Thoughts on Memorization on the Ides of May

At the end of posting Book I (Vignette XXXVII) of DC Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching and my meditations on it, I would like to comment briefly on my experience of memorization—before writing each meditation I memorize each vignette and am working toward having the full text memorized, hopefully finishing sometime this year.  Historically, it’s not a big feat—there are only 81 fairly short passages and many mnemonic devices throughout.  Nevertheless, while in some sense we are very much a memorizing culture (I listen to my sons quote entire Simpsons episodes to each other), we do not typically memorize texts much anymore.

I had read the Tao Te Ching well over a hundred times and over many years before I decided to memorize it.  Growing up as a Christian and formally studying the Bible for many years, the Tao attracted me as a living concept and as a text … it seemed to me to articulate the human experience in spiritual terms from an almost completely different orientation than the bulk of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Its core concepts—including its relationship to the earth; its attitude toward humanity’s place in the cosmos; its weighing of elitism, equality, and humility; its indistinction between politics and spirituality—seemed foreign, enticing, and somehow, despite various antiquated curiosities, true.

Yet having a text outside of you and having it inside of you are two different things.  If you eat Big Macs all the time, the cells in your body will—metaphorically at least—be made of Big Macs; you will, in a weird yet true sense, become a Big Mac.  So as the text of the Tao Te Ching migrates and stays inside me, I, in a weird yet true sense, become the Tao … or at least the principles intimated in the Tao become more natural to me and the principles I’ve associated with the West, with Christianity, and with myself—of assertiveness, volition, firm distinctions, rationality, causation, striving, knowing—begin to dissipate.

A text inside—especially one like the Tao, which is murky, meditative, slow, and calm—modifies not just one’s mind and heart but one’s body.  A text moves in the blood and feels like the blood.  It feels like the eyes … or the eyes behind the eyes.  It wraps other words in itself and slowly digests them.  Things inside become liquid, gaseous, and so nothing to be clung to, but simply part of the transient flow and vapor of existence.  This particular text becomes the nature that is lost in the city—the nature that affirms one in one’s insignificance and in this affirmation diffuses restlessness and weaves a murky thread throughout the self and the world.  It strips me down to darkness, a darkness that doesn’t seem like the fearful night of the child but a darkness that lies quietly at the center of light, a darkness that is light.

None of this is really possible when a text is outside.  Outside, it’s still something of an object, a commodity, an it.  Inside, it talks at odd times and fornicates with other inside things.  Inside, it begins to grow and gradually replace dying cells of words, cognition, attitudes, and behaviors.  Inside, it blurs distinctions and so becomes love.  Not necessarily a love of laughter and hope, but a love of drowsy acceptance and muddy days.

Tao Te Ching XXXVII

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it

the myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.

After they are transformed, should desire raise its head,

I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block.

The nameless uncarved block

is but freedom from desire.

And if I cease to desire and remain still

the empire will be at peace of its own accord.

Naturally, the empire’s nature is to not be at peace by any accord, even as my nature is to desire and move.  The Tao sleeps under the growing weight of artifacts and ideas and the heat of piling desire.  We extend our lives to give us time to crawl through the weight, heat, and heaps to cessation, namelessness, and stillness; but often it is only death that gives us time by taking it away.  No, it is always death; the only difference is the kind of death.

We are transformed to our roots and destiny through desire or no-desire, yet we are transformed.  This is the way that will always have its way and will have it without effort or possession.  But the myriad creatures resist and battle it with cunning futile massive arsenals of words.  Some are beautiful, some are not; some are good, some are not:  the way doesn’t particularly care.  It is because it does not care about goodness that it is good, because it does not care about beauty that it is beautiful, and because it does not care about ends that it does not end.

Tao Te Ching XXXVI

If you would have a thing shrink

you must first stretch it;

if you would have a thing weakened

you must first strengthen it;

if you would have a thing laid aside

you must first set it up;

if you would take from a thing

you must first give to it.

This is called subtle discernment.

The submissive and weak will overcome the hard and strong.

The fish must not be allowed to leave the deep.

The instruments of power in a state must not be revealed to anyone.

The Tao, to the exploitative, seems to exploit.  The people are straw dogs.  In order to suck the life from something, you must fatten it first.  Yet to the one who follows the way, the Tao ducks past morality’s comfortable words; she sidesteps slaves and masters with equal disregard, quite happily allowing them to feud on their various predictable battlefields.  Long before Nietzsche’s supposed revelations, she erects an alternative morality—neither a morality nor an erection but a dance that shadow-steps flesh’s peculiar moves.

One cannot exploit if one has neither desire to gain nor nothing to gain.  So the submissive and weak overcoming the hard and strong is no Christian morality—no advocacy of flagellation and blood; it is the recognition that worms will outlive humanity and that moist grass is trampled on yet thrives but dry grass is trampled on and snaps.

The sage is nimble, not committed to anything.  Nevertheless, she leaps on things for a ride, for this is what humans do and she is human.  She bends and laughs but does not snap; others walk on her and think they gain from her.  Yet she loses nothing for she has nothing but reflections to be lost.  And what is a reflection but something that can be given freely and yet never lost.  So all laugh—some because they think they gain, others because they do not think about gain.

Petty secrets are lost when they’re shared; great secrets can be shared yet remain secrets.  Everyone knows how to save the world yet no one does it.  The secret is not in the mind or the will, but in the belly.  If you become the stomach and don’t fear it, you become the secret that is freely shared yet always mysterious.