And this is a poem also in my book, Empathy,
and it's called "Chinese Space."
And, it's an imagined--
my mother once drew a picture for me
of the house, floor plan of the house where I was born,
and this is an imagined recreation of that.
We were talking at dinner about language,
and I also think that your spatial sense
is, different cultures is completely different.
And for me, the Chinese spatial sense is something fascinating.
"Chinese Space."
"First there is the gate from the street, then
some flowers inside the wall, then the inner roofed gate.
It is a very plain wall without expressionistic means,
such as contrasting light on paving
stones inside the courtyard to the calligraph foundation
stones.
My grandfather called this the facade or Baroque experience,
rendering a courtyard transparent.
The eye expecting to confront static space
experiences a lavish range of optical events
such as crickets and Ming jars.
Their syncopation, like the right,
then left, then right, progress into the house.
An experience that cannot be sustained in consciousness
because your movement itself binds passing time more than
entering directs it.
A red door lies on a golden mirror
with the fascinating solidity and peacefulness
of the pond in the courtyard, a featureless
space of infinite depth where neither unwanted spirits
nor light could enter directly from outside.
It lies within the equally whole space of the yard.
The way we surrounded our individuals,
surrounded by a house we could not wholly retain in memory.
Walking from the inner gate across a bridge,
which crossed four ways over the carp moat.
Turning right before the ice rink,
we pass roses imported from Boston
and enter the main courtyard, an open structure like a ruin.
This is not remembering but thinking its presence
around eccentric details such as a blue and white urn turned up
to dry.
Although certain brightnesses contained space,
the way white slip covered chairs with blue seams
contain it.
The potential of becoming great of this space
is proportional to its distance away from us,
a negative perspective.
The way the far corner of the pond
becomes a corner again as we approach on the diagonal, which
had been a vanishing point.
The grandmother poses beside rose bushes.
That is to say, a weary and perplexing quality
of the rough wall behind her gives the power of tolerance
beyond the margins of the photograph.
Space without expansion, compactness
without restriction, make this peculiar and intense account
of the separable person from her place in time.
Although many families live in the partitioned house now.
The reflecting surface of the pond theoretically
manifest too many beings to claim her particular status
in the space, such as a tigerskin in space.
After the house was electrically wired in the 30s,
he installed a ticker tape machine connected
to the American Stock Exchange.
Any existence occupies time, he would
say in the Chinese version.
Reading stock quotations and meaning
the simplicity of the courtyard into a lavish biosphere.
Elevating the fact of its placement
to one of our occupation of it, including the macaw
speaking Chinese, stones representing infinity
in the garden.
This is how the world appears when the person becomes
sufficient, that is, like home, an alternation of fatigue
and relief in the flexible shade of date trees.
Making the house part of a channel in space, which
had been interior with mundane fixtures
as on elevator doors in a hotel, a standing
ashtray that is black and white.
The family poses in front of the hotel, both self
knowing and knowing others at the same time.
This is so because human memory as a part of unfinished nature
is provided for the experience of your unfinished existence."