Mission: to see the Chu Silk Manuscript in the
Smithsonian’s Sackler collection.
First call, discovered that I would need an accession
number, which I might find at the research library.
Librarian was nice but nervous, self-conscious in that way
of high-end librarians.
Found beautiful images of the manuscript in their catalogue:
Three-headed man, twined serpents, the script all vines and
flowers
Chris asked me: what is it about?
About the mythical significance of the turning of the year
About the meaning of time and the natural world
About dreams, visions, monsters
About the pleasure we take in our own minds and in silk,
writing, painting
About a story we tell ourselves.
In Senator Inouye’s waiting room in the Capital: animals of the zodiac painted all
around the lower edge of the vaulted ceiling.
Animals and spirits are the same thing: Anima, soul, animism.
The twelve gods of Chu dance through my dreams.
I proffer my doctorate to propitiate the guardians & on
my last day in Washington DC am granted access.
Seeing the manuscript is like meeting the finest edge of a
forgotten world. In the warp and weft of
the silk is the wear of its two thousand years of waiting in the dark. Pigments have migrated, edges have frayed,
dissipated, been lost into nothingness.
I am stunned by the beauty and precision of the calligraphy, how the ink
has not faded but must be nearly as clear as the day it was written. Also by the geography of each character, how
much closer these characters seem to speaking of a numinous world. They are graphs of concepts, not so much
linguistic representation, but closer to the grail - to a drawing of cosmos in
time, space, imagination, intellectual structure. Each graph is a talisman and a knowing, a
recognition of the possible structure of the world. Each one has been won by a great effort of
thought. Each one is a theory.
Flight to Albuquerque.
Beneath the airplane the vast
landscape of the Mid West slides by.
Endless fields. It is stunning to
think that less than 2% of the population of the US farms these uncountable
fields.
