Seiobo There Below

2584. SCREAMING BENEATH THE EARTH

They scream in the darkness, their mouths gaping open, their protruding eyes covered by cataracts, and they scream, but this screaming, this darkness, their mouths and their eyes cannot be spoken of now, only circumambulated with words, like a beggar with his palm extended, for this darkness and this screaming, these mouths and these eyes cannot be compared to anything, for they have nothing in common with anything that can be put into words, so that not only is it impossible to describe or convey, in the language of humans, their concealed dwelling-places, this place where the lord of all is this darkness and this screaming; it is only possible to proceed above it, or more cogently, to wander there above, that is possible, while having not the faintest idea of where the thing is that one wants to discuss — somewhere down there below, that is all that we can say, so that perhaps it would be wisest just to take the whole thing and forget it, take it and not force the issue anymore; but we don’t forget because it is impossible to forget, and we force it, for this screaming does not cease of its own accord, no matter what we do, if we have heard it once, for example — between Dawenkou and Panlongchen, after Longshan and Anyang and Erlitou — this happened: seeing the statues glued together from the shards, the green bronze slabs with the drawings, it is enough to see these artifacts, just one time, for that inhuman voice to be lodged forever in the brain, so that one then begins to wander: the knowledge that they are there is insufferable, insupportable, just as is that desire to see their dreadful beauty at least once, in short, that is, generally speaking, how we set off, we push off on our journey through the regions of the one-time Shang Dynasty from a point selected entirely at random, it doesn’t matter from where or at what time, one choice is as good as another, for we don’t even know where they are, either confidently or obscurely, yes, we say, sometime between 1600 and 1100 years before Christ is where we have to set off on our journey, walking somewhere along the Huang He riverbank to the East, proceeding with the river’s current toward the delta and the sea, and never getting too far away from the riverbank, where the renowned capital cities were, that is where you have to go; roughly from 1600 to 1100 BC, the place of the dissipated memory of the cities of the Shang emperors, Bo and Ao, Chaoge and Dayi Shang, Xiang and Geng, imperial cities now vanished for at least 2800 years, where we say China but think of something else — if we do not wish to delude ourselves and mislead others, as they, the Chinese, have done themselves for several thousand years now — because it is only since the Qin Dynasty that it has been called China: as if China, Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, or in other words the World, were one unified whole, as if it were one Country, which actually it never was, for in truth there were many kingdoms and many peoples, many nations and many princes, many tribes and many languages, many traditions and many borders, many beliefs and many dreams, that was Zhongguo, the World, with so many worlds inside of it, that to enumerate them, trace them, recognize them, or understand them is impossible with one single brain — that is, if one is not the Son of Heaven — and even today it is impossible, one can only spin fabrications, blather and jabber nonsense, as anyone will do, setting off on the lower banks of the Huang He roughly between 1600 and 1100 BC, along the so-called “bends” of the Huang He, saying to himself, here I am in the Shang Empire, here I am going East, this is Chaoge here, or perhaps Dayi Shang, here below my feet, and the only truth in that statement is that they really are there somewhere below the earth, despite all of the accidental discoveries of the Dawenkous and Anyangs and Erlitous, uninvestigated and invisible, they are hidden deep below the earth in the darkness, and with their mouths opened wide they scream, the graves they were meant to serve collapsed onto them long ago; and collapsing in layers, buried them completely, so that they became walled into the earth, among the stolons, the ciliates, the rotifers, the tardigrades, the mites, the worms, the snails, the isopods, the innumerable species of larvae, as well as the mineral deposits and the deadly underground gullies — walled in, condemned to this final immobility, even if they hadn’t always been that way, they are now motionless in their screaming, as their gaping mouths are already crammed with earth, and before their cataract-clouded bulging eyes there is not even one centimeter of space, not even a quarter-centimeter, not even a fragment of that quarter, into which these cataract-clouded bulging eyes could stare, for the earth is so thick and so heavy, from all directions there is only that, everywhere earth and earth, and all around them is that impenetrable, impervious, weighty darkness that lasts truly for all time to come, surrounding every living being, for we too shall walk here, every one of us, when the time comes, we who wander here among the unfathomable vastness of the Chinese millennia, we think to ourselves, so this was their Empire, here is the Shang Dynasty, and we wander along the enormous, hypotheticized splotches of their one-time capital cities, picturing to ourselves what is below the earth, where all that was Shang is sunken below; we cannot imagine anything, just as it is not possible to capture anything with words, it is impossible to bring them out of the depths through imagination, for those depths below us are unapproachable, as are the depths of time and its howling; they cannot be reached through any kind of imagination, the route is blocked already at the starting point, for so dense is that earth below the Shang Dynasty — roughly from 1600 to 1100 BC, beyond the bends of the Huang He, by the lowest river-reaches as it flows toward the delta and the sea — that imagination is blocked and cannot get to that place where they stand, in pieces, leaning to one side, corroded by the acids, almost unrecognizable, for only those who might have seen something during the perilous tomb desecrations known as the “excavations” at Dawenkou, Panlongchen, Longshan, Anyang, and Erlitou know how terrifying they were when still in one piece, how they were fear itself, and how those who made them did not realize with what terrifying strength they had expressed what was granted to them beyond eternity, below the earth, what it is like if everything in this dense earth is crushed together in the complete and final darkness; they, the artisans of the Shang Dynasty, perhaps then only wanted, when they formed the giant gaping mouths, the bulging clouded eyes, for these statues and bronze objects to be placed at the entranceways or within the inner chambers to preserve the tombs of their dead, to protect them by frightening away the malignant forces, to hold the Earth-Demon at bay, for the people of the Shang Dynasty possibly thought that the graves must remain inviolable; they could have thought that there should be a connection between the dead and the empire of death, but they could not have considered how time goes on even further than its own promised eternity — they could not have considered how time would also extend dreadfully from their own age into the vastness of eternities, one after the other, where even the possibility of remembering who is lying here with their hun souls is extinguished; they could not have considered that almost nothing would remain of the graves, the dead, the hun soul, of themselves, their empire, or even the memory of their empire; in the ravages of time from nothing, almost nothing remains, everything that once was, disappears; the Shangs disappear, and the graves disappear with them, here by the lower reaches of the Huang He, along the bends toward the delta and the sea, and nothing else remains, only the screaming and the darkness under the heavy impressure of the earth, for the screaming, that does remain; they stand there below in their ruined graves, stand in tiny pieces leaning to one side, eaten away by the acids, wedged into the earth, but in their wide-gaping mouths the scream does not cease, it somehow remains there, broken into pieces, and yet through the millennia, that scream of horror, the single meaning of which nonetheless extends up until today, telling us that the universe below the earth, the locus of death, below the World is a colossal overfilled space, that that place where we all shall end most certainly does exist; that the World, life, and people will all come to an end, and it is there they will end, below, this time here below, below the dreams of the Shang, in the grave-statuary broken to pieces and the screaming of the bronze-cast animals, for there are animals below the earth, perhaps in immeasurable quantity, pigs and dogs, buffalos and dragons, goats and cows and tigers and elephants and chimeras and snakes and dragons, and they are all screaming, and not only are there cataracts in their bulging eyes, but they are all blind, they stand leaning to one side in pieces and corroded from the acids around the collapsed graves, and blindly they scream in the darkness, they scream that this was awaiting them, this awaited the Shangs, but that up there above, the same fate awaits us, it awaits us who now reflect upon the Shang, the horror, which is not just the residue of some cheap fear: for there is a domain, that of death, the dreadful weight of the earth pressing in from all sides which has entombed them, and which in time shall devour us as well, to close it in upon itself, to bury, to consume even our memories, beyond all that is eternal.