Dictee

The chapter begins with a series of Chinese characters numbered 1-10 with no translation or context provided. The text on the right hand side describes a moment while the narrator sits in a congregation and is arrested by the thought that magnolias bloom white even on tree branches that look dead. The text shifts to describe the process of a seed growing: Before it can emerge from the depths, the seed grows its root in a deep silence for a long period of time that seems to exist outside of time itself. The process requires much waiting and long period of darkness in a place where “no access is given to sight” (156). During the period of anticipation, the narrator describes an eclipse as a pearl-like light, or a “nacreous” (157) light, that creates its own light and “its own larger time” (157). The narrator describes the root growing deeper and deeper as sound begins to emerge, and with sound, time begins.

There is a mysterious object that the narrator holds and moves around the palm, and gradually it is revealed that this pearl is the entire earth itself. The narrator makes the seasons occur with the movements of the object in the palm through the cardinal directions.