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Chinese Space

First there is the gate from the street, then some flowers inside the wall,

then the inner, roofed gate. It is a very plain wall, without expressionistic means,

such as contrasting light on paving stones inside the courtyard to the calligraphed foundation stones.

My grandfather called this the facade or Baroque experience, rendering a courtyard transparent.

The eye expecting to confront static space experiences a lavish range of optical events,

such as crickets in Ming jars, their syncopation like the right, then left, then right progress

into the house, an experience that cannot be sustained in consciousness, because

your movement itself binds passing time, more than entering directs it.

A red door lies on a golden mirror with the fascinating solidity and peacefulness of the pond

in the courtyard, a featureless space of infinite depth where neither unwanted spirits nor light

could enter directly from outside. It lies within the equally whole space of the yard

the way we surrounded our individuals, surrounded by a house we could not wholly

retain in memory. Walking from the inner gate across a bridge which crossed four ways

over the carp moat, turning right before the ice rink, we pass roses imported from Boston,

and enter the main courtyard, an open structure like a ruin. This is not remembering,

but thinking its presence around eccentric details such as a blue and white urn turned up to dry,

although certain brightnesses contain space, the way white slipcovered chairs with blue seams contain it.

The potential of becoming great of the space is proportional to its distance away from us,

a negative perspective, the way the far corner of the pond becomes a corner again as we approach

on the diagonal, which had been a vanishing point. The grandmother poses beside rose bushes.

That is to say, a weary, perplexing quality of the rough wall behind her gives a power of tolerance

beyond the margins of the photograph. Space without expansion, compactness without restriction

make peculiar and intense account of the separable person from her place in time,

though many families live in the partitioned house now. The reflecting surface of the pond

should theoretically manifest too many beings to claim her particular status in the space,

such as a tiger skin in space.

After the house was electrically wired in the thirties, he installed a ticker-tape machine connected

to the American Stock Exchange. Any existence occupies time, he would say in the Chinese version,

reading stock quotations and meaning the simplicity of the courtyard into a lavish biosphere,

elevating the fact of its placement to one of our occupation of it, including the macaw speaking Chinese,

stones representing infinity in the garden. This is how the world appears when the person

becomes sufficient, i.e., like home, an alternation of fatigue and relief in the flexible shade of date trees,

making the house part of a channel in space, which had been interior, with mundane fixtures4 as on elevator doors in a hotel, a standing ashtray that is black and white.

The family poses in front of the hotel, both self-knowing and knowing others at the same time.

This is so, because human memory as a part of unfinished nature is provided

for the experience of your unfinished existence.