Persimmons and Precision; How Asian-Diasporic Poets may restore Meaning in Modern Western Society
Why do many feel as though meaning has disappeared in modern Western society? Similarly, how might we restore it? For in an era which seemingly thrives thanks to its revolutionary scientific innovations, many philosophical titans still urge us to “distrust the equation of the real with the objectifiable” (Dupré 1). Indeed, there is a growing sentiment that underneath the veil of scientific progress, there lies a fragmented reality which ignores nuance, creative interpretation and metaphorical meaning for the sake of objectivity. Such rigidity was not always the case — during the premodern era, figurative ontological interpretations flourished alongside those derived from mathematics. This essay asks us to consider the Asian-diasporic poet, whose works have been accepted but not yet properly integrated within existing English literature, as a potential key figure in aiding this recovery of meaning, similar to that of the premodern era. By examining Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction alongside Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons”, we will identify a link between cultural hybridity as expressed by Asian-diasporic poets and premodern linguistic ontologies — both of which affirm language itself as epistemological. When understood in this manner, we’ll explore how the Asian diasporic poet uses language in a premodern manner: as an interdisciplinary conductor, a link between the now-divorced arts and sciences, a force which urges Western interests beyond the objectifiable, all of which may aid in reintroducing shared meaning back into our ‘meaningless society’.
But before we explore this exciting synthesis between premodern ontology and Asian-diasporic poetry, we must first acknowledge how our contemporary preference for scientifically grounded knowledge, which demands we fragment reality in order to master it, has handicapped our society. Nowadays, detachment of all sorts runs rampant — from the bedroom to the office. Hookup culture has left each member feeling like “the single body alone in the universe” (Olds 31) by detaching emotional intimacy from sex; the insatiable development of technology draws us further away from the natural world, as billion-dollar corporations erect AI data centres and exhaust our water supply to satisfy a never-ending quota. Most concerningly for poets like Lee, when both the sciences and humanities were thought to be covered under the umbrella of valued knowledge during the premodern era, funding for the latter continues to plummet as our governments dissuade the next generation from taking “basket-weaving” courses (Snisarenko). German philosopher Josef Pieper provides an example to exemplify such handicaps to modern understandings of knowledge extraction: If I were to present a ballpoint pen in front of an average person and ask them ‘What is this thing?’ they would be quick to label it as a writing tool, or perhaps detail its chemical composition, from the metal to the ink, ultimately remaining within the “confines of an essentially answerable problem” (96). They won’t, by contrast, approach this question through a philosophical sense not rooted in science: what is the being of this pen? What is its significance at this particular point in time? In this sense, Pieper critiques our complacency in remaining wary of mystery, obsessed with calculable questions, and our habitual ignorance of other forms of nuanced knowledge.
Interestingly, objectivity has not always been the Western standard for genuine knowledge. While there are many who might pin the Enlightenment period and the subsequent industrial periods as easy targets for the beginnings of such modern thought, others like Belgian philosopher Louis Dupré argue that our segmented ontology can be traced (at least) back to the late fourteenth century — when scientists like Galileo began to postulate a “mathematical core at the root of physical being” (66), breaking the religious link that once tied reality together. In founding his general theory of motion, Galileo presented the scientific community with a logical alternative to theological knowledge. For even if society, at that time, conceded that God might very well have created the universe, there was a shift in beliefs that “power need not continuously flow from [Him]” (68) and that our reality was instead a series of individually moving parts which abided within the calculable and mathematically comprehensible bounds of inertia. In other words, by limiting God as merely the key that started the engine, and not the cogs, the pistons, the gears and the very oil which the world runs on, Galileo seemingly affirmed that everything in our world is independent of everything else. Phenomena that were once thought to be mysterious could now theoretically be explained through a series of mathematical formulas.
However, much has already been written on the divine connectivity of the premodern era and how the world is “charged with the grandeur of God” (Hopkins, 1). And besides, it would not be appropriate to invite our multicultural poets into this discussion on theological grounds alone, given the historical weaponisation of Christianity against marginalised groups. What we may expand upon in this paper is the idea that there have existed other connectors of shared meaning besides religion, namely that of language. In his book, Poetic Diction, Barfield presents metaphor as a conductor of meaning, which reveals how 1) the destructive projection of modern philosophy onto ancient language has stripped our society of creative knowledge and 2) how meaning is embedded within language itself.
Nowadays, we are often misled by the harmful notion that ancient language appears more metaphorically rich simply because the definitions of older words have become out-of-date, those words transformed from “mere labels for material objects” into “magical charms” of seemingly more poetic prose (Barfield 45). Barfield criticises this idea by revealing the destructive projection of Western ideals onto premodern society: “Max Müller”, writes Barfield, “like his predecessors, had only been able to look at ‘meaning’ and the history of meaning from one imperfect point of view — that of abstraction” (57). Similar to Mrs Walker misrepresenting a persimmon as a “Chinese apple” in Lee’s poem (line 43), too often have the projections of Eurocentric philosophers misshapen our modern views of creative interpretations, like metaphor, as a subjective observation between separate entities, rather than an insight into ontological meaning. Numerous ancient words were all positioned in this holistic model, and Barfield explores the word ‘spiritus’ to most clearly indicate the true nature of words as undivided experiences.
During its time, Barfield explained how ‘spiritus’ meant ‘breath, life, and spirit’ together, not just simultaneously but rather as one, undivided experience that was later split into separate meanings. He asks us to shed the individual-centric perspectives of philologists like Müller and reconnect with the premodern era, when words like “spiritus” “meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own old peculiar meaning” (64). This definition of ‘spiritus’ as a word meaning all three experiences inherently suggests a link between those experiences, one that was recognised during the premodern era and has since been ignored by modern critics who, like Lee’s Mrs Walker, limit the ‘figurative’ usage of breath in place of life as just a pretty metaphor, not as meaningful as other forms of knowledge. And when considering that spiritus is just one example of a premodern experience broken down to a series of labels, we may more easily recognise the frightening normalcy of which modern society stunts ontological connectivity for the sake of exactness of definition.
However, in “Persimmons”, Lee demonstrates how that unified nature of Barfield’s spiritus lives today through poetry. Take, for example, these two lines: “Fight was what I did when I was frightened, / Fright was what I felt when I was fighting” (35–36). The first line speaks to an unseen relationship that links being afraid and wanting to fight together, at least in Lee’s own experience (a subjective experience which we’ll later argue to be genuine truth); the second suggests an intimate interpretation of the gentle nature of both the wren, the yarn, and Lee’s mother. The very name of the poem itself uplifts a mere Chinese fruit to a symbol of tradition, family, culture and meaning — all balled together into something “as heavy as sadness, / and sweet as love” (57–58). So while we cannot seamlessly implement the unitary nature of premodern words like ‘spiritus’ into everyday language (not yet, anyway), poetry allows us to tap back into a word’s history to uncover its network of meaning to the world around us. Not only this, but poetry allows us to expand words’ meaning through our lived-through context; how might a word like a foundational word like breath, which has historically been connected to life and wind, be influenced by modern phenomena like air pollution, habitual smoking, or perhaps even artificial intelligence — life without breath?
Lee’s resonance with premodern language is naturally apparent not only because he appeals to poetry but also because of his American-Chinese cultural hybridity. Many Asian languages, like Mandarin and Cantonese, are considered high-context languages that operate more subtly and understand language as an embodied, relational system, rather than a catalogue of definitions. In practice, this means that “internal meaning is usually embedded deep in the information, so not everything is explicitly stated in writing or when spoken” (Nishimura et al. 785); readers must understand a given culture’s histories and traditions to retain the full meaning of a word. The Chinese word “xin”, for example, is difficult to translate directly with an English counterpart — “heart” or “mind” — due to its holistic nature and its ties to deep, traditional values and history: “This translation fails to transmit the full meaning of the word that is deeply rooted in Chinese culture” (76) writes Jing Li in the Journal of Languages and Culture. Like spiritus, xin does not divide emotion, cognition, and bodily experience into separate categories. Instead of merely acting as one’s heart — an organ — the mind is considered to be the ‘seat of one’s emotions’, guiding one to detect all feelings more clearly, deeply and sincerely than just simply ‘feeling’ them (Li 78). Xin’s holistic nature can also be identified through its interdisciplinary nature, namely between philosophy and medicine; Li quotes Dr Yu Chang’s writings of health during the 17th century, who states that “worry agitates one’s xin and thus has repercussions on one’s lungs, or how fear agitates one’s xin, in turn damaging one’s kidneys” (78).
Coating our language with metaphorical meaning, as Lee does in his poem, might allow for modern English words to function similarly to ‘xin’ and ‘spiritus’, turning them into entities of history, culture, and philosophical meaning that exceed dictionary definitions. Such exposure would simultaneously render Western audiences more privy to the harm of reducing foreign or ancient words like ‘xin’ or ‘spiritus’ to modern English equivalents, allowing cultural hybridity to be preserved rather than eliminated. For, the harms of this modern linguistic constriction are severe — we see this when Mrs Walker physically abuses Lee because she finds it so unnatural to even consider that his usage of language isn’t rooted within the realm of grammatical or sonic precision but rather an epistemological one. Perhaps she could sympathise with Lee’s grammatical confusion between “persimmon” and “precision”, since they are two words one letter removed from each other; she might even give Lee another benefit of the doubt given that both “wren” and “yarn” are sonically similar-sounding words. Above all, however, Mrs Walker slaps Lee because she values a word’s end product over its historical network of meaning. And while Mrs Walker is but one fictional character, we can interpret Lee’s poem as embodying the larger institutional development that has devalued the creative arts, like poetry, as truth-bearing faculties. The progressive devaluation of the humanities and such holistic ontologies is supported by Dupré, who suggests that modernity elevated scientific rationality into the dominant epistemology, to the extent that “the methods of science became normative for thinking as such” (69). Again we may turn to Lee for yet another valuable insight as to how to address this devaluation of creativity and the humanities, this time through analysing his writings on his father.
In “Persimmons”, it is Lee’s father — his blind father — who plays a pivotal role in shaping Lee’s understanding of the relationship between precision and nuance; creativity and objectivity; his Chinese heritage and the modern Western environment he grew up in. Lee demonstrates throughout the poem that precision (deductive truth) is greatly treasured within the United States, or at least in the society where Lee grew up: the opening lines of the poem depict Lee being slapped as a child for ‘disrespecting’ American literary exactness through “not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision” (5–6). Lee’s father, on the other hand, lacks all apparent precision, as his blindness and lack of bodily autonomy are his defining qualities: “I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. / All gone, he answers” (68). So glaring is the physical deterioration of his body that when learning that Lee’s father was once an amazing painter, we might initially mourn his lost artistic ability since he can no longer paint with precision. We might wonder if Lee’s father can ever paint so wonderfully again, now that he can no longer command his body to brush exactly as he intended? This inherent doubt is what makes Lee’s concluding lines, which reject precision as the sole prerequisite for meaning, so powerful:
“Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times.
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.” (80–88).
The reality is that Lee’s father, in all his blindness, is just as capable a painter now as he was during his full-sighted years. It was after he became blind, not before, that Lee’s father granted him a different kind of skill to rely only on creativity, rather than visual precision, and draw the fruits “so full they want to drop from the cloth” (76). And above all, the work of Lee’s father is objectively meaningful, as Barfield critiques those who demean the arts like poetry and painting as a “meaningless emotion — as a personal emotion symbolised.” Instead, Barfield uplifts the “individualised poetic as the very source and fountainhead of all meaning” (148).
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Lee’s poem not only uplifts the arts but also reconnects with the sciences to showcase the awesome potential of precision and creativity — the sciences and humanities — as one unified foundation of knowledge. Again, Lee aligns with Barfield, who states that “there is no distinction between poetry and science as kinds of knowing, at all” (146). Barfield continues, giving the example of the strictly poetic man, who is “unable to grasp the reality of precepts at all… not yet man, man in the fullness of his stature, at all,” and compares him to the absolute scientist, or the collector — “the man who cannot grasp the reality of anything but precepts (147).” In other words, if used correctly, precision is utterly powerful. We see this synthesis when Lee’s father reminisces over his paintings and remembers the strength that accompanies his “precision in the wrist” that led to such magnificent work. That is why leaving this revelation as experienced through Lee’s father until the end of the poem is a joy; through rereading “Persimmons” in this way, we see that despite Lee asking us “How to choose” between persimmons and precision in his first stanza, he reveals that the two are intrinsically linked, as evident in his second stanza when he equates them together: “persimmons. / This is precision” (8).
Going further, Lee’s third stanza indicates that he remains hopeful of the potential of mixing Eastern and Western traditions. In this section, Donna, whose primary descriptor is her whiteness, is presented in a vulnerable manner, a stark contrast to Mrs Walker: “Donna undresses, her stomach is white” (20) — she is clearly interested in Lee’s Chinese culture. And even though Lee has forgotten most of his mother tongue, his Chinese cultural heritage can still be traced in his valuing of the importance of maintaining nuance and tradition. We see him sharing this culture, as he remembers to tell Donna that “she is beautiful as the moon” in English before making love to her (30).
Given all of this, one might ask why the White, male poet, who has dominated the English canon up to this point, should think of himself as incapable of applying this holistic ideology and solving the modern-culture problem himself? To this, Dupré would insist that change of some sort is needed — we cannot simply reverse the effects of modern fragmentation by returning to premodern premises: Dupré writes that we have witnessed “the birth of neo-Aristotelians, neo-Platonists… neo-Thomists, and, most recently, neo-nominalists” (6). The result is futile, as modern problems “cannot be treated as errors to be corrected by a simple return to an earlier truth…that truth is no longer available; it has vanished forever” (7). So, despite it being the source of ridicule and institutional abuse, it is precisely Lee’s cultural gap that allows him and other multicultural poets that holistic perspective. While they are abashed for their otherness, ethnic poets and their premodern-esque insights allow for the process of unthinking to occur, which invites strange, unfamiliar reinterpretations of the English language to uncover hidden meanings:
“Unless he has enough imagination and enough power of detachment from established meanings or thought-forms of his own civilisation to enable him to grasp the meaning of fundamental terms — unless, in fact, he has the power of not only thinking but also of unthinking — he will simply reinterpret everything they say in terms of subsequent thought” (Barfield 137–138).
By contrast, this ethnically interpretive quality simply is generally not as intrinsically available to the Western scholar, one so “absolutely rigid under those verbal ghosts of the physical sciences, which today make up practically the whole meaning system of so many European minds” (Barfield 140).
Again, this is not to say that English words also carry with them rich histories and deep meanings — Barfield’s whole book is testament to that deep pool of meaningful connection within the language. His discussion of the history of the word ruin and how Shakespeare appealed to its history is a vivid example of how Western poets have awoken sleeping meanings through coating language with strangeness — exactly the kind of linguistic renewal Lee performs in Persimmons. He details how the word originally referred to the action of ‘falling down’, which can be traced all the way back to 1375 when Chaucer used it in his Knight’s Tale: “Min is the ruine of high halls, / The falling of the towers and of the walls.” Only in 1454 was the first recorded instance of ruins being used to describe fragments of masonry, and the meaning of the word became amplified as a living, growing entity. Shakespeare, recognising language as a network of living organisms, used ruin’s previous meanings to his advantage, coating words with strangeness that allowed for audiences’ own creative interpretations: “The word ruin, then, has grown with Shakespeare’s help into a warm and living thing, a rich piece of imaginative material ready at hand for anyone who has the skill to evoke its power” (Barfield 120).
Indeed, “Persimmons” suggests that we need more of the creativity that poets provide, ethnic or not. For it is the poet’s interest in mystery, or understanding that their truth isn’t the only genuine one, that will allow us to shed the drags of modern civilisation like an “old garment” (Barfield 22) and loosen the complete authority that precision holds over knowledge and meaning. And it is the poet who understands that they are not faced with the monumental task of inventing new meanings within reality, for we can never “invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects and between objects and feelings”; they understand that uncovering such truths “are the function of poetry to reveal” (Barfield 72).
However, while this essay focuses specifically on the Asian diasporic poet like Lee, it is the multicultural poet who may, more easily, awaken new relationships between words and awake those “sleeping beauties” that nowadays lie “prone and rigid in the walls of Castle Logic” (Barfield 113–114) by introducing new, defamiliarised metaphorical interpretations of our society by drawing from their cultural hybridity. While not exclusive to them, those who’ve grown up in different cultures are more privy to our institutionalised structure of oppression that limits words as labels and have exposure to other, more holistic knowledge traditions. Referring back to Li, the importance of properly understanding xin and its role within Chinese culture more broadly suggests that knowledge may be gained without relying solely on deductive reasoning, or scientific logic: “In Chinese culture,” writes Li, “xin is considered as a source of wisdom in a person… [and] has a higher ‘status’ than naozi (brain or mind)” (83). Li continues, remarking on how Chinese tradition affirms that knowledge gained through one’s naozi is calculated according to one’s self-interest, whereas “xin ‘can think and know’ without being contaminated by ego” (83). It is the multicultural poet’s access to both Eastern and Western ontologies that grants them the unique ability to coat familiar English words with strangeness and invite all readers to creatively interpret their “experience, [their] meaning”, which are “quite different from mine, for it is the product of quite different concepts” (Barfield 22) to establish nuanced, genuine truths.
Exciting as it is, we must at the same time acknowledge that these multicultural insights balance on top of a knife. For as many lines of cultural recollections that bloom between Lee’s poetry, they are overshadowed by him pouring out his painful experience of colonial abuse and assimilation thrust upon him; Lee being forced to “stand in the corner” (3) after making a mistake sprouting from his ethnic misunderstandings is but one example of institutionalised cultural discrimination. Through such cultural trauma, there will soon come a time when most multicultural poets inherit the Western mindset that surrounds them — when the last bits of cultural hybridity are slapped out of them in place of conformity. Lee details his Chinese heritage slipping through his mind’s fingers as he tries to teach Donna his mother tongue: “Crickets: chiu chiu.” Dew: I’ve forgotten. / Naked: I’ve forgotten” (23–24). Indeed, significant decolonisation progress has been made in granting these scholars the opportunity to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their established peers, yet most works of the ethnic poet remain, unsurprisingly, detached from our existing literary catalogue; they are, similar to modern society’s mistreatment of words as mere static labels, isolated from a living dialogue and even less so applied within our modern context. That multicultural scholar still waits on the doormat, glancing through the windows of complete institutional acceptance, yearning to be fully and unconditionally welcomed in — and it is getting deathly cold outside.
The merits of inviting multicultural poetry don’t just diversify our literature or fulfil a DEI quota; rather, doing so will allow us to restore our capacity for experiencing meaning itself. Multicultural poets disrupt the rigid precision of modern Western thought, mending the broken relationship between the arts and the sciences, coating familiar words with strangeness so the Western poet too may build on those insights and reopen our language to greater meaning. Thanks to their cultural background, they use words in a holistic structure that demands one to delve into that word’s history, traditions, and ontological connections to fully retain its meaning. The vast potential of cultural diversification is not limited to literature, by any means. This essay centres itself around just one Asian diasporic poet and his individualised perspective through his Chinese culture and his unique interactions with his own limited experience of the Western world, which, as we’ve discussed, should nonetheless be valued as truth. Imagine then, for a moment, what possibilities await us if we can get over our seat of superiority and mix other cultural traditions into our legal, healthcare, and political systems — upwards and outwards, our tree of meaning will sprout. How might the histories of words continue to evolve, now that English words will carry foreign meanings more open to being moulded and guided towards new ideas of reality?
Similar to Lee’s instructions on how to eat persimmons — the object of his own personal meaning — we must integrate such insights with grace. Gently, we must “put the knife away” (Lee 11) and tenderly peel back the layers of those different from us. We must celebrate their cultural interpretations of English texts, ask questions about why certain links are drawn, and learn from such traditions that rest comfortably in mystery. We must embrace the entirety of their multicultural poet’s experience with patience and love, all of them, “to the heart” (Lee 11–17).
Bibliography
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Dupré, Louis. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. Yale University Press, 1993.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.” Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Penguin Classics, 1985.
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Li, Jing, Christer Ericsson, and Mikael Quennerstedt. “The Meaning of the Chinese Cultural Keyword Xin.” Journal of Languages and Culture, vol. 4, no. 5, June 2013, pp. 75–89.
Nishimura, Shoji, Anne Nevgi, and Seppo Tella. “Communication Style and Cultural Features in High/Low Context Communication Cultures: A Case Study of Finland, Japan, and India.” Academic Research International, vol. 2, no. 2, 2012, pp. 785–795.
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Pieper, Josef. The Silence of St Thomas. St. Augustine’s Press, 1999
Snisarenko, Alina. “Ford Tells Students to Not Pick ‘Basket-Weaving Courses’ in Wake of OSAP Cuts.” CBC News, 17 Feb. 2026, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-osap-cuts-9.7094009.
