The Useless Tree

Lone Goose

Posting has dropped off in the past week.  I've been busy with work.  And some crazy stuff has happened in my department: turns out a man we had hired as a visiting professor (i.e. not a permanent faculty member) was not who he had represented himself to be but, rather, has been perpetrating various frauds for many years.  Rather like "Catch Me If You Can."  Crazy...

But November is well upon us now.  I've written before that this, for me, is the saddest of months.   And a certain sadness pervades Peony's recent post, "the tears of passing geese."   That line is from a Japanese poem, an explanation of why the leaves and plants turn color in the autumn.  A beautiful image.  Are the geese crying as they congregate and fly off to their summer nests?

Geese are very much on my mind these days.  I see some very large flocks of them in the morning and evening, when I'm driving my daughter to and from school.  And the sadness of the month makes me think of a Tu Fu poem:

The Lone Goose

Never eating or drinking, the lone goose
Flies - thinking of its flock, calling out.
Who pities a flake of shadow lost beyond
Ten-thousand clouds?  It stares far-off,

As if glimpses of them remained.  Sorrows
Mount - it almost hears them again....Wild crows, not a thread of thought anywhere, Squawk and shriek, fighting each other off.

Sorrows mount...  Maybe the tears of a lone goose give us the frost, not the colors, which are all now faded into browns.

A Poem by Wang Wei

A friend (thanks Tracy!) recently gave me David Hinton's translation of poems by Wang Wei, the great Tang poet. I like Hinton's translations of Chinese philosophy, precisely because he translates so much poetry, which, I think, gives him a certain appreciation of the lyric qualities of Chuang Tzu and Mencius and others. 

I came upon a poem that captured the moment I find myself in now.  It is entitled "Mourning Yin Yao."

How long can a life last? And once
it’s gone it’s formless all over again.

I think of how you waited for death:
ten thousand ways a heart wounds.

Your gentle mother’s still not buried,
your daughter’s hardly turned ten,

but outside the city, cold-silence wind-
scoured expanses, I listen to lament

on and on. Clouds drift boundless skies,
birds wing through without a sound,

and travelers travel deserted silence
through a midday sun’s frozen clarity.

I remember you back then, still alive,
asking to study unborn life with me,

but my guidance came too late. Sad
how you never found understanding.

And those old friends here with gifts—
they never reached you either. So many

ways we failed you. All bitter lament, I
return to my brush-and-bramble gate.

Let me focus on the first two couplets.   The opening two lines reveal Wang's immersion in Chan Buddhism, which itself is an amalgamation of the Buddhist ideas and practices that gradually moved from India to China, and the Taoist ideas and practices indigenous to China.  Thus, it is not surprising that Wang's contemplation of death brings him to an appreciation of the formlessness of life, a notion that I associate with Chuang Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, though especially the former. 

The second two lines brought my aunt to mind.  She was not comfortable in her last days.  The slow decline of her body and mind frustrated her.  There were good moments, but as the end drew near these became fewer and fewer.  Just before she passed away she slipped into a peaceful unconsciousness.  I thought she was sleeping but obviously it was something deeper. I was relieved at that time, not knowing what was coming, because she seemed to have escaped "the ten thousand ways a heart wounds."   And now she has for good.

She did not have the same sorrows to which Wang Wei refers - her parents are long dead and she was unmarried and childless.  Would her heart have been even more wounded if she had the burden of worrying about a surviving mother and daughter? 

I do not share Wang Wei's sense of failure.  Of course, there may have been more I could have done for her.  But she would have done what she would do, regardless of my counsel.  She lived out her time in Way.  And so, without the bitterness, I return to my own brush-and-bramble gate.

Feeling the Summer and Two by Li Po

      It's hot here, as is so much of the Eastern US just now.  The seasonal change has come in due course, building up to this rather early burst of heat.  I've had some time to adjust to the dwindling of Spring and the advance of Summer but, as always, the shift seems to come so quickly.  Some of that has to do with the tempo of human events that shape my life: the end of the academic year, graduation, the passing of my daughter's school year.   Those moments define the natural change for me as much as the temperature.  But Nature (Way) still has its way, pushing, as it has done this week, its heat and storms to the forefront, letting us know that we do not really control or manage the change of seasons.

     So, I went looking for a poem to capture the summer heat.  My volume of selections from Li Po (Li Bai) has more spring and autumn verses than summer stanzas.  But I found some that get at change in general.

Facing Wine

Never refuse wine.  I'm telling you,
people come smiling in spring winds:

peach and plum like old friends, their
open blossoms scattering toward me,

singing orioles in jade-green trees,
and moonlight probing gold winejars.

Yesterday we were flush with youth,
and today, white hair's an onslaught.

Bramble's overgrown Shih-hu Temple,
and deer roam Ku-su Terrace ruins:

it's always been like this, yellow dust
choking even imperial gates closed

in the end.  If you don't drink wine,
where are those ancient people now?

     And how could I not read Li Po on Chuang Tzu:

Ancient Song

Chuang-tzu dreams he's a butterfly,
and a butterfly become Chuang-tzu.

All transformation this one body,
boundless occurrence goes on and on:

it's no surprise eastern seas become
western streams shallow and clear,

or the melon-grower at Ch'ing Gate
once reigned as Duke of Tung-ling.

Are hopes and dreams any different?
We bustle around, looking for what?

      There's a line that gets at the onrush of summer: "boundless occurrence goes on and on."  That's what's happening in my backyard.

In Sympathy for the people of Sichuan

     It is difficult to respond to a terrible tragedy on the scale of what is unfolding in Sichuan.  Unlike Burma, there is no hard political edge here, just awful human suffering.  So, I turn to Tu Fu (Du Fu), the poet.  In a volume of some of his poems that I keep on my desk there is a section titled "Chengdu," consisting of verses written when he lived in and around that city.  Since Chengdu is near the center of the current disaster, I thought a poem from there might be appropriate today.  There is sadness in many of Tu Fu's poems, but I tried to find one that had a bit of uplift to it, something to focus our attention on survival and appreciation for small things:

Morning Rain

Sounding cold dawn skies, steady winds
Tatter visions of cloud over the river.
Ducks take refuge along the island.  Among
Thickets, swallows find shelter from rain.

Huang and Ch'i both refused an emperor,
Ch'ao and Yu an empire.  A cup of wine,
A thatched home - that I am here as today's
Flawless morning passes gathers me in joy.

    Let's hope that the people of Sichuan will soon find joy again in another morning.

Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) Talk to Each Other

At Sky's-End Thinking of Li Po
by Tu Fu

In these last outskirts of sky, cold
Winds rise.  What are you thinking?
Will geese ever arrive, now autumn
Waters swamp rivers and lakes there?

Art resents life fulfilled, and goblins
Dine on mountain travelers with glee:
Why not sink poems to that ill-used
Ghost in teh Mi-lo, talk things over?

Teasing Tu Fu
by Li Po

Here on the summit of Fan-k'o Mountain, it's Tu Fu
under a midday sun sporting his huge farmer's hat.

How is it you've gotten so thin since we parted?
Must be all those poems you've been suffering over.

Li Po (Li Bai) on Chuang Tzu

Ancient Song

Chuang-tzu dreams he's a butterfly,
and a butterfly becomes Chuang-tzu.

All transformation this one body,
boundless occurrence goes on and on:

it's no surprise eastern seas become
western streams shallow and clear,

or the melon-grower at Ch'ing Gate
once reigned as Duke of Tung-ling.

Are hopes and  dreams any different?   
We bustle around, looking for what?

Tao Poem

      A reader sends in this poem, by Charles Wright, heard on this morning's Writer's Almanac, on NPR:

After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass

Dry spring, no rain for five weeks.
Already the lush green begins to bow its head and sink to its
         knees.

Already the plucked stalks and thyroid weeds like insects
Fly up and trouble my line of sight.

I stand inside the word here
         As that word stands in its sentence,
Unshadowy, half at ease.

Religion's been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn't the sky be tatters,
         lost notes to forgotten songs?

I inhabit who I am, as T'ao Ch'ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
         When it ends, it ends. What else?

One morning I'll leave home and never find my way back—
My story and I will disappear together, just like this.

 

A Favorite, Though Sad, Tu Fu Poem

The Lone Goose

Never eating or drinking, the lone goose
Flies - thinking of its flock, calling out.
Who pities a flake of shadow lost beyond
Ten-thousand clouds?  It stares far-off,

As if glimpses of them remained.  Sorrows
Mount - it almost hears them again....
Wild crows, not a thread of thought anywhere,
Squawk and shriek, fighting each other off.

Li Po on Way

     Looking For Yung, The Recluse Master

Emerald peaks polish heaven.  I wander,
sweeping clouds away, forgetting years,

looking for the ancient Way.  Resting
against a tree, I listen to streamwater,

black ox dozing among warm blossoms,
white crane asleep in towering pines.

A voice calls through river-tinted dusk,
but I've descended into cool mist alone.

A Little Tu Fu

     Here's an anti-war lament by Tu Fu to think about:

Moonlit Night Thinking of My Brothers

Warning drums have ended all travel.
A lone goose cries across autumn
Borderlands.  White Dew begins tonight,
This bright moon bright there, over

My old village.  My scattered brothers -
And no home to ask "Are they alive or dead?"
Letters never arrive.  War comes
And goes - then comes like this again.

     I imagine many Iraqis with precisely these thoughts...