Obituary

“She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever.” 

–Alice Munro

Das unumgängliche– that cannot be tackled. Not by talking about it, not by writing about it in a foreign language, albeit the emotion might be somehow mitigated during mediation.

On the 20th of May 2015, my mother had been officially discharged from the role of a daughter. We had a lengthy conversation, though 80 percent of which were mere repetition and paraphrasing.

“She had reached her time. It was just a natural process. It was a good death.”

“Do not dwell too much upon this. Cry if you want to. Write about it if it helps.”

I still cannot write about this. Caught up by job interviews a continent away, I could not even have left a rose for her– and I have left roses for people I was way less connected to.

I still refer to her in present tense when I talk about her in front of people.

Amsterdam is only 22 hours ahead and packing could be a fitting metaphor for exhumation. And thus I thought about closure. I thought about death. I thought about how saying goodbye is dying a little. I’ve exhumed the memory that could not be tackled. And then I thought, it’s about time for the feeble attempt.

She was a remarkable woman who had given up her chance of being happy for her family. She was Japanese, and then Taiwanese, but never Chinese– she did not speak a word of Mandarin. And thus on the day of her cremation I stood by the window and bade goodbye to her in Taiwanese. My waning first language, and I was surprised that I was still able to say what I meant to say.

I wish I had conveyed.

270615, Berlin

Dead Letters

In such silence I

Revisited dead letters;

Re-lived, not relieved

A Thousand Plateaus

In this forgotten region of the colossal country, the landscape was nothing but flatness. No mountains, no valleys, not even trees. It was a neverending vastness and barrenness: rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The only being of significant height stood in the far east, known to the inhabitants as A Thousand Plateaus.

A Thousand Plateaus was an artificial landmark, composed of a thousand graves, under each buried a baby. A Thousand Plateaus was constructed overnight, in the wake of a thousand casualities. A thousand casualties of the firstborns. 

In the juvescence of the year, a traveling merchant arrived, unloading a thousand metal jars from fifty camels.

Never encountered a visitor their entire life, the inhabitants gathered around, curious.

"I would meet you upon this honestly," said the merchant disarmingly, starting distributing a thousand metal jars.  "I've come here for the future kings and queens, leaders of our generation. With this magic formula, your firstborns shall be blessed with wisdom and health. Mix the formula with boiling water, for our future kings and queens." 

And so the inhabitants brought the metal jars home, with the formula ivory silky liquid was fed to the blessed firstborns.

The merchant was patient. He sat himself under a Judas tree and waited, until the first burst of howling broke out in the night. "I have not made this show purposelessly." The merchant left with a complacent smile, the camels lined up after him mechanically.

All the trees were cut down overnight, for the sake of building a thousand baby coffins. Dogwoods or chestnut, all eradicated. No exception.

And so were A Thousand Plateaus erected. Each plateau claimed by a baby, a baby who could have gone against the time, who could have achieved something great yet failed to meet his time. Leaving the bereaved inhabitants to a sleepy corner among windy spaces.

Indebted to: 

Gerontion, T. S. Eliot (1920)

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.