Introspection or Indifference: A Search for the Essence of Zhou Mengdie
– A. S. Kline
The poet Zhou Mengdie is a figure as elusive to the Western world as he is legendary in his native China and in Taiwan, his home of over 50 years. Much of the scholarship that does exist about the poet mentions his lack of particular political affiliation and seems to generally imply, if only by leading us to conclude, since the writers avoid commenting further, that he was less political in his writing and thought than other poets of his time. However, in reading and analyzing the poetry of Zhou Mengdie, I have become convinced that he was as anti-Mao and anti-communist in sentiment and poetical expression as any of his contemporaries. Therefore, without negelecting the search for the poet in his poetry which is my main concern, I would first like to explore this aspect of his life in hopes that it may prove important to the accuracy of a further examination of Zhou’s character and self.
Many of the Misty poets, who wrote during the intellectually oppressed decade in China and Taiwan from 1979-1989, were blatant in their criticism of Maoist policy and ideology. For example, Bei Dao, in his poem Midnight Singer, writes,
“a song
is a thief who’s fled across rooftops
getting away with six colors
and leaving the red hour-hand”
which is a fairly obvious rejection of Maoist Communism, being represented here as it was in reality by the color red. The ‘thief’ fleeing the stifling singularity of the one color-communism-may be either the dominated population of China under Mao, as a whole, the Misty Poets and other intellectuals who were being repressed by Mao’s regime, or even Bei Dao himself. What is most significant is the poet’s direct, defiant image of the subject tearing away from the stricture being imposed by the ‘red hour-hand’. This immediacy and fairly obvious sort of opposition is characteristic of many of Zhou Mengdie’s contemporaries, which does lead more or less naturally to the supposition, in comparing them with Zhou himself, that because these qualities are often lacking or at least less apparent in Zhou’s poetry Zhou himself was not as political in his writing as other poets of the time. Certainly the introspective nature of a poem like On a Solitary Summit tends to obscure the subtle opposition to Maoist ideology expressed in the last lines:
“The past stands still and waits, the future does not come,
I am the bondsman of the present, and its sovereign.”
However, I propose that Zhou’s ambiguity is simply his own unique sort of rebellion, here as in his other poems. While he avoids the explosive force of Duo Duo’s anti-Mao poem To The Sun, in which Duo Duo exclaims,
“You create, rise in the east
You are unfree, like a universally circulating coin!” ,
his sentiment is strengthened by what I would argue is the intentionally veiled style of his protest against the restrictiveness of the Mao-era government. In avoiding specific criticism, he frees himself to oppose not only Mao but all the forces supressing intellectual life in China and Taiwan. His poem April is more obvious in its expression but again remains veiled enough to encompass a wide area of social and political issues. The first line,
“Nothing is more thrilling and beautiful than derailment!”
approaches the vehemency of his contemporaries, while the second is equal to any of them, where Zhou writes,
“Say that fate is color-blind, unable to distinguish the redness or
greenness of direction
Who is the wiseman? Able to seal a volcano’s lava with his robe.”
The Buddhist image of the monk’s robe subduing the red-hot force of the volcano, which could be taken as meaning Mao or any conquest-hungry political power, any destructive and annihilatory force, is, once put into context, fully as dissenting as the lines of another Misty Poet, Gu Cheng, from The Origin of Moon and Stars, where he criticizes Mao and the cultural revolution:
“Tree branches wished to tear the heavens asunder
but only poked some tiny holes.
Through them shone a light beyond their sky
which men named moon and stars.”
or his characterization of the times in In the Twinkling of the Eyes as ‘those wrong years’. Here Zhou’s meaning is again strengthened and given universal applicability by its lack of explicit or specific language, while the potency of Gu Cheng’s protest is derived from its relative lack of subterfuge. Also, he uses rhetoric in order to persuade the reader, rather than bluntly stating his convictions, as does Yu Guangzhong in If There’s a War Raging Afar,
“If there’s a was raging afar, shall I stop my ear
Or shall I sit up and listen in shame?”.
Although this again is a less aggressive approach than many poets of the time, it does not necessarily follow that a lesser degree of feeling is being indicated. Zhou Mengdie left mainland China , his wife, and his children to work in a bookstall for 21 years, eking out a meager living selling newspapers, magazines, and poetry books. Given his reclusive and introspective personality, it seems more likely accurate to think that he was deeply affected by this and by the major events of the times, and that in his life as in his poetry, his restraint is indicative not of a lack of feeling but perhaps of a greater depth of feeling. We know he would often give free poetry books to students, which indicates an strong interest in the intellectual world, and the fact that he did publish several books of poetry shows, I think, a need and desire to be involved. This being in direct opposition to the inverted and inward disposition of his personality, which is revealed not only by the mysterious quality of his poetry but by his fascination with Ch’an Buddhism, which influenced his writing to the point that some of his poems could almost be called religious works, it is entirely natural that the tension should surface in his poetry as enigmas and riddles, as images striving violently with each other and sometimes with themselves. I think it is significant that although he studied in a Buddhist monastery, he did not become a monk, possibly indicating, again, that there was an aspect of his nature that would not allow him to separate himself entirely from society, from life, from reality. This idea of an essential conflict between certain aspects of the poet’s personality bears further investigation, since it could explain his choice of certain poetic devices and themes which are strongly present in much of his poetry, and also why he is often mistaken for a less political figure among Chinese poets. For example, one device constantly employed in his writings is the paradox of being and non-being, such as the fifth line of his poem June,
“Cold from where no cold exists”
or,
“To pass through the I and not-I”
from The Grass of Returning Souls, the title poem of Zhou’s second published poetry collection, which came out in 1965 . Other examples are easy to find, but for the purposes of this argument, The Grass of Returning Souls is an excellent source of material to support this idea of the poet as a torn personality, an artist who wants to be human yet at the same time a human being who cannot escape his convictions as an artist and intellectual. Zhou’s ready absorbtion of and preoccupation with this idea of being and nonbeing, self and not-self, I suggest to be the result of an the attempt of an extremely introspective personality to understand itself and the world around it. Having reached a point beyond which he was making no progress in understanding the world and his own self, he turned to a belief which removed the need for either, but was still not able to resolve the tension between his nature and his desires. Looking again at the Grass of Returning Souls, we find these lines;
“You face the furthest reaches to consult yourself
To consult the greenness vast as yourself.”
This after the reader has just been led through the “I and not-I”, creating a circle which seems to remove the need for resolution to the quest for self-knowledge. Yet, in the next stanza, he writes,
“The distance between South and North Poles shortens,
There is laughter noisely
Burrowing out from the deep snow-covered ground
Facing the first golden ray of the sun”
This to me expresses a desire to be closer to life, to the essence of things, which is among the goals of Ch’an Buddhism, the laughter here representing life, humankind, the snow-covered ground being what divides the poet from these, what prevents him from being a part of it all. While he notes the ‘distance between South and North Poles’ shortening, being, if we continue to look at it as from a personal perspective, representative of the poem’s protagonist attaining his goal and interacting with the world, only three lines later the ‘first golden ray of the sun’ is paralled with a startling opposite;
“Facing the first golden ray of the sun
Facing that death, like dry leaves crawling beneath your feet,
and Death
Above eight thousand eight hundred and eighty”
Is he comparing the mingling of himself with society with a kind of death, the necessary subversion of the self and the pain of the inevitable misunderstanding that must occur to some degree in any human relationship? In the first verse he remarks,
“You had already tired of brewing honey from illusions
Tired of sticking sorrow in your temples and bosom.”
Yet at the end of the poem, he says of the poem’s protagonist,
“With blue eyes you proclaim to the Dust of this World:
‘He who treads in my footprints,
I shall then give myself, and my footprints, to him!”
There is a certain sad admiration in Zhou’s writing here for the determination of the described personality to in some way interact with a world that is unable to understand him. Although the poet seems to distance himself by speaking in third person, is this assumed objectivity simply another veil, a cautious reluctance to show himself in the persona he paints?
Another possibility is that the poet is speaking in a more broad sense, of the inability of many individuals, particularly intellectuals, to communicate their ideas and be understood by the general public. In this case the ‘treading in another’s footsteps’ of the first and last lines becomes the universal desire of man to imprint himself on history and be remembered. This interpretation seems to be supported by the beginning of the second stanza,
“This is an ancient story, written in snow
Written under the soles of your feet
And also aglow in your eyes and heart,
You said. Though at that time you were still
quite small…”
Here the interaction of the poet with the protagonist is clear enough to cast doubt on our first approach. Here Zhou seems more a Lu Xun-like figure, cheering from the sidelines, looking at real figures, applauding their success where he has failed, finding a certain vicarious strength in the determination of the character, perhaps of mankind as a whole, including many individuals who like the protagonist have succeeded in reaching and affecting the world, which gives hope to the poet and the reader. This reading removes the need for a personal assignment to the meaning, but I think is somewhat incomplete. Since all artists create in order to express ideas, convictions, or simply themselves, no creation is without a personal meaning for the artist. In spite of the somewhat cool, mainly objective tone of the poem, I think the poet is both present and not present here, he removes himself for the purpose of clearer expression and clearer vision on his own part, but at the same time it is very likely his sentiments which are being expressed, his own desires and wishes. An essential consideration adding to the plausibility of this last integrated view, which, finally, agrees best with what we know of Zhou as a complex and subtle personality; the title of the poem The Grass of Returning Souls is a reference to a legend which speaks of
“a blade of the Grass of Returning Souls, which grew on top
of the world’s highest summit, Holy Mother Peak. It never
withered during the winter, and its leaves, soaked in wine
could cure all kinds of diseases, and help the complexion…”
Here we catch first the negative reference to winter, corresponding with the idea of cold and snow representing the schisms that divide one human being from another or set factions warring against each other. Secondly, it becomes clear that the plant referred to, the grass of returning souls, is in fact the poem’s protagonist, removing the poet by one more step from the personality of his poem. This revelation adds yet another dimension to the poem. Strengthening the idea of something fundamental lacking in the poet himself and in intellectualism and intellectuals-the ability to overcome ‘winter’ and cure the diseases of the self and of humanity-it also seems to imply a suggestion toward the answer. This suggestion seems consistent with the interpretation we have been following of the poet as a riddle himself; it is that the answer is the ‘not-answer’, that the only response is no response. For in spite of the wistful admiration of the poet for the abilities and achievements of the grass of returning souls, he proposes no solution for those such as himself who lack the qualities, nor for mankind as a whole. This reading would be not at all contrary to what we know of Zhou’s personal philosophical leanings: we have already noted his affinity with the concrete idea-shattering Buddhist principle of being and non-being.
But drawing a sketch of Zhou’s personality mainly from one poem risks being too shallow. Some of the best-known examples of Zhou’s poetry are quoted in Julia Lin’s Essays on Chinese Poetry. Although Ms. Lin declines to comment in much depth on the poet’s person, aside from a brief biographical sketch, her pithy and concise analysis of the poetry contains many insights which may provide excellent material for continuing our speculations.
The first poem she chooses is June, which begins notably with a being non-being structure:
“Pillowing on the self that is not self, I listen
Listening to what is faintly beyond and
Yet is clearly within the self
The floodtides of June.
Cold from where no cold exists,
The riverbed of a thousand years, trembling
Walks out from a swollen yarn
To scatter a bitter smile like a snow-tear
On a slender black rose thorn.
First night of frost-fall, the grapes and vines
Dreaming under a strange yet familiar starlight,
Dreaming of grains flowering over the stone-fields,
Dreaming of dead trees cavorting around the fire,
Dreaming of the kingdom of Heaven like a small rucksack
And Jesus not the last gracious shoemaker.”
Ms. Lin begins her analysis by commenting on the “quietly impersonal tone, the incipient transcendence, the use of paradox”, which, she writes, are “common features of Chou’s poetry”. She adds that “The religious symbolism in the concluding lines does not convince, any more than does an expression like swollen yarn”.
By themselves these few notes add some valuable facts to what we know of Zhou. First, the “quietly impersonal tone”, which we saw early in his Grass of Returning Souls, again serves as a device for adding strength to the poem by preventing the poet’s naturally sentimental mode of expression from overpowering the poem. This (I would argue) conscious restraint of his natural inclination reveals two things; a profound level of self-knowledge, typical of the introspective personality, and a restraint which masks a personality that, far from being the cool, mystical Buddha he sometimes appears to be, is in fact all that this picture of him is not, warm, passionate, and torn by the difficulty of expressing a self which is at once complex and quite simple. Giving away the simplicity of one side of his personality is the unoriginal and sometimes trite sentimentality that does slip through, which Ms. Lin deplores when she writes,
“Common, too, is the sentimental coloring in Chou’s favorite
images-smiles and tears-that flaws some of his verse”.
On the other hand, his ability to recognize his own tendency toward banality and to overcome it suggests a highly developed introspective ability and a strongly analytical nature, strengthening our idea of Zhou as a divided personality.
Next we have the incipient transcendence noted by Ms. Lin, and the use of paradox. The transcendence, coming from Zhou’s Buddhist leanings, is related to the restraint we have just discussed, a device for achieving objectivity in his writing and showing us what the poet wishes to be in order to express himself and be taken seriously, while giving less direct insight into the poet’s unihibited self. The use of paradox is more revealing, for example, looking at the lines,
“Dreaming of a strange, yet familiar starlight
Dreaming of grains flowering over the stone-fields
Dreaming of dead trees cavorting around the fire…”
we see an excellent drawing of Zhou’s character. If the tension of the ‘strange yet familiar’ image represents the self spoken of in line one, then the following two lines seem to clearly illustrate the polar opposition of his two main personality types, the first being the simple, pragmatic, quiet side and the second the passionate, illogical, artistic aspect of his nature. The tension resulting in the conflict of the two images would in this case be an echo of the tension in the poet’s being.
The last lines of the poem bear looking at as well, not only because of the somewhat unexpected religious reference, but because of the possibility that they complete the picture of the last three lines we looked at. We discussed earlier the possibility that Zhou’s fascination with Buddhism and frequent use of it in his poetry was the result of a fundamental inability of his pragmatic side to effectively analyse and explain the opposing aspects of his personality. Here if we say that the poem’s tension, which as Ms. Lin oberves begins with the very first line, is re-introduced in the first of the three ‘Dreaming’ lines and strengthened by the conflict of the next two, the penultimate and final lines may represent the poet’s own solution to the problem: adoption of religious or philosophical beliefs. The transcendent quality of the two lines seems to bear this out; they correspond with each other but have no obvious relation to the previous three except for the word ‘Dreaming’ which introduces the penultimate line. This disengagement could be representative of the progress of the self from a state of struggle to one of relative harmony, significantly removed and essentially separate from the first. While the transition takes place with a suddenness that makes us think of satori, the instantaneous, momentary awakening sought by Ch’an Buddhists, the fact that the image given is Christian rather than Buddhist may be simply another foil, a slight alteration of fact to prevent revealing everything. It would be consistent with the idea we are forming of Zhou that the melancholic side of his personality would would be compelled to attempt an expression of itself, but at the same time prefer not to reveal everything at once, retaining a certain childlike desire common to a melancholy personality to always keep something back in order to have the power of surprise later. Ms. Lin’s criticism of Zhou’s use of religious symbolism as being “unconvincing” may therefore be the result of looking at the structure from a strictly literary perspective, whereas if we add this personal aspect we have been developing we see the possibility that the image was not meant to convince, that its incongruity is in fact deliberate and plays an essential role in expressing what the poet wishes to convey.
After discussing the poem’s strengths and weaknesses, Ms. Lin notes that, “The poem, in Chou’s (Zhou’s) characteristic style, proceeds from individual perception to a more universal vision.” This reinforces what we saw in our consideration of Zhou as a political writer; that he gains effectiveness in his poetry by avoiding specifics and speaking in general terms and universal ideas which are applicable to myriad situations and provide for numerous interpretations. In this way he balances a writing style which as we have seen might naturally tend to be overly personal and introspective, while keeping a platform for expressing himself and his own sentiments.
Another writer who again mainly addresses form in Zhou Mengdie’s poetry is Lloyd Haft, author of All Poems Are Palindromes: Zhou Mengdie and Symmetry Structures in Modern Chinese Poetry. He discusses another almost universal theme of Zhou’s poetry, that of transformation and metamorphosis, often accompanied by the questioning of knowledge, perception, and even existence itself. In his article he quotes another writer, Erika Greber, who wrote, “the palindrome represents the very idea of transformation and metamorphosis…sequentiality and causality of time and space are annihilated in the palindromic motion.”. The use of this theme reveals certain aspects of Zhou’s personality which we have already touched on and illuminates them further.
Haft writes,
“these elements in Zhou’s poetry, suggesting the relativity
or inadequacy of the socially conditioned view of reality,
could be called Daoist in content, but in form as well.”
The expression of a desire for change in self and things, as revealed through the inclusion of transformation motifs throughout Zhou Mengdie’s poetry, is essential to understanding the play and interplay of his personalities. Here I think the logical, pragmatic side of Zhou’s character is working with and for the melancholic, the latter being the restless part of him which needs and seeks change. The melancholic demands transformation, the pragmatic tries to deliver it. Being pragmatic, it does not hesitate to employ whatever methods are necessary to effect transformation, not being hampered by the need for originality that is part of the artistic melancholy. This accounts not only for the transformation motifs but also for the odd religious images which crop up from time to time without much explanation, since religion is by nature transcendental and invariably imposes change to some degree upon the self. For example, in the poem You Are My Mirror, Zhou writes,
“Always feeling someone on high
Is coldly observing me, watching my days and nights
My rights and wrongs, my comings and goings.
Escape too, is not allowed
Koran is in your hands,
Sword in your hands”.
The religion referred to here, Islam, adds strength to the restrictive power not of the watcher but the ‘you’ of the poem’s title. Zhou rejects the traditional approach of this religion by suggesting a new one in the next few lines:
“Why not cast a handful of light
To net all the shadows?
Friday, whose Friday are you?
Who is your Friday?
Wakened from the eleventh snowstorm
Never again to South, North, East or West. Against
This deepening night, I turn my eyes
Inward and explore.”
In The Bodhi Tree, however, he asks,
“Who hides a mirror in his mind?
Who is willing to go barefoot through life?”
If the ‘mirror’ of the first poem represents religion, then these two lines are simultaneously asking who would want to have so restrictive a thing as religion in one’s mind and who would be willing to go through life without some sort of religious or moral guide. Certainly not new questions, but they show the philosophical and religious side of his nature as well as his affinity for paradox and enigmatic pairing of images. Possibly it was his pragmatic side which led him to explore different religions, in an effort to meet the needs of the melancholy. The cautious, skeptical aspects of the pragmatic personality would have then, naturally but ironically, prevented a complete allegiance to any one religion. The likelihood of this seems supported first by his failure, as we noted earlier, to become a monk although he studied Buddhism in some depth, then by his avoidance noted by Julia Lin of an affiliation with any particular social institutions. This pragmatic skepticism surfaces frequently in Zhou’s poetry as rhetorical questions that challenge our notions of knowledge, perception, and existence, such as the line from Polydactilism which reads,
“Who is to say after the Five Seasons/there is no Sixth?”
or the passage from Arriving at the End of the Waterway,
“Arriving at the water’s end
I see no end, no water,
Only a subtle fragrance lingering
Cool in the eyes, in the ears, over the clothes.”
As in his other poems that contain references to idealistic views such as those espoused by most religions, there is a certain sadness as his melancholic side accepts what the pragmatic already knew: that no religion can be entirely understood, that religion and in fact all intangibles are by nature infinite and our finite brains are therefore inevitably limited in their capacity to grasp them. This disappointment is the basis for the searching quality present in most of his poetry, the tension created by the effort to do the impossible. To resolve it he often uses images which embrace the impossible, such as the line quoted before:
“Cold from where no cold exists”,
or the line from One Who Walks Through Walls, the title of which is itself an example of an impossible image:
“All walls, even those of copper
Erect their ears…”
These images may spring from the quest of Zhou’s melancholic temperament to do the impossible, spiritually speaking, to escape the limitations of the body, physically speaking, to express himself and be perfectly understood, the ultimate desire of the melancholy personality. When Zhou does not use paradox to express this, he often uses the circular pattern derived from Buddhist thought in which each thing is complete in itself and all paths are circles which eventually lead back to the beginning. Although this resolution appeals to the phlegmatic both in that it is convenient and conclusive, it is also compatible with the melancholy in that it is religious, has no definitive end, and contains infinite possiblities. The main fault of this structure, for Zhou Mengdie at least, is that, having the single consistent form, it needs a greater amount of innovation in phrasing and description to prevent lapses into triteness and forgettable, formulaic verse . This problem is augmented by the fact that the phlegmatic tends toward what is traditional, concrete, and established, which at times prevents the melancholy from expressing itself freely.
Conclusions drawn solely from an artist’s work, without direct verbal confirmation, hearing it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, must remain to some degree speculation. But I would argue that many facets of Zhou Mengdie’s personality are discernible in his poetry, and that certain assumptions may be made and discarded on the basis of observations made in analyzing his work; namely that he was not in fact any less political than his contempories nor was he willingly distanced from society, it was rather the inability of society to understand him, as with many artists, that created the gap which leads society to think of him as aloof and uninvolved. He is revealed in his artistry to be at once a legendary talent and an entirely ordinary person, a simple, retiring Buddhist personality on the one hand and a complex, restless intellectual on the other. His most remarkable quality, and that for which I venture to say he is most misunderstood, is his mastery of expressing his ultimate inability to express himself and his view of the world through his chosen medium, poetry. Following the pattern of traditional Daoist poetry as remarked upon by John Rothfork of the Northern Arizona University,
“Notice the paradox of Daoists so elegantly declaring their ignorance! Tao Ch’ien says he knows nothing – ‘bare rooms’ instead of libraries. Yet the elegance of the poem belies the claim of being a ‘bare room.’ Unless we are militant Confucians, it is not necessary to attempt to drive the Daoists to admit such contradictions.”
he espouses this tendency toward contradiction; returning to the ultimate impossibility of expression, he somehow achieves the impossible and in achieving the impossible, restates its impossibility. In keeping with his admiration for the famed Daoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, he uses Buddhist and Daoist principles, among other devices, to bring into harmony the mystery and simplicity that make up his being and permeate his writing, while not wasting an ounce of the dramatic tension naturally produced by his two dominant personalities. This fertile and prolific union completes the poet and the man, closing the circle that is his self and not his self, that is more than himself, that is, finally, Zhou Mengdie.
Bibliography:
Lin, Julia. Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Ohio University Press. July 1, 1985.
Zhou Mengdie. Grass of Returning Souls. Translated by Hsin-Sheng C. Kao. Printing Impressions Publishing Company, Torrance, California. 1978.
Lloyd Haft. ‘All Poems are Palindromes’. htttp://fareast.ff.cuni.cz/conferences/worm/abstr/LloydHaft.htm
Erika Greber. ‘A Chronotope of Revolution: The Palindrome from the Perspective of Cultural Semiotics,’ http://www.realchange.org/pal/semiotic.htm, p. 1.
Dao House Website. http://www.geocities.com/dao_house/poetry.html
A Kline. The T’ang Dynasty and the Tao. http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/Chinese/AllwaterTang.htm, 2000.
Jerome P. Seaton, Dennis Maloney. A Drifting Boat: An Anthology of Chinese Zen Poetry. White Pine Press, NY. June 1, 1994.
