Skipping over the Surface of Things

 

     Years ago I noticed the tendency among certain of the young to watch television in a new way, turning from one channel to the next without lingering long on any.  To me even a second-rate show seemed preferable to wandering always, hoping that the next option might offer that appeal so elusive that it never quite arrives.  The phenomenon was recorded in Springsteen’s "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," though the fifty-seven channels soon became hundreds on cable and satellite, and then, through online devices, all but unlimited.  Originally such skimming over the surface of myriad possibilities was confined to the time one sat down in front of the screen seeking entertainment, but, with the introduction of smartphones – the term was first used in 1995 but such devices did not become commonplace until Apple’s iPhone in 2007 – people could scan one thing after another anywhere and at any time.  And they do, even while shopping or sitting with friends or in a toilet stall.   In a New York subway car, almost every eye gazes into a small hand-held device.  In a crowded elevator, instead of the conventional prim stance (facing the door, looking slightly down, hands clasped in front) many are now roving mentally around the virtual universe held in the palm of the hand. 

     This has surely amounted to an alteration of consciousness.  On the watch for food sources and for possible danger, animals, predators and prey alike, must be constantly attentive and observant.  In prehistoric times, people, like other animals, walked the woods always alert to their surroundings in the interest of survival.  Everyone in the community contributed to hunting and gathering and mutual defense.  Over time with the division of labor, people learned to focus on specific tasks which for a very few high-status individuals were accomplished entirely in the head: speculation, reading, philosophy, and science resulted, with the consequence that the sharp generalized vigilance that had served so well for millennia eroded.  Working from home in the pandemic has made dramatically clear what we already knew: that today a good many workers, and many of the most highly paid among them, do nothing productive in the old sense, but simply manipulate symbols on computer screens.  Instead of seeking significant information in the world immediately surrounding them, people now perform as small cogs in an immense cooperative machinery, contributing to production in a way that is meaningless in isolation.

     Whereas our ancestors walked daily absorbed in their immediate surroundings, reading the immediate data of earth and sky and smells and sounds, people may prosper today without ever knowing the phase of the moon or a single edible plant.  The specialization of work roles diminished the range of human consciousness in many ways, but it also enabled its fabulous expansion in others. When, millennia ago, aristocrats and intellectuals were freed from the necessity of vigilance that had been inescapable in the prehistoric era.  Technology, science, and art developed prodigiously to the extent that, many have ample free time to contemplate what they will.  On billions of Smartphones people choose to occupy their minds and emotions with the rich variety of possibilities of the tiny screen.  While that is all very well and understandable, entertainment being a latter of taste, it remains to inquire about users who are not listening to music or writing letters or performing other specific tasks with their devices, but merely flipping.

     The phenomenon suggests that it not the content that keeps people spellbound, but rather the medium.  I once read, in Scientific American I believe, a study tracing the appeal of the television screen which even to infants draws human attention, to the instinct to focus on any element of the environment which is moving or changing.  Unlike the obvious value of such awareness for early humans, the attractiveness of the scintillating screen is desirable only for advertisers seeking to increase sales. 

     This skipping attention is quite unlike the purposeful cognitive activity involved in problem-solving or the experience of art; it is the very opposite of the solid and steady concentration of meditation.  To me this shallow skipping consciousness is similar to addiction.  Seeking the distinctly human pleasure of playing with the mind, the individual never quite finds it, but is sufficiently motivated only to continue the endless and always unsatisfied quest.  The same derangement of behavior is evident in drug users and the sexually obsessed, not to mention those with a compulsive greed for food or money or power.  In each of these cases the soul  like a hungry ghost grabs after satisfaction but finds only deeper frustration.

    Yet might one find as well in this digital wandering something like the non-attachment in which the Buddha glimpsed the possibility of freedom?  There is no reason that one might not similarly skip across the surface of life, watching each moment with mild but sustained interest as if from a slow river steamer proceeding up the Amazon.  Would the Sixth Patriarch find any reason to favor more functional cognitive churning?   Perhaps the very deepest and most finely pointed concentration, the sort one hears is available to skilled meditators, is identical to the shallowest, and the drifting consciousness is an example of the flow of the Dao.    

Notes on Liu Xie

I seek here only to draw attention to the extraordinary 5th century work of Chinese literary theory by Liu Hsieh (Liu Xie), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. The book is available in translation by Vincent Yu-chang Shih (along with the original text). A more recent version by Yang Guobin using the same title is doubtless more accurate. I had not seen it when I first studied Liu and came upon it only in the final stage of writing these notes. I hope I do not confuse readers by my use of the now accepted pinyin form of Chinese words while also quoting from Shih’s book which uses Wade-Giles.

     Though its most recent translator Yang Guobin says The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons has “attracted . . . unprecedented interest in the recent decades,” its reputation among Sinologists has not brought non-specialists even the barest acquaintance with its ideas. Rather like the medieval rhetorics of Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland, Liu systematized a theory of literature revering antiquity yet allowing for innovation. He surveyed the nature of literature itself as well as the conventions of his tradition, its genres and figures and the place of the canonized classics.
     His work to some extent reflects ideas similar to those familiar in Europe: the distinction between content and form, for instance, suggested by the title, and the Horatian formula of “teach and delight.” His comments on the emotional core of lyric, on style as a mirror of the individual, and on the organic form of a work of art will also sound familiar to Westerners.
     Further, Liu agrees with his medieval European counterparts in his understanding of how convention as a dynamic and flexible code facilitates signification, allowing the unique density of meaning in literary discourse. Just as all language depends upon a considerable common base in order to communicate at all and yet allows every utterance to be unique, poetry requires an audience competent in its specific system of convention. For Liu, Lao Zi and Confucius (as well as the “classics” associated with Confucius’ name) provide the base of the literary code, a position similar to that of the Greek and Latin classics in the European literary tradition. Liu’s reverence for these texts is such that he declares that he would write poetry were it not that he could not hope to improve upon the great works of antiquity. In his final chapter (I use Yang’s translation again here) he criticizes contemporary writers, saying, “We are now far removed from the time of the sages, and the ways of writing have degenerated. Writers of rhyme-prose love the exotic and like to use shocking and frivolous language. . . .They deviate ever more from the norm and head towards fallacy and excess.” For him the classics are “the starting point” for any poet. (25)
     Yet Liu clearly recognizes the role of innovation. For him, while genre is set, “the very essence of style” is its “adaptability to new modes and cadences,” adding that “only by observing this truth can a writer gallop on a road that does not end in an impasse, or drink out of a spring which is inexhaustible.” (232) Just as Geoffrey of Vinsauf wrote of Poetria Nova, saying that literature must constantly rejuvenate itself, Liu says literature “renews itself from day to day.” (236) His 45th chapter surveys Chinese history indicating how the work of every era reflected the historical conditions as “the process of transformation circles endlessly.” (344)
     Liu can perhaps point out a new solution to the problem of language’s mimesis. He explicitly denies the adequacy of language yet avoids the opprobrium of Plato’s “imitation of an imitation.” His chapter on Imagination (shensi) recalls Longinus yet cautions “The subtle meanings beyond our thought and the profound inner workings of the heart inexpressible in words are not to be reached with language; here one should know enough to halt his brush.” (220) And, even more clearly, “words do not completely express ideas; it is difficult even for the Sage to find it otherwise. If one’s knowledge is by nature limited to the capacity of a jar or tube, how can he be expected to offer all the general principles?” (6) Finally, in his postscript (omitted from Shih’s version) he notes “Language cannot exhaust meaning.”
This limitation is, however, illusory because, as his first chapter makes clear, for Liu literature reflects the Dao. A successful work, one which is “true” will necessarily arise from this universal principle. The legendary figures who established literature “drew their literary embellishments from the mind of Tao.” (12)
     This entails a profound realism and a dedication to truth. The word wen refers to literature as in the book’s title, but also to patterns of any sort. Beasts have patterns in fur or feathers, heavenly bodies in their revolutions, and humankind, too has patterns in mind which may be made concrete in poetry. Indeed, none of the other patterns that indicate the beauty of the cosmos could be perceived without mind, and humans uniquely possess mind. Just as all natural phenomena have characteristic patterns, man, as a signifying animal, creates symbolic patterns in art such as literature generated by his own nature. In this way even poems which fail to perfectly represent reality, precisely and accurately represent human nature and thus arise from the Dao. As the book’s opening words declare, wen is as old as creation.
     The parallelism so characteristic of Chinese poetry, far from being ornamental, as it often seems in Cicero, reproduces for Liu the creative dialectic most familiar as yang/yin. According to Liu just as “nature, creating living beings, endows them with limbs in pairs” the mind, creating literary language “organizes and shapes one hundred different thoughts, making what is high supplement what is low, and spontaneously producing linguistic parallelism.” (270) Thus for him what might seem an artificial literary convention is instead altogether natural.
     He does not distinguish between poetry and philosophy, saying that “words with pattern indeed express the mind of the universe. The sage is the poet, and poetry, no less than plants and animals, is among the “natural, organic expressions of the divine.” (10)