There’s Nothing in the World Smaller Than the Universe

Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale is to be preferred. The greatest of classical Chinese poets deserves a death commensurate with his wild verse. Dying because he wished to possess the moon has about it the necessary resonance of parable: this is what the mystic is willing to do to merge with the infinite. “The birds have vanished down the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away,” Li Bai writes in the first of two couplets of “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” as translated by Sam Hamill, concluding: “We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains.”

This is startlingly religious verse. The disintegration of the soul, the extinguishing of the ego, the snuffing of the person is required so that one becomes a part of the cosmos’ warp and weft. It’s erotic verse as well, as only the truest of devotional poems can be, because it presupposes the desire to lose oneself in another, to twist into something greater. In that spirit, then, the “world is neither place nor thing. / The world is a spell,” claims a gnostic demiurge, a genderless, serpentine deity in The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024), the remarkable new collection by the Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee. This is a gnomic, paradoxical book in which every word is a charm and every sentence a conjuration—a poetics of the body, the mind, and the soul.

It's as risky to detect Li Bai’s intoxicated traces in Lee as it is to talk about Shakespeare’s effect on Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, or Whitman’s ghost in the verse of Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky. But Lee himself acknowledges the influence. In The City in Which I Love You (1990), he describes both Li Bai and Du Fu as “those two / poets of the wanderer’s heart,” an apt description of his own peripatetic youth. Lee was born in Jakarta to Chinese parents forced to flee Indonesia in 1959 during President Achmad Sukarno’s pogroms (“People have been trying to kill me since I was born,” Lee writes in his 2008 collection Behind My Eyes). The family variously settled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in the unlikely refuge of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a largely Italian-American community some 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that once featured the planet’s largest sheet steel mill. (“That scraping of iron on iron when the wind / rises, what is it?” Lee writes in Rose, his 1986 debut.) Having traded the dreamlike image of Li Bai’s Yangtze for the polluted reality of Vandergrift’s Kiskiminetas River, Lee still felt connected to Chinese culture. After all, he is the great-grandson of the first president of the Chinese Republic, and the son of a physician who once treated Mao Zedong. Lee’s is a life lived in exile east of Eden, for as he asks in Behind My Eyes, “Childhood? Which childhood? / The one that didn’t last?” He seems to have always desired a return to a lost home (the origin of religion), lusting for the consummation with something powerful and good (the origin of faith), where he is “Still talking to God and thinking the snow / falling is the sound of God listening.”

It wasn’t medicine that brought the Lees to Vandergrift, but God. Shortly after the family arrived in western Pennsylvania, Lee’s father, Richard Kuo Yuan Lee, received a seminary degree, and was later hired by an all-white Presbyterian church whose congregants affectionately referred to him as their “heathen minister.” If the elegant style of Li Bai and Du Fu is obvious in Lee’s verse, so is the prophetic sonorousness of the King James Bible, which Lee’s father preached every Sunday—the implacable Calvinist God to whom their prayers were directed just as distant and immovable as the Tao of the Tang Dynasty masters. It was an upbringing during which, as Lee writes in Behind My Eyes, “The wind / turn[ed] and ask[ed], in my father’s voice, / Have you prayed?” Religion has always been the timbre of Lee’s voice, though it would be a mistake to read him simply as the sum of his influences (as is true with any great poet). Certainly, there is a lot of Li Bai and Du Fu in his work, particularly in that uncanny sense wherein it reads as if composed beyond time and space, in some scriptorium of eternity. There is also a bit of his mentor, Gerald Stern, who taught Lee at the University of Pittsburgh’s distinguished poetry program. Stern combined the quotidian with the cosmic, the personal with the paradisical in his invocations of the “God of mercy, oh wild God,” as he does in Paradise Poems (1984). Despite those influences, Lee could still sound very much like Li Bai when, in a 2014 conversation with Tina Chang at the Academy of American Poets, he argued that if

you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me— that I can’t possibly fathom—but am embedded in.

Poetry is a practice by which we can inhabit that something which is bigger, for every truly great poem is, as Lee has said, a “descendant of God.” An idiom fit for the parable, the allegory, the dream vision.

“The devotional lyric provides a supple and flexible medium for representing the varieties of spiritual encounter,” Kimberly Johnson writes in the introduction to Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (2013), which she coedited with Jay Hopler. Devotional poetry supplies description of an encounter (or a theophany, as the mystics call it) before God, or Being, or the Tao, or indeed even the ineffable mysteries of the moon’s reflection. Johnson enumerates the functions of such lyric, including the expression of “hosannah to lamentation to accusation to bewilderment to defiance to denial.” At the risk of blasphemy, I’ll reaffirm my previously stated contention that there is an eroticism to any proper devotional lyric as well, for the surrender of the self into a transcendent eternity, the submission before the cosmic infinite, should be interpreted as the ultimate ecstasy. There is a long history of this poetics, from the 17th-century lyrics of the Metaphysical poets (John Donne: “I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new;” George Herbert: “Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, / And thou hast hands”) to the 19th-century Romantics (Dickinson: “Wild nights – Wild nights!”), the Beats (Ginsberg: “The tongue and cock and / hand and asshole holy!”), the Modernists (Glück: “Forgive me if I say I love you”), and the postmodernists (Akbar: “I saw God I used the wrong pronouns // God bricked up my mouthhole”). Also, of course, Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.” Then there is Lee, in the January 2018 issue of Poetry, intoning in rapturous seraphic tricolons: “O-My-Love. / O-My-God. / Holy-Holy-Holy.

Erotic and devotional poetry are differentiated, respectively, from boring smut and stultifying apologetics because while the former eschew the pleasures of ego, the latter two valorize domination. At their core, the sacrifice to which both erotic and devotional poetry speak is a question of love. Here then is the importance of the noun in the title of Lee’s new collection. That to which these poems are addressed–as if prayers–could variously be called God, the Ground of Being, or the Tao (the last word appearing nowhere in the collection), but it’s a something to which no word can be perfectly ascribed. Darling is as good a translation as any. Evocative of Gnosticism, of Kabbalah, of Sufism, of Tantra, Lee’s sacred rhetoric conceives of the relationship between the lover and the beloved, between the individual and God, as one of reciprocity, and of a dual, ongoing process of creation and self-creation. In “The Escape Into You,” in which the pronoun is both the beloved and God, Lee writes, “Share by share, / let’s start a whole new world. / In the beginning // was an eye gazing into any eye,” mimicking both the Yahwist of Genesis (or at least the King James translation of her) and of Emerson’s transparent eyeball. Here, the boundary between the self and the universe is permeable, so that creation in one necessarily implies creation in another. This is an adamantly non-instrumentalist model of creation; this is a godhead who generates the universe not for reason outside Herself, but only for Herself. This is creation as play, as love.

In The Meaning of Life (2007), critic Terry Eagleton explains that “God is not a celestial engineer who created the world with some strategically calculated goal in mind. He is an artist who created it simply for his own self-delight, and for the self-delight of Creation itself.” There is no pragmatic reasoning, bottom-line logic, or Machiavellian strategizing in either true love or worshipful devotion. “The true lover / lives only / to love the beloved,” Lee writes. What The Invention of the Darling posits is that the universe is a coupling, and that what existence requires is not just divinity, but a consciousness capable of pursuing it. Lee’s metaphysics are such that Creator and Created want one another, wherein even if we can only be understood in the light of God, then God can also only be understood in the light of Us. The Lord isn’t even capable of self-recognition without our recognition, wherein “She knows everything / except who she is. // That’s what we, her lovers, are for. / We’re here to say to her: You.” Describing both the beloved and the Creator (here feminine, as with the Greek concept of wisdom that is Sophia, as in the Hebrew idea of God’s indwelling presence known as the Shekinah), Lee explains that “When she’s quiet, she’s herself. / When she thinks or speaks, time / begins, and she’s everyone in her story.” A shift from the positivist conception of genesis, the instrumentalist’s corrupted Eden, for God can only be conceived of in light of Her own creation, the Creator and the Created gazing across nonexistence at each other. Existence and nonexistence are just one pair of the binaries that mark these poems, structured as an unrelieved tension, an unreconciled discordance. Such tension, Lee suggests, defines the experience of the divine, whereby spirit and matter, the profound and the quotidian, the sacred and the profane, the infinite and the granular, the eternal and the present, are all intertwined. As he writes, “maybe it’s the sound of existence reminding / you of non-existence. / Or the sound of non-existence / haunting all of existence.”

Infinity and eternity. These are the contours of Lee’s cosmos: transcendence and immanence; these are the means by which we experience eternity and infinity. Throughout The Invention of the Darling, Lee evinces a venerable cosmology that sees the largest things as intrinsically related to the smallest, a kaleidoscopic Russian nesting doll model of reality which allowed Donne to see his lover’s bedroom as the whole world or which gifted Blake with a vision of eternity in a second and the universe in a grain of sand. In the stead of a Donne, a Blake, a Li Bai, Lee claims that “Whoever knows The Whetstone of Heaven knows / there’s nothing in the universe bigger / than a single tear, // and there’s nothing in the world smaller / than the universe. ” An arresting paradox when taken to its conclusion. If nothing in the world is smaller than the universe, but the universe is defined as being all that there is, then the quod erat demonstrandum is that all of us are equivalent to the cosmos (and perhaps all of us are God, or part of Her). With puckish and irreverent wit, Lee describes such visions as “all the games we know,” the task being “How to see the one in the many.  / How to find the many inside the one. // How to touch the small within the great. / How to approach the great inside the small.”

The small radiates the soft glow of immanence and the great possess the blinding fire of transcendence, but Lee suggests that such experiences are united. From such devotions the mystic can discover the multiplicity of existence within a single reality, all experiences–from the moonglow on the Yangtze to the clanging of iron in Vandergrift–but permutations of the single, ever-shifting monad. The doors of perception cleansed, now it’s possible to see the entire starry firmament and all of that which lay beyond in a single subatomic particle of infinite size. Eschewing eternity momentarily for the perception of past, present, and future, Lee describes those “Three mysteries” as being “Was. Is. Will Be.” This Trinitarian conception of time understands, again, creation as always being a process, the flux between what was and what will be within the momentary existence of what is. Later, Lee makes sure to imply that such paradise is perpendicular to our humdrum reality, noting in the subjunctive that there are “Three heavens … The heaven that never was. / The heaven that never comes. / And the heaven that’s just too far.”

A crucial three words–“just too far”–because Lee’s is a vision that would be pantheistic if taken literally. Yet sacred words (any vocabulary used to describe the divine) are incapable of being literal. Poetry and scripture such as this must gesture toward something that can’t be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted, but which can still somehow be known, can still take part in what Herbert described as “something understood.” Mocking the constrictions of straightforward religious language, Lee writes, “Some put their faith in sentences beginning, / As it is written … // Others place their hopes on dust to dust,” but the poet has rather a different understanding of the ever-mercurial nature of divine poetry. That’s because any metaphysics of the transcendent must, in some sense, also contain a metaphysics of language. Often this takes the form of expressing the inexpressible, containing the ineffable, within the conceit of secret knowledge. Think of the Gospel of Thomas, written in the second century and then buried in the baking Egyptian sands of Nag Hammadi before being rediscovered two millennia later, in which the scribe notes “these are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke.” Consider Blake’s injunction “Never seek to tell thy love, / Love that never told can be.” Lee imagines this as being verse to “inscribe on the back / of my heart, where I’ll never see,” closer to us than the very beating of that organ, and yet invisible. A library of secret books to which The Invention of the Darling can be shelved alongside, including “The 5th Veda, The Lost Books of Adam, / and The Sutra of Longing.” These contain Orphic secrets, cryptic secrets, Hermetic secrets; the acknowledgment that the reality of Being always writhes beneath our inadequate words like the beloved moving beneath the lover. “What was told to me in a whisper,” writes Lee, “I must now repeat / under my breath,” an occult intimacy of verse gnomic and obscure. Devotional poetry in that tradition of the Gnostics and of Blake requires us to read the words on the page slant. What any genuinely reverent verse can aspire to then is the conveyance of a feeling, a sentiment, a spirit, rather than an argument. What’s desired isn’t knowledge in the sense of information dutifully conveyed, but a subtler sort of understanding, seen as if from the corner of the eye.

In the title poem, which ends the collection, Lee gives fullest expression to the book’s great themes of how we fumble toward immanence and transcendence, of how eternity and infinity must thrum through all of our inadequate language. Ultimate Being, or the Tao, or God, is conceived of as the Beloved, as the Darling, but as the narrator notes, “My friend and I are in love with the same woman.” This is the nature of how all of us in our infirmities and imperfections and limitations–both individuals and denominations–must stand before the absolute, in love with the same woman but loving her in different ways. In a passage that evokes Laozi’s utterance made some 13 centuries before Li Bai, wherein the former claimed that the spoken Tao is never the real Tao, Lee writes that as concerns ultimate reality:

I’d write a song about her.
I wish I could sing. I’d sing about her.
I wish I could write a poem.
Every line would be about her.
Instead, I listen to my friend speak
about this woman we both love,
and I think of all the ways she is unlike
anything he says about her and unlike
everything else in the world.

Of course, this is the great, fruitful, and regenerative conundrum of devotional verse, for Lee wishes that he could write a poem on this subject while also doing exactly that. A gesture toward the absolute, an invocation of the ultimate, which even if not The Truth is a truth. For Lee, as indeed devotional verse more generally, the infinite and the eternal are approached via negativa, the apophatic imperative in which we must consider how God is “unlike / everything else in the world.” Of course, the Beloved–the Darling–is also unlike anything which the narrator’s friend can say about her, though she must also be unlike anything that the narrator can say about her as well. That’s because our expressions are contingent, fluid, and mercurial, but that is the great flux which Lee has long explored in his poetry. He writes “I too am bereft of means / and must wait for God / to finish this poem.” A promise, then. For even if we have not the means to finish the poem ourselves, in our ecstasy and inspiration, a verse may occasionally find itself affixed amongst the words which constitute the very descendants of God.