When Memory Clarifies What Feeling Once Obscured
Created at: October 6, 2025
"This feeling may be recalled someday, though at that moment it was already lost to confusion." — Li Shangyin
A Feeling Lost, A Memory Found
To begin, Li Shangyin captures a paradox of experience: the very moment a feeling erupts is the moment it slips beyond our grasp. His line—drawn from the poem “Jinse” (“Brocade Zither,” c. 850)—suggests that comprehension arrives late, after the heat has cooled and memory has arranged the fragments. Anyone who has left a parting conversation only to understand its meaning on the walk home knows this delay. The sensation is real but undeciphered; only later does the mind fit it to a story. Thus, the poem proposes a humane patience with our own bewilderment: we do not fail a feeling by failing to name it immediately; we carry it forward until recollection grants it form.
Obliqueness in the Late Tang Aesthetic
Building on this paradox, Li’s era prized layered indirection. Late Tang poetics favored obliqueness (often called hanxu), where images allude rather than declare. Stephen Owen’s “The Late Tang” (2006) notes how Li’s “untitled” poems braid private sentiment with historical and mythic echoes, inviting understanding only in retrospect. Such density is not evasion but technique: it mirrors how emotion actually unfolds—opaque when lived, legible when remembered. Consequently, the poem’s difficulty is not a barrier but a model of cognition: the reader retraces what the self once felt, performing the same belated deciphering the speaker describes.
Strings, Dreams, and Sensorial Overflow
In turn, the poem’s imagery stages that confusion. The “fifty strings” of the brocade zither suggest a surfeit of impressions; each string plucks a year of life at once. Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream (Zhuangzi, ch. 2, c. 3rd century BCE) blurs identity, while the Shu king Du Yu’s transformation into a cuckoo folds longing into seasonal cries. Moonlit pearls born of tears and Lantian jade exhaling warm mist produce a shimmering synesthesia. Overabundance, not absence, is the problem: the mind is flooded, not barren. Only afterward—when the orchestra of images dims—can one trace the separate motifs, hearing a melody where there had been only dazzling noise.
How Memory Rewrites Confusion
Moreover, modern psychology explains why later recall refines the muddled present. Daniel Kahneman distinguishes the experiencing self from the remembering self (“Thinking, Fast and Slow,” 2011); the latter edits, compresses, and assigns meaning. Neuroscience shows that remembering is reconstructive: memories are rewritten during reconsolidation (Nader, Schafe, and LeDoux, 2000), trimming excess and knitting causal links. Meanwhile, forgetting itself (Ebbinghaus, 1885) serves clarity by erasing noise that once overwhelmed. Paradoxically, what felt most immediate may be best understood after time’s filtration. Thus Li’s line anticipates an empirical truth: we come to know what we felt by the story memory shapes, not by the storm that first swept us.
Proustian Echoes and Involuntary Remembrance
Consequently, literature repeatedly confirms Li’s intuition. Proust’s madeleine in “In Search of Lost Time” (1913) shows how taste summons a submerged world, giving coherent form to what once felt vague and ungraspable. The later image does not falsify the earlier feeling; it crystallizes it. Likewise, a familiar scent or song can unlock a precise tenderness that the original moment smudged. This is not nostalgia alone but retrospective insight: a mind, now quieter and more capacious, recognizes what it previously could only suffer. Li’s couplet anticipates that future reader within us who will finally parse the text of our own heart.
Living With Feelings We Understand Too Late
Finally, the poem invites an ethic of afterthought: accept that meaning ripens. In a world where outcomes hurry us, Li counsels a slower chronology of comprehension—akin to Chan reflections on impermanence (“Diamond Sutra,” c. 4th century: things as dreams and dew). Practices like journaling, returning to a place, or revisiting a song allow recall to condense insight without forcing it. Regret softens when we see that bewilderment was not failure but the necessary prelude to understanding. Thus, by honoring the interval between sensation and sense, we let time complete the feeling that time initially confused.