The tag line for this blog comes from a Chinese poem by Ts’en Shen called the Fisherman written sometime in the 8th centry CE. The poem in a translation by C.H. Wang reads:
The boatman of Tsang-lang is quite old,
But his heart is as clean as flowing water.
He never talks about where he lives,
And nobody knows exactly what his name is.
At dawn he cooks on the riverbank;
Nightfalls, he glides into the rushes and sleeps.
He sings, too, one song after another,
And he holds in hand a bamboo pole:
The line at the end of the fishing pole
Is more than ten feet long.
He row and rows, following where the river goes,
And he doesn’t have a permanent abode.
How can anyone in the world imagine
What the old man really thinks?
The old man looks for what he himself thinks fit
And he never cares about the fish.
I read this poem as a young man and dog-eared the page in the book, and re-read it in Sunflower Splendor many times over the years. Now, in my late-60s moving closer to retirement, I read it with a sense of the insistent cataloging of active old age the poet observes. Ts’en Shen – that poet who spent his life as an official but recognized the value of standing aside, of observing, of being busy with other matters – wishes what he might have been, I think.
east of the fog 