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passion and madness that sent the heart into spasms and pressed the mind to distraction. This was about the last thing a new state needed. “Poetry mustn’t be taken seriously as a serious thing laying hold of truth,” Socrates warns. “The man who hears it must be careful, fearing for the regime in himself.” Thus: Hesiod’s magnificent Works and Days, banned. Homer, banned. There has always been, about poetry, this sense of the magical, that it was a key to something intimately bound to the human mystery. It was no surprise to me to find, when I went back to re-read Turing’s “Can Machines Think?” essay, that the very first thing the great mathematician dreamed up to ask a digital brain was: “Write me a sonnet.” Poetry has always marked a test. Socrates and Plato gatekeep the poets out of their republic because they know the mad part of the soul verse can touch. It is hard to blame them. After all, they were among the earliest Western minds to try to dispel madness and superstition and sophistry. Without their logic and effort there would be no Aristotle, no science, none of the sense of our world as a comprehensible machine. The confidence to philosophize – which for them meant also to poke at the political wiring of our world – demanded the break from poetry and mysticism as a source of action or legitimacy. Had they failed, we’d still be in the dark. But had they completely succeeded? We’d hardly be human.

You know, as I’ve said, when I first moved to China, there were so many things that baffled me. (There still are, to be honest.) But very high on that list was a peculiarity of ancient Chinese political life. For thousands of years the greatest poets and painters had also been emperors and politicians. Su Dongpo, for instance, the official who turned the lake city of Hangzhou into one of the great cultural centers of human history is also one of China’s best regarded poets. The calligraphy of the Qing dynasty Mingzhen Emperor is marked with a temprament of transcendent delicacy. It’s not merely that we’d never seriously expect a Western political figure to make great art – or even to have interesting ideas or be able to write these days. It’s not even that many of the most significant Chinese political documents are paintings of mountains or rivers, that even letters from high officials are often rated as great art.

My first encounter with this strange mix, art and power mingled, produced a predictable Western reaction: It’s amazing how many “Renaissance Men” China had, I thought. These officials seemed to have mastered so many different talents. What I did not understand was that these men had not, in fact, mastered many different talents, at least not in any way I might understand it. They were not “Renaissance Men”, but actually a different breed, operating on a deeper level. They had mastered one skill. This was the cultivation of a finely-tuned inner energy – an instinct powerful enough that it could be turned with equal ease to calligraphy or warfare. This sort of effort took time. It demanded that knife-in-the-leg focus of Su Qin. And it demanded faith that some sort of enlightenment would in fact take place. For this, they had thousands of years of history as proof. Once this breakthrough to inner knowledge happened, once they developed a fine sensitivity to the underlying force of power, then they could tap into it for anything. Fighting wars. Counseling princes. Fishing. Composing poetry.

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