Gao Xingjian: The Way of the Wandering Bird
05. January 2011 02:02
If you are a bird
No more than a bird
With the wind's first breath
You fly away
With an eye round and wide
You observe through darkness this sacral place below
Beyond the swamp of misfortune
Wandering through the night
You listen to the whispering air and a beating heart
Aimless yet at ease
Free from choices, you circle or soar ahead
With no obligation to return
Why revisit such hidden scrupules
Worries, constraints, and rancour
You shed the burden of the past
Liberty is now at your wingtips
Hovering, you spiral as you desire
You dive then skim across the sky
This heavy old land starts to shift
Beginning to move and follow you
First like an undulating cloth
Then like a wall swelling
Perspective, an illusory obsession, disappears
So many unexpected marvels in a row
In one broad stroke
You penetrate fog and clouds
Welcoming the glimmer of the first daylight
Gliding above the moving mountains
Then over a lake in a miraculous spiral
This is how your spirit voyages
Between desert and sea, at the meeting of day and night
An immense eye leads you towards the unknown
And you are a bird
Having once seen what your eye had seen
You now plunge into meditation
To be revealed by a metaphysics of vision
That dispels all turmoil dredged by words
Your vision now so pure, so refined that even the distance
from near to far dissolves in infinity
What you desire to see yet dare not imagine
Blurred beyond perception
Suddenly you will reach
In a dazzling luminosity
Emptiness as much as plenitude
Merges eternity with its instant
Within a transparency of time
From shadows and cracks
A forgotten haze now leaks
All that you have never had-as ephemeral as unforeseen
Yet the slightest distraction leaves you blind
And you fall back into darkness
Knowing too well you are not a bird
Incapable of running from anguish
That assails you endlessly
Like the merciless din of everyday life
Need not resist
You should at least find a haven
For the quietness of your soul, if you still have one
A space somewhere
An universe, neither paradise nor hell
To rest the weightlessness of your senses
Here is the place protected from the last judgment
And spared from the new Utopia
A place birds reserve for their sacrifice
Before nature claims them once more
So they may die in silence
But how can one reach this immaculate ground
And attain such serenity
At the end of a life so torn and worn
And have you ever seen an aging bird
Weak, pitiful or anxious
Who complains, who whines
Who betrays, who deceives
Not to speak of one who begs for survival
Although he, faced with agony, has prepared his refuge
Where he waits calmly for his life to end
This holy site, you find it nowhere
Known only to all the birds
Enjoying true freedom till the time arrives
To pay their last homage
Translated from the French by Ned Burgess and Fiona Sze-Lorrain