Was. Am.
Chinese poet Li Bai, in a piece written nearly 1,300 years ago, depicted the life of a young girl at four early stages in her life. In lines that traverse her childhood and teen years, we are shown through her words how a relatively short span of time can yield great changes in a person’s life and how those changes can shift their sense of self. We first see her as a carefree child accompanied by a playful young boy, these two then uncomfortably married to each other as young teens, later still finding great affection for her husband, and finally left in a state of marital and spiritual limbo.
In modern times, the poem achieved noteriety due to a loose translation offered by American poet Ezra Pound.
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Change is a central components of the poem: the girl turns into the young bride who then becomes a wife in love that is then left in a state of uncertainty and painful longing. As life takes her from one setting to the next, she clearly becomes different from who she was before. She changes and changes again.
Change, of course, is one of life’s few constants. As humans, we are caught in a perpetual cycle of change, from cradle to grave. In this sense, it becomes almost pointless to answer the question “Who am I?” since who you are now will not be the same person you will be in the future.
While it may be difficult to guess who we will become in the future, it’s much easier to look to our past to get a better idea of who we were and who we presently are. In observing our past, we observe our own change and see someone we may no longer be but that nonetheless was indispensable in creating who we are today.
For our next theme, in the spirit of Spring and new life, we will focus on change. More specifically, the focus will be on the past and its relationship to the present — the “I was” and the “I am” and the space between.
Some possible starting points:
- A specific event in the past and how you reacted to it then compared to how you’d react to it today.
- Our younger and naive former selves.
- Letter to a younger you.
- The changes that happen within a family, a relationship, or one’s career path.
- How we’ve changed and improved on a something — an artistic ability, for example.
- …and any number of other possibilities.
The theme is a seed; what grows is up to us.
Again, written reflections, short anecdotes and personal stories, visual art, poetry, photography, the funny, the serious, the embarrassing, the thoughtful…any and all are welcomed! We’ll post submissions in June.
