Let me remark modestly that my simulated thought almost always turns out better than the original. To continue the tennis analogy, my return improves on every hard shot. Of course, inside people’s heads every shot is a hard one. But what I can’t understand is - who serves all these shots? One of the people? Or should the server be sought in some completely different place, which isn’t even a place at all?
I’ll have to wait until I have a conversation on this subject with some intelligent person. Then we’ll see which way I drive the ball. That’s the way I’ve been discovering the truth for more than a thousand years now.
While I was finishing this thought, he had almost managed to remove my dress. I didn’t resist, I just raised the very ends of my eyebrows with a martyred air, like a little ballerina being raped yet again by a big red-necked SS man on her way to the philharmonia. What’s to be done, comrades - this is occupation . . .
Today, to be sure, the little ballerina had prepared for the encounter. I was wearing underwear - lacy white panties, in which I had cut a hole for my tail with scissors. And three identical lacy bras, size zero. The two lower ones had nothing to support, but they pressed into my body slightly and created a certain small content for themselves. Of course, I wasn’t actually trying to make any special concessions to lupine demands. It was an ironic postmodern comment on what was happening, a variation on the theme of the Beast that he had talked about so much during our last meeting.
I didn’t know if he would like my joke and I was a bit nervous. He liked it. In fact he liked it so much that he started to transform.
I wasn’t so scared this time and I studied the transformation more closely. First of all the grey, shaggy tail sprang out. It looked rather sexy - as if a spring that he couldn’t hold back inside his spine any more had suddenly straightened out. Then his body arched over and his tail and head jerked towards each other like the ends of a bow drawn together by an invisible string. And then he sprouted fur all over him.
The word ‘sprouted’ isn’t entirely appropriate here. It was more as if his tunic and trousers crumbled into fur - as if the shoulder straps and stripes were drawn in watercolour on a solid mass of wet hair that suddenly dried out and layered off into separate hairs.
At the same time, in some very natural manner, he inflated and grew. There are no wolves that large in nature, he looked more like a bear that has managed to slim a bit. But his body was real, physical and substantial - I felt its weight when he leaned his paw on my hand: it sank a long way into the divan.
‘You’ll crush me, you animal,’ I squealed, and he took his paw away.
He was obviously excited by the sensation of his own strength and my weakness. Leaning his huge, monstrous jaws down over me (his breath was hot, but fresh, like a baby’s), he bit through all three of my bras, pulling them off with his terrible hairy fingers.
My heart stopped every time his teeth clicked together so close to me. They were razor-sharp — I couldn’t think why he bothered to keep that Monica Lewinsky cigar-clipper on his desk. But then, I suppose he probably smoked cigars in his human form.
After doing the same thing with my panties, he pulled away from me and began growling, as if he was about to tear me to shreds. Then he went down on his knees in front of me and lowered his immense paws on to my fragile collarbones, like some infernal organist. This is the end, I thought.
But he avoided causing me pain. In fact, to my mind, he could have behaved a little more aggressively - I was prepared for it. But this wasn’t too bad either. I mean I’d geared myself up in advance for pain and suffering and was prepared to put up with more. However, the ordeal proved not to be as painful as I’d been expecting.
But I did things right anyway and groaned from time to time:
‘Oh, that hurts! Don’t pound so damn hard, you ugly monster. Gently, smoothly . . . That’s right.’
The letter from E Hu-Li was a long one.
Hello, Ginger,
So nice to see that you haven’t changed at all and are still trying to guide my lost soul out on to the true path.
You write that the clouds are gathering over your head. Are you serious about that? As far as I recall, the clouds have been gathering over your head for seven hundred years already; experience shows that in most cases you simply need to start thinking about something else. Maybe everything’s not so terrible this time either?
Do you seriously want to come to England? Do you think you’ll be better off here?
Understand this - the West is just one big shopping mall. From the outside it looks magical, fantastic. But you had to live in the Eastern Bloc to take its shop windows for the real thing. Perhaps that was the only meaning of your life - do you remember that Soviet song, ‘We were born to make the fairy tale reality’? That’s what you always did quite well - ‘in your head, in your head’, as the song goes. In actual fact, there are three roles you can play here - the buyer, the seller, or the product on the shelf. To be a seller is vulgar, to be a buyer is boring (and you still have to earn your living as a seller), and to be the product is repulsive. Any attempt to be anything else actually means ‘not to be’, as the market forces are quick to teach any and every Hamlet. All the rest is simply show.
Do you know what the secret horror of life here is? When you buy yourself a blouse or a car, or anything else, you have in your mind an image, implanted by advertising, of some wonderful place you will go wearing that blouse or driving that car. But there is no such wonderful place anywhere, apart from in the advertising clip, and this black hole in reality is lamented by every serious philosopher in the West. The joy of shopping cannot conceal the unbearable awareness that our entire world is one huge ski shop standing in the middle of the Sahara desert. You don’t just have to buy the skis, you have to buy the imitation snow as well. Do you understand the metaphor?
Apart from that, there is a specific difficulty for us foxes. With every year that passes it becomes harder and harder to maintain your identity and feel that you are a prostitute, so fast is everything else being prostituted all around you. If you hear an old friend’s voice speaking in confidential tones, you can be sure it is advising you to buy two bottles of anti-dandruff
shampoo so that you can get the third one free. I remember a certain word that you always used to try to introduce into the conversation whether it was relevant or not - ‘uroborus’. I think it means a snake biting its own tail. When that snake’s head and tail only exist as special effects in an advertising clip, it’s no great comfort to know that the body is alive and fat. That is, maybe it is a comfort, but there’s no one to experience it.
Your world will soon be like ours (at least, for those who are kept on to service the extraction and export of oil), but as yet it still has twilight zones where a salutary ambivalence is the rule. And that is precisely where a soul like yours can be, if not happy, then at least in balance. If these zones of ambivalence are created for you by others, then enjoy them while they still exist. The world will not always be like that. This is me preaching to you in response to your lectures.
Now about English men. Don’t judge them from your brief encounters in the National. They’re quite different here. Do you remember the writer Yuan Mei, whom our sister U married in 1739? I don’t expect you’ve forgotten him - a scholar from the Hanlin Academy who studied the Manchurian language and collected stories about evil spirits . . . By the way, he knew who our sister really was. That was precisely why he married her.
His book (it was called
What Confucius Did Not Speak Of
) is half made up of stories, but it also contains some intriguing ethnographic sketches. In those times England was known as the ‘Land of the Redhairs’. This is what Yuan Mei wrote about the English - I cite the passage in full:
‘407. INHABITANTS OF THE LAND OF THE REDHAIRS SPIT AT YOUNG SINGERS
The inhabitants of the Land of Redhairs often engage in dissolute behaviour with young singers. When they arrange their carousals, they invite young singers, undress them then sit round them and spit at their secret place. They do not require any greater intimacy. When they have finished spitting, they let them go, with a generous reward. This is called “money from the common pot”.’
This story, which might appear to be historically inaccurate, in fact reflects very accurately how an English aristocrat deals with a woman’s soul when it opens itself to him (fortunately, the system of privileged education here transforms most of them into homosexuals). Before, when I observed the English, I used to wonder what was hidden beneath that impenetrable
armour-plating of hypocrisy forged over the centuries. And then I realized - it was precisely that simple act. There is nothing else there, and that minimalism is what guarantees the stability of the order of things here.
Believe me, if you come to London, you will feel like a spittoon wandering alone among snipers who hawk and spit into your very soul, men for whom equality for women means only one thing - the chance to save a bit on ‘the money from the common pot’.
As for the
super-werewolf...
You know, it seems to me you have become too bogged down in introspection. Think - if everything that is most important were inside ourselves, then
why would we need the external world? Or do you believe that it no longer holds any possible surprises for you and it is enough simply to sit by the wall on a dusty meditation rug, pushing away the thoughts that crowd round you, like a swimmer pushing away dead jellyfish? What if one of them turns out to be a golden fish that grants wishes? I think it is still too soon to give up on this world - by doing that you might find you have given up on yourself. You know what my hubby said to me yesterday? ‘The super-werewolf will come, and you will see him as clearly as you see me now.’ Even if in my heart of hearts I agreed with you, how would I dare to argue with the head of the house of Cricket? :-=))). But let us discuss this when we meet, my dear. In a week Brian and I shall be in Moscow - don’t turn your mobile off!
Heads and tails,
E
When I finished reading the letter, I shook my head. Someone was in for it soon. The doodle :-=))), which looked like the war criminal Hitler grinning, was an ominous sign that E Hu-Li used - it meant that she had bleak and cruel intentions in mind. But what else was to be expected from the most pitiless fox in our entire family? She’s the same in everything, I thought. Ask her for help, and she advises you to think about something else. The clouds, she says, are just an illusion . . .
Although, perhaps she’s right? After all, things aren’t nearly as bad as I thought only yesterday. I was bursting with the desire to tell someone about the affair I had been forced to start. But who? Of course, I could spill the whole thing out to a taxi driver, and then make him forget what he’d heard. Only it was dangerous to play pranks like that on the road. No, I have to wait for E Hu-Li, I thought. She’ll certainly be interested in listening to me. And apart from that, she had been making fun of my virginity for so many centuries that it would be a pleasure to throw the news in her face. For all her sophistication, she had never had any lovers like that, except perhaps for one yakshi-devil in the sixteenth century. But compared to Alexander, even he seemed pitiful . . .
At this point I came back to my senses - my sister’s letter had reminded me about the most important thing of all.
I had known for a long time that the moment when you are overflowing with the joys or sorrows of life is the best time to practise meditation. I turned off the computer and laid out a foam plastic rug on the floor. It’s absolutely fantastic, a real gift for a meditator, it’s a shame there weren’t any in ancient times. Then I put a cushion filled with buckwheat husks on it and sat on the cushion in the lotus position, with my tail lowered on to the floor.
The spiritual practice of foxes includes ‘contemplation of the mind’ and ‘contemplation of the heart’. Today I decided to begin my session with contemplation of the heart. The heart plays no part in this practice, apart from a metaphorical one. It’s an accident of translation: the Chinese hieroglyph ‘xin’, which stands for ‘heart’ here, has many different meanings and ‘contemplation of the innermost essence’ would probably have been a more accurate translation. And from a practical point of view, it would have been more correct to call the technique ‘tugging the tail’.
Every child knows that if you tug a dog or a cat by the tail, they feel pain. But if you pull a fox by the tail, then what happens is beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent tailless monkey. At that moment the fox feels the full weight of all her bad deeds. This is because she uses her tail to commit them. And since every fox, apart from the total failures, has a whole heap of bad deeds to her name, the result is an appalling attack of conscience, accompanied by terrifying visions and insights so overwhelming that the fox loses the very desire to carry on living. The rest of the time our conscience doesn’t bother us at all.
A lot here depends on the strength of the tug and how unexpected it is. For instance, when we happen to snag our tails on a bush during a chicken hunt (I’ll tell you about that later), we also experience light pangs of conscience. Only while we are running, the corresponding muscles are tensed, and so the effect is not so pronounced. But the essence of the practice of ‘tugging the tail’ lies in giving your own tail a powerful tug at a moment when the area of the tail muscles is as relaxed as possible.