To master the fire tiger and ride upon it: to return to the mountain as the sage who realizes the unity of the Tao within himself. To be like Chuang-Tze, undefined between man and butterfly, when with brush in hand he hesitates over the best word. To be the butterfly that dreams of writing as it flies. Perhaps, in the use of figurative writing, to be the mutual dream of man and butterfly.
All this is pointed to by traditional Chinese poetry, where, like a winged dragon, the two main tributaries of its traditional civilization come together: the magic of breath, the search for the creative Void coming from Taoism; and the words of practical effectiveness, the virtue of etiquette and social behavior descended from Confucianism. For if the art of governing men essentially involves the use of words, we must not forget that, as Confucius said, “if you do not study poetry, you will be unable to speak.”
A language with a tendency toward monosyllabic words, poor phonetics, and reduced morphology, traditional Chinese is not a language suited to the abstract expression of ideas, but rather a language that is both rough and refined, intended to direct human behavior. And, as such, it is a language that tends to act on reality: the language of warriors and scholars; that is to say, the language of a power that always comes from the past, as in any traditional culture—and perhaps Chinese culture is one of the most powerful—the entire social fabric is tied to a past full of efficiency and power.
Thus, the Chinese language, in its pragmatism, is always powerful in communicating a volitional, emotional clash; and it is from this clash that its proven efficiency in poetry comes. In this way, the word, a rhythmic, dancing, and stylized gesture, generating a constant flow of images, is the only way in which reality is evoked: in nature and in politics. It is everyday words, in their simplicity and in the form of “descriptive auxiliaries,” that bring together a set of characteristics that flow fluidly from the natural world to the social world and vice versa around an event, action, or person. Living in the world of words, and amid the struggle of contending political factions, the poet and statesman Su Tung Po wrote in the Song era (11th century CE): to write poetry is to materialize chi (strength, vigor, and energy).
It is from this language that, rather than seeking to copy reality, it attempts to evoke it, where the verb, with its imperious and imperative force and as an active grammatical element, stands out as the main particle. It is this verb, within the verse, that will be called upon to perform the collective social ritual and the cosmic order that emanates from it at the same time.
And it will be this verse, uninterested in original metaphors or poetic novelties; moreover, a verse made to be read as much as to be looked at, that will be adorned with all the wisdom and prestige of the proverbs buried in the body of a language made community. It is also in this verse that, time and again, and in time with the passing of the seasons, the same anecdotes are recounted, the same natural landscape reflected and repeated in the cyclical forms of poetry adapted to the passing of the seasons; cyclical forms to which each poet believes he or she contributes a personal touch of originality, but only if he or she manages to find the formulas already discovered and repeated by the poets of the past.
It is through this repetition that the word becomes ritual and play, emblem, prayer, and order in the face of natural and social phenomena. Unlike in the West, there is no objective beauty somewhere beyond creation or Nature itself. The possibility of bringing this beauty into play, of bringing it to life, is only through our re-encounter with it by means of poetic language. It is perhaps a poet of the Tang dynasty who has said it best: can a deer touch the undergrowth with its antlers and leave no trace?
Beauty, all beauty, is then an advent, an epiphany, an awakening of the transitory and at the same time eternal, within the being of things through the language of the poet: an encounter that is always unique, always singular: the transformation of becoming into ecstasy.
Cover image: Imperial Order Presented to Yue Fei (1137);
ink on paper, scroll; National Palace Museum (Taiwan).
