rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_07752650-94a4-5e36-90fe-7fc03ecc918b">My Own Private China
Do you remember that cliff
We once imagined—hundreds of swallow holes,
And an old Chinese poem rolled up inside
Each hole! We can’t unroll them here. We have
To climb inside.
ROBERT BLY, “LETTER TO JAMES WRIGHT”
In 1974 Charlie Miller, proprietor of the World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield, Massachusetts, placed into my hand Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by T’ang Poet Han-shan, translated by Burton Watson. “Try these,” he said, like a doctor prescribing medicine to a patient.
At the time I was director of a nearby alternative high school that spilled its special brand of chaos over the Connecticut River Valley nearby. I often came to his bookstore, a source of delight and solace for me. A poet himself, and friend of Auden, Charlie had become a good enough friend of mine that he could sense what I needed.
I read Cold Mountain no. 10:
Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars,
Battered by extremes of hunger and cold.
Out of work, our only joy is poetry:
Scribble, scribble, we wear out our brains.
Who will read the works of such men?
On that point you can save your sighs.
We could inscribe our poems on biscuits
And the homeless dogs wouldn’t deign to nibble.
For the first time in my life, I laughed out loud at a poem! What a joyful relief to hear expressed the mad futility of poets who scribbled out poems night after night as I did. Soon enough I swallowed Han-shan’s other short poems like aspirin. His commonplace language, brusque truths, satiric jabs at bureaucracy, and longing for quiet mind entered me unmediated by any teacher, seeming to salve wounds I didn’t know I had. I fell in love with that voice, like that of an older brother I never knew, and for the first and only time in my life began to “write back” to an author, scratching spontaneous responses in the margins of Watson’s volume.
HOMELESS DOGS
I languish in a car with battered friends,
the world the same as before we tried to fix it.
Young people won’t listen to us, and old ones
mock our shaggy hair.
In despair, we read Han-shan’s poems as we drive.
Those scribed on stones make us laugh.
Those carved on trees make us cry.
We devour these thousand-year-old biscuits
like homeless dogs!
My hungry poetry dog had found its bark.
Soon enough, my wife, three children, and I moved to Minneapolis and rebooted our lives. We dove deep into community, schools, and politics while I started an environmental business, then went into marketing communications, finally joining the Star Tribune editorial board, and the great questions of life were, for the nonce, settled. Yet all the while I continued to “write back” to my mysterious poet friend, first late at night and then, when the children stayed up later than I could, early in the morning, following a voice that never stopped thrilling me.
Beginning sometime in my mid-fifties, I developed a dream, a fantasy really, I came to call “seeking the cave.” I’d see myself wandering the back country of China, seeking the actual cave of Cold Mountain, a poet who may never have existed and who, if he did, is said to have disappeared into a crack in a mountain. And all I wanted to do was say “thank you.”
Madness.
And yet, in the fall of 2006, at age sixty-two, there I was, climbing a stone stairway from the dusty trail below toward the open mouth of Cold Mountain cave.
Madness indeed.
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail
This is the poet’s journey. In my case the trail was long, and included many of the necessary joys and sorrows of a relatively educated, literate, fortunate American life. Now married forty years, a grandfather, retired teacher/ad man/journalist, and poet since a boy, I saw the clouds of a busy life part just long enough that I thought I could perceive the trail ahead. And so I stepped out.
The summer before the scheduled mid-September departure, there arrived storms of trouble and confusion and doubt about this idea. One night, up alone, I heard a cricket singing outside the summer cabin door. I had never heard one there before in twenty years. I rose and went to the screen door and gently pulled it open. There he was, in his dark monk’s robe, knocking to come in. I took him in my palm. He had a song for me.
September 19, 2006
I hugged my wife good-bye at the Charles Lindbergh terminal in Minneapolis, tears burning my eyes. My eyes streamed again, this time with laughter, as I left phone messages for our four children, making certain they understood that if I disappeared into a crack in the mountain, as Han-shan had done, they could be confident of my love for each of them, if not my reliability as a father and grandfather.
The 747-400, Northwest flight 19 to Tokyo-Narita, was big as a movie theater. My traveling companion, videographer Mike Hazard, exulted over the empty seat between us, a gift from the airline gods, given the upcoming nine-hour flight and thirteen-hour time-zone shift, a body and mind bender common for business travelers but new to us.
We reviewed our plans. We would interview esteemed translator Burton Watson in Tokyo day after tomorrow, then visit Kyoto’s Zen temples. Back at Narita Airport, we would meet traveling companions Margaret Telfer and Ed McConaghay and fly together to Beijing to meet our guide, Bill Porter, the American Buddhist translator known as Red Pine. We would follow him for three weeks through the literary backcountry of China, ending, if all went well, at Cold Mountain cave. “It is a good thing we are doing,” Mike said.
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