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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

One important component of egocentric space is the sense of
up and down. This may seem to be a purely informational matter.
But Lǐ Bái takes up this aspect of spatial direction in ways that devel-
op its social and emotional significance. To a certain point, one can
read the poem as a sort of conservative Confucian eulogy to the good
wife, the loyal woman dutifully waiting for her husband. This Con-
fucian reading is consistent with certain aspects of the spatial rela-
tions of the boy and girl, which place the boy above the girl, spatially
and thus, by implication, evaluatively. At the outset, he is upright on
a bamboo horse, plucking plums from a tree; she is bent over pulling
flowers. When they marry, her head is down so low that he cannot
even see her eyebrows, as he calls to her, implicitly from above. When
she comes to accept him as her husband, she raises her head only so
much that he can now at last see her eyebrows. In this reading, their
spatial relation of up and down is not merely physical; it suggests
social and affective hierarchization as well.
But things are complicated here. When the speaker lifts her
head to show her eyebrows, she is asserting that she now accepts the
physical intimacy that she had refused earlier. In that sense, she has
been “below,” but not subordinate. In connection with this, it is im-
portant to keep in mind that Lǐ Bái was writing during the Tang dy-
nasty, a time when women had particular power and authority
(though within limits; see Lewis 179-189). Moreover, he was a Daoist;
indeed, he was ordained as a Daoist priest (Little 25). Daoism is par-
ticularly consequential here. The imagery of the poem resonates with
yīn/yáng divisions. Yīn and yáng are the constitutive principles of all
things, part of an overarching, continually self-transforming dynamic
of existence. The yīn is feminine, dark, passive; the yáng, masculine,
light, active. The Dàodéjīng stresses the primacy of the feminine prin-
ciple, the yīn, and the way that it supersedes or overcomes the yáng
(see, for example, chapter 61).
The social and emotional complexities of spatial relations are
developed subsequently in the poem. The sorrowful cries of the mon-
keys may be taken to come simply from “above” or from the “skies.”
This preserves the vertical spatial orientation, apparently without so-
cial or emotional consequence. But the Chinese here says that the cries
come from “tiān” (天), Heaven, the source of the “tiāndào” (天道)the
“way of heaven” that all Daoists seek to follow. Employing what Chi-
nese critics refer to as “emotion-scene fusion” (see Pan 49-60, and
Samei 252), Lǐ Bái indicates that the speaker’s relation to Heaven, the

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