This Body is Like that Dying Star
In the West I know that we are accustomed to thinking of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us. We leave the past behind as we walk forward into the future. And because I think we’re homo erectus, we see the horizon line. We have metaphors of life occurring to us at the rate of walking. We think we’re walking toward a horizon into the future.
In the East it’s very different, and I think this is an essential difference that might inform some of the subsequent questions. In the East our word for the day before yesterday is chin tien: it lies ahead of us. The day after tomorrow is ho tien. Ho literally means behind you. To a Chinese mind, the future is behind us, and the past is before us. To a Westerner you walk forward into the future, and you leave the past behind. To an Easterner we walk backward into the future and everything we see here is in the past.
Now if we think about that, it’s not only a difference in orientation, it’s a difference in what we assume about reality. When we go out at night and look up at the stars, some of those stars have been dead for millions of years. So when I come out and look at them I’m looking at some late report. I am literally looking at a picture of the past when I look up at the night sky. Now to a Chinese mind this is a picture of the past, constantly. As we walk backward into the future, which lies dark because it’s behind me, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. All of this is the past. The light coming from the ceiling, my voice, my coming into the room, the sips of water I took, it’s all going into the past. We constantly live inside the immediate past. Where is the present? That is one assumption I want to make. And it seems something I live with day-in and day-out.
The second assumption I’m making is that this body itself is already the past. This body itself is the late report of an earlier body. Everything that occurred here, everything occurring here, is the late report of an earlier event. Our being here, telephone calls, plane arrangements, whatever occurred already to make this possible. So we are constantly living in the late report of antecedent events. This is my assumption.
As a result, I always assume that poetry is the voice of an earlier body. It is not the voice of this body. So that’s the voice we’re hearing in poetry, being the voice of an earlier body, is the voice of a truer body. Because this body is not our true body, this body, the same way we look up at the stars and some of those stars are no longer there, but we see it, this body is like that dying star. We see it, but it is actually no longer here at a rate of about three million cells a minute. As we speak, three million cells a minute are dying in this body. We don’t always know that, but if we choose not to know that it would be like somebody choosing to think the sun goes around the earth — when we know the earth goes around the sun. So if we know the body dies at about three million cells a minute, it occurs to us at about the rate of falling.
Now can we realize that prime reality? That, number one, all of this is going away, fading away, this minute, as we speak. It is going irrevocably into the past as we see it. And we are falling backward into the future. When we go out we don’t know whether we’re going to find a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, whether we’re going to be hit by a car. The future is dark. All we see is the past. This is a long answer to the question about the visionary.
~Li-Young Lee
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee {Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll} ~ Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, 2006 / pgs 86-7
