Cover image: Chinese dragon and phoenix feng huang playing with a pearl ball . Black and white vector illustration, from Adobe Stock, by insima.
[Moon Trine Uranus]
“The way a murmuration of starlings shifted its outline conformed to ‘universal approximation theory’ for neural networks: ‘a feed-forward network with a single hidden layer containing a finite number of neurons, can approximate continuous functions on compact subsets of Rn, under mild assumptions on the activation function’.”
They were called “Sort Sol” in Danish, which meant “Black Sun”—a network, each node in which showed cell totipotency, following their own instincts and steering towards their own directions
But He was born to be different. He had only one focus right on his left chest, like crosshairs from a sniper somewhere beyond his visual field. It burned through the orange-gold coating over his coat, and He felt like being nibbled by ants, a pain similar to which Prometheus felt in his liver
His heart was elsewhere. In Asbjørnsen & Moe stories the giant had his heart hidden in a duck egg in a church well on an island, which could still be beheld even now as a burning ring of fire in the evening sky. But what He found himself in was a hexagon like a Rayleigh-Bénard convection cell. He descended like a seraph, with the six-directional turbulent flows wrapping around his body like strong wings
“Like the vision of the Milky Way spurting out from a narrow slit in the texture of a dream: the energy of Uranus was unbridled, preposterous and violent. The yoke on the orbit tried to turn the moon counterclockwise back to MC, the prominent fan-shaped zone, but the moon went on drawing antarafacial sine waves for centuries, it color changing from ice-white to moon-white then to porcelain-white, with a purple haze rising from its navel, like a puffer fish shaking its spikes…”
People affected by Uranus were those whose names could not be found in your “Frequent Contacts”, or in any pulldown menu in the night mode. When you were lost in the mapping maze: how your physical features were related to your name/ID, there came the Eta Aquariids meteor shower, drawing behind it flocculent bubbles from debris trail of Halley’s Comet
Er sinkt, er fällt jetzt” – höhnt ihr hin und wieder;
die Wahrheit ist: er steigt zu euch hernieder!
Sein Überglück ward ihm zum Ungemach,
sein Überlicht geht eurem Dunkel nach.
“Niedergang” by Friedrich Nietzsche
The architectural complex arranged around the antiscoin of the incandescent crescent moon took the shape of rib cage, tapped open by the furies of high noon, like a combustion chamber, with the longest ribs piercing through the tempestuous dark clouds above. He climbed up to its top as a virtuoso, standing on the roof of the eagle-beak-shaped glass tower, looking at the curtains of clouds parting before his eyes
His tailbone, a pair of metal chains dragged all the way behind him through the air, as He soared over the hollows, mountains, meander bends of the rivers and bridges between cities, suddenly shattered, at this windy height, in front of bulky sets of wind turbines. “Listen, jumbo installations called ‘dinosaurs’ left those aerial vortexes since the Cretaceous period… they created them with their flicking lungs and we are right in the center of them this moment.”
[A nightmare: old film projector sounds]
Phoenix expanded his long trail of fiber optic light, rendered by iridescent nebula-coronas, nosediving towards the bottom of the city’s endoplasmic reticulum, folding himself into the cavity of the Primal Embryo, like a contortionist
Lead Singer of the band, with laserdisc-white irises in the center of his eyes, and yew-garlanded hair entangled in subliming dry ice, bluffed with his Harley-Davidson skull badge, like a bat trying to figure out the right direction… But the next moment, the wrinkles that He wore on his face like medals awarded by life, vanished as fast as ripples disappearing from the water surface. He retrograded into the appearance of a boy with sad eyes and dusty face
There were hot air balloons of Cappadocia in the sky, or they were actually Kongming lanterns in southeastern towns of China—a drop of wavering light among them, reluctant to share its journey over the squalls and murkiness, plummeted back to its original place among the spray-paint artists, blundered and ended up lighting up their hair
The twin brothers, walked backwards in opposite directions, away from each other, as if treading on horizontal escalators/treadmills. There were bleak deserts and salt marshes flashing by in their backgrounds. And a series of close-ups showed their shoes shifting from hiking boots to handmade leather shoes to carbon fiber running shoes to hiking water cord-knit sandals… They were even tossed by the force of Fate on white decks of blue ships, and the ship crossed the Tropic of Cancer from north to south… They started “mirroring” each other’s gestures without visually seeing each other, and they shrank back into the womb they were from, adjusting their postures in the shape of Taichi
There was one last ray of light before total darkness: all the indifferent observers, unnamed noises, astral-projecting souls were far away now. Cold tears rolled down his face like diamonds from a broken necklace
“You are supposed to be an unconstrained soul… A sapiosexual who gets infinitely closer to your inner self, an archipelago encircling the nightless Laputa of wisdom, shielding it from the spell of caprice moon phases…” said Uranus in a teasing, cynical tone, “An Aquarian under my protection should never be so indulged in this kind of melancholy.”
The fact was that while His physical body was fettered on the white pillow thoroughly framed in tears, while his spirit soared into the night sky like a lark, overlooking the human realms covered with neon scales. The matte-painting vision of daytime rush had faded from its surface. Uranus had retreated, together with its rosy filter layer of drifting clouds. It does not have moon phases but on the astro-rhythm chart it was either waning or waxing at any moment during the entire life cycle, without being static, leaving in the intertidal zone a skeleton from Jurassic period
“I hate everything that is in retrogression, including the logic of Time itself.”
[Mars conjunct Saturn]
/ Eight of Cups
Merlin:
Regarde bien ce calice
On l’appelle le Saint Graal
Plus fort que tous les maléfices
Il met fin à jamais au mal
Ouvre-toi à l’esprit du monde
Fais le bien autour de toi
Fais de ton histoire une légende
Et le Graal t’appartiendra...
—Opera “La Légende Du Roi Arthur”
The red-cloaked traveler decided to walk away: in his eyes the river was a detestable symbol of geographical insulation. He thought he saw an arcane oasis drifting silently down the stream. The ebb tide revealed the cracks in everything, as if something was missing from the scene, leaving the carousel of many-life experiences still running
On a movie poster an eschatological persimmon tree was blooming with its wounds agape. A man with a sack over his head hanged himself on a branch of it. The scriptwriter denied that that was “The Hanged Man”, the 12th Major Arcana card. He said that was nothing but a humble gesture on the sling before the man was bounced back to the interstellar space
/ Ten of Wands /
Rafting was forbidden. The glorious night should not be tainted with a sense of vacillation by the dull gray shadows at dusk: a logger would be ultimately killed by a rampaging log driven by brutal waters, a sentimental musician died indulged in his saccharine hallucinations and an artist was labeled with a morgue toe tag which said “Debauchee”. The heavy-loaded man in the card, did not want to share gravity with the rivers and the land, which he regarded as “a compliment” for everything on earth
What was love? New spiral flows emerging from Nature’s fabric; what was commitment? The wand which dropped on the ground would eventually grow into a peach forest like Kua Fu’s did; and what was freedom? Relict species across the debris of an Ice-Age land bridge were still echoing with each other
A Goliath walked away with its phalanges wide-spread, casting fan-shaped shadows in the back-lit gloominess
/ Ten of Swords /
That was the β-version of the “L’accordeur & nail gun” story: the red-caped man, nailed to the ground with ten swords, like a centipede dismembered to segments. The dim silhouette of metallic blue mountains and the nectar-yellow morning glow seemed to remain in quiescence before the inertia of death—the scene was symmetric with the myths of Antaeus
The Earth, as a spreading board for specimen of flora and fauna, absorbed the residual qi of the dead and decaying: a shot elk, with flesh and bone already taken away by scavengers and blood swept off by rains and winds, while its remaining energy was lingering around at the spot, tumbling into the shrubs on a stormy night, trying to kindle the fallen leaves
Or the cool fragrance left by a withering orchid, when awaken by footsteps of passers-by, took the shape of a violet flame, moving along the windy tracks.
And the skull of this man, like an unearthed bronze vessel, with the tongue caught by the perseverance of reticence, was being devastated by Safari ants, lithops and underground rivers
/ Five Of Pentacles /
“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…”
But the rose window did not necessarily lead to a church: swirling snowflakes was shielded off from the other shore by the warmth of the star signs on the window glasses, while the shuttling sun and moon formed a dynamic circle with their trails, which became the entrance to the world of illusions
Matter was the assemblage and substantiation of phenomena: the more layers were superimposed, the more fecund the outcome would be—rice combined fiery sunshine and ruthless frost, cloth interwoven with cotton and linen, while memories defined or even justified the existence of a human being
So there was no such thing like an “ending”, when myriad present moments would be concentrated into one single future. The disintegration of a matte plane into shadows was a reverse process
“‘Up’ and ‘down’ are collective concepts while ‘left’ and ‘right’ are individual concepts—the dialectics does not promise a rectification of definitions.”
The sound of a big load-shedding called an end to the Ferris wheel light show across the river. It was like an annular eclipse, during which all its internal mechanical structure was obscured, with everything switched to silent mode including water under the bridge. It bore a resemblance to a levitating street performer. The temperate suddenly dropped below zero, and clouds started to rumble in a grumpy way when they touched the ground
A layer of lilac electrophoretic coating covered the boundless wilderness. A heavy snow entered the visual field of witnesses like a flock of birds. Behind his neck, the willow-leaf-shaped feathers gyrated like a tree-aeonium rosette, untwisting the binary rays of light in the air towards the other end of the tunnel of Time
Millions of “eyes” decorating his towering wings were actually fireflies: the scalding lemon-yellow fringes around his body rolled outwards in spirals like new-born galaxies. They were flares of vanity, stacked up above all those “crystal clusters” and “gold bars” standing erect downtown, and cascaded into thousands of nightly rivers below, blowing the opalescent horizon even farther
Who was He confronted with? In this 3D coordinate system, everything shot up in a fast, thaumaturgical way but only in the vertical direction: like holes in a punch tape, the sun’s path wound up the chasm, like a boulevard of anthelia shrouded in logwood tinge. And the continent that it shone upon, had a futurist paper cut-out tower on the shore, facing a watercolor-blue saline lake
It was recorded that the conjunction between two malefic planets brought frustration, cruelty and abstinence—children painted chained eagles on their canvases, predicting their vanishing from the cages as beams of red light, leaving giant craters, miles wide, with trees swept down on the ground. He was an exception: the security laser systems of astrology dice and of Tarot cards pointed at the same exit, which led to a parallel universe, in spite of the gulf between it and the current one, full of stars and nebulae
A crouching claw, clutching on the invisible wall between livability and desolation, like a tall stalwart cedar root resisting the assimilation of darkness. The dust of everything, swirling and eddying, always rising from the dead, evolved into J1407b in the deep field of Spitzer Space Telescope. Saturn’s rings appeared behind his back: filmy, diaphanous like a heavenly crown
“They always believed that this boundlessness in the presence of Time was Industrial Light & Magic art of George Lucas, but on the contrary, this roughly sketched physical world was the modelled substitute.”
[Saturn conjunct Pluto]
“If on a windy, shady night, 12 lights unfolded themselves silently before your eyes, in the shape of a lofty arc over the horizon, you would find a Polyphyll Laputa hovering over the clouds, like a ghost castle with a strikingly solid base, a matchless crimson tulip growing upwards to embrace the stars but was pulled back towards earth by gravity, whose fallen petals slid down into the flossy area of illuminated water.”
Pluto, vertical to MC, was actually an abysm in the name of a deep ocean: even the fleshy roots of a propolis-tinctured capsule elevator got stretched into fibrous roots once they crossed this boundary. The super high-rise landmark, a Reuleaux triangular prism, pivoting one degree around its central axis every day, showed some signs of exhaustion…
The principle of Saturn and ambition of Pluto amalgamated into the stronghold of Sixth House: old-fashioned high-altitude traffic on “chains” was abandoned here, no visual consistency could be found in the movement of carriages, except that a drop of golden oil oozed from the center of this tulip like cerebrospinal fluid
“Different from elsewhere, all those wheeling in the sky were not blackbirds, but self-aware AI elements. They left the main body, like thousand millions of supercooled water droplets breaking away from a cumulonimbus cloud.”
They got up early as a daily routine to pick creamy-sorbet germs of the dawn, so they could be put in the white porcelain vases on their bedside tables, as baits for those bluish or purplish plumes of smoke that would stoop under their eaves. Over their heads, colloidal gels of pollen changed their shapes into something like inkblots in Rorschach test—they were the materials which formed the infrastructure of the universe, full of clefts
But no silent conformation lasted forever, because the surplus power of nature was meant to strike: the database adopted flash floods in Riviera region and Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban City—the satellite cloud photograph looked as porous as a piece of sponge, and there were jellyfish
shimmering in the turbidness, like a spoonful of starch rolling in the boiling atmosphere
While Artist, lodging in a seaside cabin, was depicting the palm trees behind the plank-covered window with a charcoal pencil: like the witches’ brooms thrashing the gray sky with sparkling heads and threw electric currents in all directions, when hails bashed the coastline with their meteoric light, chasing the land into the bottomless somberness
There was a smell of machine oil lingering in the old film rolls, in which Artist was driving his Ranger with his late twin brother into the thunderstorm, whose face looked even sharper than in his memories. They chased the tornado—a rotating Armageddon—until it jostled its way into the peat-black ocean waves like a titanic sulky ram, leaving scratches and holes in the flame-seared sky
“The oracle said Phoenix will be born into our millennium, but He will not show himself in his dharmakaya before He pulls himself through the torments of the Saha world.”
From the supercell thunderstorm gathering above, silver-snake scepters fell and touched the ground. His brother kissed his own gloves and tapped the shape-shifting red area on the meteorological monitor screen. His chin rose slightly in his raincoat hood, “remember the black-hat-white-hat brain-teaser? We cannot figure out the whole picture of Phoenix, because we are all aspects of him.”
Mammatus clouds spread their viscid floss like fermented soybeans—as bright as miles of unfurled brocade extending with their shades underneath, before starting their hummingbird flipping. They cascaded on the horizon and turned itself into a miasma-breathing black-and-white tapestry roll. His brother stood with his tripod under the tall narrow arc, like a cluster of spiny thistles
The fuse of the lightning guided them through the enormous gray sieve of clouds. Windmills on the distant hillside went crazy, like forlorn dandelions bending towards the bosky skyline. The quintessence of purity was expressed here: a pure blue between indigo and woad hues, colliding into the mighty vortexes
The wild grass lay flattened like arrays of screw bolts. His brother, being unable to pull out his legs from one cyclone and run to another, was scintillating in the aesthetically splendid but overpowering rain like a withering candle. Their meteorological monitor in the Ranger floated motionless like a boat lost in the ocean…
“Some think the main difference between human and other animals lie in the making and using of tools, but sadly enough, the relationship between human and tools is still a weak link: human could hardly appreciate the beauty in tools and their missions as independent subjects, while tools continuously object absurd commands from human.”
The downburst heaved cretaceous billows, which surged over everything from the wasteland to human-inhabited zones, almost annihilating them. His brother turned his head and smiled back at him in an odd way: earlier that day, his tripod fell down the waterfall with his backpack on its hook, “That was a sign… his co-fighters left him in an unforgivable way, just like He would have to leave me too.”
On his solo exhibition, He pointed at the monumental oil painting and made light of it as if it were just a bunch of roses: “No color in real life is expressive enough when it comes to the stunning sharp contrast between yellow and blue that moment… Maybe for now your eyes are fixed on the storm cloud whose anvil on the top is tilted back, or you are astonished at the thin cotton thread moving underneath the clouds which twists itself into a field-scanning milk column. But such an awe-inspiring scene could only take place when seven seals are opened and the seven trumpets are blown by angels. You can take this as an illusion in my deepest dream.”
In that thunderstorm, half of his flesh was torn apart like a stack of old newspaper falling to pieces after being slashed with ink and tears—his body remained half-open like a chimera grafted with sea anemones, its skirt flapping on his flank, like a layer of frost on the winter pebbles on the riverbank
He never forgot that day between an escalating shutdown and an illusory reboot. The lower brink of the sky exhaled ash and smoke under that prodigious sopping millstone, and rocks on the earth crumbled like paper carvings, water birds spread their red copper wings on their journey back to the origin of the Fermat’s spiral, and horses on the earth vanished like shades slipping way from a watercolor paper
But that was just the beginning. As it fast-forwarded to the moment of parting, when his brother fading out from his sight, more and more cotton wool swarmed out from behind the horizon, like aerial roots freed from the soil below by that flat-bottomed jumbo, which sucked in everything, the tin roofs, huts and pickup truck
The whole world in chaos turned into a twitchy face with bulged veins across the temples: the thunderstorm shuttled a sheeny red up and down the vessels. His frowned in painful cramps caused by inner and outer pressure, trying so hard to retrieve the fleeing ways of light
The collapsing of the whole picture began from one of its four corners, when birds poured out from there, and the colossal volume of shadow that shrouded the sky so far, dispersed all at once
[6th House Stellium]
He usually transformed himself into human shape, and took a walk upon the earth. His feathers, rosy clouds decorated with crystalline stars, so prominent in the sky beyond the smoking chimneys, had been folded away, hidden beneath the alluvial-gold-covered riverbed, like a parachute Alan MacIntosh tried to tuck away
There were haystacks of light scattered along the vertically stratified eventide, growing into salty rocks on blazing beaches in the light field. A vermilion tone was ascending along the cracks in the erosional landforms, while the seawater as dark as squid ink was taking in energy from the eternal electric blue
People were hurrying off to their corresponding pixels, on an interface bestrewed with burs, which was as complicated as the neural network. They aimed to trigger more obvious Tyndall effect, so the pillars of light could land on the remains of the night and kick up some glimmers like fish’s scales
He walked along the jetty, which appeared to be floating over the titanic water body, with fluorescent static electricity flashes starting to spark here and there when a passer-by or a bird touched its surface… He walked towards the other shore, a dusky, lone cape crouching at the far end of this halcyon zone. The saffron full moon would eventually emerge from the horizon, and waters would tremble under the impact of ten million liters of light: a jet-black shadow darted across the moon
Screeched and swooped down with fragments of aurora on his wings. With agility He somersaulted sideways and caught his flaming copper talons: the creature trailed his bird-of-paradise plumes behind, which almost brought down the whole forest with loud blasting noise, while the argali horns on his head left two deep furrow in the fields. His eyes bore a resemblance with those of a white fox, with his scintillating irises zooming in like nebulae
“My one true love,” He smoothed away wisps of gossamer fringes around the outline of his pet, with his pianist fingers, like teasing a Samoyed, “Naughty boy! Sirius has shown up in the third quadrant of our schedule, let’s go patrol.”
The creature was lifted by the wind over the sea of clouds like a kite, whose string was an extension cord pulled out of his unraveled tie—it was so thin and high-tensile that it bumped against and cut off the upturned eaves of a pavilion, sometimes it cut into the flesh of the jetty too. But most of the time it was a glittering rope swishing with a terrifying sound in the air
They must go on serving this rainy world before their infinitely far-away retirement: their tasks included carrying the glaring red full moon over to the landmass of Eurasia with warm currents, and to make sure its hot-iron underbelly would wear through the atmosphere and become a magnet absorbing water back from the vast land beneath. Other tasks also included wiping the surface of a lake in a rough-textured populus euphratica park in the night, until a crystal starry sky appeared on it. Then his pet would sprawled idly on this boundless titanium-golden-rutilated-quartz plane, throwing up a translucent sphere from his crop shaped like a snake-fruit wrapped in colorful feathers
The sphere had palpitating flesh and a flower of light blooming in its core—above the central line of this image, were tapestries converging towards the singularity, riding on the updraft of flames. A bright thread appeared, like a trophy being chased by both the sphere and all the pillars of light under the dark sky. His pet ruminated every day, polishing the sphere and made it increasingly toxic
The satiny “choker” of feathers around His neck started to fluff out, like the naga king Vasuki, playing the role of a rope in churning of the ocean of milk, threw up a mouthful of poison into the
ocean when tightened.
Let’s cut it loose like a hot-air balloon…sever the umbilical cord.”
In the world of mortals underneath, spectators standing on the mountains and along the coastlines whooped and hollered for this grand sunrise—and suddenly from the blue-ink penumbra that enveloped everything, highlights of flares appeared. Almost instantly, they recognized the wide, orange stripe of shade in the sky, fluttering before the rising sun, a virtual skin that He had sloughed off the day before
[Moon sextile MC]
“What belongs to the sky should never stay too long below the horizon, or it takes root and ends up bound to the earth forever.”
He once witnessed a blue whistling thrush trapped by straying will-o’-the-wisps which disguised themselves as glimmering cloudberries, which happened at dusk when the creek eddied down from on high like venomous crêpe georgette , its yarns entangling everything around—dewdrops, cricket chirps…—and made them as adhesive as glue, moving slowly like lava under the frozen sky
It landed in the grass and seemed to be in a trance for a brief while, but caught fire right away and was consumed from the flesh to the bone. Its remains were pale and flimsy, curled up in the heat like a Japanese iris flower. The earth was always ready to recollect all kinds of wreckages: it drew cutting lines around them with black stains like cigarette burn holes
The supermoon was overflowed with reminiscent sweet fragrance, like a desirable mellow mango. Its amrita-tasting juice melted over the river surface; its dense tufts of fibrous roots stretching out like those of a red ginseng, still snagged on the mountains rising from the southwest horizon, as if it had degraded to the role of a blood bag for nocturnal flora and fauna, almost belly-up
“You don’t belong here, what about your mission?” A figure rose from the pines and hacked at the roots around it with an axe, and from the cuts oozed spouts of flamboyant radiance, which hung still in mid-air, smelling like eucalyptus peppermint aftershave
All the artificial things, like a layer of insulation, had also blocked his nerves from sensing dangers: just like the matte-finish ground floors of the skyscrapers, soaked in haunting photochemical smog, in contrast to their upper bodies towering high above, with roots holding on a scrap of caramel map that made up the noctilucent semi-sphere of the earth, keeping this sensitive distance by stretching its shins. Hounds with titanium collars followed the Braille tiles as their noses were benumbed by the digital smell
Foams above the human-inhabited areas cleared up and unveiled a vertical conduit where He descended as if it were an sightseeing elevator, unaffected by any weather shifts: the maple-color arch bridge in the central park came into his view like an cello bridge immersed in the cocktail twilight, while his feet touched the land somewhere beyond the marked realms
Stalks grew out of his instep swelling like a water lily tuber, while pink buds as bright as ground lights blossomed, and numerous strong roots upwelled and pulled his stray legs towards the core of the earth
How much did the moon endure? All those desperately repeated tortures…there must be an unverifiable karmic relationship between him and the man who cut the Gordian knot for him: now he was peacefully dwelling in the sky, with beams of light radiated from his eyes, which fell downwards until getting adhered on the shoulders and knees of this man, like strings attached on a marionette. He knew the man was banished into the currents of time, as his proxy, as a prey, a sacrifice to his fate
His countenance was too vague to distinguish and his movements indecently suspicious, regarding the fact that He was wearing an expensive astronomical watch on his wrist rims of its domed crystal. It had an exquisite “North Pole” which oscillated in accordance to its Tourbillon system, and the 3D moon indicator pointed at “Nouvelle Lune” right now
Zooming in. Like water ripples spreading out, the dial, the movement as well as a mayfly which had stumbled into its light-illuminated center from some hidden crevice, struggling to escape, like a sparkling tungsten wire, whose posture looked like some kind of “dead cat bounce”
He closed his eyes in a dazzling sting—there was the lightning, which probably lasted for only 0.1 second, but had left an imprint in his visual field: a boy was sitting there bathed in the illumination, wearing an old-school digital watch. He wrote down a prophecy about himself on the wall under Sirius
“We are approaching the end of the story…but who is Wasserschatten? A man? A monster? A miracle/mystery?” A hawksbill turtle was swimming in the inky deep space, leaving a “∞”-shaped trail, giving out wild rattling call like a kingfisher, which heralded the opening of the Pisces Gate
Crisscrossed patterns emerged on the water surface like a venetian mask: the mountains in the distance smoldered like chimneys, dark golden veins extending through its silver-blue surface from beyond the eastern horizon made this miniature world look more like a follicle of some fruit, sunken in the center, edges glimmering around forming the shape of a peach
Shoals of light far below the clouds were sharpened vividly by the torrents of night air, like millions of venomous box jellyfish extending their nematocysts to join with one another. The true self of the Moon was locked below the heavy gate of the water prison, entangled with mimicry-master pygmy seahorses and their host gorgonian coral…
Its lighter double had already risen into the empyrean, like a fluttering flag. “No fresh water up there. It lives on the bubbles from the couple of fish.” An unexpected new perspective was found! People could observe its profile from a wide-angle security convex mirror. Even his typical air-sign eyes were attracted by its raised eyebrows
He cast his golden threads down the clouds, which fell on his marionette’s watch and tuned the moon phase to “full moon”
[Sun Trine Mars]
MV:
Night. Parthenon dressed in scaffolding. Worker sitting on the suspended platform, reading “History of the Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides with the light of his headlamp
Mobile woke up: incoming video call. He tapped to accept. The caller: “Hey buddy! I want a tattoo on my fancy right deltoid, what’s your idea? Medusa? Griffin? Pentathlon figures from the Amphora vase? Atlas bearing the globe? Gaia? Which one?”
“What about Cronus’ harpē?”
“Are you kidding me? It gives people the castration anxiety.”
(hesitated for a minute) “Let’s roll the dice! 6 numbers, 6 options.” (He propped up his phone and began to throw the dice)
The dice rotated wildly on the platform like a spinning top, emitting columns of dark light like the rosettes of a “Zwartkop”, which, to their extreme astonishment, turned into an octahedron.
“What the…”
“An octahedron? One of the five platonic solids, respectively standing for earth, fire, water, air and ether—so it’s air.”
(BGM fading in)
A gale sprang up. The platform began to sway from side to side. Sand and rubble were blown through pages of the book. Worker raised a hand to cover his eyes
A big Greek letter “∑”entwined in blue flames emerged in the foreground, like an entrance into a hyper-spatial tunnel. Mutants crawled out like small spiders, popping without any expression, their upper bodies covered with electric blue. A white stripe ran from the chest all the way down between the legs and up the back again, like a road-marking tape. Sunglasses with Ionic volute rims hung down from the protruding foreheads of the male ones, and a pair of laserdiscs with Minotaur-labyrinth patterns covers their chests; the female ones were wearing eye-ornaments made up of “Squaring the circle” series of shapes created by Leonardo da Vinci. Their upper bodies were framed in tetrahedrons, cubes, dodecahedrons and icosahedrons. With Guillochage-art handcuffs on their hands, they shook their Nymphalis-antiopa cloaks
Lyrics:
Hands of sorrow dismantles the Difference Engine, for space-time intersections little opportunities are still left out there
Fire element in this quadrant stands for a major crossroad in your life. Siren-men await you with their tourmaline breastplates shining with flares
They looks down over the fjord in the storm—like in the movie “Triangle” their Cassandra’s vision of a burning ship always comes back with smoke in the air
As Plato said in “Timaeus”: “the entire body of the material universe as the geometric form of the dodecahedron”, from a unit cell of the universe, a salamander shows its toe-tips—weirdly square
A steam-punk mechanical horse galloped, with the symbol of the earth—a huge ivory puzzle ball with burning core—on its back, and lay it down on the Greek tripod in the center of our vision. Two eagles arrived here from opposite directions: it was Delphi, the Omphalos/navel of Gaia. The actor who played the role of Python was wearing black helmet and black tights with a golden sleeve, dancing to the beat, and weighing the ball on his arm in the white smoke
Lead Singer walked out of the LED-light 3D matrix, whose design was based on a fresco in Akrotiri, Santorini. He was wearing lemon-peel-covered nose-clip round-circle lens sunglasses, a multi-layer veil in front of the fold-up large brim of his hat and a Cornucopia on top, which was “all-embracing”: gold rush squashes, turban squashes, horned-melons, mirabelles, corn cobs and citrons, decorated with sunflowers, yellow peony, St. John’s wort and Arctic poppies
Singer was dressed in the costume of Dionysus’ leopard under the waist: forelegs in semblance to those of a leopard, scroll-grass-patterned “championship belt” adorned with a gold leopard head in the center. The feline body behind his back, looked like a iris-shaped petticoat, made up of chain mail, copper hoops, cartridge clips and loud motor exhausts
Like “Salvador Dalí taking his anteater for a stroll in Paris”, Singer raised his Dynastes-headed, kiwi-fruit-color ring to his lips, and breathed into it: its springs began running, while a pair of wings, made of pineapple–leaves fibers, with 7 claws on its edges, grew out of the back of the feline body behind. He stood on his forelegs and roared like Manticore
Lyrics:
As the wheel gear turns the moon phases shift too, like a couple of fish swimming through a
Xavier-Corbero-eque labyrinth, back home
“ ῶθι σεαυτόν” “Μηδέν άγαν” “Ἑγγύα πάρα δ’ἄτη”… In a post-apocalyptic film warriors
who heard about Delphic maxims stood erect under the dome
When a Cornucopia strikes roots into the twilight zone, did the fleeting stars slap on the
Macchiatto-colored wings of a tarantula hawk that might cause a cyclone
A swan turns into a lion, sniffing the winter wind. Themis in white robe and wearing gold crown
raises her fasces when justice is banished to roam
Foot prints left behind him became dull when a cloud of dust rose over them. Falling petals and drops of the Cornucopia turned into a lemon-yellow river, which followed his footsteps towards the horizon but was finally scattered in the wind like gold leaves…
(BGM faded out in the wind)
Pan-up: The Cornucopia had crumbled and broken off from his hat, leaving the long-streaking veil behind him like a thread of afterglow. He tore it off and threw it in the wind. The sun-blocking silhouette of the Trojan horse was sinking into the smooth dune before him. He stood still, looking up at it, while swiveling-pan began: He stretched out his arms, roaring, suddenly his arms were on fire! The Trojan horse lower its head and opened its eyes behind planks…
(BGM fading out)
The caller looked so shocked, spitting out a mouthful of sand: “I remember having seen this singer somewhere… looks like Don Quixote…”
Worker was nowhere to be seen. The platform still swaying, slightly. The book, “History of the Peloponnesian War”, was turned by the wind to the chapter about “Melian Dialogue”.
Yin Xiaoyuan( “殷晓媛” in Chinese) is an avant-garde, crossover epic poet as well as amulti-genre & multilingual writer, founder of Encyclopedic Poetry School (est. 2007), initiator of Hermaphroditic Writing Movement since 2014.
Yin Xiaoyuan graduated from Beijing International Studies University. She is a member of the Writers’ Association of China, Translators’ Association of China and Poetry Institute of China. She has published 11 books including 5 poetry anthologies: Ephemeral Memories(Dazhong literature & art publishing, 2010), Beyond the Tzolk’in (China Federation of Literary and Art Publishing House, 2013), Avant-garde Trilogy(Tuanjie Publishing House, 2015) , Agent d’ensemencement des nuages (Encyclopedic Poetry School’ 10th Anniversary Series)(Beiyue Literature & Art Publishing House, 2017), and Cloud Seeding Agent (Pinyon Publishing, USA; nominated for “National Translation Award” of American Literary Translator’s Association and “Four Quartets Award” of Poetry Society Of America); and 6 translations, including The Ruby in Her Navel (Tsinghua University Press, 2014) by Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth, a translation of contemporary New York poet/artist Bill Wolak’s poetry anthology Become a River (New Feral, 2018), two novels from Japanese and a haiku anthology. T.V.Petrusenko, Head of Acquisition Department, National Library of Russian, referred to the works by Encyclopedic Poetry School as “a new trend of contemporary Chinese poetry”, and Glennys Reyes Tapia, Head of Collection Department, BNPHU, described them as “bibliographical treasure of their (Chinese) culture”.
She wrote 18 epics (which add up to a total of 70 thousand lines) and 24 volumes of encyclopedic poems.
Her works were published in 30+ languages and published home and abroad, including The New Humanist, The Poet(UK), Comhar(Ireland), Chicago Review, Madswirl, Pinyon Review, Contrapuntos (USA), Poesia, L’Ulisse, La Macchina Sognante, Argo, Rivista Letteraria (Italy), La Libélula Vaga, Aullido, La Revista Áurea(Spain), Poesía÷Neón(Mexico), Diastixo, ENEKEN(Greece), Literarische Blätter, Munich Literature(Germany), Recours au poème, Revue A(France), Buenos Aires Poetry, Revista Excéntrica(Argentina), Adelaide(Portugal), Obelisk(Albania), Лиterraтура, Новая Литература(Russia), etc. Her works have been included in the international poetry anthology Caminos sin Fronteras(Spain), Spring’s Blue Ribbon(Hamburg, Germany), ACANTO(Portugal), etc. She is one of the cover poets of Revista Conexão Literatura(Brazil). Her works have been broadcast in “Namaashoum”(Canada), “RTV Slovenija”(Slovenia) and “Radio Timișoara”(Romania). She also co-edited “POESÍA SIN FRONTERAS VII–Antología de poesía chino-española” with Jaime B. Rosa (Olelibros, 2021).
She has travelled around China by her own, challenging mountains including Mount Huang, Mount Hua, Mount Heng (Hunan) and Mount Tai, which she summited on foot.
She is also the editor and visual designer of “Encyclopedic Poetry School A.I. Papercube” (10th Anniversary Special Edition) , “12th Anniversary Poetry╳ Photography╳ Manuscripts Album” and “2020 Yearbook: Poetry╳ Photography”, “2020 Deluxe Version: Poetry╳ Photography╳ Manuscripts Album”, and “2020 ‘Hymn to Poetry’: Online International Poetry Festival CD Album”; director and visual designer of “12th Anniversary Poetry ╳Tea Deluxe Gift Set” and “12th Anniversary Commemorative Medallions”. She also directs the “Encyclopedic Poetry School Creative Writing & Integrated Art Workshop”, organizing poets, writers, dramatists, musicians and visual/installation/photography/calligraphy artists for cultural projects.
