There is a man in a bad quality pin-stripe suit reading Introducing Marx in front of me on the Tube. The suit has big buttons at the cuff, and his shirt is open to show a hairy chest on his thin frame, below his pointy nose.
All these people. Sometimes you stop, surprised that so many souls can exist, can have bodies all at the same time. Six billion humans on the Earth now. Not so long ago, London and Paris had 200 000 inhabitants each, King George III was growing slowly more mad while the calls for revolution started echoing after the first one that would beget the last one in France. The Colonies were getting lost in the US, and in Sweden, a king was shot at the theater but died less theatrically three days later in his bed, from the septic wounds. The tsar ruled Russia with iron hand in iron glove while Daoist wizards walked carefully through corridors of intrigue in the palace of the Emperor, in the Forbidden City run by eunuchs while people starved outside. A young slave named Yang Luchan came to an insignificant dusty village in central China and accidentally saw the village clan members train a strange martial art by moonlight. Stockholm had 20 000 inhabitants; cows roamed in the streets. Coffee-shops were coming to Europe, especially London, in big numbers, and so much dissent and intelligent discussion was talking place there that the authorities often shut them down.
In 1721, vaccination against small pox finally comes to general use in Europe after being imported to Turkey from China, after being used there for at least 800 years.
In the 1700´s it´s 700 years since China invented moveable type. Of the last and great printed compilation of the Daozang, the Daoist Canon from 1444, during this time there is only copy left, and due to politics it has been moved from the Forbidden City where the then emperor oversaw the compilation-work, and is now guarded deep inside White Cloud Temple in Beijing. One of the greatest herbal pharmacopeas is still in print, 300 years after it´s original edition. It contains 61 739 herbal recipes and 239 illustrations.
A jesuit sinologist and friend of Leibnitz, who invented binary code, introduces Leibnitz to the concepts of yin and yang and the soft and broken lines of the Yijing through letters in the mid-1700´s.
There is a homeless man selling Big Issue by the doors of Charing Cross Station. I give him back the copy I bought from him, so he can re-sell it and get a little more money for food and shelter. I haven´t bought extra coffee and given to homeless people this time: can´t afford to do it right now.
Makes me remember one of the poems I wrote inspired from Du Fu, the chinese Tang poet, who had a lifetime of sorrows and misery in a China rift by civil war.
Kindness to old horses
You sit there, tired and worn,
on the edge of yet another road,
your coat too tightly shut, your hands sticks
over an all too small fire,
all dreams of warmth are gone.
In the old days they used to be kind to old horses,
you write,
they didn´t send them out on long journeys.
My heart aches for you, old poet:
the one who have felt cold bite
knows how strong the hunger for heat
is in our breast.
Daniel Skyle © 2010
