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Read this aloud:

"Paint a vermillion bamboo
with bright pigment"

You inhabit now the last real part of Jin Nong, a painter.

Read this aloud:

"Paint another one: an ink bamboo
using the other one as a model,
but don't do anything surprising."

His written instructions, as mentor, to Luo Ping.

A translation, and 251 years old, but you have expressed - imperfectly - Jin Nong. Resurrected him. Piffle to your reservations about the original language. He didn't say "orange pancake the candled carp". We are close enough to his intent.

Ideas, our words, are the only lasting part of us. No wonder the Christians make so much of logos - the word - and think us such recent beings. We achieved immortality of a sort when we learned to write.

But I say more. All of our biology becomes crudescence, but my Idea Part will last as long as the medium it rests within.  I say: it is no less me than my toe.

Put my toe in a jar. Pinched, it feels nothing, but is it any less my toe? Are my words, my expressions less than a toe? Did I not grow both?

When I wrote Jin Nong's instructions up there, I extended his human presence. Ditto copy and paste, and especially longhand. Another medium receives Jin Nong, and he lives.

It works for "bring home eggs" and it works for this, from the first recorded book:

(read this aloud)

"A sparing tongue is the finest treasure
among men; the well ordered tongue
has infinite charm."

Because I am a Reader my eyes move over the source and when I speak them I literally breathe meaning into the only life that lasts. Because I grasp syntax and have a vocabulary, and have read in approximate order our human struggle, I say aloud and gain a perspective, or disagree, feel blessed or repulsed. I speak aloud and I join the thought -- the writer -- and I extend the thought, the writer, myself.

Perhaps in a meagre or mundane way. Perhaps I add to myself alone, and I will never go further. Or I see that older time, I smell an orange or taste wine or feel barley under my hand. But when I say aloud I also hear an old voice in my own, one whose only living part lives again.

Say this out aloud:

"[when one] acts knowingly but
without premeditation it is an injury;
such are all acts due to temper
or any other of the unavoidable
and natural feelings to which
human beings are liable."

You and Aristotle are one. The real Aristotle and the real You. A rock on the moon did not grade the severity of human misconduct. Aristotle did. He survives.

I am a Reader and so the Early Me has given the Now Me priceless gifts. When I read Aristotle aloud my mind is quick, I connect with lightning. And something important stands up, a light grows.

My poor fingers are tasked with a slo-mo reveal. Bear with me.

At the first words I wonder for milliseconds at Hammurrabi and Solon, I feel the necessity of law, and I flash on some grimy night court in the Bronx, a weary judge, a tired bailiff. As I absorb "unavoidable and natural" a Lego-work forms, of the Buddha plus a memory of my own time in jail, at 14, one terrible night, my attackers; hate and compassion war in me for hundreds of milliseconds. I lose my way.

I must read it again, aloud, and I end up in a swamp, amid the cracked branches and broken stumps of injuries long past, my own cringeworthy errors, my own dishonesty and anger. My crimes.

But Aristotle hums in me. I calm. I find the shore; I am in the litoral wash of something larger; I am hungry, and I find and read aloud:

"Have compassion for all beings,
rich and poor alike;
each has their suffering.
Some suffer too much,
others too little. "

The Buddha lives within me.

I find and read this aloud:

"Knowledge and ritual
without compassion
is empty."

Jesus breathes in me.

I sit under the empty sky and before the full ocean of life and feel all of this. I speak with many voices, my breath is many breaths. Something of them, something greater, is in me now.

I am a Writer, so how do I say this?

Whose voice do I use to invoke this evanescence of my shame, my compassion, my intellectual achievement, all I understand and invoke from the long-dead? The fluorescence, the pollen that suffuses the light, the new sound on this ancient shore?

It must be the bailiff's. He casually shrugs, perhaps to a newly minted public defender, as she stands bruised and reeling from her first all-nighter with the hopeless, the venal, the dregs. On the steps of the courthouse, their shift over, he gives her a pat on the arm, and says:

(I say this out loud)

"Some of us always get the cart
with the broken wheel. Some of us?
'I turn the same way you do, every time' 
-- abbadee, abbadah -- and we can't
get past each other.
Some of us? We watch out."

He smiles at her. She will recall this later, in her heart, and many years later she will breathe his words to someone else. The bailiff dies; the bailiff lives; human justice and compassion endures.

Death stands at every corner, waiting for us to rush our last yellow moment of caution, but our words are beyond his reach, our ideas above his senseless head. He hears our hoots and notes only the sound of us, our love, or fear. Our struggle for meaning is incoherent to him. Death does not understand us.

We only understand each other.

When we say each other out loud, we say what is still Now. What is insensate -- the writer, long gone -- feels no commensurate part, and for this we grieve, for the dead writer, for ourselves. But we the living breath into each lasting Part our own new breath, bellowed, whispered, re-marked. New in us, and they still live.

I read this out loud:

"Reserve your right to think,
for even to think wrongly
is better than not to think at all."

-- and I remember Hypatia, pagan, the last director of the library at Alexander; she was skinned alive with sea shells by Christian zealots, as her scrolls burned. She burns in me, when I say her words.

Remember Jin Nong. As calling card, recommendation, and a reminder that he was not gone, Luo Ping carried a scrolled self-portrait by his old friend and teacher, who had written in its ample margin:

(say this out loud)

"[If you see] extraordinary men who,
hearing my name, want to know of me,
[you] ought to take this out -- and
show it to them, so they will know
I am still among the living."

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