Here, then, is another story from A Book of Changes. This one was written in Wuhan, a city famous for its heat, back in 2010. I visited the city in the height of summer, and the hours between mid-morning and late afternoon were almost unbearable. I wrote this story one evening after an exceptionally hot day visiting Yellow Crane Tower, a place famous as a refuge for poets. The tower stands on Snake Hill, overlooking the Yangtze river, in a park flanked by busy roads. Rebuilt in the twentieth century, and now more a tourist park than a place of quiet contemplation, the tower nevertheless has a long and distinguished history. It was once visited by Li Bai 李白 (701 – 762) and Cui Hao 崔顥 (c.704 – c.754), both of whom wrote poems here. The tower takes its name from a legend in which, in the distant past, an artist painted a miraculous crane on the wall of Xin’s wine-shop.
I wrote this story in a notebook, sitting on a rickety stool by the side of a highway, eating deep fried tofu covered in fiercely spicy sauce, cooked over a brazier in a black wok.
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The wine-shop owner, Xin, had long gone. Nobody could even remember the taste of his wine. So in the absence of wine, the three old gentlemen drank cold drinks from the refrigerator. It was a hot afternoon, and none of them were used to that coldness, nor to the fizz of carbon dioxide. The sensation was welcome and strange.
The first of them was nameless, and by far the oldest—a man who, in his day, had been skilled with the brush. He painted a crane on the wall of Xin’s wine-shop and then left for who-knows-where. That evening, the crane danced, and the customers came in great number to watch. Thanks to the dancing crane, Xin became rich. His wine-shop flourished for ten years until the artist returned, entered the wine-shop, drank a bowl of wine, stepped into the picture on the wall, mounted the crane and disappeared into the sky.
The second man was called Cui Hao. He sipped upon his sweet drink with a sulky air. Many years before he had written the following lines:
Once a man mounted a yellow crane and flew,
but all that now remains is a yellow crane tower.
The yellow crane, once departed, will not return.
A thousand years of white clouds drift across the void,
the clear river reflects the Hanyang trees,
and parrot island is lush with fragrant grasses.
Dusk: where is the passage to lead me home?
The mist over the surging river brings me only sorrow.
Cui’s look of sulkiness was not so much ill-temper as a kind of poetic anxiety, an anxiety that had been troubling him ever since the moment the artist had showed up earlier that morning. When Cui had first written the line, “The yellow crane, once departed, will not return”, he had felt fairly confident that this line, amongst all his lines, would endure for centuries. But now that the artist had returned, he was not so sure. The perfection of the line was at stake; and whilst poems are not arguments in need of proof or refutation, the reappearance of the artist could only weaken the line. It was a matter of sorrow: if the crane and the artist had not indeed departed, then the sorrow was not sufficiently well-established, and the mood of sorrow was the heart and the marrow of the poem. So Cui had come—taking the ferry to the shore and climbing up Snake Mountain, paying his entrance fee—so he might evaluate the aesthetic implications of the artist’s inconvenient return.
The last of the three old men was called Li Bai. He had once written a poem about the sail of a boat disappearing into the shimmering jade of the horizon.
An old friend heading West
bids farewell at Yellow Crane Tower
in the third month of mist and flowers
and heads down to Yangzhou;
a lonely sail dwindles to a trace
in the jade emptiness,
until all I see is the river
flowing to the horizon.
Being spry and possessed of a flexibility of mind, recognising that sailing boats were no longer practical and that the world had moved on, and being a lover of conversation and company, Li Bai had caught the bus.
Of course, none of these three men should have been there at all, for the simple reason that they were all dead; and although we might know the final stages of the journeys that they took to arrive at the Yellow Crane tower—by crane, by ferry, by bus—it is not clear how they gained permission to leave, for a while, the land of the dead. Here as everywhere else, we must conclude that we do not know very much. But what we do know is that here they were, at the Yellow Crane Tower on a hot afternoon, cashing in on the so-called immortality of poets and artists.
Cui Hao looked around at the view. People everywhere. The tower was not how he remembered it. It was broader, squatter, less well-proportioned. And the city was different, too: many towers in all directions reaching up into the sky.
“I am sure that Li will agree with me,” said Cui, “But when I wrote my poem, I did so believing that true poetry is no longer possible. In speaking of cranes, I was in fact speaking of poems, for what else do poets speak of?”
Li smiled. “I know nothing about poetry,” he said. “I simply write what must be written.”
Cui looked at him with scepticism.
Then Li turned to the artist. “You know about ancient times, whilst we can only speculate. Tell me: is it true that, back then, all men were artists?”
The artist sipped his drink thoughtfully. Then, before the artist had a chance to reply, that a fourth man turned up. His skin was pale, and he was sweating in an unseemly fashion. His overall air was clumsy, lacking in grace; but he was friendly and seemed agreeable by nature. He sat down, and sighed.
“Hot day,” said the artist to the stranger. “You should try a drink.”
“I’ll do that,” the stranger said. He spoke the language poorly, his voice thickly accented. He called for a drink to be brought.
There were now four of them. One living, three dead. Or perhaps one living, two dead, and one so improbable that he may never have lived at all—but all of them equally and incontrovertibly there, sharing each other’s company.
The new arrival shook his head. “I have been trying to write all day, but I cannot. When I look back to the lines of old…” Here he stammered. “Take this example—‘a lonely sail dwindles to a trace in the jade emptiness’…”
Li smiled.
“… or, take this line—‘The mist over the surging river brings me only sorrow…’”
Here Cui nodded gravely.
“—when I think of these lines,” the stranger continued, “I wonder how it is possible to write at all.”
“It is strange that you should raise this question,” Cui told him. “We were just discussing the very same problem.”
“But surely,” sighed the stranger, “back in the day… Well, you know. Sails, and jade emptinesses and islands of fragrant grasses and parrots… But now, as one of our own poets once said, this bird has flown…”
“But it was the same for us,” said Li, indicating to himself and Cui. “We never tasted the wine of Xin’s wine-shop. Only this gentleman here has tasted it,” —here he pointed at the artist, “—but he does not like to say much.”
The artist finished his drink and looked at the other three. “Nonsense!” he said. “If miracles had been as easy in our time, why would anybody even remember that once I painted a crane and it took to the heavens?” Then he lowered his voice, conspiratorially, and said, “Poetry is a calling crane in the shade. It is the chick who hears it.”
The foreigner with the terrible accent thought about this for a while. He thought about how ancient wisdom always has this curious, vaguely phoney flavour: calling cranes, shadows, kings, pavilions, islands, machines, sages… and he wondered if, one thousand years from now, those other cranes, vast structures of steel and air that stood against the horizon, would take on some strange air of poetry and profundity. Then he looked at his watch. Sitting in the hot sun was all very well, but he had work to do. Books do not write themselves.
The stranger took out his camera. “May I take a photograph?” he asked the three elderly men. The men looked puzzled, as if they did not understand the question. So the stranger went ahead anyway. His small, gleaming machine clicked once. Then he took his leave.
When he headed along the road to catch the bus, the foreigner thought—or else he imagined—that he heard the sound of pinions rising up into the sky; but when he looked up, he saw nothing at all other than the sun filtering through the haze of smog and the endless towers of that vast and terrifying city.