The Moon Pool
drinking to excess. These two lines lead us into the line next to last, which is the actual aim of his over drinking in order to reach the state outside the limits of the human world. As a carrier, the wine just aids him in getting the state of oblivion and becoming one with the astral dust around him, the true diamonds in the sky.
"Then, setting off from the booze
Straight into a long voyage of oblivion
This line indicates that the aim has at last been achieved and the poet is soaring above all the worldly conventions. We don’t know what may have been in that realm but it seems that the space in this poem goes beyond the bounds of human imagination. If the ordinary people think of the categories within the terms of "wan-wu" or ten thousand things to be generically called "the myriad things," in another poem entitled "Difficulties on the Way to the state of Shu" Li Bai operates with the number of forty-eight thousand years, getting in the eyes of commoners the status of "Immortal Banished from Heaven," or more simply, an extraterrestrial. This is how people estimate his poetic works and extraordinary behaviour. But why did they call him like this? Is it just an exaggeration or objective reaction on a real phenomenon? Suppose that Li Bai was immortal or an alien and people happened to guess his identity. His way of thinking, which people are not accustomed to, can be accepted by only other aliens, as this seems more in line with the scale of the cosmic time system. Therefore, his subliminal is now directed at the heavens and heavenly bodies of Galaxy as indicated by the last line, which runs like this:
"We make an appointment far away,
Drifting downstream along the Milky Way.”
Li Bai is reaching the state which allows him to simply observe life from the height of immensity, becoming one with the stars of Galaxy, the equivalent of what is known as "wuji" or the Absolute. Finally, the last line proves that he has gotten there deliberately to become united with the fathomless universe around him. He visualizes his drifting downstream along the starry Milky Way; he simply follows Heaven's way of his own accord to make the final line essential in understanding his Daoist views. What the Daoist views in principle are? In so many words, they reduce to the notion of running one's affairs along with the ways of Dao, the process of daily decreasing one's ambitions for the sake of naturalness and effortlessness; hence many effective activities and good productions that the adepts of Daoism implement in life. Everyone's goal is to be one with Earth, not fight against its elements, running one's affairs within Heaven's will.
Translating the works of Chinese poets of olden times, we can better understand the history of cultural development in general. What may seem a light and not so sufficient before, now becomes important for correct perceiving a foreign cultural heritage and understanding the evolution of traditional values. Historically, this piece of Li Bai's poetry is considered to be an important literary achievement. It is obvious that his secret is concealed behind his strong sense of himself as a part of the poetic tradition. The genius of Li Bai, says one recent account, "lies at once in his total command of the literary tradition and his ingenuity in bending it, without a break, to discover a uniquely personal idiomatic form of his realization."
Scholar B. Watson, comparing him to Du Fu, says that Li Bai's poetry "is essentially backward-looking, that it represents more a revival and fulfilment of past promises and glory than a foray into the future." This is, actually, what has formed the way of Chinese mentality in general.
For the modern readers in the West, hopefully, the poem “Drinking Alone under the Moon” can now be available for some deeper understanding of its spiritual content.
Another famously known verse of Li Bai is entitled "A Quiet Night Thoughts" (jing ye si). In a mere five-character-a-line quatrain the poet uses the vivid moonlight and the frost imagery to convey the feeling of life transiency. There are several editions of this short verse; the present one is translated from the 17th-century Kangxi's edition and goes like this:
靜夜思 (A Quiet Night Thoughts)
床前明月光，The moonbeam lies in front of my seat;
疑是地上霜。I doubt it can thaw the frosted ground before the dawn.
舉頭望明月，Holding up, I look into the cool moon hung over my head;
低頭思故鄉。With head bowed, I deep in thoughts of my remote kinsmen.
A Quiet Night Thoughts
The moonbeam lies
In front of my seat;
I doubt it can thaw
The frosted ground
Before the dawn.
Holding up, I look
Into the cool moon
Hung over my head;
With head bowed,
I deep in thoughts of
My remote kinsmen.
With regard to the poet's marriage, in 730 he wrote to his friend: “The land of Chu has seven swamps. I went to look at them. But at His Excellency Xü’s house, I was offered the hand of his granddaughter and lingered there during the frosts of three autumns.” He then seems to have abandoned Miss Xü, who was impatient at his lack of promotion. He afterwards married successively Miss Lin, Miss Lu, and Miss Song. These were, of course, wives, not concubines. We are told that he was fond of “going about with the dancing-girls of Zhaoyang and Jinling.” He had one son who died in 797.
Besides, there is some deeper meaning in this very much popular piece of his poetry translated here. The poet liked to regard himself as belonging to the imperial family and, most probably, not without good reasoning.
As we know from the "New History of Tang" completed in the 11th century, Li Bai was descended in the ninth generation from Emperor Xing-sheng. Since one of his ancestors was charged with a crime at the end of the Sui dynasty (581-618 CE), he took refuge in Turkestan, a region of Central Asia. Two accounts made by contemporaries Li Yang Bing (the Li family member) and Fan Chuan Zheng state that Li Bai's family was originally from what is now the south-eastern region of Gansu. Li Bai's ancestry is traditionally traced back to Li Gao, the noble founder of the state of Western Liang (502-557). This provides some support for Li Bai's own claim to be related to the Li dynastic royal family of the Tang dynasty, as the Tang emperors also claimed descent from the Li rulers of Western Liang. Evidence suggests that during the Sui dynasty, Li Bai's ancestors (at that time for some reason classified socially as 'commoners') were forced into a form of exile from their original place to some location(s) further westward. During their exile in the far west, the Li family lived in the ancient Silk Road town of Suiye (Suyab, now an archaeological site in present-day Kyrgyzstan, and perhaps also in Tiaozhi, a state centred near modern Ghazni, Afghanistan. These areas lied on the ancient Silk Road traffic, and the Li family were likely merchants; their trade was quite prosperous.
Critic James Liu notes that Chinese poets seem to be perpetually bewailing their exile and longing to return home town. This may seem sentimental to the western readers, but one should remember the vastness of China, the difficulties of communication in the remote past. The sharp contrast between the highly cultured life in the capital cities and the harsh conditions in the distant regions was aggravated by the importance of family relationship; so, it is hardly surprising that nostalgia and, what's more, filial piety should have become permanent and hence conventional themes in Chinese poetry.
The last point to which I shall refer is the extreme allusiveness of this poem. This characteristic (which is very common to most Chinese poetry of old) is carried to an extremity in Li Bai's fifty-nine old style poems (gu-feng). Not only do they bristle with the names of historical personages, but almost every phrase is borrowed from the Classics, in which the poet was well-versed from childhood. Yes, Li Bai is very good at the so-called 'traditional education'; however, none of the modern readers could understand them without pages of commentaries to each of them. Chinese poetry, with a few exceptions, has been written on this principle of 'backward-looking' since the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). One Tang poet alone, Bo Jü Yi (772-846), broke through the restraints of pedantr
y, erasing every expression that his manservant could not understand. Translators have naturally avoided the most allusive poems and have omitted or generalized such allusions as occurred. They have frequently failed to recognize allusions as such and have mistranslated them accordingly, often turning private names into romantic sentiments and suchlike.
In the sense, there is even deeper meaning in this short verse. In the broken bottom line of the Zhou Yi's hexagram "Kun" (2), we see its subject "treading on frost in the late autumn; the strong ice will come soon, by and by, where he sets foot on as the cold breath of Yin begins to take its form. Allowing his course to go on smoothly, according to his preconceived plan, and the frost (symbol of a plan termed 'sheng' 生) will come to be strong ice (implementation termed 'cheng' 成), so he has to be timely prepared."
In the "Wen-yan" commentary to Kun (2), we read: "The family that accumulates goodness is sure to have superabundant happiness; and the family that accumulates evil is sure to have superabundant misery. The murder of a ruler by his minister, or of a father by his son, is not the result of the events of one morning or one evening -- the causes of it have gradually accumulated through the absence of early discrimination. Therefore, the first saying of Kun (2) in the "Circular Changes" goes like