2025 Miranda rights

Be advised that your tattoos may be used against you in a court of law.

The Life of Tu Fu

Eliot Weinberger, poet, translator and essayist, wrote this book during the pandemic. In a note at the end of the book, Weinberger points out that these are not the words of Tu Fu translated. Rather in these short entries—part prose, part poetry—Weinberger has taken on the persona of the ancient Chinese poet and employs many of the themes that arose in Tu Fu’s writings: poverty, aging, hard times, war, governance, etc. Also, Weinberger via Tu Fu speaks about poetics and the life of a poet. Here is a selection from the book:

They only talk about the plum blossoms and never notice
the new shoots of a willow.
-
They say that at the entrance to a house one can always
be hit by a falling roof tile.
-
Too poor for a horse, at least I have feet.
-
I thought of Wang Hsien-chi. When thieves broke into
his house, he asked them not to take his old green rug.
-
She knows he won’t come back from the army, but
patches the clothes he left just in case.
-
I lift my face to watch the birds.
I turn my head, thinking someone has called me.
-
Rebels ride the horses of ghosts.
Why do they always burn things down?
-
A hut with a single widow made from the broken rim
of a large pot.
-
Friends with good jobs have stopped writing.
-
A single petal falling means less spring.
A kingfisher’s nest, a dragonfly’s wing:
Study closely the patterns of things.
-
Live like a wren, unnoticed on a high branch, and you’ll
stay alive.
-
I thought of the philosopher Yang Chu, who always wept
when he came to a fork in the road.
-
Plants with thorns only seem to grow where people walk.
-
I dread that I’ll die by the side of the road, and only be
remembered for that.
-
Why do stupidities become customs?
-
Parrots are more intelligent than people: they know
they’re living in a cage.
-
They say failure in early life will bring success at the end,
but birds know when they’re tired of flying,
and clouds have no will of their own.
-
I scratch my head and knock out a hairpin,
more concerned with medicines than poetry.
-
I thought of how, in Han times, poems often began: “A
single cloud in the northwest.”
-
These days the poets sit on a log and wait for a fish.
-
I write poems about what I see, for things pass so quickly.
-
They say that a chicken has five virtues: civil talents,
military talents, courage, moral rectitude, and fidelity.
-
They say that when a master archer shoots, his prey
drops at the twang of the bowstring.
-
I write about what is happening:
I record the dawns and sunsets.
-
If it is not painted perfectly, a tiger will look like a dog.
-
I thought of the master calligrapher Wang His-chih, who
wrote out the whole Tao Te Ching and traded it for a
goose.
-
No time to be lazy:
This morning I combed my hair.
-
There is no path to my cottage, but I’d clear one for you.
-
I was pretty smart when I was seven.
-
Even when my teeth have fallen out, I’ll still have my
tongue.
A carp, flapping in a carriage rut.
-
Drinking now makes me ill, so I’ll just watch you,
a little jealous when you fall over.
-
Why should crickets bring on melancholy?
-
I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kuo P’o, long
dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and
after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
-
I thought of Tsu Yung who, at his examination, wrote a
a poem of only four lines. Questioned by the examiner, he
replied: “That was all I had to say.”

Eliot Weinberger, The Life of Tu Fu (New Directions, 2024)

[Note: Some entries are written as prose without intentional line breaks, but other entries seem to have clear line breaks. Therefore I’ve tried to preserve the formatting of the book.]

aged out

Being a grandparent is no job for old people.

you can call me Al

Sans serif mistaken identity: “You’re AI?” “No, I’m Al.”

money for nothing

Yet another non-profit do-nothing org.

past anything so dire

Of an attained age that makes suicide beside the point.

last word

So much smarter than you that I don’t need the last word.

try to keep up

In my business life I did a lot of drinking after hours. Now retired, I still try to keep up.

every road

Every road is a runway if you’re going fast enough and still have some lift at the end of it.

elective treatment

The day after the election I asked my doctor to put me in a medically-induced coma for the next four years.

Miscellaneous Notes of Li Shangyin

Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions, 2014, Poetry Pamphlet #14) by Li Shangyin, translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts

Li Shangyin (813-859) was a poet and a minor government official. He had trouble passing the examinations to become a minister, and his career was marked by short-term posts and varied employment. In the Translator’s Note we are told that his was a “lifetime of frustrations and thwarted ambitions,” and so perhaps it’s not surprising that after his wife died he dedicated himself to the practice of Buddhism. Lin Shangyin lived only into his mid-forties.

Li Shangyin’s Za Zuan (Miscellaneous Notes) are not typical of his poetry, which by the time of the Song dynasty was highly regarded and anthologized, according to the translator, Chloe Garcia Roberts. She refers to the Notes as “lyrical lists” that when taken together become a vivid, if fragmentary, account of the poet’s life and times.

Flipping through the book the pieces appear to be poems, with the typical layout of a title followed by a number of lines. But they’re not poems per se. The pieces of this book all have a title which serves as a ‘category’ for the list of aphoristic statements and observations that follows. The statements and observations could be described as ‘examples’ of the category (title) of the piece. The formal structure of the pieces in this book intrigues me, while many of the individual aphoristic lines fall flat. Some of the statements are too mundane or commonplace to be worthy of comment. Notice the first and last lines of this piece:

     Displeasure

     Cutting something with a dull knife
     Plying the wind with a ragged sail
     Trees darkening the view
     Building a wall that hides the mountains
     Flowering season: no music
     A high-summer banquet held away from the breeze
     Mincemeat: no vinegar
     Summer months wearing thick clothing

The pieces do convey the mores and manners of Li Shangyin’s times. By reading these pieces one is made aware of the meals and rituals, the dos-n-don’ts of marriages, rules for running households and business affairs, familial order, the clear divisions of class and rank, and thus one is given a lens into the workings of Chinese society. Remembering that Li Shangyin lived in the ninth century, and thus it can be hard to hear remarks about dealings with slave girls, concubines, and servants: “To say a prostitute feels love,” under the title, “Misleading Statements.”

Here's a selection of some of the better lines with the titles they fall under:

“Contradictions”

     A butcher reciting Buddhist scripture

“Inevitable”

     Being treated like a transient visitor in a poor temple

“Bitterly Poor: Scenes”

     Folk music played on a single-stick drum

“Instances of Waste”

     A eunuch with a beautiful wife

      […]

     A magnificent dining hall not used for banquets

“Cannot Abide”

     Rain dripping into a boat

“Oblivious”

     To be a visitor and call yourself a guest

“Certain Poverty”

     To be excessively clever at many things

“Wise and Able”

     When drunk, speaks little

“Unlucky”

     Singing songs and melodies while lying in bed

Some of the lines strike me as funny, though I’m certain they weren’t meant to be taken that way:

“Judgment Lapses”

      Going out to welcome guests in your undergarments

      [...]

     At a banquet, being careless with your snot and saliva

      [...]

     Being the first to lay down chopsticks, while everyone is still eating

One imagines an endless banquet where all the guests are down to a few bits of rice, and all are looking out of the corners of their eyes around the table, trying to see who will be first to put down their chopsticks.

better than perfect

Of course it’s not perfect—it’s better than that—it’s human.

right by chance

At any given time, some investor will be lucky enough to predict the drop or the run-up, and being right by chance will claim market omniscience.

what remained

He was a broken man but what pieces remained stacked up pretty well.

mafia thing

The person you want to kill for will be the first to kill you.

no need

Against gadgets.

lifespan

You lived longer than I did but I lived longer than you.

not compliant

Your complaint is being returned because it was not submitted in a compliant format.

no takers

It’s sad when even the robots don’t want your job.

war is us

The nearly unbearable realization that being at war is who we are as humans.

art before nature

They were painting the seashore even as it was receding under them.

spring outerwear

It was that time in spring when the optimists donned light jackets while pessimists refused to put away their down.

one and the same

The patriarchy is religion.

to a better place

He wondered if he could enter hospice care without a terminal illness, and how long before they'd notice he hadn’t died.

future perfect

We improve by moving morally ahead, and by avoiding the retrospective trap of trying to correct the past.

wisdom is

Wisdom is the habit of saying, “I think…” rather than stating, “I know…”

easy prey

It’s the compassionate and humane ones that are often fallen on by predatory woke-cancel mad dogs. The real prey is too hard for them to take down.

unable to solve

Each of us is an insoluble equation primarily because there was one or more errors in writing down its terms.

clearer present danger

We worry about AI’s dangers while we still have nuclear weapons in the world.

two kinds of edge

Impossible to tell from this distance whether it’s the horizon or the edge of an abyss—we’ll have to get closer as fate requires.

escape species

According to capitalism, he would be classified as an ‘escape species’.

dancing just the same

Standing in one place without moving for a long time is also dancing.

go round

Life may not have meaning but let's go round just the same and see what happens.

small talk only

At a certain point, he realized, sadly, that he couldn’t speak at length with most people.

trail to follow

This is the test? I’ll just answer the first ten questions perfectly, and they can figure out the rest.

things are you

Things don’t need to justify their reality and existence. It is only by things that you exist. They define you: by them you are you.

family ties

A king is a dictator with a pedigree.

two or more equals ethics

There is no need for ethics until two people (or more) inhabit the same place.

how things work

Many will see a problem, fewer will be able to describe and adequately explain the problem, fewer still will be able to propose workable solutions, and very few will have the will to act, to effectuate a solution.

literal litter

Litter is a kind of symbolic language, telling one about the life and times of a society. I’ve noticed the new litter features many discarded face masks.