NERVES IN CHILE 1: LI YI-QI CONSIDERS HIS REACTIONS TO THE DOINGS IN PARIS ON THE SIXTH OF FEBRUARY 1934

On the sixth of February nineteen thirty-four,
Boulevard Sebastopol, I was nervous amongst the drifters
the addicted the violent and the dim: 
what were they up to? shifting sheets of metal in the moonlight;
politics prejudice and mischief abroad, and I was nervous 
and the city night was beautiful; under the sodium arc lamps
skeletons glinted
under their trench-coats
reflecting the barricades
these men were constructing.
 
Did they call themselves royalists or traitors;
fascists or roundheads;
unconscious grand agents
or just secret armies? I was nervous:
beautiful was the countryside and,
odourless tasteless and colourless,
money, like the Holy Ghost,
was changing hands.
 
Now if you are addicted
to power and are not some Confucian scholar
with deformation professionelle and vomit
rising within you, you must be vicious like a tiger
and hover like a butterfly from flower
to flower, Gao-yong drunk;
know how to pass the thread
through the eye of the needle and
be familiar with the major administrative
documents of the Imperial court where
you will be presented at the death of the emperor.

I hope you understand the situation,
this is not like other countries. 
 
So if you would, please advance through the trees
and cross the water dressed in silks and satins;
go into the pavilion
and pass through the chambers
(they need not be large and fragrant flowers need not be many)
to take the oath of fealty; keep clear,
avoid banishment or surgical bleeding:
above all, do not slip your cable in a foreign land.

 
David Colledge, Santiago de Chile, Nov. 2002