Bei Dao's UNLOCK

Bei Dao’s work is “misty” to a very large degree. It can be maddening—momentarily one has a bead on his “drift,” then a moment later the poem is intimating something else. All of his poems work through image. There is very little reference to other texts (that Western readers can access). There doesn’t seem to be any subversion of logical statement nor any “intellection” to any great extent (that is, there isn’t any grappling with larger ideas outside the realm of lived experience and difficult emotions like exile and suppression). The act of reading Bei Dao is much like reading a mysterious rebus. Bei Dao’s work exhibits the accretion of image upon image that endeavors to lead the reader to a conclusion. It hints at what it is saying (an artifact left over from his days when he had to escape censorship in China).

Admittedly, I don’t always get to a place where I can absolutely say what the “intimated meaning” is in every piece. Quite frankly, I don’t care after a while. I luxuriate in his imagery. I just let it take me where it wants to go. If it reveals, so much the better. Of course, in order to be led by the nose like this, one has to develop an addiction to imagery. This may not be possible for those who always wish the imagery to “add up” to something or those who get their jollies from a rhetorical flourish.

The images are jarring and provocative. Bei Dao’s world is an intensely observed one. The compactness of his imagery is consistent throughout all of his pieces. The poems move from image to image, and there is little straying into other kinds of diction (in the English versions at any rate . . . in the Chinese Weinberger suggests that there are more different kinds of dictions present) Most of the objects that are present are fundamental ordinary objects. Bei Dao subjects them to odd juxtapositions with the insubstantial in order to get us to pry at the larger human significance that he is hinting at. Nowhere does he refer to those items that might plague the mind of a modern urbanite whose mind is highly mediatized. There are no brand names, no place names. The months of the year figure more prominently than any of these. By always staying within the realm of these simple, directly experienced items that, for example, a Chinese peasant might be able to recognize, the work almost seems to have a populist kind of appeal despite its resistance to straightforward communication. This is an interesting tension in Bei Dao’s work. A similar kind of tension exists between the quasi- formulations from classical Chinese poems at the same time he is working to twist these to almost the point of non-recognition. This “almost allusion” is the way he got around a lot of the censors in China while he was writing there.

Bei Dao’s work employs what I like to call a visual logic. It is the logic that is similar to the way a collage artist puts together images on a surface. The artist takes the forms as they are presented to him/her (by nature) and pieces them together to get some sort of overall picture that conveys a point, either commentary on a past episode or conveying some emotional content.


SMELLS

Those smells making you remember again
like a horse-cart passing through the flea-market
curios, fakes, hawkers’
wisdom covered in dust

and there’s always a gap between you and reality
arguing with the boss
you see the ad out the window
a bright tomorrow, Tomorrow brand toothpaste

you are facing five potatoes
the sixth is an onion
the outcome of this chess game is like sorrow
disappearing from the maritime chart


I’m not really a big fan of “close reading” for Bei Dao’s works (or anybody else’s for that matter), but here goes:

The first stanza introduces the general notion of “smells” and places the reader within the realm of an outdoor market. This market though seems to have withered, gone out of existence. All of the life of the market (seen in the curios, the fakes, the hawkers, indeed the most aggressive poseurs) is covered in dust. Like so much of Bei Dao’s work, there is a sense of loss and dilapidated culture present. This barren marketplace underscores this sense.

Stanza two presents a speaker addressing a reader trying to convince that reader that he/she too is dislocated, distant from authority with whom it presumably does no good to argue and distant from reality (the ultimate authority?). Economic realities prevail outside the window in the form of the “ad.” There is a sense that economic progress is being mass marketed. Its importance to one’s daily life makes it as essential as toothpaste. This seems to speak to me of Mao’s Great Leap Forward for China in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The speaker seems to dissent from such a mass marketing appeal.

The third stanza suggests that there is an odd man out, the onion that is in line with the five potatoes that precede it. Bei Dao implies that this onion is in a strategic battle with the potatoes (reminiscent of Bei Dao’s struggles with the Chinese government during the days leading to the Tiananmen Square protest). The last two lines are very curious though. The outcome of this struggle is said to be similar to the disappearance of sorrow from a maritime chart. This is a striking image and more than a bit elusive; however, I contend that the unmappable human emotion suddenly becomes absent in the same way that the human spirit disappeared from the map after it was crushed during the uprising in Tiananmen Square.

The poems that resonate most strongly for me are the ones that seemingly refer to the time of that uprising. In many ways I feel that Bei Dao is still living in that moment. It has become his identity. Many of the poems in Unlock still seem to refer back to this (or am I forcing them there through my interpretation?). I keep wondering if the pieces that don’t seem to add up for me might be relevant to a criticism of American life (where he has lived for the last dozen or so years) or some other more contemporary concern removed from China and Tiananmen.

Clearly, though, Bei Dao’s poems are dark. They are agonized meditations on that time, which use a veiled language partly as a hangover from the days of censorship in China, partly from the way that his exile continues to torture his language (like that of Paul Celan—another writer who adopted a pen name to write under, presumably because of the repression of his self). By the same token Bei Dao’s poems also champion the spirit of the individual. Perhaps the darkness and sorrow, the emptiness in his poems are elements of what he sees as the plight of the individual within a smothering collective.

Indeed, when he was asked a few years ago at his reading given at American River College what the most important prerequisite was for being a poet, he quickly and without thinking responded, “one must suffer.” This is a key insight into his work. His exile has never made his imagery buoyant and playful. It usually deals with the foreboding and ominous, the sense of loss and the attempt to recover that lost historical moment in 1989 when optimism ran high.

What is particularly pertinent in Bei Dao’s writing is the feeling of exile and how this may afflict many of us living in the US who feel we are in exile from our culture even though we are in its midst. I don’t wish to suggest that the magnitude is the same as with Bei Dao’s case. I, for instance, have never been reassigned for work in the hinterlands like he was. That said, Bei Dao’s poems provide insight into how to write political poems. For him, it was necessary to write in a cryptic manner—like the samisdat writers writing under the rule of the former Soviet Union. Of course, for Americans, the real repressive force is the market. The more one criticizes it, the more likely it is to ignore you, unless one is (mis?)fortunate enough to tweak the nose of someone in power. In the face of either kudos from the converted or dismissive jeers from the offended, is there any reason for poets not to cede this ground to journalists or content themselves with polite table talk at the Hungry Heifer Family Restaurant?

What I think is instructive from Bei Dao’s poems is he takes a highly charged moment in the political and cultural life of his nation and distills the emotions it wrought via a richly-laden and evocative imagery. The human element emerges out from under the bickering of the warring factions. Is this what political poetry in the US could be? Work that hints at the personal involvement in the culture’s formative moments, a kind of “you were there” at the World Trade Center told in mystical language that evokes how America felt at that moment? I dare say that this would be unthinkable for most American writers even if they had the credentials of Bei Dao whose line “I do not believe” was taken up en masse and chanted during the Tiananmen Square uprising.

In another poem in the collection:

IN MEMORY

Turning back from the end
when it was hard to breathe—
the angels of the fallen leaves on the hill
the sea of heaving rooftops

on the way back to the story
the deep-sea diver in the dream
looks up at the ship passing by
blue sky in the whirlpools

the tale we are telling
exposes the weakness in our hearts
like the sons of the nation
laid out on the open ground

dialogue of wind and trees
a limp
we crowd around a pot of tea
old age

Stanza 1 invokes a turning back in time to witness a breathtaking tumult. There is great uproar in the dissembled leaves and their attached angels, which suggest even the moral order is in disarray.

Stanza 2 employs a common practice in Bei Dao, the melding of the world of artifacts (i.e. the story, the song, the poetry, words, etc) with the physical world. These artifacts become equivalent to the sun and moon and objects-of-poetry-writ-large. The placement of the “story” as a location suggests its physical presence. The “diver in the dream” (someone lost in revelry?) looks up at that which passes and all is murky. The poem seems to be a meditation on memory.

Stanza 3 is the first time a “we” is mentioned. The speaker is part of a collective that is exploring the tale/story (the momentous events of at Tiananmen in 1989) mentioned previously. The exploration of this story reveals that hearts are heavy and full of remorse the way a nation’s might be at the sight of a battlefield of dead soldiers.

In stanza 4 the members of the collective dispute the events as they remember them. This is the “dialogue of wind and trees.” With the “limp” and the “crowd(ing) around a pot of tea” a suggestion of feebleness and disempowerment are evoked. Finally, just “old age” is left. Memory is the only comfort for then.

The speakers in Bei Dao’s poems suffer an affront by the world. Its moral absurdities and quandaries leave the individual speaker at the heart of the poem to construct the world as it appears in his poems as its defense. These poems with their often fantastical world intact are the counterweight to the distress of interesting times. And almost miraculously the speaker at the heart of his poems believes in the transformative power of the word and the poem. Bei Dao bore witness to his poems as the rallying cry for a revolution, and this appears to affirm that the poem as socially transforming device is possible. Perhaps this optimism is what many readers find redeeming about Bei Dao’s work despite its rather gloomy and vacant imagery. The belief in the poem as a vehicle for social change is a tall order for most Western writers to believe in when the written word is drowned out by a hundred-plus channels, the airwaves glutted with opinions, examples, and analyses. Is there anything that poetry can say with enough clarity that could cut through this haze? Again, most Western writers seem to collectively intone: I DO NOT BELIEVE. I DO NOT BELIEVE.