Cancer 19. A man memorizing Chinese characters.
The Chinese characters continued to enter his mind and fall away, then enter again, entering until they eventually stayed, lodged in his memory. At first they had seemed impervious to memorization, but as he worked to take them in he found patterns within them, and groupings, as he began to see how they hung together like strands of a spider’s web.
He loved learning old words that he later found in museum cases, carved in jade.
And as he took them in, his dreams began to fill with labyrinths and landscapes through which he wandered, where he met old sages and hermits and fishermen, and came upon rivers twisted like serpents, and mists, and forests, and mountains in them, steep as towers, until he found himself growing a beard filled with wind, his eyebrows becoming as bushy as clouds, and began himself to build poems out of these curious, painted brushstrokes.