emily > Recent Status Updates

‘On that abandoned shelf—stacked the merits—of grandmothers who thought that what they were doing was unimportant. I wonder what a memory recalls if it sees the sea before it can name it—I underlined a phrase that continues to intrigue me: ‘Here and there sounded the same’. I was leafing through—El Gráfico—Maradona, who had just been suspended for drug abuse. ‘God was a drug addict,’ a Neapolitan neighbour lamented.’

‘What happened in the sky was important. The weather and the birds which occupied the sky above their territories were important factors in their work. He was not interested in lapwings—Sinatra, ‘When love congeals / It soon reveals’ on the radio. The horse chestnut buds—sticky as a toffee apple. Some of the buds were unwrapping and revealing pale clusters of down-covered leaves. Life quickly returned to the fields—’

‘I brought her letter—from Shenzhen to Dongguan—Ningbo & then Suzhou—a place that produces the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen. Every flower is destined to wither—lychee trees saved us—no wonder Su Dongpo wrote that poem. For the first time since moving to the south, I found myself savouring a concrete sense of freedom—lotuses in full bloom. The walls—posters—Crystal Palace defender, Fan Zhiyi—& Maggie Cheung.’

‘—the Weltanschauung of each and every one of us depends on our location in the cosmos—hallowed birds of the night—ensconced in the darkest depths of the treetop. Not pigeonholed by any category—humming more complex tunes that, while fulfilling the purpose—unlike the other birds’ self-glorification and enhancement—served more useful goals—sometimes imperfectly constituted—constantly changing the dynamic equilibrium.’

‘The portrait of someone depends less on the viewpoint than on the point of arrival—I can no longer avoid loving you a little. Because somehow narrating leads us to love for what we are narrating. And I would go so far as to add that, when this transformation doesn’t take place, what’s written is a lie. Grandma,—I’ll never be able to thank you enough. What I can do is recollect all that we all helped be forgotten.’

‘And I thought that, beyond whatever the truth—this lack of questions pointed not so much to the uncertain destiny of one person as to the sordidness of collective silences. Is there any more tragic loyalty than that of eternal promises? People who appear and disappear from the story, including some we only meet for an instant. I’ll never forget your face—José Luis Martínez. There was also Cacho, I still owe you—’

‘Why—bother? What in the behaviour of animals—or maybe in their being—elicits our compassion enough that we go through the trouble—picking up a bird that has fallen out of its nest—despite the obvious inconveniences? The answer seems to be that we recognise ourselves in others. Even though whales live in an environment that is completely foreign to us—we still connect to them. Humans are empathic beings by nature.’

‘—Upper Lilang Village—the town of Buji to—Henggang—The factory’s name reflected the spirit of the time, as Nokia phones were fashionable and dominated the market. Sino-Nokia specialised in radios. Shenzhen—picking wild lychees—redder as the weather got warmer. Back then—when I heard— 蓝莲花 ‘Lan Lianhua’, ‘Blue Lotus’ by Xu Wei, I felt a trembling in my spirit—as if the music had snatched some portion of my inner self’

‘He strained muscles to make himself understood. She, protecting herself with smiles, did her best to translate him. The last thing I saw you do was plant a tree—symbolically—a willow. We all need a grandfather—so I insist on writing to you. I scarcely knew you—I remember you well. Increasingly, as time goes by. I recall the future—Having origins in two places can duplicate time. It was a time of brutal discoveries—’

‘A growing city where tropical steam would evaporate from the asphalt roads—Cantonese-accented Mandarin—plantains silently grew in the fields—I took out the dozen hardboiled eggs—only to discover that they had been crushed in my bag and had rotted in the southern heat. The memory—always brings me a sense of bitterness—which is the same thing I feel when I realise I let—my life slip away from me on the factory floor.’

‘He didn’t know whether to direct his gaze toward the beguiling north—or much further east. It was no coincidence that whenever he pointed at the horizon his destiny split in two—a large scar ran down his forefinger from nail to knuckle—a result of slicing it as a young boy on a piece of farm equipment. Ports & mailboxes—the entire history of migrations is encapsulated there. Writing and reading is a form of action.’

‘—theatre of cruelty. A stain on the floor of the world. It is Friday. Conscience sometimes explodes like a ripe, shadowy, pained watermelon. No history of agriculture could be spelled out without water. The precise language of hammers. The heavy sensuality of cement—the musicality of metal, sand, wood, gravel. Everything was on the verge of being. On the verge of flowering. Revueltas—hammering—hundreds of telegrams’

‘A ball. Orange, frayed. Beauty always gets a kicking—our opponents are very similar to us. Identification with a different team than the family; the gulf between the language of successive generations; & the transfer to another country where nobody says ‘klutz’. I don’t know why I became a Boca fan—The post-Maradona depression. Even so, I have no regrets about growing up with Boca—Sunday after Sunday—1986, Borges—’

‘—smoking smelly Mărăşeşti cigarettes—like it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t, actually—arose within his tangled viscera, like puffs of steam over a coffee cup, to regard the world once more—High on the sweet amphetamine of springtime—The entire world was a mesh of gears, where the rotation of the most minuscule grains of sand at one end of the ocean produced, at the other, a devastating earthquake—everything's connected—’

‘Not a single cloud in an outrageously blue sky—something definitive about the rural sky—stars had history—weight of shared emotions. A strike is what one finds on the edge of silence, but it is also silent itself. There are calls one can only respond to by changing location—queer, nomadic, iconoclastic. These bonds aren’t carried in the blood—but in—stickier substance: affinities—on the other side of time’s tunnel—’

‘—still pitch black—hint of early morning pink—competed with the glow the city spewed up—like phosphorescent stale breath from a drunkard’s mouth laid bare—Matías’s ‘Goya’ reproduction tacked on to his bedroom wall—Scène de sorcellerie: Le Grand Bouc—1798—But you see it (pause) from there—The apple you see (pause) is different (pause)—from the apple I see (pause). However (pause) it is the same apple (gasps).’

‘The phantasmagoria—occupied slots like screws/metal cogs—manly violence—leading to nil outcomes—made them what they inescapably were (though they believed they were the fruit of their own endeavours). The gritty realism of their lives never coalesced into a style. Nothing came from any of that. The image of Cervantes returned—like a repeated—meaningless tune. Cervantes in the midst of that smoke—had no logic to it.’

‘—acacias—barrel cacti—anachuita—unpredictable cycles—desire is a cruel master. People—in languages he half hears & half understands. If you looked into the distance, you could see the order that cotton had imposed on the plains—you could feel the eyes of the cotton on your back—Gossypium hirsutum—the Mexican cotton plant. Here—on the very frontier of all things, were those who had nothing, except faith—persistence—’

‘Human perseverance will clear the fog & illuminate the entire universe—A scientist’s path might be independent & distinctive, but there is a similarity between the sadhana of the poet. He continues to follow the light even where the light of sight ends—even when the power of hearing reaches the limit of sound, he brings forth vibrating words—carry it into a language comprehensible to the human—through unknown seas—’

‘But unlike that solar morphine that sweetly stupefies & invests humans w/ the inertness of matter, the nocturnal drug of the café triggers & ferments stimuli in hidden grey cells—sparks of violet light a vigilant eye can trace on the temples—like pollen playfully blown by the wind, transported by—the Madagascan orchid—indispensable for the continuous evolution of the species. Yes, it’s self-evident, axiomatic—Amen.’

‘A pilot whale from Vaagø in the Faroe Islands—collected in 1844—jaws are locked in a perpetual grin—midnight sun and blue skies. Flying into Iceland is like landing on a foreign planet—a barren landscape of surprising colours. Silvery veins—glacial meltwater transverse a terrain of black, yellow, bronze. But something changed—fishermen now saw the orcas' presence as good omen—Where there are whales, there are fish.’

‘ The earsplitting sound will—turn into silence. The human mind cannot bear the weight of infinity—the idea of—boundless cosmos—while being a mere speck of dust. I understood things I wouldn’t be able to express in words. If you ask me how I could hear so many things in that pigeon call, there is only one answer: it is because I love. Seeds are being dispersed day & night, through—countries—continents—Mango, litchi—’

‘The filaments of the jellyfish that had invaded his body were gone, leaving almost unnoticeable lines on his skin, like flowers—The grotesque croaking—frogs—opening a fluorescent cacophony onto the folded vault of night. On leaves of wild irises, rushes, & carnivorous plants, gigantic firefly larvae flashed—Under the yellow light, billions of pools burned as furiously as gasoline. Transparent swamp lilies opened—’

‘A light, burdensome legacy—the letter of her life. I once suggested she write down her memories—I soon forgot my suggestion, but she didn’t—The handwriting—a trace of another era. The sentences are full of whispered truths. My—grandmother—Argentine colloquialism w/ her outsider’s roots—referred to azúcar as asucre. What she missed most—violets, impossible to compare—Time shifted,—Maradona—Obelisco—euphoria swirled—’

‘I have a letter—an unresolved memory—memory is mine, although it doesn’t belong only to me. Its—is the same as always—to disappear before being told. I’m going to travel backward. It’s possible that, somewhere in the world, some distant relative still knows—I prefer to accept the version I heard as a child—the one that tells of a timely betrayal and sly cowardice. Not just far away but in another world—Buenos Aires’

‘The—time he almost drowned was when he went with some fishermen to cast nets across from the Village of Blue Women. It was—dark—fishermen began to talk about the lights that moved at the bottom of the sea. A redemption that smelled of peat smoke, of cabbage soup—A redemption that smelled of mirror, he thought, nearly choking on his bread. ‘I read Goethe until I couldn’t read anymore (Goethe, of course—is infinite)’’

‘The past constitutes the present; not knowing the history of the past will keep the present and the future unknown to us. This universe is oscillating in space. When air vibrates 30,000 times per second, an extremely high pitch can be heard by the ear. Who would think that even though hundreds of sounds enter our ears, we can’t hear them all? Endless music—everywhere—but it’s beyond our sense of hearing—the waves—’

‘They opened the package of 'natsumikan'—peeled them, one by one—various things that she had not previously understood had become clear to her—what they had been enduring came ultimately—if their roots be sought—from the ties between landlords & tenant farmers. If she considered it in connection with this—she could also understand the 'work' that—people were doing. They were shackled by their day-to-day existence.’

‘She felt the dizzying spin in her liver—Colour had completely disappeared from the city. It felt like—a black & white film, wound on a well-used reel. The old celluloid, stored damp—the copy of a copy of a copy—full of spots & scratches, and when the film was projected they looked like long drops—streams of rain. The butterfly on her ring absorbed & glowed—delicate—orange and magenta—where shadow fought with light.’

‘Birds, flowers, & trees are—coded symbolically & emotionally. The sea swallows—the falling leaves of the ‘wutong’ tree—gesture toward the transience of—living things. But plum blossoms, are a stark example of perseverance—Even the particularities of the life stages of plants might be inset with meaning in Li’s poems. Her oracular voice invites readers to sit—at the table with her & partake in her inner thoughts.’