A Sojourn in the One-Armed Country

“The Country of Singlearm lies to the north. Its people have one arm and three eyes. Their eyes have a dark Yin part and a sunny Yang part. The people there ride piebald horses. There is a bird there which has two heads; it is scarlet and yellow. These birds stay by the side of these people.” – The Classic of Mountains and Seas

When I read these lines of sacred geography I resolved to end my isolation and go to the northern country of Singlearm and see if those ancient people remained, and if they might teach me. Bidding farewell to my sorrows I grabbed my stick and walked along deerpaths and forgotten creeks, along the curve of the moth’s tongue and of the ammonite’s shell, through tunnels dug in the sky by forgotten moles and the forgotten snakes that hunted them. Gibbons called my name from the hills, promising curious pleasures, but I was not distracted.

When I came to the edge of the Singlearm country, I passed through a thicket of big ferns that parted for my path, with a perfume of tinkling gems and bird-shaped lights. The crescent moon was passing between the antennae of the Centipede, but the country it illumed was flat and bare, and only doublearm people roamed around, with a dreary look and weary fingers in the air, tracing out the same symbols, pacing the same constellations, hoping an apple might roll their way. But very few apples rolled their way.

On a hill overlooking the land stood a statue of bronze, of a two-armed, two-eyed man, leaning on a blood-encrusted sword. I read the memorial plaque beneath it- “Sir Josiah, who settled this place and exterminated the savage singlearms.” I wept for many days, until a woman said to me, “Don’t weep, but follow me.”

She took me up the river on the boat, with cormorants that kept diving and bringing up knives that they dropped with a clang in a bucket. At last we stopped in a grotto where a solitary lychee tree grew and she led me under it and told me to look up. Indeed on every branch I saw the birds perching with two heads, scarlet and yellow. And suspended from lychee stems so many eyes were growing.

Taking down an eye to plant it in her forehead, my guide blinked at me and said, “this is my eye.” And on one side the moon swam with all his tigers and his dim delights; on the other side ran the sun with her coterie of dragons and angry eagles. “And look,” she said, “my one arm is false,” and she detached one arm and showed me it was made of bamboo. “We are Singlearms still,” she said, “but every morning the statue of Sir Josiah goes roaming round the country looking for us, and if he finds any Singlearms he disembowels them right there.”

Then someone in the rocks was playing a zither, and singing, so we climbed up to where a gnarled pine jutted out and beneath it on a bed of pine needles a little creature sat with its long instrument, robed in green spidersilk. Its face was long and thin and curved like a wren’s beak, and its hands that moved so finely each bore three fingers and three possum tails in alternation. The zither itself was a solid block of blue lacquer and the strings were eels stretched taut.

The musician paused and looked at us with eyes on spiral stalks. “I’m so hungry and what I love more than anything is a good knife from the river.” So I brought up the bucket of knives from our boat and spread them at the musician’s feet. One by one it dropped them down its long throat and when it was finished, it played and sang this song, and its voice was like armies clashing in a cavern:

In the hill there is a moth
with wings like human toes.
Its sole delight is fresh red paint;
its toenails cut through bronze!

I asked my guide if she had ever seen this moth- she nodded yes, and said, “Let’s lure them to the statue, and let them do their work.” And we went out at night with a pail of red paint, and daubed some on Sir Josiah’s arm, and some on the statue’s forehead. Then in the morning when the statue arose it looked at its reflection in a pond and saw one arm was carved clean off, and an eye was carved in his forehead. And so he disemboweled himself right there, and if you place your hands on the bronze entrails it shall cure your pleurisy or incontinence. The people cast off their false arms and piled them around the statue, and now they have grown into very tall bamboo, so it is called Disembowelment Grove.

If you visit Singlearm now, you will see that the good people ride about on piebald horses with the two-headed birds singing round them. In their one arm they pick flowers or grasp wands; where the false arms were, a viewless appendage extends into the sky and arranges the stars in new constellations. The pavement’s erupted with flowers and sturgeon, and atop the overgrown buildings a cat with one head and three bodies strolls, predicting the weather by the patterns of its tails.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas further states that long ago in this place, Xingtian challenged God for supremacy; God beheaded him and buried him in the hill. But now Xingtian dances with an axe and shield atop the hill, his nipples become his eyes, his navel become his mouth.

I have shed not one, nor two, but many false arms, grown or attached over ages of servitude, and found many forgotten eyes to see with. The people were kind enough to teach me the language of the two-headed birds that follow me too, now. This is what they sing to each other:

The empress with trout in her hair
reclines on the mountain, her tresses connecting
two lakes that never have met
since the glacier abandoned them here.
Down the slopes her curls are tumbling,
up her curls swim the scintillant fishies,
my trout greeting yours in the scaly refraction,
in the mingling waters,
your murk meaning no deception,
my clarity unintendedly honest.