Letter from Fresno, Revisited

Dear N-

I cannot offer a sense of what we can do to stem the tide of this sublimely difficult sea change our planet finds itself moving through. Part of the difficulty we face is knowing so much and feeling such inability for our actions to respond properly or effectively. I immediately thought of Tu Fu's poems after we ended our call. Writing amidst the turmoil of Mongol invasions and the An Shi Rebellion of Tang Dynasty China, he testifies to the pain of what is effectively the end of the world as he had known it. Towards the end of a life of wars and migratrions, he wrote the following poems (translations by David Hinton):


A Traveler From

A traveler from southern darkness came,
leaving me a mermaid pearl. At its
center, indecipherable words lay
hidden--words I was unable to write.

I packed it away long ago, savings
against government clerks. And today,
opening wrappers to find it blood, I
have nothing left for taxes, not a tear.

--

Facing Snow

Northern snows overrun T'an-chou. Mongol
Storm clouds have ten thousand homes cold.
Windblown with scattering leaves, the rain-
Smeared, flakeless snow falls. Though my

Gold-embroidered purse is empty, my credit
Easily buys drink in silver jars. And with
No one to share the floating-ant wine,
At nightfall, I await the coming of crows.

--

I wonder what the pearl and the credit really stand for...of course, a pearl and good credit, but also perhaps memory. The tension between the memory of the past and the reality of the present is what underlies the poems. Both poems end direly, there is nothing left. Recovering the past through memory, setting this memory against the present, cannot change the present. It cannot conjure with it the actual--friends, communities, the magic possibility of youth. What then is the use of the conjuring? To clarify the despair of the present? During the same period, he wrote another poem:


Song for Silkworms and Grain

Every province and kingdom under heaven fronting on
the Great Wall, no city has avoided shield and sword.

Why can't the weapons be cast into ploughshares,
and every inch of abandoned field tilled by oxen?

Tilled by oxen,
spun by silkworms:

don't condemn heroes to weep like heavy rains, leave
men to grain, women to silk--let us go in song again.

--

Here his memory reveals the possibility of memory to the present. Memory sets up an 'other' to the present and gives the imagination the reference points for possibilities in the  future with a framework for understanding possible actions their outcomes. The first two poems clarify the direness of the present situation by revealing what is lost. They are
testimonial. This is part of our own job. We clarify what the world is like, and what hopes and dreams we feel we are losing and have lost.  We have some responsibility to testify about these hopes and dreams, what they were, how they felt, why they are disappearing, even if only to clarify the fullness of the pain we are experiencing. But the third poem wishes to point beyond that pain and to create a space where past hopes and dreams may arise again.  In this, the poem gains the voice to utter: "let us go in song again."

You and I know that the world is going to change beyond the appearances we knew and understood and loved in our youth. Your children or grandchildren may never see a glacier, understand the ice-capped mountains, know the shapes of the continents, or feel the change of seasons in any particular place as we did. Individually we know we cannot stop the momentum our nations and lifestyles have set for all of us. But we have the power to give our neighbors and those coming the same utterance: "let us go in song again."

The more I consider life, the more I feel that life is concerned with redemption; that that is how it operates. This is an "old man's" thought. What did I understand about redemption before I had really failed and lost something; when I was young? This is a gift of youth, I suppose, to see little need in redemption. But the Nature we are born into is always redeeming what has been lost, what has passed, what has died. And from this it has continued and continued, it has grown and adapted. Death in this way is a deposit, and life depends on this deposit to redeem the future.  The great process may end someday, but until then this will be the character of Nature and the nature of its process. We too, in our complex moral and imaginative, can be about this work. Memory is part of this. It is the place where the deposit is made.  Testimony, evidence, is another. It is where memory is realized. Song is a third, and it is our act of redeeming. I think this is part of what Tu Fu is doing in writing, this is part of what he is pointing towards.

Yet another poem from the same period sees a kind of redemption. In it, the past and the present become one, redeeming something for each. Whether or not the figure in the poem is actual or simply conjured is not so important, but rather that the figure is met by the poet. Tu Fu here is not about the grand redemption of China, which is beyond the scope of the single poet.  His redemption is limited, extremely limited even, but it is human and cherished.


Meeting Li Kuei-Nien South of the River

Often, long ago, I saw you in Prince Ch'i's house.
And at Ts'ui Chiu's, I sometimes heard you sing.
Just now, as we meet again, the season of falling
Blossoms gracing this world--how lovely it is.

All my best,
Doug