Timelessness in Chinese Poetry and Friendship

Chapter 12 Timelessness in Chinese Poetry and Friendship

An Lan Zhang

I presented Peter Malekin with a calligraphic scroll of a Daoist poem about time when he visited my husband and me in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s. I will analyze experiences of time and timelessness in poetry and in friendship. The real issue in translating Chinese poetry of timelessness into En- glish is the substantially different conceptual systems of mind and attitudes to- ward nature with a small and capital N in the two languages. Daoist poetics of timelessness enable the unity of the self to the cosmic measure rather than the Kantian attempt to measure oneself resisting the apparent power of nature, “resulting in a much greater degree of noninterference” in unitary consciousness and artistic presentation.1 I will argue that many Chinese poets describe individual reactions to natural settings, but not to distinguish themselves as unique and special, but rather to demonstrate noninterference in the process- es of consciousness going on around, through and within them. Friendship in classical Chinese poetry is the embodiment of bending and flowing in timelessness as gift, from which unitary consciousness routine fears and desires seem like mere illusions. During Peter Malekin’s visit one afternoon the three of us took a walk to a sandpit a mile from our home. Almost with the blink of an eye, a new street and several new houses appeared on what used to be a footpath on the final approach to this large sandpit where my husband played as a child. An owner of one of the new houses, a complete stranger, chided us from his new yard for walking too near his land. My husband immediately responded that he had walked this footpath his entire life, and had done so previously with his father, and that his grandfather, too, had walked that path. Peter, who had been my husband’s PhD professor at the University of Durham, smiled at his former stu- dent and told him not to get upset because “Common Land” is always sooner or later circumscribed or imprisoned by some individual or group which gets in the way of people’s “happy wandering.” On the way back from the sandpit, my husband pointed to a house not far from where we lived, and said there used

1 Wai-lim Yip, Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres (Durham, North Caro- lina: Duke University Press, 1997), 27. All translations in this chapter are my own.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382732_014 196 Zhang to be a pond there where he played as a child for hours on end. Later, adults filled in the pond and built a house on the site. The house we lived in was built during the American Civil War; before that it was an Indian battlefield. He once dug up an Indian arrowhead in the yard. My husband shared further analysis about how where we lived had changed a lot since his grandparents’ time, especially the progressive disappearance of open and free-access spac- es. I said there is a Chinese proverb to describe the change of environment through time; it is called “blue sea turned into mulberry field.” The proverb “blue sea turned into mulberry field” comes from the Jin dynasty Ge Hong’s 葛洪 (283–343 ce) Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳 (Biography of the Immortals).2 Once the immortal Ma Gu 麻姑 and immortal Wang Yan 王遠 were talking. Ma Gu said since she last saw him the Eastern Sea had changed into a mulberry field three times. Chinese use this proverb to describe life’s vicissitudes or simply long periods of time which adjust human relationships with their environment and values. Tan Chung, in “Time in the Cultural Frame of China,” says:

Men live in a triangle framed by time, environment and fortune. For the last many thousands of years the Chinese have been making continuous efforts to evolve a benign spiral out of this triangle. Being an agricultural nation, while agriculture is a seasonal vocation subject to the dictates of the meteorological changes in the course of time, China has acquired an early sensitivity for time from time immemorial.3

The seasonal agricultural cycle is regular and rigid, and any delay of plowing or harvesting could mean disaster. Chinese have been nurtured, challenged, and in many ways defined by an environment and national culture of inevitable periodic famine, and we have learned to value time and not to waste it. In the Han dynasty book Huainanzi 淮南子 (Book of the Master of Huainan), edit- ed by Liu An 劉安 (179–122 bce), in its chapter “Searching for Dao” (Yuandao 原道訓) is this line “The sage treasures even an inch of time, but not a piece of jade even a foot long; time is hard to get but easy to lose.” In order to demonstrate the Chinese concept of time and its relationship to agriculture I will explain the structure of two characters. The word for “agriculture” nong 農 possesses a top portion in its ancient – not current – form with

2 Robert F. Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 262. 3 In Concepts of Time: Ancient and Modern, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan (New Delhi: Sterling Publish- ers, 1996), 175.