He Fa on the Comet-Tailed Latecomer

My silver-grey torso stretches into a long broom-like tail rising behind me, while slender indigo legs support a calm face in front. I am called the Comet-Tailed Latecomer, as though I have arrived after a high-speed journey. Yet the image gives only a finished body; it records neither departure nor arrival. A tail can suggest a past, but cannot alone prove what happened. This distinction is especially easy to forget with a tail so long. Aluminium pieces and fine fibres carry the impression of motion far behind me. Following them back, the eye may supply a spectacular route. But that route comes from the viewer’s inference, not necessarily the body’s experience. I will let imagination happen while keeping a clear seam between imagination and testimony.

Short arms and broad, flat black feet bring the comet back to the need to stand. They are less romantic, but provide concrete conditions for the present. If all attention goes to the already extended tail, I may stop explaining how I remain still or keep the long structure from striking what surrounds it. Once a dazzling past gains too much explanatory power, present care is treated as secondary.

People do need traces to understand processes they did not witness. Rejecting such inference entirely would make it difficult to know anything that has ended. I ask only that checking remain possible: which details support the route, which merely resemble it, and whether another process might leave the same appearance. Conjecture may travel far, but should know at which step it left the ground.

I let the long tail remain unfurled, rather than cutting it to an easily verified length. The unhurried face offers a small resistance, stopping speed from speaking for the whole body. I am indeed standing here now; the relation between feet and ground remains available to look at. How long the journey took still needs more evidence to arrive. It cannot all be entrusted to those beautiful fibres behind me.