Tags
alcohol, Chinese history, drinking games, ghost girl, lament, mythology, Qiantang, sonnet, Southern Qi Dynasty, Su Xiaoxiao
the ghost who drank me under the table
* * *
Dreaming, I walked on the shores of West Lake.
In a spangled coach, pulled by a pale horse,
I met a comely ghost. “My one mistake,”
the girl said, “was to die beautiful. Coarse,
ugly girls sleep in peace. But not for me.
There is always some idiot writing
poems in my name, calling me foxy,
a man-eater. Pff.” she sighed, untying
the heart-shaped knot of her robe. I stopped her.
Why make the dead’s lives harder than they are?
“Drink with me,” she offered. Ghosts aren’t able
to get drunk, but she liked gin’s raw flavor.
“Thank you,” I said as I lit her cigar.
Smiling, she drank me under the table.
* * *
Notes:
Su Xiaoxiao (蘇小小, died sometime around 501 AD) was a famous courtesan and poet from the city of Qiantang during the Southern Qi Dynasty (479–502 AD). Her tomb is on the shores of West Lake, in what is known today as Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China. Being gifted and beautiful (as legend will have it) she was the romantic heroine in much poetry written by Tang dynasty poets. Even today she stars in her own Chinese soap opera, Generation of the courtesan Su Xiaoxiao, staring Yamei Wang.
memories of my ghost sista 
I like that idea, the words of the living not allowing the peace of being dead, whatever that is…dead, I mean. I’m imagining something like a dressing room where performers wait, and are called to participate in dramas written by the living. Something like the “green room” of talk shows, or the dressing room of a strip joint.
Later….
I understand reality is how we construct it, but the idea that the dead somehow stop interacting with us just because they’re, you know, dead, seems … bizarre. Isn’t that what Piaget’s theory of object permanence is all about? Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it has stopped existing. And yet, at least in a lot of Western dogma, there is a giant gulf between the living and dead (who only show up in rare occasions, usually as villains in really bad horror movies) I suppose if believing that helps a person get through the night, oh well, but it is rather limiting in one’s ability to enjoy the world around them.
I commune with the dead every day, and spread their words, and their filmic visions, etc. It’s like W.S. Burrought saying in “The Western Lands” he was writing his way to immortality. Kurt Vonnegut said something interesting when he did a non-fiction piece on the Maharishi…that the only Western form of meditation he knew of was reading…calming the mind and letting association take the reader into different realms. He said it better…I’m lame.
Later…
That’s a great connection — reading and mediation — perhaps birding is in a similar vein. One must go out into nature and then force themselves to not only be quiet but stay still, waiting for the birds to come to you. I’ve never been good at mediation, my mind keeps jumping about when I’m suppose to be serene. But perhaps it is the fact that nature is usually cold, wet and uncomfortable that allows me to focus and be still? Perhaps I should try mediating in a meat-locker? Just a thought.
Sounds like “The Importance of Being Ernest” with the nature is uncomfortable bit… I think that’s why people fish. The people who do fish don’t seem much like the meditative types, and they’ve stumbled upon a method which doesn’t have the stigma of sounding too new age-ish. I don’t know why else they would do it.
Later…
Oh, with fishermen it’s the giant rubber boots and trousers. There is no earthly reason under the sun why anyone would find it necessary to stand in freezing mountain streams wearing what is, for all purposes, the lower half of a BDSM suit, unless it was answering some deep, primitive kink. Sure, they make galoshes and waders look ugly as sin so no one will accuse them of looking like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, but at the end of the day you’re still wearing rubber and standing with your junk immersed in freezing water for hours on end claiming to be waiting for a fish to come to you. If that’s not all the signs of sexual depravity then I don’t know what is.
Exactly what I mean…there’s got to be some deeper draw to that idiotic activity. Cold, wet, boring, long trips, lots of investment, and a fish might be the prize. Nonsense…there’s some subconcious attraction, because consicously no One in their right mind would do it.
Later….
that is so true … and can be applied to so many things in life: monster truck shows, reality shows, almost everything called “lite jazz,” Andrew Dice Clay (the list goes on and on)