Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry

Notes

Notes Prologue: Transformations of a Transpacific Imaginary 1. Barnstone, “The Poem behind the Poem,” 3. 2. Ibid., 4–5 (italics mine). 3. Ibid., 4. See also Geoff Waters’s insightful essay, “Some Notes on Translating Classical Chinese Poetry,” in the on-line publication Cipher Journal. Waters writes: “Liu wrote this poem after he was demoted in 815 to a minor post in the far southern town of Liuzhou, where he died a few years later. Liu’s career had been in ruins since September 805, when the Shunzong Emperor abdicated suddenly after only six months on the throne. Shunzong had appointed the reformer Wang Shuwen to be Grand Councilor, temporarily ousting Wu Yuanheng and his powerful party. Wang, in turn, appointed a number of idealistic younger scholars to senior positions in his government, including Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi. When Shunzong was forced out, Wang Shuwen fell and Liu Zongyuan’s official career was effectively over. I see in this poem, beneath the striking visual, an ironic self-commentary: Liu was growing old, banished, alone, and wasting his talent far from Court, in a deep southern backwater town where snow never fell.” 4. Yeh, “The Chinese Poem.” 5. Lucas Klein offers a provocative reading of Liu’s use of a technique called aojue 抝絕, which Klein defines as “roughly equivalent to either feminine rhymes or off-rhymes in English. Rhyming on three ‘entering’ tones—as they were called—the rusheng 入聲 no longer a part of standard Chinese, this poem cross-cuts against the grain of expected Tang poetry versification, leaning as it does on the clipped notes of dzhiuεt, miεt, and siuεt. The effect, no longer attainable without special training, would have been jarring to poetry readers of the day, signaling an undercurrent of disquiet beneath the otherwise tranquil scene of the poem” (see Klein, “Liu Zongyuan & Fishing in the Snow of Translation”). This reading suggests that Liu was not simply offering a scene of Buddho-Daoist “emptiness” in the abstract. 200 / notes 6. Yeh, “The Chinese Poem,” 251. 7. I will discuss this point further in Chapter 4. 8. Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 33. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 3. 11. Ibid., 4. For Greenblatt’s full argument, see his Marvelous Possessions, 99. 12. See Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. 13. Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” quoted in Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 17. 14. Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 17. 15. Ibid., 18. 16. Zong-qi Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 249–50. 17. Ibid., 250. Introduction: The Poetics of Emptiness, or a Cult of Nothingness 1. Droit, The Cult of Nothingness, 9. 2. Loy, Nonduality. 3. See Loy, A Buddhist History of the West, for an interesting expansion of this idea. 4. This is not to say that “nothingness” is uniformly a binary construct in the West. In the final chapter of Ron Schliefer’s book, Intangible Materialism, for instance, he offers a Peircean semiotic reading of such “nothingness” in relation to pain that replaces binarity with a Peircean triad: sensuousness (experience without “meaning” and hence “empty”); reference (indexicality); and meaning. The book also spends some time following the semiotics of “zero” (which I discuss in the following paragraph) as something more than “simply” nothing. 5. Hugo, Les misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, chap. 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/135. 6. A good example of the equation of evil to nothingness can be found in the writing of St. Augustine in particular (see Williams, “Insubstantial Evil”). There are instances in Western literature and negative theology where the opposite is posited, as in, for example, Yeats’s short story “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God.” See also Jin Y. Park’s discussion of “nothingness” in the philosophy of Heidegger in “The Logic of Nothing and A-Metaphysics.” 7. Heidegger wrote the “Letter on Humanism” in November, 1946, about three months after he cooperatively translated the Daodejing with the Chinese scholar, Paul Shih-yi Hsiao. See Paul Shih-yi Hsiao’s essay “Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao Te Ching,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987, 93–104. 8. See Derrida’s early essay on Bataille and Hegel, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” 9. It is important to note that this poem’s lamentation of the lost center offers a different pathos than much...