mind over matter, matter over mind 207Xi Chuan has named Haizi’s and Luo Yihe’s sudden deaths as part
of the forces that reshaped his worldview and his poetics between the
spring of 1989 and the early 1990s. This is confirmed by their ap-
pearance in «Fourteen Dreams» and by other scenes in «Salute» and
elsewhere in Xi Chuan’s 1990s work. In the passage quoted above
the speaker wards off the reality of Haizi’s death through dream and
poetry, if only momentarily—but to no avail, for the fact of the matter
is that Haizi is dead, and Xi Chuan has publicly reflected on Haizi’s
death more than once. In that sense, «Salute» occupies a transitional
position between Xi Chuan’s first commemorative essay, which was
written soon after Haizi’s death and effectively launched the Haizi
myth, and his demythifying intervention called “Afterword to Death”
some four years later, both reviewed in chapter Three.
Three stanzas down there is a morbid ambiguity in «Fourteen
Dreams»:
I dream of a child [ᄽᄤháizi] falling from a high-rise. Without wings.As noted earlier, the Chinese word meaning ‘child’ resonates in the
name Haizi, and Xi Chuan has related an anecdote of someone play-
ing on their homophony; and the háizi in the tenth stanza dies a violent
death. Finally, there would be no need to assert that this háizi has no
wings unless there exists, somewhere, the outlandish assump tion that
he has wings. They must be the wings of the imagination, or Heine’s
wings of song (Auf Flügeln des Gesanges....), or those said to be confused
with nocturnal writing earlier in «Salute». They fail, however, to make
this háizi transcend gravity or an ordinary human death, whether such
transcendence would take place through poetry or through an extra-
ordinary human death, that is: through suicide.
With hindsight the references to Haizi and Luo Yihe affect the
meaning of remarks on death in the first, second, and sixth poems of
the series. In «Night», the speaker says:
For the soul that cannot sleep, there is no poetry. One needs to stay awake and be
on guard, but in the face of death one cannot ponder.Certainly in a Chinese cultural context, a soul that cannot sleep could
be that of someone who died an untimely death, as Haizi and Luo Yihe
did. After the reality of death has made its way into Xi Chuan’s poetry,
it overrules their identity as poets. They are doomed to wakefulness,