Honourable Younger Sister,
This village is a world of stone. Lanes, houses, courtyard walls, towers, pavilions, tables, benches are all hewn from ancient red rock. The stone streets are lustrous with the passage of feet and shine in the moonlight; tomorrow they will glisten in the morning rain. After six days on the path into the mountains I finally rest at this inn. Here I can buy light: to write in this loft whilst the house sleeps, though a dutiful daughter dozes against the foot of the stair-ladder to serve me should I require sustenance. Frightened by my ugliness I summoned up my sweetest voice for her and soon there was a shy smile and downcast eyes. These are long nights for the village poor, but few here as poor as those whose shelters I sought on the path. Tonight I miss the steaming breath and ceaseless rustle of the animals brought indoors for warmth and security. My travelling robes are already filthy, but my body remains clean. As soon as I depart each night’s shelter I search for a stream to strip and wash thoroughly in the ice-cold water.
Dear sister, we have both been taught that the function of letter-writing is to unburden the mind of its melancholy thoughts in the form of elegant colours; its purpose to state one’s feelings without reserve. My thoughts turn constantly on whether I have it in me to ‘summon the recluse’. Have I the stamina, the patience, the resolve to seek out these elusive souls? Such thoughts induce fear rather than melancholy, fear of failure.
Already my journey into these mountains has crossed the season of late autumn into that of early winter. I am told the russet-red leaves and pink berries of the Ash, the deceptive Rowan and speckled-leafed Lace set the mountainside alight as the sun rises into a clear sky. For me clouds hang all day in the steep valleys, and so hide the heights where the solitary ones are believed to live. They alone see with the dawn the mountain peaks aflame It is only in the very late afternoon that the sun melts the clouds, breaks through, and enlivens the landscape, turning it gold, then amber, and a final dull red before the blue blackness of dusk descends. Beyond this village my sources tell me there is real wilderness, and paths are few. I am to be my own guide.
You and I are so adept at the play of words. Our honoured father encouraged us, and as custodian of the Imperial Archives he knew how words could be arranged to both conceal and reveal; we played with the characters as other children played with coloured stones. So with the poems we call “Chao Yin”, let us play with verb “Chao” as both to seek and to summon. Chu Hsi, a courtier of that prince of Huai-nan, was sent into the wilderness to summon an errant official back to his post. His poems speak of terrors of the mountains, their ‘murky depths sending shivers of fright’ of ‘the caves of leopards and tigers’, and of the deep forest where ‘a man climbs from fear’. The poetic form uses “Chao” as in the ancient ceremonial song “Chao ***”. This calls on a dead person’s soul to re-enter the body, so ‘a summoning of the soul’. In those times such poems argued against the recluse, the withdrawn one, and sought a return. Today there is this feeling abroad that we need to consort with the recluse, to taste his solitude. Does the solitary life speak of the ineffable Way? Or is it in the search for the solitary one that a moment of enlightenment may present itself? As the saying goes: ‘to travel one must surely uncover truth’. In my bones I feel ready to invert this old poetic form. I must summon the spirit of the recluse out of the mountain fastness, but not seek his return. I need to touch his ways, see evidence of his mountain life, for a while to walk his paths breathing the same air. In my heart I expect nothing but his absence. I foresee I may reach his shelter and find his gate ajar, though the embers of the hearth still warm. He will be on some distant peak gathering herbs. If on a precipitous path I was to turn a corner and find him before me I have no words prepared. For the moment it seems I am exploring an idea through this summoning and seeking, not a living, breathing body.
Tomorrow I shall reconnoitre. My official hairpin and staff will command any audience, but for reliable answers, I am far from confident. There is always talk, rumours, sightings. The common people respect these beings as kindly mountain spirits and guardians of the wilderness. At the fork in a path, by the crossing place of a stream, corn, persimmons and millet are left for them. Such offerings will be replaced in time by the rarest mountain herbs, wild fruits, the skin of leopard or bear.
Your last letter spoke of ‘following my path into the mountains’. You have always defied convention, so it would be no surprise to find you here on my return, although I think your Lord would not sanction it. He would find such a request unfathomable. I am still perplexed at your situation, that you, the most homely of women should be so favoured, so adorned, and yet so free. It is that confidence you hold to yourself.
To me, you have always been the essence of woman. What knowledge I possess of your kind comes from you alone. The infrequent gropings that occasionally present themselves I have only dismissed. An hour in your company smoothes and stills both soul and body. Your movements and gestures are always quiet and true, as are your woven words that sing in my memory on the path.
I read your letter
And savoured your words,
Your sorrowful songs of separation.
I can almost imagine your face before me
And I sigh and sob out of control.
When will we meet again
To amuse ourselves with prose and verse?
How can I tell you of my misery
Except with these woven words?
Have I remembered your poem correctly? I expected no response to my own lines on our separation. On the very morning of my departure your scroll arrived. I delayed to read it, delaying further to know your words: to carry them in my memory on my journey. In our respective verse we follow the way of tradition: the lonely woman in her room; the man travelling far from home. How many thousand poems describe this antithesis?
My life has always been sheltered by the expectations of scholarship, the requirements of official rank, and more recently acclaim due to my songs and poems. This journey begins a new page, as a seeker and summoner. Follow my path deeper into the mountains, be at my side when I rest, calm my fear of the heights and the depths of dark ravines, reveal to me the words to paint the scene. Know that I share with you everything that is to come, without reservation.
Remember the words of Lun Yu: ‘The good man delights in mountains. The wise man delights in water’. In these mountains the sound of water is present everywhere.
A stony spring rinses bits of jade
Minnows now and then emerge, and disappear.
Here what need of my silk-strung gujin? –
The mountain water has its own crystal song.
Your brother Zuo Si