On Chinese Complexity
The Chinese mind understood turbulence:
It was the dragon, glimpsed in clouds and storms,
In viscous currents of clear mountain streams,
In fertile paddies that the great sun warms;
In passionate emotions, flames, and flowers,
In rushings-up of smoke, in fetal growing,
In all the shiftings that make up the hours,
In all that's turning backwards in its going.
The melting limestone caves and bamboo groves,
The whirlpools and the green mists of the Li,
Embody those strange twistings China loves,
Present what China knows itself to be--
The making-out-of-nothing of the Tao,
The yin and yang's incoiling symmetry,
The past and future tangled in the now,
The bright and protean energy of chi.
But all that winding Chinese indirection,
That balancing along the zigzag way,
The self-recursive clouds of Chinese reason,
The victories by patience and delay,
Bred huge injustice, eddies of corruption,
Accumulations of excessive privilege,
The wealth of the Humble Administrator,
The starving peasants in their peonage.
And Sun Yat Sen and Mao cut it asunder,
Made straight the way and cruelly simplified:
All the old weavings, veilings, knots and patterns
Were ripped apart, the growing things all died;
And heavy industry tore up the meadows,
A million fishes flapped upon the shore,
The ancient crafts were crushed or vulgarized,
And farmers died amid the furnace-roar.
The Dragon Lady Empress adored pearls,
Drank powdered jewels ground from fishers' lives;
She groomed her dogs with pearl-cream and ignored
The poor man ruined by a thousand dives;
After her death, the Kuomintang broke open
The splendid coffin and exposed her face.
A milky gleam showed in her lifeless visage,
They smashed the teeth--heedless of the disgrace--
And there within her mouth a giant pearl
Great as a hen's egg, whitely glowing, lay.
Song Mei Lin wore it to a White House dinner;
It's not been seen since to this very day.
Frederick Turner
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