Moonlight in front of my bed
I took it for frost on the ground
I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon
Lower it, and think of home.
I'm reading that this morning because a reader, K, saw my post about "tangping" and emailed:
Tang was the greatest age of Chinese poetry and the greatest Tang poetry included attacks on the court, and on corruption and in praise of "drunkenness" or withdrawal from the struggle to get ahead at the court. Perhaps for the Chinese "tang-ling" [sic] has some sort of resonance suggesting these great Tang poets. Asking, was the Tang era the greatest Chinese era or is Xi's China the greatest. Subtle, maybe, but the Chinese have been civilized for a long time. I wonder. Perhaps we should love bomb Beijing with millions of copies of On Walden Pond and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to counter the Confucian Institutes here.
I don't know what classic literature you're reading right now. Me, I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." That line about the moon — "The moon in China has a special meaning" — caught my eye, because I'd just read this, from Chesterton:
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
Is the moon clear and unmistakable? It is true that — unlike the sun – you can look right at it and the outline is sharp — because it's a dead stone. But in Li Bai's poem, he's looking at the moon indirectly, as light on the floor, and he mistakes it, sees it as frost on the ground. He looks directly at the moon, but then he looks away, preferring the unseen moon, the moon in his head, which corresponds to home.
As for whether the Chinese hear "tangping" and think of the Tang Dynasty... I cannot possibly have any idea. I used a Google Chinese-to-English translator and it basically told me to mind my own business. It translated "tang" as "tang."
FROM THE EMAIL: Linda writes:Definitely different characters
躺平 tang3 ping2 (lying flat)
唐朝 Tang2 chao2 (Tang dynasty)
(numbers are for third and second tones)
३ टिप्पण्या:
Alex writes:
"Paul Ryan and the GOP establishment would try giving some esoteric speech about how tariffs only hurt us and we need free-trade with China even after all that they've done. Trump, on the other hand, seems to have a better political sense than that. People are angry about the past year, and this is a good start towards directing that anger and harnessing it for political gain. It's also a way to help cement Trump's influence over the party in the coming elections. Let's see how many times primary candidates get asked, "Do you support Trump's call for 100% tariffs on China?" as well as their responses.
'Also, the use of "reparations" is a nice touch. With all the discussion about reparations in relation to slavery, a system which ended over a hundred and forty years ago, how can politicians call for paying reparations to blacks who may not even be descended from slaves, but can't muster the will to call for reparations to the hundreds of millions of people who were locked down, unemployed, terrified for over a year, not to mention hundreds of thousands of families who lost loved ones due to the virus?"
Bob Boyd is working on his poetry:
Moonlight in Mara Lago
I took it for frost on the rough in front of the tee box
I lift my head, gaze at the Florida moon
Lower it, and think
China must pay!
And then:
Moonlight in Mara Lago
At first I thought the rough grass in front of the tee box had died
I almost started yelling for the head greens keeper
I was going to fire his ass
But then I lifted my head and realized it was the moon
Where only Americans have walked
I look back down at the fairway and think
China must pay!
Owen writes:
"His demand is right out of the MAGA playbook: a simplistic claim with huge emotional punch, aligned with “America’s interests” as he sees them, that will get everyone talking; and —key point— will frame a negotiation. He knows nobody will go for 100% but he wants to set an anchor point, get people to consider not *whether* to impose a tariff, but *how much and how soon.*
"I guess he’s done this his whole life. It’s worked for him; why should he ever stop?"
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