Death, Politics, and Poetry

I just finished David Hinton’s Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, which I’ve written about in at least one previous blog. Hinton narrates the life of the great T’ang poet, Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.) through close readings of nineteen of Tu’s poems. Each poem is printed first in Chinese pictographs with literal English translations, and then in Hinton’s translation. Much of the commentary is about the untranslatability of the Chinese, with two problems emphasized. First, Tu’s language uses no first-person I, but English requires a subject who sees, feels, and so on. Tu’s ability to write in the no-first-person means the poems can enact what Ch’an Buddhism seeks, which Hinton describes as mind that mirrors the cosmos; a mind through which the cosmos awakes to itself.

The second untranslatable feature of Tu’s language is that his written characters retain traces of their original analogical drawings: the word looks like the thing, instead of being an abstract signifier of the thing. In my favourite example, Hinton explains how the pictograph for anxiety is a composite of two elements. One is the image of a tiger, and the other is what translates as think, but itself decomposes into an image of the heart muscle and an image of “fieldland”. Hence, for anxiety, Hinton suggests the pictograph shows, analogically, “heart-mind when there is a tiger nearby in the fields” (119). Having spent these decades struggling to put into words the anxieties of illness, I feel a sense of epiphany–“Yes, that’s it!”–reading that cumbersome but evocative phrase: heart-mind when there is a tiger nearby in the fields. That’s what I’ve called deep illness.

These translation issues explain why Tu’s poetry is always on the verge of dissolution; it’s language undoing itself, in constant awareness of its insufficiency. Language already fading back into a pre-linguistic real, just as the landscape in paintings of the same period show the emergence and dissolution of forms. All that is solid melts into air, not just in modernity which is what Marx was describing in that phrase, but always.

Tu lived a refugee life–sometimes well patronized and other times starving–because of his vulnerability to the politics of his day, and in that we today feel an immediate kinship. My Provincial government announced this morning a commissioned report that describes how to cut 1.9 billion from the health budget. The Opposition critic pointed out that the government wouldn’t need to do that, if it had not begun its mandate by cutting corporate taxes by more than twice that amount. He didn’t add that the tax cut seems to have had no effect increasing employment. He also didn’t add that to the extent the health budget could stand cutting, what’s most worth trimming is the result of previous governments using health spending as a form of electioneering, especially building rural hospitals. So that’s my problem, and wherever you are, you can fill in yours. Compared to Tu’s problems, mine are civilized, at least so far. I may consider my government wrong-headed, but Tu saw heads literally rolling as civil wars precipitated invasions.

To sustain a life within this chaos, Tu wrote. He was the consummate vulnerable writer, and we read to know ourselves as vulnerable; to acknowledge our condition.

Politics is the contingent vulnerability of the day. Death is humans’ existential vulnerability. If you understand yourself as a transient form, emerging out of Absence to be, for a brief while, one of the Ten Thousand Things, and certain to return to formlessness, then death is the ultimate homecoming–and Tu spent his life trying to get home, which was both a real place and a spiritual condition. In his poems he dies and is reborn many times. And if we read him right, our vulnerability to death changes.

“Is this the promised end?” asks Kent at the end of King Lear. It may be the most bitter line in Shakespeare. Kent has suffered in the belief that a promised end will come, and for a moment it seems possible. Cordelia has returned, leading an army. Lear and Cordelia are reconciled. But then the battle is lost, Cordelia is murdered, and Lear dies, at best holding to the delusional hope that Cordelia still lives. Shakespeare gives us another ending later, in Cymbeline, where the battle is won, all are pardoned, and the old King blesses the young lovers. Vulnerable reading can hear, in each of these endings, the echo of the other. Both endings are always happening, emerging and dissolving.

As I finish David Hinton’s book, with the greatest regret that it’s over but knowing I can soon return to it, I imagine Tu still out on the boat in which he probably wrote his last poems, trying to get somewhere but knowing he was already there. One practice of vulnerable reading is to keep rethinking what I want to read when my vulnerabilities become embodied realities; what to read if dying admits reflection. Awakened Cosmos is definitely on my list. The end it promises is neither Lear’s resounding nothing nor Cymbeline’s pardons. It’s mind dissolving into the reflection of the moon on a lake. The tiger, hearing Tu’s poem, sleeps in the field.

Survival and Its Distinctions

Continuing to read David Hinton’s book about the poet Tu Fu, Awakened Cosmos, I get to a poem in which Tu, on the run with his family from the armies that rebel against those who have been his patrons, writes about being in a boat on a river very early one morning. It’s a short poem, four lines in English or 28 characters in Chinese. Nothing much happens: the moon shines on the river, the egrets sleep, a fish jumps. Hinton reminds us throughout the book that in Tu’s Chinese there is no personal pronoun, no I. So it’s not Tu that sees these things; rather, they happen, and he is there but not as the sort of subjectivity that an English language poem would virtually require. Not as a presence distinguished from absence.

Hinton comments: “In evolutionary terms, language enables us to make the distinctions that help us to survive more successfully. Tu’s own struggle with survival, and that of his war-torn country, echoes behind the poem’s image-complex. And yet, in this moment of reprieve, those distinctions essential to survival begin blurring, a blurring that carries us into profoundly ontological depths” (87). For someone trying to do what this blog calls vulnerable reading, those couple of sentences overflow, which takes us back to the title of the poem, “Brimmed Whole”, or Hinton’s literal translation of the Tu’s title, “brim-over complete”.

Vulnerable reading is for moments of reprieve, not for the times of being in flight. It’s about being in those moments, not so much using them as being able to inhabit them fully. In such moments of reprieve, when the flight is both close behind and awaiting ahead, “those distinctions essential to survival begin blurring.” I’ve written about holding one’s own in life. Illness is one of those conditions that makes us self-conscious of how we are always holding our own. We hold our own through distinctions. I remember when I had cancer–so long ago now–how I had to learn to distinguish between what I needed, what sustained me, and what torn me further down. That might be food or different people’s companionship. It might be chairs or clothes. Or it might be thoughts, imaginations, day-dreams of future possible scenarios. I had to learn to make distinctions between whose words I would take seriously and which words I regarded as bizarre curiosities, perhaps to be used later in something I might write. Healthcare professionals were distinguished between the nurturing, the merely useful, and the toxic. Survival depends on making distinctions and finding ways to act on those distinctions.

But then, as Hinton writes, distinctions blur. Here is the Tao of Tu Fu, or anyone holding their own. We need distinctions but we eventually need to get past them, because living in a world of distinctions is ultimately false, even insidious. Tu, in wartime, needs to distinguish places that are safe from those that are unsafe. But he equally needs to recall, in moments of reprieve, that all these places take form from the same formlessness. Distinctions are not an illusion, but they are not fundamental either.

All this leads me to ask, of King Lear, what happens to Lear in the storm, after his daughters have shut their doors against him, and he, his Fool, and the loyal Kent (in disguise) are out upon the heath where “for many miles about, There’s scarce a bush.” At first, Lear is pure subjectivity, setting himself as a force of will against the will of the storm, daring it to do its worst. Later, in a moment of reprieve after the storm, he wears flows in his hair. Those flowers are believed by scholars to be one of Shakespeare’s few original stage directions; he seems to have meant something by those flowers. Eventually, after Cordelia’s armies have been defeated and she and he are being taken to prison, “We too will sing like birds i’th’cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask thee forgiveness.” The distinctions on which all depended in Act I, majesty and fealty, loving or unloving, endowed with wealth or without dowry, have blurred. In the cage blurs with being at court, which is its own kind of cage. There is the briefest glimpse of a life beyond distinctions.

Of course this reprieve doesn’t last. At the end, all that matters to Lear is the distinction whether Cordelia lives or not. Alive or not is the last, crucial distinction. Taoism, Ch’an, Stoicism are all about getting us past that distinction; the blurring of the life/death boundary is perhaps the crucial moment of what we can call enlightenment, as a word merely standing in for what language cannot express, because language is the arising of distinguishing. The beyond-distinction can have no name. Things merely are: the moon, the river, the egrets, the fish. Mind merely mirrors them, without distinction.

Wild, in Shakespeare and Health Humanities

I’ve been preparing to offer a workshop on King Lear next week in Tromso, Norway, and at the same time starting to read David Hinton’s new book, Awakened Cosmos (Shambhala, 2019). Hinton returns to and revises one of his earliest translations, Tu Fu (a.k.a. Du Fu in other translations; see especially David Young’s book). Each chapter presents one poem in Chinese characters with literal English translations of each, then Hinton’s translation, and finally a commentary of several pages. It’s a wonderful book, saying again what was said in Hunger Mountain (2012) and Existence (2016), but–and this is the point–there isn’t really that much else to say. What matters is how the poems, and the visual arts in Existence, might allow us actually to hear or see how little needs to be said, or can be said. Paradox is one of Hinton’s themes, as a crucial device of Ch’an teaching: how do you say something about what language cannot express? That idea exists in multiple forms in different traditions, from theology to Wittgenstein.

But my concern is reading Lear alongside Tu Fu, and the key word to that juxtaposition may be Hinton’s usage of wild. Hinton does not attempt to define wild but allows our sense of what he means develop through accumulated usages. In one passage that seems especially important, he writes of “wild forms” that “are not themselves part of our systems of human meaning.” That’s an idea we find elsewhere, but then Hinton adds a layer: “and since our linguistic human meaning-making is just one more of these forms, it too is wild and meaningless”–which seems another paradox. “Hence,” he concludes, adopting an uncharacteristically (ironically?) philosophical turn of speech, “the human is wild, and meaning is meaningless” (42). Tu Fu, at least one aspect of Ch’an, and Hinton’s own work, are about getting us not to nod in agreement at this reasoning, but internalize what wild implies, where it leads us, as a lived practice.

Lear is a terrifying play. It’s not just what humans are shown capable of doing–people do horrible things to each other in other plays. But in Lear there’s no bottom to it. Horatio calls upon flights of angels to sing Hamlet to his rest. No angels at the end of Lear, only the echo of Lear’s dying words: “Thou’lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never” (V.3.326). No wonder the play was presented in rewritten form for 150 years, with Cordelia living to marry Edgar. The wild had to be tamed. That’s the issue we have to confront.

Maynard Mack, whose King Lear in Our Time I find most valuable, quotes approvingly Winifred Nowottny (1960), who writes: “The play is deeply concerned with the inadequacy of language to do justice to feeling or to afford any handhold against abysses of iniquity and suffering” (99). Wild, indeed. Lear is Shakespeare’s dark enigma, which is Hinton’s translation of the emptiness of mind that recognizes emptiness is itself a description, a form, an act of meaning making that is–in my understanding–an evasion of what is. Not what is as Presence, but what is before Presence divides from Absence.

This week I was also writing a blog posting for The Hastings Center and so thinking about bioethics, and I was engaged in conversations about health humanities. So I take these thoughts back to those pursuits. My recurring, comically recurring, objection to much of bioethics as well as much of social scientific research is its failure to reflect on how it positions itself in relation to the wild. Especially the banality of the policy or clinical practice recommendations with which research articles conclude. Well intentioned and often desirable as such recommendations are, they protect writers and readers from the wild that the observations risk opening up. In this denial, they obscure what they ought to make observable: the abysses of iniquity and suffering. Take abyss seriously, in what the word seeks to convey.

My current work depends on the hope that by bringing either Lear or Tu Fu into the conversations, bioethics and health humanities can at least resist acting to repress the wild. I seriously doubt if bioethics could be bioethics–could do its job–if it were, itself, wild. But I also don’t think it can do its job responsibly if it represses the wild, because human life at its extremes tips into the wild; it’s where we end up. That’s what Lear and Tu Fu’s poetry both show, in utterly different ways. Health humanities could be where the wild receives recognition, if we can learn wild reading. Perhaps, in the form of critical response to literature that is distinctive to health humanities, the crucial gesture is silence. But I’m an old man, and it’s winter.