This is a list of the notes I’ve been saving in my phone:
To do, books to send, addresses, recording notes
Things to get, summer school participants, El Salvador post
Another to do list, the cat album track order and a note on Patrick Wolfe

A list of additional symptoms I forgot to tell the vet about
Eight thoughts about fascism that seemed important to me to write out
A draft text to aliya from a fight that I don’t remember if I sent
A recipe for black bean dip that I lifted from a very old friend

There’s a funny thing that my nephew said to me
And in the same vein, something a student wrote in an essay
There’s a bit I was developing based on the characters in the show Zoobilee Zoo
And the details of a dream I had about being in a beautiful courtyard in Winnipeg too

And some thoughts on one of the many books I keep meaning to come back to
Called Selected stories by Lu Xun published by Peking press in 1972
The only one I’ve read before is the True Story of Ah Q
And since I haven’t read the others I’m gonna share a little bit of it with you

Keep in mind I haven’t read this story in years, if you’re a Chinese lit scholar
I read it as a graduate student with Tina Chen in like 2004
But I remember it being funny and sad and uncomfortable and strange
Who was this character, Ah Q, did he deserve our pity, our hate?

The story was first published in the early 1920s
The Qing dynasty had just been overthrown and it was chaos in the country
Lu Xun was part of a group of intellectuals who wanted China to look ahead
And of the opposite tendency, the character Ah Q was chosen to represent

Ah Q is absolutely and positively always full of shit
He’s a dumbass drunk and he’s self-righteous and he’s a hypocrite
And no matter how badly Ah Q manages to fuck things up
He always tells himself that by spiritual metrics he’s the truly holy one

But we’re not necessarily to hate poor Ah Q entirely
It’s pity we feel, as he is picked apart by the world, deluding himself to believe
That he is the author and the owner of his story
When in fact he’s a fool, both victim and perpetrator of every victory

Victory, because that’s how Lu Xun refers to his failures
Like when he finally wins at the gambling tables and gets robbed of all his silvers
Or when he gets beaten by a rich man in the street only to turn around
And bully someone else, to the roaring laughter of the people in the town

My memory of all of this might be hazy
But I think what Lu Xun was ultimately trying to say
Was that pride, ego and backwardness were not going to propel China forward
But dignity, intelligence and principle would make the country modern

There’s some stuff there I can appreciate and some not so much
But Mao called him a great thinker and a revolutionary so I’m gonna take a look
And see how Ah Q and the other stories hold up to my 20 20 eyes
But I’ll start tomorrow because I’m in bed beside the cat and I’m tired

It’s 24 hours later and I’ve scored a few victories like the legend Ah Q
Couple hours ago I was eating a crust of bread and I broke my fucking tooth
Just a crunch and a weird feeling and pieces of broken tooth in my mouth
I’m almost forty is this the kind of shit that’s gonna just happen now?

And frankly this bizarre experience was just a blip in the day I’ve had
I called my mother to fill her in on some concerning medical stuff with my cat
Only to find out that someone very dear to me lost a child a few nights ago
What she and her husband are going through, I honesty don’t know

Ah Q’s problem was that he was stuck in the past, not looking forward
But that was a hundred years ago and with Lu Xun I might need a word
Cos 2020 is the dam breaking over here, and when it comes to the future I’m afraid to look
I’m sorry man it’s not that I’m criticizing your book

It’s just that given the state of things the future is so uncertain
Everytime I think things are settling back and the better times are returning
Some new loss is right there waiting to knock me on my ass
And I’d like to widen the scope of this idea if you’ll give me a chance

Because I’ve never lived through a time when despair was so pervasive
If it’s not cops killing people is a virus that is raging
And if we survive the virus there will be more on the horizon
Because the planets burning up and we’re a long way from an uprising

That could change the fundamental direction this is heading
At least that’s how most people feel it’s like we’re all just getting ready
For a descent into absolute madness and misery
I mean when’s the last time you saw a happy future depicted in a movie

You ever wonder what it was like to live in Rome in the 400s?
How many people thought everything was fine until the goths arrived like thunder
And Rome had been so fucked for so long, feeding people to lions
Any wonder the empire fell at the hands of a ragtag Gothic alliance

And let’s be honest it’s fucking funny that it had to be the Goths
There were goth kids in my high school and I never probed them for their thoughts
On the decaying Roman Empire and what it might have been like to live
Through the cascading spiral of crises that culminated in the end of all of it

But I’m increasingly certain that that’s what we’re all about to go through
America’s a inch away from fascism, they’re overwhelmed in the ICUs
It’s not a recession we’re sliding into it’s another Great Depression
And there’s a lotta guns in that collapsing empire and trigger fingers flexing

Oh and don’t forget the coming war with China
I have no idea what it will look like and when but empires don’t usually go quietly
And I don’t normally associate Americans with graciously accepting defeat
It’s inter imperial rivalry time like it was in 1914

And this war won’t have a winner
Just a lot of dead poor people to determine which rich get to be the centre
Of the next century or less of capitalist accumulation
That’s assuming we don’t blow up the planet or flood it or some other aberration

So it’s strange to read Lu Xun a century after he was writing
How dramatically things have changed while at the same time in the cycle
We’re almost right back at the same point but on an entirely different plane
I’m doing dialectics in my head but honestly this shit is hard to explain

Point is, I think in spite of the chaos around him Lu Xun was full of hope
And I’d like to believe I can find the same if I keep reading what he wrote
So I’ll go back to Ah Q and if I find myself inspired
I’ll add a few last lines here like a diligent writer