The Departure (2022)

This is a journey above clouds.

You find a book with no title on it. The plain white cover is made of a thick but lightweight synthetic sailcloth, its roughness under your fingertips reminds you of the texture of a car seat belt. It can be flexibly bent, along with the rest of the pages that are secured with an over-sewn binding that exposes the threads. You open the book to pages of thin Japanese paper protected by the thickness of the cover. The paper used is translucent with a glossy finish that is unique compared to other traditional Japanese paper. The delicate material compels you to gently unfold the book with the utmost caution, for fear of creasing the pages. Like the delicacy required for unfolding, you know this book is one not to be analyzed, but to be experienced.

The first page of this book is the last page. Both pages mirror each other, simultaneously being the beginning and the end of this journey above clouds. If you open the book from left to right, as with most English language books, you would see a reduced photograph of airport take-off lanes printed in beige. The landscape is reduced to having only abstract shapes as if the photograph was over-exposed. Lines marking the take-off lanes converge into one single point, thinning into the horizon. Only the wing of an airplane appears and points to the same horizon. The last page is processed similarly but with a printed photograph of an airport door. You are uncertain if the door is the exit or the entrance.

You vaguely see the text on the next page through the translucent photograph. The first and last page are followed by an excerpt of Li Sao written by the poet Qu Yuan. The German translation is printed after the first page when reading left to right, and the Chinese text is printed vertically at the end. The placement of the text reflects the reading pattern of both languages and both sides of the book start with the same poem. Instead of the glossy Japanese paper that makes up the majority of the book, light and wrinkled Japanese paper is used for the poem, and it is half the width of all the other pages. Within the wrinkles, the vertical text, and a 2300-year-old poem, you can feel the centuries that have gone by under your fingertips.

There exist many ways to interpret the title of the poem — Li Sao. You might understand it as "Sorrows of Departure". "离"(Li) can be interpreted as 离别 (parting ways), and "骚" (Sao) as "愁思" (sorrows). Written after Qu Yuan was banished from the state, he wallows in deep grief over leaving his homeland. This theme of departing on a journey is continued on the next page, where you find the title of the book, Ohne Wolken (Without Clouds). It is printed on spinnaker cloth, a fabric often used as cloth for cruising or sailing. When you turn the page, the cloth creates a soft arch that resembles an arched sail piercing through the wind on a ship mast. The material itself is a voyage amongst wind and across seas.

All the text ends here, and now you are only left with imagery. A series of color gradients interchange with overexposed photographs of bridges and aerial views of cities. Because of the translucence of the paper, gradients and imagery build upon each other. A saturated turquoise blue at the bottom of the page blends into the color of the paper, becoming lighter until translucent. The picture of a bridge is behind the upper half of the page, above the turquoise, tricking you into seeing a bridge above water. You slowly rise above land as the pages turn. Below you becomes a panoramic view of the city, where buildings become dots, the streets you walked on become lego blocks, and wide rivers now look like thin ribbons. Soon even the city disappears.

A darker blue replaces the turquoise, and becomes pale towards the middle of the page, compressing into a line that resembles the bright horizon. With no clouds to disturb, there are no thoughts but the blue void in front of you. Knowing it is only a gradient of colors printed on paper, you are still convinced that you are above the horizon, traveling away from where you are. And you think of how the blue sky is formed by rays of light reflecting on particles, just as this blue gradient becomes what you see in front of your eyes. Seeing is an illusion. Don't you see? The blue darkens as you turn each page, and higher and higher you rise. You become closer to the vast blackness of space, the unknown void that darkens the blue sky. No longer fixated on where you are, you are now traveling alone at 600 miles an hour and over 40,000 feet above the ground. A thoughtless melancholy fills you.

Eventually, you return to where you started, the same bird's-eye view but of a different city. The single-color print does not distinguish day from night, so you imagine the city lights are flickering below you. On the final page is an airport door that tells you that the end of the journey is just the beginning of another. The poem also appears again, now in Chinese.

忽反顾以游目兮，将往观乎四荒

Suddenly I turn around to gaze at the distance, my eyes roam over the vast land

You are particularly drawn to this line in the poem, where Qu Yuan writes about his departure. He felt compelled to turn around for a final look at the vast view of his homeland that he left behind him. It was a journey with no return for him. Your mind wanders to a past departure, to the window view of the city you grew up in, and how the flickering grid in the dark became the last view you had of home. It still feels like yesterday doesn't it? An ineffable sorrow of departure makes you want to flip back the pages, travel above the horizon, across the bridge, and return to exactly where you started. Perhaps there, the porch light would be on, and someone would be at home changing TV channels, waiting to open the door.

But again you find yourself soaring, above the clouds.







Award: The Three Generations Prize for First-Year Writing (2022)
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