representing its object; 龜(guei), being a turtle.

Yet to think, because of the ancient style of the characters, that the language itself is primitive would be to vastly underestimate the importance of various language forms and the various functions they hold. Pictographs, for example, (and as my dad recently explained in a letter recalling sections from, The Spell of the Sensuous) serve a highly important function in trade nations (like China), whereby parts can agree on a common representative script while still maintaining their indigenous dialects. This is analogous in our portion of the world to the sign/hand language used by Native Americans across the country.

Similarly, written Chinese is employed for several different dialects all of which are as dissimilar to the ear as German and English. And, while not pictographs any longer, the characters do retain a nature of that past, maintaining a more intimate meaning-to-form relation than an alphabet-based language (completely divested from meaning through form). The system that I am alluding to is that of radicals. Radicals, though not visually correspondent to the world around, provide a system, stylized and exclusive, that has no real correlation in English. (The closest thing in English I feel is our etymology; seductive though I find that in how far and ancient you can make a word feel—a word otherwise whimsical and insubstantial, giving it foundation and denotive meaning—radicals and etymology are not the same, only sharing in their nature of being vestiges of the past.) For radicals, in a way, have replaced images with a more abstract method of representation (in the way that an alphabet is abstract to meaning, pertaining only to sound), but in nature and spirit work in the same way as pictographs.

Sometimes radicals seem daunting to explain, but in short, they usually begin as characters themselves (水-water 火-fire 手-hand 心-heart/mind 人-man, to name just a few of the most common), which later in simplified forms fit into other, larger, more complex characters. Often words will have two radicals or three, and sometimes radicals can be so large themselves that they dwarf the rest of the word. (A word is suggested in its size by how many pen strokes it takes to create it—most radicals being two to six, while any given word is usually around 10 to 20. The turtle (龜) for instance is an extreme instance of a large radical, sixteen strokes, and stands on its own as its own word; it stands as one of the last words in my dictionary, a collection that organizes all of its words in order of brushstrokes, beginning with the words that contain the simplest radicals to those with the most complex.)

When radicals are combined to words, often times I notice that the sound is not changed (or only changed slightly) and yet meaning is specifically turned to the quality of the radical. For example, 泡 (pao4) with three dashes upon the left as the “water” radical has the meaning, “bubble.” The word 炮 is phonetically identical yet has instead of the “water” radical the “fire” radical, changing the meaning and visual representation to “fire-cracker.” (Note, too, the word’s onamonapea that fits for both meanings.) A third manipulation, with the “hand” radical in place of the “fire” radical, changes the sound (bao4) and meaning, “hug.” In short, radicals may act as visual clues within the written aspect of Chinese that suggest its meaning (clues that may not be present in the oral Chinese). These clues may betray a cultural prejudice of meaning; by what radicals compose which words, one may be able to attempt to identify what characteristics seem most relevant to any object or idea’s identity. In this way, radicals are like English etymology. Yet because they portray a visual system exclusive to the written script (that is not represented in sound) I find them entirely different in nature.

Poem from the Archives

During the three days of rain and wind here, I've been pacing my room for most of the days and nights. One thing I began doing is looking at everything I wrote in college. I've saved practically everything I've ever written and ninety-nine percent of it is irredeemable in any sense. But the vast majority I like to scan through in any case as one likes to scan through old photos, even though they might not be well shot or well lit or otherwise lacking. There very existence seems a fascination. Here's one:

Sun again.
Cool creaks again.
Crayfish screaming between
Our fingers in the
Long silence of a
Summer afternoon.

It made me think vividly of home and even now how I imagine it. Spent in a stream "in the long silence of a summer afternoon."

Coming Soon: 交趾陶 (jiao1 zhi3 tao2)