Six Wartime Sonnets (III)
Huiwen Zhang
Sonnet 2 is a floating labyrinth beneath the tranquil surface:
2
What might fall from our bodies,
Let it all turn into dust:
In our time we arrange ourselves
Like autumn trees, one by one
Handing leaves and late blossoms
All to the autumn wind, freeing the trunk to stretch
Into harsh winter; we arrange ourselves
In nature, as cicadas and moths
Cast all old skins into the mud;
We arrange ourselves for that
Death to come, like the stanza of a song.
From the body of the music the sound falls.
What remains in the end is the music's body:
Green hills ranged in silence.
(tr. Huiwen Zhang)
Curiosity
It begins with a curious line that at first sight seems to be a question, “What might fall from our bodies.” Indeed, almost every word of this line bears an invisible yet inevitable question mark: what is “what?” Why “might?” How “fall?” Who are “we?” Are “our bodies” concrete and physical or abstract and metaphorical?
Resurrection
The second line resembles the Biblical quote, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” which is adapted into a text in the burial service said by the Priest, “we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.” The soothing tone suggests a standard view that eases the anxiety of those who survive the departed: they will come back to life. It concerns more the alive than the dead.
Does this view soothe the uneasiness caused by the first line? Not really, because it is “from our bodies” that something “might fall.” “We” are not the mourning bystanders, but the dying—if not the dead—themselves.
And yet “our” speech would suggest that “we” are very much alive.
Architecture
There is a colon following the second line and two semicolons thereafter. They indicate a three-layer, dialectic architecture. Is it the architecture of coherence and development, or of interruption and revolution?
Reduction
Lines 3-9 present two parallels on the first two layers.
The first parallel exists between “we” and “autumn trees,” suggesting “we” surrender “leaves and late blossoms all to the autumn wind.” This is no pleasant advice, since the normal view takes leaves and blossoms for that which constitutes the beauty and vitality of trees. However, the trunk left behind nonetheless stands for life. Further, if giving up the leaves and blossoms “allowing the trunk to stretch into severe winter,” the advice is, albeit unpleasant, sensible and even hopeful.
Transformation
The second parallel exists between “we” and “cicadas and moths,” suggesting “we” discard “all old skins into the mud.” This advice sounds much more pleasant. However, the molting process differs from the shedding of trees: without leaves and blossoms trees are still trees; discarding old skins means, in contrast, the death of larvae and the birth of cicadas and moths.
Hence we realize the leap from the first to the second layer: “what might fall from our bodies” is initially illustrated as the reduction of autumn trees in winter, then revised to be the transformation of cicada and moth larvae in nature. Reduction implies getting rid of anything non-essential (but retain the core); transformation implies letting go of the core.
Paradox
Apart from the ‘leap,’ the first two layers also circle around a verb that requires reflection—“arrange”: on the one hand, “we arrange ourselves” and are not arranged by somebody or something outside of ourselves. On the other, our self-arrangement is in essence self-reduction, i.e. giving up what is ours but non-essential to us, and transformation, i.e. giving up even what is essential to us.
The peculiar verb “arrange,” therefore, indicates an active passivity or a willing acceptance.
Interruption
As demanding as the first two parallels are, they remain relatively accessible to us: we see the shedding of trees in winter and the molting of larvae in nature, don’t we? Thus there is no question about the phenomena themselves; our only problem would be to acknowledge and adopt the attitudes suggested by the phenomena—willing- and readiness to reduce ourselves to the core and let eventually even our core undergo transformation.
Lines 10-13, in contrast, bring about a parallel between “we” and “the stanza of a song” that truly disturbs us, because the phenomenon itself now turns out to be a real problem: we do not and cannot see the falling of the sound “from the body of the music” and the naked body of the music left behind alone. While we could probably identify—after some reflection—the message of the shedding trees and that of the molting larvae as reduction and transformation, we would definitely have a much more difficult time making sense of a song whose sound is falling or the music whose sound is fallen. And if we fail to recognize the meaning of the phenomenon, how could we take the next step and figure out the parallel?
Seen from this view, the third layer reveals a hitherto most perplexing moment—almost an interruption: both of the first two parallels encourage us to decipher a clearly and superficially encoded phenomenon and then transfer the message to the other side. The third parallel, however, builds on a phenomenon that is so vaguely and profoundly encrypted that we are completely at a loss.
Particularity
Moreover, the third layer contains a seemingly superfluous deictic word that irritates us: “We arrange ourselves for that coming death.”
Does “that” suggest a particular death instead of death itself? What is “that death” if not death? How does it differ from the death we generally understand?
Transcendence
The last line of the sonnet, to our greatest surprise, proves to be even more perplexing than the ‘interruption’: “Green hills ranged in silence.” This dramatic ending seems to only intensify the problem: while the encoded phenomenon in lines 10-13 remains unencrypted, another deciphered phenomenon suddenly emerges—how to imagine, perceive, and make sense of the change of “the body of the music” to a range of “green hills?” How can it possibly be?
On second thought, however, line 14 exactly helps decipher the unencrypted phenomenon in the third parallel; it rounds off the incomplete image and creates a complex echo of the first two parallels: the metamorphosis of the music hints at transformation and prompts us to think backwards. If the change of “the body of the music” to a range of “green hills” is the transformation—or molting—of “the stanza of a song,” then the falling of the sound from “the body of the music” is the self-reduction—or shedding—of “the stanza of a song.”
The dramatic ending, therefore, brings the phenomena of “autumn trees” and “cicadas and moths” together and upgrades their message from reduction and transformation to transcendence.
Paradox & Particularity Revisited
This decipherment or solution premises upon our ‘active passivity’ or our ‘willing acceptance’ of the change of the body of the music to a range of green hills. This change stands beyond common sense and human experience; any attempt to make sense of it is futile.
Thus instead of the conventional logic—understand and accept—, the sonnet promotes an alternative attitude—accept what cannot be understood: Autumn trees may not understand why there is severe winter they must strive to survive but they accept it nonetheless and give up their leaves and blossoms; cicada and moth larvae may not understand why there are hazardous metamorphoses they must strive to survive but they accept them nonetheless and discard their old skins; in a similar way, the stanza of a song may not understand why it is necessary or desirable to let its sound fall from its body but it accepts the mysterious logic nonetheless and sheds off its sound and molts. In the end, all of them become “green hills ranged in silence,” speaking for serenity, Erhabenheit, and eternal spring.
In retrospect we also realize that “that coming death” is not the death that comes and ends everything, but a particular death that comes and reduces, transforms, and transcends everything.
(to be continued)
Your reflections on this poem are wonderfully complex--nearly as complex as the poem itself! As I reread the poem from the advantage of your insights, however, I am able to appreciate additional aspects of its particularity.
ReplyDeleteGreen hills seem to bespeak the arrival of spring. The winter has passed, and the plants on the hills have put out new shoots. Some of these plants may be grass, others bushes or trees. Thus the tree that shed its leaves in autumn and stretched its trunk into the long cold dark night of winter has survived. It is no longer the same tree, of course, because now it consists of a host of leaves that did not exist last year. The hills, similarly, suggest a physical structure that has not itself changed, and yet the surface that we see of it is altogether new. The hills persist, but in a fresh mantle. Similarly, I suppose, a song can be the same song from one performance, one rendition, one expression to the next, yet the sound will each time be entirely new. It might be sung by the same voice or another voice. The body, then, that sings the song, changes, and the sound changes--it cannot persist, for it is utterly momentary. The body of the song is not the sound either, but the part of the song that is realized as sound. It requires a medium, a vehicle. Life, too, it would seem, requires a medium or a vehicle. The body of life, like the song, remains more or less the same, but the actual rendition of the life is fresh and new, like new shoots on a hillside, new leaves on a tree, the new body into which a caterpillar is transformed when it molts.
How do we feel about this? We tend to be afraid of death, and so the funereal language at the opening of the poem is disquieting. But the life that we are so concerned to preserve is in fact preserved: it passes on via the body. This is the opposite of what we usually think: that the body passes away, and so life is lost with it. The body is what preserves life and enables it to be reborn and renewed. But the body is not what we thought it was. It is a framework, a vehicle, a structure, a vessel. Like the skins of the cicada, like leaves, like spring color adorning a hill, like sound, it falls, it can be discarded. Life is neither the framework nor its physical expression, but the interplay between these. Life is not a vehicle, but it requires a vehicle. Death, then, is not an end, but simply a moment in the transformative process. "That" approaching death for which we prepare ourselves is not, then, the end of "us" for we are not either our bodies or the life that is supported on them. "That" death is simply the transformative moment. We arrange ourselves for it by singing, by supporting life, by allowing for transformation.