editors’ letters—

The word is a dead thing.

It’s strange for such cold words to open a magazine of literature. Strange for me to write them as well. I don’t quite believe them (as a lover, a student, an acolyte of language). Yet the statement is that of an immovable fact. The word is a dead thing. A unidimensional, disappointing, half-hearted compartment for what it is meant to ascribe character to. It is a tragedy by the very definitions of its utility, the expectations we have assigned to its functions; how can the flat sheen of ink on the page conceive the raw generosity of reality’s sensations, what is green about those quiet five letters aligned, when in their evocation is meant to be the immense world of leaf, and olive, and the sea in certain light?

I pronounce the word dead because I want to say this: reading is an act of resurrection, with all the mystique and reverie that the notion of resurrection intuits. In the reception of a sentence, a verse, or a paragraph, the word passes through the gray and shifting weather of signification to meet all the multiplicitous natures of phenomenon again, as they latch on to the contours of the mind which holds all the things previously felt, and known, and perhaps loved. There is nothing rosy about the word rose, no perfume or oscillating folds of petal. It is you, the reader, who gifts the word that ever-deepening world of ideas, sensations, and memories. 

In our seventh volume—the only one to come out of the wild tumult of 2020—there is a range of living beings that run through the inner prose and poetics. From the discernibly, desperately human, to the otherworldly, to the siren call of nature-things, to the decidedly dreamed. The words that beckon these elements to life are quiet within these pages, but should you turn to them, they will play for you their formidable, inimitable music.

Someone questions the invisible infrastructure of this world. A couple is overwhelmed by the militarial menace of their objects. A fox is “passing through death to arrive at / a forest of birches”. A shopkeeper encounters a grotesque manifestation. There is a September full of looking. In a continuation from our last issue, we touch death once again in the town at the end of the world. Between the texts of past and present there are words that take flight amongst the clouds. In the most desolate of places people are still getting through the winter. A childhood emerges from the variegating forms of many trees.

The art of this issue, done by the prodigious Limgcu, is treading and probing the thin façade between what is known, and what is dreamed. The creatures that inhabit her work are not quite like us, but they are not so different still. On the cover, the young woman who is hesitant to put the phone to her ear seems tired of surprises, in a year that has been nothing but shocking. I received a call from a stranger, and it seemed to me something similar to what is in your magazine, she said to me, when I asked her about from where this artwork came.

A call from a stranger. Or as Qige Tuoma says in his author’s note, “an important phone call made to god.” It is when we want to tell someone something that our words are most alive. In the process of gathering these works, translating them, aligning them within their pages. . . the pressed language has always been patient to be given life again. We entrust the task now to you.

—XIAO YUE SHAN

2020 was a peculiar year; if one were to say that it had been emblematic of descension, a locking-in, an imprisonment, then the works collected in this issue are filled with instances of wandering, exile, and redemption. This, for our bodies which have so many confines, could be considered a sacred instance of comfort and salvation.

Having experienced forty years of the technological revolution, twenty years of the internet age, and now facing the exhaustion amidst the bright aftermath of modernization and urbanization—where are we meant to situate the soul in all this? In Xie Juexiao’s collation of poems, “Small Town Factories”, he performs this interrogation with certainty and depth. Regarding Qige Tuoma’s poems—such as “Dante’s Request”—they contain a singular style, a rare tone of speculation, guiding us in the search for internality, as if entering into a communication and a comprehension with the heavens; they elucidate the purpose of poetry as a method of self-inquiry, of spiritual investigation, comparable to the elevated aesthetics of Rilke or Mallarmé but equally analogous to the existential axioms of Qu Yuan and Dong Po. In a contrasting originality are Liu Waitong’s short poems—simultaneously bold and sonorous yet reluctant to reveal, excavating the individual’s destiny from the epoch, capturing the startle of spiritual awakening. Zhu Yiye’s short poems also arrive from the fragments of a journey taken, but with equal attention paid to the true sentiments of individual life.  

The fiction of this issue can be seen as a correspondence and an extension of the ars poetica. In A Yi’s short story, “The Younger Cousin”, he uses both the secrecies of metaphor and the clarifying brushstrokes of doctrine to delineate the psychological degradation inevitable in the deluge of an excessive materialist age; how, in its procession, superficial value can metamorphose into morality—similar to the psychological disturbance and spiritual collapse in the way of Kafka or Howard Schultz. Coincidentally, Wen Zhen’s short story, “Item Log”, also probes this topic, but applies instead an angle of daily platitude to sketch a floating no man’s land in which material—no matter how exorbitant—cannot be “broken away from”. The other two stories, through divergent lenses of complexity and simplicity, speak of the two realms of reality and dreams. Lin Zhao’s prose, excerpted from her novel, portrays the elaborate smoke-work of cosmopolitan living—the folds, rotations, and back-and-forths of atmosphere, colour, and noise; its intense embroidery of cultural detail can be seen as a tribute to the particularities of Lingnan, and its groundbreaking literary style is emblematic of the artistic insights that emerge only from textuality. Li Tang’s work, “The Town at the End of the World”, uses deceptively simple framework to construct the architecture of a surreal, imagined world, populated with hummingbirds that make wine and blue-skinned tigers, inundating us with the peace and contemplation that arrives at the end of a world. 

Of course, regarding the essay—which lives between poetry and fiction—it is a reverence and a singing that occurs in the middle ground of truths and imaginations. Zhu Ge’s piece, “Rest Stop in the Clouds”, unabashedly displays this quality. Mutually informed by tradition and contemporariness, borrowing from the contents of the classic “Watching the Snow in the Mid-Lake Pavilion”, this text enters into a delimited arena of speech. Everyone espouses the same cliches of nature’s intelligences—but it turns out that the unknowing is not limited to Zhang Di and the people of Jinling, but also the author herself. 

Spittoon, as a bilingual magazine of literature, works towards the introduction of contemporary Chinese letters, in equal focus of renowned, established authors, as well as the experimental works of brilliant up-and-comers. Regarding the interconnected nature of worldly things, these pieces all respond to universal values, and find themselves also in alignment with our dominating philosophy: it appears to be an archaeology of ancient earthly knowledge—the stars are vast, but what one looks at is the entirety of the universe. What literature necessitates is faith in one’s own imagination, and imagination—as told by Matthew Stevens—is our most precious possession. 

—ZUO FEI