Month: July 2004

I like many of the poems that LaFleur selected for the last section of Awesome Nightfall, even though he did not include some of my favorites from the earlier collection of Saigyo’s poems I discussed.

In many of these poems a sense of despair is temporarily lifted by some form of natural beauty:

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Early summer rains:
no let-ups, no glimpse of sky,
but somewhere inside
this thick bank of clouds a crying
mountain warbler threads its way.

Although I like this poem in its own right, I think I also like it because it reminds me so much of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” one of the first poems I ever fell in love with and which contains similar imagery and theme.

Even in the darkest moments of life there is some faint hope, some faint reason to believe that life can be better, to believe that the human spirit can withstand the worst of times.

A similar theme is found in another favorite, one of many poems that uses the moon as a symbol:

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Winter has withered
everything in this mountain place;
dignity is in
its desolation now, and beauty
in the cold clarity of the moon.

As LaFleur noted in the first section of the book, “representations of the full moon or the full moon itself served as the focal point of for extended meditations. … Objectives of such exercises included an enhanced ability to recollect the past, greater powers of memorization, and — in the most literal sense — enlightenment.”

Even amid desolation beauty may be found if we are capable of seeing it. Though the beauty of summer has withered, there is a certain “dignity” in the snow-covered mountains, but mostly in the “cold clarity of the moon.” On another level, a lifetime of suffering can be dispelled by personal enlightenment if we are able to attain it.

I read a book of Saigyo’s poems translated by Burton Watson quite a while ago,and liked many of them, but not nearly as well as I liked those in Awesome Nightfall translated by William LaFleur.

Perhaps that’s because I have a better background to appreciate them now, or perhaps it’s because I find the poems more meaningul presented within the context of Saigyo’s life as LaFleur does in the 70 page opening section. For instance, the following quotation provided a historical perspective that I was previously unaware of:

What is best in his poetry, however, avoids the pius platitude. Much of the time Saigyo, originally a samurai, grappled with the implications of having become a monk. And, because he live in “interesting” times, he struggled to understand and articulate the connection between his religious tradition and the social chaos he witnessed firsthand. Rightly known to many Japanese today as an unusually perceptive celebrant of nature’s beauty, Saigyo’s sensitivity toward human conflict was equally deep. War was much on his mind. And he wrote about it more than any other poet of his era.

One of my favorite poems in this opening section is:

So, then, it’s the one
who has thrown his self away
who is thought the loser?
But he who cannot lose self
is the one who is really lost.

Although the poem certainly stands by itself, it seems even more meaningful when LaFleur adds the following notes:

Concerning this poem Kobayashi Hideo … wrote:

A poem such as this is a conceptual one, looking like it borrowed the dialectal grammatical structures of Buddhist texts… Saigyo, making this paradox in a poem such as this into a reliable source for poetry was opening totally new territory, a place no one had entered before.

The “conceptual” dimension recognized by Kobayashi does not,however, mean that the content was alien to Saigyo’s emotional experience. In fact, this and somewhat similar poems of the time bring to surface the kind of deep struggle this monk poet was having in attempting to grasp what it might mean for him to both reject ordinary society and, at the same time, remain attached to the prospects for social recognition of his obvious poetic skills.

While it’s certainly possible to recognize a simple truth in the poem (the idea that the person who lives solely to satisfy his own ego is truly lost) the poem takes on added dimensions, not to mention more spiritual dimensions, with the added commentary. For those of us who lack knowledge of Saigyo’s personal history and the understanding of Japanese culture during this time, LaFleur’s opening section is quite enlightening.

My favorite poem from the opening section is this one, possibly because of the excellent commentary included:

I thought I was free
of passions, so this melancholy
comes as a surprise:
a woodchuck shoots up from the marsh
where autumn’s twilight falls.

Translations of this poem cannot but stumble in trying to render the Japanese word aware. With a long history of associations (and often as mono no aware) this term, at least for Saigyo, designated the abrupt sense of being confronted with exquisite beauty — but a beauty that, because all things are impermanent, will disappear as quickly as it has arrived. Awe is of its essence. Religious and aesthetic experiences seem to fuse. What makes this poem superb is how Saigyo juxtaposes the subjective experience inthe first part of the poem with a swiftly conveyed depiction of of an objective, natural event in the second portion. The parts mirror one another. What happens in the scene of the darkening marsh is reflected in the person of the poet, soemone in whom, fortunately, long and arduos religious practice had not taken away the capacity to respond emotionally to a sudden manifestation of beauty. That this poem appeared at a time when Saigyo’s own life was drawing to a close and locates beauty and composure vis-a-vis twilight of many kinds has, understandably, made it among the most cherished of compositions.

I’m certainly not enlightened enough to believe I’m free from passions, but I’ve often been shocked by a sense of melancholy that almost seems to be triggered by a random, sudden event. No matter how enlightened one becomes, it’s hard to believe that as long as one is alive they will not be subject to sorrow, whether out of compassion for others or out of a personal sense of loss that accompanies each stage of life.

I just finished Red Pine’s translation of The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain and can certainly see why these relatively “simple” poems have retained their popularity for so long.

The advice Cold Mountain offers sounds as contemporary as today, as eternal as Taoism and Buddhism. It varies from simple homilies about the wisdom of sharing with others to esoteric interpretations of Buddhist tracts.

Needless to say, I tend to prefer those songs that offer simple but sagacious advice:

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Reading won’t save us from death
and reading won’t free us from want
so why this love of literacy
the literate are better than others
a man unable to read
never finds any peace
squeeze garlic juice in your crowfoot
and you’ll forget the bitterness

Red Pine’s notes on the poem: While crowfoot, or Coptis chinensis, is among the bitterest of medicinal herbs, garlic is among the most acrid and used here to mask the former’s flavor. In this case, crowfoot is used to represent hardship, and garlic, literacy.

I’ve often been aware of the irony of having to read poems and tracts that advise us that “book learning” can never lead to true enlightenment, an idea Cold Mountain is obviously aware of, but here he offers an original reason why so many of us resort to reading. We may not agree with some people’s actions, but understanding their actions allows us to at least accept them. Reading helps us to find a kind of “peace,” even if it doesn’t directly enlighten us. At the least, writing can let us know when we have lost the path, the Way, as it were.

My favorite poems are those, however, that celebrate the things I love to do:

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Where Cold Mountain dwells in peace
isn’t on a traveled trail
when he meets forest birds
each sings their mountain song
sacred plants line the streams
old pines cling to crags
there he is without a care
resting on a perilous ledge

Unfortunately I don’t live high in the mountains beside a mountain stream, but some of the best moments in the last twenty years have been during hikes in the high mountains, standing on a cliff looking back on the city in the distance, feeling blessed that such escapes are still possible in the 21st century.

I doubt I’ll ever attain it, but my goal is to live as free as Cold Mountain suggests we should be in:

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Amid a thousand clouds and streams
there’s an idle man somewhere
roaming the mountains during the day
sleeping below the cliffs at night
watching springs and autumns pass
free of cares and earthly burdens
happy clinging to nothing
silent like a river in fall

I’ve already become an “idle” man thanks to a teacher’s pension, Social Security, a wife who’s still working, and some savings I managed after my children graduated from college, but I’m still working on freeing myself from “cares and earthly burdens” and, hopefully, “clinging to nothing.”

I wonder if it counts if what you care about most is not yourself, but others? Personally, I’m grateful I have enough money to buy what little I want, pay for my medical insurance, and still have enough money left to go visit a grandchild in Colorado and take another grandson to Disneyland in the fall.

I still worry about those around me who are too little to care for themselves, those who can’t pay for medical necessities, and those who worker harder than most of us and still can’t pay their bills because some forms of work apparently aren’t important enough to deserve a decent wage. The poor are, even after all these years, one of those “earthly burdens” I’ve never quite been able to escape.

Perhaps, most of all, I worry that my children and grandchildren may fall victim to a culture that seems diametrically opposed to the simple advice that Cold Mountain offers us.