Sketches of China 05: The Great Wall

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fifth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The graveyard shift, sitting alone in the candlelight as the clock strikes four, the night wearing on, surrounded by the room’s thick stone walls and the damp smell of the salt air, hearing the lullaby of the waves outside and sitting, key in hand, turning it over again and again, the key to a kingdom that lies in ruin, the barbarians camping outside, their advance checked – for now – by the wall, by that enormous structure built of human sweat and blood, marking out the northern frontier, a border running west from where the mountains meet the sea, tracing an improbable boundary across rocky limestone hills cloaked in rich verdure, joining the dots of torch-lit watchtowers burning in the night, a structure only as strong as its weakest link, plunging over the face of a cliff, down into the fast-flowing waters and foaming narrows of a ravine before resuming on the other side, continuing across the vast expanses of scrub and wilderness, across the steppe, before petering out somewhere far in the west, that tormented figure sitting alone in the candlelit room, the night wearing on, meditating on the territory guarded by that immense structure, only as strong as its weakest part, key in hand, turning it over and over, the wall marking out the space where the heavenly empire dwells, the self-sufficiency and sanctity of one kingdom above all, the barbarians waiting outside, key in hand, over and over again, mulling over the decision as Beijing lies sacked and smouldering, the tortured faces of a father and a lover, meditating on their fate, on the price of revenge, weighing up a choice between the lesser of two evils – treason or an empty throne – and intuiting that the decision is perhaps already made, the candles flickering in the damp salty air, the touch of the metal, a key, the key, the key to a future preordained, destiny – or so it would seem – in the palm of a hand.

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Sketches of China 04: Beijing by train

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fourth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

Speeding across the countryside under sulphur skies, an arrow shot for the city’s heart, the forlorn moan of the electric locomotive thundering along the tracks, cutting across the land, slowing from time to time, stopping at anonymous skylines of half-built tower blocks and cranes that tell of the rapacious pace of urbanisation, the shape of a woman emerging freshly showered onto a balcony in the evening sun as the carriages pull away once again, surveying the scene from the window, the landscape drenched in wan yellow light, the sinuous figures and sun-beaten skin of peasants who till the land, resting for a moment under a drooping tree, the red and white stripes of a chimney stack behind them, a smelter belching out smoke that hangs low in the air above fields of cadmium rice and split melons, the smog lingering over rivers whose fish have long since departed, hanging in wisps above brittle fields, their groundwater sullied, their aquifers depleted, the earth sucked dry, the train reaching the first buildings that announce the metropolis under darkening skies, the forlorn moan of the engine dying out to the creak of the carriages as it slows, snaking unnoticed through shabby suburbs, the buildings growing taller, entombing the land and climbing to touch the sky, the carriages tugging as finally they come to a halt, stepping out onto the concourse, waking into a nightmare, feeling the frenetic pulse of the city as the sun gradually sinks over the fields left far behind, the land slipping into shadow to await the new day, the televised dawn of progress at all costs.

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Sketches of China 03: River Scene, Qinhuai by Night

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the third instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The mother river, the artery around which the city’s historic heart once grew, its banks now thronging with crowds, an ancient temple from another time – all but forgotten – standing behind them, the reflections of a neon dragon shimmering on the murky olive waters, couples and families pausing for photographs on the bridge, feigning indifference to the smell of putrid waste hanging in the air, stopping to watch the pleasure boats as they pass below, all lit up in yellows and reds, swallowed by the darkness of an arch from which bats emerge, their wings tracing flights of Brownian motion in the night, crossing the bridge and turning off on the other side, off down a street lined with gift shops, running the gauntlet, avoiding eye contact and playing deaf to the hawkers’ cries as they echo off the walls, finding a moment’s respite from the humidity in the chill gust emerging from a department store before being enveloped again by the muggy air, leaving the water to drip steadily from the air conditioning unit as miles away a chimney belches out coal smoke, turning off down an alley leading to the metro, the street lined with counterfeit goods, the sound of raised voices, a slap ringing out in the night, descending the stairs, the dry click of the carriage doors, sterile, modern, and a lingering question as the train pulls away: the mother river, what will her children become?

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Sketches of China 02: Cloudburst

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the second installment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The air saturated, the sky cloud-sodden, climbing the purple mountain as dusk falls, the light starting to fade, entering the pagoda, savouring its cool stone shade, the brief respite it offers from the oppressive humidity, climbing the flights of stairs and admiring the view from the top, where one feels eternal and complete, a gentle breeze stirring the torpid air, the emerald verdure stretching out down below, carpeting the land as far as the eye can see, the mist rolling up across the hills to touch the clouds, making out the concrete mass of the city’s skyline far in the distance, its compacted energy paling to insignificance against the plenitude of the surrounding landscape, the serenity of the present mingling with recollections of the paths leading to this sanctuary, of great stone steles inscribed with their ancient words of wisdom, of ponds rank with waterlilies and algae, of animals now calling out in the trees down below, embryonic memories of a still-living present, of a past yet to form.

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Sketches of China 01: Arrival, Shanghai

Illustration. Mark Doyle

We are extremely pleased to welcome to Elsewhere a series of illustrations and texts that are the result of a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle:

Stepping out of the airport as night falls, boarding the Golden Dragon as the clouds give way to rain, struck at once by the immensity of life on an unimaginable scale, the bus gathering pace as the mythical beast speeds across the tarmac, entering a world of towering high-rises, their windows unlit, all but a few, the empty shapes of the buildings silhouetted instantaneously by forks of lightning, cleaving the sky asunder as the rain grows heavier, falling in sheets, monotonous, unrelenting, its drops bursting like grapes on the elevated expressway stretching on into the night, keenly aware of a sense of detachment, of separating from home, cast adrift in a landscape of frenetic development, a feeling of unstoppable momentum, the bus unable, despite the distance covered, to break free from a metropolis as dystopian as it is endless, from an aberrance from nature on a monstrous scale, yet savouring all the while the promise of discovery, of adventure, immersed in the moment, looking neither forward nor back.

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on instagram @markdoyleartist.

Notes from a Frontier Town: Some might say, secrets interred

By J. Miller: 

Standing atop the dunes of Echoing Sands Mountain (鸣沙山). At the dunes’ base sits Crescent Moon Lake (月牙泉), where some say that at some point in history flying dragons paraded around the shadowy pond where hidden dragons lurked in the depths. That nearby, a monk translated and hid thousands of religious documents. That it was at this geographical point where Christianity and Buddhism mixed. Some might say that it is speculation. 

Off into the distance, an ancient-looking portico unburdened by a building directs its gaze northward towards Dunhuang (敦煌). Camels jockey at the portico, and off-season 4x4s await riders that never come. Snow blankets the dunes. A narrow path leads up the tallest dune. A rope ladder, a staircase that lifts travelers and tourists up the dune. These dunes composed of grains of sand appear sturdy yet transient. The traveler, a temporary pause. A footfall compresses the sand, leaves an indefinite footshape, and sand granules tumble down the dune leaving sunken lanes.

Coming here from faraway I sink into thoughts that travelers’ desires shape their experiences, that experiences can become a form of folkloric experience, and that writing about these experiences is a chance to grasp dead time, or the past.

I find myself unaware that my feet were sinking into the shifting sands. I find myself imagining others that visited here before, who let their feet sink into the sand. Shifting like the sands, the landscape is recontextualized by a traveler’s desire. Wandering throughout the buildings attached to Crescent Moon Lake – a history museum that reminds the viewer of the lake’s impermanence – is a reminder that through these shifting sands the dunes act as a natural barrier for Dunhuang.

I am grateful that I have the museum and park mostly to myself, and that I can come from faraway to visit Dunhuang, if even for a moment.

It’s imaginable that some of the sand also came from far away. That sand was carried through the thin desert air, and it is imaginable that the crescent lake is always threatened. Most of the time the threat comes from some unknowable force. For a time, I tried to let the dunes speak for themselves. Some might say Echoing Sands’ name comes from the sand that whips across the dunes. What language can they speak, where human-language does not factor into the conversation? At one point in time, Dunhuang along with three other cities were frontier garrison towns. Jiuquan (酒泉), another of the garrison towns, is neighbor to a fortress called Jiayuguan (嘉峪关), which some point out has a gate where the exiled and the travelers passed through on their way into the Gobi Desert.

Exiles that passed through this gate carved a note as ritual commemoration, an attempt to internalize the place while at the same time casting it out from memory. The Gate of Demons or the Gate of Sighs. I could not find it. Some might say that it is the gate wishing not to speak with me; that it is an attempt of the fortress to maintain its secrets from an outsider. Checking every gate and tunnel for etched farewell notes, and desiring to interpret contemporary scrawlings for ones thousands of years old [1], I reached an impasse. As one of the travelers visiting a site and trying to create their own narrative to a place, I was a traveler attempting to navigate the fortress’s physical space: the building, arrangement of rooms and entertainment theatres, the angle and height of its ramparts and bastions, and the labyrinth of its corridors reconfigured for a tourist. At the same time, this fortress contained the secrets and shadows and imprints interred in the building.

Writing down my thoughts in a coffeeshop turned barbecue lamb restaurant, a sense of disquiet pervades me. Pictures aside, this written document is the only tactile item that I intend to bring back from this trip. Even then the pictures are just digital relics on a memory card. It’s proof, like a selfie posted on social media, that at one point in time I visited this place. 

I went to a place that on the map said coffeeshop, but instead it sold different variations of the popular Chinese grain spirit (白酒, baijiu) and the owner told me to turn the corner and walk 200 meters, and when I arrived at that location, the restaurant advertised barbecued lamb and served hot water infused with white sugar and soluble coffee-powder. At some point this document will be an attempt to reclaim something, to resuscitate my immediate present with an experience already passed.

Sitting in the barbecue restaurant, the religious grottoes and fortress’ architectural designs protect their secrets in different ways. Thinking about the material and imaginary facets of places: why do certain facets take precedence over others with some aspects of a place declared irrelevant [2]? What makes my search for coffee in a once-garrison town irrelevant compared to looking for scrawlings in stone by exiles? Each place and person is a relic grasping at the tendrils of dead time. In a time of mass consumption, it is imperative to remember that through consuming articles about place, the writing is an act of commemoration. That commemoration is an act of bidding farewell. That it is a ritual practice to forget, and to welcome that place in folkloric history. 

The tourist is not content to let things lie as they should. An imposition of personal narrative always shines through, where the tourist transforms their experiences into an experience that defies any process of linear time. Each traveler reorganizes geographical space and dead time to co mingle with a sense of commemorating the past and leaving with a sense of relevant story, to share with friends, family and other loved ones.

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J. Miller is a bicyclist and educator based in Wuhan, China. His writings can be found on A South Broadway Ghost Society (2019) and A Dozen Nothing (2019) with a broadside from Chax Press (2020). J. Miller is a lecturer at Central China Normal University, where he is constantly clipping branches from the Osmanthus trees. He is the founding editor of Osmanthus which has collective focus to publish reflexive poetry and prose chapbooks and related objects. As tea drinker and bicyclist, find him in the Osmanthus branches, or here on Twitter, @yawn_sea

Notes:

[1] Cable, Mildred. The Gobi Desert. London: Readers Union Limited, 1942. pp.13-14

[2] Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Reconfiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, et al. 19-26. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. pp.19-26.