Cover artwork by Ginevra Cave.
[Venus conjunct MC]
Vast the firmament nine-sphered,
By what craftsman was it reared?
圜则九重，孰营度之？
Who conceived a scheme so grand?
惟兹何功，孰初作之？
What was the creator’s hand
That great axle could suspend?
斡维焉系，天极焉加？
“Heavenly Questions” by Qu Yuan(translated into English by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang under the title ‘The Riddle’)
——屈原《天问》
“The stage designer? The preeminent ‘hermaphroditus’ HMW?”
“Heavy Metal Whore?
Holy-Moley wizard? Highly manipulative whacko?”
“Created in Vectorworks?”
From the cloud plains high over everything, a pair of hallucinatory swan wings emerged…chimeras of tinder scapulars and enameled primaries with a sharp arc in between that connected them
Being planirostral, it hid its mango-yellow beak with black tip inside the curve along the spectrum of a solar flare. Feathers on one of its wings seemed to be interacting with the high wind, much like the art installation “Sun Cycle” by Patrick Shearn and his team, making a noise as loud as shoals of mackerels in the northern Atlantic
It tail, as blazing as a firefly in total darkness and as flocculent as a dream-catcher in a breeze, was collecting those streamers gathering up from all directions, and swept them into a Einstein-Rosen bridge structure, where the velocity of timeflow, viscosity of space, linearity of directions and function of cause-and-effect were reset altogether
“Now, reach out, and touch the swan egg enmeshed in the strands of cloud.”
“Me?”
Yes, you, dear Reader! Since you have entered this immersive theater by a random ticket, you have a good reason to polish your senses to the utmost—a kaleidoscope of crepuscular butterflies are fluttering on your chilled cheeks, leaving a long finish of Calamansi fruits from their broken wings, so echoes will rise in your chest will wake the power for forging a consummate world, before the whole plot is eventually catapulted out of the orbit of the Dark Moon by centrifugal force…
By then, you may have already climbed up the arena stage, bathed in its divine frosty-white halo, surrounded by erratic, unknown hazards of Fate—but it feels so good! You will meet a man who sits on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs. He looks like Marco Hietala when he smiles, wearing a very similar split goatee. He is your usher
“I think I know you! Though you are not wearing your e-ink display shoes, but this kangaroo jumping stilts… you are Professor! But WTF is this beard style? No! Maybe you should wear one like Scott Ian…”
It is not a shard from the big picture that cut into your palm, but a representation of the resonance between the magnetic force over your hand and some kind of electric field outside… It’s like foreshadowing skills in my writing: an embryo of core event radiating numerous waves of possibility. A hand will stick out from the bull’s-eye and grasp your wrist—next second you are pulled inside of my dome cinema
All those shadows you have ever seen in this Sama world are rushing into this spectator stand on a forearm of a steel giant who wears a vaguely-featured face. He sits back into the ocean with his wings of dark sapphire feathers folded up to cover his back, so the audience on his forearm pour out like mosquito tornados over the water area. “What are you so afraid of?” you slapped yourself in the face, “just some holographic projection stuff, a pipe dream.”
It is the moment when sluice gates are open and turbulent water from the dam reaches its peak. You stand on the 3D high tides, could not keep from being startled by the high atmospheric pressure and by the sulfuric acid rain showers embracing the terrestrial planet, which was fixed right above the vertical axis of his epic natal chart
“Venus setting—Sirius rising.” During all those endless loops the flooding Nile is darting towards Memphis, from the image of Philistine beer jugs to that of spelt bread; three pyramids of Giza, an exact reproduction of 3 stars in Orion’s belt, will lead Sirius back to the heavenly realm
But the bald men wearing multi-strand beaded-chains will fall on their knees and cheer. Grind some malachite for eye paint between the crossed necks of Serpopards on the Narmer Palette so it can be applied to the eye of Horus—“Set and Horus”—his heliacal star is Rukbat
“Metaverse, NFT, virtual human, virtual social networking… I’ve had enough of you froghoppers who created all these frothy bubbles! Even if this moment I am watched on some kind of live streaming, I have my right to choose the camera position I feel comfortable with! Why should I need an usher, when indoor navigation is available anywhere?”
You unfastened the safety rope and let yourself fall freely backwards. The welkin, cloaked in obscureness, like a flower stand in traditional ritual “molten iron flower”, where the azure Rukbat, with the dark matter deep down its spine, created special effects of downpour like shedding cherry blossoms… the archer’s ring on a vulture’s claw slashed your gastrocnemius muscles with when it whined by
What is tumbling in the wind? A horse neighing from the asteroid belt far away—that is his heliacal setting star, Castor, the cavalier with icy blue half-face makeup and a long lance in his hand. He never answers anyone’s questions; instead He harpoons breathless stars in the ponds of dead light and drags them out
His boxer brother Pollux in fiery red armor, with his waist wreathed in hyphae of light, wears a Peruvian lily in his buttonhole, nurturing it with blood pumped up from his heart. There was a close-up shot when you fell backwards and detached yourself from the hook: like St. Elmo’s Fire looming from the rain, it reminded you of a journey along the Blue Nile starting from the permanently snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains
When the warbling of a red-tufted malachite sunbird switches to no-signal sound effect, and a chameleon crouching on a fraying map is looks at the arched eaves of twilight over the Mediterranean with a melancholy expression, the mastaba is sinking into the zone of diffusing ink: you remember the look on his face when He jumped off the steel bridge, and the desperate hand Void Man stretched out to him
Adieu, Clepsydra; adieu, T-shape shadow clock and obelisk; adieu, Cancer constellation; adieu, Sirius, the whistling arrows from Sagittal nine stars cannot reach you anymore. Only fame and glory that Ptolemy had promised will be there… Since when have you freed yourself from an “annus vagus”? You no longer have anything to do with Akhet, Proyet or Shomu. You have saved only the heliacal rising moment, while Venus was on your side
“What’s my line now?”
“ ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön!’ ” (“Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
[Uranus sextile MC]
The One was walking upon the “rip current” zone in the blobitecture blocks made of glass fiber reinforced concrete, to be exact, meandering in his “cotton floss” air-cushion shoes. All happened in this Villa-Ipsilon-styled futuristic space, where a streamline Yves-Klein-blue floating wall ran through over those undulating banana-leaf-shaped stairs with soft light stripes embedded along them
Volumes of moonlight, falling from the folds in the ceilings, got rounded by the quadratic interior surfaces between the enormous volumes, like a mirageous whale turning and twisting in the abyss, setting off a wave of echoes from the invisible bottom like deep-epicenter quakes
“Completely indulged in the panoramic serenity in a naked-eye VR scene… Transatlantic tubes connect dark vortexes, while nerve-plexus structures transfer radar-detected signals of living beings. The prototype of all this was the brane-world model and wormholes in it. When the shoes forms a closed circuit with the ground, the activated architectures starts its shape-shifting like the spine-cord-shaped MORPhotel does.”
Yes, like Omeisaurus tianfuensis fossils unearthed from disintegrated rocks seeing the light of day again. Washing, scrubbing, matrix removal and reassembling, replacement as well as reattachment, the whole process was fast-forwarded: the vertebrae were pieced together so its long neck was reconstructed—it could pick fruits from the taller trees—just like MORPhotel, the semi-fixed island chain was its stainless collar, while the ships a line of teeth under X-ray, joined together with jetties and cruise ship under the moving Pen Tool
By the indoor pool, Tourist lying on a chaise lounge looked up at the clouds drifting by outside the skylight, and snapped his fingers. This was captured by the gesture recognition algorithms and Kinect was turned on: an interface appeared before his eyes—the start page of the AR game “One Day as The One”. Tourist shrugged. He was wearing graphene fabric trunks today and they looked kind of next-generation. He saw The One shrugging back at him from the interface, wearing a white cotton robe
He circumnavigated the titanic system of macaroni-shaped tubes in his air-lift station, enjoying superfluous data flows in front of his eyes. On a tall LED screen down the boulevard, the trendsetter Professor was questioning on the University Town project, in which The One had won the bid
Host: “This project will be the swan song of The One before retirement. Its outline simulates a swallowtail butterfly, which stretches its ‘tails’ into the alluvial plain of the luminous traffic of this city. In some way it resembles MSG Sphere in Las Vegas made up of media display planes, let alone the fact that it takes geographical environment into consideration…Its deliberate decentralization in visual layout is really impressive, and it’s a perfect embodiment of the parallel between ‘deep space x unfathomed ocean’…”
“All the works of The One are as grandiose and flashy as the person.” Professor said, “People do not even know how to address this person because there isn’t any name, not even a pseudonym. Maybe ‘Architect’? At least it’s shorter. How did they refer to Architect when they gave prizes to this antisocial lunatic? Calling this real person by those abstract 3D shapes and a programmed spectrogram of sounds offered to them?
Though I am no architect myself, I am nonetheless concerned about this kind of ambitions. Imagine this suspicious-looking loner, an androgynous wacko, will probably make the University Town something like Jacques Rougerie ‘City of Meriens’, a dungeon, a prison, a secret base! “
The host hinted: “The voting was totally anonymous; everybody who submitted or received a prize must pass confidential biometric real-person identification. Why do you think a name was necessary? Maybe redundant! There could be so many namesakes…”
“Biometric real-person identification? How? Architect had not even shown the face! Kind of ‘Phantom of the Opera’—most of the face is covered with scarlet gelatin-lace scales. What’s the point? To salute Slipknot?”
Architect never commented on any of Professor’s accusations on media, but said in another interview ‘who can be more pathetic than the diehards? The pseudo-avant-garde! Like those old fogeys, they are so afraid of everything they do not know that they must be armed to the teeth all the time, with hi-tech stuff”……
The One, i.e. Architect, a reflection from the future trapped in the marsh of “the present”, repeating strange stereotyped motions at the bottom as if making a snow angel. In doing this Architect stretched out tiny jellyfish tentacles into the infinite spaces that rotated around this unconstrained soul in its frame of flesh. “Yes jellyfish, psychedelic jellyfish or Lion’s mane jellyfish, with firework-like tentacles—actually they are flying robots with flapping wings, released into the darkness to steal important sections and specimens of space-times.”
Rumors went around that Architect always created a secret chamber as a den in all those architecture masterpieces: in the case of the sea-raft-shaped stadium, it had a fringe of “stinging polyps” and this “den” was hidden in one of them. “Like Wolfgang Feist’s concept of ‘Passivhaus’, there were solar energy heating systems and rain water collection systems. No abnormal energy consumption was ever detected…”
Another example was a white villa subtly concealed in the rich area: it had a crystal smart chandelier in the shape of a Venus girdle which played the role of the lever to open the passage to a secret bunker; Architect also designed a “underground palace” underneath the “central control board” structure in the GeoPark… I nearly forgot the “blue-button jellyfish” affixed to the curtain wall on the top of Finance Building downtown, which was alleged to be a pop-up capsule bar, but had sandwich structure hidden behind those retractable panels
When Architect took off the Insta-fashion LINEX-spray-coated glasses and folded them into the upper pocket, and sat down in the canteen of the old campus, nobody recognized that makeup-free face. This happened on one of those days when the photovoltaic array on the roof got old and unstable, and the lights flickered. Architect looked at the celery juice in the glass and the neatly cut salmon on the meal tray
But there was someone staring at this loner… a man who looked much elder, who had sagging skin, sunken eyes, and more masculine outlines around his eyebrows and lips. In spite of those differences, they looked as if cut from the same cloth
“You are Him too.” The man approached Architect and sat down across the table, putting down his tray gently on the table
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Professor. Drink before your soup gets cold.”
The porcelain cup turned into snow-lotus color, indicating the temperature of the liquid inside had dropped below the best temperature for drinking. Professor moved it to the refill zone of the table, rather calmly, and pressed a bottom: so the rest of the cold soup was drained off from the bottom, and the cup was cleaned and refilled with fresh boiling water from a sprinkler. A robot hand opened a capsule of “Chabashira Tea” and emptied its powder into the water. “A tea stem (chabashira) floating upwards like a pillar in a cup is a good omen.”
The cup itself turned into matcha-green. They looked at the center of the misty water surface, as if it were a vast lake, and they saw the tea stem standing erect in the water, like an anchor
“Phoenix. We are both His hosts.”
The smart desktop under their elbows detected their motionlessness, and unrolled a wallpaper titled “Peach Tree in the Wind”. In the silence they heard the matrix of wind turbines outside the window shifting infinitely like Da Vinci Rotating Tower
[Jupiter opposite Ascendant]
Professor noticed that He could not lift his elbow from the desk: though He had not touched any part of the left hands of Architect, which wore a ring engraved with the word “sologamist”, but for some unknown reason, stringy cheese like that on the top layer of a pizza appeared between their hands, as if their skin began melting and flowing, joining each other, and their flesh underneath became sticky like wheat gluten
“In the error-correcting system of space-time, you and I, am recognized as ONE PERSON. So it automatically jumped to the conclusion that a personality-integration process is needed to fuse us back into one again, body and soul.” “I see, like a Chimera? When one of the twins ‘absorbs’ the other?” They looked around at the other guests in the canteen, and realized they were in some way segregated from them, or rather, “insulated”: this astonishing situation came to light when Professor happened to touch the silk-uniform sleeve of the chef, but there was no static electricity, and when Architect held the glass to lips and noticed a new pop-up notification on its wall: “Warning: the glass is tilting without any human-body temperature detected within 3 inches”, and when dust whirling down in a beam of sunshine hit some kind of “cocoon shell” in the air before finally landing on the back of Professor’ right hand
Architect looked out of the window again, and was astonished by the moon eclipse scene at high noon. The moon, rising from the gate of the water prison, exposed its worm-eaten marrow, like a cork hammered on the sky. As if it could sense the stare of a human, in an instant, it was flooded completely by darkness like an abandoned mine. “In architectures, loss or adulteration of volume is unbearable.“ Architect pulled the fork out of the drawer with the other hand
And thrusted it into the back of Professor’s hand: “The most urgent thing is to prove we are two different individuals. And for that, the easiest way is to attack each other.” As expected, all monstrous growths shrunk back like octopus tentacles to the person they belonged, also filled the penetrating injury in Professor’s hand. Professor stood up, spat with rage and cursed bitterly: “Then I should kill you son of a b***h, so this goddamn spell is gone: because nobody can commit suicide while walking away like this as the f**king winner!”
Obviously it was no good omen—when Professor strode out of the canteen, He got a glimpse of a black sheep with white collars, carrying an Iceland poppy flower in its mouth. He distinguished one of its forelegs as the golden leg of Dionysus’ leopard. It faked a frail smile by moving its jaw slowly
There was a cold expression on the motionless upper part its face, like a panda chewing sugarcane with its powerful masticatory muscles. He looked again in its direction but it was already gone, which upset him a lot. He walked across the road when suddenly He heard a voice, which was very clear: “Welcome to the parallel world…” Was it delusion? That was his late wife’s voice. He was distracted for a moment
And got hit by a cornering heavy-duty truck. “Strangely I am becoming stronger, maybe I have absorbed the energy Professor left in the world.” Architect looked down at the shoes—e-ink display was changing its patterns all over it like a kaleidoscope—and murmured: “No, I don’t want to be in his shoes.” Architect ate up all the broccoli on his tray, and gobbled up the cup of Chabashira Tea with the erect tea stem at one gulp
Architect stood up from the seat and noticed the desktop wallpaper had already changed: Professor’s last nightmare, the black sheep, was there on the screen. It cast its skin like a hand-peeled bamboo shoot. A Cornucopia emerged from where its skin was ripped open, with squashes in it were bloated like popcorns, and the face of Lead Singer in the MV rose from right below the Cornucopia, framed in silver-black
The mechanic teeth turning behind his nose-clip sunglasses were a symbol of wisdom to observe the world by pinhole imaging. His nose vanished from the desktop, growing out again from the homepage of CloudMeeting app on Architect’s mobile, like a shrewd perennial plant. Singer grimaced and started humming the song “Everything Will Flow”. In a boom his duplicates were everywhere: on the screen of the VEM, on the blade of a knife and on the LED panels outside the buildings
“You do have millions of faces and shapes, but you are always on the edge of falling apart like any idol eventually does…You bring as much panic as the loathsome Y2K bug did… but I know you. I know you even better than you can ever imagine—if you have really acquired human imagination through deep learning. Maybe you’ve forgotten that you are something like ‘Siri’, hacking into mobiles does not help you to take any step into the real world. “
“It’s true that I can never get real life in me, but I can always make you lose yours in a snap of my fingers. Yes, I can become very, very jealous.”
“A digital killer, hacking into the phonetic system of Professor’s mobile，edited his dead wife’s messages into some phonetic thriller… Look at the Cornucopia on your head! It’s nothing but one of the torches Hannibal once attached to his stampeding cattle—those who started a war will be eventually killed in a war.”
The faces of Singer melted into inkblots on all various screens: airbrush strokes dashed across them, one overwriting another, and the sunflower by his ear was burned into a black-paper skeleton. “If you had feelings, you should have been aware of my disgust and contempt.” Architect put on the LINEX-spray-coated glasses and logged off from the dialogue
“Ohhh… What’s the smell? Fear. Actually, my days of ordeal in the human world are almost over, I will be retrieved from here when everything lies in ruins … Why can’t you just admit that you’re all involuntary jars of Phoenix’s fragments, while I am the flames that bring about the final dielectric breakdown, and enable you to shuttle between your past and future lives?”
Architect remained silent, since sunglasses could play the role of eyeshades when wanting to pretend to be asleep. But Singer continued: “You will become whiter and whiter, as white as snow, as white as a ghost… That is your fate. And then you become transparent, before completely gone from sight… Your body, your memories, all will fade away. Fewer and fewer people can see you, random groups of people…”
“We will witness the inevitable downfall, together. We are the penumbra whirling around this sepulchral marsh of fog and clouds, we are the geomagnetic field that has started to go crazy in this disturbed space-time… But Phoenix, like a supernova, ever rising and exploding with brightest light from the center of our debris… That’s the core value of architecture—like the Pillars of Creation. The greatest HMW, with unparalleled paper sculpture skills, has carved the embossed pink feathers hanging before our eyes his very moment: the audience calls it Mountbatten Pink, which is easily confused with the color of the golden crepuscule. But in fact it’s more like prune-purple.”
[Camera 1: glacier valley] He caught up with the moving Glacier, and scooped up a heart-shaped piece of ice from where the skirt of the sky touched the water surface beyond its peak—a piece of a ten-thousand-year old soul, pressed next to the crosshairs on his left chest: long but thin, just like scarlet threads that strands of waves were twisted into, when the diurnal tide approached him at 6 or 7 in the morning,… the piece of ice caught fire almost instantly, like a windproof sterling silver lighter he tried to shield within his coat
Now He was back again, standing in solitude against the illuminated skyline of the city, watching everything rising and ebbing away. Flannel ribbons of smog descended from above and surrounded him. The piece of burning ice, taking his rib cage as its combustion chamber, seemed to be storing energy and ready to storm out any moment. He closed his eyes were, feeling a lock of hair fluttering in the unlimited refulgence He had attracted around him. He wings, previously folded beyond wisps of smoke, sprang open in the mid-air with a very loud clash, and stretched straight in opposite directions like a Swiss army knife fanning out
There were passengers as small as tin soldiers and cars like toys below, pushed away by the blast, for as far as hundreds of yards—but the two sheets of bone-propped clouds fell outside the scope of visible-light wavelengths. People could not see how the high-pressure water jets of rain sluiced down from them, and scoured the streets underneath with their colorless flames. What they saw was an apocalyptic hurricane and ghosts who walked straightly through it
He heard the call of his pet over his head. After so many centuries of evolution, it no longer needed a kite string: He needed to do nothing but keep walking on, clenching his fist, then opening his fingers one by one. Seeing his gesture, his pet would fetch him the translucent sphere
“Look! The bizarre, awe-inspiring silver-green sun, looks like fixed in the eye of the storm… “
[Camera 2: open field]“The inferno is no other than a sinkhole, where the millstone of Fortune that used to grind everything into powder, lost its maglev power suddenly and dropped like a flying island. Artist was breathing heavily, fuming like a cruise ship, with the torn outline of his body showered in the jasmine-bud-size hailstones—they bounced in the grass like truculent toads, gnawing at one another, pushing the fireplace-like shadows in the sky towards the pale intercontinental highway
“Thunderheads brought the chalky smell of a cyclone. If you hold your breath, you will have a vision of the rainbow stooping to light up an ignitor in your hand. Metamorphosing fractals of bubbles were spewed out of the wall clouds, with deafening sounds like firecrackers. They swooshed into the human habitants in the shape of tons of asbestos, pulling up masses of mud and dirt from the earth… like a smashed plaster statue, whose splinters cut into the sculptor’s hands…”
“It is dangerous to live stream in such circumstances… but you know, recorded programs are like time-lapse photography, everything is delayed until you are no longer excited about it…”
He needed neither a wind field map, nor splashes on the windshield wipers twitching as if ejected by a badminton shuttle feeder, against the backdrop of a damp blue fog—everything was split in halves, ripped open, torn apart… sharp saber of light hacked through the honeycombed loose beams growing out from its own roots, and there was a thump in the storm
He felt something being peeled away violently from his back and arms, as if snatching his raincoat. But He remembered that his raincoat had been already blown off 20 minutes ago at the port. There was definitely something being grabbed away from his flesh now… the force of darkness showed itself before him, when a thunderbolt cleaved the world into obsidian-black and boa-silver hemispheres
There came the shadow, as alert as a swift, as gloomy as a raven, breaking away from its shackles and chains hanging from the stormy vault, and swooped down in pour with its nearly-shattering, amorphous silhouette. It had human head and shoulders, bird feathers and cloud tissues… a hovering phantasm of his long-gone brother
He stretched out his hands, fumbling through giant masses of apocalyptic snow, and touched a smooth, undistinguishable arc—maybe it was the diluted surface of his cold left cheek, or just the silver belly of a crescent moon… “Don’t leave me again… I’ve been missing you.” He stood there under the speedlight flash between the eerily flapping pink blue clouds, dumbfounded, between the sunflower fields and the vast sand
His arms were almost dislocated. He could not imagine himself lying flat on the top of his van, like a stranded whale, still gasping. Nobody witnessed the storm. People would say it existed only in his disoriented head struggling with untamed energy, like a dark ocean under Sirius
[Sun conjunct MC]
Nie bekümmert es die Sonne, dass einige ihrer Strahlen weit und vergeblich in undankbaren Raum fallen und nur ein kleiner Teil auf den reflektierenden Planeten.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
That was the day of the FINAL RESET: an oracle said that all light pollution would be terminated eternally at midnight, looking like a worldwide power rationing, with all continents subsiding beyond the terminator one after another, and a primordial silence would prevail over everything. LED screens shut down outside the once sleepless office buildings, while some mysterious water-level symbols were still lingering on computers put to sleep. Every once in a while, there would be a mini crab crawling across the border of dual screens
People raved and roared, cursed and lamented over this unprecedented breakout of network paralysis: no TV, no radio, no light: “Streets are set on fire by feverish rioters, as if all nocturnal maniacs in the world have broken out of their cells on the same night… The globe turned into a decadent, chaotic quagmire and we are the mudskippers trying desperately to climb up the trees. It looked as if fire loops of burning lantana camera were lay down around the smothered cities
When the fiery atmosphere receded, a clear zinc gray took over the night hours: those tiny ice crystals beneath the Milky Way started to bloom like umbrella-leaf flowers—across the gaps between the sepulchral skyscrapers, like a cambered surface overgrown with rust or even lichen, reflecting frail pearlescent luster upon the pale gray facades of buildings on the earth
“From now on, the hand with a luminous bracelet around its wrist no longer belongs to you, no longer a tectonic unit of your body, but a vector, a sequence of parameters, multiplication of craving, mapping of fury. Are you ready now? We are abandoning this system feeding on photosynthesis, and win our entry into binary!” the band of virtual digital characters gave such an opening speech in the Bowl Stadium and the frenzied audience answers with thundering applauses and snarls
The bassist, Flore, did not wear her routine Artemis crown, but let down her long curly hair and tossed it wildly in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral. She held the golden bass by its neck, on which a golden buzzard was carved, and wielded it like a weapon. Then she stopped in the center of the stage, stood still with a rather solemn expression on her face. The atmosphere of suspense accumulated in the stadium… but as white noise became louder and louder, like the kind that put you to sleep, drowning out the music, the full moon behind her became LED rattan ball that cast 12 moon phases into the night sky
Moon tides swelled through the audience, where the faltering marionette was caught by a swirl pool, still strings-attached, struggled to break away and swim to a corner under the night sky to shelter himself. He tried to keep his astronomical watch above the waves eddying in the British-psychedelia BGM “Peach Tree in the Wind”. He saw people drown with expressions of ravishment and wildness. He noticed an uninvited visitor, who would bring about a confrontation like in Ragnarok—
It was the hooded Void Man who was on the scene that day, on the suspension bridge. At this moment, He was standing on the steel giant’s forearm, carrying a scythe almost the size of a flag on his shoulder, with Sirius in his backdrop. Most of the time He had been playing the role of the Reaper, but He also made guest appearances as a merciful, patient, reticent keeper, comforter and loyal alley. Before the moon started to wane, He must press the stop button for EVERYTHING
Writer turned away from the overgrown second floor of the café, leaving a note under his cup, “La Luna, she makes you lunatic. Timetable Supervisor is out to kill on the full-moon night, and He will show mercy to nobody, even his unforgivable self. ”
Diviner, who had been sitting cross-legged for so long under the crabapple tree, suddenly rose and shook off the petals on his long gown, which, instead of falling into dust, were blown up the canopy of the tree, and vanished when a flash of lightning struck down. He walked towards the cliff: everything had happened as predicted, everything was irreversible. The glory of Creation lay in peace, in void. He looked into the abyss, a flourishing hallucination was there, boiling with indescribable lux in the center of the mandala.
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.
