Haiku: The Leviathan

The Leviathan

Fought, lost a battle against

The hubris of men

illustration by f.

--

In memory of Ahe (1982-2014), a hippo who jumped from a truck out of horror while being transported to a farm in Taichung, Taiwan. Having broken his leg, Ahe was lying stranded on the side of the road in pain for hours, with tears oozing from his eyes. The farm staff dropped Ahe again from 2 meter high while transporting him back to his pond with a container. Ahe died within 24 hours.

Rhapsody On a Cloudy Night

03:56

The flight to Madrid was at 6:30 in the morning, departing from an airport on the far southeast side of the city. When I headed out from the house, the night was still deep, my roommate just went home from partying and I was still sick from a flu I caught a couple of days ago.

04:12

It was surprisingly happening in the S Bahn station of my usually not very happening neighborhood. We were all travelers, each of us carrying our luggage or backpack. Weariness was permeable and pervasive, and a distant fatigue was written on everyone's face. None of us found it necessary to speak to each other. The platform on which the airport express arrived was filled with people, yet disproportionately silent. It was a rhapsody of a lonesome walk on a windy night for each of us, on a cloudy windy night. The only being that spoke to me was not the moon, for the moon was clad in thick autumn clouds. It was the almost dazzling lights in Berlin Südkreuz, the hissing sound of the arriving trains across the platforms, and my own footsteps that kept me company.

Egg Cracking Day

In my early teen-hood it was briefly fashionable to refer to one's birthday as the egg-cracking day. Little as we were aware of it, the reference was deeply rooted in mythology, or history.

Mythology and history are akin. From one of the very first books I owned I heard about the Chinese genesis. Mother read it to me in her sleepy dreamy voice--the world used to be an egg of Chaos. Pangu, deep asleep in the Chaos for tens of thousands of years, woke up one day, cracked open the egg and separated the heaven from the earth. Chaos was cleared. The world was defined. History was accorded.

Apart from the Chinese egg of  history, I learned, a couple of decades after, about the Greek egg of history. It was about carrying, about mourning. I read about it at a time when I was desperate for closure. Closure for a blood relative that silently passed away when I was an Eurasian continent apart. I read and mourned, as the phoenix mourned for his father. 

Hekataios narrated: "A phoenix makes out of myrrh an egg as big as he can carry. Then he tests to see if he can carry it. After that he hollows out the egg and lays his father inside and plugs up the hollow. With father inside the egg weighs the same before. Having plugged it up he carries the egg to Egypt to the temple of the sun."  

The phoenix's flight must be feeble. Feeble in a way, I imagined, like the flight of the Angel of History. The Angel of History, attempting to make whole what has been smashed, was irresistibly propelled into the future by a storm, with the pile of debris before him growing skyward. Benjamin calls this storm the progress. I identify the pile of debris as the cracked egg shell.

The phoenix breaks open the egg and carries, flies and mourns. We alike are all incarnates of The Angel of History, each of us endowed with the weak messianic power of carrying and cracking open the egg. The egg of chaos, of hollowness, of broken relations, of the past, wronged or justified, of our palimpsest of history. 

In my early teen-hood I wrote down on a certain yearbook, egg cracking day, 7th of August. Don't forget to send flowers.

More than a decade from then, the exact same date called for egg cracking. My share of history, my share of personal genesis. 

On this day, it was Ophelia herself who left a rose in her egg-shaped grave. For Hamlet had already departed, carrying his egg to crack.

Polish, half-concealed, foliage

Polish, half-concealed, foliage, short story, 15 minutes, a prosecco writing session

A woman walked inside her Kiezcafe in a sunny, yet chilly afternoon. It was an autumn day. Summer, albeit so grand, was already gone. The trees turned from amber to brown. The hue of autumn had usurped the city, soon to be followed by the foliage.

“What can I get for you, madam?” asked the waiter in front of the bar. It was one of those cafes where one had to come to the bar to order. With minimum wages came the minimum service.

“Do you have bigos?” The woman looked a bit insecure. Bigos was not what you always get in a Berliner Café after all.

“Do I have what?” The waiter looked puzzled.

“Bigos, like the Polish Sauerkraut.” As if to justify herself, the woman added frantically, “’cause it says Polishe Spezialitäten on your window, you know.”

“We don’t have what you’re asking for. But we do have pierogi. It’s homemade.” “And you don’t even look remotely Polish,” added the waiter in his interior monologue. Indeed, this woman, though hard to tell her nationality, was ethnically Asian.

“Never mind. I’ll have a chicken pasta then.” The woman quickly altered her mind. Her first experience with pierogi was in a small town on the border of Germany and Poland. The fattiness was not meant for the drinking carousel of a certain heavy metal music festival she was taking part in. Pierogi itself brought back not necessarily bad, yet a bit awkward memory. “Pierogi,” she laughed at herself. This showed how mundane and puny she was compared with other writers. “Not madeleine or macarons, but pierogi, my trigger to involuntary memory.”

“Chicken pasta it is, then.” Shrugged the waiter, nonchalant to the woman’s tiny theater in her brain. When one works in Berlin, one has the privilege of encountering people bizarre in their own ways. It could be a metropolitan problem, or simply a Berlin problem.

The woman picked a table next to the giant glass window. She was sitting deep in the sofa, half-concealed, which granted her the position to observe the passersby outside without exposing herself to the risk of being observed.

The summer was already gone. A hot plate of creamy chicken pasta was fitting for such weather after all. It might be mundane, but would be enough to warm up a commonplace mind.