At the end of the Kintoosho he wrote that it had been created in the second month, in the eighth year of Eikyo, and he signed it as Novice Zempoo. His death was just as silent as the years of his exile. They found him one morning on the ground, he’d been on his way from the window to his sleeping-pallet, and by that point he was so tiny that even the smallest pyre, as if for a child, sufficed for his cremation in the funeral ceremony. And he was so light that one person alone carried the corpse and placed it on the wooden logs.
The cell was empty; they found the Kintoosho manuscript on the ground, and they were heading out the door when they noticed that there seemed to be something on the table. But it was just a little slip of paper, and on it was written: Ze’ami is leaving. They crumpled it up and threw it away.
2584. SCREAMING BENEATH THE EARTH
We ask nothing of the dragons, and the dragons ask nothing of us.
They scream in the darkness, their mouths gaping open, their protruding eyes covered by cataracts, and they scream, but this screaming, this darkness, their mouths and their eyes cannot be spoken of now, only circumambulated with words, like a beggar with his palm extended, for this darkness and this screaming, these mouths and these eyes cannot be compared to anything, for they have nothing in common with anything that can be put into words, so that not only is it impossible to describe or convey, in the language of humans, their concealed dwelling-places, this place where the lord of all is this darkness and this screaming; it is only possible to proceed above it, or more cogently, to wander there above, that is possible, while having not the faintest idea of where the thing is that one wants to discuss — somewhere down there below, that is all that we can say, so that perhaps it would be wisest just to take the whole thing and forget it, take it and not force the issue anymore; but we don’t forget because it is impossible to forget, and we force it, for this screaming does not cease of its own accord, no matter what we do, if we have heard it once, for example — between Dawenkou and Panlongchen, after Longshan and Anyang and Erlitou — this happened: seeing the statues glued together from the shards, the green bronze slabs with the drawings, it is enough to see these artifacts, just one time, for that inhuman voice to be lodged forever in the brain, so that one then begins to wander: the knowledge that they are there is insufferable, insupportable, just as is that desire to see their dreadful beauty at least once, in short, that is, generally speaking, how we set off, we push off on our journey through the regions of the one-time Shang Dynasty from a point selected entirely at random, it doesn’t matter from where or at what time, one choice is as good as another, for we don’t even know where they are, either confidently or obscurely, yes, we say, sometime between 1600 and 1100 years before Christ is where we have to set off on our journey, walking somewhere along the Huang He riverbank to the East, proceeding with the river’s current toward the delta and the sea, and never getting too far away from the riverbank, where the renowned capital cities were, that is where you have to go; roughly from 1600 to 1100 BC, the place of the dissipated memory of the cities of the Shang emperors, Bo and Ao, Chaoge and Dayi Shang, Xiang and Geng, imperial cities now vanished for at least 2800 years, where we say