What am I doing here? Of course, I am not Korean, I don't speak or understand, read or write Korean. I don't have very much experience with Korean literature, even in translation and I'm not even, in professorial capacity, a poetry person. The most I can say is that I have a great affinity for and some understanding of at least some aspects of Korean culture via my study and practice of Zen Buddhist meditation in the Korean Chogye tradition. But still, what am I doing here?
I love the experience of reading and thinking and writing and talking about literature. I love the challenge it offers me to be fully open and present to the text and to myself and my world in the process of reading and meditating upon it, of writing and responding to it. I love the feeling of diffuse expansion, the buoyant surge of vitality and joy that comes when I stop trying to control the text, to make it say what I want it to say, and instead converse with it the way I might with a good friend, or a lover. And I love the fluid sense of communion with the writer and with other readers that I experience when I read and discuss literary works with others. I love that literature is for me an experience that teaches me how live my ordinary life better. I love the practice it gives me in using the capacities - receptivity, adaptation, improvisation, and trust - that make life a joy and an intimate gift.
People get this practice in lots of different ways: the experience of religion, of nature, of cities, of athletics, of gardening. Some of these work as practice for me too. But the experience of literature, as a writer, reader, and teacher, is my vocation. So today I want to share my experience of Korean poetry with you. Not as an expert, but also not as a beginner. Neither authorized nor unauthorized because "authority" is not a pertinent category for the experience of love and life that literature gives me. Rather just as a human being of certain age and experience, with certain sensibilities and intellectual tools, I would like to unfold for you my joyful encounter with Korean poetry and I hope that in what I unfold you may - whatever your level of experience with Korean poetry - enjoy at least a modestly enriched experience of it, of yourself, of your world, and of the possible ways of living in it.
So I'll begin with two poems. Both are translations into English of what I understand to be a pretty well-known sijo written by Yi Saek in the 14th century. The first translation was completed by Richard Rutt and published as the first sijo in his famous volume The Bamboo Grove. It goes like this:
"The white snow has left the valleys
where the clouds are lowering.
Is it true that somewhere
the plum trees have happily blossomed?
I stand here alone in the dusk
and do not know where to go."
Every morning at this time of year, as they get ready for school, my children, 11 and 9, ask me what the weather will be and what sort of clothes and coats they ought to wear. "Fleece and winter coat?" "Short sleeve shirt and fleece?" "Do we need boots?" "Hats?" "Can I just wear my jean jacket?" Thinking about this poem in preparation for this talk made me reflect a bit on this ritual of morning questions. It occurs to me that they never ask these questions in the middle of summer or in the middle of winter, not even in the middle of spring or in the middle of fall. In the middle of seasons, at least where we live, in Michigan, the weather is more or less the same day in and day out for a month or two. But at this time of year it changes on a daily basis. We have a joke in Michigan: "if you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes and it'll change." About two weeks ago my daughter and I were raking dead leaves into our vegetable garden in preparation for spring planting. We wore tee shirts and jeans and broke sweat in the warming afternoon sunshine. About a week and a half ago, she and I and my son were building a snowman out of six inches of fresh snow in exactly the same spot. Three or four days after that, the snowman was encased in a hard shell of ice as the temperature dipped into single digits for the first time all year. Today, as I write, and look into the backyard drenched in midday sun, "Melty" as we called the snowman, has lived up to his name, and is nothing but a hat, a scarf, and a few lumps of coal lying in a heap next to the garden.
It's a time of year of rapid and extreme changes in the weather. We are alternately hopeful and afraid, euphoric and dejected. My daughter will ask me in the morning: "Dad will you play basketball with me this afternoon?" And my answer will be a gingerly qualified, "Sure, but let's see if the weather warms up, or if the rain passes or if the driveway's muddy." Or take the flowers. I've seen a few crocuses exploding tiny out of gardens on my way to work in the morning, and in the garden at the Zen Temple the graceful stems of tulips are already four or five inches out of the ground. I'm excited by these signs of the inevitable arrival of spring, but my friends who are more seasoned gardeners than I are also worried about these tender shoots: another hard freeze like last week and those tulips will die without blooming right where they stand. We just don't know and sometimes the transition, the waiting, and the daily uncertainty, the emotional swings dependent upon something we don't control can just get to be a bit too much to take.
It's this time of year and the state of uncertainty, sown with the fragile shoots of a tender and tentative hope that Rutt evokes for me in his poem. Even though, like the speaker in the poem, we just don't know what the day will bring, the qualified, almost melancholic nature of the hope we feel at this time of year comes from knowledge, from experience. We've been here before and so we know, though the winter has been unusually mild and the tulips are growing, that the odds are against them, that we're not out of the cold just yet. "It always snows at least once in April," we remind ourselves grimly. We know all this. Or rather, we think we know. It would be more accurate to say that we bring our experience of the past to bear on the present moment in a fearful guard against hopes of early blossoms that we fear will be disappointed.
And right here, the poem reveals a deep and profound lesson of life, one resonant with both the teachings of my Zen teacher and my own life's experience. Be present in the moment. Often, we don't know what's going to happen, so we launch forward into the future with a question: will those tulips bloom early this year? But with equal force, in fear that the answer might be a disappointing "no", we lurch back into the past, hauling forth our experience of it as a way of attenuating our hopes. Back and forth we swing on a pendulum of emotionally charged conjecture. Meanwhile, the tulips stand there, firm and straight, pulling their rich green stems out of the cold soil, pulling their fluted leaves like arms out from within their narrow bodies. How much of our lives do we spend clinging to this pendulum, barely noticing what is right in front of us - right here and right now - so distracted are we by fears and hopes for the future that are themselves modulated by joys and disappointments from our past experience? But we don't know, we can't know, and we can't do anything about it anyway, so we might as well take what joy we can get from what's right in front of us.
Now let me take all of this with me as I look at another poem. This is a different translation, by Jaihyun Kim, of the same poem:
"The clouds are lowering in the valleys
where the white snow lingers.
Where can the joyous plum blossom
be blooming, I wonder?
I stand alone at twilight
and do not know where to go."
Two significant differences in the translated sijo captured my attention. First, the clauses that make up the first two lines of the translated poem are reversed. In Rutt's translation, the snow or its absence, occupies the foreground while the lowering of clouds serves as a backdrop. In Kim's translation, the lowering clouds form the foreground against a backdrop of lingering snow. Let me work through some of the effects released by Kim's alternative rendering of the first sentence in the poem.
Clouds lower into valleys against a backdrop of lingering snow. I have the impression that these clouds, or clouds like them, lower into those valleys everyday in the place this poet lives. The lowering clouds, perhaps, are a way of telling the time of day; a reference, in that case, of the cycle of days. The lingering snow, on the other hand, set now as a backdrop for the daily cycle, evokes the slower temporality of the seasons. Continue with the poem: we move in the third and fourth lines to the plum blossom. Here we remain in the temporality of the seasons. And then, in the final couplet, we come back to twilight the temporality of the days. So I see, through Kim's rendering, a certain structure arising that refers to scales of time: day, season, season, day. And as I think about this for just a moment more, I translate that structure into the moving earth: the temporality of the earth's rotation on its axis, which brings us the cycle of night and day; and the temporality of the earth's revolution on its axis, which brings us the cycle of the seasons.
For me, Kim's rendering brings into sharper focus me the cosmic mysteries that drive the hopes and fears we in Michigan experience at this time of year. In doing so, he also reminds me that it's all about time. The earth keeps turning on its axis, days pass into night, and as it does so, it moves slowly about the sun, winter passes into spring, spring into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter, days pass into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. Stretched across this implacable, unvarying machinery, we experience the earth's double motion as time. Time means change and change means impermanence. To be sure, as far as our perception of it goes, impermanence works on many different temporal scales. A mountain range feels permanent to us compared to a human life span, and a human life span in turn feels permanent compared with a tulip blossom. Depending on whether we're feeling good or bad about the present we might take one or another attitude toward the fact that everything is changing, everything all the time.
But this poem, as Kim renders it, has two main effects on me. First, it forces on me an initially uncomfortable awareness of something I believed four years of Zen practice would have by now instilled in me: impermanence surrounds us. We may ignore it, we may deny it, but it will never ignore us. But there's a difference between grasping this intellectually and grasping it with your whole being in experience. There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. By placing me so firmly in a time of transition - twilight: between day and night, and late winter: between lingering snow and blossoming plum trees - Kim reinforces what I'm already experiencing un-self-consciously at this time of year anyway. He reinforces the daily sense that things are changing and that being especially attentive to the fact that things are changing all the time - even if it's only the weather - requires - if we are to diminish our suffering - corresponding changes in our behavior. In Michigan, at this time of year, we usually dress in layers. We might begin the day armed in winter coat and end it in a tee-shirt having peeled off during the course of the day not only our coat, but a sweater and a long-sleeve shirt as well. When we do so we are adapting.
And this is the second effect the poem has on me. It helps transform the frustrating uncertainty and powerless in the face of the capriciously changing weather into the empowering self-conscious recognition of my ability to accept impermanence and adapt to circumstances. Again, like the speaker in the poem, I don't know what the weather's going to be. And I certainly have no power to affect the rotation of the earth on its axis or its revolution around the sun. But as I leave the poem, I'm lightened by the feeling that I don't have to know what I thought I had to know, what I thought my comfort and happiness depended upon my knowing. And I no longer need the power to control the weather. With what little I do know, I'm perfectly capable of assuming a flexible stance in relation to my environment such that I'll be prepared to adjust to its changes, to change with its changes. And then, and here is the miracle, accepting the modest extent of my knowledge and turning, with that in mind, to control what I do control (in this case how I dress for the day), produces the same effects as if I could control the weather: I'm comfortable and in harmony in my environment. Here again there is a profound and ancient wisdom: the way to ease suffering lies in adapting ourselves to changing circumstances.
So, Rutt's poem helped remind me of the importance of being fully present in each unfolding "now." And Kim's poem helps remind me of the importance of flexibility and adaptation. They go together. For fully attending to the ceaseless appearance of the present, always different than the present of an instant ago, is precisely what we need in order to adapt ourselves to what we observe. Slow down and take note of your circumstances, accept them and adapt. The very word "sijo", I learn from Jaihyun Kim's introduction to a volume of translations, "consists of two Sino-Korean characters meaning "time" or "period" and "rhythm" or "harmony." I just let those four English words -- time, period, rhythm, harmony -- hang together loosely and it as though the very name of the verse form - sijo - were a whispering chant of this lesson. It's a simple lesson, derived from reflection on a simple poem that does little more than describe the passage of time, and yet it is one of those lessons that I cannot seem to hear with sufficient frequency.
But the life lessons given me by my experience of these poems do not end here for me. Now I wish to recall and emphasize the fact that these two poems are really just two translations of the same poem, a poem I am unable to read in its original language. One way to get to that point would be to consider that the earth's movements would be experienced very differently by a reader who had spent her entire life on the equator or on one of the poles. It dawns on me that I understand this description of late winter weather because of where I've lived most of my life: around the 40th parallel of northern latitude, in the upper Midwestern United States. And the specificity of that location has everything to do with how I experience the earth's movement, and with the specific ways in which I might imagine and deal with the fact of time and its passage. The same is true, of course, for the author of the poem. And it turns out that Yi Saek, aristocrat and scholar in the late 14th century during the declining Koryo empire, lived his life right around the 40th parallel of northern latitude as well.
Now I want to pause to reflect for a moment on this line - the 40th North parallel - that I share with Yi Saek. The first thing that comes to mind is that is imaginary, a geometrical operation devised by human beings as a tool for organizing, with an aim toward better understanding, the planet they inhabit. But the second thing that comes to mind is that this tool for understanding, like other such tools, easily lends itself to the ends of division and destruction. This particular tool, considered in conjunction with Western European methods of mapping the surface of the earth, has played a sadly helpful role in the story of Western Europe and the United States' numerous encounters with foreignness or difference. This story, as everyone in this room knows probably too well, primarily consists in the attempt to render foreignness recognizable and familiar by the often violent and deadly suppression of what is untranslatable. Knowing this story and allowing myself to be moved by the suffering it involves does not, I believe, require me to cast away the tool in revulsion. One might argue that given such a tool I have an ethical responsibility to use it, but differently, for different purposes. At the very least, I believe, I have the freedom to do so. And so I will use it to connect myself to Yi Saek. To experience - without ignoring or attempting to suppress centuries of time, thousands of miles, and vast differences of languages and culture - his poem and the location we share. I will imagine that I can sit down at dusk with Yi Saek to observe and ponder the passage of a lengthening day into night and of a waning, but tiring winter into spring.
And that is a wonderful thing and a wonderful fact about poetry. Despite the first impression many have that poetry is a forbidding, coded private club, I'm happy here to be reminded that there is always, always a point of contact. Yi Saek and I share a degree of latitude. But even if there were not this, even if there is no other point of contact between me and a poet, there is always at least the words on the page. Words on the page, which we both have sat in front of and both read and both pondered. We both slow down and take care with language, at least for as long as it takes to read the poem. So I know that I can always animate a poem, so that it can speak to me and my circumstances in a practical way by just resting quietly with the language. I don't hastily chase down a single meaning, or attempt to still the shimmering ambiguity. I just sit with the words, experiencing them with my senses, and letting my mind roam among the dense forests of sound and meaning that radiate from each of them and their combination.
But language: this is where the experience of Korean poetry rapidly grows complex for me. I just imagined myself sitting with Yi Saek, maybe sharing a cup of plum wine, smiling silently at each other. Yet there's another dimension to that image. When I imagine myself sliding half way around the globe along the 40th parallel -- passing through Spain, the land of my ancestors, Afghanistan, wrecked and suffering, through China, to the Korean valley where Yi Saek sits - I come up against the stark realization that I am in a foreign land, with its own language and that Yi Saek and I can't speak to each other. We'll just sit there smiling at each other from time to time. And as much as I have learned to enjoy silence, if I'm going to converse with him, as with a friend, I'm going to have to learn something new, I'm going to have to learn his language. It's really the critical moment in my encounter with Korean poetry. Up until now, I've easily and profitably made myself at home in the poetry. Now it is time to recognize and dive into its foreignness, to let that wash over me and knock me off balance. Now is the time to experience the fact that these two "Korean poems" I've been reading are really just two translations into my native tongue of a single poem written in Korean, and 14th century Korean at that. This is the hardest part of the experience, and the hardest part of this paper to write. This is the moment when the student who has spent his entire time abroad safe within the familiar enclave of the American colony sets out on his own for the first time, wandering alone through streets and towns whose sounds and signs he cannot understand. How can I make sense of this experience? How can I have the sort of healthy, practical encounter with poetry that I advocated earlier when I don't know the language?
Let me begin this foray with an apparently simple question prompted by my comparison of the two translations, considering them now as translations. I mentioned earlier that I was struck by two differences. The first involved the reversal of the two clauses that make up the first sentence. The second involves the action each translator attributes to the subject noun snow. In Rutt's translation "the white snow has left the valleys" whereas in Kim's translation "the white snow lingers." If these were really just two different poems, then this difference would be less relevant. But as translations of a third poem, this difference marks a doorway through which I must pass if I wish to connect with Yi Saek on his own terms. So the question I have is: what is the Korean word that Rutt and Kim translate in divergent ways, and what are the senses of that word? But I can't answer that question because I don't know Korean. At this point in my encounter with the poem, the energy of my own experiences, my affective affinities with the texts, and what intellectual elaboration I could make upon these on my own generates a desire and an interest that drives me to get help, to add to the intellectual repertoire through which I can engage the poem. For this, I need an expert.
Or at least someone who knows more than I do, someone who at least knows Korean. I find Claire. Not just because she knows Korean for she's the last person who would claim for herself expertise in the language, particularly in its 14th century poetic forms. But because she knows more Korean than I do and, most importantly, because we can communicate with each other. I can't communicate with a Korean-English dictionary. I can barely use it at all. But even if I were more adept with the alphabet and the parts of speech, the dictionary still wouldn't riff on the connotations of words and on their poetic dimensions in ways specifically formulated for my understanding, for an expansion of my acquaintance with the language. In this case, Claire was playing the role of the friend who facilitates a friendship between two people she knows could become good friends if they could spend some time together. She knows the zones of likely fruitful contact.
So Claire finds the word in the hangul text, picking it out of a pretty line of boxes and circles and slashes, vertical and horizontal. It is cha cha chin. She tells me she thinks it means "settles" or "is spread around". And she tells me about an expression Koreans use to say that someone is "widely praised" - that there's a buzz about someone - and that a variation of cha cha chin is part of that expression. Later we look this up in the big Korean-English dictionary we checked out of the library and it tells us that "cha cha hata" means "is widely spread" or "is spread abroad." But none of these senses of cha cha chin allows for much of a connection with either "lingers" or with "leaves." Though it does seem to have a connection with "lowering." Yet both translators make "lowering" the action of the clouds, not the snow. So we look at the verb that, by its place in the original Korean sentence, would seem to go with clouds and we find "mo huh re ra". Claire's not sure what this means (and it's not in the big dictionary) but it does make her think of two other verbs - ma mu ruh da (to stay) and huh ruh da (to flow) - that seem somehow to be combined in mo huh re ra. Now these two contrary senses correspond almost exactly with the two contrary actions attributed the snow in the two translations: lingers and leaves.
I'm puzzled as to why the translators would both decide to connect mo huh re ra with the white snow when Korean syntax would seem to dictate that it goes with the cloud. Whether I consider it a blunder or a willful rewriting of the poem, the switch seems outrageous. But I'm certainly not the expert and so it seems only prudent to pause before calling names. Perhaps it is neither a blunder nor a rewriting. Perhaps no switch has occurred. Perhaps I've been misled by own attachment to the relatively fixed distinction between the three English verbs in question: "lowers", "lingers" and "leaves." I begin to wonder how I can stretch my understanding of these verbs, and even to find alternatives to them that could allow the senses to drift together.
Lingers and leaves. That doesn't seem too hard. Lingering contains within it at least a hint of leaving, for someone who lingers is someone who was expected to have left already. And leaving is going out the door. Leaving is not the same as here and it is not the same as gone. It's an in between state, like lingering. If I think about snow now, if I think about what my backyard looked like a few days ago, when the snow was melting, it suddenly makes complete sense to me that melting snow, the melting snow of late winter or early spring could be thought of as both leaving and lingering. But wait a minute: Cha cha chin didn't mean leaving or lingering, it meant spreading or pervading or settling. It's okay though because snow that is melting, lingering or leaving, not here and not gone does exactly that as it melts. Just like our snowman. As it melts, snow settles and spreads into the ground, saturating it and if the sun is warm enough on that day even as it saturates the ground the water that it has now become will begin to evaporate, which is to say, spread into the air.
So now I'm thrown into the water cycle, the shifting forms of water. And that brings me to the clouds which according to the translators "are lowering" in the valley. Following the syntax of the Korean original, I'm thinking that these clouds are also lingering-leaving, resting or staying and flowing at the same time. So now I imagine when clouds feel not just like clouds but like flowing things. It's when clouds are close to the ground so that you can feel their wetness, so that you can remember that they are just water. On a partly sunny day, with high puffy or wispy clouds in the sky, I don't think of clouds as water. On the contrary, I think of them as cottony which is to say also as dry. But when they are down close to the ground, as they often are on warmish late winter days, when the snow in Ann Arbor starts to melt, they are more like a mist or a fog. So the clouds that are both staying and flowing are, precisely, clouds that are lowering, descending to earth.
So cha cha chin and mo huh re ra may not, in ordinary language, or in a big dictionary, have much to do with each other. But in a poem like Yi Saek's they can begin to drift into each other. In part they can do this just because it is poetry and part of what poetry both allows and demands is that its reader pause to take hold of words, to pick them up, weigh them, stretch them. And in part, in this poem, they can do this because they refer to actions attributed to forms of water - snow and clouds - that, in the moment of this poem, are in a state of change or flux. So these words have themselves, as words, taken on the shape and properties of the things they refer to out in the worlds around the 40th parallel around this time of year.
In the course of discussing with Claire the meanings of these verbs, I also discovered that Korean has a special class of words in its lexicon known to linguists as "ideophones." These are words that signify by mimickry. If the words mimic the sound of the thing they designate then we call them, in English, onomatopoeic or phonomimes. But Korean, I learned from Claire, also has enough words that mimic the visual aspect of the thing they designate that they merit their own class. I think we have words like this in English, but as far as I know we don't have any special name for them. The name in Korean is uiteyo and the big dictionary gives the English as "phenomimes". My compact Oxford English Dictionary doesn't list phenomimes as a word in English. But even it did, not only the word, but the concept of phenomimickry was completely new and, specifically, foreign to me. It's taken me some time and a lot of brain bending to even begin to grasp it. In fact, I would say I didn't really feel as though I'd made it part of my own structure until the moment I wrote through the passages above on the drifting, flowing, melting verbs in the first line of Yi Saek's poem.
I'm so excited about this category of words in Korean. Words that don't just represent something in the world, but do something in the world. I don't know, strictly speaking, whether cha cha chin and ma huh re ra are uiteyo or not. The descriptive grammars I've consulted on the topic seem to allow a certain discretion for what they call "native intuition" in the classification of such words. Well, my native speaker thought that cha cha chin was uiteyo, but not ma hu re ra. Be that as it may, in this poem, both words act as if they were uiteyo. For these words don't just represent snow and clouds in a state of change. By drifting and flowing back and forth across the first line of Yi Saek's sijo, they do the kinds of flowing changes, they do the indefiniteness of form and state and location, that we associate with melting snow or lowering clouds. Now it occurs to me that these words aren't only doing the fluidly changing states of two forms of water in the first line, they are also echoing the fluidly changing states of time that I talked about earlier - the time in the middle between winter and spring and the time in the middle between day and night - that frame the speaker in the poem, standing alone.
I've been thinking a lot about words like this in recent months. I think of them as magic words. For magic words make themselves true by being said, they bring into being the conditions in the world that they describe. "Guilty!" "Innocent!" "Husband and Wife." "The Body of Christ." Okay, but actually it turns out you could argue, with pragmatist philosophers and linguists and some cognitive neuroscientists, it's not just magic words that work like that. All language is like that. So "I am your mother" or "I love you" they're magic words too. All words are magic words, all words bring forth a world. Nothing could more excite a person like me who has devoted half his life to words than to hear that they are all magic. And at the same time, I confess a special love for words that draw special attention to their magical quality, that cause me to stop and remember that words are magical. The words in poems are like this. Uiteyo can be like this.
Perhaps the greatest trick pulled off by Yi Saek's sijo, among all the ceaseless bewildering shifting appearances and disappearances and transformations in these lines, is that when I sit in front of it and try to figure it out, Korean and American begin to drift, melt and lower into each other. Or, to put it another way, I linger and leave, and melt and lower and flow along the 40th parallel from my native American to the utterly foreign Korean. First making myself at home, making myself comfortable in the poem in its English translations, I find myself developing something resembling a friendship with the poem and its author. But a friendship, if it is to grow and deepen and last must also involve a kind of restructuring of ourselves, a permeation of our own structures of being and experience with the ways of seeing, thinking, and talking of another. Drawn then into the baffling markings of hangul and then further into the most foreign - to a speaker of American - aspects of Korean grammar, I find my own way of seeing and thinking and being in English, in American transformed. I'm not Korean by any reasonable standard one might think to apply. But in the course of engaging this magical Korean poem, with as much of my being as possible and with the help of my training and the borrowed training and experience of others, I begin to act as though I was Korean: to see my own native tongue as a Korean might see it, as foreign. I begin to use my language, to be in my language as a Korean might be in it: highly aware of what it is has a hard time expressing. It may not be reasonable, may not make rational sense, but it's true nonetheless. That's magic.
Given that magical transformation, it might not now surprise you that I've been trying my hand at writing sijo in American. I'm drawn to the sijo, as I'm drawn to Zen Buddhism, precisely because it feels so foreign to my own temperament and habitual ways of being in the world. I'm an American, and an American academic who loves words no less. This is to say, I'm a talker. Henry Miller, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac are my favorite American authors, writers of sprawling, unapologetic stories. Kerouac typed his words on great rolls of butcher paper so that he wouldn't have to stop talking, not even for as long as it took to change the paper in the typewriter. Shoot first, ask questions later. Put everything in, you can always take something out, you can always take it back. Not very restrained. Independent and unappreciative, if not downright antagonistic towards, discipline and stillness. That's, for better and for worse, what it is to be American - at least in one of its dominant forms.
But the sijo won't have it. It has rules that pretty strictly define its length and structure. In fact, the sijo in some ways feels to me, in the realm of written expression, a lot like Zen sitting feels in the realm of physical and mental posture. When I first learned meditation, I was taught by my sunim that the "most stable" posture was the full lotus position. I tried it and I felt certain my ankle was going to break. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable. My teacher reminded us to keep our attention on our tantchjun area, on the air flowing in through our nostrils and causing that area two finger-widths below our navels to rise. Later she told us that when she first started to teach, she began with the least stable postures. These postures are more comfortable and she wanted to ease her beginning students into sitting meditation. Then one day her sunim - who is Korean -- observed her class and corrected her. He insisted that most Americans had little experience with discomfort and that it was no service to them to deprive them of the lessons and capacities to be gained by such experience. To sit in the full-lotus position and to breathe quietly through the discomfort would be a liberating experience for those accustomed to thinking that the best way to deal with pain are complaint, flight or a forcible alteration of circumstances.
As a writer, I don't have trouble with production. I almost never lack for something to say. My trouble has to do with editing and revision, with concision and economy. I've written poetry for most of my life, but I've never had a clue as to how to revise any of it. Even in recent years, when in conjunction with the development of my meditation practice, I'd begun to write more concisely and concretely, I still didn't know how to revise. And I still wasn't writing with any sense of constraint or restraint. I can't say I turned to writing sijo with this in mind. A long story of chance, love, and luck put the sijo form in front of me at a time when, for reasons that are mostly still beyond my comprehension, I was unusually open to the influence of all three. More magic. I will limit myself to saying that as part of an intensified practice period at my temple, I committed to writing a sijo each day for twelve weeks. I wanted to experiment with attempting to direct the energy for disciplined commitment that a practice period helps me muster toward my creative writing.
Most of my early sijo, I wrote in what I imagine to be an American way. I saw something, or experienced something, and so - a talker - I had something to say. And I just wrote it down the way I felt like writing it down, straight away. After that, I'd count syllables. And then I'd begin to cut. And then after cutting, I'd begin to shift words and lines around in order to try to match the sense structure of the sijo, its way of relating lines to each other. And I'd search for different words to say the same thing. After a number of versions, I'd come up with something that resembled a sijo. Over time, however, an interesting thing began to happen when I'd sit down to write my nightly sijo. First, fewer words began to come out in that initial expression. And then, eventually, the words began to come out in sijo. First a three syllable thought, then a four, then a four, then another four, then a line break, and repeat that structure, echoing the sense of the first four units, and then another line break, and a thematic and tonal twist that begins to drive home the deeper sense of the first two lines: three syllables, then five, then four, and then, in what was the most difficult moment to get used to but also ultimately the most satisfying in the sijo, that soft landing of the last three syllables.
My experience of writing sijo was nothing less than a discipline and a practice. Specifically, it was the discipline and practice of economy and structure in thought and writing. But more generally, given my own cultural background, my temperament, and my habits, it was the discipline and practice of experiencing foreignness, not so much a language, but a way of being in language. It was the discipline and practice of facing the foreign again and again until it began to do its work on me, to melt, soften, and settle my own fixed and native contours. The result of this process is not that I have become Korean and ceased to be American, nor that the sijo in my hands has become American and ceased to be Korean. It's that those borders around each of us have ceased to be so distinct, like forms of water in a state of change, like the senses of the verbs in the first line of Yi Saek's sijo. We can be so much more than what we think.
Now I'm momentarily stunned because my very specific experience with this one sijo reveals itself to be, in a way I can't articulate very well on my own, an instance of the sort of experience I cherish above all others: the experience of love. Two of my favorite American writers can help me make this connection clearer for me and I hope for you. The late Trappist monk and poet Thomas Merton once wrote that: "Love demands a complete inner transformation. We have to become in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death or our being, our own self. No matter how hard we try, we resist this death: we fight back with anger, with recriminations, with demands, with ultimatums. We seek any convenient excuse to break off and give up the difficult task." Merton's words describe for me that critical moment in my experience with Yi Saek's poem in which I had to enter Korean. He pinpoints the resistance I had to this. I remember arguing with Claire that there was nothing special about uitey-o, trying desperately to take away from her description all its foreignness, everything about it that asked me to transform myself into a person who could hear in a word the shape of an action. And then Merton tells me that this is what it takes to love.
John Dewey describes a similar process, but with a slightly different stress and tone, emphasizing the importance of affect and imagination in the process: "Friendship and intimate affection are not the result of information about another person even though knowledge may further their formation. But it does so only as it becomes an integral part of sympathy through the imagination. It is when the desires and aims, the interests and modes of experience of another become an expansion of our own being that we understand him. We learn to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and their results give true instruction, for they are built into our own structure." This is the sense in which literature gives me practice for life. Working with this poem was nothing less than giving myself the opportunity to exercise the faculties and experience the shifts in feeling involved in loving. We can be so much more than what we think. Transformation. Magic.
Finally, I realize that by affording me this experience, of being between languages, between ways of being in languageYi Saek has performed one last magic trick: he has transformed me into the speaker of his poem, the one who is paused between fluid states of time and being, in the late winter early spring, in the late day early night, in sodden ground dotted with patches of melting snow, surrounded by clouds of water. I am in the same position as that one, and like that one, I don't know where to go. But I don't not know out of ignorance. The English Romantic poet John Keats called this "negative capability" and described it as "the capacity to be in mysteries and doubts and uncertainties without an irritable grasping after reason." That not knowing is not a limitation, but a freedom. It's a not knowing in which we pause having already traversed lands of ignorance, and learning, and knowledge, and certainty and then just continued moving to this new, foreign, kind of active not-knowing.
The Japanese Zen and haiku master Basho, in the 17th century, recommended to his students: "Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and yourself are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit." Basho here turns Keats' negative capability into an active and generative program for poetry, for making something. But he does more than this also, because he is describing a method of approach identical in structure to that described by Merton and Dewey in relation to love. So now Basho tells us that to really make poetry is to really make love.
There's a trilogy of books, His Dark Materials, that I read to my kids last year. It centers on a young girl Lyra and a friend she makes from another world whose name is Will. Together they share a quest that is ultimately a destiny. The fate of these young friends, on the cusp of puberty, is to replay the scene in the Garden of Eden, a scene remember that in Christianity is a battle between God and Satan. In His Dark Materials, the legions of angels and rebel angels are gearing up for a rematch. The books take the position that God was just the first angel who then convinced most of the angels that followed him that he was the Creator. Satan and some of the other angels disputed this and were thrown out of heaven. The fall of Adam and Eve in the garden was not, from the point of view of rebel angels a fall from a state of ignorant blissful innocence, but rather the gift of knowledge and experience. Lyra and Will are, unbeknownst to them, to replay this critical movement.
Along the way, each acquires a special object to help them. Lyra is given an alethiometer, a truth telling machine that looks and works much like a simple compass. One asks the alethiometer a question and then its three needles swing around the dial, pausing here and there at any number of the thirty-six symbols printed there. To comprehend the answer it gives you requires an understanding of the many different levels of meaning associated with each symbol. Typically this takes years of experience and study, but somehow Lyra is capable of reading the alethiometer instantly without this training. All she need do, she discovers, is allow her mind to go into a state of relaxed concentration, attentive to the question she has asked and to the movements of the needles, but open also to whatever else may arise in her mind in the course of the reading. For his part, Will gains possession of a knife one of whose edges is so subtle it can cut through the very fabric of the universe to permit access to an infinite range of parallel universes that exist alongside ours. The trick is that to use the subtle knife, Will must relax his mind into the same state of attention required for Lyra to use the alethiometer. It's much like the frame of mind recommended by Basho and described by Keats. And in these books, that frame of mind is the precondition for making use of devices that give Will and Lyra access to two capacities: the capacity to discern the truth and the capacity to move between worlds. It's the frame of mind, in other words, necessary for knowledge and freedom. And in this trilogy knowledge and freedom are what make humans human. It is the combination of innocence and experience - William Blake called it "organized innocence" - that make us what we truly can be. At the center of the story of course is that what we have for thousands of years been calling a lapse - the moment when Adam and Eve discover knowledge, freedom, and also love - is in fact the highest attainment possible for our kind.
This is what I think the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was talking about when he wrote, in a passage that has stood for me as an inspiring guiding light for my own work as a writer who writes sometimes about other writers: "my ideal, when I write about an author, would be to write nothing tht could cause him sadness, or he is dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he knew how to give and invent." This is how I have tried to think of Yi Saek, by going to Yi Saek as Basho went to the pine, with a ready combination of innocence and experience. Yi Saek has given me friendship, and knowledge and freedom, and love. And here is what I'd like to give back:
March Sijo
- for Claire
(After Yi Saek, 1328-1395)
White snow slow melts flows and rests
by the Huron where cloud slow flows.
So happy to see tulips
burst green from earth. Where tulips burst?
In twilight alone standing still
to go some where not knowing.
