Even the old 50 baht with the Chapel of Wat Benchamabopit long-since
bumped but still legal glows briefly.
The rupiah glows in Indonesia and we are skipping over the Malaysian
ringgit the Phillipine peso and the Singapore dollar’s Orchid series its Bird
and its Ship series.
The stations and the circuits between stations lighting up in a sequence so
complex it’s mystical or maybe it’s like following a branching thought
through the brain of It All—the System Entire which has no real name.
In the most tangled complexity one finds moments of great imtimacy where
the sun shines on a friendly picture of Soeharto with open collar and a jet
rising reverse over Soekarno-Hatta Airport and so glows the Indonesian
rupiah.
And the South Korean won 10,000 glows through the now-destroyed Water
Clock of Borugak Pavilion with moiré on watermark and intaglio latent
image.
And then the ruble which has been everywhere and once rubbed shoulders
with Mayakovsky.
The ruble glows and starts to fade at the frontiers of Asia and now a pause in
the series but comes a moment in which the effigy of the Republic and the
green-winged Macaw on their dusty rose perches inside the Brazilian 5 real
note both glow briefly ever so briefly.
And the peso convertible the pride of Argentina on which appears in gentle
blue the disgraced historian who translated Dante into Spanish this too
finally glows and that is said to be the end of beauty.
But I say there is nothing as beautiful as the yuan and among all the various
bills with their lotuses and their Halls of the People none compares to the
humble kuai note with its orchid watermark and Three Pools Mirroring the
Moon at West Lake.
