Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

The Miracle of...

to the common folk from down below. And the Emperor himself, being of superior rank and awesome dignity, soared in spirit upon his visitation of his monument and, upon gazing into his own face, was greatly mortified. It was then that the devious Chim Pan-zee commanded that a tower be built out of elephant ivory opposite the monument and, having thus diminished the memory of his most immediate predecessor, he then had the sculptor Chu immured within the tower’s face, providing him with but a single tiny window immediately opposite the contorted mug of the baboon. One story below him, at the level of the donkey, he had those poets incarcerated, whose poems, as the legend proclaimed, the donkey had sported under his arm. Peering out of their windows, the disgraced poets, seeing naught but the donkey’s mug, continued to compose their odes to his perspicacity. And this became the origin of that renowned expression regrading the tower of ivory. History tells us that, in meditating upon the confluence of rivers, the Emperor Chim Pan-zee came down with hydrocephaly and slipped into his grave, and was replaced by yet another E Li-fan, and thus the era of the Great Extraction of Mountains began. It was decreed that the ivory tower be magnanimouly disassembled to be utilized in the construction of the mountains, and the poets scattered this way and that, and the sculptor Chu continued walking a long time after that doubled over crookedly, fearing to look into the face of any and all passersby. Afterwards, he departed into the not yet

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