Six Wartime Sonnets (II)
Huiwen Zhang
Just as I was about to move on, a friend of mine sent me his response to Sonnet 15:
[…] Our freedom, the freedom we gave ourselves by breaking our dependence and theirs, allows us to soar on high, and so to gain anew the feeling of possession, of control, of domination. This perception alternates with its opposite: the bird has nothing at all; the universe it felt it owned was a universe of nothingness, of emptiness.
Thus we ask what we are: what it means to be. This we know: we can carry nothing in, can carry nothing out. Our being, then, consists neither in what we can carry nor in what may be carried to us, as by the horde of horses, by the water, and by the air. It consists not in the lands we’ve visited and made our own nor in those we’ve left behind to start again, to be on our own.
(cf. Comments on Meditation on the Road [1/6])
These remarks serve as an immediate introduction to Sonnet 16:
16
Standing on top of a hill,
We turn into endless view,
Into the vast field before our eyes,
Into the paths crisscrossing the field.
What paths, what streams, do not conjoin?
What winds, what clouds, do not resound?
The towns, mountains, and rivers we wandered through
Have all turned into what we are.
Our growth, our grief:
A pine tree on a nameless hill,
Heavy fog upon an unknown town.
Blowing in the wind, flowing in the water,
We’ve become the paths across the field,
The lives of those afoot upon the paths.
(tr. Huiwen Zhang)
The contrast between Sonnet 15 and 16 is striking.
Starting with the smooth transport through “horse,” “water,” and “wind,” Sonnet 15 climaxes with bipolar perceptions alternating between triumphant possession, control, and domination on the one side and despairing loss or denial of them on the other. This leads to an end that subverts and reverses the start, leaving a couple of questions unanswered.
Sonnet 16, however, launches a different approach: the verb “turn into” repeated in the 1st stanza stands out. Against common expectations, the wanderer “standing on top of a hill” turns into—not turns to—the landscape “before his eyes.” His eyes zoom in like camera lenses from “endless view” through “the vast field” to “the paths crisscrossing the field,” while at the same time he himself is transformed into the “view,” into the “field,” into the “paths.”
Thus a different message comes through from the very beginning: a decisive step in communication is not “bring/take,” “carry in/out”, “own/rule,” or “lose/give up,” but “turn into/become.” Instead of transport and the subsequent “feeling of possession, of control, of domination,” transformation and the corresponding feeling of resonance, identification and integration are presented and promoted. Even though as high as the “bird flying in the sky,” the wanderer “standing on top of a hill” would never suffer the shocking fall from heaven to hell: he does not “own” or “rule” anything, neither is he willing to “own” or “rule” something. He simply becomes everything.
The 2nd stanza develops the idea in two ways. The first half replaces the wanderer’s view with ‘God’s vision’: “What paths, what streams, do not conjoin? / What winds, what clouds, do not resound?” These rhetorical questions set the reader free from “top of a hill” to float into every corner of the world. The second half, then, confirms the new type of communication from the opposite direction: “The towns, mountains, and rivers we wandered through / Have all turned into what we are.” Not only does the wanderer turn into everything he sees, touches, and passes by, but everything he sees, touches, and passes by turns into him as well. They turn into each other as smoothly as breathing in and out. Hence, a circle of transformation, self—>other—>self, is established.
The serenity of this circle is further illuminated by a new verb launched in the 3rd stanza—“be”: “Our growth, our grief: / [Is] a pine tree on a nameless hill, / [Is] heavy fog upon an unknown town.” I took out “is” from the English version for the sake of rhythm; the conceptual development from become to be is nonetheless evident.
A curious echo of Sonnet 15 springs from the 4th stanza: No longer “sands (from distant nameless lands)” and “sighs (of foreign towns),” but “we” ourselves are now “blowing in the wind, flowing in the water.” The wanderer is carried by wind and water in the same sense as he carries them. Actually there is no need to “carry” because they are but one and the same.
For the same reason there is no need to “blur” here and there, past and future, self and other. The mutual breathing transcends the geographical, chronological and biological boundaries; the endless circle engulfs all kinds of separation, distinction, and alienation.
Seen in this light, the last two lines of Sonnet 16 is the full completion of the cosmological harmony. They send the reader back to the 1st stanza and carry on the zoom-in sequence interrupted by conceptual detours: standing on top of a hill, the wanderer “turns into endless view”—he becomes “the vast field,” “the paths across the field” and “the lives of those afoot upon the paths.”
Our being, therefore, our “mere” being, our being despite our “utter lack,” consists in the mutual fundamental transformation among all beings of the universe.
Note the nouns that are conjoined:
ReplyDeleteOur growth, our grief:
A pine tree on a nameless hill,
Heavy fog upon an unknown town
Our growth--not something we own, but something that pertains uniquely to us (though here even the plural works to deny its singularity); then a feeling felt by us, therefore if not pertaining to us, originating in us (though again not singularly so); then a tree, a particular kind of tree, a tree whose type at least has a name, but on a hill that no person knows, so therefore both particular and yet remote, isolated, not incorporated into human consciousness, except now; then a heavy fog, that is, something that hides all from sight, hides from sight the town beneath it, a town like the nameless hill, unknown--but unknown to whom? To all persons? Surely, it must be known to those in it. Therefore unknown only to the observer, to us? But if unknown to us, unknown in what sense? If altogether unknown, how do we know that it is beneath the fog? Is only its name unknown? So we move from things known only to us, or best to us, though in some sense shared, to objects like a tree and fog that can presumably be viewed by anyone who is in the right position, and yet the suggestion is that the tree, or at least the hill on which it stands, has eluded perception, as has the town unseen even to us beneath the fog. Thus the town is known and unknown, the tree identifiable but on a hill not yet identified, the grief that stems from us not ours personally, uniquely, the growth of our bodies or minds pertaining to us uniquely and yet also collectively. Thus being, the being implied by the concatenation of these nouns, our being and that of the natural and man-made world, is ambiguous, complex, dynamic.
This one is my favorite of the six right now.
ReplyDeleteThe towns, mountains, and rivers we wandered through
ReplyDeleteHave all turned into what we are.
A sense of identification with landscape or a sense of landscape identifying oneself---
It is all perfectly indeterminate.