from Notes on Facing the Wall
_________________________________
[10]
A soul is undergoing the Death of a Thousand Cuts, from its own
graver. The final form has not yet emerged. But already your hands hang down,
the look in your eyes drifts with the gloom, your lips are shivering in the
season of ice.
Now that you’ve lost all the sketches, how are you going to sculpt a
Self? You have lost your way among the beautiful and the ugly: caught between
humans and spirits. You draw a cross on your sole: east south west north. Where
are you going to set out from?
All the mountains are already rising. Amidst that ancient solemnity,
escorting the clouds you surge along into a cosmos that awaits enlightenment.
The field of your heart resounds with your superhuman footfalls.
[40]
Merely lifting your hands, you become a ladder to the clouds. And a
desire arises. The beauty of flying: you call and the wind pays obeisance.
Who’s to ascend by means of you? Those spaces beyond clambering. And
you: a tortuous road through the sky, unfolding into the Void.
It’s that way of standing: what trees mean. What distracts me. While
your solitary shadow keeps all its dangerous depth.
[47]
Wind, lightning cannot touch you, nor the carpenter’s axe. You are a
gnarled oak, beyond mark and measure. Sun and moon swirl in your growth rings.
Fragrant nor pretty, though you walk an unfamiliar road you unfold a
landscape of your own, using the sunlight to form a shadow on the ground.
Remembering ruins: pillars and beams meant to stand, burned in the
fires of lost empire. But you, the lowly oak, have a corner of the green hills
all to yourself, luxuriantly being nothing special.
[50]
You heard a bullet leaping along the trajectory. And then a life
burst out of your breast. What you are holding in your cupped hands is that
kind of life: kneading the sound of metal into an image of tomorrow, its
fire-colored face washed up from the blood that a million human cries drowned
in.
Behind your eyelids the sea thickens, becomes a tear. Mountains are
pressed by your palms, becoming grain-sized fossils. When you forge yourself
into a sword with which to prop up the sky, the very constellations come
tumbling down.
You have no name in the books of time, though your body is a history
that can never be read to the end. And from somewhere, against a background of
curling smoke and battlefields, the sunlight of life emerges in pastel.
[52]
Your footsteps are an inquiry into my whereabouts. And free from the
depths of my valley the oriole’s song rises, woven into the brocade of a
landscape. Wakeful blue eye, who was it that planted the exiled willow beyond
its habitat, and sold springtime at a giveaway to the dwellers in the sunny
South?
And how many refrains are you still going to sing? The westward road
stretches even longer, your shadow has grown thin as a daisy: why not trim it
into a bonsai? Who will bring you an autumn with which to color the Southern
Mountains?
So you brandish the cup, urging your own shadow to drink. Your gaunt
fingers pluck cold strings. For whom will you play the lute that your face is?
[53]
The lute that your face is sounds your autumnal plaint across the
red of autumn leaves: that blood-washed ball, the setting sun. The final fall
of the city of loneliness.
The first snow flies as a flag of surrender above the drunken guest’s
temples. From in a mirror you read aloud the proclamation: joys and sorrows to
be altered beyond recognition! A banner painted with battlefield scenes comes
snapping into view.
Gather up the gunfire complexion of yesteryear; make of it a stiff
border for the travel bag that your flesh is. Like the clanking ring on the
haft of an ancient sword, the wailing walker’s footprints trudge out song
beyond all following.
[70]
Smash open any of the audible worlds, and you come leaping out. Iron
and steel blossom with graceful sparks in obeisance to you. In every house
enjoying the sleep that is the fruit of autumn.
It’s an imprisonment, like a peachpit, and spring peeps out of it.
While the language of flowers longs mightily for a wind to write it wide.
You forge a Self in stones and metals; the quiet flow of time falls
silent to allow your shadow to pass.
[71]
The neighbor to the east raises chrysanthemums; the neighbor to the
west makes wine. And there you are, sad and between, heaping yourself into a
mountain. Call Tao Qian and he doesn’t answer; call Li Bai and Du Fu, they won’t
come. Your solitary shadow is carved in silvery moonlight across a garden of
allusion.
It is always at these moments when the willow’s drunkenness congeals
into blue eyes. Just in the midst of your ease, a gaze is fixed on you.
Walk circles around the pine, the chrysanthemum. Sample the face in
the wineglass. To be sure, the wine’s no longer the fruit..
[72]
Your scales become sediment, become an arc of moonlight on water
beyond the angler’s reach. Your wings are adrift, a cloud no arrow will touch.
And so you let your shadow wander, wide as sea, empty as sky.
But what is embroidered on the map of your heart? You’ve laid all
the patterns aside, giving the flowers back to the snow, marrying the moon off
to the wind. As you let yourself melt away into nature, the very face of this
world mutates.
Inside your body a time of honesty is taking shape. A beautifully
wrought fountain of blood is being opened, rejoining the purple river’s flow
while you keep charting your little course across the heart’s transparencies.
[73]
You are the cracked earth that even the clouds’ long stilts can
stamp no moisture out of. In what the sunlight’s golden blade dissects – in
those parched crevices, you keep hoping to find an edible fish. And who’s to
tap a well of autumn water in those blind eyeballs? In a vase full of tears, a
soul is dying of thirst.
Twisting your own hair into a rope, you hang passionately from
whatever appears, while gloom interlaces the thicket of your hair with a
boundless, vague luxuriance. Who will trap the light of autumn and kindle a
torch of red leaves for you?
Get the moon to lend you a diviner’s coin: can that obscure text,
your fortune, be translated into the darkness of tomorrow, into the forwarding
address of a lost shadow?
[77]
Your long arms dragged, became oars; your loose hair became a sail
and you were pulled down every kind of stream. Who knows the winds, the tides
you poked your way through.
It must have been the river that wine turns into, that you came
bobbing along. Are you the one who caught the moon? Your net bulges with the
numberless eyes of autumn.
While moonlight wanders through the alleys, you remember a dried-up
river bed. And then your boatman’s song falls, falls the full length of your
shadow.
[89]
Who could stir up your footprints from the campfires’ ashes? The
last gunshot still rings with the news: fire contact made. Every tree waits in
its original state.
The butt of the gun in your hand is already sprouting with spring
fungus. The myriad birds sing sadly; the hundred flowers are spattered with
tears. Who’s to read yesterday’s Diary of
a Hunter? Weekend: green unicorn circling left and right, colorful phoenix
dancing up, down.
But your body rises as a tree that marks the years on a map without
coordinates. One by one the wind-eroded clouds come out of hiding.
[88]
Night after night your two eyes, which have survived the first
frost, gaze upward, becoming a skylight at autumn’s end. Who will siphon off
the stars you overflow with, and wash your grieving shadow clean?
If two migrant birds were to fly out slowly from behind the
crystalline curtains of a boudoir, the Milky Way would not be the home they
returned to. Like snow, like falling stars their multifarious feathers would
drift one by one into oblivion.
Two ploshing springs keep coming, painting a stream of blue across
the sky: sun and moon, held in your longing, that sunflower exploding, that
dawn.
[1] The 20th-century Taiwan
The term mianbi 面壁, which I here translate literally as ‘facing the wall,’ is also a
traditional Buddhist term for meditation practice. One of its modern meanings is
[ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary 2003]: to ‘engage in pursuing
something difficult.’
The original Chinese text I have used
is from Yang Lingye zixuan ji 羊令野自選集 [Yang Lingye: Works selected
by himself], published by Liming Cultural Enterprises 黎明文化事業 , Taipei, 1979. Thanks to
Liming for permission. The original contains 94 numbered sections, of which I
have selected and translated 13.
In 1995, I published a brief article
outlining my own approaches in reading and interpreting Yang Lingye’s poetry. I
hope to revise and expand it soon. It can be accessed under the link 'On Yang Ling-yeh's (羊令野) poetry' on this blog.
