Sacha Rosel's Blog, page 5

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Gazing on lilies:

river runs through

long fields of rye,

many-towered road collapsing

into the sky.

Poetry Copyright © Sacha Rosel, 2022 (picture taken at Casa Cavazzini, Udine, Italy)

Sanctuary

Loneliness can be a sanctuary,

a well and a compass,

guiding our way to the stars and the inner fears.

Feel the beauty of the plunge,

dip your fingers in its dye and cry out its name,

lulling you to recognition and bliss,

illumination and joy.

“You are not alone”

doesn’t mean you have to join the world

of humans or feel anger

in a negative way.

Feed what your cochlea

tells you to nurture and shine.

Let go, but let shine too.

Poetry and Image Copyright © Sacha Rosel

Thanks to Linda Collins for her words on Ben Okri’s To an English friend in Africa.

Joyful silence

Be joyful in your silence

Ben Okri, To An English Friend in Africa

Whenever I feel lost or hopeless, poetry comes to me with the right suggestion, the perfect advice to touch things as if it was for the first time. Silence can be joy, as loneliness can. I’m sure of it. Despite social distancing and lockdowns looming over beauty and connectedness, words no longer flowing perpetually the way they were supposed to, still we can learn how to feel them step back into us, their unexpected wonder embracing all we thought might be gone forever.

For more than a year I barred my way to this space, my thoughts moving in the quicksilver landscape of self, my energy joining silence in a luminous, but solitary way. No need to come here and leave my alphabet trail behind. Yet now, thanks to a Zoom session with other poetry lovers, l feel words discovering you through me. I feel joy in silence, and silence in joy. Maybe a blog truly is a shared silence blooming its way into the other, or maybe is just an offering, a portion of our truth resonating in other people’s truths, who knows. Yet here I am again, shedding skin for you, with you, Ben Okri’s invitation shining like a summoning, or a “rich road” made of flowers and spells.

Climbing memory

“to climb

the starry

memory”

Tristan Tzara, from The great lament over my obscurity

Books also reactivate energy. When I started reading Selected Poems by Tristan Tzara, at first it just gave me new ideas without any clear direction, then they slowly started coagulating into filigrees of truth and lucid awareness. Sometimes it just takes a short breath to understand what we were waiting for has come for us as a wall or a memory to climb with its infinite stars  ̶  not my own memory, but the objects’ memory creating and suspending the surrounding space within the breathing voice of the world and its “still life” contents: escalators, trains and rain darting by, the silent pull of leaves swirling, neon signs, the skyscrapers’ glass, everything running before your eyes and making you alive, finally peaceful and tuned to the lying embers and the quiet detachment of mystic daoism. If there really is a footprint one may overlap, and overprint, on the way’s path, on 道, maybe electronic music and the distilled words of poetry may be its visual and aural representation, as something without a plot, without a chorus, without a chain holding back a looped, repetitive, one-way meaning leaving no way out.

Broken Machine

Aren’t we all like broken machines sometimes, trying to cope with the unbearable boredom of metal days running the same old way over and over again, falling without catching ourselves from falling. Sometimes you just don’t want to feel “up to the task”. You don’t want to fit in. Sometimes it just feels good to be a broken machine, a malfunctioning animal licking its wounds, coiling back to its neon dreams.

Beauty

Beauty is definitely superior to life, because it is not boring, it’s out of the ordinary and it’s exceptional. What strikes me is how many forms of beauty can be in the world, each one of them different. I remember Marc Almond once saying (or writing, I’m not sure which) that to him beauty lies in what other people perceived as deformity or imperfection – drag queens, thieves, boxers, freaks, all the “beautiful losers” (his words), those having deep dark circles around their eyes and bruises on their skin. Diane Arbus photographed imperfect people as examples of beauty, almost as a secret gift from outer space, or hidden signals creeping through the crevices of urban space. Beauty is anything that captures our attention and makes us whole, I think. It can be a piece of chinaware, a cup of strongly brewed oolong tea, a smile of a passerby, a tree, two people briefly connecting like they’ve already met in a previous life then letting this connection spontaneously disappear, a sentence in a book, a tear falling on the ground and forming new patterns fluttering before our eyes.

Way, Side B

Way

what is this road that separates us

across which I hold out the hand of my thoughts

a flower is written at the end of each finger

and the end of the road is a flower which walks with you

Tristan Tsara, Way, from Selected Poems, translated by Lee Harwood

On second thought, it would be too simple to see this as a dialogue between two people. Maybe what Tzara is talking about is something else altogether. Maybe the road he is talking about represents the future, while the flowers written at the end of each finger are all the possible choices we can make before taking the actual road, and the two entities separated by the road itself are just the two halves of ourselves, in the time before making a choice and the time after making that choice. In the end it’s just a matter of letting the right choice bloom like a flower to make our life meaningful, instead of letting it rot like a bunch of stale petals. It’s a poem about choice, and about the present becoming the future thanks to our knowledge of the past  ̶  all linked by the flower of conscience and awareness. It’s about wising up and shedding yet another skin to turn ourselves into a thing of beauty, constantly changing while taking new, unexpected turns.

Way, Side A

Way

what is this road that separates us

across which I hold out the hand of my thoughts

a flower is written at the end of each finger

and the end of the road is a flower which walks with you

Tristan Tsara, Way, from Selected Poems, translated by Lee Harwood

My own way of seeing Way is: this made me think of you, each thought of mine a flower I could offer you to make your absence – the road that separates us – join our spines together, silently rejoicing of their mutual embrace, like the pale blue flower of pain and bliss I placed on your mouth not to forget about our meeting, and parting, by chance.

Winter Begonia 鬢边不是海棠红

Yin Zheng as Shang Xirui in the TV drama Winter Begonia

(Warning: the following review contains spoilers on the Chinese TV drama Winter Begonia)

The thick divide between the original title and its rendering in English for the international audience has always been one of the strange mysteries of Chinese culture: books, films, even records, often bear two names  ̶  one in Mandarin, one in English  ̶  which barely resemble one another, sometimes exploring completely different concepts.

Take Winter Begonia, for example, one of the highlights of Chinese entertainment in the year 2020: while the English title tends to be very vague, its meaning never fully disclosed as the plot steadily unfolds (apart from a fleeting moment with the two protagonists taking a picture together in a Shanghai photo studio), the Mandarin title is both dream-like and melancholy, hinting at the meaning of the whole story without giving it away completely  ̶  a typical feature in Chinese culture called “indirect strategy”. Bin bian bu shi haitang hong 鬢边不是海棠红, which is the original title in Mandarin, may be translated as “the hair on my temples is not crabtree-flower red”; though at first this may just seem a poetical sentence, it ultimately tells us more about the hidden meaning of the whole drama than the English title does.

Based on a popular 2010 gay-themed web novel of the same name (published in printed format in 2019), 鬢边不是海棠红 tells the story of two men’s lives crossing paths in 1930s Guomindang-run Beiping, the city we know today as Beijing. Cheng Fengtai 程凤台 (Huang Xiaoming 黄晓明), who everyone respectfully calls Er ye 二爷 (“second master”, the title ye marking his status as a rich man), is a handsome and warm-hearted Shanghai businessman running the local Company of Transports in Beiping and his wife’s textile factory in Shanghai; Shang Xirui 商细蕊 (Yin Zheng尹正, whose performance in the show is absolutely astounding), is a whimsical, stubborn danjuer 旦角, a male singer performing female roles in Chinese opera and a very talented one, well versed in martial arts too, though being an outsider in Beiping may prevent him from becoming the great star he knows he is destined to be. The two casually meet during one of Xirui’s stunning performances and a spark suddenly lights up their heart and soul: Er Ye immediately becomes Xirui’s zhi 知 (“intimate friend”, or “confidant”), and though the show is devoid of any explicit gay contents to get around CCP censorship, there’s no doubt a form of intense, asexual love takes hold of them both completely.

Apparently shrewd and interested only in money, Fengtai actually becomes intoxicated with Chinese opera and with the performances of “Shang laoban” 老板 (“Boss Shang”, a polite and respectful way to address opera troupe leaders), so much as to help him conquer the heart of Beiping financing his company, the Shuiyun lou 水云楼 (The Watery Cloud Tower). Lost in a dream-like trance, Fengtai sees Xirui turn into the living representation of Yang Guifei楊貴妃 (Yang the worthy favourite), legendary beauty of the Tang dinasty era celebrated in many famous literary works and cherished concubine to Emperor Xuanzong玄宗, who neglected all state affairs to watch her dance performances and spend some time with her. Soon overwhelmed by the long-gone memories of his youth as a passionate would-be writer, Er Ye realizes he will give every slice of energy he has to this fascinating figure transcending the here and now of physical constraints, Xirui himself growing more and more loyal to their precious friendship, all the while cultivating his art to perfection. Fame may well be just around the corner, but war is too, the Japanese troops inexorably closing in on most urban areas of China, including Beiping. What started off as a lavish, motley fairy tale could any day crumble to dust, like petals falling from a lover’s hair, suddenly turned white.

Which brings us back to the original title’s meaning: “the hair on my temples is not crabtree-flower red”. This may all seem like a silly game at first, but it’s not; the opera glitter may look like a flower blooming for just one night to vanish in the end, a bright-burning illusion pinned on the concubine’s hair, but it’s not. Red is real, not just a shadow. It’s the red of pain and blood rending skin and soul apart. It’s war splintering life into fragments which one must learn how to let go, as one learns patience and courage, to finally reach wisdom. After all, as Xirui says to Er Ye, “I’m not a damsel in distress who needs to be saved, I’m a hero”, and a hero can only be larger than life, eventually transcending life itself through discipline and selflessness.

As all his desperate cries dry up in memory and regret, I imagine Xirui secretly uttering these words to himself, and to Er Ye’s reflection:

“Art may seem but a pale mirror of life, a shadow emotion leaving nothing but empty memories, but it’s what I chose and would still choose over you, over everything. I crossed the path dividing life and death severing all my ties with them both just to reach perfection, so that I could save you forgetting me, and there’s no turning back from this. My voice, like a siren in reverse, was the only thing that could finally set you free, my whole body a channel bringing you back to breathing and meaning. But you’ll never know, because I can’t allow ordinary life to stand between my art and me.”

This, I think, is the dilemma all artists are faced with sooner or later: giving in to the safe shelter of stability (though becoming a de facto concubine finally “accepted” by the official wife is not exactly a perfect ending, is it?) or transmuting into creativity, your craft, body and heart becoming one with the universe, like Cook Ding becoming the knife becoming the ox becoming the cut simultaneously in Zhuangzi’s daoist story. Which path would you choose?

Winter Begonia (鬢边不是海棠红), directed by Hui Kaidong 惠楷栋, written by Yu Zheng 于正 and Shuiru Tian’er 水如天儿, available on the Iqiyi 爱奇艺 streaming platform in China and on Rakuten Viki in the rest of the world.

Leaves are Waves are Us

SACHA ROSEL, Leaves are waves are us, water colour pencils on paper and poem, August 2020

In the phosphorescent hem of light

I met my sisters,

a crumpled heap forgotten on the ground.

 We exhaled our trembling births,

an oval breath expanding from each other’s filaments,

and made our secret sound happen,

jade-leaping into

a new truth,

jumping blue streams

and pearlish-grey purples,

fuchsia enchantment of

chromatic prayers,

instants lost

and erased.

And rose our voice like waves

stronger than wind,

until the world was now   ̶

and us  ̶

our story unwritten

finally loud

and vivid:

We are the instants beyond silence,

and the words within silence rising

like fire in the sky.

(originally created as an after thought and comment on the AROHO Global Summer Camp experience held in August, 2020)