"We are both drifters across the world. We meet. We feel. Do we need to know each other?"1
Introducing Myself
In a law career, I worked for a federal judge, practiced in private firms, and earned tenure on a university law faculty. As a musician, I performed on festival stages and town gazebos, fiddled for square dances, and played honky-tonk music in bars, theaters, and rural dance barns. Sometimes a crowded dance floor; sometimes an audience of empty chairs.
In retirement, I read poetry and write songs. My home in Ohio sits on a ridge that a glacier left on its retreat after the last ice age.2 Woods and wild brush cover this hill of clay and till, which is now a nature preserve. My berry patch and rock garden are only a few miles from elaborate geometric earthworks that Native Americans constructed more than a thousand years ago.3
Out in the woods, friends have placed a bench in memory of my dear son, overlooking a ravine. On good days, I follow a deer trail into the woods to the bench and join the passing season.4
Here are three quotes from Tang dynasty poets that strike close to home. First, from Li Shangyin, a reflection on my career path:
Worse Than Ignorance:
Aspiring scholars knowledgeable in music, because of this knowledge, squander their careers.5
Next, from Du Fu, a suggested resolution:
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I should give up being an old man who sings crazy songs, aim instead for a mind of no-attachment.6
Finally, from Bai Juyi, the sigh of self-realization:
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I cannot cease to play,
Even if no one listens.7
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Endnotes
1. Po Chu-I (Bai Juyi), Song of the Pipa Player, in WaiLi Yip, trans., Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres (Durham: Duke U. Press, 1977) 295.
2. Ohio History Central, Ice Age. In 1926, a farmer in nearby Johnstown, Ohio dug up a mastodon skeleton. Thousands of years ago, local fauna included mammoths and giant ground sloths.
3. The Newark Earthworks date to the Hopewell Culture (BCE 100 to CE 400). Wikipedia, Newark Earthworks. This area has many resources valuable to those early residents: flint nodules in rocky ridges, clays, streams, salt licks, and abundant white-tailed deer. “Hopewell” is the term that archaeologists apply to these people’s cultural sphere. We do not know what these people called themselves.
4. The bench is inscribed with the closing line from Ease My Heart, the song of grief and healing that I wrote for Daniel’s memorial service: “May a peace blossom quietly.”
5. Chloe Garcia Roberts, trans., Li Shangyin, Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New York: New Directions Books poetry pamphlet#14, 2014) 13.
6. From Du Fu, Distant View of the Temple on Ox Head in Burton Watson, trans., The Selected Poems of Du Fu (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2002) 103.
7. From “Abandoning the Qin,” as translated in Henochowicz, Anne. “Evolving Antiquity: ‘Guqin’ Ideology and National Sentiment.” College Music Symposium, 49/50, 2009: 375–384.