A story about a man...with an Ailanthus tree growing from his head...
It was outside Lin-Yang, on a quiet stretch of unevenly bricked road, where Gheng first saw it. Initially, he merely took it to be another Ailanthus tree—a large one swaying in a gentle breeze that came off the nearby mountains just above the level of the undergrowth. However, when he set up camp for the night, it soon became apparent that this 'tree' was moving closer. For hours, well into the evening, Gheng patiently listened as the periodic jostling of small branches and shrubs became louder; until he could also hear the soft breath of the moon, whispering in small blue-lights, across the now visible top of the methodical tree as it gradually edged within his field of vision. "Who approaches?" he called, being careful not to allow his voice to register any alarm or anger. "I am Tung," spoke a small but muscular voice from the edge of the clearing near Gheng's modest evening-fire. With much relief, Gheng beckoned the stranger closer, until there appeared a man much like himself, dressed simply in black, with a large Tree of Heaven, rippling out from the scalp area above his slightly wrinkled forehead.
Gheng motioned for Tung to come closer. Tung, after several brief but complex gesticulations, sat across from Gheng, his tree resplendent in the light of the small flames now dancing off of the cedar logs that fed the fire. "I am not good with formalities," said Gheng—feeling unaccustomed to speaking with another human being, after so many months of neat total silence—but I would be grateful if you and your tree would share my small offering, and accept it as a meal." "I would like that," said Tung, then adding, "thank you."
Before it was exported around the world, the Ailanthus tree grew everywhere in China. It would sprout leaves outside crowded urban pagodas, and grow perpendicular to the stone-brick faces of large walls; it would rise from garbage piles of broken dishes, adjacent to busy tea-houses, and mature without shame through the wood-slatted walkways outside bordellos; it would snake its way up through manicured gardens, in the spacious courtyards of dynastic palaces, and ascend like a woodwind-transfixed cobra from the woven-basket fishnets immersed in the muddy-creeks of tiny peasant villages. It was everywhere one looked; this Tree of Heaven, unfettered in fields of soil-dusted yams, and disinterestedly towering over saplings in a bamboo forest. It fed birds and insects and small animals, with its leaves and nuts and nutritious bark; it provided a home for the cocoons of exotic moths, and cemented the soil through which its roots aggressively scoured the dirt-layers for water and nutrients. It was so hardy that it was known to take root in the dust-caked hides of Water-Buffalo during droughts, and to wind across the antlers of deer-stags during the rutting season; it arose from the flower-pots of dead turtle carapaces, and came up through the thatched roofs of farmer's houses. It was even said to take up residence in the unused shoes of bed-ridden elderly mandarins, and to grow from the scalps of slow-moving and deliberate wise-men.
Gheng was considered by many to be one of those wise-men. He was a thoughtful and deliberate man who lived in an agrarian province of central China, and moved so slowly that no one ever actually saw how he got from one place to another. Though he was old—so old that as he liked to joke, he had simply stopped counting at 120—he could still see and hear with the acuity of a much younger man. Whenever he looked closely at what was going on around him, he could see people flitting back and forth very fast, moving like fireflies in and out of his range of vision, while he purposefully sauntered through the same place with great deliberation, always careful to look where he was going, and to observe everything around him. One day a small yellow bird dropped a seed on Gheng's head; he could hear it land on his scalp with a light tap, almost as if he had brushed up against something tiny and delicate. He knew immediately, just from the sound of the small kernel falling through the closely woven fibers of his skull-cap, and into the matted, but wispy hairs on top of his head, exactly what kind of seed it was. He had been germinated, by a tiny spore like nodule that would one day grow into the "Tree Of Heaven," and Gheng knew that it would bring him good luck; that is, as long as he was willing to let it take root atop his otherwise unoccupied scalp. Within a few days Gheng had accepted the entire situation as a normal occurrence, in his life of wandering; only now, he took great care to walk even more cautiously as he travelled through the countryside.
As time passed, the tiny seed slowly became a sapling; and, after a relatively short number of years, as the sapling grew and became an adult tree, it began to attract birds and bark beetles and other small and delightful animals. By this time, Gheng, still moving extremely slowly, had walked, imperceptibly, from one side of the province to the other. He walked so slowly, in fact, being extra careful now not to upset the growth of the Tree of Heaven sprouting from the top of his head, that a large nest of yellow birds—known for their skittishness—had taken the tree's upper branches as their home. These branches were quite high, spreading out to the height of almost a dozen full grown men, above the forest floor. When one added to that the not-so-impressive, but sturdy, height of Gheng, it was no wonder, that instead of being mistaken for an almost invisible wise-man, he was now simply mistook for a large tree. However, when people came too close, because of their nervous firefly-flitting and twitching back and forth, the birds would become aroused and fly out of the tree all at once, upsetting the balance of the small ecosystem on Gheng's head and causing him to list, ever so slightly. This listing was never enough to cause other animals to fall from their perches but it created within them a more nervous disposition than they would otherwise have had.
This also distracted the birds from their purpose, which was to drop more seeds onto the heads of other people, and thereby fulfill their destiny as the "Yellow Bird-midwives of Heaven." However, since over time, the world had become more crowded, people now moved faster and faster, in part to avoid bumping into each other as they made their way through a busier and busier series of interlocked thoroughfares. The more people there were, the more gadgets they invented, the more complicated the rituals and walking itineraries became, so that pretty soon, most people spent most of their time, simply avoiding certain other people and making convoluted bodily gestures, while walking in giant circles, instead of simply gathering fruits and vegetables from the fields, and then going home to cook them, as they had once done. Needless to say, it was no longer possible to find anyone, apparently, who would stand still long enough for a dropped seed to germinate on their head; the seeds would most likely fall off, or never make contact with their targets at all. This was of some concern to Gheng, although it didn't affect his quiet, unobtrusive, wanderings.
There were also many different little species of animals, inhabiting the tree, whose comings and goings he took great delight in observing. There were the various birds of course, the Yellow Midwives, and the Snoots as well as the Elephant-Nosed Egrets, with their long legs and large proboscis, and the Shandong Roosters, whose flag-like crests, looked like giant red mittens hanging precipitously from their conical heads. There were also tiny nut gatherers like the Klinx, the Goopes and the Spotted Troom, as well as a host of small monkeys, beetles, voles, and even a tiny predator called by the unusual name of the Himalayan-Mouse-Tiger. Stranger than that however, was the presence of a rare species of black-speckled, air-breathing jellyfish, which looked like the freshly extracted lung of an elderly coal-miner, called a Shanghai Sticky Kite. They all lived in a kind of rough harmony within the branches and foliage of the tree, which, of course, was held aloft by Gheng as he walked ever so slowly in search of fragments of occasionally elusive wisdom.
II
Gheng studied the well adorned, but unassuming man before him.
"I didn't get your name."
"Gheng, my name is Gheng."
"Have you been wandering long, Gheng?"
"By the size of your companion, I would say, no longer than you."
"Well, for me, it's been almost seven years."
"That's a long time. To be honest, I really have no idea how long I've been out, myself, the passage of days has no real value for me now that I've left the world—you know, the village, human concerns."
"It's impressive that you can forget all of it so quickly—"
"Forget what?"
"Human concerns. I've been wandering endlessly, and have thought of little else. I don't know that I really have the discipline to stay in the forest long enough to watch my tree prosper, and then grow old and feeble."
"You have to think of it as a process, an ongoing experience, rather than a series of doorways leading to separate, un-related, rooms; otherwise, you spend all of your time waiting—that's how I try to think of it anyway."
"Well, doesn't a 'wise man' just know the way?"
"Not, not-necessarily, you need to, um, use guiding principles."
Gheng could see the flames of the small fire casting strange lines and shadows on Tung's face. He could hear some rustling in his counterpart's branches as if he were shivering a little despite being so close to a source of heat.
" You mean like, truths, like in Confucius?" Tung asked.
"Well. Yes, but, Confucius gives truth as parable," responded Gheng, "as little stories and general lessons; there, um, has to be room for interpretation."
"Yeh, but interpretation means that your truth could be different from someone else's truth—how can you follow a rule if it changes each time?"
"The rule, the rule doesn't change, the situation changes, and then the way the rule is applied changes—if we simply obeyed edicts, without any interpretation, or outside, you know, considerations, um, we would be like bees in a hive, not thinking creatures...Wisdom isn't, it can't be, automatic!"
"But doesn't there have to be a proper way, proper in all situations; I mean a man can't just expel wind when he meets, I don't know, his new father-in-law, can he?
"A man is a man, he has to expel a foul wind sometimes. He tries not to do it in front of his father-in-law, but sometimes, um, you know, it just forces its way out."
"I want to believe that it's the way you say it is, but—"
"But, you're shaking your tree a little"
"No, how am I shaking it?"
"You're nodding your head, slightly, and the tree starts shaking, just a bit. It makes the birds nervous, since they can be very delicate creatures."
"I'm not nodding my head! And what's the difference, as far as the birds are concerned, whether I'm nodding my head or walking through the woods? said Tung assertively, and showing some sudden annoyance at being scrutinized.
"You are nodding your head," said Gheng; "not much, just a little. And there is a difference, at least to the birds, especially after you sit down—its unexpected, and it can make them a little nervous."
"Well, I'm not!"
"You are, or you did, just a little. You did shake it just a little bit."
They sat in silence and ate, and then retired for the night, each basking in the ambiguity of the exchange and the reflected glow of the moon.
III
The next morning, Tung woke Gheng excitedly, as birds flew to and from each of the quietly rustling treetops. "Do you know anything of dreams?" asked Tung. "I have interpreted a few," replied Gheng uneasily, as he maintained the conviction, unusual among wise men, that to tell another person the meaning of their dreams was a form of arrogance. "I had two very strange dreams last night, I hoped that you might tell me what they might mean," said Tung, in anticipation. "I can try," replied Gheng, with a certain amount of resignation, as he knew he was going to have to listen and then play the role of interpreter, whether he wanted to or not.
"In the first dream, I am crossing a loose bamboo slat bridge with badly tied rope-trusses, over a deep river-chasm, coming out of the jungle, when I hear the flapping of a bird's wings. I turn around, and see a large gull, with a tremendous beak, as he alights on one of the low hanging branches of my tree. I ask him, out of politeness, if he would like to take a rest from his tiring flight, and partake of the tasty insects that live in the bark, but he does not answer. This makes me nervous, and as I try to turn my head, without also turning the tree, and thus knocking many of my other guests from their homes and perches, I can hear the sound of someone carving wood. At that moment, I feel the sawdust begin to flake off onto my shoulder, and I know that he is using that gigantic beak, as a saw, to cut down the Tree of Heaven. Well, 'you can't do that,' I tell him, to no avail, as the sawing continues, and I begin sneezing from the heavy cloud of sawdust. Within seconds, I am immersed in it, and as my body shudders, I begin to sway and lose my balance. I hear a loud snapping sound, like an Egret closing its bony-flaps on a small fish, and I see out of the side of my eye, the entire tree—branches, trunk, and mandorla of birds and insects, all of it—go toppling over the bridge and into the chasm; and, as it does so, loosening and breaking the ropes holding up the fragile bamboo structure itself. Now, I am careening as well, the bottom of the chasm now filling my entire field of vision, as I hurtle towards my end."
Tung was silent for a moment, allowing the full impact to soak in. Gheng was transfixed.
"In the second dream, I am sitting in an open meadow, in the sunlight, and I have a strange feeling of total penetration. Then I realize, and see in my mind's eye, the entire root system of the tree, as it slowly reveals itself inside my entire body, first through the skull and thinking parts, and then into my throat, heart, arms and legs, through every meridian point. As I am basking in this sensation of fullness and power, one of the sun's rays becomes an acupuncture needle and nestles itself deep into my right forearm, as I feel it connecting with the tendrils of the tree's deepest roots. At that moment, a powerful, but wiry, strand of lightning ropes out across my arm and into the sky. At first, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction, a feeling of power and contentment in the knowledge that I have made the connection, and have completed the circuit with the heavens. But then, while I am in my deepest reverie, I smell something burning. At first I assume that it is my flesh at the point of the needle's intrusion and at the exit terminus of the lightning bolt; but then, I realize that there is smoke wafting across my field of vision, and its coming from somewhere over my head—from the top of the tree itself. The tree is on fire, I suddenly realize, and as I attempt to scramble to my feet to look for water, I inadvertently feed the flames and the fire begins to consume the tree, amidst the loud squawking of birds desperate to extricate their hatchlings from smoking nests, and the disturbing mechanical whine of hundreds of insects being cooked in their own chitinous armature's. As the tree burns down to its roots I can feel the flames entering my body and consuming nerves, muscles, bones and vital organs, until I am merely a pall of black smoke, a rising cloud containing only one idea: Dissolution."
Tung looked at Gheng, who was visibly disturbed by the clarity of the dream images. "What do you think it means?" asked Tung.
"Well," said Gheng, clearing his throat so hard that he could hear the leaves above him begin to rustle, amidst the chirping of birds, "it sounds like you have been presented, by fate, with two choices. In the first," he started haltingly, "you are faced with the dilemma of how to maintain balance under the threat of internal discord or, um," he paused, feeling acutely self-conscious, "instability." He almost enunciated the word. "In other words, you need to find a way to maintain your tree in the face of a large bird representing chaos. If chaos wins, your tree will fall, and with it, you as well—right over the side of the rickety bridge that is a symbol of the fragile sanity of all human beings. You must find a way to weather this storm. I am not saying it will happen, but you need inner balance to offset the outside instability of the world as it exists;" added Gheng, feeling a little presumptuous, as he remembered an adage about the unreliability of men who interpret the dreams of others without paying heed to their own.
" And the second dream?" asked Tung.
"The second dream is simple," replied Gheng, surprised at the emphasis of his own response. "In the second dream, you are experiencing your own power, as a carrier of the Tree of Heaven. If you become too enamored of the lightning-bolt energy and influence of that power..." He paused, "you will be destroyed by it, and will suffer the consequences of too much power, as your tree and its animal tenants, burn along with you. To avoid this, you need to become truly humble. You need to see yourself as the carrier, not the master—the tree is its own master. You are, as I am," added Gheng, "merely a litter bearer." And, as he said so, he wasn't sure that he could himself believe that either of them played so modest a role in the life that swayed and swooned above. No, he thought, they were navigators, not 'litter-bearers,' but did not say so out loud, fearing that it would smack of arrogance.
" Let me ask you another question," said Tung. If I told that dream to another wise man," he queried, letting the word wise linger long enough for Gheng to realize that the younger man was being slightly sarcastic, "would he offer the same interpretation?"
"I don't know." Replied Gheng.
"Why not?"
"because—look, if you throw the I-Ching, you may know the hexagram, the character you threw on, but it still has to be interpreted, right? If you ask ten sages in Szechuan how to read that character, they're all going to say something slightly different. It's not like calculating a distance—"
"But if the dream is a message, trying to tell me something, how can the message change from person to person?"
"The message is the same, but it has different elements; in other words, the dream isn't some immovable truth, it's like a story, and stories aren't so cut and dried—I am giving you an example of one way to resolve the riddle of your dream, it's not the only one. You can't calculate it, like on an abacus."
"Yes, but you can see why I am suspicious of your slick answers, right?" asked Tung, with a disarming sincerity.
"Yes, I can," replied Gheng, truthfully; and then added, "but dream divination is like reading a pig's entrails, it's an art form, and everyone does it differently."
"So, in other words, this is your way of emitting a strong-wind in front of your father-in-law? queried Tung.
"Maybe," answered Gheng.
The two men stared at each other in silence, without guile, or even curiosity. It was as if each had come to recognize that the stranger before him was in actuality his mirror image—a doppelganger. Here they sat, each before the other like a contemplative object carved in stone; and, while this sensation was largely an illusion, each knew that they would never again see themselves in such idealized fashion—their trees in resplendent glory, leaves fluttering like oddly colored flags of impossibly malleable, paper-thin, textured glass in a strong breeze—than they would at that moment. Thus, they looked into each other's deepest recesses, their wrinkled folds and hidden lacunae, and even across impossible angles comprised of the incompleteness that each man saw in himself—now projected, across the charred bits of cedar wood from the previous evening's fire. They must have stood there, like that, for a long time, since, in their respective minds they knew that they would never again be as perfect as they imagined the other to be at that moment, even as they understood, in a profound way, that these were also fantasies that required a double on which to project such otherwise puerile banalities. The moment continued, as the sun traced a predictable itinerary through the morning sky, and then...
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
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Written on 2013-09-30 at 18:42
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Gheng's tree
Gheng's TreeIt was outside Lin-Yang, on a quiet stretch of unevenly bricked road, where Gheng first saw it. Initially, he merely took it to be another Ailanthus tree—a large one swaying in a gentle breeze that came off the nearby mountains just above the level of the undergrowth. However, when he set up camp for the night, it soon became apparent that this 'tree' was moving closer. For hours, well into the evening, Gheng patiently listened as the periodic jostling of small branches and shrubs became louder; until he could also hear the soft breath of the moon, whispering in small blue-lights, across the now visible top of the methodical tree as it gradually edged within his field of vision. "Who approaches?" he called, being careful not to allow his voice to register any alarm or anger. "I am Tung," spoke a small but muscular voice from the edge of the clearing near Gheng's modest evening-fire. With much relief, Gheng beckoned the stranger closer, until there appeared a man much like himself, dressed simply in black, with a large Tree of Heaven, rippling out from the scalp area above his slightly wrinkled forehead.
Gheng motioned for Tung to come closer. Tung, after several brief but complex gesticulations, sat across from Gheng, his tree resplendent in the light of the small flames now dancing off of the cedar logs that fed the fire. "I am not good with formalities," said Gheng—feeling unaccustomed to speaking with another human being, after so many months of neat total silence—but I would be grateful if you and your tree would share my small offering, and accept it as a meal." "I would like that," said Tung, then adding, "thank you."
Before it was exported around the world, the Ailanthus tree grew everywhere in China. It would sprout leaves outside crowded urban pagodas, and grow perpendicular to the stone-brick faces of large walls; it would rise from garbage piles of broken dishes, adjacent to busy tea-houses, and mature without shame through the wood-slatted walkways outside bordellos; it would snake its way up through manicured gardens, in the spacious courtyards of dynastic palaces, and ascend like a woodwind-transfixed cobra from the woven-basket fishnets immersed in the muddy-creeks of tiny peasant villages. It was everywhere one looked; this Tree of Heaven, unfettered in fields of soil-dusted yams, and disinterestedly towering over saplings in a bamboo forest. It fed birds and insects and small animals, with its leaves and nuts and nutritious bark; it provided a home for the cocoons of exotic moths, and cemented the soil through which its roots aggressively scoured the dirt-layers for water and nutrients. It was so hardy that it was known to take root in the dust-caked hides of Water-Buffalo during droughts, and to wind across the antlers of deer-stags during the rutting season; it arose from the flower-pots of dead turtle carapaces, and came up through the thatched roofs of farmer's houses. It was even said to take up residence in the unused shoes of bed-ridden elderly mandarins, and to grow from the scalps of slow-moving and deliberate wise-men.
Gheng was considered by many to be one of those wise-men. He was a thoughtful and deliberate man who lived in an agrarian province of central China, and moved so slowly that no one ever actually saw how he got from one place to another. Though he was old—so old that as he liked to joke, he had simply stopped counting at 120—he could still see and hear with the acuity of a much younger man. Whenever he looked closely at what was going on around him, he could see people flitting back and forth very fast, moving like fireflies in and out of his range of vision, while he purposefully sauntered through the same place with great deliberation, always careful to look where he was going, and to observe everything around him. One day a small yellow bird dropped a seed on Gheng's head; he could hear it land on his scalp with a light tap, almost as if he had brushed up against something tiny and delicate. He knew immediately, just from the sound of the small kernel falling through the closely woven fibers of his skull-cap, and into the matted, but wispy hairs on top of his head, exactly what kind of seed it was. He had been germinated, by a tiny spore like nodule that would one day grow into the "Tree Of Heaven," and Gheng knew that it would bring him good luck; that is, as long as he was willing to let it take root atop his otherwise unoccupied scalp. Within a few days Gheng had accepted the entire situation as a normal occurrence, in his life of wandering; only now, he took great care to walk even more cautiously as he travelled through the countryside.
As time passed, the tiny seed slowly became a sapling; and, after a relatively short number of years, as the sapling grew and became an adult tree, it began to attract birds and bark beetles and other small and delightful animals. By this time, Gheng, still moving extremely slowly, had walked, imperceptibly, from one side of the province to the other. He walked so slowly, in fact, being extra careful now not to upset the growth of the Tree of Heaven sprouting from the top of his head, that a large nest of yellow birds—known for their skittishness—had taken the tree's upper branches as their home. These branches were quite high, spreading out to the height of almost a dozen full grown men, above the forest floor. When one added to that the not-so-impressive, but sturdy, height of Gheng, it was no wonder, that instead of being mistaken for an almost invisible wise-man, he was now simply mistook for a large tree. However, when people came too close, because of their nervous firefly-flitting and twitching back and forth, the birds would become aroused and fly out of the tree all at once, upsetting the balance of the small ecosystem on Gheng's head and causing him to list, ever so slightly. This listing was never enough to cause other animals to fall from their perches but it created within them a more nervous disposition than they would otherwise have had.
This also distracted the birds from their purpose, which was to drop more seeds onto the heads of other people, and thereby fulfill their destiny as the "Yellow Bird-midwives of Heaven." However, since over time, the world had become more crowded, people now moved faster and faster, in part to avoid bumping into each other as they made their way through a busier and busier series of interlocked thoroughfares. The more people there were, the more gadgets they invented, the more complicated the rituals and walking itineraries became, so that pretty soon, most people spent most of their time, simply avoiding certain other people and making convoluted bodily gestures, while walking in giant circles, instead of simply gathering fruits and vegetables from the fields, and then going home to cook them, as they had once done. Needless to say, it was no longer possible to find anyone, apparently, who would stand still long enough for a dropped seed to germinate on their head; the seeds would most likely fall off, or never make contact with their targets at all. This was of some concern to Gheng, although it didn't affect his quiet, unobtrusive, wanderings.
There were also many different little species of animals, inhabiting the tree, whose comings and goings he took great delight in observing. There were the various birds of course, the Yellow Midwives, and the Snoots as well as the Elephant-Nosed Egrets, with their long legs and large proboscis, and the Shandong Roosters, whose flag-like crests, looked like giant red mittens hanging precipitously from their conical heads. There were also tiny nut gatherers like the Klinx, the Goopes and the Spotted Troom, as well as a host of small monkeys, beetles, voles, and even a tiny predator called by the unusual name of the Himalayan-Mouse-Tiger. Stranger than that however, was the presence of a rare species of black-speckled, air-breathing jellyfish, which looked like the freshly extracted lung of an elderly coal-miner, called a Shanghai Sticky Kite. They all lived in a kind of rough harmony within the branches and foliage of the tree, which, of course, was held aloft by Gheng as he walked ever so slowly in search of fragments of occasionally elusive wisdom.
II
Gheng studied the well adorned, but unassuming man before him.
"I didn't get your name."
"Gheng, my name is Gheng."
"Have you been wandering long, Gheng?"
"By the size of your companion, I would say, no longer than you."
"Well, for me, it's been almost seven years."
"That's a long time. To be honest, I really have no idea how long I've been out, myself, the passage of days has no real value for me now that I've left the world—you know, the village, human concerns."
"It's impressive that you can forget all of it so quickly—"
"Forget what?"
"Human concerns. I've been wandering endlessly, and have thought of little else. I don't know that I really have the discipline to stay in the forest long enough to watch my tree prosper, and then grow old and feeble."
"You have to think of it as a process, an ongoing experience, rather than a series of doorways leading to separate, un-related, rooms; otherwise, you spend all of your time waiting—that's how I try to think of it anyway."
"Well, doesn't a 'wise man' just know the way?"
"Not, not-necessarily, you need to, um, use guiding principles."
Gheng could see the flames of the small fire casting strange lines and shadows on Tung's face. He could hear some rustling in his counterpart's branches as if he were shivering a little despite being so close to a source of heat.
" You mean like, truths, like in Confucius?" Tung asked.
"Well. Yes, but, Confucius gives truth as parable," responded Gheng, "as little stories and general lessons; there, um, has to be room for interpretation."
"Yeh, but interpretation means that your truth could be different from someone else's truth—how can you follow a rule if it changes each time?"
"The rule, the rule doesn't change, the situation changes, and then the way the rule is applied changes—if we simply obeyed edicts, without any interpretation, or outside, you know, considerations, um, we would be like bees in a hive, not thinking creatures...Wisdom isn't, it can't be, automatic!"
"But doesn't there have to be a proper way, proper in all situations; I mean a man can't just expel wind when he meets, I don't know, his new father-in-law, can he?
"A man is a man, he has to expel a foul wind sometimes. He tries not to do it in front of his father-in-law, but sometimes, um, you know, it just forces its way out."
"I want to believe that it's the way you say it is, but—"
"But, you're shaking your tree a little"
"No, how am I shaking it?"
"You're nodding your head, slightly, and the tree starts shaking, just a bit. It makes the birds nervous, since they can be very delicate creatures."
"I'm not nodding my head! And what's the difference, as far as the birds are concerned, whether I'm nodding my head or walking through the woods? said Tung assertively, and showing some sudden annoyance at being scrutinized.
"You are nodding your head," said Gheng; "not much, just a little. And there is a difference, at least to the birds, especially after you sit down—its unexpected, and it can make them a little nervous."
"Well, I'm not!"
"You are, or you did, just a little. You did shake it just a little bit."
They sat in silence and ate, and then retired for the night, each basking in the ambiguity of the exchange and the reflected glow of the moon.
III
The next morning, Tung woke Gheng excitedly, as birds flew to and from each of the quietly rustling treetops. "Do you know anything of dreams?" asked Tung. "I have interpreted a few," replied Gheng uneasily, as he maintained the conviction, unusual among wise men, that to tell another person the meaning of their dreams was a form of arrogance. "I had two very strange dreams last night, I hoped that you might tell me what they might mean," said Tung, in anticipation. "I can try," replied Gheng, with a certain amount of resignation, as he knew he was going to have to listen and then play the role of interpreter, whether he wanted to or not.
"In the first dream, I am crossing a loose bamboo slat bridge with badly tied rope-trusses, over a deep river-chasm, coming out of the jungle, when I hear the flapping of a bird's wings. I turn around, and see a large gull, with a tremendous beak, as he alights on one of the low hanging branches of my tree. I ask him, out of politeness, if he would like to take a rest from his tiring flight, and partake of the tasty insects that live in the bark, but he does not answer. This makes me nervous, and as I try to turn my head, without also turning the tree, and thus knocking many of my other guests from their homes and perches, I can hear the sound of someone carving wood. At that moment, I feel the sawdust begin to flake off onto my shoulder, and I know that he is using that gigantic beak, as a saw, to cut down the Tree of Heaven. Well, 'you can't do that,' I tell him, to no avail, as the sawing continues, and I begin sneezing from the heavy cloud of sawdust. Within seconds, I am immersed in it, and as my body shudders, I begin to sway and lose my balance. I hear a loud snapping sound, like an Egret closing its bony-flaps on a small fish, and I see out of the side of my eye, the entire tree—branches, trunk, and mandorla of birds and insects, all of it—go toppling over the bridge and into the chasm; and, as it does so, loosening and breaking the ropes holding up the fragile bamboo structure itself. Now, I am careening as well, the bottom of the chasm now filling my entire field of vision, as I hurtle towards my end."
Tung was silent for a moment, allowing the full impact to soak in. Gheng was transfixed.
"In the second dream, I am sitting in an open meadow, in the sunlight, and I have a strange feeling of total penetration. Then I realize, and see in my mind's eye, the entire root system of the tree, as it slowly reveals itself inside my entire body, first through the skull and thinking parts, and then into my throat, heart, arms and legs, through every meridian point. As I am basking in this sensation of fullness and power, one of the sun's rays becomes an acupuncture needle and nestles itself deep into my right forearm, as I feel it connecting with the tendrils of the tree's deepest roots. At that moment, a powerful, but wiry, strand of lightning ropes out across my arm and into the sky. At first, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction, a feeling of power and contentment in the knowledge that I have made the connection, and have completed the circuit with the heavens. But then, while I am in my deepest reverie, I smell something burning. At first I assume that it is my flesh at the point of the needle's intrusion and at the exit terminus of the lightning bolt; but then, I realize that there is smoke wafting across my field of vision, and its coming from somewhere over my head—from the top of the tree itself. The tree is on fire, I suddenly realize, and as I attempt to scramble to my feet to look for water, I inadvertently feed the flames and the fire begins to consume the tree, amidst the loud squawking of birds desperate to extricate their hatchlings from smoking nests, and the disturbing mechanical whine of hundreds of insects being cooked in their own chitinous armature's. As the tree burns down to its roots I can feel the flames entering my body and consuming nerves, muscles, bones and vital organs, until I am merely a pall of black smoke, a rising cloud containing only one idea: Dissolution."
Tung looked at Gheng, who was visibly disturbed by the clarity of the dream images. "What do you think it means?" asked Tung.
"Well," said Gheng, clearing his throat so hard that he could hear the leaves above him begin to rustle, amidst the chirping of birds, "it sounds like you have been presented, by fate, with two choices. In the first," he started haltingly, "you are faced with the dilemma of how to maintain balance under the threat of internal discord or, um," he paused, feeling acutely self-conscious, "instability." He almost enunciated the word. "In other words, you need to find a way to maintain your tree in the face of a large bird representing chaos. If chaos wins, your tree will fall, and with it, you as well—right over the side of the rickety bridge that is a symbol of the fragile sanity of all human beings. You must find a way to weather this storm. I am not saying it will happen, but you need inner balance to offset the outside instability of the world as it exists;" added Gheng, feeling a little presumptuous, as he remembered an adage about the unreliability of men who interpret the dreams of others without paying heed to their own.
" And the second dream?" asked Tung.
"The second dream is simple," replied Gheng, surprised at the emphasis of his own response. "In the second dream, you are experiencing your own power, as a carrier of the Tree of Heaven. If you become too enamored of the lightning-bolt energy and influence of that power..." He paused, "you will be destroyed by it, and will suffer the consequences of too much power, as your tree and its animal tenants, burn along with you. To avoid this, you need to become truly humble. You need to see yourself as the carrier, not the master—the tree is its own master. You are, as I am," added Gheng, "merely a litter bearer." And, as he said so, he wasn't sure that he could himself believe that either of them played so modest a role in the life that swayed and swooned above. No, he thought, they were navigators, not 'litter-bearers,' but did not say so out loud, fearing that it would smack of arrogance.
" Let me ask you another question," said Tung. If I told that dream to another wise man," he queried, letting the word wise linger long enough for Gheng to realize that the younger man was being slightly sarcastic, "would he offer the same interpretation?"
"I don't know." Replied Gheng.
"Why not?"
"because—look, if you throw the I-Ching, you may know the hexagram, the character you threw on, but it still has to be interpreted, right? If you ask ten sages in Szechuan how to read that character, they're all going to say something slightly different. It's not like calculating a distance—"
"But if the dream is a message, trying to tell me something, how can the message change from person to person?"
"The message is the same, but it has different elements; in other words, the dream isn't some immovable truth, it's like a story, and stories aren't so cut and dried—I am giving you an example of one way to resolve the riddle of your dream, it's not the only one. You can't calculate it, like on an abacus."
"Yes, but you can see why I am suspicious of your slick answers, right?" asked Tung, with a disarming sincerity.
"Yes, I can," replied Gheng, truthfully; and then added, "but dream divination is like reading a pig's entrails, it's an art form, and everyone does it differently."
"So, in other words, this is your way of emitting a strong-wind in front of your father-in-law? queried Tung.
"Maybe," answered Gheng.
The two men stared at each other in silence, without guile, or even curiosity. It was as if each had come to recognize that the stranger before him was in actuality his mirror image—a doppelganger. Here they sat, each before the other like a contemplative object carved in stone; and, while this sensation was largely an illusion, each knew that they would never again see themselves in such idealized fashion—their trees in resplendent glory, leaves fluttering like oddly colored flags of impossibly malleable, paper-thin, textured glass in a strong breeze—than they would at that moment. Thus, they looked into each other's deepest recesses, their wrinkled folds and hidden lacunae, and even across impossible angles comprised of the incompleteness that each man saw in himself—now projected, across the charred bits of cedar wood from the previous evening's fire. They must have stood there, like that, for a long time, since, in their respective minds they knew that they would never again be as perfect as they imagined the other to be at that moment, even as they understood, in a profound way, that these were also fantasies that required a double on which to project such otherwise puerile banalities. The moment continued, as the sun traced a predictable itinerary through the morning sky, and then...
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
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Editors' choiceWritten on 2013-09-30 at 18:42
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