High Art

“The little supermarkets are still open, and vegetable sellers are still on the street side. I bought some vegetables on the curb and picked up eggs and milk from a supermarket. It took stops at three supermarkets before I tracked down one with eggs. I asked if they were worried about becoming infected by staying open now. Their answer was matter-of-fact - we have to get through this, and so do you. True, they have to go on living and so do we, that’s the way it is. I often admire these working people. Sometimes a brief chat with them leaves me feeling mysteriously calmed. It was like in those days and nights when Wuhan was gripped by the worst panic, and cold with wind and rain. On nearly every deserted, rain-swept street, a cleaning worker still meticulously swept away. Seeing them, I felt ashamed about feeling so tense, and all of a sudden, I would calm down.”

“Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City” Jan 31, 2020 journaling entry by Fang Fang

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Dear Alex,

Saying yes to the gardening of life is often done when the garden is wrecked. Why would you say yes to gardening at ground zero of toxicity where there is nothing to grow?

Few in the liberty of modern democracy have written in the likeness of gravitas as did 65 year-young Chinese novelist and poet, Wang Fang, her pen name as Fang Fang, in an authoritarian state of reign. Born in Nanjing during the Cultural Revolution, Fang Fang worked as a factory porter to help feed her family before studying literature at Wuhan University in her early 20s. The mass of no’s paving her younger years - no to the luxury of 10-step AM facial cleansing routine and 30-minute line up for bubble tea - have now mounted to millions of yes to pandemic introspection. Her words in the tenor of fierce simplicity wrestled with her witnessing the most elemental paradox of humanity in the 76-day Wuhan lockdown - the courage of one dismantling cowardice in throngs.

I am ashamed to admit my hypocrisy in reading. I have a literary fetish for form in flamboyance, a lover of long, layered passages and canals expressive in the classical Victorian language. I grew up thinking if one were to strike an entrance, then the striking of fingers on pen and parchment should precede that of the foot in style. Since my teen years, I have been wont to read for flair rather than meaning. The syntax and structure of writing have swooned me more than the revival of change and perception from page to flesh. And so I am pummeling through my garden poor in purpose, pooped from show, pressed for Fang Fang.

The street cleaners of Wuhan are the real writers of high art with their brooms.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

If your dog is to wait for you to go home before she dies you know it speaks of a destiny beyond what merely happened.  If your homecoming took beyond a decade and it was the very day after feeling you again that she let herself go, you would know for sure someone from the great beyond was trying to speak something significant to you, that all your coming and going have never been an accident.  That life has meaning despite--because of--all.  Your dog was the messenger, not the initial/final speaker, because the message obviously did not die with her, actually only started to reverberate since her passing, going forth to your tomorrows, going back to your past, an epicenter of revelation.

Was I speaking in prose just now, or poetry?

I said your dog waits to let herself go, as if she has a choice.  I proposed she feels too, even through her thick coat of fur.  And most sentimental of me I suggested there is a transcendence, that what we see is not the half of what we get.  "It is very difficult for many twentieth-century minds to believe that poetry is genuinely primitive, and not an artificial way of decorating and distorting ordinary 'prose.'"

We all live by myths.  Some call us to keep saying Yes to life despite all the reasons to say No, some the other way around.

What is it for you this morning?

Yours, Alex