Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Sinica Leidensia, 86)

mind over matter, matter over mind 209

How will the ghosts appear? Unless hats can be transformed into hat ghosts and

clothes be transformed into clothes ghosts, flesh-turned-ghost must be naked, but

the appearance of naked ghosts is not in keeping with our current morality.

In the penultimate stanza, the speaker again sets himself apart from
other living human beings, and affirms his affinity with the ghosts of
the dead in a playful encounter with them:

In the dark, someone reaches out a finger and taps me on the nose.

To return to my reading of «Salute» as poetry about poetry: the poem
suggests that poetry is powerless in the face of death, although more
negotiable aspects of reality will leave it in peace. Whereas examples
of this type of indeterminacy—not poetry or reality, but poetry and
reality—are scattered across the series, poetry does remain exempt
from many rules of daytime life, accepting a socially “marginal” status
in return. In «Night» for instance, the youth singing to his heart’s con-
tent doesn’t do so for a paying audience but in the basement, unseen
and unheard. In «Salute», this statement:

Illusions depend on capital for their preservation

may first appear to forge an unexpected bond between dreams and
money, but it is followed in the same poem by the instrumental pas-
sage on the mountain dweller who calls the capacity to feel a criterion
for authenticity. According to this authority the realm of poetry is real,
not its unfeeling counterpart. In other words, illusions are associated
with material wealth. Incompati bility of material wealth with emo-
tional and spiritual wealth, hammered home by the critics quoted ear-
lier, also comes to mind when in «Maxims» the speaker admonishes a
general audience:^22

don’t sleep with your wife in your arms while dreaming of high profits; don’t light

lamps during the day, don’t do business with the night.

Finally, the opposition of poetry and the truths of daytime life finds
good-humored, ironic and equivocal expression in this scene from
«Winter», the last poem in the series:

(^22) The last phrase of this passage (don’t do any business with the night) occurs in Wan
Xia & Xiaoxiao 1993 and is among Xi Chuan’s corrections to the text in The Nine-
ties.