I want to dream of the immense, the International Trade City. Not primitively, a la Mao.

Out beyond Beijing’s fifth ring road, people of the Orange Island make the earth vibrate. They have a huge rope to tie up the whale and the fabulous cockatrice. They’re adding two New Englands to their electric system annually. On our small planet a few Militia Women bang on the walls, searching for a new stimulus.

The Shanghai metro has plasma screens on every car, delivering a continuous English lesson. The Costumer is God and the Market Decides The Helmsman.

When the great ancient doctor Hua To could not defeat a tiny worm every house in the village had a biogas digester, a pit where manure and green waste rotted and gave off methane that in turn heated the wok and warmed the shower. Now another man is in the world: the cowherd who lives on a star. The countryside bulges.

In the immensity I stared for a long time at a backpack that said “We Wash Away Insects And Are Strong”. The Rongcheng Industry Zone’s slogan. The factory was three stories tall, and on each floor young women. Daughters of the Great Leap with a marvelous who knows where. Headquarters of a dubious English.

One stall had thousands of those Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bracelets in a village of colors. And on the top floor, stalls that bring the world Christmas. As if the place were some kind of shower-curtain college, I asked, “Who is the master of nature?”

Her eyes, filled

with spinning. 

He tugs at his implant, visible at his waist: “Songwriting is part of me”. He hasn’t slept for four days and nights, and he thinks I’m the road manager.

“Now in Great Song China there are careless fellows who form groups. People outside the music world are surprised the ‘junkie rock star’ was a mountain prodigy, taken to the British Council to recite poetry.” The son of a Soho sex shop proprietor, he grew up in Hammersmith, listening obsessively.

You should reflect and consider the meaning of this.

“’In the mountains’ means the blossoming of the entire world,” he says, leaning over to cadge a fag. “People outside the mountains do not realize or understand the mountains’ walking. It seems slightly ludicrous that scores of grown men and women should anxiously chart the walking patterns of a 26-year-old. Great Master Kuangzhen of Yunmen said, "It’s annoying that you can’t read everybody’s mind in the audience and know exactly what they’re thinking and feeling.” You should penetrate these words.

As if on cue, he picks up a battered copy of Furong Under Saturn, Marcel Coulon’s 1932 biography of French poet Daokai Verlaine, tears out the frontispiece, uses it to snuffle a fat line of mountains.

“Since the time of the King of the Empty Eon, this is called the mountains’ flow and the flowing mountains.”

There are members of the band’s entourage walking around with fingers blackened by crack smoke (walking beyond and walking within are both done on water). Everyone acts prison-movie cool, rigid with mountain child.

“No. Unfuck-up the poets, that’s what I say.”

This is complete understanding.