月不牽人 · The Moon Pulls No One
夜深無舟還
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月不牽人 · The Moon Pulls No One
Every twelve hours the water climbs the stone stairs of the river town, stops at the third step, and goes back down. Nobody calls it. It has kept that hour for longer than anyone here has been counting.
This song stands on those same stairs at midnight, and it turns on one Chinese word that carries two lives at once. 信 is a letter, and it is also keeping your word. The tide has 信 and no heart: it is punctual because something else is pulling it. The man who wrote a date on a piece of paper and went away has neither.
王充's 《論衡》, the book of scepticism finished in the first century, already ties the tide to the moon. The chapter does it while disproving that the bore of the Qiantang is the ghost of the murdered 伍子胥 1:
濤之起也，隨月盛衰，小大滿損不齊同。
When the tide rises it waxes and wanes with the moon; full and slack are never the same size. 王充's argument is a gift to a song like this one: the water is regular because the moon is regular, not because the water means anything by it.
The other source is 張若虛's 《春江花月夜》, which opens with the moon and the tide rising together — 春江潮水連海平，海上明月共潮生 — and then asks the sky, 江畔何人初見月？江月何年初照人？ 2. Its answer is 人生代代無窮已，江月年年望相似: each generation of people is endless, and the river moon, year after year, looks the same. That sameness is the first verse here — 昨宵止於此，今夜還至此, last night the water stopped here and tonight it comes here again.
The same poem wishes 願逐月華流照君, I would follow the moonlight and shine on you. This song refuses that wish and asks the moon something colder:
我問天上月 既能牽得水 何不牽一人
I ask the moon in the sky: since you can pull the water, why not pull one person.
潮信 — the tide's word — is a Tang commonplace, and the two poems that made it one are the poems this chorus argues with. 李益《江南曲》 3 is the plainest: 嫁得瞿塘賈，朝朝誤妾期。早知潮有信，嫁與弄潮兒。 I married a merchant of the Qutang gorge, and morning after morning he missed our date; had I known the tide keeps its word, I would have married a tide-rider. 白居易《浪淘沙》 4 turns the same edge inward: 相恨不如潮有信，相思始覺海非深。 In resentment I cannot even equal the tide, which keeps its word; in longing I learn the sea is not deep.
Both poems measure a man against the tide and find him short. This song gives the tide its advantage back. Water that arrives on time because the moon drags it is not faithful, it is compelled — 故潮之信者，非信乃勢耳 — and a man who came the same way would not be arriving at all: 我願君自來，不因他人牽.
The second verse sets the other meaning of 信 beside the first. 曾有一紙書，書上寫歸期，云待燕歸時 — one sheet of paper, one season written on it, the swallows' return. 燕已歸兩度，書在人未還. The swallows have done it twice. The paper is still here, and the man is not.
Four lines put the two returners beside the one who does not come back and stop there: 潮又來，燕又歸，君一去，不復還. The tide comes back, the swallows come back, and he left once.
The instrument under all of this is the 尺八, an end-blown bamboo flute whose blowing edge is cut across the outer rim of the pipe, so the breath itself becomes part of the note. It has five holes and a hollow low register, and it holds a long note past the point where a smaller flute would have moved on, which is what water does at the top of the tide. Sparse guqin sits under the verses, a low xiao answers in the bridge where the argument turns, faint pipa harmonics stand in for the light lying on the water, and no drum enters anywhere. The first chorus stays close and breathy; the last one opens out; the outro thins to one flute line over black water.
Play it last thing at night, when the hour is doing exactly what it always does and one person is not.
References
- 1論衡 · 書虛篇 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 2春江花月夜 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 3江南曲 · 李益 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 4浪淘沙 · 白居易 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
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