It's simple: To say anything about the nature of things, you must attend to the facts, facts in their original form. The trouble with knowledge is that it keeps chiseling things away. If intellectuals were like Yü draining flood-water into the sea, there'd be nothing wrong with knowing. Yü succeeded by letting water have its way, and if intellectuals just let things have their way, knowing would be great indeed. Heaven is high and the stars distant~ but if you attend to the facts, you can calculate solstice for a thousand years without ever leaving your seat.
The line mentioning 'intellectuals' seems to remind me of Louis Aragon's wry commentary on engagement (
engage') with his parable about Goethe and Kant:
When Kant heard the news of revolution, he interrupted his walk. Goethe continued his. How pretentious of them both!
But looking further, I find what is intriguing is the consistency of ambulatory meditation, ie, the Schitzo's stroll*. Syntaxis as the true 'heartland' of the unspoken meaning, the root of Zen so to speak. In Syntaxis is already the one thing (singularity) and the ten-thousand things (complexity).. Here is a nice poem from Hinton's Meng Hao-jan to illustrate though there are many others:
And such a wonderful nod to the grotesque, both in its secret meaning, and in its popular form combined.
Look at the line:
First I hear you're resting at the Chang River,
Now I hear you're among Ta'i Mountain's wandering
dead. There's a pond here still tinged with ink,
but Autumn's tumbled out of mountain clouds,
Is T'eng among ghosts, or
Zombis?
Is T'eng in a battle zone among the wounded?
Is T'eng himself dead? Mountain's what?
Trails? Body? This is a great way to concretely link
a sort of formal Zen (Chan) technique to a theory
of the grotesque. Is writing dead? What is a voice
absent its Master? Is 'an empty home' writing itself?
And then there is this strange idea, or perhaps just
timely of a pond tinged with ink. Would the washing of an
inking stone leave some visible residue, or is this a conflation
or integration of thought and nature? This idea of tumbling
gives us a clue. "Tumbling as a word is specifically non-specific."
Same abstractional class as Syntaxis.
Another theme which may be rendered part of the cathexus of the grotesque / Zen, is monstrosity as naturalness, or rather, mutation is part of an unjudging continuum coterminous with nature:
Yü succeeded by letting water have its way, and if intellectuals just let things have their way, knowing would be great indeed.
This is also echoed in a poem by Meng Hao-jan:
Months and Years perfect old pines here.
Wind and frost keep bitter bamboo sparse.
Constant wind usually bends and twists trees in places like he is describing. It makes of them
strange bent monsters, but to an artistic temperament, in the Tang, there is a a deep calligraphic identification
at the level of the Chinese line and writing. Nature itself is a kind of writing, and writing a kind of evocation of nature. Images in nature seem to have a specific mood in Chinese poetry, and this tradition continues on for over a thousand years entering the Asian tradition all over the place. Japanese poetry expresses the moods of nature as an identification of human identity with that of nature. etc..
This is really a deeply bridging node for me
You have syntaxis, the grotesque, but also aesthetics, a way of linking Taoist-Chan-and Wabi-Sabi Aesthetics to a sense of sustainability and ecology. Harshness as an aesthetic agency.
Some things are perfected in this place, some problematic things are kept from flourishing..
And then there's the oddity of Mencius basically prefiguring the Mechanistic so-called "Western" world view:
Heaven is high and the stars distant— but if you attend to the facts, you can calculate solstice for a thousand years without ever leaving your seat.
Here is the bland scientific determinism the West has been saddled with for hundreds of years, but in the China of Mencius, it was a spiritual revolution!
Mechanistic determinism is Enlightenment! Love it!
West and East united forever in mystified determinism..
*And I would also like to note this surface connective between Schizze (Sketch) and Schitzo..
Perfect node for connecting Irronism and Syntaxis.
