Li Bai, the Drunken Poet

Li Bai gets set to knock one back

by Ernie Diaz

A bit misleading, that title. As if there were only one famous poet whose spirit was moved by spirits. It’s just that when it comes to Chinese antiquity, the west still tends to put thinkers and artists in the Confucius Box. Think “ancient Chinese poet”, and you’re bound to start imagining robed gentlemen of celestial refinement, tottering from the calligraphy table to the tea house.

No harm done, but no harm in knowing that China’s best verse-slingers would have preferred the boozy company of Dylan Thomas or Jim Morrison to a prudish tea circle attended by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Head and shoulders above his tipsy compatriots is Li Bai, known as much for his love of liquor as his immortal body of work.

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine,

I pour alone lacking companionship.

So raising the cup I invite the Moon,

Then turn to my shadow which makes three of us

Because the Moon does not know how to drink,

My shadow merely follows the movement of my body.

The moon has brought the shadow to keep me company a while,

The practice of mirth should keep pace with spring.

I start a song and the moon begins to reel,

I rise and dance and the shadow moves grotesquely.

While I’m still conscious let’s rejoice with one another,

After I’m drunk let each one go his way,

Let us bind ourselves for ever for passionless journeyings.

Let us swear to meet again far in the Milky Way.

- Written on the Wall While Drunk at Wang’s House North of the Han River

Don’t worry – we’re not out to electrify anyone by delving into a screed on Li Bai’s use of meter to convey the rhythms of nature. But we can’t help pointing out that the preceding lines, translated though they are, grant an ease of access altogether missing from the stuff you stumble across in the pages of Harper’s. And the typical China expat should have a much easier time identifying with Li Bai’s themes – loneliness, getting faced, imagined reunions – than with those contained in the hackneyed doggerel of your average “urban poet”.

A born maverick, Li Bai spurned his shot at respectability, and his family’s wealth, by refusing to sit for examinations, instead taking to the open road. This was in 8^th century Tang China, when there wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room between social strata. Today that dirty-sandaled youth in the Lijiang café could well be a Trustifarian whiling away time before inheriting the earth. In Li Bai’s day a tramp was a tramp, most likely a bandit to boot.

The distinction is worth noting, in order to appreciate the magnitude of Li Bai’s charisma, and the effect of his verse. By willingly forsaking his family for the adventure and the bottle, he was basically piddling on Confucian ethics, that is, Chinese culture. Yet no door, royal or otherwise, ever closed on Li Bai. Emperor Xuanzong himself requisitioned the wandering poet for an introduction. He fascinated commoner and aristocrat alike with his unique take on life and ready wit. Then he blew them away with his poems. All while drunk as a monkey.

The secret to Li Bai’s charm, personal and artistic, lay in his deep affinity with the Dao. Although certainly not austere or disciplined enough to make even a mediocre Daoist monk, he somehow grasped the emptiness behind all forms. Better to say that he didn’t grasp, that fame and fortune were just two among the ten thousand distractions, which is why they came all the easier to him.

The Daoist hallmark of eschewing intricacy, the better to reveal the genius in simplicity, stamps Li Bai’s work with the seal of greatness. Spontaneous with his language, uncontrived in imagery, yet staggeringly rich in imagination, Li Bai branded himself one in a billion 900 years before Shakespeare.

Alas, running to drink will run even a legend to ruin, and the bottle was the end of Li Bai. At least it wasn’t mundane old cirrhosis that got him. Smashed out of his skull at a boat party, he reached out to embrace the moon’s reflection in the river, tipped in, and drowned. It’s a famous story, all the more Chinese in that no one has ever inquired into whether his fellow revelers thought he was away on a pee-break, or just rubbernecked while he drifted down to the riverbed.

Still it wasn’t a bad way to go for a guy whose life and work centered around alcohol. Just take a look at this snatch from Parting at a Wine Shop in Nanjing. Soak up the baijiu-fueled, transcendental rebellion of a genius laughing at society’s strictures twelve hundred years before Kerouac discovered amphetamines. Then see what image you conjure next time someone mentions an ancient Chinese poet.

To the old master, Tsen,

And the young scholar, Tan-qiu,

Bring in the wine!

Let your cups never rest!

Let me sing you a song!

Let your ears attend!

What are bell and drum, rare dishes and treasure?

Let me be forever drunk and never come to reason!

Sober men of olden days and sages are forgotten,

And only the great drinkers are famous for all time.

…Prince Chen paid at a banquet in the Palace of Perfection

Ten thousand coins for a cask of wine, with many a laugh and quip.

Why say, my host, that your money is gone?

Go and buy wine and we’ll drink it together!

My flower-dappled horse,

My furs worth a thousand,

Hand them to the boy to exchange for good wine,

And we’ll drown away the woes of ten thousand generations!

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