霜從地起 · The Frost Rises from the Ground
九月霜降日
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霜從地起 · The Frost Rises from the Ground
The first frost of the year arrives without weather. On the morning of 霜降 the sky can be perfectly clean, with no cloud that could have snowed and no wind that could have carried anything in, and the courtyard is still white to the last stone. The calendar word for the day says the frost came down.
The oldest Chinese definition of the day says something else:
霜降，九月中。氣肅而凝，露結為霜矣。
Frost descent: the middle of the ninth month. The air turns austere and congeals; the dew freezes into frost 1.
Read that sentence once for the surface and once for its grammar. What descends in it is the air, 氣肅; what freezes is the dew, which was already lying on things. Nothing in the sentence travels from the sky to the ground. The same page goes on to quote an older book, the Discourses of the States: 駟見而隕霜, when a certain team of stars appears, frost falls. So the falling is older than the name, and the name inherited it.
Half of the word is exact, and it is the half people feel. The cold does arrive from somewhere else, and it arrives all at once:
季秋之月，霜始降，則百工休。乃命有司曰：寒氣總至，民力不堪，其皆入室！
In the last month of autumn, when the frost first comes, the hundred crafts rest. The officers are then commanded: the cold air has arrived altogether, the people's strength cannot bear it, let them all go indoors 2.
The other half is what the eye gets wrong. Frost is water vapour going straight to ice on a surface that has cooled below the frost point, and the crystals stand off that surface as needles: 霜會組成針狀體的冰，在固體表面形成. They gather on a nail head, because a nail holds little heat and gives it away fast, so the frost accumulates on the nail's top 3. Frost does not settle on the field. It grows out of whatever is standing in the cold, each thing growing its own.
The Tang writers had watched this more closely than the calendar had. 崔損's Rhapsody on the Descent of Frost puts both motions in one line: 天地之氣，嚴凝為霜 …… 所以從地而升，應律而降, the air of heaven and earth hardens into frost … it rises out of the ground and comes down in time with the pitch-pipes 4. An anonymous Rhapsody on Autumn Frost is blunter: 雖變露而成形，不憑雲以自致, it takes its form by changing dew, and does not arrive on a cloud of its own accord 4.
Zhu Xi, asked about it, answered as a physicist: 霜只是露結成，雪只是雨結成 —— frost is only dew congealed, snow only rain congealed. And then, on where dew comes from: 露只是自下蒸上, dew merely rises up from below 4. The Great Record of Rites had said it earlier and more briefly: 陽氣勝則散爲雨露，隂氣勝則凝爲霜雪, when yang prevails it scatters into rain and dew; when yin prevails it congeals into frost and snow 5. 邵雍 made the pair into one of the plainest couplets in the language: 暖則為湛露，寒則為繁霜 …… 二物本一氣, warm, it is heavy dew; cold, it is thick frost … the two things are one air 4.
Two small things about these texts as they stand in that volume. The 集解 sets its second sentence without a comma, 氣肅而凝露結為霜矣; with the pause or without it, the two steps are the same — the air congeals, the dew becomes frost. And the 霜部 text of 邵雍 prints 寒測 where the couplet needs 寒則, a slip in the transcription; the sense is not in doubt.
So the white is not a visitor. It is the ground's own water, stood up in needles, and the sky's whole contribution was to take the warmth away. Meanwhile the word for it is a mourning word. 劉熙's Explanation of Names: 霜者，喪也，其氣慘毒，物皆喪也, frost means loss; its air is bitter and poisonous, and all things are lost by it 4.
霜不從天降 白自從地長 天高無所有 所見在腳旁 終夜無聲息 平明滿院霜
The frost does not come down from the sky; the white has grown out of the ground. The sky is high and holds nothing; what there is to see is beside your feet. All night there was no sound at all; by first light the courtyard is frost.
The chorus says the same six lines three times and changes one of them each time. The second pass puts the question to the word itself — 誰見其降者, who has ever seen it come down — and the last pass takes the white away again: 日出即無霜, once the sun is up there is no frost. Between the second chorus and the third, the song does what the Monthly Ordinances says the season does to work. The order goes out, the hundred crafts close their doors, and the order reaches one potter's yard: he shuts his kiln, the unfired bowls on the shelf wait for spring, and the clay he has kneaded for a hundred days is beaten by a single night — 我手所摶土，不如一夜霜；摶土須百日，成霜只一更. My hands' clay is no match for one night of frost: a hundred days to knead it, one watch of the night to frost it over.
Then 崔損's rhapsody hands the song its ending, because his one sentence carries both halves at once: 百工由是休矣，萬物于焉成之, the hundred crafts rest by it, and the ten thousand things are completed by it 4. The same frost that closes the workshop finishes the year's work in the field — and it is gone by mid-morning, 見晞于旭日, dried off by the rising sun. So the last five lines do not console anybody:
霜已晞 日已高 器未成 物已成 名猶在
The frost has dried off; the sun is high; the vessels are unfinished; the things are done; the name is still there. The name stays, still saying descent, long after the white has gone.
The lead instrument is the 陶笛, which has not led an issue of this channel before. It is a closed-pipe wind instrument of fired clay, played through a whistle mouth, and it is the one Chinese instrument that is made of the same material as the things it is played over: the clay of a bowl, the clay of a kiln 6. The same article notes the older Chinese clay instrument, the 塤, and says plainly that whether the two share an origin cannot now be traced, so nothing older is claimed for it here. Its voice is hollow and slightly breathy, with a small edge of clay in it, which is the sound of the ground's own water going hard. Sparse guqin under the verses, a low xiao answering in the bridge, a few pipa harmonics for the cold. No drum: frost makes no sound, and the song should not add one.
Put it on before sunrise on the first cold morning, while the white is still on the step and you can still see your own footprints dark in it. Or put it on the day your own season gets closed, and the work on the shelf will not be finished until spring. It runs about three minutes, and it ends at the moment the sun takes the white away.
References
- 1月令七十二候集解 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 2禮記 · 月令 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 3霜 · 維基百科
zh.wikipedia.org
- 4欽定古今圖書集成 · 乾象典 · 霜部 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 5大戴禮記 · 曾子天圓 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 6陶笛 · 維基百科
zh.wikipedia.org
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