In Eastern and Western poetry, there’s a sharp difference of color in journeys beyond death. In Daoist poetry, for instance, such as Li Po’s drunken approaches to the purple aurora (an entry to heaven), or Tao Yuanming’s peach blossom spring beyond the grotto (a living paradise), the literary trope is one of hues and shadows. The purple aurora is the divine flash of color in a sunset’s final moments; the land of peach blossoms is sheltered and shaded by imposing houses and mulberry trees. But in Dante’s Paradiso, as we ascend his empyrean toward primum mobile, the heavens are so bright as to be blindingly white. In order to see at all, Dante must have the light reflected through Beatrice’s face, who is herself so sublime that she too escapes color and description. The difference here is one of hierarchy or provenance: Li Po’s purple sunset is a watercolor apotheosis where nature converges, while Dante’s Living Light is the source itself from which color deviates and corrupts. But the impulse of the two poetries is similar: both strive for a perfect order, formally and cosmologically. As Beatrice explains in Canto 28, “blessedness is in the act of vision.” I’ve taken this out of context (she continues morally that love leads to goodwill which merits such vision), but the gesture of the line has always stuck with me. It points and says, You have to see the grotto entrance; you’ll miss transcendence, the divine mirror, if your eyes are closed. It says to the poet and the seeker, even when blinded and regardless of color, Keep looking.

There is no single moment. Mathematics cannot account for the infinity of instants between one relative microsecond and the next. We think of “right now” when it’s already gone, already out of synch with our conception of it. We bite into a pizza and at that moment think “pizza,” but what we taste is the thing’s relationship to our expectations. That bite of pizza is every pizza we have ever had and ever imagined, compacted like an accordion into the illusion of this instant. Alan Moore got to the heart of this in a scene in Watchmen, when Dr. Manhattan is on Mars and his prescience can no longer be filtered for normal human time. Whatever he thinks, that’s where he is, and the frames are zoomed in so close that the setting and context don’t matter: “Twelve seconds into my past, I open my fingers. The photograph is falling. / … It’s 1945. I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen, fascinated by an arrangement… I am sixteen years old. / It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty-six years old. / The photograph lies at my feet, falls from my fingers, is in my hand.” The numerical markers are hard facts, but their insufficiency brings us back to Stephen Dedalus and the false “refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls.” Later in Dr. Manhattan’s memory, his father the watchmaker throws the cogs of a watch over a balcony, declaring that even time is untrue, inconstant from place to place. In a triptych, the falling cogs are juxtaposed to a meteor shower — reminding us that in the scope of space there is no “downward” — and the falling continues. The verb “to take place” seems to assume that an event is extant but timeless (in both senses: unrecorded and eternal) until it latches on to a concrete setting.

Individuality doesn’t make us citizens or fellows. It makes us ourselves, which makes us Others in a contextual time-trap.

Arthur Sze’s poem “Pig’s Heaven Inn” introduces an anthology he recently edited, Chinese Writers on Writing, of translated prose from 1917 to the present day. He is known for his poems of collage-like simultaneity and relatedness, and this poem is situated in his introduction to show that, as writers, we phase-shift between past and present all the time; our minds and intentions abide in no single, clean reality. The speaker of the poem closely pairs two memories in the present day: “during the Cultural Revolution, / my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story / window; at dawn I mistook the cries of / birds for rain.” There is no line to separate today’s morning and the uncle leaping decades ago; both memories have equal presence. Each noun is a word in relation to another: from aunt to husband, from birds to rain, and the enjambment calls attention to the “third-story” as a multi-level house as well as a multi-level narrative. The poem ends on a mountain path

The anthology itself spans from early modernists like Hu Shi and Lu Xun to contemporaries like Gao Xingjian and Wang Ping, each of them entering the dialogue of literature’s how and why. The book’s collected pieces effectively cover China’s rapid modernization, which offers a sobering mirror to the West’s aesthetic puberties. Unsurprisingly, the dilemma of change is at the center of their discourse. “Outdated words” is a leitmotif. Many of the writers push against elitism, spotlighting and validating individual voice; many more straddle the modern fence between solipsism and service. Certain centers of gravity are unavoidable: the vernacular of the times, the self in society and nature, and the mystery of language consciousness. But all the rest — defining apexes and watersheds, using one aesthetic beacon to darken the next — seems somehow puerile in its mathematical pretensions. Poetry’s polestar is not a linear history but a synchronic human experience, and we see this now more than ever at a time when the education of the poet means the private re-enactment and distillation of centuries. The pulse of words is the memory of their history, which creates a new history. Xi Chuan points out that incentives to “nativize” a cultural language, to cash in on distinct and ancient heritages, is ironically modern. I believe that information technologies have already atomized us all into a global internet eternity. We have a freedom to pick and present our identities like never before; we have each deposed and supplanted the king, the prophet, the seer. Voice is the privilege and burden of absolute choice; and the choice to be free is already out of our hands.

Individuality doesn’t make us citizens or fellows. It makes us ourselves, which makes us Others in a contextual time-trap. In Middlemarch, Mrs. Cadwallader tells Dorothea, “You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.” But Dorothea says, stoutly, “I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did.” So why not let poetry speak the rest? Especially if the poem is never-ending, if the memory and the reality are one distorted whole, and if the flight of words can keep us in any way. Poetry — for all its dense logic and denser intuition, all its masks and erasers and flashlights of self — is the unique truth of madness, the only refuge from the sane world.