What If?

"My Lord, where do you live?

Your servant lives in Hengtang",

Boats pause, just long enough to ask a question

And what if they were both from the same village?

-Anonymous

Beautifully consistent with the East Asian aesthetic tendency to compress vast spaces and entities into breathtaking, comprehensible miniatures, and thereby serenading the audience with a semblance of panorama and magnanimity (consider scenic portraits and banzais), this simple quatrain achieves that precise effect through the magic of language – The polar opposites of the pronominal “me” and “you”, creating a vastness within the poetic textuality which frames the imagery of a placid river, upon which drifts the characters’ fishing boats. Notice how such a compression of essence should never be confused with the onerous and mechanistic, albeit similar task of cartography. What is truly charming, however, is the creation of an almost wistful hope for coincidence, when the boatmen ponder the possibility that despite chancing upon each other in the poetic vastness and flux of the aesthetic landscape, their point of origin might after all be the same. Hence the minor ripples of a threat to collapse the entire miniature universe constructed within the text; hence the tension and the deliberate non-resolution of a thought provoking philosophical situation; hence the dynamism through which forces and relations inherent in the conceived vastness of the subject matter are successfully preserved and elucidated.