oddity of sand and water — cherlynn.zhang

oddity of sand and water (excerpt)

view full collection in English

(Please email me if you are interested in the Chinese version)

In the artificial lake at Suifenhe, there is a small boat, wobbling.

I sneak into the boat, secretly.

The boat sways, gently.

I always enter this dreamscape.

In the heart of the desert, there is a small boat, wobbling.

I sneak into the boat, gently.

The boat, sways and sways. Am I the water, or the sand?

At the moment, there is a group of human beings standing in front of me, holding all kinds of cameras, taking photos of me, dreaming. In the next second, they are in my dream. They don’t seem to panic about breaking into someone else’s dream, as they are still commenting on the act of me sleeping in the desert as “Land Art.” Have they realized, as they pressed the shutter a moment ago, they have become part of this Land Art. No one can escape.

No one can escape. Sometimes I like to trap humans in my dreams, and they can never return to the place they call reality. They emerge from the shimmering waves, becoming white yaks. One cannot deny that humankind has a special emotional and spiritual attachment to white creatures, but this attachment does not prevent the former from enslaving the latter. The white yaks in my dream share a pair of dreadful eyes, not much better than those of the dead fish. Because there is nothing but dirt in their vision.

There is nothing but dirt in their vision. They never turn their face to the broad-acre Qinghai Lake. They take only a few steps back when the tourists ride them for a picture, then, they are pulled ashore after minutes. Their owners, who remain as human, happily collect money from tourists; the tourists, who also remain as human, are impressed by and obsessed with the sacred appearance of the yaks. Such a cycle will repeat several times a day. And life goes on.

Life goes on. One night, the yaks walk towards Qinghai Lake, slowly, but all together. At the shore, the yaks begin to gnaw each other’s hair. The gnawed hair, is spit out on the shore. Such long and messy hair--they become snakes when they touch the ground, swim away quietly. The yaks, soon, have nothing left on their body except a skin. They keep moving forward.

They keep moving forward; the water reaches their ankles--an intimate memory of their daily routine as they are so used to the coldness of the water. The water shackles the yaks; but they keep moving forward.

They keep moving forward, their bodies submerging into the water. Frosty? Bone-chilling? The yaks can’t find a word to describe the coldness. Indeed, they don’t need to describe it. They become obsessed with it; they claim it they possess it they kiss it they hug it they burn it they kill it. Or. The other way round.

Or, the other way round. The group of yaks never turn back to the shore, disappear into the ripple. On the next day, the shepherds start to look for their yaks. A small ball of fur, slowly, fell on the ground. A fleeing cloud.

Like a fleeing cloud, the yaks emerge from the shimmering waves, becoming humans. They are trying to climb a dune. Suddenly, a firework ignites the sky; the humans on the dune are falling like meteors. They drop on a grassland, becoming flocks and flocks of sheep. Their constant morphing between beings confuses me, since their journey seems perpetual. Are they looking for an exit of my (our?) dream? In fact, I don’t even know if this exit ever exists. But why bother? They seem to have a good time morphing. Leaping down the dune, my body loses gravity, every step is rocking with waves of sand.

Rocking with waves of sand, I find my boat. The boat wobbles through a tunnel of green misty glass, returning to Suifenhe. It is the same spot where I find the boat. The octopus street lamp falls down on the roadside with its teeth and tentacles frozen in the air; a spider is hanging on the street lamp, trying to sell a bowl of electronic ginsen chicken soup to the pedestrians; and in front of me, a small door is engraved into the wall. I open the door, carefully, and there it is! Someone is reshaping my dream with a stamp and clone tool from Photoshop!

well…they can’t get out of the dream now. neither do I.

funeral for fish

“呼倫湖在史前已經有人類居住。歷史上曾數易其名：《山海經》稱大澤，唐朝時稱俱倫泊，遼、金時稱栲栳濼，元朝時稱闊連海子，明朝時稱闊灤海子，清朝時稱庫楞湖，當地牧人稱達賚諾爾，意為「像海一樣的湖泊」。”

Hulun Lake, inhabited by humans since prehistory, has changed its name many times. All of the names were centered around one translation: a lake like a sea.

For humans, for fish, they share the same imagination about this body of water: it’s a sea.

The sun was burning on Hulun Lake, and I sat on the shore with countless dead fish around me. Their memories may be connected to the distant Khentii Mountains, following the stream of the Kherlen River to the east, ending abruptly at the Hulun Lake. It was a pilgrimage, to the sea.

The sun was burning on Hulun Lake. Standing on the shadeless stony bank, visitors are excited to witness the fusion of the water and sky. But no one ever noticed there are eighteen stranded fish lying on the bank. It is melancholic to stare at them: I hold a funeral for fish, a three-second silent tribute for every fish I meet.

Part of their body is eroding into a layer of white form. The form of their bodies is a rhizomatic network of sponges, stretching outward from the fish scales to the surrounding gravel. There is nothing they could do about the decay of their own bodies, and I even sense that they are nearby, watching their bodies being invaded, parasitized, slowly turned into a white tumor. They stop breathing in different postures, but they share the same pair of eyes--a pair of gray, sunken, deflated eyes.

Death and eyes seem to be inextricably linked. To the Chinese, dying like a fish is not a good omen. The deceased might have deep obsessions that they couldn’t let go of before dying. Fish do not have eyelids, so they cannot close their eyes by nature. Or do they all have deep obsessions? Interestingly enough, humans have always claimed that fish have a fleeting memory. How do the fish know where they are going if they have fleeting memory? Does every fish that eventually reaches the ocean close its eyes?

I look down and search for every stranded fish at the shore, the burning sun overhead almost makes me faint. I suddenly feel that I am the same as them, we were all rotting and decaying under the vault. Following the ebb and rise of the tides, we are re-embraced into the water, a new journey begins.

In the eyes of the fish, all waterways in the world are interconnected, all materials are part of the water, such as sand. Through their eyes, I see that they had crossed the desert to the Yellow River, like a giant whale, stranded by the shore after exhaustion. There were four beings on the shore: a little boy was staring into the half-opened mouth of the dead fish; a sparrow, stood from a distance, was looking at a sheepskin raft slowly flowing down the river; I walked across the Broken Bridge, joining the swimmers up and down up and down in Yalu River; a frog, half-submerged in the river, watching the people watching her.

where do we come from? what are we? where are we going to?