Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale is to be preferred. The greatest of classical Chinese poets deserves a death commensurate with his wild verse. Dying because he wished to possess the moon has about it the necessary resonance of parable: this is what the mystic is willing to do to merge with the infinite. “The birds have vanished down the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away,” Li Bai writes in the first of two couplets of “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” as translated by Sam Hamill, concluding: “We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains.”
This is startlingly religious verse. The disintegration of the soul, the extinguishing of the ego, the snuffing of the person is required so that one becomes a part of the cosmos’ warp and weft. It’s erotic verse as well, as only the truest of devotional poems can be, because it presupposes the desire to lose oneself in another, to twist into something greater. In that spirit, then, the “world is neither place nor thing. / The world is a spell,” claims a gnostic demiurge, a genderless, serpentine deity in The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024), the remarkable new collection by the Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee. This is a gnomic, paradoxical book in which every word is a charm and every sentence a conjuration—a poetics of the body, the mind, and the soul.
It’s as risky to detect Li Bai’s intoxicated traces in Lee as it is to talk about Shakespeare’s effect on Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, or Whitman’s ghost in the verse of Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky. But Lee himself acknowledges the influence. In The City in Which I Love You (1990), he describes both Li Bai and Du Fu as “those two / poets of the wanderer’s heart,” an apt description of his own peripatetic youth. Lee was born in Jakarta to Chinese parents forced to flee Indonesia in 1959 during President Achmad Sukarno’s pogroms (“People have been trying to kill me since I was born,” Lee writes in his 2008 collection Behind My Eyes). The family variously settled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in the unlikely refuge of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a largely Italian-American community some 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that once featured the planet’s largest sheet steel mill. (“That scraping of iron on iron when the wind / rises, what is it?” Lee writes in Rose, his 1986 debut.) Having traded the dreamlike image of Li Bai’s Yangtze for the polluted reality of Vandergrift’s Kiskiminetas River, Lee still felt connected to Chinese culture. After all, he is the great-grandson of the first president of the Chinese Republic, and the son of a physician who once treated Mao Zedong. Lee’s is a life lived in exile east of Eden, for as he asks in Behind My Eyes, “Childhood? Which childhood? / The one that didn’t last?” He seems to have always desired a return to a lost home (the origin of religion), lusting for the consummation with something powerful and good (the origin of faith), where he is “Still talking to God and thinking the snow / falling is the sound of God listening.”
“you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me— that I can’t possibly fathom—but am embedded in.”
posted by f.sheikh