184 chapter four
sense, can be seen to foreground exile as a specific category of alien-
ation. To this reader, the fact that it does so by suggestion rather than
declaration, less directly than some of the earlier examples, makes it
one of the finest specimens of exile poetry from China.^82
«Borrowing Direction»
A single fish has a life
full of holes
holes in flowing water oh froth
is what I speak
Borrowing direction
the drunk travels through his storied echoes
but the heart is a watchdog
forever facing the lyric core
Music underway
is shattered in an accident
skies cover
our emotional life from the other side
Borrowing direction
birds break out of my sleep for the trek
lightning strikes in everybody’s glass
he that speaks is without guilt«Borrowing Direction» is a poetic reflection on difference, distance
and absence, as component parts of alienation in Bei Dao’s work. In
froth is what I speak, the speaker’s otherness—specifically, his inability
to communicate with others—is foregrounded in the image of inef-
fectual or futile language, just like in the Chinese spoken to the mir-
ror in «Local Accent», and the world and I failing to communicate
through language in «To the world....». As for the poem’s title, twice
repeated, a direction one borrows is not one’s own. It hints at removal
from a locus of origin, and lack of control over one’s destination. Tang
Xiaodu, in an interview with the poet, wonders whether the image
represents an ironic, anti-ideological stand. Bei Dao affirms this by
saying that a direction is temporary, like an assumption, as opposed
to the unequivocal and definitive nature of ideology, which he calls
(^82) Bei Dao 1996: 88, 2003a: 188, 2003b: 239.