"If only I could reach you there by mail!"
August 29, 2024
I want to try sharing a realization that I had recently.
Like any good realization, it came (and continues to come) in multiple layers. This "plurality" makes it hard for me to share it with you properly. I have many options for how I could turn it into language, but each one, taken individually, wouldn't really be able to capture the full depth of the realization. What I can say though is that this is a realization about Chinese poetry, which should come to no surprise to anyone who's been regularly visiting my website. Chinese poetry has been my main recreation for most of this year, so the roots of this realization are in some way tied to whatever compelled me to start seriously reading poetry back in January.
So what inspired that?
Back in September, I saw someone post a Lithub article critiquing Haruki Murakami and his "globalized" novels by way of another Japanese author, Minae Mizumura, whom, at the time, I hadn't heard of.
The article characterized Mizumura as an author who embraces "the untranslatable", in contrast to Murakami, whose novels are too easily translated, and therefore flattened and placeless.
In her 2008 book, entitled Nihongo ga horobiru toki: eigo no seiki no nakade or, in the English translation, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, she argues, much as [Tim] Parks does, that the genius of the Japanese language, and in particular of Japanese literature, is being lost in a time when writers no longer seek to activate that genius but, following Murakami, strip their prose and their plots of recognizable, culturally bound markers of Japan in favor of what Parks calls the “overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk”—or a Murakami, we could add. In a world and global literary market where Mizumura’s brand of “culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity” (Parks) are impediments to global publication, Murakami and his literary ilk stand to inherit a greater portion of the readership pie.
As I sometimes allude to, I have a very complicated relationship with Murakami. I crave scathing critiques of him, but whenever I actually do read such critiques, I find myself almost instinctually defending him. At the time I read this article, I was thinking a lot about my relationship with Murakami and the impact he'd had on my writing -- but I was also thinking about English as a medium of writing, and what it meant to be an author in a particular language, part of a particular literary tradition. I felt guilty that I was spending so much time writing in English when the people who surrounded me in real life all spoke Chinese (I believe my first tenuous and indirect allusions on this website to this problem are found in the opening paragraph of this short essay). I was thinking a lot about an old Tim Rogers essay where he mentioned writing cellphone novels in Japanese, because the predictive text functionality of his Japanese cellphone didn't support English. Language and technological medium became intwined. In contrast, I was spending many insomnia-wracked nights typing English-language diary-like ruminations into my own phone -- "should I be using Chinese to write these?" was my constant paranoia.
So I was drawn to Mizumura's book, ready to both feel attacked by it and to relate to it. And in a rare case of a book doing exactly what I hoped it would do, that's what I got.
I was doing daily runs at the time, though it’d mostly devolved by then to me just doing a single short run everyday before going to bed. I no longer went on the long runs that gave me such a wonderful feeling of discovery in the past. Running instead was just an obligation -- something that occurred at night, when weather is harder to observe, rather than in that overcast world where cool winds felt like they were coming out of the ground.
I read Fall of Language in Yinyin's living room, on her sofa, as Xiaoxi played Animal Crossing or We Love Katamari. I was supposed to be writing my thesis proposal, but I kept getting distracted by thoughts of Mizumura, wondering what more she had to say. Anytime I felt remotely tired of staring at my computer, I instead stood up from Xiaoxi's desk, walked from the blue-tiled balcony to the wooden-floorboarded living room and sat beside Xiaoxi so I could stare at another screen -- my phone screen -- and read more Mizumura.
As a work with a central thesis (that the dominance of English has weakened the modern literature of other languages, specifically Japanese), I found the book very questionable. But as a record of certain feelings, confusions and idle thoughts directed towards language by a woman who I found very relatable in many ways, the book was quite eye opening.
At the age of 12 her family took her across the sea to America, to Long Island specifically, and suddenly she found herself in a world of English, dreaming each night that her home back in Japan was just a short walk away.
"Just like me," I whisper to myself, despite having literally none of these experiences.
I convince myself that we're close -- and still she tells me I could never understand her. I feel so angry when she writes this. Yet when I step outside of myself and observe the both of us standing together, side by side, I realize she's probably right. I have to hold back my urge to scream out to her "we're not so different!" To do so would only embarass me once more.
Somehow my experience spending years alone in a room in America, struggling to read novels in Chinese, struggling to use this language in order to express myself to no one in particular, seemed to me like sufficient qualification to sympathize with Mizumura, even if, on further analysis of her experience, I realize that these are really two quite different things. The loneliness she described was soothed by her own native language -- she formed an attachment to Japanese that I could never have to English.
She didn't talk about it much in Fall of Language, but in An I-Novel, she talks quite a bit about her self-consciousness regarding her Japanese ability. Her sister is a little shocked that she wants to write in Japanese rather than English. The diary she'd been keeping on her computer had been in English, as this was a time when typing in Japanese wasn't as simple as going into the computer's setting and flipping some toggles. (Compare this to Tim Rogers writing in Japanese on his phone -- if only I had some similar technical limitations forcing me to write in Chinese!) For her PhD work, she wrote in English and French -- though she claimed that this wasn't enough to give her any help in actually writing a novel in English. Academic writing requires only a certain amount of technical vocabulary. Writing a novel requires a total command of the language -- something that goes far beyond just a few words.
Japanese was her language -- the language through which she had truly connected with literature -- and yet it was a language mostly unspoken, other than talking with family members -- all of whom, other than her sister, she was isolated from by the opening of the novel.
And now, after all of this preamble, I can finally get to the real takeaway I got from the book.
In the fourth chapter of The Fall of Language, Mizumura quite explicitly projects her isolation and loneliness onto Natsume Sōseki (and, more generally, onto his whole generation). This is the most memorable chapter of the book, where she looks at the many traces of Westernization found in Sōseki's novel Sanshirō. It's not that she decried such Westernization -- her point instead seemed to be that the interaction between the West and the East in early 20th century Japan created a "literary miracle" -- though at the cost of intense loneliness for the authors responsible for said miracle. They were cut off from the Chinese-based canon of the past and forced into a new, unfamiliar and even alienating Western canon. She imagined what it must have been like to have one body of literature form one's inner emotional core, and yet to have to use a completely different form, the Western novel, in order to reach the outer world.
Of most interest to me, she wrote in abstract about Sōseki's Chinese influence, quoting liberally from the preface to his Theory of Literature, where he talks about having grown up studying Chinese literature, and posessing a great fondness towards, in contrast to English literature, which he studied with blind faith, assuming he'd someday find something great in it after he learned the language well enough -- but in the end all it ever did was disappoint him. However, despite all the importance she placed on this "Chinese influence", she didn't really say much about what it was actually constituted of. The two Sōseki novels I'd read at that point, I am a Cat and Kokoro, didn't seem to have much of what I would have called "Chinese literature" in them.
This then unlocked in my brain a question that I'd had long before this, but which was so obvious that I'd never really verbalized it before: What is Chinese literature? To help me mull this over, or to act as a kind of heuristic guide, Mizumura granted me another question that was entirely new, that I hadn't considered before, subconsciously or otherwise: What did Chinese literature mean to Natsume Sōseki?
Thus I found myself reading a great deal of Sōseki, first Kusamakura, and then, book by book, everything by him with an English translation. At the same time, I read more Chinese poetry than I ever had up to this point. It helped that my Chinese seemed finally to be ready -- I could read poems and get the base meaning (if not some deeper more profound "submerged" meaning) on the scale of seconds and minutes rather than hours like in the past.
You can find my not-particularly-fruitful attempts at wrestling with the first question all over this website. But what about the second question?
To begin answering it, the most obvious place to start is the same source Mizumura used: the preface of Theory of Literature. As Mizumura stated, Sōseki found English literature lacking when placed next to Chinese literature. This he says quite explicitly. But what exact works of Chinese literature was he comparing English literature to? He specifically mentions the Confucian classics and The Four Histories (i.e. the first four histories of the 24 Histories, though the footnote of the translation of Theory of Literature I read replaces Records of the Three Kingdoms and Book of the Later Han with Spring and Autumn Annals and Guoyu.) Based on references in his novels, the Confucian classics that he enjoyed would have at least included The Analects, which he mentions several times in Mon: at the beginning of the book, the protagonist reads it in an attempt to calm his nerves. Later on, a geisha riding the train reads as though it were a novel, laughing at the characterization of Confucius's students. He also presumably was familiar with Shijing, the classic of poetry, which he references at the beginning of The Miner. Outside of the Confucian canon, he mentions stories from Zhuangzi several times in Theory of Literature and his novels.
So thus far, what we have is all pretty standard fare.
As for poetry after the Shijing (what I often think of as "Chinese literature"), the actual body of Theory of Literature talks about it in in abstract quite a bit, but doesn't seem to allude to any specific poems or authors in a way that I can look up. Instead, his discussions of Chinese poetry are mostly limited to illustrations of his weird overly complicated mathematical models:
To make the case that the same waveform thesis applies to the succession of F when we are dealing with sustained periods of time rather than instants, we might consider the following example. Let’s say there is a person who, during a certain period of life, is extremely taken with Chinese poetry and reads it frequently. Then afterward, for a period of several years, he puts poetry aside and does not touch it at all. One day by chance he finds himself picking up the volume again. In that moment, despite the fact that he can decipher the meaning, the impressions and poetic imagery seem vague and unclear, and as a result the interest excited by the poetry is faint. However, as he regains practice in reading, and the poetic imagery works its way into his mind, his pleasure eventually reaches a peak. As this process continues, the pleasure recedes bit by bit, gradually slipping into the domain of indifference. Here we can say consciousness with regard to Chinese poetry ascends from the peripheries of consciousness to the focal point and then descends again to the peripheries.
(Translation by Joseph A. Murphy)
Almost all the poetry he actually does quote is English. While he mentions poets like Tao Yuanming and Wang Wei in Kusamakura, in the parts of Theory of Literature that have been translated into English, the only writer of Chinese poetry that I can find any explicit mention of is the Japanese Kanshi poet Fujii Chikugai (藤井竹外) -- though only as an example of a person who devoted their whole life to a small niche (in this case, four line Chinese poems).
The term Kanshi requires a bit of elaboration. It's the Japanese pronunciation of 漢詩, which literally just means Chinese poetry. Though it might be better to translate it as "Chinese-style poetry", as in this case it refers specifically to poetry written by Japanese people in the language and form of the Chinese (usually Tang dynasty) Shi.
I was aware that Kanshi was a favored literary medium for Japanese intellectuals throughout the ages (I think I originally learned this from the introductions to Heian era writing like The Tale of Genji and Sarashina Nikki, which talk about such writing in Chinese in an almost pejorative way). I also knew from Mizumura that Sōseki continued to write Kanshi throughout his life, even after devoting himself to writing fiction. At first, I took this merely as an interesting tidbit of knowledge. It made me think of an assertion I'd seen about Lu Xun, made by Jon Eugene von Kowallis in his book The Lyrical Lu Xun that, despite his fame being derived from his Western-style fiction and prose, his most personal writing, where his deepest innermost feelings are revealed, is his classical-style poetry. I wondered if the same could be true of Sōseki -- but somehow it never actually occurred to me that his Kanshi were something I could actually read and evaluate for myself. I first had to spend months reading Tang dynasty poetry, English translations of his novels and even flipping through pages of Grass by the Wayside in the original Japanese, trying to decipher sentences in this language I don't understand, before it dawned on me that, if I wanted to, I already have the means available to me to read Sōseki in his own words, unmediated by someone else's translations. All I have to do is crack open his Kanshi.
Of course, it can never just be that simple: Sōseki's novels are filled with fathers "fond of Chinese poetry" that his protagonists spend their respective novels arguing with in their heads. This is a generation I know almost solely through his second-hand descriptions. They wrote Kanshi. What if I read those too? What do they have to say? And what about the generation before them -- the generation that grew up and came of age before the Meiji restoration, witnessing those events only as mature adults. If I'm going to read Sōseki's Kanshi, I shouldn't continue to privilege him over those he reacted against -- I can read them in their own words too.
We can go even further back. While I've read Edo-era poets like Bashō who wrote in Japanese-style poetic forms, namely linked verse and Haiku, what were their contemporaries writing about in Chinese? What did it mean back then to write Japanese-style poetry instead of Chinese-style poetry, or vice versa? Is Japanese-style poetry defined in anyway by not being Kanshi? Does the existence of an alternative in turn somehow demarcate Kanshi written by Japanese people from Chinese poetry written by Chinese people, who didn't have such a hypothetical alternative? Why would a Japanese person in Edo or Meiji Japan decide to write in Chinese and why would they decide to write in Japanese? Somehow, such a question seems as important for understanding what Chinese literature actually is as directly looking at the great poets of the Tang dynasty is.
But beyond anything else, Kanshi represent an opportunity to, for the very first time, engage with a subset of Japanese high-literature in the original language, one-on-one with no one between us.
--
The collection of Kanshi I bought contains poems from the 7th century all the way to the modern era. The first poem collected (which seems to be the first known Japanese Kanshi) is by Emperor Kōbun of the Asuka period:
皇明光日月，帝德载天地。
三才并泰昌，万国表臣仪。The Emperor's brightness shines forth like the Sun and the Moon,
His moral character blankets over all of Heaven and Earth.
The three cai [Heaven, Earth, and Mankind] are at peace and flourishing,
Ten thousand nations pay their proper respects as servants.
Disclaimer: this and all the other translations I did for this essay are likely filled with inaccuracies. I also didn't aim for anything that sounds nice in English -- I just tried to preserve the meaning of the originals as I understand them, with word order that mirrors the Chinese whenever possible.
The last poem is by the Sinologist Tadahisa Ishikawa, born in 1932:
无锡
江南胜地水为乡，膏米银鱼泉酒香。
请看太湖三万顷，溶溶诱客人风光。
Which I'm not even going to translate, as it kind of just reads like an advertisement for the city of Wuxi, north of Suzhou, on the shore of lake Taihu. I'm sure he wrote it while visiting.
Right away, having access to this collection reminds me of certain curiosities I'd encountered in Tang poetry that it never occurred to me I could investigate further. For instance, Wang Wei has the following poem:
送秘书晁监还日本国
Sending off secretary Chao Jian on his return to Japan积水不可极，安知沧海东！
九州何处远？万里若乘空。
向国惟看日，归帆但信风。
螯身映天黑，鱼眼射波红。
乡树扶桑外，主人孤岛中。
别离方异域，音信若为通！Boundless waters without end,
To think that there's something east of the East Sea!
Is there anywhere in the nine provinces so far?
Ten thousand miles, like taking off into the sky.
Facing your kingdom, hoping to see the sun,
Yet sails put their faith in only the wind.
The bodies of giant lobsters reflect the black heavens,
Fish shoot red waves out of their eyes.
A tree in a village outside of Fusang [A fancy name for Japan],
A master on a lonely island.
Departing, heading off to an alien land,
If only I could reach you there by mail!
"Secretary Chao Jian" in the title is Abe no Nakamaro (阿倍 仲麻呂), a Japanese envoy to China who ended up serving in the Tang bureaucracy and, despite many attempts to return to Japan, kept meeting trouble and ultimately lived in China until his death. This poem by Wang Wei, describing Japan as some kind of fantasy land at the edge of the universe, was written on the occasion of one of these failed attempts.
It turns out Abe too wrote Chinese poetry:
望乡诗
Looking Towards Home翘首望长安，神驰奈良边。
三笠山顶上，想又皎月圆。Head raised, gazing at Chang’an,
Soul transported to the edge of Nara.
Standing on top of Mt. Mikasa,
Thinking again of the bright full moon.
We can also look at Fujii Chikugai, the man who devoted his life to Chinese poems with only four lines:
花朝下淀江
Going down the Yodoe river on the first day of blossoming桃花水暖送轻舟，背指孤鸿欲没头。
雪白比良山一角，春风犹未到江州。Peach blossoms and warm water send off a small boat,
Back pointing towards a lone goose, its head soon submerged.
A corner of the Hira Mountains white with snow,
It seems the spring wind still hasn't reach Gōshū.
Another joy of flipping through this collection is that almost none of the Kanshi poets it contains (presumably the most famous Japanese poets of Chinese-style poetry) have English or Chinese language writings about them that I can find from Google. All I have is what they say in their poets. One such Meiji poet that I've quite enjoyed based on the two poems of his that were collected is Onuma Atsushi (大沼厚):
岁晚书怀
Feeling nostalgia for books at the end of the year门冷如冰岁暮天，衡茅林麓锁寒烟。
床头日历无多日，镜里春风又一年。
技拙未成求舍计，家贫只用卖文钱。
闭来拣去新诗句，市酒犹能祭阆仙。The door is cold like ice at the end of the year,
A thatched cottage on a wooded hill locked in cold smoke.
The calendar at the head of the bed doesn't have many days left,
The spring wind in the mirror is back for another year.
Too unskilled and unaccomplished to own anything,
So poor that all I can do is sell my writing.
Shut the door and gather new lines of verse,
If I buy some wine I can still make a dedication to Langxian.
The last line is apparently a reference to a Tang dynasty poet I hadn't heard of before, Jia Dao (贾岛), whose courtesy name was Langxian. The story that Onuma references is apparently famous enough that my dictionary summarizes it in the entry for 祭诗 (making a dedication to one's own poem). Every new year he'd pick a poem he wrote the previous year and make a dedication of wine to it in order to console himself. The Song dynasty poet Dai Min apparently wrote this couplet about it:
杜陵分岁了，贾岛祭诗忙。
While Du Fu is celebrating the new year,
Jia Dao is busy making dedications to his own poems.
There are three poems by Jia Dao that I like. I can't choose which to share. Luckily enough two of them are in his Wikipedia article along with translations, so the amount of effort to share them all with you is rather minimal:
剑客
The Swordsman十年磨一剑，霜刃未曾试。
今日把示君，谁有不平事？For ten years I have been polishing this sword;
Its frosty edge has never been put to the test.
Now I am holding it and showing it to you, sir:
Is there anyone suffering from injustice?
(translated by James J.Y. Liu)
A swordsman desperate for blood on white steel -- desperate to be a hero in a world that has no need for his services. When I read this poem, I immediately wanted to come up with an essay where I could get away with quoting it. My first thought was to finally do that Xianyu essay that I've been wanting to write for over a year, using the poem as a metaphor for the need I feel to start collecting the kind of old junk one can buy on Xianyu (so that I can in turn write an essay about Xianyu in the same style as William Gibson's essay about buying old watches off of eBay), and the anxiety I have when I start to realize there's nothing I actually want to collect. I'd imagine myself as a weird guy accosting strangers on the street, holding up my phone to them with Xianyu opened up and asking them if there's anything strange and quirky they know of that I could start collecting. Of course, there's a reason I keep putting off that essay, so the best I can do is instead waste it on this essay that is already explicitly about poetry.
Next we have
访隐者不遇
Seeking the Master but not Meeting松下问童子，言师采药去。
只在此山中，云深不知处。Beneath a pine I asked a little child.
He said the Master went to gather herbs.
Alone was he upon this mountainside,
The clouds so deep he knew not where he was.
(Translation by Red Pine)
My gripe with this translation is that the original didn't have any pronouns, so it's not explicit who doesn't know where who is. My imagination was the narrator continued on, going deeper into the forest to find the master, and loses himself in deep clouds, not necessarily ever finding "the master" (which in the title is refered to as a 隐者 -- usually translated as hermit or recluse, but perhaps with less of the negative associations than these two English words sometimes have). The translation here instead makes it sound like the narrator did find the Master, contradicting the title. However, it still is nicer to read than any translation I could write.
Not meeting, it turns out, is a recurring theme in Jia Dao's poetry:
题李凝幽居
Li Ning's Secluded Retreat闲居少邻并，草径入荒园。
鸟宿池边树，僧敲月下门。
过桥分野色，移石动云根。
暂去还来此，幽期不负言。Living at ease away from any neighbors,
A grassy path leads into an unkept garden.
Birds nest on a tree at the edge of the pond,
A monk knocks upon the moonlit door.
Crossing the bridge that cuts the wilderness in two,
Rocks are moving in the shadows of the clouds.
I'll leave for now and come back later,
Our secret rendezvous must be honored.
So now here we are -- we started out in Japan, a new vision of it unlocked for us (or, well, me) by the magic of the Chinese language, and now we've just spent three poems immersed in the Tang dynasty -- the ocean which whole rivers eventually flow back into.
There's a certain joy to accumulating a stack of books and cross-referencing between them. My collection of Kanshi, the compendium of essays on Tang poetry my girlfriend's parents gave me (thicker than the Bible), the thin dictionary I have for looking up common words in Classical Chinese, and a comprehensive historical dictionary so thick that I can only access it digitally (if I owned it in paper form it would take up all the available surface area in this apartment). Meiji Japan, Tang dynasty China, and me, this 21st century entity bound permanently to his American origin, whether he likes it or not, can all be in conversation with each other, existing for a few moments as though they were contempories.
Part of what makes this possible is the shortness of each poem. I can take my time with each one, because I don't have hundreds of pages ahead of me, taunting me, the way I would if I tried to read, say, The Ring and the Book. Each poem feels like a single view of one massive "thing" -- that thing being the whole universe.
In Algebraic Geometry, after a certain point we stop thinking of geometric objects as existing in isolation as only themselves, and instead start viewing them as individual points in the space of all similar geometric objects, said space in turn having it's own structure. This new space has a geometry beyond comprehension, intersecting with itself in all sorts of complicated ways -- just trying to understand it locally at a single point is already a daunting task. Yet the knowledge that it does have structure, that there is a neighborhood filled with other points nearby it, each representing other geometric objects that are "deformed" out of our original object -- somehow makes the task of understanding more doable.
In all these ruminations though, I've forgotten my original object: what are Natsume Sōseki's Kanshi like?
What I'd like to share now is a set of two Jueju he wrote that seem especially apt for our purposes, as evident from the title.
题自画（二首）
Self portrait (two poems)(一)
山上有山路不通，柳阴多柳水西东。
扁舟尽日孤村岸，几度鹅群访釣翁。Mountains on top of mountains -- a road that cannot be passed.
Willows, shadows, and more willows -- waters flowing east and west.
All day long a small raft floats along the shore of an isolated village,
While processions of geese call upon the old fisherman.(二)
唐诗读罢倚阑干，午院沉沉绿意寒。
借问风春何处有，石前幽竹石间兰。Done reading Tang poetry, I lean against the railing.
At noon the courtyard fills up with a greenish chill.
May I ask this wind where springtime went off to?
Beyond the rocks, a dark bamboo forest; between them, an orchid.
(Thanks 小丑 and tbearzhang from the The Classical East Asian Languages Discord server for clarifying some questions I had about these.)
As should be obvious from my translations, I find these two poems quite mysterious. According to a footnote, "The old fisherman" is one of Sōseki's own self-designations. It's a little surprising, since the only time I've seen him write about fishing was to deride it in Bocchan. Perhaps he wrote these poems at the peak of one his waveforms -- immersed in poetry just long enough to feel inspiration to write his own. In the first, he barely feels present -- an afterthought left until the last two characters of the poem. In the second, I imagine him as the protagonist of Mon, but picking up Wang Wei instead of The Analects in order to forget his anxieties.
Am I any closer to him now than I was reading his novels?
I'm not sure.
Mizumura asserts that Sōseki's novels were for the next generation, while his Kanshi were for himself, as the youth were already cut off from the Chinese tradition and didn't possess the tools to appreciate them. I, in turn, am a person who has allowed himself to be misled by various supposed internet sages and cyber-hermits into devoting his energies towards the pursuit of writing the most aggressively useless and unpopular writing that his current abilities can manage. When Sōseki's Kanshi are framed this way, I feel a deep obligation to understand them -- to reach out and grab the hand of this lonely Sōseki trapped inside both Mizumura's imagination and mine.
But why?
He represents a nation, or at least a generation, and yet he's just a middle aged man, all by himself. And more importantly, he's dead. It's not like he can ever be my friend. To understand him, or the remnant of him still alive in his writing, would it help me understand Mizumura? She's still alive, but she's just as distant -- perhaps even more so than Sōseki. Fall of Language terrified me in a way Sōseki never has. Even if An I-Novel: From Left to Right introduced me to a gentler, less aggressive side of her, practically speaking, I don't think we'll ever have the opportunity to be friends.
Now that I have a long term girlfriend, I suppose reading and writing have become a substitute for ending up in strange lonely women's apartments late at night, lying in bed together, beside stuffed animals or beneath towering bookshelves filled with plants and gear for making electronic music, hoping that somehow we'll spill our darkest secrets out to each other and thereby know "true belonging". In certain moods, poetry, like sex, is nothing but a symbol for connection that can never actually happen -- because the connection I yearn for doesn't exist. At most this yearning is just something injected into by other lonely writers who never connected with anyone in that way either.
Of course, I have connected with people in much more normal, down to earth ways. Yet none of the connections that have really been succesful or long-lasting seemed to have resulted in or from real understanding. This is one of those topics I keep writing about on this website in different ways -- but everytime I get closer to someone and feel something akin to belonging, another part of me (not necessarily a deeper or more important part of me) feels a little bit lonelier. I still don't know what to make of this phenomenon, despite thinking it over again and again.
--
Now, having sojourned through Meiji Japan, Tang dynasty China, and 80s Long Island, let's return to me (or, should I say, a different part of me, since it's not like we ever left me for even a moment) and my confusion over what Chinese literature actually is.
I wonder if it would help to reread Hong Lou Meng at this point? Hong Lou Meng, after all, was my first true encounter with Chinese literature that inalterably changed me (someday I'll write about this in detail). I was reminded yesterday reading Qian Mu's essay 谈诗 (Discussing Poetry), that Hong Lou Meng is filled with Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu talking (arguing?) about poetry. In my imagination, filtered through the haziness of memory, a lot of these conversations have an anime filler episode quality to them -- like in Evangelion when Shinji and Asuka have to learn to work together by playing future-technology Twister.
The actual conversation Qian Mu quoted involved this couplet by Lu You:
重帘不卷留香久，古砚微凹聚墨多
Heavy curtains undrawn keep the smell of incense for a long time,
An old ink-slab, slightly concave, gathers much ink.
Lin Daiyu thought this was abysmal. She said that if you want to study poetry, then you should throw this trash away and instead read Wang Wei, Du Fu, Li Bai and Tao Yuanming. Once you've read a few dozen (or around a hundred) poems from each of them, you'll understand poetry.
Yet I wonder if that's precisely the kind of advice I should be ignoring? Coming across allusions I didn't understand to Jia Dao, an unfamiliar name, held in disdain by later poets like Su Dongpo, and flipping through a few of his works just for fun -- I found more joy in that than I ever had systematically reading through Wang Wei's most celebrated works. I think it's ok to accept myself as a serial flipper -- and maybe it's even ok to like this silly couplet about curtains and ink. If Lin Daiyu insults me for it (and I suppose I should mention here that Lin Daiyu is a stand-in for an actual person that I know, someone who flashes before my eyes every time I try to read poetry), there's a certain pleasure in that too.