Sitting Still (Auracular Spaces #2)

“Matter, it was discovered, can be used to tell time.
‘A rock,’ said physicist Holger Müller, ‘is a clock.’”
Harper’s Magazine, “Findings” March 2013

I am sitting still in a small park on a compact university campus in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. The temperature is in the 90’s and I am inclined to remain motionless while humid currents circulate around me.

A dark haired woman picks up a long bamboo pole and begins to swat at the plum-sized yellow fruit suspended in bunches above her head in the branches of a tree. Her companion picks up the fallen fruit and rubs it with water from a jar. She then places it on the seat of a wheelchair already occupied by a slight immobile man in white pajamas. He may not be aware that he has become a basket for the ripe fruit.

The two women are slightly heavier and quite a bit darker in flesh than many of the other women in this city; they may be ethnic minority Chinese employed as home health aides for this elderly and seemingly incapacitated man. Three animated elderly people sit on a bench nearby eating the same fruit. The two trios are linked by the sweet ripe fruit, but nothing else.

Two school girls pass by arm in arm. Workers traverse the path just beyond the low railings with small wheelbarrows, tools, and pallets of water behind bicycles.

The clicking sound of high heels draws my attention to a slender woman in a long-sleeved black dress with a spine overtly zippered from neck to hem.

I hear a flute somewhere behind me in the middle air.

Another wheelchair approaches the bench to my left. A young adult male pushes an older man. After transferring the older man to the bench, the younger one sits beside him and turns his full attention to his cellphone. The older man enters the park’s ambiance in the role of witness.

The wooden benches are built to seat two comfortably, but they are occupied one by one by one.

This park strays toward the wild side with soft low grasses that are not trimmed between the paths. The shrubs and trees are carefully randomized to present every shape, texture, and size with limbs growing horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and fractally. Greens go forth as leaves, fronds, tufts, fingertips, feathers, sprays, needles, fans, ferns, shoots, and every other possible projection and extension to form a thick and light-entrapping tent. Fallen and falling leaves become part of the appealing pattern.

Pensive notes from several flutes at a distance play hide and seek among the leaves.

This garden has many more paths of patterned tiles than necessary to pass through it in any direction. The trails criss-cross and converge at a five-pointed, off-kilter star deliberately far from the notion of center. The tiles inscribe skewed triangles and irregular four or five-sided geometric shapes. This park makes a deliberate statement about beauty and order, reminding me of the Wallace Stevens line, “The Imperfect is our Paradise.” Inside is a pause outside the ordinary. Though all sides have low boundaries, no glance in any direction gives up the secret of its size and shape. Peripheral vision is quiet on the subject, making no guesses.

A woman with silver hair and red shoes scribbles in a notebook. Three brightly dressed girls take photos of a baby sitting on a bench. A pregnant woman listens to music through headphones.

An organic breathing space offering the privacy of intimate public rooms, this botanical sanctuary presents two objects for visual convergence. One is a bronze head on a large, slightly irregular stone block. The other is a water-pocked stone in the shape and size of two horses kneeling nose to nose. Formed of elements and momentum, the stones beckon like evidence.

I am still . . . sitting . . . and then . . . the flutes draw my themes onward.

The park takes another breath and recomposes space and time around the flight of a single white butterfly.