On ‘An Inexperienced World’ by Sheng Keyi

I live to encounter phrases that have the power to undo me. Where these words go, or what I will do with them, is unknown. The Eucharist, some say, is a process of metabolising Christ. You internalise the living word until it erodes you, becomes you, until you are no longer yourself. It has been a long time since I felt this feeling. A kind of blindsiding because the words are too much; they don’t make sense, or, they make too much sense. Siri Hustvedt once said that she looks at paintings until she gets dizzy. ‘I don’t mean that in some poetic metaphorical way. I literally get dizzy.’ 

The woman in Sheng Keyi’s short story ‘An Inexperienced World’ is both dizzying and dizzied. She is ‘woman’ and she is ‘writer’. She both lives to become undone, and watches outside of herself. She cannot be both at the same time. This is what drives an urgent yet banal encounter with a younger man. The conversation is sparse, bitsy and totally uninteresting. Desire, in this moment, is not desiring discourse, but desiring desire: an inexperience to enter her wholly and render her speechless. 

Sheng Keyi’s writing is poetic the way teeth can be – something marbled or cold, something heavy dropped down a flight of stairs. Perhaps what I mean is, Sheng Keyi’s writing is lonely, and therefore, deeply hungry. The woman ‘lives alone. She has long been sexless.’ She reaches for things in the night. 

Experience has taught the woman to see at a glance how this or that meat would yield to the tooth; to gauge weight and height from the beast’s posture in flight; to accurately judge age by the sound of its cry; to know by its scent the purity or pollution of its soul.

I cannot help but think this sentence is something I will live to understand: that meat can yield, surrender; that experience is a tooth we sharpen by tearing. This is a story plagued with animals – the man a crane, the woman a lion – which reminds me of what Jennifer Chang said of Wong May’s poems, that they are ‘the animals…driven by the heat of instinct’. There is something about that heat that will always make hunger scriptless, singular, humiliating. Some people think desire is clean, purifying, whole. But now I think of this woman, reaching for something in the dark.