Fairy Tales: The Magic of Black Tea 4 🧚 Kunming
All the Tea in China
Sous le Sous-Sol
Baldric remembered the cold prairies, a French TV show, a rickety stairs, a pretty French girl looking at him with love in her eyes. At the same time he was descending into the stories beneath him, on a wooden staircase built by the diligent workmen, Li Po and Jia Dao, and by all the poets of China before them. On the dragon-tail of poetry he was sliding down into the rarefied substrata of archaeological and archetypal forms.
Baldric felt that he had travelled beyond everything, but Ragor knew that he was only at the sous-sol — both the basement of an apartment and the geological layers beneath the surface of the Earth. He needed to go further, into the psychological, genetic, archetypal layers beneath. Geologically, this past was engraved in the earth as valleys and ravines. Psychologically, it was engraved in the collective memory as instinct and language. It was only by travelling through these layers that he could integrate the past into the present.
Human philologists knew that the origins of language link us to the past, whether we know it or not. Yet Ragor knew that it was more than this: words link us intellectually and genetically to the past, and yet they also link us emotionally and experientially, in a way that’s as palpable as a complex taste of a rich tea mingled with a rich pastry. Sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, from the tip of the tongue to the back of the mouth — and from there down into the stomach, the blood, the heart, and back into the head.
Baldric was travelling on the memory of the sweet co-mingling flavours in his mouth, just as Proust had predicted. And yet more than Proust predicted, for Baldric was also travelling into the memory of the tea house and into the history that lay beneath its foundations. He travelled from the construction of the bakery to the construction of the French railway line that brought a cargo of French wine, Lebel rifles, and dead workers. Deep in his blood, which now carried the bitter-sweet taste of opium, he felt what it was like to be a crazed addict with hallucinations straight out of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, sister stories to those of Poe and his talkative raven. Baldric felt what it would be like to be back into the chamber turning, all his soul within him burning.
With all the opium and tea in China as his cargo, Baldric travelled back even further — to the Mongols on the ramparts of the North, to the founding of the Han Dynasty, to the burning of the books and the burying of the scholars, and to the mystic trances of the Daoist sages, who communed with the mountain mists, the placid green lakes, and the infinite potential of what they called the uncarved block. The staircase slanted, ever more steeply, into the river banks of time, beneath the Neolithic Chinese on the Yellow River, beneath the Aryans on the Indus, beneath the Sumerians on the Euphrates.
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Across the Void
As he descended, the staircase lost its walls and the steps floated downward into dark and empty space. Beneath him he saw a small platform at the bottom of the steps. As he got closer to this platform, he saw that a narrow wooden walkway projected from it, and led precariously into a murky void. In the bottom portion of the void he saw faint outlines of ripples, as if the walkway stretched out and hovered over a body of water. Above the void was mist, then cloud. At the end of the footbridge he saw another wooden platform. It floated on what appeared to be a small current of smoke. On the platform sat a creature, cross-legged.
Reaching the first platform, Baldric saw that the creature had two antennae, a body like that of a large hornet, and a face creased with deep folds. Baldric made his way across the rickety wooden footbridge. The bridge extended as he walked. It seemed he would never get across what had seemed only a dozen feet when he’d seen it from above. The water below was like a mirror, reflecting fiery gulfs and celestial rainbows. The time it took to cross this footbridge seemed like weeks, although in fact it was an eternity.
At last Baldric reached the platform on which the creature sat cross-legged on his cloud of smoke, his back to the imaginary fires of the celestial and infernal realms. The creature stared out into the blackness, dark and cold. Baldric’s footstep on the platform surprised the creature, who turned around to see what form of being might visit him in such a place. The creature had two multi-coloured eyes, both of which were connected to a brain of fantastic density, wrapping and enfolding the knowledge of countless worlds. Each of his two ears was lined with fine golden hairs and could detect the sound of a feather falling in another universe.
Algotodo was listening for a voice, lost for a million years. All he could hear was a recent song, as if some intruder had stepped into his musical memory, perturbing him by confirming what he already knew:
In the silence of her mind / Quiet movements where I can find / Grabbing for me with her eyes / Now I'm falling from her skies.
The creature heard Baldric’s footsteps on the wooden platform, but he couldn’t see Baldric at all. All he saw was the increasingly vague face of his beloved Wei, who had been lost along the way.
No sugar tonight in my coffee / No sugar tonight in my tea / No sugar to stand beside me / No sugar to run with me.
Baldric saw the strange creature and thought of Alice’s caterpillar smoking his hooka.
Looking in Baldric’s general direction, Algotodo asked, “Antiny, is that you?” His antennae started to vibrate and then he disappeared.
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Be Here Now
Claudine was rubbing her foot against his shin, and looking deep into his eyes. “Are you here? Earth to Baldric. Isn’t this perfect?” Yet Baldric was in another world. He’d taken a staircase up from glass booths and arguments to a heaven of sweet light — and then down again into a living museum of lost worlds, with forgotten paths that led upward, like an Escher print, back to the present. Just as Claudine started to say something about this type of travel experience being the reason she left Québec, and just as her hand reached across the table to touch his, a man in tattered blue overalls sat down at their table and asked, Do you want to buy drugs? Pot, meth, opium?
They left the shop immediately before any other facts of Chinese life came to haunt them as well. Once they were back in the dormitory, he hoped that she might want to take another shower. But instead, she slipped into a silk negligée and asked softly, Tu veux faire l’amour? Like a modern day Casanova, Baldric glided across the room to the light switch and flicked it off, plunging the room into darkness and leaving the other backpackers to stare into the black pages of their diaries. He floated back to Claudine’s bed, spoke one or two words in a romantic language he didn’t understand, and slipped into the illusion of love.
As he rocked in Claudine’s arms, he pulled down her panties and inserted his penis into her soft, warm vagina. Their pubic hair swayed like seaweed beneath the waves. He lost all thought of the outside world, and found himself in the nerves of his chest and stomach, pelvis and cock, his head bobbing inside a world so secret that even naming it with words like cock and cunt could only be done in her ear, secretly, so that only her heart could hear the holy, unholy truth.
Baldric lost himself in the journey his mind was taking down a tunnel that was warm and dark. He rolled back and forth in it like warm serum in a test tube. Imploding deeper and deeper into his body, and into the secret life that lives along the curves and spirals of DNA, he saw thousands of living cells, shimmering light beings, each nodding its head to him in quiet acquiescence of the process whereby it glimmered for a moment and then fell into meaningless obscurity.
He saw himself surrounded by all the other boaters that set out like he had done at the precise moment at the starting gates. Each one was like a photoplankton or a glow-worm on a rocky beach, seen only by the blinking eye of a walrus. He saw the lights in their eyes shimmer and die. Each set of eyes held a universe within them, and each went from tadpole to ling cod, shark, or whale, each and all setting out into an enormous fluid sea, white and milky like the stars.
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Next: 🔮 The Stories They Told Themselves
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