I am the grass.
Let me work.
—Carl Sandburg
My Japanese friend turned out to be a travel agent from Tokyo. From her I learned that physical ruins are foreign to the Japanese aesthetic. One obvious reason is that wood, the primary material of its traditional architecture, is naturally much less durable than marble or stone. There is no equivalent of a Tintern Abbey or Temple of Neptune in the countryside of Hokkaido or Honshu. Instead, nestled deep within a forest sanctuary in the Mie prefecture, lies the Ise Shrine, one of the most revered places of the Shinto faith. Its architectural style is characterized by a primitive simplicity, with principles of constructions dating back to the sixth century CE.1 Ritually destroyed and rebuilt every twenty years, the temple looks much as it did one thousand four hundred years ago. Like the ship of Theseus, the Ise Shrine retains its formal identity while its material parts are constantly replaced. Spiritually speaking, this practice of periodic rebuilding, shikinen-zōkan, embraces the Shinto belief in the regeneration of life through ritual renewal.2 The revered shrine continues to live in an ageless present, its alteration through the centuries imperceptible, whereas, as we have seen, there is an abiding part of European culture that wants the past to stay in the past.
Although in the classical Japanese tradition ruins do not linger in the landscape, there actually is a poetics of ruin. Composed toward the end of Bashō’s (1644–94) life, Narrow Road to the Deep North recounts a journey undertaken to the interior countryside to see the various sites—temples, shrines, palaces, castles—that have enormous cultural resonance in the collective memory of Japan. The poet was disappointed to see the gap between reality and legend: “Although many of the places that have been composed on from the distant past continue to exist, mountains crumble, rivers change direction, roads are altered, rocks are buried in dirt. . . . As time passes and generations change, the traces of the poetic places [utamakura] become uncertain.”3 When he visited the site of a fallen Samurai castle, he wrote:
The ancient ruins of Yasuhira and others, lying behind Koromo Barrier, appear to close off the southern entrance and guard against the Ainu barbarians. Selecting his loyal retainers, Yoshitsune fortified himself in the castle, but his glory quickly turned to grass. “The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walks turn to spring, / grasses and trees are green.” With these lines from Du Fu in my head, I lay down my bamboo hat, letting the time and tears flow.
Summer grasses—
Traces of dreams
Of ancient warriors
Natsukusa | ya | tsuwamonodomo | ga | yume | no | ato.4
With a graceful economy, the haiku master moves from historical fact to poetic citation to personal reminiscence to lyric production. The absence of physical ruins is conjured by the presence of the lyric voice of the distant past. Poetry here replaces architectural materiality as the transmitter of cultural memory. The evanescence of the seasonal grass is reflected in the brevity of his poem. Though his imagery is simple, Bashō weaves a dense nexus of intertexts and allusions in his evocative and luminous lines. As Haruo Shirane observes, “The four successive heavy ‘o’ syllables in tsuwamonodomo (plural for warriors) suggest the ponderous march of warriors or the thunder of battle. As with most of Bashō’s noted poems, this hokku depends on polysemous key words: ato, which can mean ‘site’ ‘aftermath,’ ‘trace’ or ‘track,’ and yume, which can mean ‘dream,’ ‘ambition,’ or ‘glory.’”5 In these lines Bashō conjures the essence of utamakura, the poetic trope of remembering places that expresses the yugen, “mystery and depth,” of memory.
Intersecting time and space, utamakura is a thread for linking allusion and intertextuality in traditional Japanese poetry.6 Bashō is using this trope when he quotes Du Fu (712–770), traversing geographies, states, and dynasties. The Chinese poet is, after all, writing almost a thousand years before Bashō:
國破山河在
城春草木深
恨別鳥驚心
烽火連三月
家書抵萬金
白頭搔更短
A kingdom smashed, mountains and rivers remain,
Spring in the city, grass and trees grow deep.
Moved by the moment, flowers splash with tears,
Alarmed at parting, birds startle the heart.
War’s beacon fires have gone on three months,
Letters from home are worth ten-thousand in gold.
Fingers run through white hair until it thins,
Cap-pins will almost no longer hold.7
Like Horace in Diffugere nives, Du Fu contemplates the inexorable direction of human life versus the cyclical returns of nature. But instead of invoking distant myth, he lingers on personal details. The vision of the poem sweeps from the vast (kingdom, city, mountains) to the small (trees, grass, hair); from premonitions from the sky (birds and beacon fires) to the harbinger of age (thinning hair); from the passing moment of a flower to the unrelenting signs of war. The pathos of this poem is found in the diffused melancholy of these overlapping temporalities. Objects of sentimental value—letters from home and cap pins—underscore the pain of exile and old age.
Du Fu follows a long tradition of the banished scholar ruefully contemplating the ruins of the past.8 In “Lament for Ying,” Qu Yuan (343–278 BCE) gazes at the “mounds of rubble” (qiu) left by fallen castles. Qiu is glossed by the earliest Chinese encyclopedia as “emptiness.” Cao Zhi (192–232) in his lamentation on his hometown says, “On foot I climbed up Beimang’s slopes / and gazed afar on Luoyang’s hills / Luoyang, so silent and forlorn, / its halls and palaces all burned away.”9 Bao Zhao (420–589) ends “Rhapsody on a Ruined City” (Wucheng fu) with “For this ruined city, I play the lute and sing. . . . For a thousand years and a myriad generations, I shall watch you to the end in silence.”10 In “Eulogy on the Ancient Battlefield” by Li Hua (ca. 715–774) the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, and listens to the voices of the dead before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past.11 Meng Haoran (689–740) writes, “In human affairs there is succession and loss; / men come and go, forming present and past. / Rivers and hills keep traces [ji] of their glory. . . . Tears soak our robes.”12
Du Fu absorbs this entire tradition. A generation after the poet’s death, Yuan Zhen (779–831) explained that Du Fu “attained all the styles of past and present and combined the unique, particular masteries of each other writer.”13 He carves his monuments from the monuments of the past; his tears flow from the tears of Meng. The art historian Wu Hung states that there are two words in Chinese for “ruins”: “The concepts of ji [跡] and xu [墟] thus define a site of memory from opposite directions: xu emphasizes the erasure of human traces; ji stresses survival and display. A xu in a strict sense can only be mentally envisaged because it shows no external signs of ruins; but a ji, being itself an external sign of ruins, always encourages visualization and representation.”14
To my surprise, when Bashō writes “traces of dreams,” yume / no / ato, the Japanese kanji he uses, ato, is 跡, the same character as the Chinese ji. The character in both languages signifies tracks, marks, signs, scars—in a word, vestigia. There are various kinds of ji: some are of antiquarian interest, others are for political, elite, or popular consumption. Shen ji, “divine traces,” are sacred mountains shrouded in clouds where spirits dwell. The concept is related to shen hui, “spiritual meeting,” of like-minded literati throughout the centuries. Divine traces are numinous and ambiguous. Only the poetic imagination can render them lucid.
After myriad generations Bashō has a “spiritual meeting” with Du Fu by tracing the vestigia of his Chinese predecessor in two ways: the allusion to hair and the blades of grass. The long, flowing lushness of spring and youth is contrasted to the brevity of the season that withers, whitens, and thins. The original meaning of utamakura is “poem pillows”; as we lay our heads on pillows to sleep, so does Bashō tap into the nocturnal reservoir of classical topoi: “traces of dreams / of ancient warriors.” Ato, ji, vestigia—all signs of memory, traces of tradition.
Bashō’s reverence for the cultural past is one of the driving forces of the Japanese appropriation of Chinese poetry, similar to Shakespeare’s remaking of Horace. But the absence of any residue of the Yasuhira castle suggests that it is the very opposite of the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” since the Japanese fortress has now been completely dissolved and all that is left is vegetation. Natsukusa (summer grass) is a seasonal word for summer—a rich, thick, deep growth nourished by the rains that washes away the blood-stained fields of treachery.15 Du Fu’s grass, however, emerges in the spring, the earliest signs of renewal. It is as if only after eight hundred years the Tang spring finally matures to an Edo summer.
The Japanese-Chinese nexus of poetics of ruins shares with that of the European Renaissance the sense of tradition, of transgenerational dialogue and the recovery of the past through allusions, however subtle and microtextured they might be. What is different is that the East Asian tradition seems to lack any boasting of poetic immortality. Bashō and Du Fu enact a translingual and transcultural friendship by transmitting the intimate moments of personal memory. Instead of burnishing their everlasting fame, their poetic creations seem content to leave impressions that vanish like the summer grass they describe. In his reflection on the autumn leaves in Kyoto, Italo Calvino describes this aesthetic—the Japanese sensitivity to the rhythmic passing of the season—as “the obverse of the sublime.”16
The Renaissance poetry of ruins, in contrast, strives for this very sublimity, even before the term is defined as such in the Enlightenment. Bashō’s and Du Fu’s grass-covered fields are the green sites of memory, dislocated signs of prehistory that are ever in the process of returning to nature, of easing into oblivion, even as they sustain a verbal poetic memory. This sort of poetic memory is strikingly different from Petrarch’s hopeful tracks, Du Bellay’s formless dust, and Spenser’s fragmented monuments.
By starting with the unit of a literary quotation, a fragment, or a particularly resonant word, and by looking at these through the vanishing optics of the ruin, a thing that is and is not, we can revise some of our most basic ideas about classical texts and how they came to be. Though empires might crumble and the gilded monuments of princes besmeared, so long as poets can write and readers read, literature shall live. The poetics of ruins, whether east or west, is finally a poetics of mutability—not so much a mode of survival that depends on a work’s imperishability but rather an artistic process of continuous transmission, translation, and transformation.