Self-Medication, the True International Language

Maybe it's my extremely American private education, or some kind of xenophobia that I am afraid to confront, or even a more altruistic form of patriotism or genetic memory, but I've always been more attached to American and English poets than those of any other extraction. My countrymen gave me the kind of controlled misery that appealed to my WASP-iness

But recently, in the midst of a particularly dark time, I stumbled upon a collection of Chinese poems from the Great Dynasties. These translations were surprisingly sympathetic to my current cause. I'm suddenly guilty for not taking to heart Michael and Lionel's insistence that "We are the world" (one depressed, heartbroken, functionally alcoholic world).

All of us receive
am empty body
All of us
take
the universe's breath
We die
and still
must live again
come back to earth
all recollection lost
Ai! No more than this?
Think hard about it
All things turn
stale and flat on the tongue
It comforts people? No
Better
now and again
to get blind drunk on the floor
alone

(Wang Fan-Chin, T'ang dynasty)

Here we are forced to confront the many faces of death. In the first lines, is the poet speaking literally? Is he referring to an actual physical death followed by a spiritual reincarnation into a new physical body? Or, is he lamenting the constant reincarnations we are forced to experience in THIS life, due to various emotional deaths? Either way, no matter what life (or lives) we are handed, it seems that we can all agree that booze is a definite necessity.