Ruminations on hotness coolness
[a mini-essay]
“a bon mot”
Today a FB friend posted a bon mot:
If your partner is hotter than you, that means you’re cooler than them.
I replied with a quatrain:
One may say both hot & cool are honorifics
but denoting differing standards of appeal
if the hot entice the senses with specifics
yet the cool attract through secrets they conceal
My interlocutor remarked:
As a Professional Engineer, I was looking at it more from a physics point of view, and the poetic perspective is a refreshing change.
Thereafter, I expanded on my initial, verse response by considering (more methodically) the idea of hotness & coolness in the following rumination & analysis.
Ostensibly hot & cool describe states of temperature, but in fact these terms carry more obscure linguistic baggage. Ostensibly metaphorical, I don't think the two terms really belong to the same metaphor (or metaphorical universe). They don't operate in exactly the same way, even though their adjectival usage seems very similar.
The two words (as applied to people) have slightly different histories & I suppose they carry different sorts or ranges of implications. 🙂 They present an interesting puzzle.
Some analysis:
When someone is dubbed "hot," this mainly suggests they elicit the heat of attraction in the *viewer* -- not in themselves. The "hot" person is heat-producing (in others / onlookers). That’s not the primary sense or idea with "cool," however. With a "cool" person, the temperature trope is much less literal / physiological, more mental & associative. *Coolness* is a state of being: the cool person is centered within themselves in a recognizable & powerful, yet mysterious & indescribable manner. Of course certain musicians, certain artists, poets, philosophers, novelists, composers, performance artists, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, even perhaps essayists are variously included in the shifting, subjective, culturally arcane yet perennially significant registries of the cool.
“The existence of the cool presupposes the existence of an intelligentsia capable of recognizing & appreciating the cool.“
The existence of the cool presupposes the existence of an intelligentsia capable of recognizing & appreciating the cool. Coolness will somewhat mutate & vary over generations — yet the category seems to carry enough gravitas as to preserve the status of its favored denizens across decades if not to say centuries. By my generation’s calibration (for instance), Leonard Cohen & Bob Dylan both epitomized coolness when first encountered in the 1960s. To many of us, that estimation still applies today.
Compared with the vapid, juvenile vagaries of mere hotness, “cool” is clearly a more esoteric (& hard-won) commodity; and as often used, it’s also a much more mystical term, I’d hazard.
In fact many of the same qualities ascribed to the "cool" personality in popular culture strike me as being oftentimes akin to distinctive qualities that spiritual aspirants instinctively recognize in their teachers & mentors & divine incarnations, etc. One could even say that the saint, the Avatar, the Sadguru variously embody coolness taken to this word’s most profound possible dimensions. 😎
“this mode of coolness”
Registries of this mode of coolness might typically include personages such as Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Naropa, Milarepa, Aurobindo, Kabir, Rumi, Saadi, Ibn Arabi, Mirabai, Lal Ded, Tukaram, Socrates, Bodhidharma, Shankaracharya, Nizamuddin Auliya, Teresa of Ávila, or the figures noted in a 1940s photo above — Meher Baba & Upasni Maharaj. This variable spiritual registry runs in parallel with the cool artists & poets etc. & there’s sometimes even an element of anecdotal cross-fertilization between the parallel rosters. When I think of the fraught meeting of W.S. Merwin with Chogyam Trungpa, for example, I see the two lists engaged in a surreal encounter if not to say tussle. Beyond all anecdotage or variable estimations touching all such calibrations & dimensions of coolness, the category continues to carry peculiar cachet. Hotness is (by my estimation) unlikely to catch up anytime soon.
Of course there’s more that can be said or nuanced on this topic. After “publishing” the above yesterday [May 25], I was pleased to get a note from a younger-generation friend (now in his 30s) calling into question my theory that the cool is less a matter of temperature than is the hot. He makes a good argument.
Haha! Love it. But based on my understanding of the term “cool”, l think a “cool” person does cool people’s spirits the same way a “hot” person excites them. I think it’s still more about the observer. A heterosexual man might refer to another man as “cool” because he’s laid back and generally cools the vibe. A heterosexual woman might refer to the same man as “hot” because he heats her up? Not sure, just a thought.
Well noted. More rumination may be required. I can agree the cool (like the hot) may reference or connote a response or register an affect within the being of the subjective viewer as much as denoting a judgment regarding the subject who’s being qualified by the adjective.
In my initial analysis, I’d proposed a distinction between the hot/cool person’s affect on one’s physical body (in the case of the “hot”) verses on one’s mind (in the case of the “cool”). My young friend (who happens to have the extravagantly cool name Lincoln Dylan Lin) countered my theory in this wise: “l think a ‘cool’ person does cool people’s spirits the same way a ‘hot’ person excites them.” This opinion elides the mind/body distinction my theory had initially attempted to demarcate, suggesting whether we’re talking body or mind, both are in any case subsets or extensions of “people’s spirits.” Again, I find the point a good one — though methinks both theories (Dylan’s & mine) can coexist, depending on whether we want to look at this granularly (as my theory arguably does) or whether we prefer to view the person holistically & account for the totality (as does Dylan’s formulation).
Dylan & coolness / 酷 Kù & Li Po / jiu & puerh
You might wonder that I refer to my friend as “Dylan” rather than “Lincoln.” I first met Dylan’s parents in the DC area in the 1990s, when Dylan [迪倫 Dí lún] was just a lad & his sister Linnan [林楠 Lín nán] was an infant; we became friends & I got to watch them grow up, being always known in their Falls Church household as “Uncle David.” Since I’ve always known Dylan as “Dylan,” I think I’d best not shift nomenclature now. Speaking of Dylan: it’s evident his Chinese dad & American mom shared an appreciation for Bob Dylan — whereas Bob (aka Robert Zimmerman, the Jewish-born songster) had latched onto the name originally around 1959 when he was starting to perform as a freshman at the University of Minnesota & unexpectedly encountered poems by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas [1914–1953], finding them cool enough to warrant the name-change (he’d been toying with calling himself Bob Dillon till then). This name thus cycled through a couple generations & rounds of inter-cultural coolness to reach the lad in question. Coolness at times attaches itself to names / ideas / trends; it doesn’t have a NASDAQ index, yet it maintains cultural capital.
Coolness itself [i.e., the American word “cool”] of course enjoyed currency in post-Cultural Revolution-era China. I asked Dylan what word they used? Answer: 酷 (pronounced Kù). However (texting from Beijing) Dylan adds: “People [now] usually say 帅 [Shuài] though [literally ‘handsome’]. Or 帅气 [Shuàiqì, ‘of handsome demeanor’].” Evidently Kù is no longer as cool as it was in Dylan’s dad’s younger days. (I well recall the word being bandied about in the 1990s.) Can’t help but notice how this word designed to represent our 20th century “cool” — 酷 — contains the Chinese radical 酒 jiǔ = “liquor” (most typically denoting saké = so-called rice wine: the beverage that Tang poet Li Po favored & that’s often been mistranslated in poems as “wine”). This connection of coolness to 酒 jiǔ might well owe something to Li Po himself.
When I first got to know Dylan’s dad Lin Xiaodong [林晓東 Lín Xiǎodōng] in DC in the mid-1990s, he was something of a drinker of beer & jiu. When I spent time with him in Beijing a decade later, this had changed. Rather than jiu, he was drinking puerh tea [普洱茶 pǔěr chá] night & day — a truly salubrious beverage (originating in Xiaodong’s native Yunnan Province). By the time of my 3rd or 4th Beijing visit (2007/2008), it seemed the cognoscenti in that metropolis had largely switched over en masse from jiu to puerh. Xiaodong had also established himself in commerce as a puerh distributor; & I myself took up the genteel habit. (I quaff fine [Tolkein-referenced] Elevenses puerh as I type this line.)
Tea & Bodhidharma
Of course it’s possible my perception of a Beijing cultural shift from jiu to puerh is being overgeneralized or overestimated by my imagination. But my impression is: there was a recalibration of the coolness index for both commodities, in favor of the biodynamic, cultured [in 2 senses of the word: bacterial & human] tea brew. This rumination now also reminds me that, per Chinese folklore, tea itself has a Zen / Chan origin-story: the plant having allegedly grown from the eyelids of the First Patriarch of that meditation school in China — the venerable Indian monk Bodhidharma [Daruma in Japanese], the so-called “wall-facing Brahmin” (he having initially sat for 5 years in motionless meditation after arriving in China, circa late 5th century AD, before commencing his teaching in the new land). If Li Po & jiu are cool, Daruma & cha [tea] also register on the coolness index.
“hoarfrost on the earth-ground”
Li Po (as he first became known in the West, aka Li Bai [李白 variously pronounced Lǐ Bái or (in classical mode) Lǐ Bó]; 701–762 AD), it might be recalled, is said to have met his demise when (aboard a small boat) he overreached for the moon on the water after overmuch jiu. The moon embodies coolness & so did Li Po! but coolness can have a way of veering into fatality. That poet’s classical encomium to the moon (anthologized & absorbed by centuries of Chinese literati in Poems of the Masters [re: which book, see more below] might be, historically, among the most-studied quatrains in the world. I’ll pause & share my translation of the terse verse.
Before my bed the bright moon’s shine-down
apparently is hoarfrost on the earth-ground
raising my head I gaze upon the bright moon
bowing my head I contemplate my hometown
The blend of placidity & longing in the poem (the verb 思 sī at once signifying contemplate / think about / long for) might recollect the wistfulness of Erik Satie [1886–1925] or Claude Debussy [1862–1918]. Attributes of coolness: the nocturnal, the lunar. More could be said about this — my mind runs to Robert Graves’ eccentric-genius tome The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948). Let me leave that here as a mere shimmering reference. (If we follow every thread, we’ll be chattering away forever.)
“But a tale that might be human”
Ah, but no sooner I’ve invoked Robert Graves, thoughts turn to W.S. Merwin’s rather Gravesian (& coolly archaic) narrative poem called “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” [from The Dancing Bears (1954)]. A masterful composition from his early career (before his poetry underwent so many changes), the poem is Merwin’s reimagining of the Cupid & Psyche myth, via a Norwegian folktale embodying that mysterious story. After I moved to India in 2007 & recommenced painting there, I lifted a line from Merwin’s poem when painting on a verandah in Bhopal in late winter. Hey this is my essay; so I’ll share said painting with you without further ado. (Many of my poems & paintings have been lost; this remains extant — if for nothing else, I’d be pleased to be recalled for this modest work.)
If you peer close, you might note 2 books depicted: one is Merwin’s Collected Poems; the other, The Plays of Kalidasa (bearing a cover of my own invention, with a figure intended to represent the heroine of Shakuntala). Slippers & sarangi, folk idol & teacup complete the afternoon still-life. One of the cluster of Bhopal lakes appears in the background (lakes that in later seasons grow rife with outsize lotus flowers), bordered by the distinctive lakeside arches. The small blue car of my Sanskrit / Hindi tutor (Sangeeta Gundecha) sits at roadside; kelly leafage announces spring.
Methinks I’ve been impacted by Merwin (1927–2019)’s poems more than by poetry from other contemporaries. His line inscribed here (“But a tale that might be human”) is drawn from the above-mentioned narrative:
Say the year is the year of the phoenix.
Ordinary sun and common moon,
Turn as they may, are too mysterious
Unless such as are neither sun nor moon
Assume their masks and orbits and evolve
Neither a solar nor a lunar story
But a tale that might be human. What is a man
That a man may recognize, unless the inhuman
Sun and moon, wearing the masks of a man,
Weave before him such a tale as he
— Finding his own face in a strange story —
Mistakes by metaphor and calls his own,
Smiling, as on a familiar mystery?
This stanza (in 13 lines) is the first of 39 verses (of the same length) comprising Merwin’s poem. The stanza stands unique & alone as formulation of theory that serves to frame the tale that follows. The tale involves a young woman — the story’s heroine — who might be thought to embody the soul of poet or artist. (She’s betrothed to a prince who, by day, through enchantment, assumes the form of a white bear. I won’t recount the poem further here.)
The ideas in the above stanza include — by my reading — an explanation for theatre & story & art; and concomitantly (or conversely) an articulation of the principle of divine incarnation (or of idealized beauty). When man or woman assume the masks of sun or moon, we have art / theatre / story / metaphor / symbol / myth / religion. When sun or moon assume the masks or form of man or woman, we have divinity embodied in human guise / romance / idealism / mysticism. But this tale is endless & its canvas too wide; it takes us afar from our present theme. Let’s return to the modest puzzles of coolness. To do so, I’ll shift to a more recent poem by a younger poet, whose work I’ve only just begun to acquaint.
“Without waking up turn to page thirty-seven . . .”
In the title poem to Ranjit Hoskote’s The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (2019), the poet (born in Mumbai in 1969 — who in the real world is also an art-critic / theorist / curator) offers instructions to the reader (who is evidently cast here in the role of a dreamer):
Without waking up turn to page thirty-seven
in the Atlas of Lost Beliefs
and surround yourselfwith apsaras, kinnaras, gandharvas, maenads,
satyrs, sorcerers, bonobos, organ grinders,
stargazers, gunsmiths, long-distance runners,
gravediggers, calligraphers, solitary reapers,
beenkars, troubadours, rababias, ronin,
nagas, pearl divers, Vandals, Goths,
mummers, snipers, collectors of moths,
hobos, dharma bums, bauls, drifters,
djinns, mahjubs, mahaboots, qalandars,
griots, mad hatters, speakers in tongues,
trippers, star angels, batmen, punks,
eggheads, buffoons, lay preachers, agitators,
friends of the court, friars minorite, agents provocateurs,
bird-spangled shamans, fainting oracles, screeching owls,
wise men of Gotham, and women who run with wolvesall blessed by the blue hand of a reckless dancer
who spares a thought or two for the world but no more
as she poses, heels in the air, Cossock-kicking on a crumbling reef.
The reader must work out for her/himself what’s going on here. In the situation posited by this poem, there exists such an Atlas of Lost Beliefs (a book encountered in dream). The book in one’s hand thus bears this record of the dream-book one is imagined to encounter. (In the book now at hand, the title poem happens to appear on page 17 rather than 37: consonant with dream experience, where facts are generally & characteristically shifted a few notches away from any real-world correlate.) One is not then instructed to read the book; rather, the list we then peruse is the poet’s roster of what the soul (the reader) is being inscrutably directed to surround herself with.
Allen Ginsberg attributes the literary concept of “the list poem” to Anne Waldman in this riff:
But by this anaphoric rapture, or anaphoric repetition, it (Crashaw’s poem “The Flaming Heart”) actually builds up to rapture. So this is what Anne Waldman calls “a list poem”, actually, an early list poem. I taught a little poetry workshop this weekend and checked out list poems and the samples I used were (the) thirteenth and twenty-eighth chapters of Ecclesiastes (because there is “..or the golden bowl be broken”), and then I read Christopher Smart, I used “Like to the flaming of a star.”, the little.. — I used that as a list poem (in case you didn’t think of it as such, it is also a list poem, catalog). I used Whitman‘s…an early poem…“Starting from Paumanok”, an early list, a catalog (by the time it comes to Whitman, they’re called “catalogs” (Anne calls them “lists”). Then I used (Ted) Berrigan, a couple of Berrigan’s poems (his imitation of Joe Brainard‘s “I Remember”, his “again” poem — “we will not go back there and read that again” — [Editorial note — “Ann Arbor Song”] — I don’t know if you know that. from his new book — [Editorial note — “Ann Arbor Song was first published in 1970 in Berrigan’s In The Early Morning Rain, Allen is clearly refering to So Going Around Cities, published that year (1980), Berrigan’s “new book” — the poem includes the witty lines “& I know Allen will follow me round the world/with his terrible singing voice/But it will never make us laugh here again”]
“And then..” — I’ve forgotten..he has another one at the end that was really funny
– and I used this, used this (Richard) Crashaw.
[source of the above: A List of List Poems]
Perhaps something of this sort is going on in Hoskote’s noted poem: the very itemization of such practitioners of “lost beliefs” tends toward a sense of rapture. (It’s an astonishing catalogue.) Yet arguably the Atlas list is simultaneously a multi-cultural registry of the cool — and is not so unlike my attempt above to construct a (perhaps widely acceptable) spiritual Who’s Who. Hoskote’s list includes a range of adepts: spiritual, musical, martial, or journeymen skilled in other esoterica — including several classes of supernatural beings all too commonly encountered in Indian (or Greek) mythological narratives recounted in antiquity but unknown in today’s real world. The poem concludes as do many dreams, with an enigmatic image — in this case an image of the evident [or possible] Creatrix, who is apparently largely lost in her own cool oblivion.
“Come to think of it, maybe Nirvana is ultimate coolness.”
Come to think of it, maybe Nirvana is ultimate coolness. That, or Nirvakalpa Samadhi (involving conscious realization of the “I am God” state — which per Meher Baba inevitably follows in the wake of Nirvana; an esoteric tweaking or correction to Lord Buddha’s account of the final cooling down).
But Bodhisattvas, too, are cool — they who vow not to enter Nirvana until all beings in the limitless realms of Samsara have attained liberation. Compared with this manner of cosmically heroic idealism, all efforts at discovering meaning or creating beauty or establishing social justice or serving humanity or saving the planet or enriching culture are perhaps various species of coolness training wheels. Yet wheel within wheel, the coolness chakra spins.
What about Miles & Han Shan?
A musician-friend remarked:
interesting piece. surprised you didn’t talk about Miles Davis. The hotness that is sometimes hidden under the cool.
The point about Miles Davis is well taken. Perhaps no serious consideration of coolness can exist without mentioning Miles or musicians of his ilk — albeit for the present I’ll let the allusion suffice, as my friend (guitarist Dave Cipriani) there makes his point succinctly & nicely.
I’ve also been thinking how the Tang dynasty poet-recluse Han Shan merits mention vis-à-vis questions of coolness. This morning [May 28] I looked up — & freshly translated — the particular verse that had come to mind & that strikes me as pertinent to these ruminations. With Han Shan (whose name means “Cold Mountain” — a name borrowed from the remote place where he dwelt as a hermit), the frigidity of his habitat seems to merge with a sense of the hermit’s elevated mind. He seemingly makes that point himself in this poem.
People ask the way to Han Shan
Han Shan: there’s no road through
in summertime the ice has not yet melted
at morningtide the sun’s still hid from view
if you ask me: how did I manage to reach this place?
your mind & mine my lord are not akin
but if your mind becomes alike my mind
you’ll find this is the very spot you’re in!
This was among the Han Shan poems Gary Snyder translated in the 1950s — & that (if I recall aright) Jack Kerouac included in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958 — before Snyder himself had a chance to publish it on his own! — as the poet-translator remarked to me ruefully when we chatted about Han Shan in DC in the ’90s. He also pointed out that Red Pine had more lately translated the complete volume [The Collected Songs of Han Shan (1983, 2000)]). [Cold Mountain Poems didn’t appear in book form till 1969 (coupled with Snyder’s Riprap); but Snyder first published the Han Shan sequence in the Evergreen Review in 1958, perhaps in the wake of the Kerouac novel’s appearance, wherein his fictionalized representation of Snyder — “Japhy Ryder” — recites a few of the poems, thereby introducing Han Shan to an American generation of proto-hippies & seekers. Allen Ginsberg puts in an appearance as “Alvah Goldbrook” in the novel. The surprise popular success of Kerouac’s debut novel On The Road (1957) opened a public space for the novelist’s Buddhist musings in The Dharma Bums. Han Shan isn’t methinks typically so familiar to Chinese literati per se, but is admired in Zen circles. It’s not clear historically whether the recluse had received any formal Zen training, but his poetry was appreciated in later centuries.] It was Snyder’s translations that initially got me interested in Han Shan (& also in Snyder’s own work) when I stumbled on his Cold Mountain Poems at Shambhala Bookstore on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley in the 1970s [with the sequence in outsize handwritten English calligraphy]. The translation above is my own (I having unwittingly followed in Snyder’s track, studying classical Chinese at UC Berkeley a couple decades after he did the same, albeit I didn’t run into his Cold Mountain Poems till some ways into that study. [The one professor I’m sure Gary & I shared was a Tang poetry scholar, the late Edward Schafer, who was amused by my somewhat incorrect but poetical efforts with the 19 Ancient Poems — another topic entirely & one I’ll perhaps return to eventually, inshallah.] I was also impacted by Burton Watson’s admirable version: Cold mountain: 100 poems by the Tang poet Han-shan (1962).)
Han Shan’s Dao
The opening line of the above verse [ren wen han shan dao] could be read to mean “People ask: what is Han Shan’s Dao?” — what’s his path, his marga, his yoga? He then replies by taking the word Dao in its more literal meaning (a roadway) and taking Han Shan to refer to the mountain (rather than to himself): People inquire: what’s the way to Han Shan? / Han Shan? there seems to be no way to get there! That’s how cool people behave, isn’t it? (I’m reminded of Salvador Dali, when asked: what are the requisites of genius? He replied: First, you’ve gotta be born a Spaniard. Second, you should be named Salvador Dali. Han Shan, however, hardly lays it on that thick.)
In this poem, the author proceeds to describe the environment of his remote habitat, never fully turning away from the first sense of the question: what is his discipline, what is his doctrine? In the second half of the poem, he fully returns to that sense of the question — but again playfully, addressing now the reader — the questioner — respectfully yet with a critique. You, my lord, don’t look at things the way I do. If you did, you too might renounce your ambition for a comfortable life in society. You’d be right here like me!— you’d be, like Ramana Maharshi, lost in a cave at Arunachala, lost in the thickets of self-inquiry.
Han Shan’s tone here reminds me of Kabir — a challenging / chiding aspect in Kabir’s poetry that scholar Linda Hess beautifully brings forward in a snippet (from a longer film) worth a look (if I can get a tad multimedia within these ruminations); see: Linda Hess introduces Kabir (Episode 3 excerpt from the film Chalo Hamara Des [Come to My Country](2008), 4.5 min. on YouTube).
It’s not just literal coolness, it’s the remoteness of this recluse’s abode, which — for some Chinese or Japanese readers in gone centuries, as still for we world-weary 21st century denizens — exerts an appeal: we note with curiosity the driven individualism & the quixotic quest of this (so we’re told) erstwhile petty governmental functionary who evidently suffered some disappointment or reversal of fortune early in his life (the details are unknown), some shock that was enough to drive him literally into the wilds, determined to establish for himself an inner life.
Looking further at Han Shan
Maybe we can look a bit more into Han Shan’s story. The only way to do so is to read another verse or two (the sole reliable account). In another poem, the hermit sketches more appealingly his mountainside environment — which thankfully isn’t always & only ice & mist.
What birds express my heart cannot endure
at such times I’ll recline in my thatch hermitage
the peach & cherry blossoming scarlet-scarlet
the willow & poplar spangling slender foliage
the daybreak sun o’er-sailing azurite hills
the pristine clouds a’bathing in kelly ponds
who’d know I pass beyond the dust of the world
in swiftly ascending southerly Han Shan?
This could be deemed “nature poetry,” except it’s simultaneously a mapping of experience. Like a painting, or a musical composition, there’s a deft balancing of imagery, line by line, the poet’s own figure appearing in the end as if discerned from great distance.
After 40 years, I’m still amused how the line I render “What birds express my heart cannot endure” [or in another pass at the same, “my heart just cannot grapple with”] was given by Gary Snyder as “I can’t stand these bird sounds”! Xin-bu-duan [the heart can’t bear] surpasses, methinks, irritation. Overcome, qi shi [at such times] the poet lies down & lets the emotion pass. The figure in repose in line 2 somewhat plays against the poet’s swift ascent of the southern slope in line 8 — leaving behind the dust-of-the-world / the pettiness & harm that must have spurred the mood of vairagya [renunciation] underpinning Han Shan’s life-story. The poet gets a bit more autobiographical & retrospective in another of these 8-line poems:
Once I went to sit at Han Shan
lingering I’ve remained these 30 years
I lately came to call on friends & kin
more than half had gone to the yellow springs
it gradually fades as does the guttering candle
long a’flowing like the rippling river
this morning when I watch my lonely shadow
unwontedly do tears twainly dangle
sitting & lingering
Of course “to sit” [zuo] can suggest sitting-meditation [zuo-chan / Zazen in Japanese]; anyone who lingers for 30 years is presumably onto something. Gone to the yellow springs is a euphemism for dying. In this poem’s 5th & 6th lines, there’s no stated subject — the reader must supply one: [it] gradually fades as does the guttering candle / [it] long flows alike the rippling river. What gradually fades? What long flows? The poet’s life — or his attachment to life — that attachment that can still glimmer in a sudden, unaccustomed dangle of tears (recalling Tagore’s “a mist of tears”) in the wake of a most rare visit to the lowlands after so many years aloft, & back again facing his solitudinous shadow — back to his lonesome Dao. (Lao Tzu said: Other men are shiny-bright / I alone am dark & dull / but I take refuge in the Mother.)
classical parallelism
We note Han Shan’s classical instinct for linguistic balancing: a single / solitary shadow in line 7 of the above poem contrastively positioned against doubled / paired tears in line 8; like the grammatical & semantic & syntactic echoes between “gradually fades” & “lengthily flows” and between “guttering candle” & “rippling river” (each such phrase positioned within its 5-character line in the same spot as its echo-buddy in the next line). It merits mention that in the distinctive sense of form inhering in such grammatical & syntactic parallelism lies much of the dimension & artistry & beauty of classical Chinese verse. One sees a parallelism of grammar & image coming in play in couplets such as this 2nd couplet of the top-most poem:
in summertime the ice has not yet melted
at morningtide the sun’s still hid from view
— where the [2-character] temporal phrase summertime plays against the [2-character] phrase morningtide; and where the image of the sun contrasts with that of the ice. Classical parallelism comes fully into play in the top-most poem’s 3rd couplet:
| daybreak | sun | o’ersaling | azurite | hills
| pristine | clouds | a’bathing | kelly | ponds
the daybreak sun o’er-sailing azurite hills
the pristine clouds a’bathing in kelly ponds
Do the clouds bathe in the ponds? or are the ponds refreshed by the clouds? Be as that may, they’ve got a mutual admiration & purification society going on up there in the lost hills.
Again, there’s syntactic parallelism in the 2nd couplet of the 2nd poem above:
the peach & cherry blossoming scarlet-scarlet
the willow & poplar spangling slender foliage
For sake of suggesting ubiquitous rhyming in the poem, I compromised on reflecting the poet’s thorough parallelism at the lines’ end. If seeking to bring that facet of his poetics into focus, the couplet should instead be rendered:
the peach & cherry blossoming scarlet-scarlet
the willow & poplar spangling slender-slender
— for there’s a reduplicative adjectival binomial at the end of each line (a doubled word akin to boo-boo or no-no or coo-coo or cray-cray in English, except in classical Chinese this sort of reduplication is mainly found with adjectival expressions): the 1st [scarlet-scarlet] indicating color, the 2nd [slender-slender] indicating form: the 1st implying blossoms, the 2nd implying leafage. (This is what Chinese poets do! — & those who can’t read the original wouldn’t know it; for translators oftentimes fail to echo such formal facets of the poetics.) Speaking of Kabir (as we were above), I’m reminded of the Hindi phrase jhini-jhini [thin-thin] in a memorable poem (often sung as a bhajan): meaning so gossamer-thin as to be semi-transparent / translucent. The Chinese tiao-tiao [slender-slender] is such a descriptive adjective applicable to elongated forms in general (e.g. to fish or fingers — or as Han Shan shows, to the foliage of willow & poplar). An affect of these paired intensive adjectives in the couplet is to give an impressionistic or pointillistic sense of the local tree-life. Han Shan here paints like Van Gogh.
Turning to the 3rd poem above: In Han Shan’s original, parallelistic play rings between “came” & “gone” in this 2nd couplet of the poem:
I lately came to call on friends & kin
more than half had gone to the yellow springs
In this poem’s 3rd couplet classical parallelism runs full tilt, touching each word of Han Shan’s exquisite 10-word couplet here:
| gradually | fades | as | dying | candle
| long | flows | like | passing | river
it gradually fades as does the guttering candle
long a’flowing like the rippling river
Formal parallelism lends such couplets peculiar strength & resonance in the original Chinese, heightening their aphoristic qualities. In the practice of rigorous poets writing shi from the 5th century AD onward [such poetry having then been dubbed jinshi / “modern poetry” albeit we now may call it “classical,” thus distinguished (still) from gushi or “ancient poetry”], conventionally both the 2nd & 3rd couplets of a 4-couplet (8-line) poem will generally show full grammar & image & syntax parallelism. Han Shan doesn’t adhere to that in every poem, but it’s a norm he very often does achieve. There are literally MILLIONS of such poems written over a span of some 1,500 years by Chinese poets! A small drop in that large bucket has seen English translation.
Parallelism in Lao Tzu
Regarding (what I call) the strength & resonance inherent in the formal parallelism of classical shi — of course the same can be said of Lao Tzu’s superb mystic poetry (written some 1,000 years prior to Han Shan). In Lao Tzu’s day, the specific form of classical shi in which Han Shan, Li Po & myriad other Tang poets excelled hadn’t yet been invented. But Lao Tzu is rich in wordplay & aphoristic parallelism, beginning with his memorable opening utterance:
道 可 道 非 常 道 | dao ke dao fei chang dao
名 可 名 非 常 名 | ming ke ming fei chang ming
[literal]:
the dao [way] that you can dao [say] isn’t the constant or continuous dao
the name that you can name isn’t the constant or continuous name
(For in classical Chinese, Dao means both way & say — rather akin to Kabir’s [Hindi] Shabda per Prof. Hess’ explication in the above-linked clip.)
[which I might now render]:
The way you can say | ain’t the autochthonous way
the name you can name | ain’t the autochthonous name
Han Shan’s rippling river
Back to Han Shan: one may only hope some of the poetry’s bamboo aroma (that wells up from such elegant language) spills over into the English pantomime — or (in the happiest case) the poem’s fresh echo reconstructed like a boat within an English-language bottle. So: we were looking at:
it gradually fades as does the guttering candle
long a’flowing like the rippling river
“Passing river” would in fact be a somewhat more literal translation; but wanting to emphasize the grammatical mirroring with a sonic echo in English, I’ve opted for rippling river [to accord rhythmically with guttering candle (for I’m writing primarily as a poet in English, secondarily as a quasi-scholarly translation hobbyist)]. As regards that guttering candle in the couplet — with guttering used adjectivally by Han Shan [nota bene: in classical Chinese poetry, the grammar of a word is signaled by its location in the line (or one may say, in the sentence) rather than by any change in the written character, which remains exactly the same regardless what grammatical function the word takes on based on word-order]) — so: this guttering is the same word chosen centuries earlier when Buddhist scholar-translators sought a correlate for the extinguishment denoted by the Sanskritic Nirvana: Nirvana being the extinction of separative existence (the Fana of Sufi terminology), metaphorically alike the extinguishment of a flame when the candle has finally fully burned down, when it has attained ultimate coolness — with Nirvana’s Sanskrit verbal root nir being the evident root of English words such annihilation & negation & nullity & nescience & naught (& William Safire’s nattering nabobs of negativism & Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody! Who are you? & Wallace Stevens’ the nothing that is & Meher Baba’s The Everything & The Nothing & Edgar Allan Poe’s Nevermore).
I think of our phrase “nil & void” & then I think of Nilkanth: literally blue-throated (a name of Siva). Zhuangze [Chuang Tzu], you know, asked a question: Is the sky blue? or does it only seem blue because it’s so far away? The Hindi nil (blue) & Sanskrit nir (naughting) hob-nob in Han Shan’s guttering candle. And Saadi’s moth (the lover who dives into the candle of the Beloved & thereby dies) is somewhere flitting around the margins. But since I’ve mentioned Saadi, I shouldn’t omit Hafez, who in one couplet [per my version] wrote:
The majesty of loving transcends the intellect’s lore
approach love’s doorsill when you’re game to be you no more
An idea or theme also reflected by the 20th century Urdu poet Jigar [again in my version thereof]:
Love is the name for annihilation | one cannot expect survival in love
her happiness is the mass happiness | for your happiness ignore happiness!
But let’s return to the Chinese verse:
it gradually fades as does the guttering candle
long a’flowing like the rippling river
this morning when I watch my lonely shadow
unwontedly do tears twainly dangle
Thus Han Shan muses on the gradual extinction & long endurance of the play of Maya, both personal & universal. (His imagistic sketch is so archetypally drawn, the philosophical lines so abstractly written, the paired / balanced / contrastive observations — re: candle & river — may be felt to apply variously to one’s individual life or to the phenomenal world overall.) Confronting his single [& lonesome] shadow, twain [& thus ironically social] tears dangle. This sudden dangling of tears was chronicled in black ink some 14 centuries ago. Can the unwonted glimpse of emotion gleam even now, echoing afresh in language, garbed as a sequel in a foreign translation?
“My Mathews Dictionary” & a rain-check
It was only after I lost my fulltime job in a law office last July that I ordered for myself a used copy of the Mathews Chinese-English Dictionary (my prior copy had been lost years earlier) & resumed some of the dabblings in classical Chinese that had occupied my time in the early 1980s before I sold my piano, bought a record player, started writing music reviews, and thereby zoomed out of Tang / Ming / Qing poetry into 20th century music (a trajectory I lately recollected in a poem as yet unpublished, “My Mathews Dictionary”). During that period of time [I mean, after losing my job last July — in consequence of the pandemic, when more than half my firm’s staff was laid off — albeit more than half didn’t in this instance go to the yellow springs], I also began to assemble a manuscript of my own poetry [written over the past 14 or 15 years — much of it during my period of travel in Asia 2007–2009]. Happy to say I managed to complete that process, and I’m now shopping around that fruit-basket (currently, via the American poetry-prize “lottery” — as Red Pine amusingly referenced it in a recent email when I’d written him, showing him my poems & a few of my Chinese translation efforts).
To get myself fitted out for this return-to-the-classics that I staged (as said) after losing my job, I ordered a bevy of books including some of Red Pine’s volumes (including his Lao-tzu’s Taodeching (2009) as well as his Poems of the Masters (2003), which latter anthology offers a traditional selection of Tang & Song dynasty poetry). Another book I got for myself but had only barely dipped into is The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi & Peter Levitt (2018). The book shows every poem in the original as well as in translation; and these chaps interestingly seek to distinguish poems they deem genuine Han Shan from later additions to the corpus. I opened this book 2 days ago when I wanted to retranslate the 1st Han Shan poem seen above (“People ask the way to Han Shan”) & found the poem positioned as the very 1st in the book. Just now I’ve opened the book again & come upon another poem I really must study & add here — for it sketches circumstances that led Han Shan to flee the world & seek refuge in the hills. (This shows me how riddled with lacunae has been my so-called scholarship, that this poem stares at me as an unknown thing.)
I’ll plan to return to this space after I’ve consulted my Mathews [& other things] & spent a bit of time with the poem; for a place-holder, here’s the version that the noted translators offer us:
As a youth, I carried scriptures and a hoe,
while living with my brother’s family.
But others made accusations
and even my own wife turned her back.
So I left the dusty world,
to live idly reading books.
Who can offer a bucket full of water
to rescue this fish from its cart-track puddle?
(Ah, now I do recall encountering this poem in Burton Watson’s book, one day more than 40 years ago when I sat on a green slope beside the rill that runs thru campus at UC Berkeley.)
Around the time I finished putting together my own poetry MS (a month or two ago), I’d suddenly again started working — 3 days a week in a vaccination clinic. Then my old law office supervisor texted me & invited me back to work there (3 other days a week). So I’m again a busy, working stiff (the sorta thing Han Shan went to pains to avoid).
This being so, Gentle Reader, I’ll hereby stage a recess & beg to take a bit of time before I more definitively draw to a close these ruminations.
So here’s my rain-check | for now adieu
will likely be back | in a week or two
[posted May 30, 2021, 11:59 AM]
[Notes to self: don’t forget to touch on *the limits of cool* — an essential rubric. Also: coolness as aesthetics vs. coolness as moral response.]
June 5: “Han Shan in English” & Two English Shi
Heck, I’ve some things to add now, although it’ll be a while before I catch up with the promised (4th in my sequence) Han Shan shi. But you know, back in the late ’70s / early ’80s, when I discovered I could translate rhymed classical shi into rhymed English (a fact that for me came as a happy revelation), I set out — concomitantly — to make my own attempts at writing my own shi in English (i.e., poems that take classical shi as their model, whether fairly rigorously or somewhat loosely so). One of those poems was entitled “Han Shan in English” & I remember writing it at a cafe in Washington, DC [at the back of the Politics & Prose Bookstore] when I was sitting with a booklet bearing that same title — a book that gave a then-current overview of its stated topic. Google advises it was written by Paul Khan & published in 1989. I lived in DC from early 1991 to early 2007, and I‘m sure I wrote the eponymous poem in the early 1990s but can’t share it now. It was included in one of two poetry MSS I wrote in the ’90s, both of which have been lost to the world (a story also recounted in “”My Mathews Dictionary”). Leaving aside that particular English shi specimen, anyway I’ve continued on that track (on & off) ever since. My recently-completed MS includes more than 60 poems based on Chinese models, with more than half of those based on 8-line shi.
But I’m not here today to delve further into those past poems of mine. Instead, I want to show 2 new examples of this genre, poems hot off the screen [of my mobile phone]. Anybody who’s read this far & waded thru my (perhaps laborious) explications of Han Shan’s poetics (& Li Po’s quatrain) is thereby qualified to consider some merits & faults of my attempts at English shi, I’ll hazard. So happens, each of these poems has an associated [mobile phone] snapshot with it. The first dates from yesterday afternoon (& was written while sitting on a Metro platform — where the photo was snapped).
Shi: Pasadena DMV
got my driver’s license once again
ready to tool the roads at time’s decree
cars have a role to play in lives of men
& sometimes even in the life of me
back at the Metro waiting for the train
“10 minutes Union Station” reads the sign
across the freeway exotic pines remain
hello my friend! I’m only passing by
[For “exotic pines,” I’d initially / tentatively written “Douglas fir,” adding : “Is it truly a Douglas fir? Or is it pine or cypress? The words “Douglas fir” (as once spoken by Allan Way, the late Director of my Quaker school in Temple City) came to mind (surfacing from 5 or 6 decades ago) & maybe the mind is right. According to ancient scholarly justifications for studying poetry, one was that it would help teach the names of birds & plants etc. Consider this a crowd-source plea for help.” A botanically-savvy FB friend offered a correction: exotic pine, remarking:
clearly a pine — the long needles define that. When I said exotic I was using that to mean non- native, from elsewhere in the world. Not capitalized, so not a proper name. To get down to specific ID for pines one often has to count the needles in a cluster, and in any case I am not an expert on pines.
That being said the needles are longer and more abundant than on any native pine [hence “exotic pine.”]. Absolutely not a Douglas fir! Beautiful tree though.
The 2nd poem is from half an hour ago today (in my room in Valley Village).
Shi: “a yogi seat”
Incidentally my mousepad’s now a yogi seat
I needed a mousepad & ordered up this item
it’s of pseudo leopard skin and I find it neat
I’ve become I suppose its guardian ad litem
are my fingers sketching asanas with the mouse?
can my hand attain a state of yoga samadhi?
I’d best regroup & clean my cluttered house
that “pad” that is the abode of my “food body”
I did need a mousepad (had been using a piece of cardboard for nearly a year) & when I saw this gaudy item (for a few bucks on Amazon) it at once fetched recollections of the actual animal skin I used for my yoga practice (in a brief period in my teens when I resided at one of Yogi Bhajan’s ashrams in Los Angeles) — although that skin lacked the leopard spots. But the far-above image of Milarepa depicts the Tibetan yogi with that sort of traditional seat.
It’s a matter of historical curiosity that in the first edition of Meher Baba’s magnum opus God Speaks (1955), the frontispiece photo of the author finds him with arm akimbo, chilling out on a similar yogi seat. I’ve an idea that Murshida Ivy O. Duce (who figured on the editing/publishing team for said tome) might’ve chosen this photo (or requested or arranged for such a photo) because in those days, this was something expected of Eastern Masters, and that Baba obliged. I’ll probably get this somewhat vague story sorted out after a while (& may append a likely correction or tweaking of it here), but for the moment, there it is. Did Meher Baba defer to perceptions of Eastern yogi coolness? It’s possible. In the 2nd Edition of the volume (appearing posthumously, not too long after Avatar Meher Baba “dropped the body” in 1969), the yogi-esque frontispiece had been replaced by a portrait of Baba that Murshida Duce definitely had arranged (it was shot in her own home in Washington, DC in the ‘50s by a photographer from the Chase Studio). I’m certain the photo-change was done with Baba’s approval.
Life At Its Best
Among others in her contact, Murshida Duce presented that unusual book (when published) to the distinguished American anthropologist (& translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead), W.Y. Evans-Wentz — who met Meher Baba in California during the Silent Master’s visit in 1956. Dr. Evans-Wentz wrote a Foreword to the thin but significant volume, Life At Its Best (1957), a compilation of Baba’s publicly-shared spiritual messages during his month-long travel in America that year.
In the book, Meher Baba himself prefaces the sequence of short discourses by his own verse in English — which poem serves as the source of the book’s title. As a young man at Deccan College, Merwan Sheriar Irani (later known as Meher Baba) was schooled in English romantic poetry. He later (in the 1920s) wrote Farsi ghazals (he having also been schooled in the work of Hafez-i-Shiraz), a Gujarati arti, and still later, rarely— as here — the occasional / short verse in English. He writes:
If understood, life is simply a jest;
if misunderstood, life becomes a pest.
Once overcome, life is ever at rest.
For pilgrims of the path, life is a test.
When relinquished through love
life is at its best.
June 6: Troubadour tradition & the origins of rhyming
Meher Baba’s rhyming (in the above verse) calls up a point which, while obscure, is perhaps more than tangential. Reading W.S. Merwin’s Foreword to his translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio (2000), I was somewhat floored by his observation as to the origins of rhyming in European (& thus methinks English) poetry, which he identifies with the troubadour tradition & notes to have flowed from the influx of Arabic poetry in southern Spain in the 10th & 11th centuries. Merwin’s account of this rarely-noted literary history is wonderful. He writes:
In its rapid development the tradition of troubadour poetry evolved the convention of a beloved to whom, and about whom, for whom the poems were written. Of course love poetry, both erotic and idealized in one way or another, had existed and had been important in other ages and in many — perhaps in most — cultures. And the figure of the beloved who is the subject of the poems and to whom they are addressed had often been evoked, whether idealized or not. But the theme and elevation of a beloved emerged with particular intensity in the tenth-century Arabic poetry of the Omayyad Moorish kingdoms of southern Spain. In the highly cultivated poetry and culture that had evolved there, a code attitudes, behavior, gesture developed, a stylized choreography, that were clearly the mutated result of an ancient tradition. Early in the eleventh century, Ali ibn-Hazm of Cordova, a philosopher and literary theoretician, produced a work entitled On Love in thirty chapters. In the chapter “Love at First Sight” he tells of the poet Ibn-Harun al-Ramadi, who met his beloved only once, at a gate in Cordova, and wrote all his poems for the rest of his life to her. [I believe the eminent Sufi Master, Ibn Arabi, is said to have had a similar experience.] Love in that tradition is spoken of as the greatest of inspirations and the ultimate happiness. In Spain, Arabic philosophy absorbed the work of Plato, which the Provencal poets and their Italian successors drew upon in turn. The forms of the Andalusian Arabic poetry were developed from, or in accord with, the songs of the folk tradition. A stanza was evolved, its measure strictly marked for chanting, and it made important use of something that had not been part of the classical languages of Europe and their Latinate descendants — rhyme. One form in particular, the zajal, or “song,” became the most common one in Spanish-Arabic poetry in the tenth and 11th centuries. Out of the eleven surviving poems of the first Provencal poet whose works have come down to us, the one who is generally referred to as the first of the troubadours, Guilhem de Peitau, or Guillaume de Poitiers, three are in the form of Hispano-Arabic zajal. And Count Guilhem, one of the most powerful men in Europe in his generation, was at least familiar, and probably as sympathetic, with the courts of Arabic Spain as he was with much of northern France. So were the troubadours who were his immediate successors; and the brief-lived courts of love of Guilhem’s granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine continued a brilliant kinship with the Moorish kingdoms to the south.
The rhymed and highly stylized poetry of the troubadours, with its allegiance to music, the codes of the courts of love, the Hispano-Arabic assimilation of the philosophy of classical Greece, were essentials of the great Provencal civilization of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The secular splendor of that culture and its relative indifference to the tedious imperium of the Church were in the end (1209) barbarously and viciously ruined by the wave of political ruthlessness and deadly self-righteousness known as the Albigensian Crusade, one of the great atrocities of European history. . . Both that rich, generous, brilliant tradition and the devastation that had been visited upon it were part of Dante’s heritage. . . The legacy of the troubadours survived even beyond Dante. Petrarch is sometimes described as the last of the troubadours. And the attention given to the manners, the psychic states, the perspectives, the ultimate power of love, the exalted beloved, the forms of verse, including rhyme, all come from the culture of Provence either directly or via the court of Frederick II of Sicily.
But Dante’s beloved, Beatrice, did have an earthly original in Dante’s own life and youth . . .
[pp. xv-xvii]
[awaiting some elaboration here]
June 7: coolness & equanimity
My accretions to this (erstwhile “mini”)-essay are getting a bit fragmentary, partly just due to the juggle of my current life. Officially I’m working 2 jobs (each 3 days = 24 hours / week) but have been down with a cold the past 3–4 days. Having procured that driver’s license, I’m also buying a car so I can help my housemate transport a bunch of her dogs [I reside in a house with 3 humans & 12 canines in Valley Village] to her other abode in Florence, Alabama (or, first, to a couple friends in the general area to care for the dogs while she gets her house back in gear — it having been ransacked by marauders nearly a decade ago & she having stayed in Calif. since then . . . part of a long story as you can see)]. Plan is to go in a 2-car caravan (4 dogs per vehicle — though 2 of mine are my own cheweenies, along for the adventure & heading back to LA with me straightaway, once I’ve delivered the others). Looks like we may be able to make a brief, pilgrim-stop at the Avatar Meher Baba Heartland Center in Prague, Oklahoma — where (driving the other way across the country with a multitude of dogs [she’s a dog rescuer] in 2012) said housemate’s car broke down on the highway right near Prague [she having had no idea said Heartland Center existed] & having ended up celebrating Meher Baba’s birthday with folks there.
Anyway & regardless: I want to add one point before I zoom off to ply my day-job (word processing in a downtown LA law firm). [The cold absolves me for now of my other job duties, working in a vaccination clinic as a registration clerk — no worker with any symptomology at all can set foot in the hospital premises.]
[May 29, 2024 — I’ve added the image of Meher Baba beside a fire as a replacement for another image I’d borrowed from the oilpainting of artist-friend Nadya Phillips amid this mini-essay; the latter image can be seen at Meherabode Gazette №. 3 (July 2014)— it being the “cover image” for that issue of an online publication I co-edited for in 6 quarterly issues. The above photo of Meher Baba is borrowed from the Avatar Meher Baba Trust website; for some context, vide: DHUNI OF MEHER BABA now ON 12th OF EACH MONTH.]
My communication with friends who are regulars on social media differs from my communication with friends who aren’t. With the latter, the genteel, last-century customs of EMAIL remain intact. I sent a link to this essay to a few such friends, and one — a superb artist in Walnut Creek, Nadya Phillips — replied to the question of “what is cool?” inherent in these proceedings with a useful report (from her recollection as a young adult in the 1960s era). Nadya was born in London but has lived mostly in the States. Two days ago, she wrote:
Dear David, I have been meaning for some time to respond to your previous email. I am between two cataract surgeries so reading has been difficult for some time. Wending my way through this essay my first thought was that “Only a Gemini….” But I remember that in the 1960’s the word “ cool” had the connotation of being safe. If someone was cool you did not have to worry that they would report you to the police for whatever your nefarious proclivities might be. Also people were concerned to be cool, that is their appearance, behavior, ideas, etc. would be approved of by their peers. One characteristic of a person who was cool was that they appeared to be above the fray and unaffected by events around them.
Nice to hear from you whatever the venue, 🦋🦋🦋 Nadya
Sent from my iPhone
I find that last observation — that the “cool” person “appeared to be above the fray and unaffected by events around them” — especially useful & germane to our inquiry. Will have more to say about this in another session.
[MORE TO FOLLOW; I RESUME INTERMISSION IN WRITING]
“on the road”
I began these ruminations with a quatrain — so I’ll conclude them in the same manner; for something in me favors this sort of circularity.
Come to think of it maybe Nirvana is ultimate coolness?
although many gradations of cool emerge on the road
on the road is the place where the narrative seeks to unspool this
yet the cool’s enigmatic! elusive! obscure its abode!
Namaskar,
d.i.