On Mediation

June 18, 2024, at 2:50 P.M., I was returning to Shanghai from Ningbo. As the car crossed the sea bridge, the opposite shore reappeared after the gloom. The tidal flats stretched toward me, endless, extending.

I fell into a dream: standing on the soggy mud;briny water rising through my soles; cold is needling the skin…; as I looked up, like a row of steel-armored riders, concrete towers charged towards me.

I woke up at the moment of impact. The tidal flats were behind. A water bottle had fallen. Water soaked into my shoes.

June 27, 2024, at 18:02 P.M., I was in Jinhua, sitting on my friend’s balcony. Dark clouds hung low. As I narrowed my eyes, mountain ridges and ramparts shimmered above the cloud with banners lifting in the wind. The sight pulled me unbalanced. Then my phone rang.

There was a tiny garden on the balcony. Plants scattered loosely, half-tended. I wanted to ask my friend about the phone, but everyone in the room had vanished. I heard water running in the bathroom; I called out, and nobody answered.

The sky turned all dark when I looked back. Rain was pouring hard. All the ridges and the ramparts collapsed. My friend came out of the bedroom, replying to me in drowsy.

Someday at 9:30 A.M. in August, 2020s, I experienced the third strange incident of recent days in my family home in Shanghai. An old desk lamp shade surged like a boiling spring; its crimson erupted across the living room. A few seconds later everything returned to normal. I felt a strange sense of coolness. I sat back down at the keyboard to continue the task at hand: before moving, I needed to catalogue the contents of every box, and enter them all into Excel. Then, I could assign each item a unique number with a single click. Further, I could classify them by category or by age. What’s more, I could estimate their value and sort them out, though before doing so I would first need to define 3 categories of value applicable to old objects. Constitution of Memory Slaughterhouse, Article One: every old object shall be subject to multilateral interpretation, and its value shall be taken as the arithmetic mean of the assessments provided by each relevant member of the household. Article Two: valuation shall balance utility and constraint. Utility is divided into commemorative and economic forms, while constraints consist of spatial capacity and load bearing limits. Article Two Supplementary Clause One: commemorative utility shall take into account substitutability or reproducibility, original labor, and associated identity…That evening, I encountered the fourth strange incident. A teapot purchased by my parents on a trip bored its way out of a cardboard box and drank the fish tank dry in a single gulp. At midnight I switched on the light and waited with utmost urgency in the bathroom for two basins of water to refill the tank.

Perhaps, some forms of trust are already corrupted, some experiences proven false, or perhaps never ever justified. Sometime in the 30th of a month in 2025, a junior fellow student from my high school told me he had finished reading The Cloven Viscount. I wasn’t pleased when I read this at the first time: A cannon shell split the viscount into Good and Evil—It’s too simple. But later I pondered: however you blast a person apart, the halves can never truly stand alone; each is only thinkable because the other remains. Heart is heart, and mind is mind, you said, heart is just heart, but mind is just mind.

On October 1st, 2025, an alumni told me: walk out into the world, make everything, only to return to the days where you began—back to the cradle, as civilizations walk back into its cave.

October 2, 2025, a staff member told me: the worst of theatre is criticism. You are meant to feel, but criticism is thought. You thought how you should feel, and then you feel. But then what you feel is thought, what you feel does not feel.

August 4th, 2025, sometime at fifty-six, I went to Hangzhou to meet a friend. Passing the Yongjin Gate, the ripples suddenly entice. I thought of what another friend said to me: from here, head south, you push straight into the mountains.

I recalled two years ago, sculptures of Five Hundred Arhats rose into motion in the temple after lights went out and the temple’s guard chased me from hall to hall. I slipped onto a barren hill, slept for a day, woke up tredding on wet leaves to visit a monk friend. I drifted across the Xihu Lake with a classmate, falling into the sun, losing consciousness. All flickered in gold. The subway announcement cut through. I messaged my friend: I’ll be twenty minutes late, sorry.

But on the Xihu Lake boating is not allowed, none of my friends were once a monk, and I have never been to the Yongjin Gate. None of these can be found, up in the heaven and down the earth.

“All his longing is but fiction.” O absolute pristine image, in my own pure spirit, might be seen through tears.

October 8, 2025, 1:08AM, California. I stood under a streetlight. A classmate walked by; we spoke for ten minutes. Totally unimportant. And then everything howls. Water beams rise on the lawn.. The mushrooms broke apart by the mower in the morning would grow back, I thought.

In the mist I saw myself the child, seeking mushrooms, breaking into tears at the mower’s conquests. I believed that I could sense a natural command, that I was a servant of some power beyond me. But from the encyclopedia, I found nothing about commands, powers, or servants. One said to me: You must never forget the mushrooms. It matters. I was confused, but still followed. Mushrooms. Mushrooms?

As I move the step forward, I will no longer be consistent; the laws I hold dear can no longer subsist. My body is rebelling me. “Come to our side,” they said, “magic.” I crouched inside a book until nightfall, flipping through a bare sixty pages; between the lines I saw wild birds and boars. They rove through the interstice between high cities, running from Theory - between each breath, omnipotent omnipotence of Theory.

Sometime at 12:13 AM, 2025, in the rain along the coast, I dreamed again. I rode a white stag, holding a javelin in hand, searching among green cliffs for the ruins of a paradise.

This dream kept running, faster than any idea or metaphor can capture.