A Letter from Li Po

Conrad Aiken's genius is far too great to be completely unearthed here, but I'll mention some highlights.

I read this poem a few years ago, and just rediscoverd a note I made at the top of the page: This kind of poetry doesn't just happen, it says. The man was a slave to the English language.

The poem begins,

Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
anounces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.

This is a delicate, almost elusive way of expressing that stretching of days to the breaking point which occurs at the height of summer. Like Annie Dillard's "hundred hollow and receding blues" it touches--even challenges--the temporal nature of the sea. Li Po communicates by stringing letters down generations, from his children's children all the way down to us. The "light" he possesses is of unknown origin, but though it may be "a slant of witch-light" on silk, when it hits the page, it becomes "a slant of genius." Light enables vision, and on the text promotes reading. Yet, this powerful melding of light and text seems to signify something more--even something incarnational. It marks words with greater significance; and the poet's words, thus strung, are evidence of this strange fact.

Who is this Li Po? A wine-loving Chinese Poet in the habit of considering time's passage.

Aiken expresses that time exists in a place "such as imagination dreams of thought." This is how we see things, isn't it? At least, it's how we see those elusive things that come to mean so much to us: inklings, epiphanies, limits. And it is, perhaps, the only way we can express those thoughts of which our imaginations can only dream: by expressing meaning in images directed at the sub-conscious, perhaps even by-passing the brain's logic.

"Yet to spell down the poem on her page [...] parsing forth the seven-fold prism of meaning [...] is to assume Li Po himself: as he before assumed the poets and sages who were his." This is interesting and powerful. It suggests that Li Po is somewhat like a guardian of all meaning and beauty. It makes him a central point or a prism into whom all meaning is poured and from whom it all later flows. Comparison to Christ seems inevitable, too, especially in light of the poet's subsequent claim that like Li Po, "we too have eaten of the word." Li Po's burden is that of the universal poet: to become master of all beauty hitherto expressed and somehow to reflect it all through her own (hitherto unexpressed) uniqueness, through her own singularity.

Here, constrained by (or in) the bottleneck of Time, we as lovers of literature must seek something divine in all this--and Aiken helps us when he declares, "all is text, is holy text." It passes into poet after poet...

Gertrude Stein's work is memorable, and gives off a similar vibe: text into text, text out of text... But Aiken hides meaning "individually" in every single line--and we find it. Whereas, with Stein meaning is a general impression we have of the text. Yet both make literature an event worth attending because we know that these writers will probe the questions worth asking. They are like the calligrapher Chang Hsu who "needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning," and on whose scroll "wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, [till] the sky opened upon Forever." For in this ephemeral span between birth and death, how can we be compelled to act without being moved? How can we endure our days without the kind of inspiration we can get only from those "intimations of immortality" that remind us of Elsewhere, which seems so much more our home than here?

Who knows but one day we shall find,
hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,
the square root of the eccentric absolute,
and the concentric absolute to come.