The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952–2009

Definitions

107 Definitions 定義 (1975) A Very Difficult Object Its surface is colored gray and white, and its mass is clearly less than half a cubic meter. On one side are letters: Soft White Scotti® Free Fold. It contains precisely 400 sheets of soft white paper, and the utility of the paper is left up to the purchaser. Now, I pull out the first sheet and blow my nose. It occupies a certain space. Therefore it naturally follows the mode of existence in time. I cannot definitively state whether it is beautiful or ugly. Have I already told the readers what it is? An Impossible Approach to a Glass It often takes a cylindrical shape with a base, but not a top. It is a depression that stands erect. It is a defined space closed to face a center of gravity. It can hold a certain pre-defined amount of liquid without letting the liquid disperse within the earth’s gravitation. When only the air fills it we say it is empty, but even then its outline is shown clearly by light, and the existence of its mass can be confirmed by a level-headed glance, without relying on instruments. When tapped by fingers, it vibrates to generate sound. At times the sound is used as a signal; at rare occasions, as a unit in music. But the resonance has a sort of stubborn self-satisfaction beyond utility and assaults our ears. It is placed on a dining table. Also it is grabbed by a person’s hand. It often slips out of a person’s hand. In fact it hides a possibility of becoming a weapon, as it can easily be intentionally broken into pieces. 108 But after it is broken into pieces, it does not cease to exist. Even if, at that moment, all of its kind on earth were broken to smithereens, we could not escape from it. Even though it is named in a different orthography in each specific cultural confine, it already exists as a fixed idea shared among all. So, even if we are forbidden, accompanied with extreme forms of punishment, to actually make it (with glass, wood, iron, or clay), we would not be free from the nightmare that it does exist. It is a tool used mainly to quench thirst. But in spite of the fact that, under some extreme circumstances, it functions no better than two palms put together to create a depression, it undoubtedly exists silently as a thing of beauty, in the context of current diversified human lives, at times under the morning sunlight, at times under artificial lighting. Our intelligence, our experience, and our technology gave birth to it on this earth and named it. We point to it by a string of sounds as if that were a matter of course. Yet, as to what it really is, people may not necessarily have accurate knowledge. A Personal View of Gray However white a white may be, it never is a true white. In a white without a single bit of cloudiness, invisibly minuscule black is lurking, and that is always its constitution itself. A white does not regard a black with hostility, but rather it is understood to contain a black because a white by its nature fosters black. At the very moment of coming into existence, a white is already beginning to move toward a black. But in its long process toward a black, however many gradations of gray it passes through, a white does not cease to be white until the very moment it is totally black. Even when it is infiltrated by what are not thought to be attributes of white such as, for example, shadows, dullness , or absorption of light, a white is gleaming behind a mask of gray. A 定義 • 1975 Definitions 109 white dies in a flash. In that instant a white disperses leaving no traces, and a total black rises up. But — However black a black may be, it never is a true black. In a black without a single speck of gleam, an invisibly minuscule white is lurking like a genome , and that is black’s constitution itself. At the very moment of coming into existence, a black is already beginning to move toward a white. . . . Observation of a Play in Water To start, her footprints wet with water vanished, and next her cute dimples and innocent eyes vanished. Her...