Autumn has officially arrived though the seasons are no strict observers of such dates. But the turn into March invariably has a feel of the autumnal, not because I think it should be so, but because the nights are getting cooler and unmistakeably, the odd green leaf is yellowing. In a week or so the process will accelerate and many such examples will be apparent. This is my favourite time of the year, for though the events of autumn presage winter, yet there is still a long lingering of summer warmth in the daytime, the cooling of the night and the ever-so-gradual dimming of the days.

I have been dipping into a lot of books lately, my mind never quite settled on just one tome. I'm about half-way through A Tale Of Two Cities, a similar distance through a book on logical fallacies and have just begun yet another text on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In between times, I read quite a lot of old Chinese poetry, translated into English, of course. Most recently One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, by Kenneth Rexroth, has piqued my nightly curiosity. Rexroth tries to get to the heart of meaning when translating, so if it means that some textual accuracy is tweaked, he will do it in the service of the what he conceives is the poet's intent. The latter requires a huge amount of scholarship and a lot of poetic sensitivity. But Rexroth was a poet himself, so surely this gets him onto the first rung of the ladder.

Lu Yu was a late Sung poet and highly regarded both then and now. His poems resonate because despite the distance of a thousand years and a vast cultural gap, he is interested in the human condition. The later Lu was essentially in exile in his home province and like many poets, had a free affinity with wine. Such an affinity would destroy my ability to write, but not so with the Chinese masters! Lu was also able to further cultivate his Taoist and Zen inclinations, seclusion in the countryside being an adjunct to the process. As David Hinton writes,

"In (his) late poetry the Sung interiorization of tzujan (roughly, going with the flow, spontaneity) came to another of its logical conclusions, for the mastery of the poems lies more in their form than in any particular statement they make. They don’t just portray wisdom, they enact it by following the provisional insights of everyday life, and so demonstrating (the) understanding that ordinary experience is always already enlightened, that enlightenment resides in the everyday movement of perception and reflection, rather than in the distillation or intensification of experience into privileged moments of insight. It is this day-to-day transparency that represents Lu Yu’s distinctive way of weaving consciousness into the fabric of natural process, of making every gesture in a poem wild."

I Want to Go Out, but It’s Raining

The east wind blows rain,
Vexing the rambler.
The road turns to mud
From fine dust.

Flowers sleep, willows drowse,
Spring itself is lazy.
And it turns out that I
Am even lazier than spring. (Greg Whincup)

Night Thoughts

I cannot sleep. The long, long
Night is full of bitterness.
I sit alone in my roorn,
Beside a smoky lamp.
I rub my heavy eyelids
And idly turn the pages
Of my book. Again and again
I trim my brush and stir the ink.
The hours go by. The moon comes
In the open window, pale
And bright like new money.
At last I fall asleep and
I dream of the days on the
River at Tsa-feng, and the
Friends of my youth in Yen Chao.
Young and happy we ran
Over the beautiful hills.
And now the years have gone by,
And I have never gone back. (Kenneth Rexroth)