(Mis)translating Fragments from Friends

被接受的建议

麦克

用柔的力，只对风微笑。

盯着露珠直到它们的眼睁开。

从枝上扭下花，向后折

花瓣象一片弯曲的唇直到它断。

在人群中移动象他们脸旁的空气

止住你的笑声，当他们把你吸入。

教给裸树和冰河你的信条，

向死鸟和血雪讲道

当夏天来时梦想它们的智力。


读书一天

尼古拉


我习惯把我的脑子叫头脑

因为哪个词的意思我都不知道；

我手里满满一手石子

它们棱角的罪被冲走在

河里。我错认他们是小

头脑把脑子象雨下到湿路上，

而别的脑子长在腿和手上，路过

错认我和我的头脑们是献礼

给混凝土埋着的神们，当

世界以钢的目光被重新创造。

我光滑的思想做的就是弄脏

地面直到一位善良的陌生人

清走它们，留给我的责任

是再次掩埋地面直到我死。

Advice Well Taken

Michael Kicey

Apply a tender force, and smile only to the wind.
Stare down the dewdrops until their eyes are open.
Twist the flower from the branch, and bend back
The blossom like a curled lip until it breaks.
Move among the crowd like the air around their faces
And brace your laughter as they draw you in to breathe.
Teach the naked trees and the freezing river your ethics,
Preach to the dead birds and the bloody snow
And dream of their intelligence when summer comes.

One Day's Reading

Nicholas Theisen

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;
I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles
whose jagged sins were washed away in
the river. I mistake them for little
minds raining brains on the wet pavement,
while other brains on legs and hands pass
mistaking me and my minds for offerings
to deities the concrete buried when
the world was made anew in visions of steel.
all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

Hey Earthworm,

Do you lose patience with your blindness

and the uncertainty of being

in the middle of nowhere?

Do you panic after a thunderstorm

your wet curves on the pavement

vanishing in the sun?

Complit Plate

tomato, cucumber, fresh tuna, potato salad,
spinach, bean sprouts, Italian noodle, cheese cake...

never mind the order
all on board

a bite of each
keep it neat

Falling off the curb

I fell off the curb this morning while thinking about my first year in AA. Five passers-by offered their hands and asked, "Are you Ok?" I did not take any because I could get back up by myself, but I was touched: The anonymous crowd is not aloof as it seems; its humaneness is only revealed by mishaps. Zhuang Zi writes, "相濡以沫，不若相忘于江湖, " roughly translated as "Better to swim freely in the rivers and lakes and forget each other than moistening each other with spittle (when the pond is dry)." It's true.

P.S. No picture to go with this entry.

a spider loves my doorstep

so it offers me a deal

from sunset to sunrise it runs
round and round
spinning its web
from sunrise to sunset
it pulls up its web
so i could sit

My grass turned into a flower

it's tiny
it lasts for a day
it folds
as if to sleep
for the night
next day it moves
a step up
closer to the sun
its old place clean
as if it has never lived
there

In other words

I got attached to some pink tree
at the South Gate
and designed a route to maximize
my time with it
for ten days at noon I walked by,
my nose, my ears, my skin cells
all opened wide as my eyes did

Now the tree is green, the gate is marked
by trash cans recyle bins and a blue mattress
I still follow the same route,
with the same gladness

Yes dear, I am an idiot

Whose Money?

We were walking back from lunch. He noticed some greenbacks on the ground and asked, "whose money?" He said to the man close by, "Is this your money"? The man looked down, paused a second, and picked them up. As they were going innocently from his fingers to his pocket, I noticed they were two fives and two ones and suddenly realized: they were my money! I just got them from the food cart vendor. They just slipped out of my pocket.

Well, they are no longer mine. If I told the man they were mine and demanded them back, it would be like slapping him in the face. How could I allow anybody lose face like that?

Saturday Afternoon

As I was standing by the window peeling an after-lunch apple, my neighbor called, telling me her cats were out. I put down the phone and went out. This was no time to procrastinate. A second late, they would be gone.

The cats were mother and son. The mother was once a wanderer, a cat-shaped piece of darkness except for a pair of gleaming eyes, perfect outfit for a wandering life, especially at night. She was extremely sensitive and scared of any sudden sound and movement. I did not get to see her at all last time I visited. Now she was at her coresident's feet, enjoying her favorite red comb gliding through her short hair. But she soon caught my eyes, mistook my admiration for a hunter's hungry gaze and disappeared behind the curtain.

The son was all black except for a white triangle around the nose, a white bow-tie at the neck, a white strip down the belly and four snow white paws. No doubt he was less traumatized. He stuck out his head out of the railing and studied me, brushed his shoulder against my neighbor's feet, stretched against the fake pine wall, sharpened his claws and attempted to reach for the bird feeder hanging on the eaves, all the time while my neighbor and I exchanged smiles and comments about him, she on her second floor balcony, me on the grassy slope under an empty cherry tree, soaking up the sun.

Country Bumpkin on the Strip

Just back from Las Vegas. No girls. No shows. No gambling. I totally missed those parts of the paradise. Why should I sit in front of those blinking screens when the computer has been hurting my eyes every day?
The Strip was a huge theme park where childhood fantasies were given material forms. I strolled with the crowds from one hotel to another, happily ignoring the traffic, the work and the future. My favorite? Bellagio. Look at the big pink flowers, the big red bug and the African crown crane who is acting out a Chinese idiom that I have been repeating to myself a zillion times in the past months.

In fact, what really took my by surprise: the abundance of water in this desert city. Fountains, water falls, canals, pools, ponds... From now on, I'd hear them whenever I turn on the shower.
If I do decide to gamble, this is going to be my seat.

Fourteen Commandments on Writing

Here are some notes I took at a talk by a General Surgeon on writing. It sounds absurd that I should listen to a doctor to blabber about writing, but when I followed him through, the ghost of my old self knocked.

1. Writing is a form of healing.

2. The ideal effect on a reader: Let words disappear into thought; let thought disappear into emotion.

3. Don't push things. Let the materials come to you.

4. Live with your materials: always debate about it with three or four friends.

5. Feelings are thoughts without words.

6. It's not the language; it is something from within that stirs us.

7. Don't censor yourself. Just write what you feel like.

8. Personal is universal. It is OK to put the self into writing.

9. It's a dreadful mistake to imitate the style of other writers.

10. Don't be afraid of being idiosyncratic if you are.

11. To whom does the story belong?

12. write with a pencil, not with keyboard.

13. Writing is about you, not about objectivity.

14. The unconscious is the royal road to semantic cohesion.

---"Writing Medicine: Another Way of Being a Doctor," talk by Sherwin Nuland, MD 1/18/07

He quoted Wordsworth, Shelly, Huxley, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Bloom. He sounds like an old-fashioned teacher of creative writing. He is many things that my training kept questioning. But he conjured up the ghost I thought I already left behind. So I put his words down, like some good old song.

看戏

周末往家打电话，侄女接的，说爷爷奶奶到城里看戏去了。第二天再打，母亲接的，自然说起看戏的事。

其实上周村里已经连演了六天大戏。各厂出钱请来县里唱得最好的。虽不是一个班子，但戏都熟，也不用排练。这边刚演完，大哥就把二老接走了。城里请来沈阳评剧团，在娱乐宫演出， 五六十块一张票。幸亏票是人送的，不然凭老爸每月六百块退休金，戏再好也不能看。母亲说，沈阳评剧团唱得好，演员都是十几二十来岁。村里请的临时戏班，最年轻的也四十几岁了。

看来英雄还得出在少年。祖国传统剧目后继有人，心中宽慰。突然想起好长时间没看过戏了。现时纽约热演 "The Coast of Utopia"，文化精英们都去看，一张票两三百块，美元。咬咬牙，还是舍不得。做精英要有经济基础。自己这状况，只能看看临时戏班的免费演出。

下大雨了！

门前的小路流成了河。水从坡上下来，冲刷着冬天的孤岛。草地又是鲜嫩的淡淡的金黄，只有眼角的余光能看到。高兴！终于可以洗掉一冬天积攒的雪泥，旧貌换新颜。大雨面前，车车平等。

疾驰在湖边，轮子下浪花飞溅。今天，不用眼巴巴看着湖绕群山，哀叹只有在图书馆和住所之间，才能远远瞥一眼理想的生活。乘风破浪在此时，直挂云帆济沧海。小舟从此逝，江海度余生。YEAH！

Gym

I went to the gym this morning. I have locked myself into a two-year membership to guarantee regular attendance since last month, not to get bulging biceps, but to get a robust mind, robust enough to resist all the surges of dark thoughts in the process of writing a dissertation. I remember Felipe once wanted to write his dissertation on the struggles of a graduate student, but was told that was not a good topic because nobody cared about the struggles of a graduate student. If that is really the case, we nobodies could at least nod at our struggles in our blogs:)

This was my third visit in two months. I had found all kinds of legitimate excuses not to go though the gym was only a five-minute walk from my place. Apparently, the ache of dollars bleeding from my purse could not force me out of my old habit.

The gym was crowded. Many people got a book or magazine spread open in front of them while pedaling away on the machine. I wandered how they could read when their bodies were constantly in motion. Does staring at the beautiful bodies on the page make the transformation into the ideal easier and faster? Or, is this another way of avoiding eye contact with fellow exercisers? Or, maybe it's just me having trouble reading while running.

Why this picture? I wish I could visit the gym with the same joy and persistence as this surfer dog. I took this picture in Monterey. The owner told me they came to the beach everyday, and everyday the dog chased the waves with the same excitement and energy. Nonstop, for an hour.