Tales of the Emperor by Jack Winter

Author:Jack Winter [Winter, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Jack Winter, China, History, Fables
ISBN: 978-0-88922-945-7
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

VOICES FROM A VILLAGE

What is most peculiar is that we never have been told the Emperor’s name. Are we meant to call him by the name of his era? Or of his policy? Or of his fate? Even those names will be known only in retrospect, and collecting fragments of the past to obtain a hindsight of one who plummeted through it is hardly our concern. It is difficult enough to dig out last year’s frozen dung for this year’s fuel. Besides, what are we to call him now? His titles are so copious as to require a wax seal longer than any single edict it is fixed upon. Where in all that is his name? The absence of the Emperor’s name seems to us entirely inexplicable. Were anyone to try to remove our names or even to overlook them, we would resist to the death and beyond. What else in this nameless village have we to protect?

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In our village there is one who fights for prize. We attend his every combat, no matter how little he pays us to come. Should he be beaten into insolvency, we would still wish to watch him fight and even, perhaps, pay him to do it. Thus far, that has not been necessary. He remains unthrottled, and each fight he wins earns him enough to pay us to cheer him on to attempt the next. Fighting for prize, after all, is a matter of pride.

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In our village the saying is: stand still or how will fortune find you? Other villages have other sayings but the meaning is the same. Like all sayings, this one is necessary because what it implies never happens. Everyone stands still. Fortune finds no one. Which probably suggests that misfortune is due to our failure to observe some other saying. He who truly is at rest has no need to put up his feet, for instance. Perhaps we are not truly at rest? Perhaps our stillness is lethargy, our serenity indifference? Perhaps we are like the bird in the saying? Which saying? Any saying with a bird in it. Thus, saying leads on to saying and that, one might say, is the way of it.

For another thing, we are forever enumerating. The Three Cardinal Vices, the Seventeen Mandatory Suppressions, the Twenty-­Seven Feasts, the Hundred-and-One Fasts, the Infinite Chain of the Future, the One Link of the Emperor … it seems that priests and lawgivers must first know how to count. Which is, of course, another saying.

I, myself, am free of the servitude to sayings and enumeration. My primary principle is: never mind. It is precisely that profound sense of resistance to tuition and mistrust of discipline and indifference to advancement and contempt for achievement with which I seek to inculcate my students. In my classroom, progress is punished as a lapse in tranquility. As a result, my students regard me as no schoolmaster at all, but as one of their own number, and by no means the least. In a word, ever thence ever thither.

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