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Crying in a Public Restroom
By Zuo Fei/昨非
Even the rotten Romans
were allowed to weep at public baths
which led to the fall of their fortress
What a shame for me
not to be crying in my own bathroom
What a violation to find I'm all alone
wailing against the wailing walls of a public booth
and all this imagined crying together with you
is but a fantasy I create to soothe myself
Not to mention the harm I do
in lessening the efforts of that performance artist
who holed up in a filthy public suburban restroom
back in the late 1980s—
naked, coated with honey to trap flies
or maggots or whatever thrived in the summer
for thirty-six hours to see
if he could win the politics of protest
or defeat the will of God
For all this I cry even harder
for not having cried with him in that public toilet
and that he chose to humiliate us so with patriotism
and for not having saved him from the deception
that he could save us through the endeavors of art
June, 2021
The Backstory of “Crying at a Public Restroom”
By Zuo Fei/昨非
An interesting aspect of modern life is that we’re afflicted by both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. To escape a public place where the former rages, we retreat to a private space, only to find the latter preys on us, and to avoid the latter, we are forced to go back to the former. The circle goes on and on. A public restroom is the domain in which the two territories cross.There are many situations where we cry. As animals of tears, we can’t decide when to collapse; therefore, this happens to us often: we cry at a public place, say, a restaurant, which is a taboo for adults, so we rush for its restroom. Here’s the weird thing: you can let out more emotions there, for it’s supposed to be more private than a public square, but it’s still rather public, for there could be security cameras overlooking you—a kind of surveillance almost everywhere these days. This poem is about crying in such dilemmas. On one hand, one is keen to release what is bottled up, to cry like babies, like the Jews whooping under “the wailing walls,” where crying is not only justified but also cemented as a beautiful ritual, or like “the rotten Romans” weeping freely at their public bathhouse. On the other hand, since a public restroom is not as private as his “own bathroom," one inevitably feels "shame”. The freedom the Romans presumably enjoyed has been notoriously depicted in books such as The History and Fall of the Roman Empire and movies like Caligula. But for me, they were “rotten” also because of what Baudelaire would call Ennui, an essential ingredient of modern life, to be more specific, of modern urban life, which he relentlessly explored in such poems as “Spleen"—"even in baths of blood, Rome’s legacy/our tyrants’ solace in senility/he cannot warm up his shot corpse...” The Romans are to blame for “the fall of their fortress”; however, in this poem, I envy the Romans’ free willpower to express themselves. And in my eyes, their bathhouse, showcased in the unearthed Pompeii, is like a public square they used for freedom of speech.Alas, as a poet, I’m constantly under the spell of wild imagination and metaphorical associations. Actually, quite a few black-and-white movies I watched from the 1950s are about a sad love story set at Pompeii, the ruins. What is more disturbing when love and disaster are intertwined and Eros and civilization collide? So the poem was for someone who is bewitched and thus wrecked by love. But in many of my poems, personal life is usually mixed with public experiences. The public restroom, being a public sphere, was once used as a platform for democracy protests back in the late 1980s by a certain performing artist, and pictures of the performance may even be found in some photography books. So the narrative goes into politics and art.But for me, poetry is more than to narrate the story; it is to confront all the inexplicable complexities one goes through either in real life or in intellectual hypotheses. One may be crying for a personal reason and trapped in a public restroom, isolated because of not being able to cry over the shoulders of one’s lover or any sweet stranger; one may have the wild wish to cry along with the performance artist, who, stuck at a public toilet, arguably might be similarly lost, his cause of protest arbitrarily interpreted, and his career pursuit controversially challenged—we may not be saved by his sufferings or artistic means. Here is one more reason for the speaker to resonate with the performance artist: both of them feel agoraphobia or claustrophobia when confined in a public restroom. Baudelaire spared no efforts to translate Edgar Allen Poe, probably because he sensed the claustrophobia and agoraphobia presented in many of Poe’s works. The same force probably drove Water Benjamin to translate Baudelaire before he eventually took his own life at the border he could not push across. Translating Elizabeth Bishop the other day, I couldn’t empathize more with the “man-moth” she characterizes, who is tormented by the two phobias in the existential threat of living on a train. When talking about transforming civil disobedience into a piece of artwork, it’s hard not to notice the artist’s desire behind it: to change the ephemeral world into artistic eternity, as is shown by Shakespeare in Sonnet 18. The purpose for me to have crafted this poem is no other than to put mundane life into a time capsule, a parallel universe, that I can always step into to cry as the first time I did. Originally published in Mingled Voices 8: The International Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology 2023.
