182 chapter four
the book lies open on the table
rustling, just like
the sound that fire makes«Notes» has the familiar elements of distance between the I and a
world out there, on the street, and the speaker’s proximity to (written)
language in the book. The first four lines of the final stanza also consti-
tute a declarative moment of the type encountered above:
One who paints fruit on the earth
is doomed to go hungry
one who dwells among friends
is doomed to be lonely
tree roots show, outside of life and death
what the rain washes away
is the soil, is the grass
is the sound of lamentJust as in «Spite», however, the declaration of alienation—in this case
of difference, rather than distance or absence—is embedded in the
poem’s body, not attached as a conclusion. This softens the effect of
closure.
We started from declarations of exile in Bei Dao’s later poems.
Bearing in mind distinctions of physical and inner exile and some criti-
cal junctures in the poet’s biography, we then moved back in time to
related textual moments in his earlier work. In so doing, we have situ-
ated his literary expression of exile within a larger thematic of alien-
ation that is already present in the 1980s. To conclude, let’s return to
Bei Dao’s later work for a discussion of two poems that also feature this
thematic. Crucially, however, they do so in suggestive, not declara-
tive, fashion. «Whet the Knife» (ߔ⺼) was written late in 1989 or in
1990:^81
«Whet the Knife»
By the glimmer of dawn, I whet the knife
and find that its back grows ever thinner
and its edge remains dull
as sunlight flashes(^81) Bei Dao 1991: 46 and 2003: 111. The table of contents in Bei Dao 1995 con-
firms this estimation of the date of composition.