Qui zhijie over Ai Weiwei, as to art but not as to writing. If there is a warm body at the end of this Szechuan sizzle, know just how fully slaked the thirst for attention can be by the tacit sign or involuntary shrug. A buzzing bloom on high cheeks, not yet forgotten. A rapid tachy heart rate, a so called symptom but we know better as the pulse of faint long-distance recognition.

These maps of course are the ruins found in the shoring up of the outer territories. Letters are lost in the doldrums, when sucking limes or the aspirin-colored orange piths. Maps in need of refinement, their vulnerabilities being no more inviolable than an apothecary may surmise.

The year of the Monkey, the last occasion, if it can be called that, when a meaningful flood of images washed up. A prickling at the back of the scalp before certain banks broke and the swelling took root for real. Why were the schools so shoddily built and whose pocket was lined to make it so? How high the cost of accepting the opposite of excellence, cultivating the antithesis of craft. But that cost is cheap compared - compared to what? If the theodicy is the ping of the register on both sides of the superpower, perhaps our clash of the titans model isn’t much of a model and is really more of an alibi shadowing its own complicity?