234 t He tang Dy na s t y
Phoenix, phoenix, how has virtue failed!
The future you cannot wait for; the past you cannot pursue.
When the world has the Way, the sage succeeds;
When the world is without the Way, the sage survives.. .16The madman’s act of mocking the Sage for his idealistic efforts to restore the Way
in a declining age would have been well known to Li Bai’s readers. For those famil-
iar with the poet’s occasional assertions of his position as the savior-poet, here to
restore poetic writing to its long-lost golden days—not to mention his own ambi-
tions to serve in the court—the irony of this declaration might be so strong as to
inspire them to laugh out loud.
But it is unlikely that he was engaging in self-mockery in this poem, and, even
if he were, the opening couplet offers much more; layers of meaning adhere to the
first two characters, wo ben (literally, I-original). The mere presence of the pronoun
“I” in the first position of line 1 of any poem, even of the ancient style, while not
unheard of, is a bit startling. Had this been a yuefu, in which first-person speech
uttered by a particular character is frequent, this would not necessarily be espe-
cially significant. Here, in a lyric poem, it makes a point of the poet’s spontaneity,
his lack of inhibition in directly addressing his readers and confronting them with
his existence, not as a cool, detached contemplator but as an actor in his (and our)
own world. He proclaims himself an actor, not merely in the sense of an agent, an
independent subject acting in the world. It seems that his freedom to act includes
the possibility of assuming roles, of changing his costume before the eyes of his
audience. What is interesting, though, is that he draws his readers’ attention not
just to the legendary figure of the madman, but also to their shared acquaintance,
as readers of history, with his story; the pleasure of partaking of shared allusions
is part of the function of the second word, ben.
Ben means “at the root,” hence “originally” or “inherently.” But there are at least
three valid, if slightly overlapping, ways to read it in this context. First, the line
might read as Li Bai’s explanation of who he is at heart, as in “I descend from the
madman of Chu.” Second, with a slight shift of nuance, ben can suggest change
from a former state: “I was, originally, the madman of Chu.” And finally, a slightly
different reading, in which ben connotes the essence of something and thus yields
something like “I am, at heart, the madman of Chu!”
No single one of these is really adequate to the sense intended here, but a con-
sideration of their conjoined range of meaning is. Together, these readings of ben
suggest that we have just witnessed a revelation of the true, fundamental identity
of the poet behind the mask. But, interestingly, and in his typically playful fashion,
Li Bai executes this revelation not by removing a mask but by putting one on—as
though the “I” that is Li Bai is somehow false, and the madman constitutes his true
essence. The subtle ambiguity between the two interpretations conflates—or even
confounds—the pedestrian distinctions between past and present, replacing those
distinctions with the promise of mutability.