Let’s turn the clock back to nine hundred and forty years ago.

The abbot of a Buddhist temple ensconced in the quiet bosom of the sublime and many-splendoured Mount Lushan gets wind of an unscheduled visit by a celebrity to his neck of the woods.

This celebrity is none other than Su Shi (no, he did not invent sushi), a preeminent Jack of all artistic trades (culinary included) and a down-on-his-luck bureaucrat maligned, bullied and excommunicated by jealous and vindictive people in high places whose feathers he has inadvertently ruffled.

The starstruck monk sends word that Su is welcome to grace the sanctum and, preferably, if he doesn’t mind, leave a few lines of verse to mark the occasion. With his signature cheerful alacrity, Su accepts the invitation and the attendant implicit licence to scribble his poetic inspiration on one of the walls of the holy house.

Su Shi (aka Dongpo, after which a braised pork recipe that he purportedly invented is named) looks out of the open windows. This is what he sees:

And this:

And this:

And this…
Never mind, you get the ‘picture’.

Then he picks up the writing brush, dips it in the freshly ground ink, eyes the blank wall for a few seconds, mutters “Don’t mind if I do” and sets to work…

(Images from sohu.com/a/243821276_427900)

Here is my humble, somewhat sorry attempt at what may pass as a translation:

A nice story, innit? A different take on the art of graffiti, if you like.

But ‘writing on the wall’ has very different connotations in English. The phrase has its provenance in the Providence, or a manifestation thereof. It “suggests a portent of doom or misfortune, based on the story of Belshazzar’s feast in the Book of Daniel.”

Su Shi’s poem has survived nearly a millennium and continues to delight today’s readers. It can easily survive many more centuries, provided that we can. But can we?

Can we?

Can we, as a species, survive the next millennium, nay, the next century, if we continue to ignore THE WRITING ON THE WALL that refuses to be erased and instead stares us straight in the eye day in, day out?

I’m sure Su Shi, a principled humanitarian and a dogged fighter against utilitarian expediency, is dying to say to us, “Forget that little quatrain of mine daubed on a wall pondering the impenetrable enigma of a natural beauty. There is no mystery about the signs writ large on the flaky walls around you, on the shifting ground under your feet and in the darkened sky above you. Please read them.

“And do something about it.”