The Numbered Passages of a Rhinoceros in the China Shop
1
A bird translates silence. This certainly holds true in Tang poetry. If one were to eliminate the bird — or bird noises — there wouldn’t be many Tang poems left.
In an otherwise clue-less poem, the bird is as good a guide as any sinologist.
2
If most of the Tang poets are landscape poets, it is the soundscape that oversees all. This collection starts off with the wails of a stricken ape at Yellow Stream — as heard by Liu Zongyuan on his journey into exile. The gibbons of the Yangtse, it is said, always sound off thrice, on the odd chance of drawing tears from humans.
Wails resound in Li Bai, Du Fu & Bai Juyi. The Tang poets covered much the same territory in their exile.
3
A tentative list can be drawn up of birds & beasts in Tang poetry (our flora & fauna were tellingly in four categories: Flowers, Birds, Insects, Fish; where are the beasts?). Flowers firstly, then come the song birds, crows, migratory geese; insects: cicadas, crickets, silk worms, locusts; fish: fisherman — poets admired the angler’s fixed stance. Among the unlisted: horses, donkeys, tigers, foxes, jackals, there is the out-of-category e.g. the yellow crane & the phoenix. What does the fabulous phoenix sound like? The poets were as afflicted by this mystical bird as they were by the common crow. 262
4
The Rhino 通天犀 in Tang China held a special place, much like the unicorn in medieval Europe — not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit.
5
As for the seasonal, no poetry in the world has poets more observant of the seasons. Tang poetry is to all intents a quarterly. Meteorology. Before it is science.
6
& if the poets were asked to forgo the moon? A slim volume, with a qualitative difference: Banish the moon, Tang poetry would be a very dark place indeed.
7
A great deal has been said about Chinese classical poetry being mired in the wind/flowers/snow/moon school — stock images they certainly were — but the workshop of the poets happened to be the killing fields of China’s tumultuous Middle Ages.
8
The moon was not banal in the Tang Dynasty. In poetry it was primarily the exile’s moon.
9
In Du Fu’s ‘One Night’s Homesickness in Five Places’, Du Fu, his three brothers & a sister, separated by war, looked up to the same source of light, drawn by the same longing. The classical moon is a great simplifier & stylist. Between the lines, the words — the unsaid, thick & fast like wool; the unsayable writes itself.
26310
Homesickness becomes for the dispossessed synonymous with home. In this they belong together, when little else holds. So the full moon, its importance in classical verse — a perfection unapologetic — in hard times, past understanding. The frontier poets couldn’t help but notice. Du Fu with his young family fleeing the rebels’ army in his Pengya Ballad of a ten-day trek across the ravine, like much of Tang poetry, is framed by the moon.
11
The order of appearance of the poets in this collection is not chronological, but spatial, similar to a museum plan. In the first room, Liu Zongyuan (773–819), the quintessential poet of exile. Almost all of his poetry & essays were written during the 15 years of his political exile, five of them lived out in a monastery. Liu’s landscape poems engender a chill, a disembodied light. Typical of the landscape of an exile? It is in fact hard to regard the Chinese Heaven or Sky in any other light. We have but one word for both. Too true. It exemplifies the all-knowing which sees everything & does nothing. Heaven won’t change & the sky can’t.
Le He’s “If the sky but knows, the sky would have grown old” (p. 208, my own reading vacillates between ‘if the sky should care’ or ‘but knows’) is a poet’s supplication for the all-knowing to be not just omniscient; not merely omnipresent.
This sets the scene for Tang poetry & its tone.
12
In times of continual, rampant warfare, a retreat to Nature was a necessary strategy. If the poets seek refuge in Nature, it must also be evident that Nature seeks refuge in a Tang poem; the temptation of a 20-word quatrain — for infinite Nature to come to rest in a 4 × 5 grid, just so; a sight to behold.
13
In the second room, Du Fu — if any room could accommodate the poetry.
History attests, poetry rarely fails the dispossessed. One needs but think of the Book of Psalms; & Dante, an exile in three realms, for whom nos autem, cui mundus est patria — the whole world is a homeland, yes but he went on:
though I drank from the Arno before cutting my teeth
& love Florence so much that because I love her 265
I suffer exile unjustly.
Unjustly? Atrociously? From classical antiquity hasn’t Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) in ‘Letters from the Black Sea’ said it all — carmen et error? A song & a mistake that saw him banished for life from Augustan Rome. Poetry does get one into trouble. In pre-dynastic China, Qu Yuan (340–278 BC) our first exile-poet whose Elegies of Chu, & Lisao ‘On Encountering Sorrows’ have bequeathed poets of succeeding generations not only a genre of poetry, a legit school-text, but also a domain. Exile is the domain. Qu Yuan was much loved & emulated — his accidental death in the Mil...
