This is the wrong place. No one’s turning back, which is a kind of courage. Location! location! location! But once you make exceptions for natural barriers and climate, we can make a heaven of hell. That’s the only culture we bring with us, actually, the one that can make others think twice, when, without a word spoken, enough of us put our money down.

We build towers not of gold, but authenticity, which you won’t find in these words, which are mismatched to the sight of those flat, strangely seductive towns. You can only get the taste of this beef noodle soup in the back of that strip-mall ethnic supermarket; otherwise, it can only be had at a cart on a particular corner of a second-tier city on the other side of the world, a corner which may have been razed over by now, anyway, so that grace, revered by the ignored in its homeland, becomes precious in this underwhelming locale, by force of homesickness. Queues of the determined form in the back of this shop, for you still have those who make the trek across the desert to seek it out, but their numbers are falling. Later it will become merely a legend, then forgotten, if it doesn’t make it over into this tongue. It takes more moxie than you think to succeed where so many have failed.

This time, though, it’s not the same. This isn’t the brute force of imagining a grid over a dry gulch and filling it with tract homes.

There may be other words to put this in, but, for now, these are the only ones we have. Blank architecture on a hot, hilly landscape. This speech. Beyond them, there is a vision, with, as you might imagine, not much else needed to conjure the exotic. This land drinks it in. One drop and something incommensurable springs out of the ground.

How to put this, though? People think there should be a way we, for me to, talk, but this is the way we talk. It’s somehow suspicious? regrettable? tragic? not to have a way with words, as if there weren’t anything other than words for indicating when, in the realm of the senses, the beauty’s right there. What’s lacking is the analogy between language and appearance, smoothed over by the comfort of knowing we’re really all one and the same “inside,” but of course the signs are that we’re not. The vowels or the arc of thought, or apparent lack thereof, give it away. (Actually, they suggest otherwise, but only for those who know how to look for them, which only makes it worse.) What this really brings to light is that language, this language anyway, is beside the point.

There may be other words, other thoughts. Let’s hold onto the possibility. Always better to hear it in the original anyway, even if you don’t understand it. At least you’re getting the music, whereas translated, unless it’s completely made up, it’s colorless, and of course when these thoughts turn concrete, literally, the translation is exposed for what it is. Instead of an upturned-eave pagoda planted on top of a high-rise, you get that barren architecture that’s an honest expression of cultural poverty.

That’s real now, and that beauty is still there, sitting in silence.