The Rooster and The String

One enjoyable aspect of living in the American ‘melting pot’ of ethnicity is that people recognize and, if time and opportunity allow, celebrate everyone’s holidays. Although life is already quite hectic, I would vote to recognize even more holidays. Unfortunately, since becoming a citizen and being able to vote I have not found anything resembling this idea on the ballot. I suppose a logical objection to a growing number of holidays might be expense, and many of them celebrate similar concepts. Although the rationales behind many of our diverse holidays overlap, there are still advantages to celebrating more of them.

Multiple celebrations of the New Year are a good example. Last Friday evening, I held a bubbling beverage and watched the lighted ball atop a building in Times Square drop down to usher in the year 2005. The Times Square celebration stems from a calendar worked out in the 1580s at the order of Pope Gregory XIII. But, 2005, or, alternatively, the Chinese lunar year 4703, will arrive again with the Chinese New Year celebrated on February 9. Thus, one advantage of celebrating both New Year observances is that, separated by a little over a month, the two New Years give me a chance to test drive my resolutions and see which are likely to last (and which to drop quietly). Although the Chinese adopted the Western calendar in 1911, the lunar calendar is still used for festive occasions, so if I were in China I would have even more time to eat, drink, and fine-tune my resolutions, because New Year festivities traditionally start on the first day of the lunar month and continue until the fifteenth, when the moon is brightest.

Another advantage of celebrating both New Year observations is the opportunity to revisit the ways humans have tried to understand and describe the world around them with the stories and myths that have grown up around the holiday. The Chinese Lunar Year is the longest chronological record in history, dating from 2637 BC, when the Emperor Huang Ti introduced the first cycle of the zodiac. The Chinese zodiac has twelve signs, referred to as the twelve Earthly Branches. These were used to keep track of time and to record events. Unlike the Western linear concept of time as a straight line from the past through the present to the future, the traditional Chinese concept of time is cyclical. This means that after these twelve Earthly Branches came to be designated by animals, every twelve years the same animal name or ‘sign’ reappears. Because most people were illiterate when this system arose, it was a practical solution to describing and using the passage of time. Any event would be associated with the animal sign reigning during its occurrence, and a child would simply have to remember under what sign she or he was born.

Folk tales developed around this system. According to one legend, Buddha summoned all the animals to a New Year’s celebration where he was to designate the first twelve animals arriving to be the signs of the twelve year cycle. When the cat heard the news, he let his friend the rat know about it and they decided to go together. When the time came, however, the rat did not wake the cat who slept through the morning. This is why there is no year of the cat and why cats hate rats. The rat knew that a small animal like himself would not be able to compete with the others, so he begged the ox to let him ride on his head. The ox agreed and they went together. But just as they were about to arrive the rat jumped off the ox’s head and crossed the finish line first. This is why the year of the rat is the first in the cycle of years, and the year of the ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig follow according to their arrival orders. Chinese folk stories maintain that one’s personality profile can be predicted from the animal presiding during one’s birth time, and known as the ‘animal that hides in your heart.’ If you have visited Chinese restaurants you have probably seen these animal signs and discovered the profile for your birth year found on the paper mats beneath your plate. The year 2005 is the Year of the Rooster. People born under this sign ‘tend to hide their conservative natures via a display of aggression and self-confidence, however they are very dignified.’ Rooster traits include loving to be the focus of attention, showing scant regard for others, vigilance, decisiveness, straight-forwardness, and accuracy. Although it is possible to cast a rooster’s actions in the afore-mentioned terms, other predicted traits are that roosters are ‘excellent with money,’ ‘great purists,’ and ‘have minds that work along scientific lines,’ which is to project strictly human characteristics on the poor bird.

This kind of anthropo-morphism, or projecting human qualities onto non-human entities, is part of early attempts to understand and describe the world. Folk explanations of the world are frequently anthropo-morphic, and they range from animistic ascriptions of life and human-like motives to inanimate objects, to the ancient Greeks explaining events around them as the actions and whims of the human-like gods. Such creative mythical structures make sense of the world. These analogical ascriptions of human qualities to natural objects reflect ideas about which human qualities were valued more than others. Besides many of the resulting pronouncements being wrong, generalizing our notions of human traits and projecting them on a large universe of natural phenomena results in a powerful ethnocentrism and parochialism. This perspective is much like the idea a worm has of an apple: that the whole world is an apple.

It is typical of parochialism that its holders do not consider themselves parochial. We seldom realize how parochial we are; we know only how parochial others are in comparison to us. Yet, it is difficult to draw a clear line between parochial and non-parochial anthropomorphisms because no matter how abstract many of our pronouncements about the world may be, they are rooted in our need to understand and describe nature in human terms: linguistically. Human language use projects onto the world around us the limitations of our ability to communicate and describe. Even the concept of time is problematic. We may smile at the thought of a twelve year cycle of animal signs, but many issues remain to be resolved regarding understanding of time: what time actually is; whether time exists when nothing is changing; why time’s arrow points forward and not backward; whether the past and the future are real; whether it is sensible to speak of time flowing; and whether the present is an objective feature of reality or only a product of subjective experience. Even the stresses and strains of Einstein’s theory of relativity are described in terms of an analogy between Einstein’s space and a piece of elastic material such as a plain rubber band. The current ‘string theory’ explanation of the space-time continuum is no better.

The traditional myths and stories concerning holidays of all cultures derive from our species’ imaginative attempts to understand the world around us – and they are a reminder that there will always be new discoveries that will make what we think we know today appear primitive and parochial. Until that day I would rather celebrate the Year of the Rooster than the Year of the String.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

Some 6 or 7 years ago when I became interested in attempting to write poetry, a friend pointed me in the direction of The St. Louis Poetry Center, a group founded in 1946, which holds free monthly workshops in the autumn, winter, and spring of each year. At that time, I’d written a handful of pieces I thought might be poems. When I read them to a close relative the response was swift and certain: “I don’t know where you’re coming from, Bobby—but the trains don’t run there anymore.”

At my first visit to a Sunday workshop of the SLPC, I was able to say one of my poems and found a group of people willing to listen and offer sincere suggestions how I might improve its composition and my reading of the piece. The leader of the workshop that afternoon, or “poet-critic,” was Richard Newman, editor of River Styx magazine. Since that first visit, the SLPC has become an indispensable component of my writing passage.

The St. Louis Poetry Center’s long tradition of making newcomers feel welcome and providing an outstanding reading and discussion forum for beginners and seasoned poets alike, continues in the coming months.

Poet Michael Heffernan and Poet/Editors Laurence Lieberman (University of Illinois Press) and Christian Wiman (Chicago’s venerable Poetry magazine) will be the featured poet-critics at free Sunday Workshops sponsored by The St. Louis Poetry Center, held at 1:30pm at the University City Public Library’s 2nd-floor meeting room during the months of February, March, and April. Specific dates are given below.

Interested attendees are invited to send a poem to the featured poet-critic for possible critique during the afternoon workshops. Details for doing so are available at the SLPC’s website, www.stlouispoetrycenter.org, or by writing the SLPC at 567 North & South Rd., #8, St. Louis, MO 63130.

Sunday, February 20, 2005, will feature Michael Heffernan, Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. Mr. Heffernan’s latest volume of poems, his seventh, is The Night Breeze Off the Ocean, forthcoming in early 2005. He is the recipient of three grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence. His poems have appeared in APR, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Margie, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and many other reviews.

On Sunday, March 20, 2005, the SLPC will host poet-critic Laurence Lieberman. Mr. Lieberman is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Champaign and poetry editor of University of Illinois Press, where he founded the poetry series in 1971. He has published thirteen collections of poetry and criticism, most recently, Hour of the Mango Black Moon, poems with paintings by Stanley Greaves and others (Peepal Tree Press of Leeds, England, 2004). His poetry has been widely anthologized, recently in The Body Electric (APR/Norton) and The Best American Poetry. His awards include grants from the NEA and the Jerome Shestack Prize from APR. Mr. Lieberman received a William Carlos Williams Citation from the Poetry Society of America. New work appears in APR, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Margie, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

On Sunday, April 24, 2005, Christian Wiman will serve as poet-critic for the SLPC workshop. Mr. Wiman is editor of Poetry magazine. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1998), which won the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, and Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). He has also written a book of criticism, Ambition and Survival: Essays on Poetry (Zoo Press, 2004). His poems and essays appear frequently in such places as Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.


Each Sunday workshop will last from 1:30pm until 3:30pm. Messrs. Heffernan, Lieberman and Wiman have graciously agreed to hold book signings at the conclusion of each of their respective workshops.
Of further note: The St. Louis Poetry Center’s National Contest has a deadline of Feb. 15, 2005. A Grand Prize of $2,000 will be awarded to the winning poem and the winning poem will be published in Vol. 4 of Margie/The American Journal of Poetry. 2nd and 3rd prizes will also be awarded. Poet Denise Duhamel will serve as Finalist Judge. Please consult the website or write the SLPC for complete entry guidelines.

I am grateful to have discovered The St. Louis Poetry Center. I hope, in the coming months, we will welcome many new members: young, old, in-between, and from all walks of life—further enhancing the broad diversity of distinctive voices already present.

Robert Nazarene is a poet, the Director of the Executive Committee of the SLPC’s Board, and founding editor of Margie/The American Journal of Poetry.

Fiction writer Kathryn Davis will be visiting Washington University as the Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English. She will read from her books on Thursday, February 17th, at 8 pm and give a talk on the craft of fiction on the following Tuesday, February 22nd, at 8 pm, both programs are in the Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201 of the main campus.

Kathryn Davis is the author of five novels, including The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf; Hell; and Versailles. She has received a Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Of her work, Kellie Wells, assistant professor in the English department and fiction writer on the faculty of The Writing Program at Washington University says: “Kathryn Davis’s fiction defies description. No other writer boldly dares to claim-stake the same fictional territory. No one else writes a sentence like Davis or bores through the world’s deceptive veneer with the gimlet eye that she does. Her voice is one of the most interesting and original in American fiction.

The Center for the Humanities Advisory Board 2005-2006