Breath-Space and Seed-Time - article and poems by David Hinton

[Julie]

Artwork by Studio Airport

November 27, 2024

In this essay and six-poem sequence, acclaimed translator and poet David Hinton finds an uncannily literal translation of modern science’s “space-time” in yü chou—one of ancient China’s most foundational cosmological concepts, which renders the Cosmos alive.

IT WAS WONDROUS enough as Coyote’s mischief, or Sun and Moon losing themselves in the dark love-making of solar eclipse. But in empirical fact, the birthplace of stars is now always everywhere, a quantum particle-burst blossoming out and flaring starlight where the mysterious fabric of gravity tightens. The more we know about it, the more wondrous it becomes, and we can see through knowing to the question that remains: Being, shadowy Being somehow ablaze with itself here, even after thinning and cooling for nearly fifteen billion years.

This is the Cosmos that modern science describes as space-time, a mysterious gravity-flexed fabric of continents and oceans, stars and galaxies, black holes and dark matter. Space-time is an uncannily literal translation of yü chou, one of ancient China’s foundational cosmological concepts. There are similarities, and yü chou too seems empirically accurate, but it is also something more, something primordial and alive and portrayed clearly in the pictographic dimensions of its ideograms.

The yü ideogram portrays breath spreading beneath a roof, rendered as the end-view of a traditional Chinese roof, its dragon-spine ridge and wing-curve slope. Hence: “the space beneath eaves” or “house.” Then by extension, it comes to mean “breath spreading free beneath the canopy of heaven,” from which is derived “the space beneath the canopy of heaven,” and on to “space,” “space itself as dwelling-place,” dwelling-place alive with primal breath. And so, the Cosmos as a living breath-infused expanse, as our breath-space home.

Similarly, the chou ideogram depicts a seed sprouting beneath the same dragon-spine wing-curve roof, from which comes the meaning “home” or “dwelling-place.” By extension, this becomes “a seed burgeoning forth beneath the canopy of heaven,” which came to mean “time,” “time itself as dwelling-place.” And this seed is also infused with that primal breath, making it the very image of a more primordial understanding of time. Rather than time as an imaginal dimension that seems to somehow leave us out of the fundamental movement of natural process, a kind of metaphysical river flowing past, chou recognizes the Cosmos as an all-encompassing present, a constant burgeoning forth to which we belong wholly. And so, the Cosmos as a generative self-emergent tissue, as our seed-time home.

Combined, yü and chou describe the two dimensions that weave together to form this Cosmos as a tissue of breath-emergent transformation. Vast and deep, everything and everywhere, including all the depths of our mental realm, this Being is always moving and changing. It is alive somehow—existence-tissue magically, mysteriously, inexplicably alive. It is whole—but not complete, never complete. Instead, it is pregnant through and through, subjective and objective realms a single generative tissue all dynamic energy in perpetual transformation. This is the Cosmos infused with an awesome sense of wonder and the sacred. There seems no other way to say it, for each of the ten thousand things, including everything that happens in the mind, seems to be miraculously burgeoning forth from a kind of emptiness at its own heart. And at the same time, it is always a burgeoning forth from an emptiness at the very heart of the Cosmos itself.

The pictographic images in yü chou are one way ancient China described this living Cosmos. Dragon, mythic embodiment of that shadowy starlit Being, dragon is another. Feared and revered as the venerable force of change, dragon is in constant transformation, writhing through all creation and destruction, all appearance and disappearance, shaping itself into the ten thousand things soaring through their traceless transformations, their origins and vanishings. This was seen as a kind of wondrous flight, captured in the ideogram for dragon, in which the image of a dragon’s body is graced with wings.

Our cultural assumptions tell us in so many ways that we “humans” are fundamentally other than “nature,” that we are not kindred. And that separation has led to the instrumental and exploitative relationship that has brought us so far into ecological collapse. If there is any hope, it must begin with a renewed sense of kinship between human and earth. Alive with the shelter of dragon-spine and wing-curve, this yü chou Cosmos is dragon’s realm, is indeed dragon itself. And according to ancient Chinese legend, we inhabitants of this realm are ourselves descended from dragons: Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice. Not long after primordial chaos separated into heaven and earth, Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice emerged half-dragon and half-human from Bright-Distance Mountain. They were the original couple, and Lady She-Voice gave birth to the first humans. So, we have dragon hearts pumping dragon blood, dragon minds thinking dragon thoughts. And our eyes, too, our wondrous eyes that can see through knowing to the question that remains: we look with dragon-deep eyes, and it is dragon gazing into dragon, into yü chou, this dwelling-place, this breath-seed home.

All this

apparently

 

began when

matter and light

decoupled. What

were they

 

arguing about, I

wonder? The future? It’s

always the future

isn’t it? How

can I tell them

 

it all turned out

so beautifully? Stars

appeared. This

planet. A radish

 

bright red, its

long tail

trailed out

 

glistening

 

white: a perfect

marriage of

matter and

light. Slice it

thin or

 

eat it whole.

 

 

 

 

Fire looks like

wild roots, flames

 

reaching out

restlessly, feeding on

sky. And we trace

our origins

back to it: hearth-

 

fire we

once gathered

round, learning

 

how to cook, tell

stories, warm

shelters, get along

 

together. Upthrust

mountains trace

their origins

back to other

fires. Gravity-lit

 

stars and galactic

centers others. Where

am I here

 

among sun-

lit basalt cliffs

cool lava-blaze

black? I

 

light a small

heap of wind-

 

parched deadwood. It

takes, and

suddenly origins

 

flare into planetary

skies again somewhere

deep in the natural

history of fire.

 

 

 

 

History’s a pretty

vast subject, no

limit to

even the least

 

lizard wind-

shimmered among

ruins. Who could

think through

it all: world

 

wars sprawling

though galactic

spin-velocities, whales

migrating tectonic

 

drift, fields weathered

grains of fossil

 

record. You can

grow the most delicious

melons in those

fields. I’m lost

 

here. I slice

all that history

open, scoop out

seeds, and it’s

 

another morning’s

delightful breakfast.

 

 

 

 

Who knows

where or

how far the future

leads? Curious, I

 

set out

into it, wander

morning market

 

then mid-day field-

land leading

out ahead to blue-

sky ridgelines

 

and beyond. But soon

I’ve lost

my way, finding

instead origins

 

everywhere: delicate

gravity conjuring

 

dark star-

wreckage into all this

newborn light.

 

 

 

 

I make my way

across stone shelters

tumbled into

ruins, talus

 

mounds spilling

off ridgelines

fossil-laden and rock-

strewn. Long ago

 

shepherds and farmers

struggled at

life here

 

until finally their

every future

 

vanished. You

never outlive

death, never. So

it seems

 

impossible—but

when I

turn toward

home, I’m suddenly

deep into a future

 

rivers and mountains

travel without us.

 

 

 

 

I think I know

where I’m

going on this

afternoon walk. Then

 

suddenly I

see their fossil

footprints, quick

 

shorebirds flickering

across rippled rock

 

nowhere among

all those

maps and calendars

 

orienting us, those

histories we

rehearse: earth,

human, my

own. Here, tumbling

 

past canyon

cottonwoods, river-

tissue plumes

through writhing

tectonic gnarls, explaining

 

nothing. Breath

rustles and gusts, voicing

words the same

way. What

 

choice do I

have? I

keep walking.

Article from Emergence Magazine, emailed to me today

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