In the old book market on the left bank of Paris, I accidentally flipped through a yellowed "Mechanical Fairy Tales", and a postcard from 1923 slipped between the pages. On the painting, twelve carousels of different styles rotate under the night sky of twelve cities. The decorative pattern of each horse implicitly conforms to the local mythological system. This discovery was like a rusty key that opened the forgotten amusement park deep in my memory.
The first wooden horse is hidden in the underground bell tower in Prague's Old Town Square. When the bell strikes twelve o'clock at noon, a circular gap will crack on the stone brick floor, revealing a rotating device inlaid with bohemian crystals. I once met an old woman in a dark green velvet dress who would ride on this wooden horse that can only carry one person on her birthday every year. Her silver hair intertwined with the light spots reflected by crystal in the air, as if dancing with an invisible soul. Eternal waltz.
The fourth wooden horse on the Kamogawa River in Kyoto is folded from 3,000 sheets of washi. During the vernal equinox, geisha will take off the white powder and board paper horses without makeup. Their twelve-layer jackets will be lifted in the rotation, like blooming eighty-fold cherry blossoms. The most amazing thing is that when dusk falls, the paper horse will absorb the reflection of the river and rub the rider's face deep in the paper layer, becoming the secret charm of the next year's cherry blossom festival.
The seventh Trojan horse deep in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar is cast of brass, and the twelve saddles are engraved with the motto of Sufi poets. When the rotating speed reaches sixty-six revolutions per minute, the bronze horse will emit a mournful cry similar to the Nye flute. Three years ago, a wandering Greek poet left a poem here: "We are all looking for a rotation that will not be dizzy." The handwriting was continuously covered by the latecomers in Arabic and Hebrew, eventually forming a colorful text whirlpool.
On the top floor of the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City, the ninth Trojan horse shares the same base as the Aztec Sunstone. On the Day of the Dead, the horse's mane is dyed the orange yellow of marigold, and riders need to make a detour three times with tequila. I once saw a boy in a wide-brimmed hat whose wooden horse suddenly derailed from orbit and carried him through the glass dome of the museum and disappeared into the stars-and the next morning, he was found sleeping peacefully on the steps of the Pyramid of Teotihuacan.
The most mysterious one is the Aurora Trojan horse in Tromso, Norway. When the northern lights fall, twelve carib-shaped wooden horses will break free of the chains and carry passengers towards the melting glacier. An old Inuit man told me that his grandfather had seen the disappeared messenger of the Thule civilization on this wooden horse. The other person left a sentence written in ice crystals: "Rotation is the way stars remember." Nowadays, those ice crystal characters are still looming in the aurora, like a crushed Milky Way.
The fifth Trojan horse on Shanghai's Bund is the only modern installation that remains in operation. Mechanical horses wrapped in neon lights start on time every evening, and most of the riders are aborigines on the Bund with old photos. I met an old lady wearing a cheongsam. She always took out a yellowed family portrait from her purse on the seventh lap. The Trojan horse in the photo perfectly overlapped with the real device, and the words 1937 on the edge of the photo were slowly fading.
The twelfth Trojan horse deep in the Amazon rainforest is made entirely of vines. The tribal wizard will guide the tribe on the night of a full moon. When the speed of the wooden horse and the chirping of the tree frogs, the vines will bloom flowers of twelve colors. German botanists stayed here for three years, trying to record the spectacle, but only left a frantic German sentence in their notebooks: "They are stealing time by rotating."
These merry-go-round scattered around the earth are like twelve forgotten space-time nodes. Prague's crystal horses collect unspoken confessions, Kyoto's paper horses seal fleeting faces, Istanbul's copper horses sing eternal confusion, and Amazon's vine horses may be weaving our life energy into something more grand existence.
Nowadays, every time I pass by an ordinary Trojan horse in the city square, I always think of the last paragraph in the mechanical fairy tale: "Real rotation is never trapped in a circular orbit. It is an eternal moment spinning in the river of time. The resonant frequency of all unfinished stories. "The twelve Trojan horses are still spinning in their respective dimensions, carrying the most primitive desire of mankind-to find breakthroughs in the cycle and touch eternity in the vertigo.
