‘Searching and Seeking’

Miles Link

李清照《寻寻觅觅》1

寻寻觅觅，冷冷清清，凄凄惨惨戚戚。

乍暖还寒时候，最难将息。

三杯两盏淡酒，怎敌他、晚来风急！

雁过也，正伤心，却是旧时相识。

满地黄花堆积，憔悴损，如今有谁堪摘？

守着窗儿，独自怎生得黑！

梧桐更兼细雨，到黄昏、点点滴滴。

这次第，怎一个愁字了得！

Li Qingzhao, ‘Searching and Seeking’

Searching and seeking, dreary and desolate, mournful and wretched and miserable.

When warmth turns to chill, then it is hardest to bear up.

Two or three cups of weak wine, poor screens from the harsh evening wind.

A wild goose flies past—heartbreaking, to see that old companion.

Chrysanthemums piled on the ground. How withered they are, who would gather them now?

Standing by the window, how to endure the dark alone?

Drizzle collects on the sycamore trees. All along ’til sunset, dripping drop by drop.

This condition—how could a single word like ‘misery’ capture it?

This piece by the Chinese poet Li Qingzhao demonstrates very different expressions of a melancholic repetition, in both its form and content.

Li Qingzhao was from a wealthy family of the intelligentsia during the last years of the Northern Song dynasty, making this poem just about 900 years old. In the wake of inter-dynastic conflict, Li became a war refugee: as far as we know, she wrote this poem after she had fled her home in Shandong in the northeast and resettled in Nanjing in the south. Her husband also died shortly afterwards.

Most of her surviving poetry, like ‘Searching and Seeking’, are examples of the 词 (cí) poetic form popular in the Song era, in which poets wrote to the tune of popular songs. The songs are now lost, but, even in the appearance of the original Chinese poem, it is clear how the poetic form influences the text: as you can imagine if you wrote lyrics to fit an already-existing song, the poem is not perfectly orderly and rhythmically even, as in Tang dynasty poetry.

Perhaps we tend to think of repetition as having this quality of rhythm and regularity. And perhaps, then, this is another way of distinguishing the two forms of repetition that Lacan raises in Seminar XI, automaton and tuché: that is, there is a repetition that is not predictable and regular and orderly. Certainly, that quality is what characterises this poem: there is an identifiable repetition that nonetheless moves in unexpected ways.

This is evident in the poem’s first line, which in (modern) Chinese sounds like this: ‘xún xún mì mì, lěng lěng qīng qīng, qī qī cǎn cǎn qī qī’. ‘Searching and seeking, dreary and desolate, mournful and wretched and miserable.’ The Chinese language has the property of redoubling characters, to express both emphasis and a repetitive or cumulative action. Hence, for example, the Mao-era slogan: ‘好好学习，天天向上’: hǎo hǎo xué xí, tiān tiān xiàng shàng: ‘Study hard, and every day you will improve’. So the first line of Li’s poem does not just say, ’I’m looking for something, and I’m sad’, but ‘I am endlessly searching, and I cannot escape the state that I am in’.

Then again, there is no identifiable subject in this first line, just a verb and a string of adjectives. In fact, throughout the whole piece, there is no ‘I’ at all, either as observer or actor. The lack of clear subjects and the absence of pronouns is a staple of Chinese verse; it is an example of what François Cheng, the poet, writer, and collaborator with Lacan in the 1970s, calls one of the ‘passive procedures’ in Chinese poetry—that is, to delete pronouns, prepositions, and adverbs (all of which Cheng tellingly names ‘empty’ words), or to play those empty words off against ‘full’ words, like substantive nouns and verbs.2

But there is very little play of ‘empty’ and ‘full’ words in Li’s poem. In this first line, we are left with only a set of overlapping impressions that interrupts its own rhythm. The line feels airless and drawn into itself; it sets up a distance from us that we can only cross when some superfluity enters it. In this way, the significance of the repeated search for the lost object arrives in its own interruption.

The rest of the poem is a set of disjointed images. Here is another kind of non-rhythmic repetition: not in how these images overlap, as in the first line, but in how they are isolated from each other and fail to cohere. The speaker looks and feels and hears, but these sensations in some way remain distant. These are not the traditional poetic images of nature mourning along with the speaker. Li Qingzhao is not a fan of Patsy Cline; here there is no ‘weeping willow crying on his pillow’. Instead of Patsy Cline, we might think of Albrecht Dürer, and his illustration Melencolia I, from 1514: the subject sits, withdrawn, while all the tools for work lay around and wait to be used.

It’s striking that there’s actually quite a bit of motion in this poem, but it is action that is arrested or contained: within the speaker’s space, things move back and forth, like the sudden changes from warm to cold in the autumn, or they drop straight down, like the drizzle on the sycamore leaves. It’s as if the speaker lives trapped in a world where Zeno’s paradox actually holds true, and you really can’t walk from one end of a path to the other. Just as the first line of the poem imparts a tychic encounter by piling up too much in one spot, the rest of the poem spreads things out too thin. The situation is overripe, the flowers are withered, the scene is missing that element that will put everything into a new alignment.

Or, according to Russell Grigg’s conception of melancholia, maybe the problem is not that something is missing, but that it is all too present.3 The only exception to this arrested motion is the wild goose (or it could be geese), which flies overhead. Commentators on this poem are eager to point out that geese are conventional ‘messenger’ figures in Chinese poetry, since they migrate between north and south. And that would suggest that this wild goose is carrying a message of grief from somewhere else, from someone else. But the speaker calls the goose itself 相识 xiāng shí: an ‘acquaintance’ or ‘companion’— that is, someone of whom you know (识) each other (相). Is this wild goose a messenger? Is it a metaphor? It is like a word, a ‘presence made of absence’,4 as Lacan says? Isn’t that the trouble here, not with all this presence from which something is missing, but with the missing-ness from which things are made present?

No wonder a single word like ‘misery’ cannot capture all of these repeated attempts to break open an absence. Actually, the Chinese character in the last line, 愁 chóu, here translated as ‘misery’, means something closer to ‘anxiety’—and, if nothing else, we can say that the speaker of this poem is most assuredly ‘not without its object’.

References

1 Original from Gu Shi Wen Wang, https://so.gushiwen.cn/shiwenv_f82821b9d569.aspx. Translation is my own.

2 Cheng, F., Chinese Poetic Writing, Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1977/2016.

3 Grigg, R., “Melancholia and the Unabandoned Object”, Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can't, London, Routledge, 2015, 139-158.

4 Lacan, J., “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, Écrits, New York, Norton, 1966/2006, 228.