A Poetic Dialogue Across Cultures and Time

On Oct 27 2023, “Dancing with the Dead,” a documentary movie featuring American author and translator Red Pine premiered in Port Townsend. This movie included ten songs I composed over Chinese classic poetry. Amanda Blaine, one of my friends, wrote this prose after viewing the film.

Images from the premiere night in Port Townsend, Washington

On hearing my friend’s singing in a film debut about ancient Chinese poetry: For Spring

by Amanda Blaine

Friend, I have sung with you before, and it was not like this. I was sitting behind you in the theater, and 25 minutes into the film, when a voice sounded out from the images, it was not the voice I remembered. 

Still, I felt a rush inside me, and the impulse to rub your back, say, “hey, that’s you!” 

But I did not. Too profane an act for the sounds I was hearing. 

I heard your voice as I have never heard it before, more deeply you than anything that has had space in our shared life. I felt your voice in the bodies around me, too, and beyond them in all the bodies in the packed theater, a hundred or more. I thought, that is my friend. And also, I have not heard this friend until now. 

I heard the mountains and the centuries of China, not as a geopolitical place, but as a myth, a people, a heart made of many hearts over millennia. I heard a power, not the power that makes borders or amasses bombs or enforces rules. Not the power that trades stocks or builds factories for microchips. I heard the power that comes from countless moments of choosing, over countless lifetimes, to pay attention to right now. 

I was going to say, “I had never been curious to go to China until now” but I remember: I have been to China. Not this one, your China. The China I visited was not the China of your voice, of the poems you let move through your body and be animated with your breath. The China you sang awakened in me the knowing that beauty is never dead. 

Even if the melodies are silenced in the throats, even if the throats are cut, even when the paintings are faced into the wall, beauty keeps going. Even when you move across an ocean, even when your mouth busies itself with words your grandparents would not have recognized, beauty is still there. Beauty can survive without a place in time or a country. Even when your mother’s fingers, blackened by coal, teach you to worship at the only altar she can, the altar of Science, beauty is still there.

Even when you have to dig through refuse bins, even when your belly rumbles from the lunches you skipped, beauty is still there.

Beauty just like this, just like your voice ringing out in a dark theater, a voice we recognize as yours but new to us fills us. This voice surrounding us now, new to us and as familiar as the shadows of leaves

dancing on my carpet in this autumn afternoon sun.

Spring’s Reply to Amanda

My friend, upon reading your words, I dropped to the floor, weeping. I wept for the ninety-nine percent of my waking life when I didn’t believe being seen this way by someone was possible. I wept for the one percent of me, hanging on to a thin thread who sings songs I thought no one would care to listen to but me …

I wept for those hearts who have given up being seen and touched deeply by another human being. I wept for the loneliness that has infected all of us and imprisoned us inside an illusion of separation. But tears also gushed for countless souls who choose to believe; choose to sing songs flowing from the heart; choose to embrace the self found in stillness; choose to resonate with the vibration of now.

China is how English-speakers call my homeland. Zhong Guo, or Zhong Yuan, is how we call our homeland. These words means the Land for the Center. Being at the center and walking the Middle Way is what my native culture values the most. Thanks for discovering that “Land for the Center” in your own heart, where beauty, truth and kindness resides.