Insight, the body. Sinuous it goes.

According to East Asian astrology, this is the year of the water serpent. I’m trying to understand what this means for my imagination of this year. Serpents. Sinuous, terrestrial. They know and observe according to different rationalities. I feel time might congeal for them where it runs past me.

I passed by these dragon statues near Chinatown on my walk home this evening. The dragons felt nude to me, exposed. I normally imagine them enclouded, outside of my total vision. They roam the skies, dwell in fog banks encasing hermetic mountaintops, slumber in taut, silent lakes. Aren’t these truly the totems of inspiration, insight, the knowledge that crashes down through us — what we can’t prepare for?

I feel that so much has already crashed down. This year will hopefully be a quiet year of recovery, of subtle, deep set and slow terrestrial movements. Of serpent tectonics that bring the sky down into the sea. Serpents as land dragons. Slowed down, distilled and more gentle for our encounter. Speak.

Sha told me he was prepared to give up being human.

What am I prepared to foreswear in order to enter this dark blue room, the other side of sight. To continue as I have is to be pinned to the sky — blind, mute, frozen, exposed. An iron curlicue. No new forms.