I, Calligraphy: Chapter 1: The spherical raindrop in the middle of the storm

The bus ride

Rain had fallen on the thin rooftops of the city, collected in the hollows of elephant-ear-sized leaves after running like mercury beads along the smaller spear-like leaves of the taller trees, racing droplets of silver through a non-sensical matrix of an ecosystem like ball bearings in a Rube-Goldberg machine.  Not unlike myself, in that respect.  I tried to map my mind—helical, multi-cameral, chambered nautilus that they say a mind is, though it seems like I spend most of my time in some cavernous, dim and stone-floored anteroom—I entreated whatever it was that lived in that room, luminescent and birdlike, to refract itself onto each of the separate beads of water…to become a consciousness that was pointillistic, free-falling and mapping the topography of the space I didn’t yet know—to tell me in advance what my time on the island-nation of Taiwan might be like. 

But my scattered thoughts were reflected along the teardrop curvature of the rain, excluded from the center of perfect, monadic clarity of the spherical raindrop in the middle of the storm, that ephemeral crystal ball that can tell the future.  The squall ended and I looked out the window of the bus.  Next to me was the colleague who had come to meet me at the airport and guide me to the correct bus.  He seemed to want to keep the conversation going, perhaps like some artists fear negative space.  But I wanted to silence.  I wanted to understand what I was looking at.  Instead of a communion with a companion, I sought solidarity with the rain itself; at that particular moment, the unexpected and garish multiplicity of neon signs outside of small, glass booths was being reflected in the glass of the booths and on the glass of the bus window and in a long, trailing smear of neon in the wet asphalt of the road.  It was a kind of neon calligraphy made possible by our motion.  A woman inside a booth was blue and white because of the ultra-violet light.  I asked what it was that I was seeing and my colleague, in an emulsifying mixture of lust and explanatory eagerness, told me about binlang girls, and betelnut—a shredded, fibrous drug that looked like saffron filaments wrapped in a leaf, and one chews it and this produces an excessive amount of red saliva that is spit into a cup or in fern-shaped patterns on the sidewalk. We spit.  We spit.  We spit.

Water was reflecting light.  A woman in a mini-skirt and halter top worked industriously at packing the betel-nuts.  She remains suspended, like the light, itself was suspended in its reflection upon the surface-tension of the water.  Neither the moral nor the erotic response which she evoked was terminal; I chose to have an associative response.  I wanted her quiet, industrial power.  That room, which was also a gallery of the self.  Roadside indifference to glares and stares and what they call the gaze.  She was Sisyphus.  She had escaped, as Camus suggested, by virtue of work.  “A face so close to the stone,” as he said.  Work is release from work.     

There was something anachronistic—both futuristic, in its coloration, and passé in its blatant objectification—there was something of a temporal-tuning fork about the betel-nut girl, a simultaneity of the unknown direction I was heading and a valedictorian farewell from an era already over.  It was liminal.  That neon-smear would remain in the Vaseline-like-viscosity of memory, the clarity of her long fingernails, even her fingerprints like the signatures of the self were somehow seared upon the moment, sealing it with identity, as she gathered unto her symbolic inventory the roles of lover, muse, the island-itself, danger, salvation, the strength of the infinite and the fragility of mortality.  I don’t know why that image was the one that stuck with me instead of something when I was collecting my baggage at the carousel or waiting for my passport to be stamped by a man in a uniform.  There are so many possible imagistic harbingers of the life we have yet to have…and should I have fixated upon another image, whose to say that I wouldn’t have chosen an entirely different artistic…or non-artistic…path?   

We made it into the city after an hour of jostling and thunking into potholes and asthmatic hissing of brakes and the squeaking hinges of the opening and closing of the telephone-booth-like doors of the bus and the constant slush and splatter of the ever-present water.  Water, it would turn out, would be more the zeitgeist of the island…of any island…than land.  Water makes an island possible.  It is the water we should have talked about, really.  It is after the water that we should have named these strange floating gardens we call islands. 

I struggled to free my suitcase from the tessellated mass in the belly of the bus—an almost Excalibur-like-feat—and was annoyed to learn that we now had to travel by metro for a few stops before arriving at his apartment.  As I’ve never been good at masking my emotions when tired, it was obvious to my colleague that this might be the proverbial straw and he pivoted, suggesting that we could also take a taxi. 

“Let’s take a taxi,” I said, not understanding how that had even been debatable. 

“Don’t worry.  The company is paying.  And taxis are cheap.  We could have taken one from the airport, but I wanted to be frugal with the company’s money.”

I didn’t say anything.  I was hired overseas for a Director-level position.  Perhaps he thought it would make a good impression to demonstrate financial thrift, taking the jostling and bumpy bus instead of a car for hire.  I’d have preferred the comfort.  But then I might not have had my neon moment with the betel-nut girl and the rain and the reflections. 

“Here we are,” he said.  And he started rummaging through keys on a system of key rings that reminded me of my dad’s trout-keeping chain with its clasping metal loops that you hook through their gills.  A person’s keys tell you everything you need to know about a his or her personality.  A lot of keys on a lot of rings—entropic tendencies, bikes, cabinets, the need to hoard and to hide, a missing sense of security—deficient motherly love. 

Of course there were stairs.  If I were going to earn my entrance to this stage of my life, I would of course have to travel on a run-down bus in the rain to have to transfer to a taxi to arrive at a decrepit building without an elevator.  He took one of my suitcases and I wrestled with the other, like Sisyphus, knowing full well I would have to descend to fetch the remaining carry-on pieces.  Knowing full well that in a few days, I would need to descend with all of them and transfer them to another temporary apartment.  Another stairwell.  Another spiral.  Another narrow road.  Another chambered nautilus.  I couldn’t have known then that the next place would be the place I had been searching for without even knowing it.  The co-worker whom I was originally going to cohabitate with—she had a bigger, more modern place—was windsurfing.  I was going to have temporary lodgings for the first long weekend.

The apartment

I don’t like to look the gift of hospitality in the keyhole.  But I am afraid that it was all too much for me to remain internally composed.  The week I had arrived was one of record-breaking cold weather.  It was toward the tail-end of Chinese New Year, of which I knew nothing about.  The bed I was to stay in was his great-grandparents’ ancestral bed—it looked like a miniature replica of a Ford Model-A made out of lacquered bamboo.  It was much more of a museum artifact than a functional piece of furniture.  And as it was normally not cold—or, not that cold in Taipei, we had to resort to the bottoms of trunks for old wool army blankets, towels and floormats not currently in service, and other rags and patches of fabric with which I might try to mummify myself, wrapped in an ancient and simultaneously post-modern flag of identity, trying to stay warm, but shivering with teeth-chattering ferocity.  I wore every piece of cold-weather clothing I had packed: short-sleeved t-shirt, long sleeved turtleneck, sweater, vest, jacket, hat.  And still, the cold penetrated like an x-ray, eschewing the materialism with which I had attempted to keep it at bay. 

Showering was even worse than sleeping.  There was one bathroom and it was tiled from floor to ceiling.  Picture One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  There was a shower handle on a hose on the wall and a coat-hanger to suspend your towel.  The air was wet and cold—more of a Bose-Einstein condensate than a suitable environment for a human being.  And when I thought it couldn’t get any colder, I attempted to regulate the flesh-peeling scalding water from the shower and got water that was somehow still in liquid form at what must have been only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.  Of course I swatted the shower head away, getting my towel soaking wet.  Shampoo was running down my face, chemically stinging my eyes without remorse.  I thought of Job.  I thought of karma or darma—whichever one it is that you need to work off.  There was the Lohan under the leaf in the rain with the dog biting at him and an empty bowl.  I thought of California and comfortable beds and warm showers.  I cursed.  It occurred to me that I hadn’t yet slipped on the wet tile floor.  I hadn’t cracked my skull.  I was miserable.  And yet it was, as Pangloss would say, the best of all possible worlds.  Or it was about to be.  I couldn’t see that yet. 

After getting dressed and a being handed hot cup of coffee from my host, I was able to take in the scene.  The apartment was an homage to the avocado: the tiled walls, the formica, the coffee-cup.  Everything was somewhere in the spectrum of green.  With the exception of the vinyl couches, which were black.  While there was an entire wall of windows, the glass was all frosted—this made it feel even colder.  Wire-harnesses and computer cables and tech-detritus was everywhere.  On a nail on the wall near the door was the ganglia of keys—I’d guess it weighed half-a-kilogram.  And a slicker—a clear, plastic slicker that had yellowed with age.  The air in the apartment was heavy—a little stale.  Smelling of sweat and mildew.  Dust had coated every surface except where it had been swept away by body-contact or foot-shuffling.  But the dust was so old that it had hardened into a layer of patina.  Which reminded me I wasn’t wearing slippers.  He apologized but only had one pair.  My thin socks were insufficient insulators, but that was okay.  My feet had gone numb. There was a use-sheen on the left segment of the couch and the armrest.  An area on the card-table where a bowl and a spoon remained from the habitual regimen of his mornings.  To be honest, I was envious.  I have never been aesthetically indifferent to my surroundings.  Through acts of organization and rituals of cleaning do I seek to appease, to understand, to atone, to pay tribute, to seek rapture.  I’ve always wanted to be a person who could filter out chaos and not see the flotsam and jetsam of life. 

The bike ride

We went for a bike ride after coffee.  I didn’t really have a choice in the matter.  And, in a way, it let me see what was behind the gauze-like windows.  I descended the apartment stairs quickly, forgetfully, and took a survey of the street outside.  We were near a metro-station.  I heard the keys jangling.  He was unlocking two water-logged bicycles.  We mounted.  My crankset would have given its teeth for some grease.  I tilted and faltered and eventually got some kind of balance and we made our way to the riverside bike trail. 

There is not really a diplomatic way to describe one’s initial aesthetic response to Taipei in the daylight.  Dilapidated older buildings sit like rotten teeth amidst the too-new, too-tall, ultra-modern new buildings.  Everywhere, everything is being eaten by vegetation.  Plants.  Molds.  Trees.  Flowers.  Ferns.  Spores.  Cillia.  Flagella.  I am not sure of the full panoply of botany and flora at work, but life wants to live.  And that life grows out of every crack.  If a seed is buried under a meter of concrete, it will wick the moisture from that concrete and split the sidewalk and life will emerge.  Taiwan is, in many ways, growth.  It is alive.  Is it the origin of life?  Primordial?  At first, I only saw the discord of this dialectic between the city and the jungle.  At first, I lamented the damage and destruction a moist environment wreaks on buildings and monuments and metro-stations.  It would take a while until what I had seen as a linear conceit rejoined itself into something circular and then something multi-variable and cyclical.  Calligraphy, and all art, is underwritten by this same ethos—we make that which is dead—artifacts—and then these dead seeds come to life in the soil of the mind of future artists.  It is all cyclical.  Everything is.  Everything.

I had lived in Tokyo prior to moving to Taiwan.  While a similar dynamic existed, Tokyo is latitudinally higher and somehow has been more relentless with its concrete.  In Taipei, human effort seemed smaller than the might of nature.  Perhaps it was the coast, and how savage things were there, that recalibrated me.  I came to love every broken tile and graying fragment of concrete in Taiwan.   Odd that wabi-sabi needed to be at outdoor scale for me to embrace it—one might say I was on a kind of wabi-sabi safari, if one wanted to engage in a little light-hearted word play.  I came to love the entirety of the surface area, the full and complete volume of all human accomplishment, and the living, breathing, fullness of the nature that met with and checked human progress at each and every point of contact.  I guess there comes a kind of peace that one feels when one is in a place that is right—to be calibrated with a place.  To transcend the optics of a moment—to overwrite time, in a way.  Or, perhaps, to stop fighting the currents that one floats upon—to have found one’s island.  To have found stability in flux.  To be able to do one’s work.  To unfold.  To create.  To declare oneself. 

My arrival could be looked at, narratively, in an infinite number of ways.  A kaleidoscope would be too simple a device to suggest the pluripotency of story.  For all recounting is part of something cellular and massive and dying and being born at all times.  My story is part of your story.  It is part of my colleague’s story.  It is a part of the stories of people I haven’t mentioned yet, and of people I won’t mention.  And all of these people are part of the story of a place.  It is falling in love with a place that compels one to write.  The place changes.  In that way, it dies.  It may be that the new place becomes the locus of love for a new writer.  Writing a memoir of a person in a place is a writing a love letter to an indexed instance of time and space.  There can be nothing, ultimately, but gratitude and then even that is let go of.  There was that movie about the aliens—overrated, in my opinion, but still something could be gleaned from it.  The movie called Arrival.  It hadn’t occurred to me but I came to this island from the sky in a metal craft with a door.  I didn’t know the language of the people.  I was designated an alien.  I sought communication through large, abstract ink patterns.   I discovered calligraphy, accidentally.  I drifted into the asemic.  But is it really without meaning?  Is there not a universal script—neither alphabet nor character, that tells the story of discovery, of motion itself, when narrativity has been unbound from the linguistic? 

This is the story I wish to tell you—the story of finding two things without which my life would feel hopelessly impoverished.  In truth, I wouldn’t know I was missing those things—or perhaps other treasures would have been discovered.  But for me, I found a place I belonged, Taiwan, and a thing I was supposed to be doing—calligraphy.  The story of these discoveries necessitates the people surrounding them.  Necessitates me.  For I sometimes wonder, as Nabokov did, whether art is ancilla to life, or life to art.  Or are they one and the same?  This is the story of the discovery of art.  And, in a way, it is an attempt to say goodbye to art, too.  To let go.  To get ready for that even bigger, post-activity discovery.  This doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing, creating, taking photographs, organizing things in museums, making calligraphy, mounting shows, and loving people as I go along.  But somehow, I feel closer to the end of the book than to the beginning, and that requires getting comfortable with the loss of eyesight, the loss of language, letting go.  I’d like to leave something behind.  Something about how wonderful it was to have been a human and to have been a calligrapher.