YANG MU
(1940- )
Nineteen Seventy-Two
Translated by joseph R. Allen and Han Haiyan
1.
So this is what it means to live in the Northwest: fleeting days and endless winter nights, and always waking up to sound of rain. Darkness hangs beyond the dripping eaves, even though the clock on the floor says it’s already eight in the morning. The blinds open up onto waves of mist caught in the debates between the depth of night and the coming of dawn. And there is always the rain, but sometimes it is quite unlike rain, rather it is like snow that has not quire crystallized, floating lightly down.
Rain that falls with the demeanor of snow.
Here we are in Seattle, a coastal city in the upper latitudes: the Northwest famed for forests and salmon. We have fallen into this dark, dank winter. Out in the yard a naked, leafless tree stands; I am not sure what kind of tree it is but I suppose it might be an apple tree. At least when we were living in California we often heard that this part of the country was famous for its apples. We heard the same thing when we were living in New England. When I get up and wander over to the window, I am surprised to see the lawn covered with a thin blanket of snow that is just now beginning to melt.
The University of Washington stands above a large lake. On a clear day from one of the vantage points on campus you can see the floating bridge below with its constant stream of traffic. I understand that there are times when you can also see sailboats out on the lake, but I suppose that is only in the summer. Beyond the lake is another lake, and then off in the distance are the mountains, which stand tall and snowcapped, arrayed along the horizon in hues of white and blue, somewhat like the mountains above Denver. Yet there is something different about them too. The boulder-strewn slopes of the Rockies stand larger and more majestic; looming among the neon lights of the city, they arrogant and overbearing. They are really quite nice, although not very elegant. Even though the mountain in Seattle are also tall, expansive, and snow-covered year round, they are not as desolate as the Rockies; they have instead a certain elegance about them. Perhaps this is because of their proximity to the lakes and ocean.
The sun is, however, not a common sight in Seattle, especially in the depth of winter such as we are today. And if the sun does come out, it is never before 9:30 in the morning. While I sit typing in fount of my office window on the fourth floor of this Gothic-styled building, I lift my eyes every so often to either gaze out into the distance or to watch the people who bustle along the damp stone pathways below. Across the campus, there are rooms where I can see the lights burning brightly. Winter in Seattle is in the turning on of lights.
Suddenly I am overwhelmed by a melancholy like that of a teenager, an unknown, inexplicable sadness. Suddenly there is this flutter of unhappiness. By now I should have outgrown the age when I could dash off a twenty-line poem at the drop of a hat, when the setting sun or breaking dawn could sink me into a fit of melancholy; I should have outgrown the age when I was always sad but did not know why I was sad. But suddenly I am filled from on high with these brooding and confusing emotions; gazing far off into the distance, I am unsure how I might dispel this mood.
And now there is occasionally this fatigue. When we first came here, I felt a belated grievous sense of renewal, like Dante without his guide. I rediscovered a sensitivity to the imagery of things, as real and as uplifting as a return to Florence. Even the clamor of the city was beautiful. Whenever I came to an intersection I would glance to the west, bake across the sea, the never changing sea. I knew that each time I looked, the sea would be the same, but I always turned to look nonetheless, trying to make it appear a casual gesture, an everyday glance to the west.
I no longer awoke terror-stricken in the middle of the night. When I had my tea, I liked to sit by the lamp near the fireplace, but that was not necessarily a sign of old age. No, there was this resistance in me, a feeling of confronting myself, of fighting with myself. I had no idea what my friends were doing-no doubt some were off wandering, some wounded, and some weeping. At first I was concerned for them, and missed them; I even invented lives for them: fascinating, novel lives, lives as serene as temples and as persistent as clocks. But in the end I grew tired; one might even say that I grew tired of them. One might imagine that long ago we had run into each other and spoken briefly, met and then parted. Now, having parted, we are indeed apart.
In a similar way, met and then parted. Now, having parted, we are indeed apart.
In a similar way, I left behind my life of the last ten years. As if once I had decided to wade the stream, the trees and flowers instantly lost their natural fragrance; once I put out the light, the room sank into darkness. Caught in this cold and solitude, I questioned myself until I grew board with the questions. Perhaps a new life lay at the far end of hopelessness. Perhaps we can be like the wind, without form or substance, blowing from one valley to the next, letting the size and configuration of the valleys determine our form.
2.
Sometimes I wonder if I miss New England. Perhaps not, but New England is, after all, New England, a place not easily forgotten. I was there from September 1970 to December 1971. When I left there still was no snow on the ground, which was very rare. Yesterday I received a letter from a friend who said it had been below zero ever since the first of the year.
Days of cold can also be unnerving. During my first winter in New England, we lived in a small house in the woods outside town. Once we returned from New York around midnight to find the woods blanketed in glistening snow. The snow lay deep on the walk, untouched in our three-day absence. Wading through the knee-deep snow, we headed toward the front door. It took ten minutes just to go the thirty yards to the house. When we got to the house, there was a cedar tree bent over blocking the door. I gave it a shove, it shock off some snow and sprang upright, sending a shower of snow flakes into the air. Swaying back and forth, it then stood still and tall again: a cedar dimly glistening, backlit by the light off the midnight snow. The cedar is called a “tree of shadows.” Unlike other plants that turn toward the sun, the cedar tends toward shades and shadows. Thinking that it had been leaning against my snow-bound door in the dead of the night made me feel uneasy.
Throughout that dark, gloomy winter, the snow continued to fall outside my window inside, the fireplace burned without warmth. Through it all, I felt chilled and listless. If not snow, then sleet-raining and snowing together, turning the ground into a thick sheet of ice. In my room I typed, worked on my dissertation, every once in a while coming upon lines such as “We march along, rain and snow falling on the mire.” Spring came very late. Way into March the sky was filled with blowing snow as the wind howled through the woods. At the end of the month the snow still lay in a forgetful winter sleep, which even the April sun could not budge. The snow did not melt, the lilacs did not emerge from the dead land, and without the spring rains mixing desire and memory, April is not the cruelest month. This lasted up into May, when suddenly one night the spring wind began to blow, and when we arose in the morning the last little patch of winter’s snow was gone. Only then did we notice that the lilies were about to blossom, the woodpeckers were hammering away, and the bugs were out in droves. But before we had prepared ourselves for spring, it was already gone and we were into a summer of buzzing bees and chirping crickets. Farmers placed bunches of garden asparagus by their fount doors for sale. They sold it throughout the summer, right up until fall arrived with its dead sunflowers, shriveled corn stalks, and gigantic pumpkins piled high in fields, porches, and sheds. The fall foliage that filled the town and surrounding hills was so beautiful that it made your heart ache, made you feel faint; it was beautiful that it filled you with anger and suspicion. It was so beautiful it made a believer out of you; you sought for some god to lean on, to worship for making all this possible.
By the time of the first snows of November, you weren’t quite so intent upon finding god. By December, you were shivering and cursing, having returned to being a dyed-in –the-wool atheist.
3.
The natural beauty of New England was such a shock to me that I could never find the words to describe it. One could never be ready for a world so full of change. You just could not grasp it. When you thought of a line to describe that world, it had already changed into something else, abandoning you, making you feel that its swift changes were there to tease you, to scorn you, to expose how your imagination was too weak to capture its ever-changing light.
There is a beauty in the world that humbles, and this was it.
Now I suspect that perhaps beauty can bring us pain beyond all other pain, one might say it is a pain that does not just attack one’s mind. Perhaps it is something like a slow poison that, once it affects the senses, seeps slowly into the blood, circulating throughout the body. There it stays, lodged permanently in the system, part of its very chemistry, making it impossible to resist or to escape.
Pure beauty can drive one to madness. As it did the old aesthetician who collapsed on that sunlit beach in Death in Venice. His sole purpose in being in Venice was his pursuit of perfect beauty. This reflects the spirit of the German cultural tradition with its preoccupation with the Mediterranean world. Ever since Wincklemann, there had been this tendency to look southward in their pursuit of beauty; in this way, Goethe’s travels to Rome were a search for his spiritual home. Under the spell of that young, godlike boy of perfect form, what was originally merely a trip to the south was transformed into a tragedy emblematic of an entire culture. The high culture of the Mediterranean appeals directly to the senses rather than to the intellect. That the beauty of ancient Grecian statues and painted vases of Rome could be found in the body of a young boy is beyond the comprehension of the German intellect, with its penchant for logic and argument. For them this is a destructive and deadly beauty.
Death in Venice, moreover, contains love tainted by a primeval offense. Perhaps the earliest manifestation of that is in the madness and infatuation on the beach. Classical Platonic infatuation of one man for another is not to be found in the heroic form of David, rather it is in the desire for complete and perfect “beauty,” which turns the aesthetician into a symbol of ugliness against that southern backdrop. Over and over again, we see in the contrast of the guileless young boy and that pensive old man the alternation of god and demon, the cruel devouring of great intellectual power.
In this sense, the intellect is pointless and irrelevant: it is as if one were trying to appreciate a peony in a purely analytical light.
Furthermore, there is also something suspect about our understanding of “love.” According to traditional explanations, love is mysterious, reverent, and above criticism; thus, it should exist in a state of complete independence-free from value judgements and beyond the imposition of analysis or generalization. That being so, then love should offer sustenance to all things as the wind and rain do. It should sweep over and fill them without distinction or qualification. One thinks of those such as Gide who, alienated from their own sexuality, seek spiritual and even physical sustenance in the homosexual world. Then when one thinks of the criticism that these people suffer, one realizes that “freedom” is in the end a very limited liberation. A well-known scholar of comparative literature once said, “Homosexuality is perhaps quite natural; many people discover only in middle age that their early aversion to homosexuality was in fact the repression of a manifestation of their own sexuality.” Within my first week in Seattle a friend and I happened to start talking about the problems of love and life. He said to me, “I am a man, but there seems to be no way for me to approach a woman. The object of my love are other men; when I am with them I am happy. But people are disgusted by these feelings.”
4.
This winter Seattle suffered the most severe snow storm it had seen in twenty years. It snowed for two days and two days and two nights; the roads were impassable, cars were abandoned everywhere, the fence in the yard was crushed under the weight of snow, and the pipes in some people’s houses burst. The University of Washington closed down for two days and there was no talk of making up the classes; it just closed. This was unheard of here.
After the storm all was quiet and restful. We thought, well, tomorrow it will probably rain all day and wash away the snow. But no, it did not rain at all-instead we had more than a week of crystal clear skies. This was when we first actually saw the surrounding mountains, tall with their blue-green forests covered in blankets of glistening snow.
The first time we went out after the storm, we turned right heading down the street; there they were, standing on the horizon, mountains as tall and imposing as the mountains above Denver. After this, whenever we went out, either for a walk or drive,we were always looking at the maintains. Now that I think about it, that obsession with looking at the maintains was probably dangerous. But to stand by the lake on campus looking at the mountains felt natural and comforting. The lake was empty; at the most there might be an occasional motorboat speeding along the shore. The sailboats were all stored away; they would have to wait until spring to sail again, or at least until warmer weather.
One day, after an entire afternoon of being holed up in my basement study, I went out to buy some beer. On the way back to the house, I was driving along a hillside near the lake when I suddenly raised my eyes and saw right in front of the car a towering mountain-we had been in Seattle for a month and I had never seen this mountain before. It is hard to say, perhaps it was not so much that I raised my eyes to it, as it moved into my line of sight; I didn’t see it, it saw me. At first I didn’t believe it was real; it was just too huge and awe-inspiring. I really wondered if it might not be some sort of winter mirage caused by the reflection of the evening light in the cold mists. I stopped the car by the side of the road and got out to look at it more closely. Yes, it was real . Lofty and majestic, from its delicate peak, the mountain sloped gently off to both sides. Half way down was bathed in the golden light of the setting sun, which was just about to disappear.
More imposing and more real than Jesus Christ himself, Mount Rainier, standing some 14,400 feet tall, the most important peak in the Cascades, a coastal range that threads through the Northwest corner of the United States. This mountain was my epiphany.
1972
104第二學期 (1)