I got attached to some pink tree
at the South Gate
and designed a route to maximize
my time with it
for ten days at noon I walked by,
my nose, my ears, my skin cells
all opened wide as my eyes did
Now the tree is green, the gate is marked
by trash cans recyle bins and a blue mattress
I still follow the same route,
with the same gladness
Yes dear, I am an idiot
35 comments:
Oh man, that is a strike of pure brilliance. I'm serious! I had no idea you were such a postmodern cynic with a splinter of romantic irony driven into your heart. PLEASE give us more like this.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I'm literally crying, that's so funny.
Yeah, I'm with Nicholas on this one. I laughed out loud when I read it before, and I laughed just now too. It fuckin' kills me, for reals. This is awesome.
Your nose shut to block the smell
Your skin cells shunned feeling the air
Your eyes widened more to watch what happens
--to the mattress
And your ears really do not care
Yes dear, you are an idiot
dears, thanks for laughing with me. laughs are good, especially in times of misery.
beauty's parody proves again how much presumption it takes a critic to make an argument.
mike's comment reminds me of my fight with our beloved vassilis five years ago. when i tried to use lao zi to explain how Hegel was wrong (yeah, ignorance makes bold actions), he said, "you are very post-modern." i said, no, i was not. because i was hopelessly romantic, believing myself a daoist hermit. you just saw and named what five years of sophisticated phd training has turned me into. it takes some humor, irony, cynicism toward the self to survive a grave situation.
i still don't know much about brecht, but from what you said about him, i agree with nicholas, he is at least closer to the daoist spirit than Benjamin. facing the worst entanglement of obstacles, a water philosophy works better than a head-on collision.
But since when, my small foreign friend, does the "Daoist spirit" reserve final judgment for all things? I've been reading Benjamin for several weeks now, and I can say that it's been one of the more rewarding and illuminating experiences I've had in the last few months - my recent personal catastrophes notwithstanding. If you believe in the Dao, and practice it, then more power to you; and the same goes for Nicholas' Catholicism - but it's one thing to be a theologian, and another to be a critic. In their purest forms, each may appear bankrupt to the other - but those "purest forms" are idealizations of what each of us are, which is a whole crowd of people, very few of whom agree about much. Nobody doubts that we have to lead our own lives according to some principle - as Hume writes, "be a philosopher, but first, be a [hu]man" (my emendation). The ethical test of our actions and thoughts is not and can not be the success of our research, or anything else that has to do with the 'profession': in short, like Socrates suggests, the test is whether we're willing to live with ourselves, to be friends with ourselves, at the end of the day - or perhaps, with all the people we've been in that day. The two are and should be worlds apart, though inevitably they share notes. And no, at that same end of the day, I don't imagine I'm better off in the slightest because I can quote Hume and Socrates. Hume and Socrates both have nothing specific to say about what it feels like to eat mediocre food and sleep in an apartment that's stacked with boxes, waiting to get out of there because you and another person have mutually failed each other.
I, at least, only count myself lucky that I seem to have found a way to spend my life in which my private enthusiasms find a point of contact with other people: through teaching, writing, and talking - in forums that include even these blogs. And for as miserable as that 'privacy' (read: isolation) sometimes is, and will no doubt continue to be, it's better than a privacy lived as stubborn esotericism and involuntary outsider-status in a culture that's more interested in irresponsible titillation fed by foreign oil and fanatic capitalism. I am grateful for that - and I am, in fact, grateful to struggle through things I don't fully understand, whether it's Hegel, Benjamin, or the next academic reception I attend. But at no point do I imagine that any of the privilege I enjoy will save me from loneliness, from disappointment, from disaster, or even from death. That's between me and me. But at best, what I do allows me to change my mind about things - and that is often a pleasure, for not just "me and me" alone. My point, perhaps, if I have one, is to suggest that changing one's mind - even if it represents a bit of a detour from the Dao - is a pleasure.
Anyway, I mean all this in the most friendly way. If you took the epithet "postmodern" as a jab, I retract it - it was written without much reflection.
oh, mike, don't get me wrong. i took that "postmodern cynic with a splinter of romantic irony driven into your[my] heart" as the highest compliment and the most accurate comment of me i ever had, seriously. i myself did not realize how much i had changed after years of miserable struggles until you pointed it out. i was happily surprised that you saw me so clearly through that few lines. when i said, "it takes some humor, irony, cynicism toward the self to survive a grave situation," i meant it. the "grave situation" was not how i had to "fight against" hegel or vassilis, defend "dao", and refuse to change, but how i had to struggle with the conflicts between my preconceived vision of being a poet hermit, and a term called "academia," and CHANGE to come to terms with this new environ. besides, i was told repeatedly (don't ask by whom)to forget about creative writing and be an academic, though only until recently did i realize this two didn't have to be either/or. these few lines of "poetry," if they may be called so, were the first time i could pull myself together and look at my struggles with a sense of humor.
i am not sure what you were referring to by "stubborn esotericism and involuntary outsider-status in a culture", if you meant my "moral inertia," you forgot how often i decidedly confirm something to show, in our shared funny way, its absurdity, like nicholas often does. and of course, "water philosophy" and "daoist spirit" were both coinages meant to be funny. when i said daoist "spirit" or water "philosophy" i was borrowing some western terms to be funny, to say, humorously, brecht seems to be more flexible than benjamin because benjamin gave up hope and killed himself whereas brecht did not. i did not read enough to say anything about them, so i used "seems."
the text "dao de jing" [i am being lazy here, for there is no "the text." countless fragments of different versions of "the text" have and will continue to be digged out of ancient graves. scholars did not even agree whether lao zi wrote dao de jing or not. even it's agreed that he did, scholars argue which part were written originally by laozi, which part were added or revised by later people] does not offer a theology as a religious text would do, nor a philosophy in the sense of Plato, Socrates, Hume or Hegel. sorry for lumping them together, i realize they are very different, but dao de jing is more different from them because it reads more like poetry or fragments of riddles than logical arguments of a system of beliefs. in my experience. if i "cling to" anything that dao de jing offers, that would be the idea of change, the qualities of water which always reminds me to be flexible to go forward, to go further away from what i want in order to come close, when i fixate on my miseries and refuse to change.
mike, thanks for sharing. i have been struggling through things i don't fully understand too, but feeling despaired and miserable. now, you and other friends are telling me i should feel grateful for this. i am grateful and happy to know that i am not alone.
so, mike, this seems to another discussion of brecht/benjamin/laozi. i did not write about "dao de jing" because i didn't and still don't feel i know it enough to write about it. but please teach me about brecht and benjamin and please continue to question laozi. i will read more about these three. hopefully, nicholas, you and i will eventually produce something out of this discussion.
Your minor explosion of scare-quotes notwithstanding, I'm glad I didn't put you off too much. The phrase "stubborn esotericism and involuntary outsider-status in a culture" should be read wholly in light of its qualifier, i.e. "a culture that's more interested" etc.; at no point does this refer to you. I was merely making impersonal reference to the catastrophic, non-academic image of my possible self I developed before I came here - working a dismal office job for a few decades and crying into my Rilke at night, basically. I would sooner live the way I do now than half-heartedly pursue my interests under the sign of "after-work leisure", a concept and a practice which I find disgusting.
At any rate, this makes your auto-critique unnecessary, though revealing. Given my own circumspect nature - and the fact that I have Nicholas to remind me of the obvious fact that there is no easy point-to-point correspondence between Western and Eastern cultures - I fully realize that applying terms like "spirit" and "philosophy", or even "text", to something like the Dao is only an absurd concession on my own part to the fact that we're writing in English. Nonetheless, my understanding was and is far from nuanced enough to really pick up on the satire you lace them with.
On a biographical note, and speaking as a witness to the episode in CL 600 you mention, I still scratch my head at the idea that you felt like you had fallen into real conflict with V., who strikes me as having less of an agenda - intellectual, political, or personal - than almost any other faculty I know. He's certainly no more Hegelian than I am. On the other hand, I hope I'm not the first to break it to you that nobody really understood that reading, either. You may be cheered to know, furthermore, that when we read the excerpt from Derrida's _Glas_, a text which did more injury to my sense of meaning than six years of frustrated sexuality and heavy drinking, I wrote a bloodthirsty and hopping-mad parody of it for that week's assignment. In retrospect, this would represent a rather ham-fisted attempt at _Einverstaendnis_. To which V., being (I think) the Brechtian/Daoist sage he really is, responded by writing, "Well done, you really got the point."
All told, he had the unfortunate position of absorbing all the initial outbreaks of our anger, incomprehension, and disillusionment in our first semester; he saw it as his responsibility, I think, to loosen our joints a bit - mostly so that they didn't shatter under the brute force of the months and years to come. And you have to admit that for this task, he took a LOT of shit from the five of us, including the famous "fetishizing culture" exchange between Nicholas and A., which would have driven any sane person promptly into Ashley's. I think he deserves some commendation for not losing his head - whether it's from strength of character or Hellenic fatalism.
Anyway: yes, let's get back to the Lao Zi-Brecht connection. I'll peruse my collected edition of BB for relevant texts, and maybe post something short.
OK... I should stay away from this place for a moment??
Just a couple of things for Water, since you have the moral responsibility to console me.
Water:
I must confess that I have a crush on both Laozi and Benjamin. When I enjoy the company of one of them, I often forget the other... But when I read "The structure of truth...demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence" (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), I could feel them both. And I insist that this impression (that they are somewhat identical at certain points) results more from my personal attachment with these two great lovers than from intellectual endeavor. I see one of them in the other only because I see the same me in these two different relationships.
(Would my feminist friends blame me for framing everything in heterosexual terms? Well, I am too stressed out by dissertating to care.)
mike, of course, you did not put me off. i am glad we talked it out. my response was also written in a rush. i did not realize the kind of unintended connection people would make because of my lack of reflection.
i remember taking a glance at your hilarious and brilliant piece while we were waiting for a film to start. i remember everyone laughed hysterically, if my memory did not trick me. you were not the first one to tell me nobody really understood the reading, but you are the first to remind me that V suffered as much as we did, which made me feel sorry for him. i did not really get into conflict with him. for my extremely rebellious mentality and poor vocabulary, i relapsed into total silence as a defying gesture, which, most probably, he did not notice at all. another absurd situation. you are right. i was not fair with our poor professor. he does deserve a lot of commendation for not losing his head. i wish i realized this earlier.
great, beauty already started posting quotes about Benjamin and laozi. i look forward to your post too.
Aw shucks. I blush.
who is brecht
laozi dao and benjamin
de-de da-da re-re-me-me
daodejing
Bury yourself in the C
you will get a D
and who cares
If you have a poignant p
but sure, dear,
give me a ring
and you will find me still
eating, drinking, drooling
with beibei oo aa cooking
oops,the evil machine has turned my "cooing" into "cooking". but who knows? maybe she is cooking something,after all, for herself and for those around who never truly understand her?
hahahaha... [with echoes from all directions] this is so much more postmodern or into the present than mine! sumiao, cooking is even better than cooing. true, who knows what beibei has been cooking for us all. she is the one who could really pull off a miracle.
to be literal about the ring, i did call you last weekend, on your home phone and cell phone, while i was taking my weekly walk to the superstore, but nobody picked up the phone. i thought you and beibei had been out reading in the bookstore again.:)
Beaut, the problem you're encountering is that water, mickles, and I are not only colleagues in the same department but close friends as well with a taste for irreverent humor, that, in my case at least, borders on racist and is highly inflammatory.
We were very willful children, with the possible exception of the Oaktree, who, Sylwia assures me, is not as wooden as I believe him to be. So, I do kinda feel bad for Herr Professor, but I think he enjoyed it as much as we did.
Oh, and hello, Sumiao.
We are not only willful children, but busy ones too. Look at all these comments!
I've eaten too much spaghetti and can't think today. I'll write something punchy tomorrow.
I ate some Korean spicy noodles, and I can't think either. Let Laozi speak for the moment. Forgive my persistent crush on him.
Sumiao's poem reminded me of two passages in Laozi, about the infant and the ultimate Way.
Chapter 28. Know the Male, cleave to the Female...
Know the Male, cleave to the Female
Be the valley for everyone.
Being the valley for everyone
You are always in virtue without lapse
And you return to infancy.
Chapter 55. One who remains rich in virtuous power...
One who remains rich in virtuous power
Is like a newborn baby.
Bees, scorpions and venomous snakes do not bite it,
The wild beasts do not attack it,
Birds of prey do not sink their claws into it.
Though its bones are weak
And muscles soft,
Its grip is strong.
Without knowing of the blending of male and female
S/he is a perfect production,
The ultimate in vitality.
S/he cries all day without getting hoarse.
S/he is the ultimate in harmony.
I must admit Chapter 55 sounds (to these tired and Western ears) remarkably close to certain tenets of Roman Stoicism, not to mention the early Christian church. What's different is the emphasis on power and vitality here, which is almost totally absent from the early Christian realm (really only God possesses power and vitality, dispenses it at will, etc.), and present in a somewhat modified form in the Stoics. For both of them the stress falls on mastery won through submission, not on this kind of mastery. The striking and fairly uncompromising irony of the one rich in power being like a newborn baby has no parallel to anything I know - not even Socrates could throw out something like that without a few hundred Stephanus pages of tiresome explanation. The idea of a helpless and exposed fragility which nonetheless goes spared, though open to danger on all sides - and that without the reassuring anthropomorphic presence of the divine, like Athena to Odysseus or God to Christ - is also pretty crazy. Just the power of life: no figure, no allegory, no stand-in or stunt double. I'm like a fish out of water without a representation to mediate subject and object. *Sigh*. Nicholas is laughing right now, and cursing his committee who are all like me.
Naturally I have no access to the Chinese, but from what I've read of the erudite exegeses of my peers, I'm probably missing out on most of the picture, and making most of this up. Help! I'm a comparatist.
PS As for cleaving to the Female, I'm done with that for a while. How about cleaving to the Bar?
Hahahaha, "cleaving to the BAR!" That is a good one! And it totally makes sense--unlike the English translations of Laozi.
Anyways, I swear I am going to drop Laozi now. But I must clarify that "the Female" refers to the softer/yin aspect of things, including that energy/element in your self. However, your last comments--and the materiality of life in the imagery of BAR--deserve applause!
(PS This "cleaving to the Bar" is very Rabelais!)
Wait, are you implying I have a "softer/yin element" in myself? Maybe that's the half-digested spaghetti still soldiering its way through my system.
Hmmm, the Feminine in me... well, I was once told that outside of jazz, my tastes in pop music pretty much correspond to a white urban lesbian in her 20s.
To be honest, I was giggling. And I do hate you (by "you," of course, I mean my committee, which is to say mostly yours as well).
Laozi certainly wouldn't have fit in with Seneca and his ilk, as least I'd like to think so.
Cleave to the Bar!
first off. look at what i found while googling "genitive absolute".
Rom 12:9 Hate the evil! Cleave to the good!
second. mike, the underlying assumption in laozi's "philosophy" might be that human beings are born harmless, rather than evil or sinned. nobody would harm anybody else if everyone keep the harmless nature of a new-born baby.
i realize i am opening a can of worms. got to stop before i make more grotesque generalizations.
First, I want to know, Water, why did you need to google "genitive absolute?"
Second (I begin to sound like Democratic Senators such as Kerry and Biden, who always use their hands to count their talking points), some translators use "masculine"/"feminine" but I prefer "male"/"female" because the former is too Western and too modern to be used to understand Laozi or the anatomical base of ancient philosophical thinking. Still, it seems that Mike did another translating in his mind and smoothly replaced "female"/softer/yin with "the Feminine." Well, that's wonderful, since in Psychoanalytical feminism, "the feminine" implies subversion. And the imagery of "half-digested spaghetti soldiering its way through my system" is just as subversive, if not more. Your friend's comments on your taste for pop music therefore must be taken as a compliment!
Although I'm not really sure what we're talking about anymore, if anything:
Clearly the Daoist viewpoint on newborn babies is way off the mark. I tend to agree with St. Augustine here, who sees newborn babies as too helpless and powerless to commit evil acts: the will is clearly there - witness the relative violence of their tantrums - but the ability is absent. Young children, on the other hand, who have gained some power to accomplish their will independently of others' help, are evil incarnate, and will stop at nothing - precisely because they possess both will and ability. This is the way I see it, too - any idiot should be able to see that children are the most evil beings in the world; it's just that our judgment is clouded by biological and cultural drives to "nurture" and "cherish" the young, who deserve our loving attention about as much as an armored tank does.
As for genitive absolutes - hmmm, how to write something that Nicholas won't correct or find fault with...
A genitive absolute is a grammatical construction in ancient Greek that consists of a self-contained clause (subject + verb [+ object]) separated from the rest of the sentence (hence ab-solute) by virtue of the fact that the verb is made into a participle (these inflect in Greek) and this participle and the subject are then inflected into the genitive case. They're used to express conditions that attend, modify, or otherwise affect the main action of a sentence, and they're usually translated in English by subordinate clauses like "Although..." "Because..." "Since..." "Such-and-such being the case..." "While...", etc. Herodotus uses A LOT of very long genitive absolutes, because they're handy for indicating simultaneous action, of which a lot goes down during the Persian Wars he describes. This also makes reading his Greek in certain places into something of a bore, I find.
Water googled the gen. abs. because I mentioned them in a comment on somebody else's blog (I don't remember which, there are so many of them all of a sudden).
Wow, now I feel like Nicholas must feel, except with more sleep. Anyway, let's get back to Laozi.
PS. There is absolutely nothing feminine about the spaghetti in my intestines right now.
Water--you are the owner of this space. Don't you want to tell us what has happened to the blue mattress, before the jar of comments explodes?
Mike is right, especially about the simultaneous action, but what's odd about absolutes, both the Greeks' genitive flavor and the Roman's heartier ablative one, is how they often use as conditions for the main clause things that have no obvious relevance to the action. This works well for herodotus, who practically manufactures cause when he can't readily find it (not unlike a certain North American bicameral legislature), but not so much for Thucydides, who loves the te...kai formation, which is often used for natural conjuncture: as if to say, "te he consumed the whole of the bagel so ravenously kai he was bloated for hours."
Scholastics (i.e. medieval Jesus freaks with a penchant for philosophizin') were fond of the absolute "deo volente" (God willing) to describe practically anything: "deo volente Gaius could a few books in order to pay off his enormous bar tab." Strangely enough, so were Caesar--Rex Harrison, not the weeny--and Cicero, both of whom were big on digressions and short, sometimes, on the facts. Cicero's case against the conspirator Cataline essentially amounts to "there was once a well intentioned guy named Sulla who really fucked shit up for us." Most of that digression takes the form of the ablative absolute. His case is basically, "seeing as bad shit happened in the past when someone consolidated power..."
But back to Laozi: it's hard, for me at least, to figure out just what it is he's saying or even if there is something concrete he wants to get across. I think Liansu probably has a better handle on things when she says it's more a riddle to puzzled over than a concrete philosophy. After all, in the eighth chapter, he talks about the non-contentious nature of water but in the 78th says that against strength there is nothing stronger than it (seemingly a contradiction), which is to say, I think, the only strength against the strong (though the chinese means something more like rigid) is weakness, or rather yielding. Conventional notions of strength and weakness are being turned over on themselves over and over again.
To take the burden of frivolous nonsense off Liansu's blog, I invite you all to post a comment on my own new entry:
http://his-nastyness.blogspot.com
i agree with nicholas'distinction between the ordinary strong and the daoist strong. the ordinary strong seems to imply rigid conficts and aggressive moves.
come on beauty, why are you so obsessed with the blue matress? anyway, it probably has moved to a bigger trash can or something. i am now after more shady routes since the summer is here and the sun is bloody hot!!
Look, I swore that I would drop Laozi and I am going to stick to it. You can't imagine how difficult it is for me to do so while the conversation about him continues. That is why I brought up the blue mattress, something that was not even invented in Laozi's time. Water, don't you think I am a very considerate guest on your blog?
I am going to have some gelato at the Zingerman's now. (I bet you miss it!) Before that I can't think. Why don't you write about what you have been eating? Let's take a break from the linguistic and philosophical and move on to something more sophisticated--food and drink.
I just ate a big salad - no more spaghetti for me. I'm discovering more and more that the american prejudice against putting dried fruits or nuts in salads is stupid. Witness the extreme instance: the chef's salad. You might as well eat a deli sandwich. Also good in salads is corn, raisins, and tuna (not at the same time, probably). Speaking of cleaving to the Bar, that's what I'm doing tonight. So that covers food and drink at the moment.
I ate a burrito--without beans, cannot handle those. I asked for the spicest sausa, but still had to add a bit extra hot on it. So that is food. As for drink, I bought a bottle of chardonny. I am waiting to open it when I get ready to write some crazy stuff on someone's blog.
Last night, it was hamburgers, cherries, and potato salad. The potato salad, in a sense, was the star, as it's impossible to find here, so I had to make it myself. It was quite good, but if you don't like it mustardy potato salad, you wouldn't like mine.
A bottle of Chardonnay? Why not just drink motor oil?
ok... it seems it didn't really matter what i drank last night... it shut me up. and our sophisticated conversation about food and drink surely puts a lid to this evil can of comments and allows Water some peace...
Wow, I cleaved to the Bar, and I think the Bar just cleaved back. I just got up, and it's 2.30 in the afternoon.
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