Review from Paul Hartal
星期日 四月 06, 2008 3:18 pm
Dear Anna,
Your Mirror poem is a short but pensive and poignant collage. It is also an intriguing opus about shared solitude and suffering. However, it reveals less than it hides. Mirror poems are miraculous portals of the poet's identity, of self and soul. They also represent an entire genre in themselves.
Now, before I go further, let me point out that as far as I am concerned, I do not trust mirrors. They are hopelessly incorrigible liars. They shrink you, enlarge you, and distort you. They reverse your reflection from right to left. Just show a written page to the mirror, and you immediately see what I mean. Besides, no two mirrors are the same; regardless whether they are concave or convex, or ordinary flat surface mirrors. They are all different. And they always contradict you. For example, if you point your finger horizontally toward the north, perpendicular to its plane, the mirror will point to the south.
Actually, what we see in the mirror is not an exact reflection but an image modified by our perception of ourselves. We project our thoughts and feelings on mirrors. People with eating disorders, for example, tend to see their reflected image in the mirror fat, even if they are slim. Due to the intense fear of becoming obese, they perceive themselves overweight in spite of being emaciated. The vast majority of anorexic-bulimic persons are young women from middle and upper class families. They are victims of a cruel society obsessed with debased views of youth and sadistic contempt of aging, immersed in a sick culture that does not respect women and dehumanizes womanhood.
Culture is complex, of course, but in this Machiavellian environment also a cunning conspiracy exists between the entertainment industry and the fashion establishment, between promoters of diet fads, pharmaceutical corporations and medical clinics who unscrupulously brainwash people that something is wrong with their appearance. Thousands of plastic surgeons perform every year millions of liposuctions, face lifts, nose jobs, breast augmentations and other operations. Most of their patients are women, who stand more and more time in front of their slyly concurring mirrors.
But let us go back to poetry. Generally speaking, a poem does not attempt to exhaust its topic. In the particular case of your Mirror, perhaps we even might ask: Is less more? What I mean is this: How does the poem gain weight by connecting your own reflections with the tragedy of Plath and Atwood's fascination with mirrors?
I am not calling here for changing the verse, because I believe in the author's authority (please, see page 51 in my collection of Postmodern Light), regarding the correspondence between intention and expression. Revisions are double edged swords: sometimes they improve the piece, sometimes they weaken it.
Western art, including poetry and literature, is obsessed with a confused postmodern perspective of meaninglessness, nihilism, despair, malice and venom, eventuating in the the culture of drugs and death.
Personally, I am attracted more to your poems than to those of Plath, Atwood and many other North-American writers. Why? Because your gracefully sensitive voice, your mystical Taoist outlook on the world, intertwined with Confucian wisdom, bring a flowering high noon antidote to western decadence.
It is good to grow and evolve, but does every direction of change benefit us all the same? I do not subscribe to the credo of cultural relativism, which ironically concludes that all societies and cultures are equal. Cannibalism still exists in some parts of the world. The West had practiced slavery, witch burning, and its modern dictators murdered countless millions of people. India is a remarkable ancient civilization but it has had a tradition of burning widows. And before the East became red, many Chinese parents deformed their daughters' feet in order to increase their wedding marketability by means of a bizarre sex appeal. In brief, cultures and societies are not equal.
Canada is a fascinating mosaic of provinces and communities, a relatively young country, which became a confederation only in 1867. It is a sterling parliamentary democracy with a high quality of life. But when it comes to culture—to paraphrase the lament of a critic from The Montreal Gazette -- Canada is a land of whisky and hockey, rather than a country of art and poetry.
On the other hand, you come from a marvelous ancient land with a grand poetic heritage. China is a country with at least 5,000 years of continuous civilization, fabulously rich in art, refined and sophisticated in culture. In the Shi Jing, or Book of Odes, there are poems that are probably older than Homer’s Odyssey. And in contrast to the antagonistic individualism and competitive conflicts that characterize life in Canada, the Chinese people are known for their spirit of team cooperation, aspiration for social concordance and collective harmony.
You carry within you a pristine magical world, a spiritual extension of the Great Wall as a majestic symbol spanning continents, bridging past, present and future:
Upon my heart, the Great Wall
is an eternal home,
crossing over the Pacific Ocean.
My offspring will follow its beckoning
towards a root-searching return (1).
In order to contrast your poignantly lofty, soul uplifting oeuvre against the voices of existential angst and despair as the hollow backdrop of Canadian literature, I would like to use the example of Margaret Atwood. Although she is a toweringly gifted writer, her main forte lays in the mastery of the language, in the domain of aesthetics, rather than in the power of her arguments, the validity of her message, or the persuasiveness of her vision. Her excessive preoccupation with form and deconstruction obfuscates content and meaning in her work.
The deconstructionist ambiguity of Atwood’s writings is a telltale hallmark of postmodern art. Deconstruction denies the possibility of point to point communication between author and reader. It claims that the meaning and the significance in the writer’s constructed text are always altered through the deconstructing interpretation of the reader. Thus the reader is as much a creator as the author. Consequently, communicating coherent meaning is impossible.
While it is certainly true that communication always involves the possibility of misinterpretation, extreme deconstructionist theory does not really hold water. If effective human communication were impossible, the astonishingly complex operation of landing the astronauts on the moon could not have been accomplished.
My basic criterion for judging the value and significance of art is tied to its life serving function. Atwood herself says that art is not for its own sake, or for the sake of morality, but for “survival’s sake”. She examines human history and discovers its bloody cycles of violent calamities. According to her she wrote the dystopic novels of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake as cautionary tales for our inevitable apocalyptic future of self annihilation through the abuse of science and technology.
Although we have to differentiate between the beliefs of fictional characters in a novel versus the author’s own views, I find Atwood’s vision of history misguided. What is worse, her fundamental message as a visionary writer ironically backfires because of her non sequitur panic and hopelessness. Is it really the destiny of the human race to destroy itself? If there is no hope of survival in the future, why should we struggle at all? To prevent the inevitable apocalypse? I reject not only the depressing vision of a hopeless human future but also the homogenously repulsive climate of her dystopias, which on the whole dehumanize women and demonize men.
In spite of the fact that history is filled with darkness, violent tragedies and wars, it is a story of light, accomplishments and periods of peace as well. I believe that through collaboration, goodwill and harmony among the nations we are capable to avoid a spiraling deterioration of the human condition. Just as humans are capable of waging wars, they are also capable of making peace.
I take it for granted that women have equal rights to men. I also believe that peace on earth cannot be achieved without the elevation of women. However, human happiness cannot be divided into separate realms of female and male domains. Individual happiness can be achieved only through the collective efforts and collaboration of man and women.
Generally speaking in many respects women appear to be wiser than men. I believe that women have a higher sense of care for others, as well as a higher level of emotional and social intelligence. They really should hold key positions in every field of life in greater numbers.
And this brings me back to Atwood. Reflected in a feminist mirror, her characters are often men portrayed as rapists, predatory aggressors, violent misogynists and evil murderers of women:
The men of the town stalk homeward,
Excited by their show of hate,
Their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
And me wearing it (2).
Her Half-Hanged Mary is inspired by a real event during the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. However, Atwood distorts history by presenting this case as evidence of a war of men against women. She withholds the fact that men and even children became victims of witch hunts; and that women also participated in the persecutions of witches. Her approach to history reminds me Mark Twain’s comment: The truth is a most precious commodity, let’s economize it. So, Atwood’s poem emerges as a well-written propaganda piece advancing feminist agendas. Ironically, it is politically correct but historically false.
Unfortunately, within the context of North-American literature Margaret Atwood has contributed to the postmodern outlook of despair and hopelessness. Her poetic voice also has deepened the discordance between men and women, furthering their alienation. It undermines social harmony.
The truth is a sacred domain of the poet, yet nonetheless poetry is full of lies. This paradoxical Yin-Yang polarity is its necessary attribute because poetry expresses all aspects of existence, earth and sky, matter and mind, reality and dream, cosmos and soul.
I find your mirrors more fascinating than those of Atwood, Plath and other poets of despair. In contrasts to their depressive verses, your poetry moves, inspires and uplifts. You sing about poplars, dandelions and moonlight, memories and dreams, joys and sorrows in a magical voice that transcends the here and now.
Yet the fall cannot stop its footsteps,
And descends into the dark night.
I stand like a beacon.
Light travels to shine on the faraway road.
I won’t believe—
We cannot arrive in spring (3).
And with its sober sadness, the touching melancholic tone of your poem, When I die, celebrates life even in death:
My grave will open its sliding tunnel,
For a butterfly to flutter to the moon,
When lavenders swing in evening primroses,
A wish star shall land in your dream (4).
Your heartfelt words and thoughtful lines transport me from the mundane world to a spiritual cosmos. They create unbounded bridges between finite matter and infinite soul, suspended in the ethereal sphere of the transitory past and the eternal present.
There must be something
Beneath the snow,
When quiescence dominates mountains,
Squirrels clutch pinecones,
And I watch you from a distance (5).
Well, Sweet Anna, at this point I stop.
May you go from strength to strength!
Paul