Yang Earth

Container of Tears

ON EITHER SIDE OF THE PATH to the cliff is a margin of black bamboo around thick green tangled forest. The wild lands quivered, green blades twirled. Quick stink of rot — dead fawn — the dirt blazing red as I advanced, glimmering black-red, rising with each step. I was almost there, turning back through the memory of days with my family, filling my lungs with spicy dust and vapour infused with that intense green.

The cliff is not obvious until the path and the forest end, and then there’s only pale wet air ahead and the river far below rushing for the dark gorge.

Upstream there was banging and sawing; but I was too taken with a blinding headache to consider what was going on, except there were women working as well as men, women like giant flowers come loose from the forest. Children swam in the river. Their voices were with me even there, where the cliff crumbled slightly at the edge.

FOUR WHITES

A bellyache and no appetite. I shat everything out and got dizzy and went down to the encampment and wandered like a ghost among the villagers. They are small people with dark skins, quick to smile, not alarmed by the presence of a Westerner in monk’s garb, yet not inclined to speak either. A faint rotten smell off the river. The rescued girl saw me and ran to hide. By noon I had to lie down and sleep in the shade of a big river tree. What? I woke up asking myself. What is it?

I vomited all afternoon.

GREAT CREVICE

Slept under the stars with three other monks. Woke in terror to footsteps in the fallen leaves. It must have been midnight. I lay bathed in sweat, trembling and prepared for assassins, and saw soft animal faces among the branches and the stars and remembered the fawn on the cliff path two days ago, her eyes black with flies. She had not been dead long; she had not lived long either, perhaps four months. A kind of circular song shook my body until morning.

I had a conversation with a young woman on the bridge. She and I were crossing in opposite directions. For my part, I was coming back from collecting supplies from the bus; she was leaving the settlement for some guilty occupation, or so it seemed from the way she hurried, and kept her eyes on the corrugated deck, only looking up at the last moment.

She stopped and said, “You are ill.” In her small dark face was the ripple of a question. Perhaps just concern. Perhaps fear: she was in the territory of men who do not farm or go out to hunt.

“Yes. I am feeling unwell.”

“I hope you will soon feel better,” she said.

We stood still. I set down my load. A warm fragrant breeze blew from the fields. Dust swept against our faces. We turned together to listen to it hiss through the river trees.

“Do you hear a child singing?” she said.

“It’s only wind in the cables.”

We stepped to the edge, our clothes flapping.

“It is in the river,” she said. “Up there.” She pointed upstream at a distant tangle of branches and bamboo. “Where my son drowned.” She looked at me in fierce sorrow and turned away. I watched her cross the bridge to the road and disappear.

What sights we witnessed in each other on that bridge under the weight of a child’s death. And she was beautiful, proud, hurt, angry. Beneath me the current had wrapped a blue plastic bag around one of the pylons.

EARTH GRANARY

The settlement woman was probably twenty-six or twenty-seven though she carried her small dense slender body with the self-conscious ferocity of a girl. Her face and arms, especially her neck, were dusky, such a contrast to Imogen’s fair skin. Just now a heron laughed. I am not myself. I’m cold, then hot. My stomach and sides and upper arms have a bright red rash, though the nausea has passed. I’m concerned to know whether she has returned to this side of the river, my imagination fired by images of her meeting a lover or an enemy alone on the desolate country road. Delirium draws me to embroider the story with darker shades of violence. Actors play out such stories in discrete, disjoint, feverish units, making films.

A moment ago the bell sounded the start of night. Down below, a circle of torches burns, voices and drumbeats rising into the air, fading and surging with the intermittent wind.

Now it is quiet but for the occasional laughter and yowls and hoots of men.

In my hot fevered state I sense invasion, forced change, instability. Six crushed beer cans found under the old cedar above East Shrine have fed my new fear of roving gangs. Some of these men are not as poor as they seem and are venturing freely through our community and onto the lower slopes of the mountain. Unfamiliar, unwelcome, especially when we’re preparing for autumn.

The master told me I was about to do something sacred or forbidden, but he would not say what. Something to dispel wind-heat. Sitting with him earlier this evening, I was light-headed.

“Do you know what you will do?” he said.

“I feel like buying cigarettes.”

He laughed.

“Or perhaps I need to get rid of something.”

The master said to calm my thoughts and loosen my robe. “I will balance your body.” He lit a candle and I undid my clothes. The rash on my chest was a range of angry red hills on a white plain. What strange diminishing fevers! Then I felt complete, seamless, as though death might be tomorrow, death the next turn, the new direction.

GREAT WELCOME

A slim woman in a short black dress and her arms full, slung her hip against the edge of her car door to slam it shut, the action turning her toward me; her complicit grin was outside time, outside language. Now it’s tucked safe in memory’s closet to be brought out on an occasion like this. The end of summer. The first day of school. I was on my bike and just aware of women’s bodies and hers was young and wise and poised and wide open: hip shot for balance, leg extended, knee bent; inches of thigh.

What else?

A woman in a black dress. A glossy black car. A flurry of forbidden activity. A leap of some kind, then, over something my father had already tamed.

JAW BONE

There you are. My goodness. Audience member, reader, witness.

I’m cool again and safe for now from external pernicious influences, and remembering my wife’s cunt, how it opened when I sat before it, that beautiful cowled monk above the petal gate — surely the point of points when all the channels are singing! I won’t see another, not in that glorious way.

Curlicues of river current are repeated in the heated air. My chills were simple echoes of what is always spinning through the breezes and mirages. My body knew women’s bodies. My body used to know my mother’s body. And my wife’s body was the strategic bridge from that past to this future.

Women are agents or spies; they travel without portfolios. What a mood I’m in! And what about children? These children are a reminder of my own child. They are also reminders of a boy who has drowned.

BELOW THE JOINT

The water rose over the child’s head and his hands shaped something delicate below the surface, some earthen artefact old as bones, a hello to darkness.

Two pretty children played by the river where cold water ran swiftly at that deep place regardless the season.

Excessive cold along my spine, along the midline from sternum to pubic bone, makes me unsure I will be alive by the time Imogen comes, a year from now. This central channel reminds the body it was once a single cell dividing into two. I can feel a daily shift in my surface pulses, below which is madcap frenzy, and there are many indications of change in the valley, too, that suggest fire overacting on water. By next summer all will have changed.

The village woman’s name is Song Wei. Her child, I have learned, was a boy named Suiji. He drowned after falling from a rocky outcrop when playing with his friend. Water will not wet his skin again; air will not dry him. And the girl has not spoken since the accident.

Fearful as a rabbit, I sit on my haunches and grasp the pen and write words to wake the god who will want them. The master says it is good to write. Sun on the horizon trees, the river whitely brimming. A small bell tinkles close by — one of the children. Then voices, men speaking in low tones. My brothers are at their various occupations, just as I am at mine. All of us elements in the moment beyond moments. The bell is circling me. An invisible child playing a game. Like me, you will sicken. Like me you will heal. My wife sickened and died, though we were already divorced. And I’m getting well again. Are you still there? Yes? Like mine does now, as I stand up to see the child, your shadow crosses the paths of others who don’t notice. You cross the paths of others who love you. Like mine, your body will give up the ghost. One thing more: ghosts here are different than ghosts in the West.

HEAD’S BINDING

Today I went down to the bridge and crossed without knowing what I was doing. Crossing the bridge was like encountering resistance in a point, say triple warmer fifteen, Heavenly Crease, though the discordance was fleeting. What I have learned here is that nothing is entirely my own. Between heaven and earth, as Shakespeare knew, runs a current that we vertical ones must transmit or suffer the consequences. Put more than two of us together and we collect what the universe throws at us, but don’t know what to do with it. Only two and the container has a kind of perfection. What I feel might be what you are feeling; only lifetimes of whimsy and intuition — not interpretation — will shade the difference between us. What delight and misery!

I looked down from the middle of the bridge. While not quite leaping up and waving bandanas at me, the river people, some of them children, were looking in my direction, some with expectation in their eyes. Already I recognised many, though some seemed distant, seemed to belong to other times and places.

Across the bridge, outside the monastery, I was entirely alone. Ah. If I remove myself from results then everything I do will set in motion energy along the path that needs the juice; every intersection will light up like a transit schedule.

MAN’S WELCOME

On the bridge home at noon I met someone again, not the woman but a small man, a dwarf with a large head of black hair and the blackest eyes, who was leaning over the rail scanning the water below. He’d seen me and as I approached gave me such a look that I stopped in my tracks. I waited beside him for further acknowledgement while he returned to his searching. The sun came out of the grey sky, hot on my back. The weather was unsettled. Rain had fallen in the night and it had been cloudy all day. We watched mist flowing around both banks and in and out of the forest. Perhaps he was waiting for the river to reflect these changes. We stood an hour in silence, during which time I had the feeling we were in conversation already, and it was not going well. The perfection between two beings seemed unlikely. My stomach went from unease to embarrassment, then to such shame that I couldn’t move. Eventually he spoke. The sun burned deeper into my back. Hot nails into metal and fire points: pericardium, lungs, heart. I glanced down at the water and saw something float by and at the same instant the man’s shoulders hunched and he got down on his knees and gripped the sharp metal edge of the bridge.

“My sister, Song Wei, has lost her husband and now her child,” the dwarf whispered.

WATER PROMINENCE

We spread carpets under the plum trees in the margins of the storehouse courtyard in order to practice point location and the subtle pulses. The monk I worked on was the youngest among us. He giggled when I felt for Kunlun Mountains behind his ankle where water meets fire in the heavenly star point.

I found it difficult to concentrate. I couldn’t stop thinking of the meetings on the bridge.

The boy monk had dusky skin like Song Wei’s. His body had weak pulses on the left, and gall bladder felt like a kite in gusts of wind. Around us, monks were murmuring the names of points, and for a moment I got lost and couldn’t feel the pattern of his deeper paths. Song Wei’s face wouldn’t go away. Nor would her son Suiji’s identical drowned face.

When it was my turn to lie on the carpet, the young monk said my pulses were big, bigger than usual, too big, like proud judges! Circulating sex, kidney, wham, wham, wham!

QI ABODE

Every morning the sun lights the bamboo outside the storehouse window; this is the first thing we see when we sit down to eat, after the body’s electricity has left the core for the skin and the orifices are wide and dreams have ebbed to leave bits of image and sensation in pathways of the strange flows.

Yang bridge, couple point, Back Ravine, Small Intestine-3, edge of each hand between the root of the little finger and the wrist. I hold this, talking to heart’s minister near the inner frontier gate. How’s it going?

I kiss the jumping skin of my inside wrist and the minister responds. “Hold qi abode, those notches either side of Celestial Chimney, that pocket above the centre of the sternum.”

The dwarf came today to ask, on behalf of the rest of the village, if they might attend the next shrine festival. I was late for meditation, on my way to the temple. He touched my hand and backed into the forest and said he wished to present a petition to the master from their counsel of elders, all of whom, he said, were women. He glanced up at me and asked for my name and I shook my head. I had another encounter with his black glistening eyes and experienced his body this time as a proud nerve encysted in dense muscle. As I looked, the muscle relaxed and black waves rolled out — physical violence, or something more dreadful.

“I am Zhou Yiyuan,” he said, and bowed. “Because you have come from far away, from another country, my people think you are the one to represent our interests in the valley to your master.”

“Who are your people?”

“The first to live in these valleys.” He stooped and looked around, a dumb show of caution. “No one remembers that we were forced north. And now the north that nursed us has buckled and blood runs under the mountains and we are the flow manifest.” And he cackled to himself: “There is no war in this country. There is no discontent in this region.”

“You would like an introduction to the master?”

“Yes. At a ceremony.”

“For what purpose?”

“We count on the blessings of people who understand the true position of human beings. We were farmers. Now our villages are floating. We are a remnant that acknowledges other remnants. I tell you this because you know nothing. We have been pushed farther and farther north into remote regions. Now the ground will not respond. We dwindle with each generation. It is time for us to come home.”

EMPTY BASIN

“Zhou Yiyuan requests a place at the autumn festival.”

The master looked at me sharply. “For himself?”

“For his people.”

“All of them?”

“The elders, I think. Women.”

“No.” The master’s willingness to hear me was at an end. “How did you meet this man?”

“His sister, Song Wei, is the mother of the drowned boy, Suiji.”

The master stared at me then waved his hand. “Let another monk bring me information. These people have no names. We will not speak again.” He shivered as if cold and closed his eyes. “He must be your master now. Meet with him. Meet as often as you like.”

The rest of our meeting was silent. My qi looked out at the arrangement he had set in front of me. I could not put aside Song Wei’s name or her face or her grief. And now her brother: how could this squat man’s anger have anything to do with me? I felt fear ripple the surface of my skin.

QI DOOR

I remember a boy with an AK47 running down a busy street and pedestrians scattering as the boy fired at shop windows and into the crowd and at stopped cars, drivers and passengers spilling into the street. The boy began turning in a slow circle, firing bursts at those standing till most everyone was lying down, trying to crawl away or get behind a car. My wife was crying. We were both crying. We had been drinking coffee at a café, talking about the final division of property, years after our separation. This was before Amsterdam. Our own boy, who had delayed university for a job in the North Sea, was this boy’s age. For days the sudden onset of tears. No control as the weeks went by. Our son’s voice on the phone, at least with me, was terse and noncommittal.

Today was overcast, with cool wind whipping through the long grass in the fields by the river, hissing in the bamboo, then the lonely dry sound of crickets. On the path to West Shrine, inexplicably, I found a crumpled black robe, old and musty, with face-like markings on one side, so I hung it in a tree beneath one of my manufactured nests.

STOREHOUSE

“What did your master say?” Zhou Yiyuan asked.

“He won’t meet you.”

He leaned to one side. “People are in ignorance of what is about to happen.”

I was visiting him in his lair, a kind of lean-to at the centre of the ramshackle settlement, and the sky drew our attention, clouds streaming continuously westward, their patterns repeated on the lower slopes of the mountain.

“Armies took days like this as a sign to march,” he said.

“The weather is restless,” I said. “How is your sister?”

“Song Wei has been sent to live alone in the forest,” he said. “Until the festival.”

The villagers around us had stopped what they were doing; they wouldn’t take their eyes off me. Sunlit clouds were massing on the southern horizon.

“The master will not allow you to attend,” I told him.

“Every shift in life is accomplished by loss,” he said, his eyes cast down. “We find no footing. And yet we meet. Song Wei will wait for you at a place of your choosing.”

ROOM SCREEN

It felt as if I was swallowing something unwholesome. There’s no one but you to tell. But that’s all right: my confidence in you is absolute.

Zhou Yiyuan told me that his sister must meet me before the next festival. Some taint in their community needed to be cleansed. I listened yet couldn’t follow him. He spat words from the side of his mouth as he spoke of greater and lesser generations. Ours was a lesser since our master was great and lesser generations nurtured great masters.

Because the villagers stare yet won’t meet my eyes, and Zhou speaks in code, and the master has cast me out, and brief fevers still visit, my mind is in turmoil. These worries beg the memory of other shocks.

My aunt sent me to the shop for uncle’s fags and a tin of cat food and I looked at pictures a long time by the magazine rack and when I got home she’d been electrocuted and rushed to the hospital and I never saw her again.

A physics teacher explained chaos by blowing cigarette smoke at the open window through which I saw a man thin as a signpost in shorts and nothing else sending lines of traffic left and right by flailing his arms until an old lorry took him in the midriff.

When I was sixteen and had more or less shed my accent, my mother drove me out of Vancouver and let me off by the side of the freeway and I stuck out a thumb and, ride by ride, travelled east along the Trans-Canada.

BREAST WINDOW

I dreamed I was in a boat, letting the current take me, and the river was flowing away from the sea, and I woke up ecstatic — so happy to have avoided the threat of evolution and heredity, to have found the river guilty of reversing its course.

I have a great number of dark moles on my arms and sides and back, more each year, and each is an ancestral eye looking out at the people in the valley. Each is a point and innocent. If I take off my robe the moles see Zhou Yiyuan. Cancer is the fear of seeing too much and doing too little. All my father’s family died of cancer. Cancer tasks vulnerability with horrific patience.

MIDDLE OF THE BREAST

I can’t think straight today. I lost my glasses and found it difficult to manage the details of the demonstration. I couldn’t remember the day’s point. Everyone waited while I stared at the point chart, then at the names, then at the expectant faces. I couldn’t see and felt so tired. Elaboration of the deeper paths, though clear within my own body, seemed impossible. The monastery and its practices seemed remote. Any attempt at explanation fell short. I fell short. Am falling still, if not short, then asleep.

ROOT OF THE BREAST

I remember waking up alone in a hotel room, standing at the window in the morning light. The building was perched on a cliff overlooking a Norwegian river town, three streets converging on a bridge, the river below chaotic with spray. I paid the bill and walked out into autumn, all that dirty sky, got into my car and started the engine, defrost on high, coffee on the dash, childish excitement at the journey ahead. A successful run had ended — Hamsun’s In the Grip of Life — and I wanted to cross Europe by car. Goodbye to the cast the night before. Then hours and hours behind the wheel, heading out over mountain passes, through local weathers, limping through the rain on the deck of a ferry, still Blumenschøn, insecure and arrogant, pushing on through border crossings, past forests and lakes, following river meanders and skirting villages and towns. I’d stop only to buy coffee and a sandwich at a fuel stop, or to piss by the side of a desolate road, the car ticking like clockwork on the empty snaking highway, the first dry snowflakes falling on my shoulders. So travelling east again, stitching each morning to night. And by night I’d be gaunt and gormless in the car with only headlights to illuminate the physical world, the flaring lights of others to keep me company. And tomorrow, with dumb luck, would be the same.

Five snails on the path today. A monk with a long-handled broom must be careful to sweep around them. Let them have their pilgrimage undisturbed.

NOT CONTAINED

Resin has sealed the earlier pages of my work — I left it on a fresh-cut stump — just as I was deciding to read what I had written. The potential of the past is sealed with fresh sap. The exposed rings of the stump left a pattern that may be read, but not by me. The rings, let’s say, the episodes, the days. The tree’s dying wish to over-write human history.

Let me try this. The past is not worth figuring out — my life, my accomplishments, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Synge, Beckett, Handke, my rise and fall, my responses to theatre’s roiling manifestations and joy then filmmaking’s tedium and belly laughs. What happened yesterday, even the snails, is not worth present contemplation. There is music, a pulse, from the village by the river; geese honk overhead; rain falls so gently it doesn’t stir the dry leaves of the willow. I will find a way to enter the centre of the village, to be accepted and acknowledged; the heart of that pulse was an empire a moment ago.

SUPPORTING FULLNESS

Let me try this. An ordinary working man barrowed compost from the pile to fertilise the field. Let’s say the dirt, inadvertently carried from work to home, from relationship with cast and crew to relationship with a woman and child, had in it seeds to some important change. Let’s say a dream told at work returns the favour, seeds internal change.

I think I understand Zhou Yiyuan. Certainly, I look forward to our next meeting. Meanwhile I keep my fingernails clean and bend over bodies to jar loose matter no heavier than the sum of my intangible parts.

Last night I was woken by the voice laughing then howling and yipping like a dog. It pulled me from sleep and I stepped outside. All dark, the soil wet, the trees dripping, though not from rain, from heavy dew. The other huts silent. The bathhouse steaming. Afraid, I could imagine the monks as orderlies and nurses. The master was a special doctor. The villagers were visiting their sick relatives. Who beside me was ill? Why was I so wide-awake? For the remainder of the night I stood listening to drops of dew falling from leaves onto the roof.

Season fire is over and season earth carries us toward metal. We will cut and carry wood for winter and the cooking fires. Listen. The yellow grass is hissing. I am dirt before the axe descends. Soon I will be water.

BEAM GATE

The morning bell in the day’s third hour is a ceiling to sleep. A calling in of the living. The deer look up, their triangle faces all knowledge and care and strategy.

In my salad days, when the alarm woke me for theatre school it called me into loneliness. Folks under the pink sky at the bus stop were accidents. We paused in unison to light our cigarettes and nod good morning. Only accidents. I’d lose myself in roles, notes, affairs, then return home on the tube to further accidents and greater loneliness, a troubled sleep and fresh alarm. The electronic trill had to do with community, but also with authority. The pair that have confused and terrified me since the first day of kindergarten are now embodied in Zhou Yiyuan and Song Wei.

The blind bellringer, one of the oldest monks, lives in solitude near the spring above Mountain Temple. His bell hangs on a massive frame under a tile roof on an elevated piece of ground; it and North Shrine are the last edifices of our monastery complex before North Gate and the steps up the mountain. A short zigzag path leads from the bell mound down to the spring, then up to the gate. The blind monk teaches others how to use the bulldozer and the dump truck. He is good at small engine repairs and speaks rusty English since he lived several years in Evanston, Illinois, where he worked as a mechanic and met Thomas Cleary. He rings the morning bell when metal yin is fullest.

Today I was up and running to his hut before I was properly awake.

“I’ve fallen in love with one of the travellers!”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Does the master know?”

“The master has told me to follow her brother.”

“Follow how?”

“Zhou Yiyuan is my new master.”

The bellringer’s shape moved back from his doorway. He sat on the floor. “I have never heard of this. Bring me some water.”

I filled a cup from the barrel by the door and gave it to him.

“You may come in and sit with me, but I can’t help you.”

This valley, the monks, the temple and shrines, the bamboo forest, the paths. Close my eyes and I’m living close to where I was born, on the banks of the Ribble in rural Lancashire, in a secluded asylum for people who can no longer cope with the discrepancy between their inner lives and the highly textured boxes into which the world has been sorted. As the doctors cross their lawn, we retreat into backwaters while our bodies run amok, amok, and have to be restrained with drugs and jackets, then pacified with elaborate illusions: now we are actors in a play; now we are monks studying the ancient eternal classics, each day woken by a bell rung by an old blind man who once spoke with Thomas Cleary, who says that he has in him a book of his own, who says he can’t help me.

There is perfection in the idea of this being a dream, but when the old monk speaks to me in his rough American English of the birds in the valley, those that live by the river or on the mountainside or in the bamboo forest, how some he knew when he was a boy have disappeared, then I see that perfection does not have enough room. Perfection is not big enough. In the storehouse a room is always kept empty; it has dark corners and a trapdoor to the cellar and a sealed door to the granary.

My father and mother were born in Preston near the Ribble. My father lived in my grandfather’s attic with my great grandfather’s chest of tools. My dad was a diluted cabinetmaker with many physical skills and a talent for silence and absence. I’m a talking version of him. The old tools he left me I lost or sold.

PASS GATE

Everyone slept on his feet on the night journey to the sea. The start of fall, named for the squirrel, involves the expression of human sorrow for all life between sky and earth and a long walk to get news from the hermit monk.

“Wasps have invaded two shrine festivals and a temple ceremony,” he told us. “Something is happening. Late Heaven is being rearranged. Wasps in great abundance.”

And it was true. Even in lantern light wasps caught in our sleeves and danced drunk in our faces. Everyone was stung.

On the island we ran Wei mo, the Great Regulator.

(What is lost is lost in the great death or in one of the many minor deaths. My heart grieves for you. My heart grieves for all who have made way for me. My heart grieves for the mother of the drowned son. The laugh I hear from the river in the dead of night is a premonition of the arrival of the unknown. My heart grieves for the birds the old monk remembers from sixty years ago. Something has happened. A final curtain. A wrap. A book put down, finished with. A moment of hesitation and doubt.)

I lit lanterns on the posts around the island shrine to illuminate the four paths. Then I carried three lanterns to the three points of the island; at each location I had to wait until the place had forgotten me. Then I gathered the others and led them to the shrine.

Later, alone on the shore, sand squirming beneath my toes, the black-silver current twirling watery acres of twilight, I dug my fingers into the rich soil of the river plain; I thought I might bring something home to the temple, something precious from the time before our valley was inhabited. And hunched there, I saw our valley filled with rubble and fallen shrines and myself trying to climb through the detritus without sending the whole patchwork crashing in on itself. What d’you think? Is Song Wei the new Imogen? Is she the embodiment of all I have made way for?

SUPREME UNITY

When the alembics are unpacked from their cases and arranged for use and the hermit is consulted and the straw dogs burned and the blind bellringer’s bobcat has smoothed the land behind West Shrine after burying the drainrock so the shrine won’t flood this winter and the leaves have been swept away and we have gathered to hear the birds at sunset, last sun red and hot on our shoulders, our breaths held in unison, the actors take their places and the slow autumn dance begins. The monks and the villagers, complete, no one missing. The master and two priests are all that’s needed to bridge heaven and earth; their movements and chants fill not only the vessels, but each fissure in the valley’s mantle and every political hiatus in history with water as innocent of life as the first rain. We washed sea-salt from our feet. We salved our wasp stings. We prayed until we were all asleep.

SLIPPERY FLESH GATE

Once through the great outer gate, a curved path runs north past the warrior tree, under the small gate, and then along a wooden walkway through the courtyard. Bow to the wishing tree and the well. This morning, walking to the storehouse, I came upon Zhou Yiyuan practising on the walkway. As he crouched, waves of heat rippled out from his belly and blew me back a step. Mountain Temple seemed to float in the air on the left shoulder of the storehouse. The mountain reared above the temple, its face brilliant in the sun. Zhou held his qi and I passed him quickly, shuddering, and forgot to bow to the wishing tree. Rain was falling into the well, not real rain, but a kind of focused downpour of tiny red blossoms.

The storehouse is vast. Built of massive fireproof timbers five hundred years ago, it is the oldest building in the region and attracts more visitors than the temple, which is only two-hundred-and-sixty years old. When I entered the south door, the west side of the building was lost in shadows, and the tall windows high on the east wall were like the night buildings of a distant city.

The great practice hall doubles as a drying room in winter. Time moves slowly here. The ceiling arches high overhead. The stairs, of black wood, lead to a railed walkway, to rooms and chambers where the belongings of the community are stored. In the lower northwest corner is the library. In the northeast corner of the groundfloor is the empty room.

After an hour of darkness and silence there, I blinked and returned; the red petal rain filled the doorway; it only faded when I walked through it and was outside again — the dwarf nowhere to be seen.

Calmer, I bowed to the mountain. Two late swallows were dipping and swooping above the temple’s layered roofs. A building said to break the hearts of those who see it by moonlight covered in snow.

HEAVEN’S PIVOT

A slow passage into tidal disturbance is how I remember the end of life in Canada, physical energy rousing me only a few moments each day for the small film parts and theatre festival appearances that had all but vanished. A gradual turn northward out of Active Pass, final sun flashing on the water, seals rising from green depths, their silver-grey bodies streaming bubbles. Who is passing above? What motors are stirring our world?

I was on a ferry from Vancouver Island, having abandoned a short run in a small production (local troup, local playwright), glancing up from my computer screen. It was midwinter, my hand was bandaged, and I’d just received news of my ex-wife’s death, and was absently clicking through a website dedicated to Asian village shrines.

Now I breathe and chant with other monks, and plunge once a season, oftener in summer, into the river below the mountain.

The sun burns hot. The day hangs fire. My heart rises at the scent of oil on my fingers, on the wooden shrine figures. All morning I stood or knelt beside bodies and felt the channels light up. As usual, hooded witnesses mildly curious about this work waited by my side, crosslegged watchers observing human-flavoured energy cycle and flare. Were you among them? I think you were.

A year ago I sat in the branches of the warrior tree and watched Imogen swaying from her hut with her luggage. Two monks accompanied her downhill to the river and over the bridge. I lost sight of her in the trees on the other side, but waited for the return of the monks. They came walking briskly — the morning was cool and mist lay on the water and on the banks — and were laughing together.

Next morning I lay sick on my mat and listened to the rain. I heard each drop hit the roof, roll down the tiles, fall through the air and hit the ground.

Zhou Yiyuan stood in the forest to one side of the path as I swept. Morning light streamed through the dying leaves of the plum trees. He skipped left and right on the balls of his feet and a shaft of sun lit his dark face. His eyes, when he looked up at me, sparkled. They were very black.

“You have not named a place. We have missed a festival. Meet my sister tonight on the bridge after the bell is struck, after the bus passes.”

He was quiet a long time. A breeze moved here and there in the grasses and in the high branches above our heads.

“This is the moment,” he said. “Otherwise conflict.”

OUTER MOUND

This meeting fills me with excitement and dread. I count steps everywhere, breaths, leaves, geese, half up the mountain and back, then all the way to the river. I count monks, villagers, days, productions, appearances, lovers, cities, but no number will provide me with a clue to what will happen next.

She was waiting on the bridge already, the bus behind her, its windows shining through the trees, the engine loud until, with a huge wink, it shrieked into the night. Silence. A single frog croaking. A million crickets.

Song Wei held an electric lantern and was dressed in a tight-fitting silver shirt and silver trousers. Her dusky skin looked black in contrast to the shimmering bands of fabric. She turned and hurried across the bridge toward the road. Her light went out and she was cutting upriver along the south-bank trail before I gathered my wits and followed. She was a white blur, easy to make out under the thick river trees, her black hair swinging across her silver back, a supple crease. Her bare feet slapped the dry path.

Only after hearing car doors slamming did I register the sound of a motor being shut off on the road above. Footsteps and loose male laughter. A geometric tangle of light beams descending.

The gang swept through drifts of leaves to arrive on the trail ahead of me and flowed like a wave toward the woman, who dropped her lantern, raised a hand. Flashlights converged on her and the moment was as fluid as mercury.

Wind in high branches and the low gurgle of the river.

They surged along the path. Some I knew from the settlement; others were strangers. I recognised Zhou’s squat form. Song Wei gave a sharp cry and was caught by the first to reach her, a boy and two men, who dragged her to a fallen tree.

It was an old scene, an often-repeated set of actions, an eternal secret vile code that I possessed the capacity for witnessing, though this was not the night-scene of a black-and-white film. Now I charge myself with what I saw, but at the time I did nothing except pay attention.

“Here is the extinction of luck,” her brother told me early this morning when we were shivering on the beach, the fire between us dead.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“An ancient remedy,” he said. “A boundary skirmish.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

The bell sounded from across the river to signal the beginning of the new day.

“What a terrible thing!” I said.

THE GREAT

And then night, sleep and dreams; blame drunkenness for all, all the men were drunk and losing control, of their bodies, then restraints — forget work, forget colleagues, forget rules, morning will never come — forget ethics, order, reason.

An inverse ratio: to the extent that our boundaries are weak, our exertion of control must be strong. Comes the declaration of war and the first battle plans. Do I know what I’m talking about? Rape as a setting of limits — a terrible thing. Nothing here makes the kind of sense I was educated to perceive. The village at night is full of turtles and fish; in every hut they swim, small and big, all colours, while people hang onto their bottles and continue to drink. I am with my father who falls into machinery when crossing a swingbridge. I meet an old friend whose face is dear to me, and an enemy, sober, who says the boat is sinking and suggests we swim home. “You are doing this all wrong,” he says. “You will never find your way if you go farther in that direction.” And my sister gives me a pet bug: a small praying mantis that immediately escapes its box.

A bedtime game I played with my son: “Here’s writing on your back, writing on your chest, writing on your arms and legs, and on your fingers and on your toes. Now climb into your envelope. Here’s a kiss for a stamp. Now let’s mail you to dreamland. Think of where you want to be. Night-night, off you go.”

Say it is research into causes, the work I am doing, and these are not monks and villagers (not inmates either), but players, and I write lines each night for them to perform next day, not knowing completely what I’m doing. What will happen at dawn? What will the river carry down or the road transport to our gate? I’m not confident that the events of tomorrow will fit well with the events of yesterday. The lines, the lines. We need to meet the lines anyway, meet them halfway, as they come, because if we don’t then this valley will lose its witness and will not know itself. Say all this is so, my father and mother dead, my wife dead and our son gone, I may have had to cast myself out. West is the usual heading, aiming for a complete revolution.

WATERWAY

First thing today I went to see Song Wei and her brother, without expecting to find them. But they were both there. She seemed shy and unhurt, her face pure and open. Confused, I told them I had no power in this community, no voice, that I was like them, an outsider, and from a culture that to almost everyone else in the valley was a dream, whereas this — and I waved my arm wildly — for me this was the dream. They did not seem interested. Zhou Yiyuan began at once to petition for my help.

He knew I would help them now to gain favour with the master of the monastery.

“How can I act after what happened last night?” I said.

Zhou raised his eyebrows. He rubbed his hands together. He said he’d noticed that the timbers of the bridge were beginning to show signs of decay from exposure to the rain and wind and sun, and he would like to offer his services in undertaking to repair the bridge before winter, the present season being suitable, with the low level of the river and the warm dry days and, if agreed upon, he and his workers could begin at once.

The formal rehearsed nature of this speech was terrifying. His chin jutted toward Song Wei. I saw her body arched across the dead tree, the men circling.

“He has told me that you are my new master,” I said.

He leered at me, his head weaving like a cobra. “Tell him,” he said to his sister.

She turned slowly, then stared into my eyes. “We build a box in autumn, fill it through winter.”

A long gleaming golden strand from her eyes hooked a sibling strand in mine and some plan, some shape materialised. Such forms as this are usually kept underground and are only hinted at in myth or brought out in performance. I know this because I’ve been in love. I’ve acted out of love. But I’m in a different land. These are forms I do not understand.

RETURN

Today we planted pines beside South River Shrine. Great Central Channel represented in saplings. We carried water in buckets from the river, one per tree. We sang to each tree beginning with Wind Palace. For some reason, by the end I was weeping like a child. I fell to my knees and when I looked up everyone was standing, head bowed, everyone but the master, who was looking at me with a smile. I’ve never seen trees so tame and helpless or a sky so blue. Each needle glinting, isolate. The circle and silence were in service to every aspect and absence of aspect this side of art. Here was beauty again.

Then Zhou Yiyuan walked into our midst with his own bucket and set it at my feet. There was an intake of breath. Even though I’ve put it away, I still recognise stagecraft. My face in the bucket of water was a shock.

RUSHING QI

This is the last day of the month and the hour of kidney, opposite to heart, fire burning on water. Zhou dozes head down outside the shrine while I write. He has brought me a black box, heavily ornamented, indicating that I am to give it to the master for the temple. The box smells smoky. It sits to one side of the folding desk, at the edge of the shrine deck.

As the day closes, the master appears at the end of the path and pauses to lean on his stick.

Zhou wakes and gazes at the master, then gets to his feet and backs into the bamboo.

After dark I went to the master’s hut. He received the box with a bow. When I spoke Zhou Yiyuan’s name, he raised his voice and declared that the bridgework would begin in the morning. He announced that all the monks would sleep under the stars tonight to celebrate 9/9 of the yin calendar.

Fog rolled in and I slipped through the forest downhill to the river. The nomads sat around their fires and barely stirred as I wavered there, out of breath, and Song Wei came forward to take my hand. We found a path into the heavy wild land. No one came here, only animals.

The night fog continued to roll in and the leaves, fat with water, dripped on us as we lay together in the bamboo forest. I woke once in the night. Song Wei slept on her back. I watched her, then set my shoulders into the soft earth. We were side by side, facing the sky. It felt as though stars were bursting on my eyes.

At the morning bell, I crawled to the warrior tree and prayed, then joined the monks in the storehouse courtyard between the well and the wishing tree. Our bodies were soaked from the dripping leaves, our eyes fresh from sleep. We ran through silken movements, then into the storehouse and lit the braziers.