Rethink.

The Jewel Stairs’ Griev­ance (from Adam Kirsch’s “Dis­tur­bances of Peace”)
Li Po, trans. Ezra Pound

The jew­eled steps are already quite
white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my
gauze stock­ings,
And I let down the crys­tal cur­tain
And watch the moon through the
clear autumn.

Com­ment:

Kirsch pro­vides us with a com­ment Pound him­self wrote to explain the poem -

Jewel stairs, there­fore a palace. Griev­ance, there­fore there is some­thing to com­plain of. Gauze stock­ings, there­fore a court lady, not a ser­vant who com­plains. Clear autumn, there­fore he has no excuse on account of the weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stock­ings. The poem is espe­cially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

I read this and still have been star­ing at this poem off and on for hours. A few observations -

• “Already” moves to “so late:” dis­crete moments are now lengths of time. The poem ends with the moon, part of an eter­nal cycle.
• “White,” “gauze,” “moon:” mois­ture becomes film, then finally only light.
• “Dew,” “dew,” “crys­tal:” the dew that oppresses emo­tion­ally (it’s late) and phys­i­cally (soaks the sub­ject) would also be on that win­dow one way or another.  It is a cov­er­ing that invites an opening.

Yeah, I know — unless I know Chi­nese, these details are purely made up. It looks like Pound is try­ing to intro­duce us to a cul­ture more or less with that note. I think this is a good enough excuse as any for ran­dom speculation.

It seems we are watch­ing an unap­proach­able woman; she’s in love, and per­haps her com­plaint is part of that love. If her lover is a jerk, she may be attracted to play­ing hard-to-get (the only game in love there really is, when you think about it). The wealth involved puts at us some­what at a dis­tance from her, but her star­ing at the moon is the way we know those stairs are not an invite to any of us. She’s not even set­tled on her com­plaint; her mind moved like that dew did, up the stairs, and is out the win­dow. Her heart is firmly fixed on some­thing distant.

At the same time, we know cou­ples break up because of moments like this: even “friends with ben­e­fits” can’t sur­vive this. We have no con­fir­ma­tion that her heart is solely on him, even though we can rest assured that she’s not early because of any­one else. I need not inform you that there are moments we will not take a lover even while a rela­tion­ship is unset­tled, falling apart or non-existent. In that last cat­e­gory: the need­i­est lovers who are “offi­cially” in a rela­tion­ship are almost no dif­fer­ent in sta­tus than stalkers.

So we can’t strictly account for her griev­ance through her love, nor her pride. It is a vul­ner­a­ble state of resis­tance; if we want to dwell in moral terms, we could call it a false pride. But this is emphat­i­cally not a moral prob­lem — there is a what is ques­tion here. The details bring us to the natural.

The mois­ture soaks, and its sur­plus is unpleas­ant. Time is defined entirely by antic­i­pa­tion; it is emo­tive, it is felt. The poem ends with light and see­ing, and we have noted the “light” is not unre­lated to the cor­po­real. This isn’t about love or pride, or about any human desire or con­ven­tion (moral­ity). This is being, where motion has set­tled to rest, and the dis­cur­sive intel­lect — think­ing things through — acknowl­edges its debt to the con­tem­pla­tive: the only thing in front of the sub­ject is the cos­mos and its darkness.

It sounds nuts to say being can be seen plainly in a dejected female who would love. We could say she for­mu­lated her com­plaint on the stairs, and the look­ing out the win­dow is just an exten­sion of that mood­i­ness. But I’m say­ing (right now, any­way) the mood is deeper than we think it is. It won’t accept any­one because it knows there is a place for her, some­where. It does not know that place yet. It is active in pas­siv­ity. The domain of what is is larger than that of the good; in the­ory, this looks like it makes per­fect sense. In prac­tice, it leads to the para­dox that we long for things we don’t even remotely under­stand. As far as I’m con­cerned, the par­tic­u­lar was left on the stair­case, and all ascents are a mixed bless­ing for the unwise.

• On Pound’s “In a Sta­tion of the Metro”
• Purity and Growth: On Pound’s “Fan Piece, for Her Impe­r­ial Lord”
• Notes on Ezra Pound’s “A Virginal”
• The Com­ing Age, part 3
• Divine Ter­ror: On Emily Dickinson’s “I fear a Man of fru­gal Speech” (543)

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