László Krasznahorkai
We ask nothing of the dragons, and they ask nothing of us. - Zi Chan
They scream in the darkness, their mouths gaping open, their protruding eyes covered by cataracts, and they scream, but this screaming, this darkness, their mouths and their eyes for once cannot be spoken of, only circumambulated with words, like a beggar with palm extended, for this darkness and this screaming, their mouths and their eyes cannot be compared to anything, for they have nothing in common with anything that can be put into words, so that not only is it impossible to describe or convey their concealed dwelling-places, this place where the lord of all is darkness and screaming; where it is only possible to proceed above it, or more cogently, to wander there above, that is possible, while having not the faintest idea of where the thing is that one wants to discuss - somewhere down there below, that is all that we can say, so that perhaps it would be wisest just to take the whole thing and forget, take it and not force the issue any more; but we don't forget because that is not possible, and we force it, for this screaming does not cease of its own accord, no matter what we do; for it happened nonetheless, after Dawenkou and Panlongchen, after Longshang and Anyang and Erlitou; to see the statues glued together from the shards, the green bronze slabs with the drawings, it was enough to see these artifacts, just one time, for that inhuman voice to be lodged forever in the brain, so that one then begins to wander, for the knowledge that they are there is insufferable, insupportable, just as is that desire to see their dreadful beauty at least once, in short, that is, generally speaking, how we set off, for the most part we push off on our journey through the regions of the one-time Shang Dynasty from a point selected entirely at random, it doesn't matter from where or at what time, one choice is as good as another, for we don't even know where they are, either confidently or obscurely, yes, we say, sometime between 1600 and 1100 years before Christ is where we have to launch into our journey, walking somewhere along the Huang He riverbank to the East, proceeding with the river's current towards the delta and the sea, and never getting too far away from the riverbank, where the renowned capital cities were, that is where you have to go, to that place of the dissipated memories of imperial cities now vanished for 2800 years, the cities of the Shang emperors, Bo and Ao, Chaoge and Dayi Shang, Xiang and Geng, dating from roughly 1600-1100 BC, that is where we say China but think of something else - if we do not wish to delude ourselves and mislead others - as they have done themselves, they, the Chinese, across a period spanning several thousand years, because it is only since the Qin Dynasty that it was called China, that is Zhong guo, the Middle Kingdom, or in other words the World, something that is one unified whole, as if it had become one Country which it however had never been, for in truth there had been many emperors and many peoples, many commoners and many feudal lords, many clans and many languages, many traditions and many borders, many beliefs and many dreams, that was Zhong guo, the World, with so many different kinds of worlds inside of it, that to enumerate them, trace them, recognize them, or understand them is impossible with one single brain, if one is not the Son of Heaven, and even today it is impossible, one can only spin fabrications, blather and jabber nonsense, as anyone who, setting off on the lower banks of the Huang He river roughly between 1600 and 1100 BC will do, after the so-called "bends" of the Huang He, saying to himself, here I am in the Shang Empire, here I am going East, this is Chaoge here, or perhaps Dayi Shang, here below my feet, and the only truth in that statement is that they really are there somewhere below the earth, contradicting all of the accidental discoveries of all the Dawenkous and Anyangs and Erlitous: uninvestigated and invisible, they are hidden deep below the earth in the darkness, and with their mouths opened wide they scream, the graves having collapsed onto them long ago, the graves placed there for their use, and which, collapsing in layers, buried them completely, so that they became walled into the earth, among the stolons, the ciliates, the rotifers, the tardigrades, the mites, the worms, the snails, the isopods, the innumerable species of larvae, as well as the mineral deposits and the deadly underground gullies, walled up, condemned to this definitive immobility, even if they hadn't always been that way, they are now motionless in their screaming, as their gaping mouths are already crammed with earth, and before their cataract-clouded bulging eyes there is not even one centimeter of space, not even a quarter-centimeter, not even a broken-off fragment of that quarter, into which these cataract-clouded protruding eyes could stare, for the earth is so thick and so heavy, pressing in from all sides, everywhere earth and earth, and surrounding them is that impenetrable impervious weighty darkness that lasts truly for all time to come, surrounding every living being, for we shall all walk here, every one of us, when the time comes, we who wander here among the unfathomable vastness of the Chinese millennia, and we think to ourselves, so this was their Empire, here is the Shang Dynasty, and we wander along the enormous outlines of their hypothesized capitol cities, picturing to ourselves what is below the earth, where all that was Shang is sunken below, but not only can we not imagine anything, since it is not possible to capture anything with words, it is also not possible to bring them out of the depths through imagination, for those depths below us are unapproachable, as are the depths of time and its howling; they cannot be reached through any kind of imagination, it is blocked already at the starting point, for so dense is that earth below the Shang Dynasty, roughly dated from 1600 to 1100 BC, beyond the bends of the Huang He river, by the lowest river-reaches as it flows towards the delta and the sea, that imagination is blocked and cannot get to that place where they stand, in pieces leaning to one side, corroded by the acids, almost unrecognizable, for only those who might have seen something during the perilous tomb desecrations known as 'excavations' at Dawenkou, Panlongcheng, Longshen, Anyang, and Erlitou know how terrifying they were when still in one piece, how they were fear itself, and how those who made them did not realize with what terrifying strength they had expressed what is below the earth, bequeathed to them beyond eternity, what it is like if everything in this dense earth is crushed together in the complete and final darkness; they, the artisans of the Shang Dynasty perhaps then only wanted, when they formed the giant gaping mouths, the bulging clouded eyes, for these statues and bronze objects placed at the entranceways or within the inner chambers to preserve the tombs of their dead, to protect them by frightening away the malignant forces, to hold the Earth-Demon at bay, for the people of the Shang Dynasty possibly thought that the graves must remain inviolable, they could have thought that there should be a connection between the dead and the empire of death, but they could not have considered how time goes on, as when it promised it would be eternal, and yet they could not have considered how time also could stretch dreadfully from their own era into the vistas of eternities following one upon the other, where the possibility of memory of who is lying here with their hun, their souls, is extinguished; that of the graves, the dead, the soul, the hun, of themselves, their empire, the memory of their empire, almost nothing would remain, that in the ravages of time almost nothing remains from nothing, that everything that once was, disappears; that the Shangs disappear, and the graves disappear with them, here by the lower reaches of the Huang He, along the bends towards the delta and the sea, and nothing else remains, as does the screaming and the darkness under the heavy impressure of the earth, for the screaming, that does remain; they stand there below in their ruined graves, stand in tiny pieces leaning to one side, eaten away by the acids, wedged into the earth, but in their wide-gaping mouths the scream does not cease, it somehow remains there, broken into pieces, and yet through the millennia, that scream of horror, the single meaning of which nonetheless extends up until today, telling us that the universe below the earth, the locus of death, below the World is a colossal overfilled space, that that place where we all shall end most certainly does exist; that the World, life, and people shall all reach their end, and it is there they shall end, below, and as well here below, below the dreams of the Shang, their statuary broken to pieces and the screams of the animals poured into bronze moulds, for there are animals below the earth, perhaps in immeasurable quantity, pigs and dogs, buffalos and dragons, goats and cows and tigers and elephants and chimeras and snakes and dragons, and they are all screaming, and not only are there cataracts in their bulging eyes, but they are all blind, they stand leaning to one side in pieces and corroded from the acids around the collapsed graves, and blindly they scream in the darkness, they scream that this was awaiting them, the Shang Dynasty, but that up there above the same fate awaits us, we who now reflect upon the Shang, the horror, which is not just the vapor of some cheap fear, for there is a domain, that of death, the dreadful weight of the earth pressing in from all sides which has entombed them, and which in time shall devour us as well, to close it in upon itself, to bury, to consume even our memories, beyond all that is eternal.
Translated by Ottilie Mulzet