地力常新壮，何敝何衰之有

Twenty-ninth of August, Chengdu. Ten lines on a sheet, one per drying house: Chang's six, Abdul Rahman's three, Rehmanjan's one. A vertical rule down the side making two columns. Left: still there. Right: can be renewed. They are not the same question. Left means I can still buy from it this year. Right means whether I can still buy from it in five. The left column filled in fast — all ten are still there. On the right I stopped. Chang's six: can. Abdul Rahman's three: the pen stopped for a long time, and what I finally put was neither can nor cannot. I drew a circle.

Then I broke those three lines apart and listed what is still there and what is gone. The houses. Six hundred-odd wall holes nobody can carry off. The tree. Three strings on three doorframes. Six thermometers, twelve this year. The sieve. The colour board. Two years of readings. And the boy who took them, nineteen. All present. One thing gone: the man who bit for forty years. In the book: ten things still there, one thing missing. And: the missing one is the man who joined the other ten together.

Chen Fu came at two — very old, past seventy, coarse cloth gone white with washing, an old rain hat instead of a cap, and filthy hands: earth under the nails and earth in the palms. He had a handful of soil in his fist. He did not speak first; he put the soil down on a sheet of paper on my table and crumbled it apart with his fingers. It fell open, dark, slightly damp. Then: those three lines on your sheet, the ones with circles. Sir. Chen Fu.

He began with a proverb he had heard all his life. When the soil is worn out, plants will not grow. When its vapour is exhausted, living things do not thrive. Meaning? Land that has been farmed a long time loses its strength. Three or five years and a field is spent. And: I heard that from childhood. Is it true? No. Flat. In my book I wrote six characters: this saying is almost certainly untrue. And four more: it comes of not having thought it through.

I objected that long-farmed land does in fact go thin. It does. I never said it doesn't. Pushing the soil forward: what I said is that the thinning is not caused by farming it. Then by what? By not adding. And: you take out of the field every year and put nothing back in. Of course it is spent in three or five years. And: that is not the land failing. And, and I picked up the pen: that is you not having added.

His formula: if one can add fresh rich earth from time to time and treat it with manure, then it becomes finer, riper, richer and better — and then the phrase the book is remembered for — and its strength will always be new and vigorous. I asked why the fresh earth has to come from elsewhere. Because the soil inside one field, turn it as often as you like, is still the same soil. And: however diligently you turn it, it is that one plot. And, four times into the book: a field cannot feed itself.

I told him about the strings: ten houses, each with a reference drawn from that same house's own accepted batch, used the following year against that same house. Then it is feeding itself. Yes. For how long? Chang's thirty-one years; mine two. In those thirty-one years, was anything ever added? — and I had to think, and then: yes. Chang Bin put refrigeration into house five this year, and what house five produces is no longer the same as the other five. That, he said, is the new earth.

And the caution, which is half the essay: you cannot add just anything. Raw manure laid on suddenly, or too much of it, is fierce and hot and scorches the crop dead. Then how? Look at the nature and kind of the soil first. Sandy, heavy, sour, alkaline. See it clearly, and use the kind that suits it. And: the country people call this manure-medicine. Using manure is like using a drug. And, three times into the book: a drug is a good thing, but you look at the patient first. And: a man who doses without looking does as much harm as the man who never adds anything. — M.

Memo to file. Chengdu, 29 August – 3 September 2031. Two columns: still there, and can be renewed.

1. Ten houses, and the right-hand column is the one that matters. Chang's six: renewable — the string was handed to Chang Bin in 2030 in front of a witness and line five (choose a middling one) went into his own notebook. Abdul Rahman's three: circle. Rehmanjan's one: too new to say. The inventory of those three houses is almost entirely intact — house, wall holes, tree, three strings, twelve thermometers, sieve, colour board, two years of readings, and a nineteen-year-old who kept them. One item is gone, and it is the one that joined the other ten together.

2. Chen Fu's correction, which applies to every self-referencing standard I have built. The received view is that land wears out from being farmed. His answer: it goes thin from not being added to, and that is not the land failing, that is you not having added. And the condition on renewal is specific: fresh rich earth from time to time — from elsewhere. A field cannot feed itself. However often you turn the same plot, it is the same soil. Applied: every reference string in my system is drawn from that same house's own accepted batch. Chang's has run thirty-one years — and when I looked for what had been added, the honest answer was house five's refrigeration, this year, which is the first outside input that system has had in three decades. My own are two years old and have had no input at all. A closed standard does not fail loudly; it drifts, and the drift is invisible from inside because the ruler drifts with it.*

3. The one clause I wrote, 30 August. At closing, each household keeps a second string, not for itself — posted to another household, with a slip giving which house, which day it came down, how many days it hung. The receiving household hangs it on its own doorframe beside its own, and at next year's take-down pinches its own, then the other. And it does not pass through me. Every single mechanism I have built in three years runs from a household to me. This is the first one that runs household to household.*

4. Chang Bin's objection, which I had not seen and which nearly killed it. "We're grapes. They're apricots." I said then we won't do it. "Don't be hasty." And: "I said the goods are different. The feel in the hand may not be." And: "When my father pinches a raisin he's feeling whether it comes back. Your bite is also whether it comes back." And: "Different goods; the thing you're reading may be the same." And: "I can't settle that. I'll ask my father."

5. Chang's answer, relayed 2 September, and the shape of it matters more than the content. He said nothing at first, then asked two questions: how old is the man over there (69) and can he still work (no — half his body). Then he stood up, went out into the yard, stood there about ten minutes, came back, and said six characters. 今年多留一串 — keep a second string this year.

6. Two sets of six characters, and I have put them on the same page. — 14 July: 三号房那一串，今年别换. Don't replace. — 2 September: 今年多留一串. Keep an extra one. Two men, sixty-nine and sixty-four, thirteen hundred kilometres apart, who have never met. One says hold on to it. One says give one away. In the book: the one who says don't replace has nobody else left in the house. The one who says keep an extra has his son standing next to him.

7. And the wall I hit on 3 September, from Alim, in four messages. He agreed at once — we'll keep an extra one too — and asked who to send it to, and then: "Do we write the slip in Uyghur or in Chinese?" — "Chang's people can't read Uyghur." — "Our family can't read Chinese." — "I can." — "My father can't." — And then: "That old man at Chang's — can he read Chinese?" I rang Chang Bin and asked, and wrote the answer in the book. He cannot. The exchange runs between two households in which the two men who can actually read a reference cannot read a word of the label, and the two people who can read the label are nineteen and thirty-two and neither of them is the one doing the pinching.

"Where then is the wearing out, and where the exhaustion?"
He was arguing against a proverb that everybody around him had grown up with: that soil worn out will not grow plants, that after three or five years of sowing a field's strength is spent. His verdict on it is unusually blunt for a farming manual. This saying is almost certainly untrue. It comes of not having thought the matter through.
He did not deny that long-farmed land goes thin. What he denied was the cause. You take out of the field every year and put nothing back in. Of course it is spent in three or five years. That is not the land failing. That is you not having added.
The remedy is stated as a condition rather than a promise: if one can add fresh rich earth from time to time and treat it with manure, then it becomes finer, riper, richer and better — and its strength will always be new and vigorous.
The word doing the work is fresh, and it means from somewhere else. Turning over the same ground, however diligently, moves the same material about. A field cannot feed itself.
And then the half of the argument that stops it becoming a slogan. Adding is not automatically good. Raw manure laid on suddenly, or too much of it, is fierce and hot, and it scorches the crop dead — so it does harm instead. The prescription is diagnostic before it is generous: look at the nature and kind of the soil first — sandy, heavy, sour, alkaline — and manure it with the manure suited to it.
The country phrase he records for this is manure-medicine: using manure is like using a drug.
A drug is a good thing, but you look at the patient first. A man who doses without looking does as much harm as the man who never adds anything at all.