Month: November 2007

The Machine Age

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Hamill’s The Essential Chuang T’zu and am having a hard time deciding how to accurately convey the essence of the work. In a novel I could discuss some of the themes using short passages; in a book of poetry, it’s easy to quote a few poems that are representative of the poet’s theme and writing style.

I’m not about to quote five or pages pages, though, and if I simply quoted a few lines it might well sound like the Taoteching. So, I’ve resorted to quoting some of the shorter tales in their entirety, even though those don’t always seem as meaningful to me as the longer sections.

Keeping that in mind, this is a tale that seems like it must have been written for modern men who type their response on machines they neither understand nor control:

HEAVEN AND EARTH
[From Chapter 12]

TZU-KUNG WENT SOUTH TO CH’U, AND, RETURNING BY way of the state of Chin, he was passing along the south shore of the Han River when he saw a big fellow working in a one-acre held of vegetables. He was climbing down into a pit well with a pitcher, then climbing out and pouring the water on his crop. It looked like he was working himself to the bone without getting much advantage from his efforts.

“There’s a mechanism for this,” Tzu-kung said, “and with it, in a single day you could inundate a hundred acres. It doesn’t take Mach effort, and it yields a great advantage. Wouldn’t you like to have one?”

The gardener rose up and gave him a look. “How’s it work?”

“It’s a machine constructed of wood, heavy at one end, light at the other. It lifts the water like a dipper, lots of it, so much that it gushes out as if it were boiling over. It’s called a well sweep.”

The gardener made an ugly face, then said with a laugh, “I’ve heard my teacher say, ‘Where there are machines, there will be machine problems; where there are machine problems, the mechanical will find entry into the hearts and minds of the people; when people’s hearts and minds become mechanical, what’s pure and simple is spoiled. Without the pure and simple, the spirit knows no rest. And when the spirit knows no rest, even the Tao can’t carry you on.’ It’s not that I don’t know about your machine, but that I’d be ashamed to use such a thing.”

I’m glad I don’t have to draw my water from a well or three miles away from the nearest creek, but I suspect that many of modern man’s problems do stem from the overuse of machines. Some seem to think that our machines have allowed us to transcend Nature, but I’m not one of them.

We’ve traded the stress of scratching out a subsistence from the land for the stress of trying to keep up with the machines we’ve created.

Manic Depressive?

I recently downloaded fifty dollars of music from iTunes, songs I’d marked over the last month or two, and I’m just getting around to listening to all of them, mostly while playing a mindless game called “Big Bang Reaction.”

It’s a pretty diverse group of songs, including soulful ballads, New-age synthesizers, and reggae. I like to think I have a fairly wide range of tastes when it comes to music. Just how wide, though, doesn’t become apparent until I stop and listen carefully to the lyrics, and the music behind the lyrics.

Though I’d really like to include the music, I’m not willing to tempt fate, so I’ll just include the lyrics from two of the songs which are found all over the net, including the artists’ official sites.

The first lyrics are from Bob Sinclair’s Western Dream album:

LOVE GENERATION

From Jamaica to the world
It’s just love, It’s just love,

Why must the children play in the street?
Broken arms can fade the dreams
Peace on earth to everyone that you meet
Don’t you worry, It could be so sweet

Just look to the rainbow you will see,
The sun will shine ’till eternity
I’ve got so much love in my heart
No one can tear it apart

Feel the love generation
Feel the love generation

Come on, come on, come on,

Feel the Love Generation
Feel the Love Generation

Don’t worry about a thing, gonna be all right

Why must the children play in the street?
Broken hearts, faded the dreams
Peace on earth to everyone that you meet
Don’t you worry, It could be so sweet

Just look to the rainbow you will see,
The sun will shine ’till eternity
I’ve got so much love in my heart
No one can tear it apart

The lyrics are actually less cheerful than the reggae music which makes even me feel like getting up and dancing, though I restrain myself and limit my dancing to fingers on the keyboard. It’s an uplifting song, reminding me of early years when I loved to go dancing in local bars until the wee late hours, and everything, including the girls, looked more beautiful through those amber glasses.

This mood, however, is counterbalanced by Traci Chapman’s album Where You Live, and positively blown away by Bruce Cockburn’s album You’ve Never Seen Everything:

YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING

Nobody’s making me say this
I’m talking to you
Been traveling 17 hours
Irradiated by signals, by images
of viruses, of virtues
like everyone
Like exiled angels we swing out of the clouds
Above night city-
Fields of light broken by the curve of dark waterways

On the other side of the world
an unhappy teenage girl sets fire
to herself, her house, her neighbourhood and some that dwell therein
Sorry simulacrum of sad dawn

You’ve never seen everything

Sleep of the just, sleep of reason, any damn kind of sleep please!
I’m trying to balance on a sloping bed in Naples
or is it Skopje? I forget
Through the thin hotel wall a man groans in his dreams

And on the other side of the world
the drug squad busts a child’s birthday party
Puts bullets in the family dog and the blood goes all over the baby
And the Mounties are strip-searching schoolgirls
because they can

And a car crashes and burns on an offramp from the Gardiner
Two dogs in the back seat die, and in the front
a man and his mother
Forensics reveals the lady has pitchfork wounds in her chest –
Pitchfork!
And that the same or a similar instrument has been screwed to the dash
to make sure the driver goes too

You’ve never seen everything

I see:
A leader of the people with a ring in his nose
And the leaders of business tell him which way to go
With tugs on the golden chain which once led the golden calf
And we’re supposed to be impressed with their success
But my mind goes blank before the unbelievable indifference
shown life
spirit
the future
anything green
anything just

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Years ago when my brother was in India
A small town baker got a bright idea
He cut his flour with pesticide
and sent a bunch of neighbours on their longest journey
He was just being cheap -trying to make a profit
Didn’t even have shareholders to answer to

But it’s worth remembering, as we sell off the forest
gene-splice the world’s food into an instrument of control
maim and destroy as acts of theatre,
what came next –
That when the survivors looked around
and understood what had been done
they butchered
that baker

Snow swirls in the parking lot light like flour
like pesticide There’s a trade war brewing – or at least that’s the face they paint on it

But it’s only more transnational manipulation
It’s all bad magic and gangrene politics
Hormone disruptors and carcinogenetics
Greed twists eternal in the human breast
But the market has no brain
It doesn’t love it’s not God
All it knows is the price of lunch

Here I sit
Staring at my own shadow
Feeling my blood move
Trying not to have a drink
Trying to find somewhere to put the rage I’m carrying

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Never feel the light falling all around
You’ve never seen everything

Am I manic depressive to find pleasure in both of these songs? Or just idealistic even though I know better?

The Essential Chuang Tzu

I’ve started reading The Essential Chuang Tzu translated by Sam Hamill and J.P. Seaton. Chuang Tzu’s writings and the Taoteching are the primary sources of early Taoist teaching. I haven’t read Chuang Tzu since taking a grad level Chinese literature class many years ago, but as I read this translation I remember much of what I’ve read before, just as one remembers a classic movie seen as a child that was so insightful, so powerful that it continued to live on in our memories.

One of my favorite Chuang Tzu stories is this one, found in Chapter three:

Ting the cook was cutting meat free from the bones of an ox for Lord Wen-huj. His hands danced as his shoulders turned with the step of his foot and bending of his knee. With a shush and a hush, the blade sang following his lead, never missing a note. Ting and his blade moved as though dancing to “The Mulberry Grove,” or is if conducting the “ching-shou” with a full orchestra.

Lord Wen-hui exclaimed, “What a joy! It’s good, is it not, that such a simple craft can be so elevated?”

Ting laid aside his knife. “All I care about is the Way. I find it in my craft, that’s all. When I first butchered an ox, I saw nothing but ox meat. It took three years for me to see the whole ox. Now I go out to meet it with my whole spirit and don’t think only about what meets the eye. Sensing and knowing stop. The spirit goes where it will, following the natural contours, revealing large cavities, leading the blade through openings, moving onward according to actual form — yet not touching the central arteries or tendons and ligaments, much less touching bone.

“A good cook need sharpen his blade but once a year. He cuts cleanly. An awkward cook sharpens his knife every month. He chops. I’ve used this knife for nineteen years, carving thousands of oxen. Still the blade is as sharp as the first time it was lifted from the whetstone. At the joints there are spaces, and the blade has no thickness. Entering with no thickness where there is space, the blade may move freely where it will: there’s plenty of room to move. Thus, after nineteen years, my knife remains as sharp as it was that first day.

“Even so, there are always difficult places, and when I see rough going ahead, my heart offers proper respect as I pause to look deeply into it. Then I work slowly, moving my blade with increasing subtlety until-kerplop!-meat falls apart like a crumbling clod of earth. I then raise my knife and assess my work until I’m fully satisfied. Then I give my knife a good cleaning and put it carefully away.”

Lord Wen-hui said, “That’s good, indeed! Ting the cook has shown me how to find the Way to nurture life.”

I’m not sure whether I remember this because I had just taken my first cooking class, mama’s Chinese cooking, and was amazed at the versatility of the Chinese cleaver or because I had always felt this way about my woodworking tools. Perhaps it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or perhaps I liked ZAMM later because it reminded me of Chuang Tzu. When I think about it I wonder if this is the reason I love the way Ichiro treats his glove and bats. No matter.

The message seems true, no matter what the reason. True craftsmen who purse their craft with love and devotion have found The Way as surely as a monk or priest. Unfortunately, modern life makes it difficult to earn a living through fine craftsmanship, and most of us have had to find other ways of discovering The Way. Fortunately, modern life has also give those of us who are not addicted to material possessions the free time to find the Way.

Without Going out the Door

When I began this review of the Taoteching in preparation for reading the Jesus Sutras, I purposely didn’t go back and review what I’d previously written as I wanted to see if I would come away with new perceptions. Not so much, as it turns out.

When I looked back today, I found that I’d chosen several of the same verses, and I’d said much the same thing, though in different words. Although I like to think of myself as open to new ideas (after all, I have read all those books on the sidebar in the last five years, almost all of them for the first time) after a certain age the tracks seem to get a little deeper, and you find yourself drifting back into them without even being aware you’re back where you started. Of course, I might also attribute it to my INTP personality and my tendency to evolve a consistent philosophy throughout my life, even if that philosophy seems quite different from most of those people who I have grown up with. The fact that I was drawn to the Taoteching in my early 30’s and keep returning to it suggests that I am, indeed, drawn to the kind of life it extols and have been most of my life, even before I knew it existed.

There is, of course, the element of Nature in it that I’ve always been drawn to from my early experiences on Puget Sound and fly fishing in the backwoods. Probably even more important than that is the meditative aspect of Taoism. That, too, may have stemmed from early fishing adventures when my father passed his love of nature on while sitting quietly for long periods of time while fishing. Perhaps it was nourished by long hours spent reading in California when it was too hot to be outside doing anything besides visiting friends’ swimming pools. Heck, if my parents had been wealthy enough to have our own pool I might have never been drawn to those quiet times in my life.

I do know I was drawn to the lifestyle as early as college because I instantly fell in love with Emerson and Thoreau when I took my first college-level lit class. I instantly agreed with Emerson when he said, “Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” Needless to say, I thought Thoreau’s Walden was one of the greatest American books ever written.

It should come as no surprise then that I am also particularly fond of verse 47, in this case as translated by John C. H. Wu:

Without going out of your door,
You can know the ways of the world.
Without peeping through your window,
You can see the Way of Heaven.
The farther you go,
The less you know.

Thus the Sage knows without traveling,
Sees without doing,
And achieves without Ado.

with its obvious parallels to Walden, and even to Blake’s famous grain of sand. It’s not only my frugal ways that keep me from traveling. If it weren’t for the Army and relatives, I would probably have been happy to spend my vacations in the Cascades and at the beach for the rest of my life. Heck, if I’d stayed in Seattle instead of moving to Vancouver, I probably would have been happy spending my vacations visiting the San Juans and the Cascades.

Of course, if you’re not even going out your door, then you’re probably going to have to rely on meditation to discover the essence of the universe, as suggested in Wu’s version of Verse 56 :

He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.

Block all the passages!
Shut all the doors!
Blunt all the edges!
Untie all tangles!
Harmonize all lights!
Unite the world into one whole!
This is called the Mystical Whole,
Which you cannot court after nor shun,
Benefit nor harm, honour nor humble.

Therefore it is the Highest of the world.

Like much of the Taoteching, or any poetry for that matter, the lines suggest two different interpretations. The first two lines suggest that the Sage who knows the Tao “does not speak” because as we’ve already been told the Way cannot be named, so whoever gives it a name, who speaks, does not understand the Tao.

How, then, does one learn about the Tao? “Block all the passages! Shut all the doors” seem to suggest turning inward, not outward, there to experience the “Mystical Whole.” For me, at least, that suggests silent meditation, which, Google assures anyone who cares to check, is a major aspect of Taoism.