{"id":6183,"date":"2012-11-21T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T13:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=6183"},"modified":"2012-11-20T14:10:53","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T19:10:53","slug":"panax-ginseng-a-possibility-sensitive-to-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/21\/panax-ginseng-a-possibility-sensitive-to-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Panax Ginseng: “A Possibility Sensitive to Time”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a bi-monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those with hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the English language\u2019s congenital borrowings and derives from the Greek <\/em>panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d together with the Cantonese <\/em>jansam, meaning \u201cman-root.\u201d This perhaps troubling image of one\u2019s roots as panacea informs the column\u2019s readings.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

1. Diptych<\/p>\n

Manoa<\/em>\u2019s recent \u201cSky Lanterns\u201d issue spotlights \u201cnew poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond.\u201d The issue features contemporary poets organized in order of age: \u201cnot as a bow to hierarchy,\u201d writes editor Fiona Sze-Lorrain in her prefatory note, \u201cbut to trace a possibility sensitive to time.\u201d From a first glance at the cover, we see a juxtaposition of the old and the new in the grandly staged Soul Stealer,<\/span> <\/em>photographs by artists Zeng Han and Yang Changhong. In the diptych\u2019s top half is Mulian Opera #11<\/em>: costumed figures of an ancient theater tradition, including mythic animal avatars such as the monkey king, who populate a green landscape with a seven-story pagoda obscured by mist. Meanwhile, in the bottom half is World Warcraft #11 <\/em>(dated a year later): costumed figures of neo-contemporary archetypes, including the princesses, warlocks, and demons familiar to role-playing video gamers, who populate a craggy landscape with a line of skyscrapers obscured by what may be polluted smog. The \u201cpossibility sensitive to time\u201d in the photographs is appropriate to this volume because the costumed figures above and below reflect the modulations of culture, place, and society over time\u2014and yet exist as avatars of myth and imagination outside of time. The same might also be said of the figures and expressions of poetry.<\/p>\n

The volume opens with Bei Dao\u2019s essay \u201cAncient Enmity,\u201d which frames our reading with the enmities he claims exist between the poet and the poet\u2019s era, mother tongue, and self. Bei Dao quotes Rilke\u2019s \u201cancient enmity \/ between our daily life and the great work,\u201d which also calls to mind Yeats\u2019s choice between \u201cperfection of the life or of the work.\u201d One is invited to read the chronologically arranged poems in this volume with an attention toward how poetry\u2019s relationship or antipathy to the world has changed. An ironic continuity emerges, at once apologia<\/em> and apology for poetry in the world, as we see in the ending of \u201cDoubt\u201d by Amang:<\/p>\n

a certain longevity
\nrubbish
\npoetry and song<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The translation is interesting here: \u201ccertain\u201d calls to mind certainty<\/em>, yet is undercut by the preceding article \u201ca\u201d (there are no articles in Chinese) to mean finally a <\/em>type, a mere kind <\/em>of longevity. And on either side of the word \u201cpoetry\u201d are juxtapositions by what may be synonyms: both \u201crubbish\u201d and \u201csong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSong\u201d is another word of interest because Luo Dan\u2019s photographs, interspersed throughout the volume, come from a series entitled Simple Song<\/em>. In an end note, we\u2019re told that these are photos of the Lisu ethnic minority in a remote, autonomous region of Yunnan, and that the photographs were made through the laborious collodion wet plate process. It\u2019s a long process which yields \u201cexquisite detail,\u201d but \u201cduring which time the subject must remain perfectly still.\u201d For some of these photographs, especially those in which scenes are suggested (#24: two women of great contrast in color and size face each other on a narrow path; #25: John raises his hand to ring a bell in Laomudeng Village), this means the illusion of candidness. Sze-Lorrain\u2019s first sentence in her prefatory note is: \u201cWhile my impulse in composing this note was to think aloud, this first sentence has already been revised more than once.\u201d I mention all this to gesture at the labor that goes into seeming simplicity, the staging and revision required. The process of such labor is an enmity with language, which can fog or halt as much as it might elucidate or open.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. Time<\/p>\n

The first three poets in the volume mark a rapid chronological trajectory. (It\u2019s worth noting also that, though veiled by the translation, language evolves through time in the volume: the first few poets write in Traditional Chinese, until Yang Liang marks a turn toward Simplified, and from that point forward only Amang, who resides in Taiwan, writes in Traditional.)<\/p>\n

Li Shangyin, a poet from the Tang Dynasty (813\u2013858), makes use of that era\u2019s poetic tropes: allusions to the seasons, meditations on the moon, and the sound of music in imperial settings. \u201cYet, rancor,\u201d reads one line. Another line hits the same tenor of undercut beauty: \u201cWorth grieving, how a little garden becomes the long road.\u201d And on the limits of human kinship, the poet says further:<\/p>\n

Today a pine on the ravine floor,
\ntomorrow a cork-tree on mountain\u2019s peak.<\/p>\n

Agony: when heaven, earth, are overturned
\nwe will see each other, we will not be known.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is a despairing observation of change. Yet the following poet in the volume is Arthur Sze, born centuries later in New York in 1950. That\u2019s a wormhole in time, and perhaps an attempt to form a continuity which historicizes contemporary writing. Sze writes in English in a rather different tenor:<\/p>\n

if she bows and hears applause
\nthen puts her bow to the string,
\nif she decides, \u201cThis is nothing,\u201d
\nlet the spark ignite horse become
\nbarn become valley become world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the ending of \u201cArctic Circle,\u201d and the poem\u2019s cosmic interrelatedness is a variation on Sze\u2019s use of the sublime, an exquisite illusion of cause-and-effect that is ultimately shown to be synchronicity. The sparks are constant, and the world is, if not united, at least connected.<\/p>\n

The third poet in the collection, Ling Yu (b. 1952 in Taipei), offers a long poem entitled \u201cMyself, My Train, and You,\u201d in which meditative travel bridges the distance between times and people. In the second section of the poem, the speaker names items in her suitcase: \u201ccandle, \/ Notebook, Dickinson. The nineteenth century \/ And myself, pressed in each other\u2019s palms.\u201d We encounter Borges, Baudelaire, Plath, Tsvetaeva, a third-century barmaid, a fourth-century landscape, twentieth-century ideologies, and this question:<\/p>\n

Has the universe gotten too narrow?
\nHow does a thing get buried?
\nPut the train out of mind . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later we are pointed to \u201cthe train that is Mother,\u201d and see the narrow vestibule of travel making nothing of a cliff or abyss: \u201cEnd of a century \/ Just another day \/ Start of a century \/ Just another day . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. Place<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable to consider that a collection of writing organized under the conceit of locality brings us finally back to the universal: across localities, boundaries of era or language. We see this enacted in geographic landscape, too: Karen An-hwei Lee\u2019s short work of fiction, \u201cVestiges of Sea Pilgrims,\u201d with its haibun<\/em>-like dialogue with Emily Dickinson, guides us through places of water in Los Angeles as a whirlpool into Venezia, Rome and Greece, Japan, and Paris. This is an expansive instance of the \u201cAnd Beyond\u201d we encountered in the anthology\u2019s title.<\/p>\n

Woeser\u2019s essay, \u201cRinchen, the Sky-Burial Master,\u201d deals with natural landscape as place but also as identity. The essay is a short piece of ethnography whose central anguish is how to represent a piece of one\u2019s culture without exoticizing it. The essay begins sharply: \u201cAnother writing about a sky-burial master is sure to be suspected of having chosen a sensational subject just to get attention. When one brings up sky burials, all kinds of exotic stereotypes about Tibet leap to mind.\u201d (This might also apply to Sky Lanterns <\/em>itself, of course, which has proven idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan even in its representation of Tang Dynasty poetry.) The essay has a pointed awareness of the tourism industry, for better and for worse, and Woeser mentions having gone in a previous year with a TV production team from Taiwan to see a staged sky-burial, in which a dressed-up cow\u2019s leg was used instead of a human corpse. She\u2019s also aware of the gaze trained on her by others: that traveling with two cameras around her neck makes people assume she holds the permissions of a traveling journalist.<\/p>\n

Early in Woeser\u2019s journey, she comes to a moment of self-revelation when she and Tashi, a horse-keeper, are left alone in the woods. She is overwhelmed by nature and wants to sing out, but cannot do so: \u201cI realized that I was a Tibetan who had been estranged from the natural landscape for too long. Tashi, on the other hand, simply burst into song . . .\u201d (This resonates with a note from translator Thomas Moran at the beginning of another essay in the book: \u201cFor Wei An, the essence of Thoreau was not a \u2018return to nature\u2019 but rather the \u2018completion of man.\u2019 \u201d)<\/p>\n

Which of course makes one wonder: is there any resting point for us as people and as writers? It\u2019s a question worth consideration if we are to use language to reach across geographies and self-understandings. Consider these thoughts from Woeser, which seem to suggest that we don\u2019t need<\/em> a resting place, that the ambivalence of our identities \u00a0is a kind of synchronicity across time. She notes, after having gotten to know the sky-burial master Rinchen:<\/p>\n

Although it could be said he had several identities, I understood that deep down he was, after all, a typical nomad. The identity had been given to him by history, but his identity seemed to me redundant now, and vanishing without a trace. It was futile to expect that I could have found in him the identity that I had sought in the beginning. Somehow, this made me feel sad, but also relieved. It is precisely the pluralism of their identities that turns a great many Tibetans into two, three persons, sometimes even more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a bi-monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those with hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the English language\u2019s congenital borrowings and derives from the Greek panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d together with the Cantonese jansam, meaning \u201cman-root.\u201d This perhaps troubling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[705],"tags":[912,646,911,186,211,914,915,913,908,907,917,916,910,909],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6183"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6216,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6183\/revisions\/6216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}