Diaries

The Moons told me to speak and cringe. The minutest of syllables can turn woody, take the shape of a sudden dagger, and fall inside the flesh. Indeed, the Book of Odes tells the speaker to look up and down her jeongja and cringe:

"While the ceiling looks down upon you,
Be free from shame in your own house
As though exposed to the light of heaven."

In the Land of Morning Clans I heard a dear leader speaking. He was a furious rabbi, a peripatetic swallow. A housed Messiah. I had left the West like any migratory verse so as to imagine him and a new morning, because heaven's light pointed East, and so towards East I flied. I became a disciple in heart, but for fear of being caught exposed and pierced by a sudden dagger, I threw my jeongja far away from chanting passages or any dear leader. I wanted to keep heaven very light, as eternal Spring, and the rabbi as furious as a lovely spectre.

Whenever thoughts levitated between wood and soul, I could frame universes unfolding. There was peace all around, and the maru radiated pillows of feather: you could sleep on them and be spoken to by Mencius or Wang Yang Ming without cringing. This I heard straight from the Messiah's mouth, pausing under cherry blossoms, while he brushed a world of colours and subtle contours with his right tongue. I say right because he also spoke dark hymns, and when he did it, his tongue forked, left and right, and he took the shape of a newly painted dragon, as if to remind his disciples that on his Eastern name once buoyed "yong", a dragon. But we were not afraid, because his fire boosted the spring that fed the animal who held each one of us spellbound and exposed to the light of heaven.