My lord, the master of the west wind

Arriving home from faraway travels, after many month's absence and a grueling long trip, how pleasant it is to be welcomed at one's threshold by an old faithful friend who'd rushed on ahead to sweep the cobwebs, warm and light the house and whisk up a frothy tea.

We sit and chat and then in passing she mentions the west wind:

In the ninth month, the west wind quickens
Under the cold moon, flowers of frost have formed.
When I think upon my lord, the spring day seems long.
My soul, nine times, rises towards him in one night.

In the second month the east wind comes
Tearing at the plants till the flowers lay bare their hearts.
When I think upon my lord, the spring day passes slowly.
My heart, nine times, leaps up to him in one night.

Which is a fancy way to say that I have found, upon arriving home, a copy of The Pillow Book waiting in the mailbox -- of all the books that I had preordered, this one was the first to come and the only one to be already waiting. So, having dropped my bags and shoes at the door, I curled up on the sofa with it. This poem, by Po Chu Yi, is mentioned in its 150th chapter (as Morris numbers them), but only obliquely, of course, with the sort of reference you are liable (and calculated) to miss.

I can't explain what I find so very moving about it... surely, I hope, not just the fact that I do not understand it (and my head spins trying to understand it).

An auspicious conjunction

Last night I went to a party next door. Well, "next door" is about 700 meters, but the full moon made the night as bright as broad daylight and I decided to go there on foot.

I left before the countdown -- the party was like all the parties always are -- but coming back home, among the rice fields and banana groves (the shaggy leaves were edged silver by the moon), along the dirt country road (which gleamed before me as white as snow) was very beautiful: occasionally, there were by the roadside broad leafless trees -- it is the dry season here and many trees are naked -- and then the road was covered with the spiderweb of their shadow in the moonlight.

I recalled a letter a Chinese scholar¹ wrote in the eleventh century describing just such a moment: walking in the spider-web shadow of naked trees under the beaming moonlight; and here was I, a thousand years on, experiencing the same thing. The moment felt as magical to me last night as it had to him full ten centuries back.

The natives have a beautiful custom of celebrating holidays by sending into the sky flying lamps -- small hot-air balloons: a jar of cloth turned topsy-turvy with an glowing oil lamp attached underneath; and every way I looked last night there were a dozen such lamps, glowing orange in the sky, climbing up and turning left, east, with the prevailing wind: new constellations in the sky, brighter than the old stars, and constantly shifting: the Ink Brush, the Bolt of Cloth (which then morphed to become the Suckling Waterbuffalo), the Three Working Girls Each With Drink In Hand, the Very Ancient Bronze Vessel.

Su Shih would surely have said it was a very auspicious way to ring in the new year.


¹ Su Shih (1037-1101 A.D.), scholar, poet, essayist, lover, administrator, politician, political dissident, exile, and -- a terrible calligrapher. "Snakes hanging from trees", said Mifu; "tadpole traces", said Huang Tingjian.

In the sala

A day so happy (to get the erudite allusion out of the way right off). I spent it in my sala, which is a steep tiled roof on four massive trunks and stands perched up on top of a small hillock, my garden's highest point. It has views towards distant mountains and a nearly constant easterly breeze. There I lay on my couch, sprawled oriental and decadent fashion, facing west, towards the hills, reading and listening to audio books by turns, dozing off, and staring at the flowering trees and the distant views and listening to the birds. I listened to Le Temps' first chapter some half a dozen times, falling asleep each time, and then waking and falling asleep again, until from the various bits heard and remembered, or sort-of remembered, I got a pretty good impression of what it is about, which is, of course, dozing off. Then I read in Kangxi's autobiography, so cleverly put together from fragments of his edicts by Spence, and was, as always, deeply moved by it: I have known and liked the man for so many years now and, always, the more I learned about him, the more I liked and admired him. Interesting, cultured and decent, men do on occasion arise within our species; odds are, of course, that we will never meet one in the flesh; but the invention of writing allows us to meet them in their words, at least; and when we read them, we know that such men are possible; and therefore that the species is not entirely a waste. There is a warm feeling about the heart. As I lay there on my couch, gradually the day's heat wore off, it leaned towards the evening, the sun set behind the hills without much ado, and darkness began to gather in the air. I lay there absolutely still, waiting for the night. At length the world turned black; a strange bird began to caw; and then I saw a flickering light approaching through the trees: it was my servant coming to collect me and take me home.

A vignette written to celebrate my commencement of reading Le Temps Perdu

At daybreak I woke up remembering the rain.

It had woken me in the middle of the night: the patter on the roof, the murmur in the bamboo outside. Delighted and confused -- was I dreaming? -- I got up and walked out naked onto the terrace. It does not rain here in December. Ever. When God made the world, he had declared that there should be no rain in these parts until May. Yet, there it was, the rain: the surface of my pond, black, oily and glistening in the dim light of a single yellow lantern among the bamboos on the other side sprang growing circles where individual drops of rain fell upon it: here, there, here.

At daybreak I woke up remembering the rain. I walked out onto the terrace again, trying to ascertain whether I had dreamt it: there was dew on the trees, the ground was wet. Did it rain last night, or did I dream it?

I looked around. The sky was overcast and the air was humid. It's never humid this time of the year. There are not supposed to be any clouds in the sky. Have I woken up in a different part of the world from that in which I had gone to sleep? Was I dreaming still? I felt displaced. The experience was confusing but it was pleasant to be confused: I had been tired with my old reality, I had grown desperate thinking that it would never change. An unexpected tectonic shift in it would have been welcome; falling into a time-space anomaly like this would have been an answer to my prayers.

I search for clues to the mystery of where it is I had woken, I began to wonder through my garden, looking at the flowers and the trees, until I came upon my neighbor's hut. He was on his porch, making coffee.

Theo, I asked him, did it, or did it not rain last night? Nope, he said definitively.

By the pool I met Annette. Annette, I said, did it rain last night? Most certainly not, she said and dove in the pool.

Then, suddenly, I remembered something. Doubling back by Theo's house, I asked him: Theo, do you think it is possible that there might have been a dog drowning in my pond last night?

Wouldn't know anything about that, said Theo. But would you like some coffee?

I walked back home slowly.

There most definitely had been a drowning dog in my pond last night. I remembered it now. Her yelping disturbed my reading several times, until at last, taking my torch in hand, I headed out to see what the matter was. After some searching I discovered her, her eyes squinting in the beam of my flashlight, in the bushes on the other side of my pond. She lay exhausted half-way on the ground and half-way in the water. She must have come down to drink, slipped and fallen in; but as the bank is very steep and slippery here, she couldn't scramble out. She struggled and struggled and at last collapsed breathless, slowly slipping back into the water where she was going to drown. And now she lay there, yelping, resigned to death by water.

Laying my torch on the ground, I stripped, wrapped my arms in my jeans in case she should scratch or bite, stepped in the pond up to my waist, and lifted her up. She offered no resistance. She was as motionless as dead. I carried her to the garden gate and gently put her outside, on the road, in the moonlight shining through an opening in the clouds. She looked miserable, wet and trembling, and had the world's stupidest expression on her snout. Have you ever seen an embarrassed dog? As I locked the gate behind her, she looked at me, confused.

Yes, I now remembered that. It had happened last night. And then I went to sleep. And then I woke in the middle of the night: the patter of the rain on the roof had woken me, and its murmur in the bamboo. And then I went to sleep again. And then I woke uncertain whether any of that had happened or not.