Li He / Li Ho

Witness the man...

The two lines 'Witness the man who raves at the wall / Making the shape of his questions to Heaven' are probably the most significant lines in 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun'. Their source is Li He's 'Don't Go Out of the Door'.

While not one of Li He's greatest works, this poem does have the distinction of being described by Professor Graham as an eruption of 'paranoid fury'. Moreover, it encapsulates the very heart of Li He's gripe against the world. In it, he compares himself to virtuous men of Chinese antiquity who were essentially too good for the world and were taken away early by heaven -- an eerie foreshadowing of the poet's own early death. The man who raved at the wall was the great poet Qu Yuan, who lived over a thousand years before Li He.

The poem runs as follows in Graham's translation:

Who was Li He / Li Ho?

DON'T GO OUT OF THE DOOR

Heaven is inscrutable,
Earth keeps its secrets,
The nine-headed monster eats our souls,
Frosts and snows snap our bones.
Dogs are set on us, snarl and sniff around us,
And lick their paws, partial to the orchid-girdled,
Till the end of all afflictions, when God sends us his chariot,
And the sword starred with jewels and the yoke of yellow gold.

I straddle my horse but there is no way back,
On the lake which swamped Li-Yang the waves are huge as mountains,
Deadly dragons stare at me, jostle the rings on the bridle,
Lions and chimaeras spit from slavering mouths.
Pao Chiao slept all his life in the parted fens,
Yen Hui before thirty was flecked at the temples,
Not that Yen Hui had weak blood
Nor that Pao Chiao had offended Heaven:
Heaven dreaded the time when teeth would close and rend them,
For this and this cause only made it so.
Plain though it is, I fear that you still doubt me.
Witness the man who raved at the wall as he wrote his questions to Heaven.

The Chinese original, with pronunciation and English gloss (one English word to one Chinese character unless otherwise indicated), is as follows:

A few notes are in order as Li He makes some references that are not immediately apparent to the modern Western reader.

• The title, with the Chinese word 'master', a term used from wife to husband, refers to an old work 'Don't Cross the River' which deals with sacrificing one's life for love.
• The 'bear snake', which can also mean 'male snake', is a poisonous nine-headed snake referred to by the ancients. The snake was very quick moving and liked to devour human souls. It occurs in the poem 'Heavenly Questions' as well as another poem entitled 'Invoking Spirits' by Qu Yuan. The line in 'Heavenly Questions' runs (according to the Yang-Yang translation):
  

  Where do savage cobras stay,
  With nine heads that dart and play?

• The 'orchid-girdled' refers to a line from Qu Yuan's 'Encountering Sorrow' which goes:

  I pluck an autumn orchid for my girdle.

  Qu Yuan was a high-minded man of great integrity and principles, and the phrase 'the orchid girdled' conventionally refers to such a person. Li He clearly regarded himself as similar to Qu Yuan.

• The 'chariot' sent by god refers to a horse-drawn vehicle reserved for the use of high officials.
• Lake Liyang refers to a place located in modern Anhui Province. The place was supposedly drowned and transformed into a swamp overnight.
• The 狻猊 suānní and 猰貐 yàyǔ were ferocious creatures of the ancients. The first has been identified as a lion; the second is a huge mythical creature with the head of a dragon, the tail of a horse, and the claws of a tiger, fast running and man eating.
• Bao Jiao was a virtuous sage of ancient times who ate only what he grew himself and drank only water from his own well. He wore only clothes woven by his wife. One day, in hunger, he ate some jujube fruit in the mountains. Seeing this, people sneered at him and asked if he had grown the jujubes himself. Bao Jiao spat out the fruit and preferred to die of starvation.
• Yan Hui was Confucius's favourite disciple who died by the age of 30. Li He himself apparently went grey at 18.