He projects the self-image of meditative and eccentric man. In winter, he is often seen in a worn black topcoat, belted with an ill-matched rope. In summer, he wears turtleneck sweaters or tieless long-sleeved shirts with the top button done up. Once a week he leaves his temporary seclusion in the suburbs to have his hair cut, or to meet his friends in a downtown Taipei coffee shop, returning at midnight....
Those acquainted with Taipei's modern Chinese poetry circles immediately recognize the description. Yes, it is Chou Meng-tieh.
His real name is Chou Chi-shu, but the poet styles himself by the pen name Dream (meng) Butterfly (tieh), inspired by an allusion in Chuang Tzu (a work of more than 100,000 words, mostly fable, by Chuang Chou, a Taoist contemporary of Mencius):
Once Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased; he didn't know he was Chuang Chou. But suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. Still, he didn't know absolutely if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
The name Meng-tieh is a representative footnote for his creative works.
Chou writes in the free verse style of modern Western poetry rather than in traditional Chinese verse forms, but often includes Chinese "flavors" in his works. His fountain of inspiration is discernible-he draws concepts from such Chinese classics as Chuang Tzu, Chu Tsu (a collection of poems by Liu Hsiang of the Han Dyansty, 206 B.C.-220 A.D.), works of other ancient poets, and from Zen Buddhism.
He believes Zen is "one way," but he also says he wants it to become "his way."
"It might have been destined in my previous existence," he jokingly explains his bound relationship with modern Western poetry. Actually, it was more likely destined in the poverty, deprivations, and hardships that have lingered through most of his life.
Born in 1920, he was raised by a mother widowed young (four months before Chou was born). His early years were much disrupted by the Japanese invasion of China.
At seven, in his native Honan Province, in a traditional arrangement by a matchmaker, he was engaged to an eleven-year-old girl. Ten years later she became his wife; she bore him two sons.
Chou studied education, attending two mainland teaching academies, but had to leave both and by 1948, had attained only the second term on the way to a teaching diploma. He ran out of money, but finally tried once more at a school in Hankow which awarded scholarships to students with war-disrupted educations; but war again intervened. He joined the army and events brought him to Taiwan; the rest of his family was left on the mainland.
"In the army," Chou recalled, "I was assigned to guard a warehouse. A lunch box and a book were enough for me then for a whole day." During that period, he took every available minute to read famous Chinese and (translated) Western writings. This devouring reading is the foundation of his writing career.
He spent almost all his earnings on books. One day, poking through a few pages of a newly translated bookstore copy of Mme. Bovary, Chou became intoxicated with the smooth and beautiful Chinese translation. He rushed to the bookstore as soon as he had the money to buy the book, then read and reread it four times. Later, Shakespeare's works added their special impetus to his growing urge to literary creativity.
Publication of his love poem Without Title, in the Central Daily News in 1953, opened the curtain on his writing career.
In 1955, he finally decided to retire from the army, "Because with only unrealistic fantasies, I knew I couldn't be a good soldier," he asserts.
He reentered the civilian world with a trifle in retirement pay, a straw mattress, a blanket, and a mosquito net; everything outside seemed so big and strange to him. Yet, he was purposeful, and soon established a "base" -a small bookstall-under the arcade somewhere on Wuchang St. in Taipei. There, for the next 21 years and 25 days, passersby glanced at or through the frail book seller- balding, emaciated, apparently taciturn, dressed in poverty. Occasionally, one or two young men would stop by for some time, discussing modern poetry with him. He did not really care at all whether people had any interest in his books.
Nights, he stayed in an attic also used for storing tea. Books were his best and constant companions, suited perfectly to his inner needs. Often, Chou ate no more than a piece of steamed bread and several peanuts as a meal. "I was never a man to seek high aims," says Chou very seriously. "I still just want to live only as I like."
Chou would sit at the bookstand on a broken chair, often musing, watching the kaleidoscopic pedestrian world. To most passersby, he hardly existed. But to students who loved modern poetry, he was the spring, bringing life to a cold, severe northern land. This eccentric figure is suddenly illuminated in his bookstand days when we realize he was making the active acquaintances of poets Lo Men, Ya Hsuan, Yu Kuang-chung, Chang Ling-ling, and Kuan Kuan; especially from Yu Kuang-chung, Chou learned of writing techniques in modern poetry.
At one time they criticized one of Chou's earliest writings, An Angler. "From the viewpoint of writing technique, it is a good poem," Chou remarked, "however, my friends did not like it at the time because they thought I could not have useful insights into a man trying to angle a kingdom."
At the deepest ends of my roots,
I weave sadness:
To angle a kingdom?
With a hookless rod?
Like many other poets of his time, Chou in his early writings-mostly surrealistic and anti-traditional in form-followed a road to modernism opened wide by the 1919 May Fourth Movement. His content, however, was emotion. "My early works were full of concepts but lacked artistic elements," he now says, adding that his poems of later years much better reveal his artistic viewpoint, in some measure an encounter with Buddhism. His philosophy of life is passive, aloof from worldly affairs-an outlook embraced in his vocation. Nothing comes that will not go, and nothing is born that will not die-such acceptances of Buddhism influence him greatly. His poem Hesitation, appearing in his first collection, A Lonely Country published in 1959, expresses the poet's feeling that there are few choices in life:
All shall be ashes,
And ashes breed all.
Cherries to turn red,
Bananas, blue.
God forbid that you be red forever!
God forbid that you be blue forever!
"Oh! God! Please let me
be green forever!"
Yet, the cherries still turn red,
And the bananas blue;
How many times?
I hesitate between red and blue.
The poet leans on a parapet, the colors in the garden impressed on his gaze: Cherries are turning red, bananas their early blue. His sentimental mind "sees" through the ripening of today, and foresees its fading tomorrow. He doubts there is true meaning to existence and lingers between red and blue—Sakyamuni under the Bodhi tree, pondering the misery of birth, aging, disease, and death.
But, is he really so pessimistic—All shall become ashes? No—And ashes breed all. The wheel of life will roll.
In Chou's collection Huan Hun Tsao (The Grass of Returning Souls, published in 1965 and later translated into English by Hsin-sheng C. Kao in 1980), we see celebrated the philosophy of wandering easy and free, of letting things take their own courses, of the butterfly of Chuang Chou. The spirit of peace and serenity sought by the Buddhist faithful is quite clearly portrayed. This is the fabric of Chou's daily life.
For example, Chou's principle in making friends is to "refuse no one and solicit no one." His material life receives scant attention since, warned of life's caprice, he has found a spiritual home in poetic writing. Therefore, though he lives in a busy, material world, he asks little of it and does not belong to it.
His poems, embraced by misery and sorrow, manage to transcend misery and sorrow.
Traces of Chinese classic structures—long forgotten and deserted by most modern poets—delight Chou's readers. Each poem must shelter a climax, the rest spreading naturally. He likes to contrast differing phenomena, to unravel a main theme right at the beginning, or to end in aftertides that gently toss about. Here, from Grass of Returning Souls, in free translation:
Wandering Free
"In the Northern Sea is a fish named Kun, a fish so large I know not how many thousands of li he measures. Kun changes into a bird named Peng, whose back measures I know not how many thousands of li. When he rises and takes fligh!.... "
Chuang Tsu
Fly to escape. In our wake
Tumultuous clouds overturn,
and waves rise by the thousands;
It is boundless, vast, and empty.
A smile, like an echo,
Falls across the traces of my existence.
Remembering the cold Northern Sea,
Long back and long talons are
Still de wed in last night's dampness;
All dreams must end in waking-
The dense fog breaks to a hundred-foot
roll of thunder.
Yesterday has already sunk,
A mermaid's snow tears
have dried away.
I flew, my heart high and cold!
High and cold, the Eye-Spirit of
the Great Transformation;
I am the Eye-Spirit's unyielding gaze.
It is not seeking, but having to seek;
It is not transcending,
but having to transcend.
When clouds tire, the winds hold them;
When the winds tire,
the seas hold them.
And if the seas grow tired?
If the shores grow tired?
If flight is considered the
end of returning,
Then must the returning end in flight.
The world is at my wingtip,
The myriad galaxies by my side;
Heaven's vast harmony
Ascends from me ....
Chou's cosmos-wandering free and easy-is immediately unraveled in the first stanza. Those familiar with Chuang Tzu surely broke into an understanding smile at the start of the poem. As we follow the stanzas we see a continuation of the boundlessly empty scene, the main theme gradually drawing out. The camera zooms in slowly, and we detect traces of damp on the back and talons.
The third stanza rises suddenly to the nature of the Eye-Spirit, and gives way to symbols of ending-a series of waves. Then, a climax focusing emotion ... and afterwaves that gently toss about.
Each of Chou's poems may be seen as a heralding series of waves, a crest, and gentle surf. He dissipates an oncoming force and launches gentle afterwaves, forging'a single entity.
Appropriate classic references are a special quality of Grass of Returning Souls. Old China's classic poetry sometimes employed profound phrases to engrave simple meanings, and sometimes linked the profound to the profound. Chou's preference is with the latter. After blind passion, then a cry, in a Chou poem, the reader may find his own mind suddenly empty of meaning. But if he is patient, if he will chew and ponder, meaning will finally dawn.
Grass of Returning Souls, Wandering Free, and On the Moat are indebted to Chuang Tzu; Heavenly Inquiries to Chu Tsu; The Lamplighter, Listening to the Bell, and Round Mirror to Buddhist scriptures; and Walking to the End of the Water to a poem by Wang Wei.
These lines from Chou's Skylight were inspired by the Book of Changes:
In an instant, laughter radiates from
the stone wall, deeply, quietly
Reaching to the three lines
of masculine strength,
The ≡ of the Tai-chi diagram,
And brushing them lightly.
These lines from The Closed Night allude to images from Pusaman by Li Yu of the Southern Tang Dynasty (Five Dynasties):
Sing for me again.
Smile again, that sad
Pretty smile.
The moon has descended
And dewdrops are waiting,
Waiting for you to return
In soft, wet, gold-threaded shoes.
The gold-threaded shoes in Li Yu's original poem were worn by the Little Chou Empress as she secretly stole out to meet her lover. In Chou's poem, the ghosts of the lovers relight emotions of long ago.
More often, Chou prefers to merge classic allusions into his cosmos. Reminding his readers of himself, he withdrew a butterfly reference from a chapter of A Discussion on Making All Things Equal by Chuang Chou. In Chuang Chou's work it signified a pleasant and beautiful dreamland. As it appears in Chou's poems, it symbolizes free, transcendent, and fleetingly colorful life. This butterfly imagery appears many times in Grass of Returning Souls.
Poetry critic Yieh Chia-ying once remarked that Chou's poetry casts sadness and sorrows via philosophical theories. Chou asks in the poem Under the Bodhi Tree from Grass, "What man secretes a mirror in his heart? Who is willing to step across history in bare feet?" In April he asks, "Who is the wiseman, able to seal the lava within a volcano?"
Grass of Returning Souls is also a collection of love poems-an affection that is intercepted and refracted. Occurring unexpectedly and wounded by rationality, the emotion becomes deeper, more intense. In Heavenly Inquiries, Under the Bodhi Tree, and Prison, the course of this struggle is agonizing. However, unification and harmony are the real desire of the poet, only emphasized by the contra diction. The cries issuing from Grass of Returning Souls end in the poem On a Lone Peak, there revealing the poet's deepest intention—pursuit of serenity and perfection, the highest state of Buddhism.
A line by the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu—"To conquer the sadness of life with the sadness of poetry"—opens the curtain on Chou's first collection. Ku Tu Kuo (Lonely Country, published in 1959). The poem Let shows Chou's affinity for metaphors developed in a natural way:
Let the soft reds of fallen flowers
drift in a spring stream's flow,
Let passionate butterflies
caress the last petals of
a summer rose,
Let the aloof charm, the thin sadness
of autumnal chrysanthemums
fill a poet 's empty cup.
Let wind and snow come to me,
loneliness come to me;
If I must devour
or burn with light,
I would be a burning candle on
a divine altar or a distant star, sad
on the stillness of a lonely night.
The three seasons depicted in the first stanza symbolize man's youth and prime; the poet himself now steps into his final stage of life-his cup of accomplishment empty. Winter portends, and he views alternatives of his life's meaning.
The title poem, Lonely Country, is a favorite of the poet:
Last night, I dreamed myself again,
Naked, cross-legged,
on a snow-topped peak.
My peak's season is winter-spring,
(Its snow as warm and soft as velvet);
Only the sound of time's self-chewing,
No cobras, owls,
or man-gazed animals,
But mandrakes, olives,
And jade butterflies;
No writings, politics, or religions,
But a tide of raw, silent power.
Here, night is brighter, more
resplendent, more rich than day,
As cold as wine, concealing poems,
clothing beauty;
From the void comes understanding
of the art of chess
And an invitation to a board of stars.
The past is forward, the future shy;
I am "now" the servant;
I am "now" the king.
Through a dream, the poet depicts the substance of a "way" (in a metaphysical sense) that is supreme, invincible. Substance, phenomena, and activity form the universe; the peak is the "way"—pure and aloof.
Within this "way" of the poet, man's disputes, his seven classic emotions and six sensory pleasures, and evil and artificiality do not exist. There is no past, no future. What does exist is "present," in his interpretation, enternal.
It has been 30 years since Chou's first poem appeared in a Taipei newspaper; since 1953, he has published only two collections of poems. "I am a slow writer because I write slowly," Chou emphasized, unsmiling. Others compare his works to traditional Chinese realistic painting, characterized by very fine brushwork and immense attention to detail.
Not long ago, he was asked by a young admirer if he is over 80. Although, inevitably, the question saddened him (actually, he is 63), it reminded him that the days ahead are countable. He feels he needs to write faster, to complete his third book (no more than 30 pieces are now ready).