Verdigris shadows ran through the radial-patterned boulevards in a HDR OLED display. The illuminated metropolis, being anything but a ballet of enormous fountains programmed to dance to the beat of symphonies, set everything champagne pink on her turf on fire, while the restaurant curtains in the followspot from the moon flip-flopping in the wind…
The huge butterfly-shaped shade lying in the basin of the night like a snow angel, was evaporating slowly into daylight. But underneath its skin was the skeleton of an archaeopteryx, with its vertebrae and spinal cord planted deep into the massive concrete base. A chartreuse orchid spiraled upwards along the spine and climbed into the foreground, like strokes of emerald body paint seeping into the flesh,
His oil-paint carmine lips did not move at all. There were carriages of the sky trains running through this tilt-shift photography scene, fully lit like magic boxes, shuttling up and down their orbits, high over the matrixes of windows below. There was no trace of any human-beings, only the ecliptic and the equator swirling around each other like the Eye of Agamotto, a double-pupil eye emerging from the dark in a quirky way
In a vision He saw two young men challenging each other with lightsabers, before giving each other high fives and then juggling fluorescent beer bottles. There were also skaters riding fakie and jumped at the end of a steep slope, when it provided people with a view down at the hyperoxic-symptomatic face of the city; a male dancer in red harem pants, who brought him a déjà-vu experience as well as symptoms of anomic aphasia, was puffing electronic cigarette smoke… Deep in his heart He saw himself as a brand, stamped on this matte black holographic-projection planet. He stooped and looked into his own translucent abdomen, and the tinder down there was lit up again, as if numerous glass candle cups were floating in him. They called what was down there “wind erosion landforms”
Swans flew over them. Petals shedding from mauve clouds of cherry blossoms finally fell into a champagne tower of constellations, which were overlooking the mortal world. It felt like Lady Gongsun performing the sword-dance, hurling gusts of wind into the gloomy zone, while the hallucinations around thrusted in like inserted segments of music
Notification of Mail Arrival: ”LunaSolCal.jpg” attached. A snapshot of moonrise time in his city.
He raised his left hand in a shy way and touched the sweating, foil-covered wall, and approached the glass curtain wall: a full moon was heaving into the arch with its rusty trails, like an onrushing old locomotive
[Sun Conjunct Mercury]
The hour hand and the minute hand formed the symbol of a pair of scissors, when they met and separated their ways again– “Battement tendu jeté”, the extended leg lifted from the ground briefly
“Look at that clock tower—it is 12:05:05 now, as if some kind of enchanting finger were right pointing at it, casting a spell. The angle between the two hands is exact 28 degrees.”
This region of the sky, where clouds of silent lava surged and died down every day, was no more than 1/12 of the entire palette of “Hue-Saturation-Brightness”, the grand design of Nature. As an ultimate drop of crystal light, a masterful finishing touch to Creation, Mercury stood solemnly in the gap between “combust” and “under the sun’s beams”—for the graffiti artists the gap looked more like a bumpy scar in the wall
During the long exposure, sangria red and Dodger blue light trails started to stretch, while the blurred figures of people like scratches unveiled their essence as photo stacking: luminous bodies were granted with administrator privileges, coding history, converting record formats, being both sophisticated enough to play the judges and curious enough to show backward compatibility
The ephemeral phantasmagoria, like the trailer of a movie, displayed his introduction to the glamorous world: how strangers drew near and greeted him with cocktail cups in their hands, then moved away along the preset arcs in the coordinates—those repeats usually take place when a vector flower was being created in Illustrator. He lived on a bright dot, where the eyes of the audience focus on, and under the magnifying glass the white of his eyes were burned and became transparent like peach gum
His zooming vitreum could not bear the darkness, even for a moment. It made his eyes grumpy, like swarm of krill affected by El Niño, even the Blue Label whisky in his glass turned into a white cat with blue necktie and slipped away from his lap. At that moment, a forecast but never -acquiesced solar eclipse showed its signs, the world got out of control, like a snake game of multiple pile-ups when jams formed along the air rails in the distance
The expressionless 2/3 view faces of elites in custom-made suits revealed themselves from the backseat windows of cars whistling past. They all bore a resemblance to heat-insulating laminated glass. He looked down at the areas in the city suddenly caving into the darkness, like a spiderweb of tungsten wires broken by flying stones
Massive network crash was on the TV news. He sat in the flooding shadows, trying to detach himself from compulsion to find excuses on behalf of the world:
In his natal fixed stars in Parans, Sun conjunct Peacock, trine Aldebaran and sextile Antares; Ascendant conjunct Almach; MC conjunct Albireo; Saturn conjunct Spica; Uranus conjunct Dubhe; and above all, heliacal rising of the Moon with Fomalhaut
[Sun square Jupiter]
UAV’s perspective: light-turquoise infinity pool on the cliff was blending into the fjord in the background. A band in yuppie-style fuchsia-colored suits was playing French horns and saxophones, standing on the diagonal leading into the twilight
Was it the amplified aroma of beerwort bubbles floating in the sunlight, or wisps of smoke blooming underwater like ostrich feathers? Like an exquisite doll on a fondant cake, He was indulged in his own grandiose elegance. Being a smart beaux, there were even star-shaped diamonds on his icing-sugar nose tip
Macaron-colored balloons with ribbons streaming around his body seemed to have brought time to a stop. There were pokerfaced twin sisters in golden ruff collars posing in a bathtub filled with bath soap rose flowers. He sat on the mannequin riser, holding his head erect and kept his back straight, as if his heart-shaped pink-blue gradient sunglasses had pinned him down on it, with a blue & white Munchkin cat on his lap
“It was not me who was there.” He said and pointed at a vertical direction: a grayish blue road winded down the amber mountains. An obsidian-pupiled jogger wearing wireless bone-conduction headphones waved at the camera and turned away: “In order to keep himself awake, He went on telling himself stories, and what you have heard, was just one of its many versions.”
Another version was about a diviner, wearing ankh-rimmed glasses, sitting cross-legged under a crabapple tree. Petals fell on his gown from above and turned into banknotes. He looked somewhat annoyed, because he could not control in which direction the wind should blow, and some of the bills dropped into the crevices in the rockeries
He demanded to eat some of the crabapples before his number was up—whether they were served in gold wrappings or not. After all, they were a part of his prophecy, already fulfilled
[Mercury Trine Saturn]
“The author of this book is a high-performance alcoholic, an intermittently reclusive workaholic, ‘a flag is seen turning into an eagle’(Sabian symbols: 309). In his natal chart he had all these aspects: Sun conjunct Mercury, like in the chart of Marcel Proust; Sun & Mercury in Aquarius and also in House 10, like Virginia Woolf; Mercury/Saturn aspect, like William Shakespeare; Moon trine Uranus like Umberto Eco; Mercury trine Mars like Stefan Zweig… He was born in the depth of winter, when his fire element converged at the IC, in the duplicated sign Leo, where the 4th house was intercepted. Talking of how far Uranus and Neptune in Sagittarius could carry him, this eccentric just needs a stroke of luck!”
On the darkened-edged cover was a man in British three-piece suit, crossing the railway, carrying a spinner-wheeled suitcase. He was not the main character in “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino, who was gazed at and warned by Dr. Marne in the bar
He always held a vintage metal-cased mechanical stopwatch in his left hand (some say that He also had a Graham foudroyante chronograph watch up his sleeve, and that in his suitcase were collections of top-brand watches, like on a world clock wall. For him, Time was untrustworthy, no more than the track of a target in the eyes of a killer
But with amazing adeptness He took off his Leonard-Cohen-styled fedora, sat by the window on the second floor in the café, right opposite the railway, adjusted his crosshairs and waited for the train to pull in, like a good shunter did…
“Elena’s dead. Murder. ” He turned his head slightly towards the bar and said that before He left
“Oh… She was such a sweetheart, really heartbroken to hear that.” “Oh no! Her junkie husband and her rogue brother should be killed instead!”
“Elena who?”
“You don’t know her? The heroine in his latest fiction. He’s a writer, but He calls himself ‘Timetable Supervisor’. Every time the train is late for over 10 minutes, He kills one of the characters the readers like best.”
[Mercury trine Mars]
“Yes I harmed myself but you took God’s name in vain/ Don’t forget the whip because Salomé will have you slain/ I understand that the thought of ‘family’ makes you insane/ My brother filled my wallet while your sister buggered your brain!”
“You call me psycho but you are a hostage to mania/ Believe it or not, every word I said became a dogma! / Want ‘View of the Sea at Scheveningen’? Sorry it’s in the clutches of the mafia/ You are a Beta male while I am the Alpha!”
Among the giant LED cylindrical screen and 3D interactive media facades in the square, the “Nietzsche vs. Van Gogh” rap battle was showcased via multi-screen display. Strangely it was not some official tourism promotion 4k video on there, as usual, nor a fine-grained commercial about color cosmetics series of an internationally primary brand. This magic-reality broke out in full scale at 11 p.m.
On an AR immersive exhibition, He churned “De Sterrennacht” clockwise in the motion capture system and watched the endless forming and collapsing of marigold-shaped maelstroms, in whose visual verisimilitude He rode the billows with high winds under his wings, lifted through the twilight zone between honey-yellow and cobalt-blue
He could not ward off the shadows of the cypresses in Saint-Rémy: they were like sargassum—the invasive aquatic weed in the Atlantic, whipping the ocean currents into a turbulent turbidity–the next scene must be him embracing a horse being flogged by its owner in Turin (kind of “Ewige Wiederkunft”)
Nietzsche was a sharp splinter, cutting into Van Gogh’s dreams–“Aber dem Rüssel des Ebers gleich soll mein Wort den Grund eurer Seelen aufreissen; Pflugschar will ich euchheißen.”(“Also sprach Zarathustra”)
Mercury, named after the Greek god Hermès, is associated with what enlightened the human mind–information, media, high tech, communication, logic and intelligence. When you click on the homepage of human history, a virtual digital human, the bassist for the band, Flore, appeared. She enjoyed playing under the disco laser ball, shrugging off everybody with the triskelion tattoo on her right shoulder
Her standard configuration included imperial gold lips, slant-shoulder abstract-inkblot T-shirt and copper-coated steampunk pants with black tassels, also a copy of Georges PEREC’s book “La Vie Mode D’emploi” pressed closely to her chest. It looked as if she could switch any topic to Gridding Algorithms or Hamiltonian graph and laugh at the other for being ignorant of Discrete Mathematics
“So wie am Tag, der dich der Welt verliehen, die Sonne stand zum Gruße der Planeten, bist auch du fort und fort gediehen: nach dem Gesetz, nach dem du angetreten.”–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He hurried off the hot coal walk which led into “Café Terrace at Night”–where “Timetable Supervisor” declared his decision to kill Elena. So when He sat down He heard muffled footsteps overhead, like chunks of mold peeling off the ceiling, before He jumped up and fled to “Wheat Field with Crows”…
[Moon sextile Venus]
He tried to create a semiotic model for his moon in Pisces, something like Theo Janson’s “Strandbeests”—miraculous pneumatic system with anemotactic+hydrotropic attributes… But as the waves crossing the ocean surface cut the full moon into pixels, his attempt was thwarted again
A treasure-laden wreck should not be salvaged in troubled times—yet He felt himself stalemated being unable to stop this resplendent moonrise from taking place, which was a moment as intense as melt iron ore barging about in a blast furnace. He looked at it in the mirror instead of gazing at it directly, so it would not cause him pain or solar retinopathy
Just like Medusa’s reflection on the bronze shield of Perseus. “Do not try to hide yourself again, my dear enemy… My tyrannical Mars and Pluto are asleep now, and the moon has taken over.”
It smelt as cool as a cup of lemonade with mint leaves, that atmosphere. This sextile aspect had given it a mediatorly temperament to resonate with both
Like venom injected from hollow fangs of a snake, decomposing into water swiftly, clouds got unrolled into strip of bright scales in the sky
“Everything is back in its place, and the moon returned to the city enveloped in mysterious mist.”
[Mercury square Jupiter]
“Just like the stages of fashion cycle—the superstition cycle! A Mobius strip: not complicated at all—when you buckle up the leather collar for your purebred Doberman in a wrong way, you happen to create one! So it’s not surprising there’s another fever for MBTI personality test, which I used to enjoy with my students 20 years ago…” the Professor, who bought a pair of Pegasus VaporFly SP “villain red” on a whim just days ago, was now wearing ShiftWear series of sneakers designed by David Coelho, with flexible color e-ink displays
“What type are you, Professor?”
“An old man who enjoyed mind-blowing cool tech, like me—an INTJ beyond doubt!”
“Well, they didn’t say there are INTJ chatterboxes…”
“You are definitely right: my bad, yes, my Jupiter is to blame! It squares my Sun and my Mercury too! Like Tonto in the movie “The Lone Ranger”, who acts in a pompous, weird way—there is one thing that Depp and Jupiter have in common—Depp has a dead crow on his headdress to feed every day, while my Jupiterian mind always keeps talking as long as somebody calls me Professor.”
Those who were born in the day were always blessed with a brightly lit horizon during their lifetime. He walked into the lecture hall, as an uninvited visitor… Professor noticed his entrance—BGM was psychedelic electronic music—and recognized him right away as Mastermind behind the scenes—like a beam of light, a beam of dazzling red light from a cult movie
Professor said his role was no more than one parabolic mirror unit in a whole concentrating photovoltaic array, and asserted that “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright was an epitome of the numb human world. Only when a plane full of cracks and creases became a smooth mirror, could He start to believe that old age and wisdom were the best parameters to live in all these virtual environments
“You are like an HC1 head-mounted computer, which supplies hands-free interfaces before your eyes—highly functional indeed, but does not even exist.” “What about you? You are like Blockchain, yes, hot and faddish, everybody is crazy for you… but what’s the point?”
They sat still under the antique ceiling fan, looking at each other through the silver-coated visors on their astronaut helmets, which were made of variable-transparency glass, as if they were having a dialogue in some kind of gaming capsule. Somebody was singing “Matterhorn: Unberürt” upstairs with a Daurian Redstart voice, whose traces dispersed in the wind—he must be the kind of guy who kept singing on the airport escalator with a rucksack on his back… but before the singer finished that song
They had decided to part their ways: Professor went back to his 9 to 5 work schedule, while He vanished from readers’ notice for the time being. “It felt completely different, unlike when I released a wounded nightingale.” Professor confessed to one of his favorite students: “It was a leviathan with divine wings, burning and exploding in the sealed containers of my mind and my personality. I even thought everything would end up in ruins for the rest of my life—it just ripped me apart like a pea pod and soared into the sky…”
Years later the student wrote in his memoir: “Everybody is a drupe with two stones inside of them: one as light as a buoy ball while the other as heavy as a plummet. Like a hand with the thumb pointing at the zenith while the index finger at the earth’s Core. If you can’t imagine that, try to look at ‘Double planetoid’ by Maurits Cornelis Escher”
[Venus square Pluto]
The suspension bridge was cast from Bethlehem steel. It spanned the foggy strait, resonating with the gale, like a harp with strings. Clusters of high-rise buildings approached the plains and the Pacific every day, until everything dissolved into a unfathomable vastness with a blazing surface. Cruise ships were scattered over it, under the afterglow shaped like a dome cover, beyond the edges of the circuit boards called “continents”
All those building, in the style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, their C-C bond formation seemed to overlap or stagger when you looked at them from a different viewpoint: they were like new-year lanterns swiveling on their pedestals, but the crowns of them—spires with masts, beacons and lightning rods, kept vertical in the skyline like tumbler dolls
Cruise ships left wakes on the dark emerald water surface. The bridge was like a blue chiffon ribbon unrolled by the wind, with the other end flapping in the starry sky. The sun, always plunging towards the edges of glass buildings during the day, were eventually cut into two, and melt into millions of point light sources in the night, embedded in the honeycomb of the metropolis
He walked alone on the top of the north tower. Suddenly He heard a shot in the dark. A bird fell by his feet. From that critical point on the timeline everything became capricious: thick maroon fog accumulated beneath the third layer of crepuscular rays from the top: over it were immense clouds fermenting stunningly fast and below was the abyss, where the Adonis Belt around the supermassive human colonies dived into, together with the setting sun
Several days earlier. He was guided here by a hooded Void Man who radiated with a sheer coldness from head to toe: “The fog is gathering… time to put on the sleep mask and walk to the edge… you will hear the wind harping on the steel wires, there will be scary snaps and dizzy buzzes…Are you afraid, kid? ‘Water under the bridge’, is it really ‘bona fide third party’? I tell you that, this bridge is nothing but the steel ruins of a stupendous mirage, which will crumble in front of your eyes very soon!”
While the Void Man was still whispering, He squatted a little, as if he was intimidated, but then all of a sudden He jumped off. His eyes became bloodshot while he fell through the air, like welder’s flash, and the mask on his face was on fire…
How could he refrain from trusting the bay? This steel mammoth, firmly anchored under the liquid buffer pad, would show its gargoyle side once the bridge got uprooted by a mega-kaiju like in an apocalyptic movie… But now it seemed to be mourning for something, indulged so deep in sadness and did not notice him.
The void man stretched out his hand to him (obviously in vain because it was too late) and the hand turned into a maleficent flower which dashed through the air and opened its viper mouth, watching his fall. After a brief moment of solemn silence, almost a sigh, the suspense about his arrival at the predestined vanishing point was substantiated, as he crashed heavily on the electric barbed wire deep down the darkness
Ashes and burning embers were everywhere. His wings, previously spread from the vault of night to the plumbless abyss, were torn to fragments, which cut into the land like Nazca Lines. Their stumps dripping sooty treacle as if he were a figure lying in the center of a sugar painting. The electric wire began to collapse link after link, and among them a wire was glowing in the heat, slowly fading away in the cold, salty wind
He saw black butterflies rising from the shadows of black-rose petals: his was in agony and could barely open his eyes as there was sticky pitch adhered to his eyelashes. His eyelids fluttered like Venus flytrap with red lobe interiors. He heard loud noises of chewing, skull-head praying mantises were gnawing at sugar wreckages
He fell downwards again every a few hours: from a neon spider web onto a glass roof, from old scaffolding onto the newest air rails. The mantises chased him all the way along with their metal teeth while crayfish tried to catch him from below. It was a dual-experience of the land as well as the ocean, between the devil and the deep blue sea
“An abyss amidst all space-time coordinates, filled with total darkness… The venation of him, superimposed with the lights over the continents, was glued upon them by some unknown power, and he could not move at all.” They said, “The legendary Phoenix fell. His gold claws entangled in stinking planktons, with the afterglow of his life lingering on the disorienting wild moor called ‘the world’.”
[Mars sextile Lilith]
Street Dance Tutorial: 360-degree Monkey Flip+Headspin, like a spinning top—a bold head like a Fructus Monordicae being gilt by the raised dust in the dusk. As adept as in performing a Flicflac, the contours of his body was reflected on the edifices erect like black-and-gold bars, against the backdrop of star tracks in time-elapsed photos
The flyovers took on a maple syrup hue, which made them more velvety. Among the high-saturation palm trees shaped like bearskin hats, was TV tower standing in the center. The dancer flip-flopped, which was followed by a handstand. He jumped over a glistening wall in his High-Street hip-hop pants
Then with a cheat gainer he landed, to everybody’s astonishment. He was on the loose since then from the thermal infrared imager and did not show up again until the end of the 2nd Act
A female dancer with lemon-color crew cut struck the audience with her defiant vitality. Lite feet+Glide, she beckoned all the lights with her movements and postures, with “La Coq gaulois” undercut design on the back of her head, with her silver lambskin moto jacket, and the diamond stud on her tin-foil lips
She was wearing slant shoulder T-shirt, somewhat like that of the virtual digital human, but hers had an Om symbol on the chest, which changed into a skull when watched from a different angle. With two rings on her hand: one decorated with a double-sided car logo and the other designed as circle of perpetual occultation/apparition, she pointed at the regular octagon convex glass and started a rap battle, with a provocative expression on her face. Instead of her own she saw the average face of bestial signs, double-bodied signs or vocal signs, swelling from the abyss
But the man in the mirror was the dancer who did “cheat gainer” a while ago. He was looking into the mirror fearfully from the other side, like prying into a worm-wriggling channel leading to another space, from which strange living things could be puked out any time. He exclaimed, his eyes throwing flames like blowtorches, and pointed at the female dancer in horror while she happened to be pointing at him
A hermit emerged from the abyss, while a chameleon tossed confetti and streamers… People went all the way from pride to envy to wrath even if they broke away from lust and sloth until greed tore them apart from inside… What was left? Gluttony! Colored lights, perfumes, fountains, bouquets and fireworks were ready!
The cast and crew of “Faust” comprehended the deep logic of this antagonism and puzzled out the way of mediation. To dramatize the scenes they splashed chili-pepper red, purple potato powder, pumpkin yellow, butterfly pea blue, avocado green…and Hitchcock-esque chocolate syrup too
At the word of command everybody turned into an epicure in an unexpected but natural way: the director, the dolly grip, the actors and the cameraman started to eat up the glutinous-rice-paper contract with Mephistopheles (which had a rose jam thumbprint on it), the Quiche-Lorraine-style plate, and the toast-art books on the shelf…
Between the hotel shaped like a colossal red-mouth olive and the concert hall designed as a giant clam in appearance, was an enclave for the human race. Absurdism was allowed here too. Illuminations were lit up for ever for the moral-free carnivals, even the ravens playing tricks on the passers-by were not punished at all
[Moon Square Neptune]
When he wanted to have a conversation with Wasserschatten he came to the lakeside. The aquamarine was of such tonal gradation, extending into the crystalline lightness of daylight. In the satellite view this lake was but a thumbnail-sized observation window into the ball-shape hydroponic plant glass called “the Earth”, which rolled night and day with shimmering oceans around it
He remembered that the tree was full in the wind, with the slender silver foils on their stems rustling, very similar to peach leaves in shape. The wind increased the tension and paired up their rhythmic sounds with white noise of the waves dashing against the reeds
It looked much like the background in “Fine Wind, Clear Morning” by Katsushika Hokusai. What was there beyond Mt. Fuji? Altocumulus clouds or gleaming waves ? They looked more like snow of monoaware gathering on the woodblock print, flowing out of this boundless smoky landscape. Whispers, lawn- mowing…all noises around him were drowned by peacefulness. The mower looked like a steampunk arthropod designed by Mike Libby, with its cog wheels slowing down, in the mist created by the hissing rotary sprinkler
A black swan lurking under the tree was corroding the bank, like the dragon Níðhöggr gnawing at the third root of Yggdrasil, and it kept sinking with the bank, which was worn away bit by bit—during the winter the swan lay low and ate pure ice only, but as soon as the surface of the lake started to thaw and the edge of ice curved like an arrow, aiming at where the thunders were born, the wind would become an egret and vanish over the horizon
(To be continued)
Yin Xiaoyuan(Yin Xiaoyuán, “殷晓媛” in in Chinese) is an avant-garde, crossover epic poet as well as a trans-genre & multilingual writer, founder of Encyclopedic Poetry School (est.2007) , initiator of hermaphroditic writing movement and chief drafter of Declaration of Hermaphroditic Writing. She is the editor and visual designer of ”Encyclopedic Poetry School AI Papercube ” (10th anniversary special edition), ” 12th Anniversary Poetry ╳ Photography ╳ Manuscripts Album ” and ” 2020 Yearbook: Poetry ╳ Photography “, ” 2020 Deluxe Version: Poetry ╳ Photography ╳ Manuscripts Album ”, and of “2020 ‘Hymn to Poetry’: Online International Poetry Festival CD Album ”. She is the director and visual designer for the “12th Anniversary Poetry ╳ Tea Deluxe Gift Set” e “12th Anniversary Commemorative Medallions”. She is also the director of the “Encyclopedic Poetry School Creative Writing & Integrated Art Workshop”, members of which include poets, writers, dramatists, musicians and visual/installation/photography/calligraphy artists.
Cover artwork by Mubeen Kishany.
