Tse Hao Guang
Issue 2: Vanishing, January 2024
to the towering city of books with a faint heart and the ripple of my face in a pool of rainwater, water which is like the wisdom of the ancients whereas the wisdom of the moderns is like light striking the sign of the dimsum restaurant, wooden dragons & everywhere lanterns & the crossing hands of the clock which are the only things at peace in this crowd— who could tell me what happiness is or if it is even the right thing to want, a building to fit a single man, a success to succumb to, an additional eye to improve your face with?; I have twelve fingers & a mother & am complete, the subject of my own image—I remember the rainpool, reflecting shadows & revealing the spirit—it splits me into six and shows at least I have a whole & I arrive at the tower whose floors chitter with untranslated dialects, balancing its holy nights with profane days that take too long to end quickly; someone screams good luck have fun & I count its birthdays one by one as I ascend to the popular floor, good luck have fun, remember if the beginning of art is its end it is a single-word poem: in a used bookshop I can’t say love without being misunderstood, talk about the sky as if it remained a mystery that wouldn't be tread on, my victories must be won head hung, a great deal made reluctantly, like wishing a diabetic good health or for a lazy dog to stop the quick brown fox jumping: the whole of humanity holds its breath as the dog stretches its paw, the grace of humanity! to find myself here at the end of the world I need to bring back some kind of wisdom, right? some reward, every wish for a prosperous year ahead or for long life, you have to have a book for that, right?
Process Notes
I was drawn to the “new language” Jialei created in her scroll, and I decided to begin by taking screenshots of each glyph. Then, I ran each glyph from top-right to bottom-left through MiniGPT4, an AI model that has a limited ability to describe, in text, any image that is uploaded to it. The model returned “translations” of each of the glyphs like so:
The image shows a Chinese character for the word “smile” written in black ink on a piece of paper. The character is composed of two horizontal lines at the top and two vertical lines at the bottom, with a small circle in the center. The circle is surrounded by a series of smaller circles, which form the character’s eyes and mouth. The character is written in traditional Chinese calligraphy style.
Of course, I regenerated responses when I felt they were too repetitive or uninteresting. I then used these “translations” as the basis for my poem—turning each six-character group of glyphs into a single long line.
In response to
Zheng Jialei’s Breathing, Gasping, Words Stuck in My Throat
Tse Hao Guang is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2023) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015, SLP shortlist). Poems and essays appear in The Yale Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.
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