Yesterday started with my slow eyes opening to Gavia pouring my tea just beyond the mosquito netting of the bed. Mother’s Day. The tea was too sweet (two spoonfuls of honey—she couldn’t remember how I liked it), and this made it perfect, because the way I like my tea is Made By Gavia for Me, Early in the Morning. It is best to wake up to the kindness of others, and therefore Mother’s Day began well, with tea, and ended well, with wine. Somewhere between those beverages, I decided I needed to get back on the blog machine. Somehow, this coincided with doing a lot of situps. I must be into repairing the slide of neglect caused by a too-long winter.
So here was the first thing we looked for:
The lizard hanging out on our downstairs friend’s door. There are no screens on the hallway windows here, so outside our doors the mosquitoes and flies swarm, hoping for a tasty bite as we emerge from our apartments. Alas, the lizard is here to eat. We nod to the lizard wherever we see it, and imagine it roams from one floor to another, following the migration of our blood-seekers. However, there is no lizard today. It has taken the day off, and will hopefully return with a lizard troupe, one for each door. Or at least one for ours. We want a lizard.
Next, everything exploded, more or less right on time (~10:30a.m.), because someone is always getting married, dying, or encouraging us to shop, all the usual uses for four solid minutes of fireworks. Here’s what it looks like after about two minutes of the explosions on an otherwise lovely day. This picture is taken from the balcony just outside our bedroom (to note: it’s hazy):
And finally, of the balcony itself. Gaiva has transformed it. Ian has been up to his birdseed heads, and Gavia decided to plant the birdseed and to leave it out for the birds. We now have sunflowers growing on our balcony, and sparrows that arrive all day to fuss over the seeds. They do not leave the balcony neat. Better, they make it alive. With feathers and droppings and rustlings and the constancy of tending and observing. They need more all the time. They bring their young, who ruffle their feathers and turn into round little balls of warmth. They hop among the sunflowers. This is what I wanted for mother’s day: birds and a living space outside my window. With tea too sweet and a girl who reads to me out loud and has learned to bike with one hand so she can scratch her mosquito bites with the other. Oh yes.
Here: two young sparrows just outside the window:
I am delighted to announce that I have an enormous interview published in this month’s issue of Chinese Calligraphy 《中国书法》. This is a big score for me, as this is the major calligraphy journal in China, and my interview with Zhang Ping occupies a full thirteen pages (!) with lots of illustrations. In this interview I talk about ways my work has been influenced by Chinese calligraphy and allied arts, and I reflect on a host of things in my life from making nibbed pens with my first teacher, Margot Voorhies Thompson, to encounters with Ch’an monks on Wutaishan to the implications of reading the calligraphy found in meteorites. I have uploaded an English translation of this interview on my website, which you can check out here: http://ianboyden.com/?p=shufa_interview.
Here’s an excerpt of the first paragraph:
Ian Boyden: My first interest in Chinese art is what has also proved to be the most enduring one: I am interested in the relationship between ink and paper, how the word can be understood as image and physical form, in the ways the written word can give shape to experience and bring us closer to an understanding of enduring spirit.
By now, you all know about the failed N. Korean missile launch. But what you do not know is that I was also in the air at the same time, flying from San Francisco to Shanghai—a flight that usually crosses Korean airspace! And so, my flight was rerouted northward so I flew over the icy Bering Strait and I got to look down on that place where all the humans crossed tens of thousands of years ago and thus occupied the Americas. And I also then soared above Siberia, where they are now finding a lot of mammoths frozen in the permafrost. And thus the pilot totally avoided the Korean peninsula. This added a bit of time to my flight. As some of you know, I share the same birthday with the late Kim Jong-Il and so it came as no surprise that his son would launch a rocket on the same day that I was in the air near his country. This kind of thing happens to Aquarians all the time. I am certainly not trying to take any credit for the rocket’s failure. Really, for most of the flight I kept my window closed and watched the movies provided which included Ben Stiller beating a solid gold replica of a Ferrari owned by Steve McQueen, and Robert Downey, Jr . detonating a bomb in an Egyptian sarcophagus. And when I landed I happened to see a flock of flamingos migrating northward. Happy to be home with my family.
We are going to have an exhibition of Gavia’s paintings this coming Saturday in our apartment. Here’s a link to a preview of it on YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs67VdIIArU
It has been raining here, a lot, day after day. And so I have been walking around holding an umbrella (over my head). It is not my style, but works to shield me from the rain, and even more to protect my eyes from all the other umbrellas. My umbrella has a little tie on it that holds the umbrella tight when it is wrapped up. When the umbrella is unfolded this little tie dangles down off the outside edge of the canopy. This is where things get strange: as I walk, my umbrella mysteriously manages to rotate around until the tie is swinging right in front of my face and stays there. This is really annoying. And so I turn my umbrella very deliberately so that the tie is dangling behind me and keep walking. And I tell myself to hold the handle tightly to keep the umbrella from turning. But then after a few minutes there it is again dangling in front of me, insidiously, crying for attention. It is almost as if the umbrella were animate or something.
Here’s the dangling tie. If you look closely, you will see that it reads “PARADISE.”
So this morning as I was walking along and pondering this mischievous umbrella of mine (a rumination reminiscent of Beckett’s Molloy) and wondering what it might mean to be plagued by this tie and the periodicity of its rotation, it occurred to me that I could use it to great effect. I happened to be passing by a market and I stopped in and found a carrot, 
which I then purchased. And because I was unable to hide my excitement about the carrot, the shopkeeper charged about ten times the normal price. But no matter, I’m used to such offenses, and, as you can see, it was a really excellent specimen. I then used the Strap of Paradise to attach the carrot to my umbrella.
The results were spectacular. First, I was surprised to find that the umbrella tie was the perfect size for holding the carrot, as if it had actually been made specifically to hold a root vegetable. It transformed my walking experience. I have never before felt my walk filled with such a sense of yearning for the proximate coupled with exhilaration, purpose, and drive. My umbrella stopped rotating, remaining in a fixed position with the carrot hanging in front of me, sometimes swinging to the left or right when I turned corners. I entered into a timeless state.
It occurred to me then that a large percentage of Chinese landscape paintings feature donkeys—donkeys hoofing through magnificent landscapes. To such an extent, in fact, that I think it could be argued that the totem animal of the traditional Chinese landscape painter is none other than the donkey. These donkeys are the embodiment of the painter’s imagination. These donkeys are actually self-portraits, they are the painters wandering through their own creations. Think about it, if the painters were to paint themselves in human form then they would be roundly criticized and mocked for placing themselves in their own paintings. Truly unacceptable hubris. However, disguised as a donkey they are free to roam as they please. Here’s an example by the Song dynasty painter Fan Kuan. Donkeys are in the lower right.
Look, here’s a detail:
One of my close friends has pointed out that these donkeys always appear to be “well-beaten pack animals, not free spirits wandering happily through the natural world.” And he has used this logic to dismiss my argument. But I actually think his logic only bolsters my own position. I mean, if the donkey were freely cavorting about, it would call undue attention to itself. It would be vulgar, perhaps enough so to anger the Emperor, which would surely curtail (perhaps permanently) one’s enjoyment of one’s own landscape. Surely the great painters of old were not so naïve!
I myself have dreamed of owning a donkey and wandering through the hills around my home. Alas, I do not have a donkey, and therefore I have no choice but to follow the example of all these ancient painters and become the donkey myself. However, I have no need for ink and paper. To make such a transformation, all I need to do is attach a carrot to my umbrella. Further, it allows me to coax my own self through my own landscape. If I may be so bold, this seems like a fairly significant contribution to the tradition of Chinese landscape painting.
Here is a photograph of me (as a donkey) walking over a small bridge by my studio, and beyond the bridge you can see one of the famous Suzhou canals that smell so wonderful. 
And here is another photograph (I am still a donkey) with a pagoda in the background. 
People on the street really love my transformation (so nice not to be seen as a foreigner anymore). So, I bray you all to strap carrots to your umbrellas and experience asininian liberation.
The surrealists are alive and well in Suzhou! But these are not the old school surrealists, no one is lurking around denying that they are mad. No. These surrealists are so surreal that they have become pragmatists. So, when the sun comes out it is time cure meat. And this is best done on the closest sidewalk.
Note the really cool stone in the lower right hand corner of the last image.
Where have we been? I know this sounds impossible, but we have been trapped underground since Valentine’s day and all we had was a broom. And we swept for a long time until we finally found our way out. Look, here’s the photo of where we eventually emerged:
I think it might get me arrested in the states, because it would likely violate some kind of B&E law (crime lingo, compliments of a Law and Order obsession which was later over-gratified and thus satiated during a stay at a hotel where they had one channel which was a Law and Order all-the-time channel. Watch even one, and it doesn’t take long to figure out what a B&E perp is, man (that last “man” is actually a quote directly from Ice-T )), but here, it is not at all difficult to get a photograph of people’s underpants. Look: here’s one now:
See? No problem. It’s hanging on a line at the edge of the street where 119,000 people walk every day, give or take three million. What I love about this is that people’s underwear is often just this proximal, visible, and unaccompanied by any self consciousness. These little nether flags fly from face-high lines everywhere there is a house at street level. So here, in honor of Valentine’s Day, is red underwear as seen on this street (it is early and overcast, so the parade of people has not yet begun):
Even better is Gavia’s Valentine’s poem to me:
Valentine
Rhymes with spine.
Will you be my
Sea urchin?
(The answer is so Yes)
In with a bang. Not yet out. Over a week later, and the explosions continue—hours and hours of it for nights in a row. For us, Chinese New Year began around January 22nd when we went to a friend’s house and ate lunch, turned around, and ate dinner. We ate sea cucumbers, fish in sweet sauce, fish in garlic, fish head soup, mochi balls with meat and sweet sesame inside, deep fried roots, dumplings, spinach, celery with sausage, mushrooms, cold chunks of lamb, rice, bean sprouts, and more. We ate from 10:30 am until about 6:30 pm, and then we tried to find cab home, but there were no cabs to take us. We stood at the bus stop watching as the fireworks got going, and lit the sky, tentatively at first, and then persistently, gloriously, emphatically.
The fireworks gained momentum and crashed on all through the night. Once we got home, we rubbed our overfed bellies and rolled around on the bed where we have a heat pad on the mattress, which is also our apartment’s source of heat—pathetic, I know, but coldly true, and listened to explosions rock the city and light the sky. It went on all night long, but reached its apex at midnight, when from the deck of our apartment, we counted eight different major fireworks displays in the foreground. For the record, it would be inaccurate to confuse mere firecrackers with fireworks. There were firecrackers too, for sure, but what we saw were eight separate displays of state-fair grade fireworks which went on not for minutes, but for hours. Hours. Giant blooms of color ripping open the sky.
Eventually, the sky turned to smoke and the stars disappeared, with only the fireworks penetrating the haze. In the midground, we counted at least seven other major fireworks displays, but they seemed about half a mile away. In the background, we saw flashes of light from multiple, uncountable other sources. And this was from the vantage point of just one minor lookout in one city. China has 1.4 billion people in it. All of them were lighting off fireworks, and there was no end to it. I went to bed, but not to any kind of sleep beyond the restless, drifting kind. I woke up often each time aware that the fireworks were till happening, going strong, still giant flowers of sparks and light, still the crashings of the new year promising prosperity and luck and health. The fireworks tapered off by late morning, renewed again in the afternoon, but the next night was curiously quiet. And the night after that, too.
But last night, four nights after new year’s day, the sky was torn apart again. It was the night when people send the gods back to the immortal realms or chase away death, and they do it by exploding more fireworks. All. Night. Long. This display was twin madness to the one on New Year’s eve, but it went later into the morning and was, in fact, renewed around 9am. The rest of the day has been sporadically explosive, which has been terrific complement to Warlock (by Oakley Hall), the western I am currently reading. Lots of shooting and excess and grim men and women who know way too much about where the edges of bones and dust press up against their lives.
The streets are full of red paper from the exploded fireworks.
The air smells like smoke.
The cats of the city lounge in a post traumatic daze.
The birds are resentful. Their songs sound greedy and spiteful today, and they should. Their air has been vibrated and ripped at until it must seem out of tune for them.
We asked one of our friends if he ever thinks of guns when he hears fireworks. His answer, amazingly: no. Never. For the Chinese, in a place where citizens do not have guns, fireworks are fireworks. Amazing to not hear the explosions and want to move toward it to see better rather than to run for cover.
This morning is the official day when people re-open their businesses (everything has been closed here for a week, as it is bad luck to have a business open for the four days after New Year). How do they do it? With fireworks, silly! They bring in a new year of economic prosperity by shooting the fireworks into the sky.
And, so far, we have seen nothing, we’ve been told. We are to prepare ourselves for when we’ll see some real action-February 6, the 15th day after New Year’s, which means Something Really Big. We don’t know what it means yet. It means explosives and red paper blowing in the streets in the morning and hearing loss and dogs going crazy. Apparently, the fireworks we’ve seen so far were a little starter course. The entrée is coming. When it does, we’ll be watching, huddled and fascinated.
Today we went to the zoo. There had to be one hundred animals or more! There were peacocks, a mandrill—a baboon with a blue behind, emus, ostriches, also an elephant. There were huge lions as well. The tigers! They were beautiful! Unusually, there was a panther! And also, parrots and a big big vulture. There were black swans, zebras, gazelles, red-crowned cranes, flamingos, a giraffe, and jaguar! (Also a yak). I love the zoooooooooooo.
