tang dynasty times

Dreaming of Carthage

 

I just finished Richard Miles' Carthage Must Be Destroyed. It was fabulous--an illumination of the time of heroes; of Hannibal crossing the alps and Salammbô. Miles says: great cities have great foundation stories. Indeed, the story of Carthage is the story of Tyre, Troy, Rome and Sicily... Tangled webs and Homeric Destiny?

Dreaming of Carthage.

At one time it was the most luxerious, most fabulously wealthy city on earth. I have been re-listening to another Melvyn Bragg program, this time on the Roman destruction of Carthage, and one of the guests mentioned that in ancient times, traveling from Rome to Carthage would have been like going from London to New York today.

Well, I prefer to think of it like Hong Kong: a dazzlingly rich, bustling trading entrepot; populated with people from all over the region-- Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Persians and those from the Levant mingling with Spanish, Egyptian, and Sub-Saharan Africans. Strabo claimed that over 700,000 people dwelled in the city. A city of maritime merchants, it was also a naval super power.

Built on the fortunes made from the legendary purple dye of the Phoencians-- these great traders of the Mediterranean made the finest ships and traded in everything from ebony and ivory, to African animals used for the Roman Games-- skins, hides, lions, elephants and peacocks. Tin and silver from New Carthage (Spain) was important as was their trade in crockery and spices, honey; the city was also known far and wide for its wine and for its version of the wildly popular Roman condiment, Garum--made from fermented fish innards, it was "like the tomato ketchup of the times," said one of Melvyn Bragg's guests. (See Silk Road Gourmet's Making Garum!)

Facing the sea, with it's superb double harbors, you almost cannot help but imagine that on a clear day a person could see all the way to Sicily.

Taking a look at the city layout one can immediately sense how well-planned the city was. Guarding the circular military harbor and the larger mercantile harbor stood a watchtower, and located near the tower were both the tombs and the kilns. I imagine this also would have been a good place to have located the dye vats and the garum producing factories as well-- guarded and facing the sea.

In fact, the entire city was well-guarded, as Carthage was known for its massive city walls.

Not surprising, in the center of the city was the busy agora, and giving the people's predilection for trade, you can just imagine the kinds of goods that must have been available in the markets-- incense from Arabia and maybe even silk from China sat alongside local dates, figs, olive oil and the most exquisite embroidery in the Mediterranean.

Scattered beyond the agora, were temples and four residential areas layed out in grid patterns.

Like Hong Kong, I imagine it to be a place that exuded unstoppable excitement. And, thanks to the fact that-- unlike their mortal enemies, the Romans-- the citizens of Carthage never took to the Stoic philosophy, conspicuous consumption was always an option. And, so the city was also renown for its monumental architecture and beautiful buildings, embodying all the latest Greek and Egyptian styles. There were five and six story residential building, for example, which are said to have towered over narrow streets-- and of course, the famed mosaics.

Going through an exhibition of Carthaginian artifacts in Tokyo, one could only just barely catch a glimpse of the splendour of what was Carthage. There were terracotta urns used to store the city's famous garum (in Japanese called 魚醤）and coins, gold jewelry,beautiful glass beads and armor. I think it had to be the mosaics that most impressed. To be honest, compared to things you see from China at a similar time period, it seemed somehow under-whelming. However, world-class she was-- and Carthage, during Punic times, stood as the great mirror of ancient Rome. Sometimes referred to as twin cities, Carthage and Rome were entangled by an ancient curse and entertwining destinies, jealousies, and rivalries. If nothing else, there was always Sicily to fight over. So, I suppose it only inevitable that one or the other must fall.  

Carthago delenda est.

Cato the Elder always ended his speeches thus: And by the way, Carthage must be destroyed. It might have been Mary Beard or one of the other lady scholars with Melvyn Bragg who described the time that Cato took out three ripe and exquisite figs from his pocket: Look, these are but three days from Rome...Those figs representing wealth beyond imagination and a city infamous for its child sacrifices and lack of restraint. Decadence, sacrifice and fabulous riches.

Cato kept up his mantra and before long the opportunity to attack presented itself leading the way to the third and final Punic War. 

It was Scipio, of course, who brought the city down.

After a long siege, Scipio-- "the Roman Hannibal"--swept in to inflict defeat on the Carthaginians and raze the city to the ground. Anyone not killed was sold into slavery and the city buildings were all destroyed.

The final moments of the battle have been told and retold. The Carthiginian general, hoping to at least spare any final suffering after he realized that all was lost, had left the citadel to surrender, to the disgust of his wife, who yelling insults at his cowardice leapt with her children into the fires. The entire city was, by that time, I suppose, on fire. And then as the Greek historian Phobius stood at his side, Scipio-- with tears streaming down his cheeks, was said to have cried out a sentence from Homer:

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

And Priam and his people shall be slain.

The Greek historian was deeply moved by this; for --as all historians know-- there is such a thing as Homeric destiny, and hence, just as Troy fell, and now Carthage falls, so too shall one day Rome be destroyed as well.

History as destiny

Miles' book has chapters about heroes. Not surprisingly, when I mentioned being on another Hannibal kick, one of my associates on facebook said, "The Punic Wars, now Those were Wars." Interestingly, not an hour earlier-- thinking along very similar lines, I had asked Caesar whether he thought that there was any chance that someday future historians would be talking about our wars in such heroic terms... Vietnam, Iraq, AfPak-- is it near impossible to imagine that modern wars will ever inspire people in the same way.

For history is more than anything a love story, and in this way, Troy, Carthage and Rome remind me of my murals at Bezeklik.

Located along the Great and Glorious Mural Express, they were renown in all lands for their stunning beauty-- in particular, it was the extravagant use of the costly color blue that amazed East and West. Like Carthage, like Troy, like Rome, they were painstakingly created over hundreds of years-- only to be destroyed in waves: ancient treasure hunters, Islamic iconoclasts and finally by the western scholars who pried the murals right off the cave walls. The most precious of the murals, cut into pieces and shipped back to Berlin, perished during Allied bombing during WWII.

And, so it goes.... and yet that is not the end of the story for Bezeklik since researchers in Japan are now trying to digitally reconstruct the murals to bring them back to life once again. One can get on board the mural express to see them or one can log on to see them digitally reconstructed on a scholarly site or even visit them in Second Life. 

Less some Manichaean fight between light and dark, history-- told and re-told like a poem-- rises and falls as it is reborn.

Or as Charlotte Higgins article on the war and the Iliad concludes:

At the end of the poem comes the scene between Priam and Achilles, when the frail, grieving father finds it in himself to kiss those "terrible, man-­killing hands / that had slaughtered Priam's many sons in battle", when ­Achilles sees reflected in the face of Priam the likeness of his own beloved father. Weil underestimated the power of this passage. Achilles is not simply an unfeeling "thing", reduced by the unspeakable power of force. The truth may be harder to take. He is at the same time a mass slaughterer and the gentlest of men. Only a few lines of verse stand between the Achilles who wipes away the tears of his beloved Patroclus and the one who piles up hecatombs of the Trojan dead. Find in this comfort, if you can.

 

**

Ponte dei Sospiri (溜息橋)

         

absence / absence
Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object -- whatever its cause and its duration -- and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment-- Barthes

 Queen Dido.

You will recall, the last we saw the two lovers, they were overwhelmed and lying in each other's arms-- whispering softly in Japanese: 愛していますよ, she says, "I love you."

That eros （愛神）had intoxicated her in a cloud of longing and desire -- that cannot be denied. I ask, though, that you recall the cave scene (caves as female body/sexuality) when "torches of lightning blazed," and the "prisoners of lust" ("enthralled by shameless passion') make love

That was the first day of her ruin and the first cause for sorrows; for she is not moved by her appearance or reputation, now Dido no longer thinks of her love as a secret: she calls it marriage; she hides her fault by this name

Is everyone finally getting the picture?

They have made love, and she now believes they are married. Aeneas, for his part is probably thinking, "Hey, who said anything about marriage?"

And that is amour （恋愛）.

Turning back to daoism for a moment, last night I re-read a friend's work on the topic for the third time. And, if daoism urges us to put aside our various mental constructs (of Self, of how we think the world should be, etc.) and go back to the purity and honesty of childhood, I am left asking again, what if anything was Dido's reaction than a fit of love and abandonment? I wonder, if the ancients had this one 狂気の愛 (amour fou).

Burning incense and tossing oracle bones, I read Barthes like the Gialbo reads the yijing:

A classic word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence (to sigh 溜息→感嘆 ): "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace 色 in that melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels.

So there she is-- walking over the Bridge of Sighs (溜息橋), but finds herself utterly unable to just turn around and walk back to the other side. And so in my reading, Dido does nothing （無為）-- or she does something 有為 (it's all in what direction you are facing on the bridge) but walking forward (or backward) she lies down in the flames; cursing all Trojans.

Regarding the wuwei world （無為自然）I found one japanese explanation I liked a lot-- though, I warn you I have no idea if this works for those dwelling in the State of Chu. And that is this, the kanji wei (為/为) means, "to do" and "to become" but in Japanese at least, the more common meaning of the kanji is "for the purpose of"-- and one blogger wrote how it is this that is the point of wuwei. Do not perform any action which you do for the purpose (...の為に）of something else. This means, basically, to always act in terms of ends (ends in themselves)-- never in terms of means. Being un-strategic and without ado... About Dido's heart, Brodsky said, "her love was like a fish."

Is she not the real hero of the epic?

I was listening to an In Our Time program on free will and not surprisingly, Aeneas was mentioned. Discussing the surprising lack of interest the hero has received by Hollywood, one of Bragg's guests mentioned that it may in part have been due to the hero's lack of free will. Indeed, out of all the ancient heroes, Aeneas is considered to be almost totally lacking in free will. Pious Aeneas and his duty. Controlled by destiny, there is almost no wiggle room in his mind.

But, of course, this is not the only reason Aeneas-among the ancient heroes-- has been looked down upon and sometimes even derided. For as Hubert Dreyfus said (and I agree), it's hard not to dislike him really.

For as my friend, the Count remarked :

 Zeus has nothing to do with it. This is the sod part.(And it can be admirable: look at Odysseus, who is always, always, in every instance, the better man. Baby, he says to Calypso, you are everything a man would ever wish, but I love another. Calypso hates it, and can’t come to terms with it for seven long years. But in the end she does. And she does because at least she knows she is not being lied to, made a fool of, cheated. Usually — sometimes — even a woman spurned can admire character in a man).

For more, see In Praise of Heroes Not saying Stupid Things.

Barthes ends his meditation thus:

The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my "truth" and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.

In Praise of Heroes not Saying Stupid Things

-- In Carthage (from the Peony Archives)

Standing beside the large window that overlooked the harbor, they stood silently watching the sea. She stood just behind her lover, trying to gaze out in the same direction in which he was silently staring. His gaze, sang the poet, so faraway that, 

his lips were immobile
like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon
in his goblet was still.

It was warm and she could feel the sunlight streaming in from the window. Flinging off her shawl, she stood dressed from head to toe in the luxurious purple robes that had made her ancestors so rich that they could send their daughters out across the sea to establish Kingdoms of their own.

A Queen, she stood in a cloud of perfume. Jasmine and sandalwood, frankincense and lemons-- she walked in bare feet over carpets covered in rose petals. Yet, it was the smell of the sea which lingered so undeniably.

Trying to follow his eyes out toward the horizon where he was looking, no matter how hard she squinted, she couldn't see past the intense glare of the sun shining off the water.

The Poet sang of what happened next-- of the Queen, whose

love
was just a fish—perhaps which might
plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship,
and knifing the waves with the supple body,
perhaps yet overtake him—but he,
he in this thoughts already strode upon the land.
And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow.

And the great man left Carthage.  

And thereafter history has questioned whether he really was all that.

Cut him some slack

my friend, Conrad-- an expert in these matters--once remarked,

is it that we have become so Greek that we are no longer able to understand the Romans?

I mean, I guess you could say, he really had to do his duty, right? Pious Aeneus.

Or, is it that we are no longer able to really daydream? For the Queen, walking in a cloud of fragrant dreams was not really thinking clearly, was she? As Conrad teases:

While Dido in a Bed of Fire,
A new-found way to cool desire,
Lay wrapt in smoke, half Cole, half Dido,
Too late repenting Crime Libido

In complete disgust, Conrad's friend the Count had called him "a sod and a wet blanket," suggesting that, "Dido must have really killed herself because she wouldn't believe that she fell for that???"

Indeed, in her distress

She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers
had kindled by the city walls,
and she envisioned between the flame and smoke of the fire
how Carthage silently crumbled
ages before Cato’s prophecy

Dreyfus seems to think likewise, complaining that the real nail in the coffin was not only did he say, "Honey, I've got bigger fish to fry," but that he had to gone on and add "but even if I didn't have to obey Zeus and leave, I still wouldn't stay with you as in truth I would probably choose to go back to Troy if I could...." Couldn't he have let her down a little more gently, really?

This is what just baffled Dreyfus, who suggests that, it's hard not to dislike him really.

The Count was similarly annoyed with the invocation of Zeus... for as he remarked :

 Zeus has nothing to do with it. This is the sod part.(And it can be admirable: look at Odysseus, who is always, always, in every instance, the better man. Baby, he says to Calypso, you are everything a man would ever wish, but I love another. Calypso hates it, and can’t come to terms with it for seven long years. But in the end she does. And she does because at least she knows she is not being lied to, made a fool of, cheated. Usually — sometimes — even a woman spurned can admire character in a man).

I tend to agree. Character is everything-- and Aeneas was no Odysseus, that's for sure. Really, is it any wonder that Dido lamented? But as I suggested to Caesar this morning, as the philosophers suggest, fate is probably nothing more than a person's character and their chosen path. Yet, "chosen" is probably itself ambiguous as it doesn't necessarily mean "to choose" does it? As in fact, in the end what is a person's fate but one's charater plus the world one is thrown in? Look at Aeneas. Did he choose what he wanted to do or did he merely do what was felt necessary given the man he was and the world he was embedded? 

Amor Fati, whispered Nietzsche.

A man with a mission, and yet, I just cannot help-- in praise of daydreaming; in praise of desire; in praise of heroes not saying stupid things-- to side with the Queen.

**

Below Joseph Brodsky's Dido and Aeneas is the from BBC's Vanity Fair. Rebecca Sharp's dazzling rendition of Dido's Lament:

DIDO AND AENEAS, by Joseph Brodsky

The great man stared through the window
but her entire world ended with the border
of his broad Greek tunic, whose abundant folds
resembled the sea on hold.
And he still stared out through the window, and his gaze
was so far away from here, that his lips were immobile
like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon
in his goblet was still.

But her love
was just a fish—perhaps which might
plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship,
and knifing the waves with the supple body,
perhaps yet overtake him—but he,
he in this thoughts already strode upon the land.
And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow.
And the great man left Carthage.
She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers
had kindled by the city walls,
and she envisioned between the flame and smoke of the fire
how Carthage silently crumbled
ages before Cato’s prophecy.

 

 

 

Dido Sings the Wuwei Blues (Part 2)

 

 Shipwrecked at Carthage-- Part 2 (this time for the Gialbo) 

Seneca is stoically silent, while Ibn Arabi voices his complaints loudly on Facebook. It seems that some of you are not yet convinced that Dido had a point. The Gialbo-- in his typically subtle and yet sophisticated manner-- brings up the famous scene where Zhuangzi mourns his dead wife in order to try and better understand what exactly we are talking about:

莊子妻死，惠子弔之，莊子則方箕踞鼓盆而歌。惠子曰：“與人居長子，老身死，不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎！”莊子曰：“不然。是其始死也，我獨何能無概然！察其始而本無生，非徒無生也，而本無形，非徒無形也，而本無氣。雜乎芒芴之間，變而有氣，氣變而有形，形變而有生，今又變而之死，是相與為春秋冬夏四時行也。人且偃然寢於巨室，而我噭噭然隨而哭之，自以為不通乎命，故止也

I am at first taken aback by Seneca Crane's interpretation (see here). It is pure stoicism (I cannot help but think darkly). Although I do know what he means in a sense. That one is to "taste without tasting" (ddj63) etc. At the same time, I decide to go ahead and make my own translation of the passage to see if I cannot get to an interpretation that will be more satisfactory to me (and to Dido).

After completing my rendition, I discover, it's not all that different from Watson's-- except perhaps that I would want to stress much more this concept that Zhuangzi (otherwise known as ZZ) is basing both his behavior as well as the reason behind his behavior on something the Japanese translations have as 自然の法則　principles of nature and the dao　道理.

Ibn Arabi-- whose stamina for debate is unsurpassed-- has many problems with this, but for now I am sticking to this idea that what Watson call fate and what Legge calls "what is appointed for all" is really best expressed as the laws of nature or Way.

But more importantly, that this really boils down to one man's (the man we call ZZ) personal response to Way. And, that this personal response to Way has less stress on an objective-sounding normative "should" than the Roman version would suggest (I am basing my interpretation on online Japanese sources-- which many of you will be aware that I usually am more friendly to since after all they have been doing this a 1000 years). In fact, concerning this second point, two of the online sites I used had this last line explicitly translated something like, "and as for myself, I thought to cry like that would be ignoring what was natural as Way.... "

These small adjustments in emphasis lend for a translation that is much more intuitive to me:

(牡丹訳）

(trans)
When Zhuangzi's wife died, Huizi found him singing and drumming.

Huizi asked him: "Zhuangdi, is it right to to be singing and drumming during a time of mourning? Afterall was it not your wife who lived with you all these years, raising your children? To not cry is one thing, but to sing and drum-- is this not a time for sadness (is not your reaction unnatural)?"

Zhuangzi replied: "Not at all. Was I not devastated when she first died? Did I not cry then?

"Thinking about it, though, I thought about that time before she was born when she had no real "existence." Not only did she have no real "existence" but she had no physical form. And without a body, she also had no spirit (氣). From out of this murky nothing, however, 氣 was generated and this was changed into "form." Now this body and 氣 has returned to it's origins-- and this is no different than the changing of the seasons. From spring to summer, from summer to fall, from fall to winter, this is the natural way of the world. That humans can return to a peaceful slumber in a great room within nature-- in this happy state, why would I then cry thinking of her like that? To cry after thinking of it in this way would be to ignore what is natural-- or the Way of Nature." (天命）

Watson calls this concept of 「命」 Fate. And, I don't dislike this-- as long as we remember that while for the Stoics, fate was like a dog tied to cart being dragged around town; for the daoist sage, what was fate other than simply the natural unfolding of events? Actually, just going by the Japanese, 天命 perhaps all it really suggests is the concept of all those things which are out of human hands-- or as wikipedia explains, "how one should live the life given to human beings by "heaven" (天から人間に与えられた一生をかけて行うべき命令のこと)

Ok, fate.

To my mind, the interesting question is: how does one know what to do in any given situation? How can person understand what is their fate? Well for the stoics, one knew fate (or Nature) through reason. And to cultivate reason one was to do everything in their power to diminish the emotions which could cloud our rational faculties (like our Lady Dido). Harvard tells me that his Latin professor once remarked in class that the main Stoic policy was, "Never fall in love, under any circumstances". 

I just don't see that as being part of the daoist mindset since emotions and passions are not categorically dismissed in the same way. And indeed, to "not act" is-- in fact-- to act. "Not acting" as such is an absurd concept so we really, I think, have to be not so quick to dismiss poor Dido just because she acted (even in this case cursing unto suicide!). Because of course, even had she not acted with passion, she still would have been acting.

How can one possible judge what was in harmony with the way and what was not? Well, I am left with the idea that our fate (or Way) is known through our intuition and to cultivate intuition one seeks to heighten sensibility in what is in the end a very individual project. And, I would suggest that only those involved-- including Dido's subjects-- only they could pass accurate ethical judgement-- after the fact.

**

So, what does that say about Zhuangzi mourning his dead wife? Well, I reject that it says anything whatsoever about the limits of our loving relationships-- at the same time agreeing with Professor A Ku that it recommends-- rather than any sort of emotional detachment--  rather it prescribes an individual commitment to staying in the present tense and yes-- going with the flow (even if that means cursing onto suicide).

Indeed, when I read the passage, it resonates to me as one long meditation which has as its base ZZ's tremendously attached love for his wife. For if he wasn't so enthralled by her as to be devastated by her passing, why would he have thought about this so deeply. It is absolutely beautiful, I think.

And no where does he say, "better not to be attached to love," but rather-- better to understand that death is nothing to be fearful of as death is part of the natural cycle of things (自然の循環 ）. Where Confucian teaches, "just take care of your life and death will take care of itself," our Man from the State of Song, says that death is as part of nature as the passing of the seasons. It is not only not a sad event, but it is all part of the way things are (無為自然→自然の規則的な循環 ）

As a side note, I read a very interesting paper last night as I lay next to Adonis watching him sleep like an angel. Written by a professor at Nihon Daigaku, Kunitsugu Kosaka, it presents wuwei as being not something that humans do alone, but rather that it is nature that is wuwei. Again and again the paper had this phrase 無為自然 and so this I think is the best clue to understanding what wuwei is (and perhaps it is something that all daoists need to take their own stand on in individual ways?)

**

Anyway, I learn that my man Ibn Arabi also plays the guqin. Over at his very bare-bones abode, he writes very beautifully about a piece of music called Mozi Grieving over Silk, explaining,

Mozi was walking through town one day when he came across silk dyers plying their trade. He was moved to tears by this scene as it led him to reflect that on the inevitable force exerted on man by his surroundings, his relationships, and his experiences. Life dyes us: we can never go back to the way we were, let alone imagine how we might have turned out if this hue, that hue had never bled through us.

And when I complain

Yes, I think it is true that life dyes us– every single experience. Therefore, don’t you think only the cowardly turn away?

He wisely responds-- whether you turn away or not, life will dye you.

True. But, we also don't want to turn away from life or our emotions, right?

Ronald de Susa ends his paper Learning to be Natural like this

We are forever launched into a dialectical dance: our emotional dispositions respond to, but also create, entirely new contexts. We obviously can't judge new situations with anything other than our old dispositions; but if we apply ourselves to take as comprehensive a view of the new context as possible, the totality of our emotional reactions will generate new paradigm scenarios, from which emerge fresh axiological judgments.

"Every translation is an interpretation"

Happy birthday to Sam, and to the man who made me smile all day long yesterday after telling me, "I am no Roman-- I am all about the love" this is for you:

lacrimae rerum ( & Dido sings the wuwei blues)

 

I abandoned your shores, Empress,
against my will.
-- Aeneid, Book 6

It was his fate. Well, that is, if you believe that fate is a person's chosen path (plus their character).

Aeneas.

Thinking about Him, I spent some time last night re-reading a discussion about wuwei 無為 that went on over at the Gialbo's palace last spring: Wuwei-- what does it mean? The Gialbo suggested that in daoist wuwei there is more emphasis on something like “non-learned action.” I agree to a point-- though I personally would much prefer to see the emphasis placed the avoidance of action based on over-thinking ("hard-boiled action?).

But, we actually don't have a lot to go on, do we? 

In Japan, wuwei has become so intertwined with Buddhist notions of non-causality that it's hard to step back and recall how wuwei was used by the daoists-- especially if you are thinking in Japanese. But, in fact, kojien gives this earlier pre-Buddhist understanding of the word first in its list of definitions: 道の在り方 "the way of the Way." (also, "the natural state of the natural state").

Maybe the Buddhist conception has somehow influenced the understanding of the word in today's time, but I question whether wuwei is anything more than a general policy concerning not over-thinking one's actions; that is, rather than a categorical state of non-action (as a form of Self-extinguishing), it is instead a Will to heightened-awareness in order to be more sensitive about what is happening around oneself; a sensitivity to how things are unfolding, developing, moving or not moving in any direction. And, the Sage or Hero cultivates this sensibility in order to "go with the flow."

As a side note about flow, to me this is profoundly different from Czikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow-- which has more in common, I think, with a skilled absorption in meaningful occupation as a means to achieving happiness.

For one thing, is wuwei even about achieving happiness? Not really. Isn't it more about achieving a kind of harmony with the here and now (people and events as they exist in front of us)?

What do you do, though, when there is a Disturbance in the Force?

Last month, my sister took Adonis with my nephew, little Puyi, to Puyi's preschool. Some little girls can be so forward with little boys, and one of the girls in Puyi's class took a real liking to my Adonis and latched on to him like glue; following him around, not letting anyone else get near him and otherwise monopolizing him. So, there they were out on the playground happily playing with Adonis' hotwheel cars (which he always travels with a few hotwheels in his pocket). Well, he must have said or done something really stupid because the little girl suddenly flung her hotwheel down in to the dirt and yelled, "I hate you!" And turned and walked away.

Adonis, looked around in complete bewilderment at all the mothers and raising his arms up toward the heavens, asked, "What just happened here?"

Yes, that is what I call a Disturbance in the Force.

Baffled and completely beyond understanding, he just went back to playing. Some may think-- yes, non-action, wuwei.

But is it? Did Adonis take the hero's path?

Wuwei is not really about non-action as much as knowing when it is natural to act and when it is not natural to act-- and how does one "know" this? I would say by pure Confucian sensibility.

I know some of you may blame Peerless Helen. I mean, of course, all those dead Trojan soldiers for one thing. Virgil, too, I think came down hard on her. But, it's interesting to note that the ancients themselves had a more ambiguous understanding of Helen, whom they called, Peerless Among Women. For in one sense that great Mood that overcame her to run away with Paris, well by acting on it, was she not going with the Flow (it is hard in a sense to judge now because we cannot but help see it through Christian or even Roman terms, can we?) The above is pure Dreyfus-- but I like it.

Now back to my man-- the Antihero. He tells us that it is his Fate to leave the Empress, right? It is his path and is also his character. But was it wuwei?

How can one even know?

I think the tricky aspect of thinking about wuwei is just this: that perhaps it can really only be understood in retrospect.

As some of the readers of these pages may recall, I have unendingly watched My Lover the Emperor trying to navigate this path of lesser resistence. He was an ardent daoist-- like me, he tried to keep his head down and never look Fate in the eye. This fate of His, though, (the world falling in on you) was never faraway and as armies amassed along his borders, he still chose non-willed engagement-- choosing instead to focus on other projects-- the bronzes, calligraphy, his gardens, poetry, painting, music and the perfect shade of blue. Distractions? Or merely the path of lesser resistence?

It wouldn't end well for him, would it? And yet, history has not come down hard on him like it did on the wet-blanket Aeneas.

Odysseus, Huizong and Aeneas-- all three chose to act-- even if acting was not a direct confrontation of the issues at hand (Huizong).

Self chooses-- to act or not to act.

Of the three, Aeneas alone was not particularly sensitive to his surroundings as he chose his course of action-- insulting Dido and then sneaking out in the middle of the night. Really, is it any wonder that she would not speak to him when their paths crossed again in Hades? This was perhaps my friend's gripe with him: that his actions were over-thought, hard-boiled and not sensitive to the situation.

The situation being Dido.

My friend Geneva might well suggest that Dido could do with a little wuwei herself. And yet, did not the great poet already tell us that her love was like a fish? (Fish, of course, usually swimming with the flow) That is, did she not do what felt so right to her that it overcame her? And did not the gods forgive her in the end? Because wuwei does not mean "doing nothing"-- but rather suggests a sweet and skillful understanding of the situation based on a harmonious and intuitive grasping of what is happening right in front of your eyes concerning how and when to act (or not). Whether you call it destiny, or Way or "fate plus character," I would argue that a Self is there that intutively chooses. 

And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow.

And the great man left Carthage.

**

Professor Ku and I started chatting about choice in Confucian philosophy versus Existential philosophy. We may or may not disagree as we have not gotten that far yet. We did, however, decide to next read Fingarette's Confucius: the Secular as Sacred. I will make an announcement when we decide when and where-- but for anyone who might like to join the conversation, the more the merrier. Chris and Manyul will also post announcements to the reading before we start.

**

And about the heartbreaking world of tears and the burdens of mortality that so touch the heart, my comrade Conrad's comrade, the honorable Raminagrobis, has written a great post about the problems of... yes, the problems of translation.

Finally, I copy the Akhmatova poem that I loved so much below(thanks Austin) And below that-- because, well, why do I not own this DVD yet??-- The 2005 Choreographic Opera, Dido and Aeneas (this one too even better--for Geneva of course)

11

I abandoned your shores, Empress,
against my will.
-- Aeneid, Book 6

Don't be afraid -- I can still portray
What we resemble now.
You are a ghost -- or a man passing through,
And for some reason I cherish your shade.

For awhile you were my Aeneas --
It was then I escaped by fire.
We know how to keep quiet about one another.
And you forgot my cursed house.

You forgot those hands stretched out to you
In horror and torment, through flame,
And the report of blasted dreams.

You don't know for what you were forgiven ...
Rome was created, flocks of flotillas sail on the sea,
And adulation sings the praises of victory.

--Anna Akhmatova1962
Komarovo