Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Something to think on … Anything you can do, I can do meta

 Something to think on …

Anything you can do, I can do meta
— Rudolf Carnap, born in May 1891

"All I really want to do is go to the book store , drink coffee and read." Jean Paul Sartre

When the world was without form, so we are told by Richard, the spirit of God moved upon the face of waters. The closest Antipodean or Bohemian artists have come to imagining what such a vision might have looked like is to offer myriad swirls of marbled walls, shimmering with potential, to gaze on; the well-known 13th-century manuscript illustration of God as Architect wielding a pair of compasses above a marbled sphere testifies to that fact…




Water Becomes Water

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become
the image of the machine, the dusk becomes the machine’s dusk,
in piercing we are pierced by the machine, we must use
a defective good to prove we are defective goods, use movement to complete


the machine’s deficient movement, use the reality of words and screws
to realize our own reality, become phantoms of order forms or profit
to transcend defective goods, and the summer rolls up its black tongue: from inside the machine
peel away the machine as it revolves, from the assembly line separate out
the finger as it returns to my body,

 
from the midst of pain return
to the womb as it gives birth, from dreaming return to the dream, the machine lives in
the sight of iron nails, as we face ourselves in the mirror
all that’s left in the sky is a pure orphaned moon, and the Henan wheat
recognizes Anhui flavors, Dongguan videotapes search
for Tokyo tastes, plastic tears drip into a basket,


the wind unfurls the fall, the women workers start the long climb up the screws’ ladder

—  Translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman
By Zheng Xiaoqiong