try to define - ("Drinking Wine, No. 5")

Zeb Raft's handout
"The Pageant of the Thundering Prince - Poetry at a Medieval Chinese Ceremony"

contained this five-syllable poem


Tao Yanming (365-427), "Drinking Wine, No. 5"



I built my hut in a place where people live,
and yet there's no clatter of carriage or horse.
You ask me how that could be?
With a mind remote, the region too grows distant.
I pick chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge,
see the southern mountain, calm and still.
The mountain air is beautiful at close of day,
birds on the wing coming home together.
In all this there's some principle of truth,
but try to define it and you forget the words.

(trans. Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, p. 135).

Go

(A friend of mine is an avid Go player. He went once to a weekend Go conference, and played against the instructor. My heavily paraphrased illustration of what he told me:)




He placed his stone on the board.

"Why did you go there?" she asked

"It felt like a good move." he replied
he was telling me this story as a response to my decent beginning intuition

"But why," she pressed. "You should have a reason."




I suppose intuition and reason are at their best when tempered with each other.

Turtles and 氣

I am not going to get this story quite right. Forgive my paraphrasing.

In my Tai Chi class, the instructor had been introducing a set of exercises called the "Animal Play" series. The animals of interest that I remember were mostly the tiger, dragon, and turtle (which, now that I come to think of it, represent 3 of the 4 cardinal directions). They have names like "Turtle Looking" and "Turtle Swimming" (the English names, of course).


One day during class, he demonstrated an exercise by which one roots one's feet and plants one's palms on one's hips, then moves the waist through ever-widening circles while trying to keep the head level. At some point, the circles become too great for the rest of the body to compensate for and the person falls off-balance and must take a step.

The first step catches and prevents the fall, the second step follows less urgently in the direction that the body is naturally moving in, and the third step places itself in a shoulder-width, stable position alongside the other foot.

Our faces displayed a mix of amusement, confusion, and skepticism.


He explained,

There was a man, a practitioner of Tai Chi who fell ill for a long time and though his family cared for him, nothing seemed to aid his recovery. While the man rested at home, he noticed that every day a turtle would crawl up near his house and he observed it performing strange actions, falling over, stumbling, and then righting itself. He decided that the turtle was trying to show him what to do and he patterned himself after its actions. After taking up this practice, he recovered his health.

The relation of the body to the flow of qi (氣 or chi) can become disrupted, disordered, and misaligned. The purpose of this exercise is to lose control of the body and allow the qi to realign it to its natural direction regarding the cardinal points.

By the time the third step is taken, the body should be standing comfortably, facing the new direction that the qi naturally aligns with, when release of other controls allows it to do so.

siwei

It has been said: "A sense of rites, righteousness, integrity, and shame constitute the 'four covenants' of the country. If these four covenants do not thrive, then the country will perish." Excellent indeed is the gift of Guan Sheng [Guan Zhong] for words! Rites and righteousness are the premier methods for ruling others; integrity and shame are the premier maxims for anchoring the self. Without integrity, everything is acceptable. Without shame, anything is done. When ordinary men are so disposed, anything can occur, including disasters and riots. But when high officials willfully accept or do anything, the coming of chaos to the world and peril to the empire is a virtual certainty!

From Ouyang Xiu's preface to the biography of Feng Dao (882-954) in The Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, quoted in "Chaste & Filial Women in Chinese Historical Writings of the 11th Century" by Richard Davis (Journal for the American Oriental Society, April/June 2001).

BELIEVING IN THE ABSURD

(the end of this poem is my favorite part)

Harold Norse

writing a poem
& feeling absurd
about this useless activity
I went to the window
& saw a scraggy nut
beret mothy beard
groucho moustache
grinning
muttering
to himself
staring
at greeting cards
in the window
of the imprimerie
gît-le-coeur
suddenly
in a swift
handwriting on the wall
laughing secretly
& shaking his old head
(lonely weirdo
in priestly garb
ratty & black) he
wrote
& I had to see
& ran downstairs
& read

WE ARE SEARCHING
FOR RATIONAL REASONS
FOR BELIEVING
IN THE ABSURD

Knowledge and Fish

I saw a quote somewhere recently... I think it was at the Mirador shop where I was looking for henna. One of those quote magnets so that you too can have profound thoughts on your refrigerator for only $1.25 or whatever.

Knowledge keeps as well as fish

And it's true.
The periodic cycles by which we perceive our process of living shift around the different facets of experience. We constantly change approaches, each time sure that the next is better, only to end up where we've been before.

A friend of mine was looking at the filled bookshelves he'd moved into his new room, musing that he'd read most of all of those books, and yet did not consider himself nearly as smart as the contents of all of those books.

If I remembered half the things I've discovered and scribbled to myself on scraps of paper (or even on this blog) in fear of forgetting....
It's so hard to hold them all at once.

This is the beginning of a new project. Every few months or so, I ought to gather up the things which I really can't afford to forget. The things which will be true no matter which perceptive cycle I've chosen at the time.

Here are just a few that I want to remember right now:

Crazy Path + Head up
With this in mind
I have decided
that the best path to take
is the crazy one
the one that you might slip or fall in, but invites a try.

But only if you keep your head up
and keep the sun in mind
otherwise, for all you'll learn, you might as well have taken the easy way home.


Tango

It seems that this requires
sharing weight
imposing oneself
taking another's space (ask first)
and trusting that such actions will be received and returned.


Awareness
Do not be passively boiled

The Wind
The wind knows where it's from and where it's going to. The leaves have to wait to find out.

Don't Limit Yourself, and don't adhere too closely to prior learning or decisions as to obstruct further understanding.

Fear stymies creativity


and if Devdas asks you to leave with him,
go.

Amphibious

A frog
ought to pay close attention to the temperature of the water he's in.
ought to extrapolate from trends
ought to have a good memory and an eye for detail

and a prepared decision of when to use his ability to leave the water.

Awake,

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellis

No more red balloons,
no more incubation,
I'm awake.


No more rolling about like a cannonball on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's ship.
I've done enough damage by passivity.
No more eating truth off of the ground like a stingray.
I've spent enough time in the mud.
Blindness and bottomfeeding can inhibit the ability to look up.

I find myself feeling suddenly capable,
having a sense of direction and a measure of endurance.
With this knowledge, I have some responsibilities to take.
I've got a person to be.

Someone has pulled back a curtain on a big picture that I've been oblivious to.
Keep to the small, see the big picture, don't drop the oil in the spoon.

I have let myself be taken captive for too long by tasks in dreams that, after 30 seconds of consciousness, are clearly not real.
I think I am at last awake.


Every day, I will go to bed happy because I have worked and lived

Have you noticed that the air often seems clearer after a storm?

The cure for passion is eternity

up that Hill

We biked back home after dinner.
I was the taillight, he was the headlight.
But we'd gotten reversed coming around a corner and I was the one who knew how to get back home.

(conversation, my paraphrase)

That was a good ride

Yeah, I liked it

I didn't know if I was going to make it up that hill

Oh, sorry (I led the venture up the hill)

No, no, that's what makes it a good ride - when you don't know if you're going to make it


I think he's right,
even though it never feels like that at the time.

"Lessons in the Kitchen are Life Lessons,"

he said during his Classic Deserts American Club Demonstration Kitchen class.

Speaking partly of Baked Bananas Foster, Chocolate Gooey Cake, and Rosemary-Honey Créme Brûlée and partly of life in general, he phrased it slightly better than I'd worked out in my own head:

"If you are so afraid to make mistakes, you'll never do what it takes to risk innovative things and you'll stymie creativity."
-Richard Palm
Pastry Chef

yes.

Some things are more difficult to experiment with than Créme Brûlée, but still.
yes.

Beetle

I don't remember exactly when I found this. It was months ago.
But, I thought this was a very interesting beetle.

High School Plays

In high school,
my involvements with plays were
1) painting the set
2) making the shirt art
3) playing person #4

shirt art:

Indoor Birdhouses

A continuation from "Unfinished Business":

I did a lot of set painting/design/management for plays in high school, often with very little time before the performance. I like making large walls look like something else and if someone gives me a wall, a general idea, and some paint, I can really take off from there.

I only get chances to work on this mural here and there when I go home on breaks.
There are still things to add, but ... it's getting there. My grandma keeps remarking how 'precious' the hummingbird is.

..If I could do this for a living...
well. I'd still want to do other stuff too. But, this wouldn't be bad at all.

The Nightingale and the Rose

I wanted to find a folktale I read somewhere long ago to post here, but I have been unsuccessful.

In the story, the trickster character - a fox or coyote - keeps his life in the tip of his tail. At some point in the story, he is severely beaten and left for dead, but they neglect to beat the very tip of his tail. So though it takes a long time, he collects himself and regains his life.

Being unable to find that, however, here's a link to Oscar Wilde's telling of The Nightingale and the Rose, as tangented here.

One Man's Dream

I was listening to One Man's Dream by Yanni while reading Traversing the UncertainSea, on Sam's Blag.




















I stole these pictures (which I originally took anyway) from his post because the combination of looking at them and listening to One Man's Dream was somehow an amazing combination.

Keep to the Small

The Boy Who Drew Cats

I really like this story,
but I have yet to find an elegantly-told online version.
And by 'elegant', I probably mean 'the way I remember it.'

Mellow Colour

It's dark
and I am warm and feeling worlds away.
There is a lot of pain, loss, and sorrow outside.
There always is, but tonight, they mentioned on the news,
the same massive 'wall of fog', they're calling it, that I enjoyed and took pictures with today has caused a 100-car accident. It's rather serious.
And here, I'm just sitting inside with my pulse.




The song is José Gonzáles' cover of Heartbeats by The Knife.

Faulkner and the use of words

From As I Lay Dying by Faulkner

"And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook.

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."




words as little cages

I AM

I am not just my face
or my feelings
or a collection of chemicals working out to equilibrium

I am more than my personality,
the frequencies of my voice,
my pulse and heart rate

I am none of these things.
I am all of them.

I am not just a sister
or a daughter
or a friend

I am integrated over my past
and my future
of which my considered self now
is but an instant


I think God is like this, too.
That's how He gets to make statements like
I AM
without supplying a particular referent.

Thus the omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.

That's how I could watch my concept of God dissolve.. not like a vanishing, but more like a solution.


GODISNOWHERE
is true, either way you read it.
He's nowhere.
He's everywhere. everything.



A friend once asked how I thought of God.
My answer then was A person, I suppose for the reason that I found it convenient and useful to think of the relation between God and myself as the kind of relationship that might exist between two people. I recognized that this was probably a limited view, but it seemed the most appropriate for then.

I explained to a different friend a few days ago that I'd felt about God as though we'd been in pen-pal correspondence for quite some time, becoming familiar with one another but never really meeting, until one day I received a letter along the lines of "I suppose it's about time I told you, _______..." - I don't know what exactly would follow, but it would be something that did not invalidate what I knew of this person, but really called into question my sense of familiarity and prompt me to wonder whether the image I'd built of them was at all representative of the person I'd actually been writing to this whole time.

QUESTION

Given this spin on my understanding,
what is my response ability?

Maturity

In the last few days, I've had the rare and remarkable opportunities to speak at length with collections of friends that I don't often see together.

The question was posed:

How would you define 'maturity'?

(This from the same guy who asked me how I would define aging, and to both his own reply was 'I'll let you know when I get there!')
(My eventual response: The process of becoming inflexible)

That night, my friends and I were speaking on an unrelated topic (It may have been about how one begins to establish mental categorizations for things [be it consonants or religions or humans], since that seemed to be the theme and variation for many of our discussions) that led to a discussion of how a person's perception of identity develops.

We remarked that from our experience, it seems that a person's early years are very influenced by their environment and molded by the kinds of people around them. As a person gets older, has more agency, and begins to wonder more about his or her identity, it is at first a more passive sort of wondering. The question Who am I, and who am I becoming? takes the attitude of a person watching and discovering who it is that the many outside forces acting upon their basic clay are making them into.

Continuing, a person may realize that they have an idea of the kind of person he or she wants to be and may perceive his or her identity as less of a lottery and more of a project. From here, the person may resist certain external events and pressures in favor of an internally-driven identity sculpting.

Independently, a friend and I realized that this might directly relate to the question posed to us earlier.

What is Maturity?

I think we agreed on the concept, so I will use my wording at the time:

the ability to mold oneself

And, by 'ability', I mean both the capability and the skill.

星星和雪花

Tonight, the stars in their bowl shine bright overhead like a suspended snowfall.
星似凝空雪


the world is black above
white below
feet in the snow
head in the stars



also,
I recently saw Tekkonkinkreet or 鉄コン筋クリート
based on the manga Black and White by Taiyo Matsumoto.
...很有意思