Transformations

     I suppose we must accept the physicists’ telling us that everything is drifting toward a meaningless entropy, but that is the long long view and provides all the more reason to feel pleasure at finding within the ineluctable galactic tides eroding ordered patterns now and then contrary eddies within which little miracles of creation occur.  Floating with the current and struggling always as we do, against breakdown, dissolution, and the horrid odors of decay, we welcome the solace of something that, instead of simply rotting, mutates, or, better still, we rejoice at what seems a creation ex nihilo.  Surely William James, the pioneering investigator of mysticism and revelation, had something similar in mind when he recovered from despair with a new determination: “I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.”  The individual may be doomed to lose but surely that fact only makes resistance more heroic.  Each of us is Achilles, striving to do great deeds while under an unappealable death sentence. 

    One need be neither a philosopher nor a warrior, though, to delight in transformation.  What young child is not charmed upon learning how a wormlike caterpillar can shut itself up in a chrysalis and, after a bit of thought, emerge a fairylike butterfly?  Perhaps others, like me, had a chemistry set in elementary school years with a booklet of experiments designed less to teach scientific principles than to miraculously turn a clear liquid bright blue when a white powder was stirred in and then red with another additive.  I recall as well watching with the same quantum of amazement (though over a longer time span) an intensely green shoot venture out from the inside of a bean, then grow and curl and bask in  the sun and eventually make a hundred more beans. 

      Once these phenomena become routine, we manufacture new marvels woven wholly of imagination.  Stage magicians make theater of such wonder for children and adults alike as they produce silk handkerchiefs out of thin air or saw a person in two only to restore her a moment later with a flourish.  Similar spectacles accompany those we consider more or less holy whose miracles are to believers their surest bona fides.  (Their acts most safely remain well in the past to avoid the scrutiny that has marred the reputation of recent practitioners such as the late Sai Baba who liked to materialize wristwatches, coins, and ash for his devotees in a formula I suspect was dependent on their level of donations who in retrospect seems more an adept in prestidigitation than miracles.)

     Fictional metamorphoses like Apuleius’ Golden Ass or the Monkey King’s Journey to the West, at once amusing and profound, point toward spiritual enlightenment, while Ovid’s brilliantly retold tales of mythic changes is a virtual encyclopedia of permutations, but equally astonishing phenomena have shaped the world and continue to take place daily. 

     We smile when we read that Aristotle thought that oysters emerged from slime in a process of spontaneous generation, but, of course, life did at first appear from nonliving components.  The family tree of all plants and animals began about four billion years ago, though there remains a good deal of controversy about the details.  Surely the story the scientists tell is as weird, poetic, and profound as the versions in Genesis and Hesiod’s Theogony. 

     A miracle occurs daily as well when life fuels its survival with food, which is always organic.  Life lives exclusively on life, even for vegans.  What we eat is broken down until in the series of reactions called the Krebs cycle sugar is metabolized and becomes available as energy.  Inert matter is thereby brought to life and transformed into action, and the process is taking place right now.

     The most momentous transformation can only be the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the starting point of everything.  As mysterious and mythic as creation by fiat, the physicists say the universe sprang into being where once was nothing, not even, it seems, time.  If this event seems remote and speculative, it is equaled countless times  in the present era by the quantum fluctuations that, even in a vacuum, generate virtual particles in pairs which, after arising out of nothing, almost instantly annihilate each other.  Whatever the physicists say, I would like to think that positive and negative charges in the cosmos,  matter and anti-matter as well, are precisely equal and thus combined add up to precisely nothing?  The universe is a void, sufficiently bored with its emptiness to play at pendulum swings between existence and non-existence.  It sounds like a science that Nargarjuna would have understood two millennia ago. 

     Though the fact is counter-intuitive, solidity is the illusion, flux the rule.  Matter never ceases transforming from one form to another.  People may feel uneasy about their bodies’ physical dissolution, but our present form is merely a moment in the dance of the elements, which briefly resulted in the formation of this particular sensitive burden of human flesh with the ability to contemplate itself.  Presto change o!  Our cells are constantly sloughing off and being replaced by fresh recruits. 

     In social life as well as biological, we are repeatedly rechristened in new roles.  During each stressful change we protect ourselves with ritual: birth, death, puberty, marriage, even the acquisition of academic degrees, every change requires the blessing of a ceremony.  One may try to cling to a handful of the river of time, but the water passes through our fingers and heads quietly downstream without recognizing our silly anxiety and we are carried too and know that in the end we all will arrive at the river’s mouth where we will rejoin the wine-dark seas.  No need to hustle; no need to hesitate. 

    We admire without ever attaining the enlightened views of Heraclitus who tells us that the cosmos “rests by changing” and that “all things are a-flowin” (though that latter phrase is not attributed to him until a thousand years after his death).  Had they not lived on opposite sides of the globe, the old Ephesian might have embraced Laozi whose sages contemplated the cosmos with neither illusion nor distress.

   

By attaining the height of abstraction we gain fullness of rest. 

All the ten thousand things arise, and I see them return.

Now they bloom in bloom but each one homeward returneth to its root.

Returning to the root means rest.

It signifies the return according to destiny.

Return according to destiny means the eternal.

Knowing the eternal means enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

The line from William James is part of his journal entry for April 30, 1870.  See The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott.

 

Heraclitus’ most famous aphorism first appeared in Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle though Plato had put a very similar phrase in  his mouth in  the Cratylus.  The lines from Laozi are from poem 16 in the 1913 translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul, Carus.

Water

 

     The world was once all water and all existing life was then at home in water.  Upon emerging from the seas, creatures in a way turned inside-out, such that we carry the primeval ocean about now on higher ground within us in bodily fluids, our great gangs of cells cooperating like a gang of walking jellyfish.  Water is an urgent requirement for all forms of life in spite of the fact that it contains no nutrients.   Long after life crawled onto dry land, just as the humanoid branch of great apes was developing, our ancestors continued to spend much of their time in the water according to the aquatic ape hypothesis developed independently by Max Westenhöfer and Alister Hardy, and our species adapted with such characteristics as hairlessness, fat attached (like blubber) to skin, and webbed fingers.  (Despite its imagination and suggestive power, this idea has received little support from other investigators.)

     Myths of origin using less scientific language most often begin in the water.  The opening of the Babylonian “Enuma Elish” describes the birth of the world out of an undifferentiated primal chaos when the waters divided into the fresh identified with Apsu and the salt which is Tiamat.  According to Genesis even before light the spirit was moving “upon the face of the waters,” and the Koran teaches that Allah made all living things from water.  The oldest Egyptian god was Nu, a personification of the watery abyss from whom the sun god Ra arose to order the world, first by hovering over them and calming them just as Jehovah had done.  Likewise in Hinduism the name of the archaic deity Narayana worshipped at Mohenjo-Daro is derived from the word for water and later accounts describe Prajapati’s emergence from the waters as the Hiranyagarbha or golden embryo from which the creation unfolds.  In the New Wiorld the accounts of both the Mayan cosmogony according to the Popol Vuh and the Zapotec version preserved by Fray Gregorio there was at first nothing but the expanse of the sea covering everything. 

      People did indisputably choose to live near water, and the growth of the earliest civilizations arose in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers where people could coax food production into surpluses sufficient to support idle aristocrats, administrators, and intellectuals.  Some think that extensive kingdoms developed primarily out of the need to manage water resources without undue conflict.  Interventions like dams, dikes, cisterns, sewers, and pipes were naturally first built for agricultural use, but even domestic arrangements for consumption and removal or waste appear as early the fourth millennium B.C.E. 

     Nonetheless, thousands of years passed before flushing water closets were designed in the sixteenth century by Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth and translator of Ariosto, who included a description of his invention in his allegorical satire The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a work with enough bite in its non-hydraulic implications to cause its author to be exiled from court.  (He left it to his valet to write a practical manual for those who wished to construct such a device.)

     Though it took a very long time for people to organize systems to avoid being offended by our own stink, hydraulic engineers had been successfully managing water from the very dawn of the Neolithic.  Such work occurred not only in the cradles of civilization but in more out-of-the-way spots like Papua, New Guinea where nine-thousand-year-old drainage ditches have been traced at the Kuk site.  In the fourth century B.C.E. resident of Jawa in Jordan built a walled town in the middle of the exceedingly dry Black Desert.  Their extensive earthworks prevented flooding during the seasonally destructive overflow of the Wadi Rajil, directing the waters into reservoirs for later use. 

     Thales of Miletus believed water to be the basic stuff of the universe, the substance out of which all things emerged.  Aristotle noted that this was a demythologized version of the creative work attributed to Okeanos and Tethys.  He adds that Greeks take oaths by water as it is “most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by.”  Two and a half millennia after Thales, his regard for water was thought by Nietzsche to be a worthy insight in spite of its inaccuracy as it embodied a monistic view free from mythology. 

     Pindar’s first Olympian ode, celebrating the victory of Hieron of Syracuse’s entry in the horse race, opens by declaring that for some, “water is best” (ἄριστον), but this turns out to be only the first term of a priamel.  Pindar instantly amends this survival-based intuition with the socially informed recognition that some people would prefer gold, then moves to his theme, the even more culturally determined choice of prestige gained by success in games (ἄεθλα). 

     Doubtless the loftiest role played by water as a symbolic actor is that it assumes in Laozi for whom it conveys the attributes of enlightenment: purity, simplicity, indestructibility, naturalness, submission, and humility.  The transparency of water makes it uniquely suited to represent an apophatic spirituality.  The manifold forms of water make it suggest the constantly changing phenomena of experience, while its essence remains always unchanged, “a deep pool” that will “come clean like still waters.”  At the same time, it is “restless, like the ocean,” forming “torrents that flow/ into river and sea” descending always, unresisting, going “unmurmuring to places men despise.” 

 

Nothing is weaker than water,

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.

 

If somehow, one can sidestep the sparks of ratiocination on the roiled surface of consciousness, perhaps the water which is the majority of the living body may assume the lead and conduct the self, unresisting, into harmony with what surrounds it. 

     Though today people commonly carry small water bottles about, swigging now and then to maintain hydration, in the past certain waters were ascribed more dramatic restorative powers.  Herodotus says that certain Ethiopians attained an average age of a hundred and twenty due to their regular use of a fountain of youth and his story was confirmed by numerous others.  According to the legends of Alexander his veterans, upon bathing in a stream that flowed into the Euphrates, found their youth restored.  The idea of rejuvenating waters percolated then through numerous accounts of the east, including romances and travelers’ reports.

     Among the most influential is the twelfth-century “Letter of Prester John” which describes a spring located in India “at the foot of Olympus” (considered by some to be in Sri Lanka) but also “not far from Paradise” which renders its drinkers perpetually thirty-two years old and free from disease to boot.  In  a strange anticipation of the aquatic ape theory, children in that land, the author adds, are raised in water and may spend three or four months at a stretch submerged.

     Two hundred years later, the travel book attributed to “Sir John Mandeville” (a pseudonym) describes a well in Polombe (likely modern Kerala) that “hath odour and savour of all spices,” though this changes hourly.  Drinking its waters cures all illnesses as well as bringing youth. The author accounts for these extraordinary powers by the fact that the spring arises from Paradise. 

     After Renaissance voyages enlarged the world by half, the location of this marvelous spring was transferred to the new found lands.  The sophisticated Italian humanist Peter Martyr d'Anghiera who served the Spanish court recorded the reports of a fountain of youth in the Bahamas, though he expressed his own skepticism about their truth.   Juan Ponce de León was first associated with the magic spring decades after his death in the Chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo.  The story was repeated and received revived attention through the memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda who had spent seventeen years among the Native people.  Referring to Ponce de Leon’s supposed quest, he claims to have known the location of the waters of youth, which regained in the Americas its Biblical geography, as according to Fontaneda Florida was the true location of the River Jordan, flowing out of Eden.

     That language is a reminder that the search for physical immortality is only the vulgar aspect of the spiritual grace conferred by baptismal waters.  The Mandaean Sabians who revere John the Baptist and were perhaps the first to practice the sacrament continue to perform full-body immersion.  Until the Middle Ages baptism was performed with candidates naked to signify their return to a primeval state, but even today most Christians continue to undergo this ritual of healing waters.  Their cousins in South Asia fancy similar benefits from contact with the waters of Mother Ganges, foul though it might appear to the visiting tourist. 

     Even the appreciation of the more natural qualities of water can lead to connoisseurship.  The savants in Athenaeus discuss the qualities of various drinking waters, finding that Paphlagonian sources “winy,” while a drink from the Corinthian spring Peirene is the “lightest” in all Greece.  He quotes Herodotus’ description of how the Persian king drank only water from the Choaspes which flows by Susa on its way from the Kush toward the Indus.  The deipnosophists’ contemporary descendants may find an entire supermarket aisle made up of waters, many of them touting not only their subtle flavors, but no end of vitamins and probiotics, our contemporary version of the quaint Victorian patent medicines.   

     Almost a phantom element, water has the most mysterious qualities, lacking any fixed form, transparent, odorless, able to rise invisibly from earth to sky and descend again independent of human desire.  We bathe in it and consume it and, for the rest of the day, walk about in one level or another of humidity, observing, perhaps, mists in the morning and clouds overhead in the afternoon.  Though we recognize it as a primal force, we have an intimacy with water and daily contact that suggests our kinship.  Water is always at hand to remind us of beginnings, of sublimity, of the unfathomable mysteries of the most commonplace things.  

Liezi

     The following comments are based on A. C. Graham’s The Book of Lieh-tzŭ. Rather than alter all the names and untranslated terms, in a confusing and monstrous hybrid of usage, my essay follows Graham in using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration, though my title uses the current pin-yin for the convenience of web searches by contemporary students. Thus I shall refer to Taoism rather than Daoism, Lao Tzu rather than Laozi, etc., though I am well aware of the current convention.
     Perhaps in this way I feel closer to the excitement I felt when reading this text for the first time fifty years ago when this version was new, and, in my suburban home, I ordered a copy from Blackwell’s which arrived from the U.K. bearing fascinating stamps and postal markings. Those Blackwell’s catalogues were an enchanted land in which an American high school student with a taste for words could wander without end, no less magical than the fabulous lands described by Liezi.
     Apart from sentiment I use this edition as I do not know of a newer complete translation. I have not seen the book of commentary Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic edited by Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann.


     Lieh-tzŭ is the third text of philosophical Daoism. Something of an anthology, while attributed to a “Hundred Schools of Thought” sage of the fifth century BCE, it was probably assembled seven or eight hundred years later, though using some much older materials including passages from both the Tao te ching and the Chuangtzu. Less gnomic than Lao Tzu, less unified and structured than Chuang, never venturing into the alchemical or magical bypaths that came to use the name of the Tao, consistently amusing and engaging, the book may be the best brief introduction to philosophical Taoism. Taoism can seem remote and abstruse, yet its sages sought like Socrates a way to live a satisfying life that might be useful to everyone. Many conceive of life as a battle and thus make Sun Tzu our modern American ancient Chinese best-seller, but readers will find more in which to delight as well as more challenging mental moves in the relatively neglected Lieh-tzŭ.
     The paradoxes of the book begin on the first page when it opens (as does the Lao Tzu) by insisting on the inadequacy of words. This figure of speech is familiar throughout Western literature in versions both religious (“the divine is ineffable”) or secular (“words cannot describe my beloved”) versions. For Lieh-tzŭ, however, this opening announces a book on the theme not merely of the failure of words, but of effective will, of the senses, and of logic as well. The author (or editor) elaborates a system of utter skepticism which, for all its merciless rejection of knowledge, buoys the spirit. Without values he manages to portray exemplars. Lacking a mythological structure, his imagination knows no bounds. Though he claims that endeavor is useless, he describes super-adepts in every sort of human activity. Advocating doing nothing and knowing nothing, he prescribes a regimen of psychic focus and living in the moment so demanding that few can adhere to it. Not only is (almost) every anecdote entertaining and provocative, the reader may well find immediate confirmation and application in lived experience.
     The point of the celebrated story of Chuang Tzu dreaming he is a butterfly is not that he is either human or insect or something different yet. The point is that one cannot tell, will never be able to tell. Whereas the Hindu devotee seeks to peer behind the veil of maya, for Taoists the apparent is as real as the fantastic, the fraudulent as the authentic. The third book of the Lieh-tzŭ, called King Mu of Chu, expounds this inevitable uncertainty. Mr. Yin, the rich man who dreams of being a slave, and his servant, the poor one who dreams he’s rich are said to have identical lives. (68) Even the honest emotion of the nostalgic man made to believe he is reentering his home town is only a joke played by his companions. (73) One cannot tell what is normal and what abnormal. (72) A judge even with all the facts cannot decide the case of a deer’s disputed ownership. (69) All in all, reality is probably best avoided. A certain Hua-tzu lost his memory and objected when he was cured saying “Formerly, when I forgot, I was boundless.” (70) Taoism in its extravagance goes beyond skepticism to privilege what seems to be fancy and to cultivate amazing tales like people trapped in a dark cave, passing the time in imagined visions.
     If one cannot necessarily accept one’s sense impressions, emotions, or judgments, one might yet, like Descartes, proceed through purely rational means to reclaim God and reconstruct the world. Yet for Lieh-tzŭ, this option is also fruitless. Much of his Book IV is devoted to an attack on logic. The notoriously reasonable figure of Confucius is made willy-nilly to accord with the Tao. Finding that his life’s work has been in vain, Confucius reaches a point where he returns to history and poetry without expectations, not as before with the goal of making people into good citizens, but simply because the subjects appeal to him. He follows his nature without attachment to results. (76) The writer amuses himself with the paradoxes of Kung-sun Lung (86) (which resemble those associated with the name of Zeno), but more to show the absurdity of seeking truth with words than for any other reason. The true sage here is Keng-sang-tzu who has reached virtual omniscience through self-knowledge. (77) Lieh-tzŭ sounds very like a Buddhist when he says “Whoever gets the idea says nothing, whoever knows it all also says nothing. Whether you think that saying nothing is saying or not saying, whether you think that knowing nothing is knowing or not knowing, you are still saying still knowing. But there is nothing that he either does not say or says, nothing that he either does not know or knows. This is all there is to it.” (80) The wise traveler pays no attention to where he is going. (81) The correct answer to any question is “I do not know.” (94) Everything is relative, everything subjective. Because of this cavalier attitude toward logic, what has been taken by many as evidence of multiple authorship is very likely simply the author’s willingness to contain contraries without concern and to accept mystery, contradiction, and ambivalence.
     Lieh-tzŭ certainly sounds like a proponent of Sanlun Buddhism, the Chinese form of Madyamika. He propagates paradox and balances opposites in the tradition of Nagarjuna: “There is no limit, but neither is there anything limitless; there is no exhausting, but neither is there anything inexhaustible. That is why I know that they are limitless and inexhaustible, yet I do not know whether they may be limited and exhaustible.” (95) But for the Taoist there is a significant difference in affect. Lieh-tzŭ finds the world’s unknowability exhilarating. As Confucius is made to conclude, “Rejoicing in nothing and knowing nothing are the true rejoicing and the true knowledge.” (76)
     Lacking faith in sense impressions or in rationality, one has no way to make decisions. The individual has no dependable basis for action. One cannot out-maneuver destiny. As the 6th book Endeavour and Destiny insists, the individual cannot control the world. A course of action that might work one time will fail the next. It is rank superstition to believe that one’s striving is effective. To Lieh-tzŭ most people are like Johnson’s madman in Rasselas who had come to believe that his astronomical observations maintained the sun in its path. Another example is the neurotic man of Ch’i who worries like Chicken Little that the sky is falling. (26) With our anxieties and stress, do we differ from him only in degree?
     Even moral virtue is illusory – people do what they must. Duke Huan employed his enemy not through superior insight and ethics, but because “he could not do otherwise.” (126) If all destiny is inexplicable, all attitudes are equally “right.” (130) The best doctor is the one who does nothing. (129) Realizing that effort is useless, Pei-tung-tzu is wholly content (124), while Duke Ching decides to drink. (133)
     Whatever one tries to pursue, one can only encounter the alternation of contraries. “All things come about of themselves.” (122) Because of his intoxication, a drunk man is wiser than a sober one and less likely to be injured when he falls. (30) The craftsman who worked for years to create a precisely accurate sculpture of a mulberry leaf was daft since the most perfect models hang from trees. (161) A robot is an adequate facsimile of a human. (110) The Taoist term is tzu-jan, meaning self-so-ness, spontaneity, or naturalness. Fatalism need not result in resignation or passivity. Taoism counsels rather that one imitate the cosmos and cultivate tzu-jan. “There are ways in which earth excels heaven, and ways in which each thing is more intelligent than the sage.” (19) A clear and focused mind can produce unreflecting action which is sustained by a mysterious jouissance, the result of being in tune with everything else.
     The stylistic corollary of this high state of mind is the playful mythologizing with which the author ornaments his pages. To balance the fact that the book’s philosophy is an almost nihilistic skepticism, it expresses at the same time a deep engagement with things of this world and beyond that exhibit the most fascinating and unpredictable variety. Florid legends and semi-supernatural beings ornament the margins of the vision as though to entertain, illustrate, and assure the individual that one can never be certain of the truth. Jung Ch’i-ch’i strums a lute from excess of joy (24) and the centenarian Lin Lei sings as he gleans, happy since he never “learned to behave” or “strove to make his mark.” Without moral or ego goals, he is a free man. “You travel without knowing where you go, stay without knowing what you cling to, are fed without knowing how, You are the breath of heaven and earth which goes to and fro; how can you ever possess it?” (30)
     Yang Chu, Book VI of the Lieh-tzŭ, is generally called an anomalous interpolation as it advocates a straightforward hedonism of a simple and physical sort, more like that of Ecclesiastes than the sublime (or sublimated) version of the Epicureans. In contrast to Confucian shame culture, what most call virtue is condemned as valueless (146); “reputation is nothing but pretence” (138), and ritual, including offerings to deceased ancestors is absurd, nothing but useless self-deception. (142) One must obey every spontaneous desire (140) just as Blake prescribed. As life is suffering (139), any amelioration that one can find is reasonable. Po Yi who claimed to be desireless was a monster of pride. The same is true of Chan Ch’in who claimed to be moral. Selfish as everone else, they differ only in their hypocrisy. (141)
     Though both the Yellow Emperor and King Mu are said to have rejected the pursuit of pleasure, it seems an option consistent with the rejection of all values. Just as Confucius resumed his studies after recognizing their emptiness because such activities suited his nature, another individual might follow a different inclination into dissolute days.
     For most of the volume, though, the exemplar is a Taoist adept. Lieh-tzŭ exhibits an wondrously successful archer, a water-forder, a lion-tamer, a swimmer, a fisherman, a musician. In every field, excellence comes from the mental poise and detachment than congruence with the Tao affords. (The attitude reminds me ironically of the stories of scientists and athletes during the Cultural Revolution who gained a similar single-mindedness from study of Mao’s little red book.) In Lieh-tzŭ, though, there can be no striving. When the friend of all gulls became self-conscious, the birds shunned him. (45)
     As Lieh-tzŭ was about to move from Cheng, his disciples asked what his master Hu-tzŭ had taught him. His first reply was “What did Hu-tzŭ ever say?” (17) But he then proceeds, saying, “I did once overhear him talking to Po-hun Wu-jen” [whose latter name means no-man]. He goes on to expound the “Unborn” and the “Unchanging” with rhetoric whose dramatic lofty flights and dark shadows, for me at least, better account for the world I experience daily than would-be intellectual rigor or positivist statements of any kind. Like the mystics of the via negativa, like the poets who know their words can never wholly correspond to their intention, like the lover who admits his inability to express his heart’s full feeling, Lieh-tzŭ knows he communicates only in the most imperfect manner, and, in this way, all his cards on the table, he addresses my own mind as a brother.

Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Tao-te-ching]

Kipling’s The Light that Failed

     I admire Kipling’s dexterity with verse and his knowledge of India and of plotting. Even from a political point of view, he made an excellent exhibit A for Jonah Raskin in The Mythology of Imperialism (a few years after Kate Millet focused entirely on “male chauvinist” writers in Sexual Politics). On this point one might recall Engel’s famous remark in a letter to Margaret Harkness, pointing out the superiority of the depiction of society in the work of the royalist Balzac over consciously “revolutionary” authors like Zola, saying that “even in economic details” Balzac contains more than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.”
     In this novel fighting the “fuzzies” is in the background, and what remains is Hollywood’s idea of the tragic. In fact, Wellman’s film with Ronald Colman and Walter Huston may well be a better work than the novel – movies were then a genre more congenial to the sentimental and the melodramatic. The view of the period’s artistic scene is quaint; that of the war illustrators picturesque.


By Popular Demand, The San Francisco Mime Troupe

     Though I was pleased to find this book, I am afraid these plays are not the same on the printed page. The Mime Troupe should really be seen in a public park after the Gorilla Band has gathered passers-by (some of whom may never have witnessed live theater before). These newcomers then join the group’s aficionados (and the hip always say “meem”) who have seen America’s outstanding street theater company over the more than fifty years of its history. For those with personal experience, this collection of eight scripts will vividly recall the live performances. The Mime Troupe arose out of the Actors Studio, based in R. G. Davis’ training in mime and commedia dell’arte and produced between one and two hundred original shows, experiencing arrests and collectivization (after which Davis departed for Berkeley’s Epic West). Combining commedia dell’arte with slapstick, farce, vaudeville, and current popular culture they always delight the onlookers, who invariably have a high time, applauding and laughing at all the right places, and by the end it always seems as though they will surely head off into the streets and foment revolution then and there. Though this desideratum has not been achieved, the troupe has regularly staged excellent shows.


The Classic of the Way and Virtue, the Tao-te ching of Laozi including the third century commentary by Wang Bi, translated by Richard John Lynn (inconsistent transliteration from the book)

     The Laozi, to use the most generally accepted form of the name today, is probably the Chinese classic most commonly translated into European languages. For those with no Chinese the choice is bewildering and many readers have found themselves reading, as I have, one version after another for the sake of what portions of one text or another we can digest.
     Thus I shall not speak here of the general appeal of this most appealing work, but shall confine myself to the particular qualities of this edition. Lynn reminds the reader that a good deal of the book explicitly addresses governance. Laozi regarded role of the ruler in the nation as analogous to that of the patriarch in the family or the ego in the mind. To regulate any of these levels properly requires adherence to the same Way. This closely resembles Confucius’ approach, but differs sharply from that of the more anarchic Zhuangzi. Since the elder master was said to have been run out of the country himself, heading into unknown mountains, he was easily assimilated to the quietistic, antinomian thought that arose centuries after his day.
     Another feature of this volume is its inclusion of the commentary by the philosopher Wang Bi of the Three Kingdoms era. Though his words sometimes seem to merely repeat, and occasionally to obfuscate, the text, it is often useful to see a paraphrase of the original verses by a savant of the direct tradition closer to the text than to us.