[New post] [REVIEW] “The Muffling Liminality of One’s Midlife Condition: Kit Fan’s πβπ πΌππ πΆπππ’π π πππππ” by Flora Mak
t posted: " RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader, Carcanet, 2023. 96 pgs. In his third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader, the UK-based Hong Kong poet Kit Fan invites readers to jo" Cha
In his third poetry collection TheInk Cloud Reader, the UK-based Hong Kong poet Kit Fan invites readers to join his interim reflection on the artistic journey by delving into vocational anxiety, collective wounds, supportive love, and the cycle of mortality in his usually poignant expressions and a more versatile range of forms. The unified, life-affirming collection often delivers the soothing experience of an insightful, witty, and understanding mind "walk[ing] intravenously into" one ("Yew").
The title concretely foregrounds the figure of "the ink cloud reader", who materialises from the opening anecdote and maintains a strong presence throughout the volume. The prosaic anecdote relates the poet's experience of learning Chinese calligraphy as a young student. With hindsight, the poet realises that the tiresome exercises of grinding the inkstone and perhaps also the imitation of Chinese characters were lessons of artistic initiations, modelling, and perseverance. In the manner of Romantic introspection, he probes into the mind of Wang Xizhi, "the greatest calligrapher/ in China" who nevertheless could not avoid making numerous mistakes and washing clean his brushes in a pond in his youth (7):
"Would he have seen the towering storm clouds we now call cumulonimbus? Would he have seen the trees Fidgeting in the wind? would he have seen the inky goldfishes in the pond? Would he have seen himself in the ink-surface that had turned into a mirror?" (7)
Fan amusingly compares the ink accumulating in the water to "towering storm clouds", turning the pond into a murky mirror that reflects to the calligrapher the progress of his artistic consciousness.
The anecdote is consistent with Fan's root-searching in his Hong Kong education from his first poetry collection Paper Scissors Stone, the Chinese element of which is often highlighted for its positive influence over his poetic subjects as well as sentiment, and in productive dialogues with the English medium. The "ink-cloud" association further harks back to the heritage of classical Chinese literature. The phrase appears in his translation of the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu's "Thatched House Destroyed by an Autumn Storm" (θ ε±ηΊη§ι’¨ζη ΄ζ), as "The ink-clouds turn the autumn sky/ into a dark desert", and a few more poems in the same book. The original Chinese phrase "ι²ε’¨θ²" from the mentioned poem is an elegant description of the colour of the rainclouds that joins the atmospheric condition to the scholar profession. One cannot help but conjecture that it is one of Fan's much cherished phrases, to the extent of inspiring him about the subjective projection of one's intellectual landscape onto natural phenomenon. Significantly, the extension of this poetic whim into the calligrapher's story as well as the generic "ink cloud reader" identity announces the theme of authorship in the new volume.
The Ink Cloud Reader can be regarded as the latest state of Fan's pond of trials and errors with words, sounds, forms and ideas, which proves the adage of "practice makes perfect"; it is also where he imparts his anxiety of continuing the visionary role with the self-consciousness of a "reader". Apart from the anecdote, the volume is contained by an opening and closing poem. The main body presents 36 poems, which are divided into three relatively equal sections, namely "Once Upon a Cloud" (12 poems), "Hong Kong, China" (13 poems) and "Broken Nosed JizΕ" (11 poems). The three sections move from confessional poems that spring from intimate thoughts of life and death to social and occasional poems inspired by places of residence or scenic spots.
The first section, juxtaposing the nostalgic mood of "once upon" and the literary landscape, undauntingly takes one's life, and sometimes literary life, as if they were well past its span. "Hong Kong, China" reprises Fan's most attached geopolitical landscape with refreshed responses and understanding towards its latest mutation, along with a few character sketches of departed family members. In "Broken Nosed JizΕ", Fan lets loose his Buddhist and transmigratory sympathies as he picks up different objects and episodes of interest from across the world and time, such as some Buddha statues in Japan, a Noh mask, earthquake, and the moon, and endows them with moral and existential musings. That said, this group of poems is no less deep in insight. For instance, the several elegies included are emotionally infectious with its subtle expressions and minute descriptions.
This essay will focus on explicating the ink cloud analogy along with commentary on the poetics in the book. In the overarching poem "Cumulonimbus", the topic of poetic blossoming is smoothly carried on. Fan names his fear of having "over-inked" in the middle course of his life and impatiently calls for the muses in the dramatic form of a lightning struck. The topic of authorial identity and its symbolism appear and deepen in the motifs of ink pond, rain formation and birth-giving across "Once Upon a Cloud" and the other sections, enacting the forceful coverage of atmospheric commotions over all human activities. In "Suddenly", a poem that charts the critical milestones in Fan's life, the last three stanzas introduce the lightning blast as a harming means that robs the persona's voice and the concluding line pessimistically reads "Suddenly, rain churns up the clouds. And stops." It is not certain if the gloomy sky overhead signifies the suspension or actual end of one's literary pursuit.
Against the poet's self-doubt, I would like to offer my appreciation of the artistic delivery of the intense "mind of the tree" experience in the collection, and would illustrate it with the prominent example of the ink-cloud comparison. Consistent with Fan's fascination with trees, the atmospheric territory is complemented by the arboreal. In the second-person-address "Yew", the traditional symbol of death and resurrection takes on the significance of a sedentary mode of existence, a pause perhaps, deemed necessary to a human being's spiritual transformation. In the poem, the long-lived tree is advised as the Other that can either enable natural decomposition, as "It's the body's haiku/ to rot and blossom, overthrowing us in a coup/ that ends in soil or fire" or provide "a second chance" and "an alternative avenue" to the human counterpart. At the symbolic level, welcoming it into one's mind seems to mean a momentary contact with mortality in strong doses, as the heavy breath of the yew screws tight "all your internal scaffolding" and makes the cells "rigid, indivisible". The capacity of walking through a human being is not limited to the yew tree; sycamore is named to "walks through my chest" in another poem named "The Art of Reading".
There are some lines referring to the self-reflective theme of authorship that can be likened to the arboreal arrest of a reader's otherwise flowing mind. For instance, in "All these lines", a poem that describes a hiking trip on a rainy day, the morphing of the intellectual and natural landscape further plays out:
"All these straight lives Fall from the sky like lines Of unkinked ink crisscrossing
In a gorge famous for rain. … All these lines on my palms bend and swerve with their own intentions, qualms. I want to straighten them: these loud raindrops, those nuclei of dust hurtling helter-skelter down the sky."
From the animation of rain as "straight lives", the figurative "lines/ Of unkinked ink crisscrossing", the "lines" on the persona's palm, the act of versification implied in the title, and the ink-rain analogy, the poem exhausts the notion of "line", tangling at once the visual, intellectual, and spiritual imagination of a reader. The view of the mountain pass is endowed with a matching conceit that renders the poem into a forceful Other that arrests the reader in a non-"I" moment like how the yew can. One should not forget to note how the repetition of sounds, including "ink", "-alms", "-elter" and sibilants in the quotations aptly creates the auditory effect of ceaseless rain and foregrounds the vitality of the hiker-persona's poetic imagination.
From another perspective, hypothesising one's end can be taken as a creative gesture of stress relief. The poem "Delphi" from "Once Upon a Cloud" begins with a posthumous condition and, as if to upset the nature of death as an ontological cul-de-sac, unfolds energetically in a series of deductive questions. For instance, "What sins should I accumulate to avoid being human again? If in the end there is nothingness not even the ink and the clouds would nothing then be left of me?" The prophet-persona holds onto his right to know over the aftermath of death. After probing the arrangement of the after-world punishment and reincarnation step by step, the persona circles back to the meaning of his current existence and, as shown in the final question "What are the words that can never be silenced?", the vocational topic relating to the power of words.
Similarly, "The Art of Reading" assumes the voice of a deceased person from the first line "The last book I read before I died sits idle at my desk…" The sense of playing with the state of death is shown in the choice of tenses within the quotation, as the present tense suggests that the persona is a soul that has detached from his body. The playing sense can also be seen in how the persona recollects episodes that probably occurred in more than one lifetime, e.g. falling in love with a black man in 1969 while "Once in Luxembourg Gardens Proust ignored me" (The French novelist lived between 1871 and 1922). The fictitious nature of the deceased's memories is soon made obvious, when he readily rejects the truthfulness of his claim in "On a train to Kyoto I saw my mother reading my novel and a nun reading my poetry but I wasn't on a train to Kyoto and she wasn't my mother and there was no nun". The poem ends with a meta-narrative twist by framing the run-on lines of memories as the content of "the last book in which I sit idle at my desk with a dove", hence justifying the logical incongruence between the stanzas. Life finally challenges the dominance of death as "I" gain eternal presence in the form of "the last book".
Although the outlook of important things, including one's life and city of origin, is often not rosy in The Ink Cloud Reader, Fan shows faith in literary art's ability to mediate dismal and frustration through the delightful interactions between genuine reflection and established forms. The formalist gesture is most prominent in poems responding to Hong Kong. For instance, its newly scripted fate is presented to the readers directly via the personified city "HK":
I will speak to you from the ink-dark the changing tides, the slow equivocal pain of transition, how things are moving away from the norm, the deceptive comfort of a norm, the fading neon noises on Mong Kok Streets [… ]" ("Hong Kong and the Echo").
In three unheard speeches and the less-than-helpful responses of the echoes, "HK" rants about the political inaction of the colonial government and her being "re-unorphaned"; she eventually resigns to being "high-rise windows" that box in "homemade voices in an impasse". The use of the Yeatsian model immediately stresses the feebleness of the Hong Kong population in gaining control over their political system and economic means.
To give two more examples, in the guise of a memo, "Raw Materials" highlights the ridicule of the socio-political turn of events via a matter-of-fact listing in generic descriptions, such as
Day 3 a law firm is ordered to disband because they defend a case. A university axes a photo exhibition.
The more personal "2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey" is a dramatic dialogue between the migrated brother-poet and his sister who stays regarding the censorship in their birthplace. Borrowing the urgency of door malfunctioning in the classic sci-fi story, the poem highlights the clash between national agenda and freedom of thought of immediate relevance to Hongkongers. It manifests itself in the contrast between "an army of red dots" and Walt Whitman's "green leaves". The pressure exerted over future literary expressions is suggested through the sister's passionate appeal, which reiterates the negative consequences of the brother and some dissenters' imprudent treatment of the red presence with the trope of remembering, "Do you remember the blades? […] Do you remember those tanks on the television? […] Do you remember how to remember/ and disremember? Do you remember me?"
When placed together as a set, these post-2019 Hong Kong poems collectively deposit the different levels of devastation over the city's political development in neat and echoing literary conventions, transporting readers out of the real sites of protest and oppression, and placing them into stable but not restraining literary spaces. This is not to say that the ink cloud reader is an escapist, as his mind always returns to the power of writing and social membership of a poet, as at the end of a break "after months of smoke and chase" in the poem "Pui O",
and suddenly I smell the old ink brushing my neck, thickening the sky into a void and I shiver.
Apart from the externalisation of the intellectual landscape, the ink cloud analogy has an important association with maternity. More than once, Fan compares the formation of rain to birth giving ("Suddenly" and "Mother's Ink"). Here is a line describing his own difficult birth in "Suddenly": "the cloud-knots unravelled and a droplet fell/ from a womb." It is sad to learn from this volume that the poet's mother, who is first introduced as a kitchen helper in an admiring tone in "Paper Scissor Stones" from the debut book and then elegantly in "My Mother in a VelΓ‘zquez" from As Slowly As Possible, has passed away. This time, Fan expresses his strong attachment to her subtly in the act of moon-viewing:
For nights on end I flirt with the moon, starving to earn her thin gaze back while the wind grows tall, sneering at my waistline. It's my mother's face I want, A desert face, squid-white. ("Noh Mask, Yaseonna")
By the time one reaches poems like "The Art of Descent", "Noh Mask, Yaseonna", and "Moon Salutation" in the third section of the book, suddenly it becomes quite clear that tribute to the nurturing figure has always been intended in the ink cloud reader's self-evaluation, for ink symbolises both poetic expressions as well as the inviolable source of life. By paying attention to the act of writing, Fan experiences the maternal act of birth giving himself and perhaps, as he looks into his textual existence more closely, he can get closer to his mother once more, whose lingering presence can be felt in "the goddess inside/ a man like me" ("Moon Salutation").
Finally one feels obliged to ask, what does "the ink cloud reader" see in his pond? In the closing poem "Hokkaido", he is spotted being pensive in a hot spring amidst some Japanese forest "measuring this, that" while the night trees "cancelling this, that" (87). Naked against the silence of nature, he is pressed to acknowledge the muffling liminality of one's midlife condition. It appears that the vision he arrives at is that eventually what one gleans and garners from the ink cloud is less important than the writing act itself.
How to cite: Mak, Flora. "The Muffling Liminality of One's Midlife Condition: Kit Fan's The Ink Cloud Reader." Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Oct. 2023,chajournal.blog/2023/10/07/ink-cloud.
Flora Mak obtained her PhD in English (Literary Studies) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with research interest on Romanticism, Modernism, and humanities education. She co-authored The Value of the Humanities in Higher Education: Perspectives from Hong Kong. She is now a happy lecturer of literature and hoping to read more about Hong Kong and Asian literature. She also tries to integrate her support for women's movement as a daughter, a teacher, and a volunteer.
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