An Objective Evaluation of the Flaws in Mao Zedong's Poetry (Part Three)

In Part Two, I already gave Mao Zedong's poetry a clear positioning. At the level of "seeing mountains as mountains, seeing water as water," all discussions of style, spirit, and resonance are meaningful. However, this young lady does not intend to use such terminology for analysis. Instead, let me use the most ordinary word: "flavor." So-called flavor has tangible forms and intangible forms; some can be savored through chewing, and some cannot be chewed but can only be apprehended spiritually -- the so-called flavor beyond the flavor. Tangible things are easy to discuss; intangible ones are more troublesome. In the past, people liked to use the metaphor of "salt in water" to approach the intangible -- but in this young lady's view, "salt in water" only speaks to the inseparability of a poem's form and its flavor. Yet this inseparability is still crude. According to modern science, they can actually be separated at the molecular level. So this metaphor, which may have been somewhat meaningful in ancient times, is completely pointless now.

Today, let us set aside Mao Zedong's poetry and first look at Li Shangyin's "Tianya" (The Ends of the Earth):

春日在天涯，天涯日又斜。莺啼如有泪，为湿最高花。

A spring day at the ends of the earth, and at the ends of the earth the sun slants toward dusk. Flowers blooming at their highest branch signal their imminent exhaustion, and once they are spent, spring too is spent. The spring day nears dusk; spring itself nears dusk. The warbler's cry evokes both birdsong and weeping, bringing forth tears to moisten the highest flower. Is it spring? Is it a human life? An era? An infinite cycle of rebirth? "As if with tears" -- yet do tears truly exist? Without tears, with tears -- but the spring day is always at the ends of the earth, and the sun at the ends of the earth will always slant away. Frustrated ambition, desolate solitude, the fading of life, the exile at the world's edge, the shattering of ideals, the wounds of existence -- all become superfluous words. The vast cosmos is entirely lost in that tangible-intangible drop of tears. Regardless of who you are, you are always in this moment of "the warbler cries as if with tears, to moisten the highest flower." At this moment, this existence encompasses the six directions -- it is simply that ordinary people cannot experience it, cannot express it. And Li Shangyin's twenty characters cover heaven and earth. How could the mere piling up of grand imagery ever achieve this? The entire universe melts in this single tangible-intangible tear. Here, all commentary is superfluous.

In a certain sense, only when this realm is attained can something be called poetry. True poetry must be in communion with the entire universe -- the most delicate yet the most majestic, all oppositions dissolved within it without losing a single detail. Before this kind of true poetry, all talk of style, manner, spirit, and resonance becomes putting a hat on top of a hat. All talk of history, space-time, and such becomes a joke. All is one, one is all, and yet on what does this "one" stand? All dharmas return to one -- where does the one return? Go contemplate these twenty characters. As the saying goes: words of feeling, words of Chan, a single luminous pearl, neither form nor emptiness -- appearing as it is to whoever comes. This young lady speaks no false words.

I hope the above analysis will help broaden everyone's poetic horizons. To keep poetry stuck at the level of quasi-sexual discharge not only insults poetry but insults oneself. Poetry is Being, Being is poetry -- how could you possibly not dwell poetically?