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.

Tao Te Ching XXXV

Have in your hold the great image

and the empire will come to you.

Coming to you and meeting with no harm

it will be safe and sound.

Music and food

will induce the wayfarer to stop.

The way in its passage through the mouth is without flavor;

it cannot be seen,

it cannot be heard,

yet it cannot be exhausted by use.

The small image is the image that, brilliant and precise though its reflection might be, only reflects certain images and ideas.  The great image is the image that does not refuse to reflect but blankly, openly, without protest, takes in whatever is before it but has no desire to possess what is reflected.  The great image denies nothing, affirms nothing, is blind to nothing, desires nothing because it desires everything.

If one holds the great image and nothing else, one holds only reflections, but all reflections.  Hence, the empire meets with no harm because it has already been reflected in its entirety—its contradictions, horrors, and potencies.  To one who holds this way, it is neither a threat nor a joy; it is just another concatenation of images.

It’s not the flavorless way that induces wayfarers to stop, but the myriad manifestations of the way—not the no-desire but the desire.  Flavor and dancing emerge from flavorlessness, invisibility, silence, and stillness; hospitality and seduction are reflective moons around the great voided sun.  Void reflects voids which reflect void … safety and soundness rest on an empty infinite foundation.  The soul, like the universe, is a replete emptiness.

Tao Te Ching XXXIV

The way is broad, reaching left as well as right.

The myriad creatures depend on it for life, yet it claims no authority.

It accomplishes its task, yet lays claim to no merit.

It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures, yet lays no claim to being their master.

Forever free of desire, it can be called small.  Yet as it lays no claim to being master when the myriad creatures turn to it, it can be called great.

It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great.

The way gently comforts, as a parent might his child; the way sorrowfully slaughters, as a noble warrior might the enemy.  Despite the way’s ability to move into any thoroughfare or corner of the soul—without judgment, attachment, or unfamiliarity—it does not establish itself above anything.  How can it establish itself above anything when there is no above?  Or, when every above is also below and beside?  How can it claim when all around it claims and claimants obviate the need for claiming?  The Tao is great because it allows the myriad creatures to proclaim what it does not need to proclaim.  The Tao is a rolling sphere, in which everything jostles and has its time at the bottom and top.

If the Tao could be said to be intentional about creating the myriad creatures, it might be said that it created them so that they could proclaim what it does not.  But this cannot be said.

Small, it can fit into the crevices of freedom; great, it can fit onto the canopies of meaning and desire without attempting to become them.

Volition is the mind telling the body that it’s in control.  It’s history telling humanity that it matters more that it does.  Volition creates beauty, peace, and devastation; this is its ambiguity.  But what it does not do is create what it says it’s going to create; this is its eternal deception.

The Tao moves where it wills according to whatever flow seems right, without regard for itself.  It never cares about promoting itself or constructing systems that explain anything.  How rare this is.  How unqualifiedly beautiful and minimally devastating.  How great.

Tao Te Ching XXXIII

He who knows others is clever,

she who knows herself has discernment,

he who overcomes others has force,

she who overcomes herself is strong,

he who knows contentment is rich,

she who perseveres is a person of purpose,

he who does not lose his station will endure,

she who lives out her days has had a long life.

The vessels, the mandarins and bureaucrats, the splinters of the uncarved block, the specialists and proponents, the advocates and the good—each one aligns himself with a tribe that promotes a particular set of ideals and behaviors from within life’s morass of ideals and behaviors.  Each set is a realm and each realm is separate, peering at the others from its own peaks, plains, and chasms.  Sometimes there is activity to join realms, but all that is done is the creation of a new realm with its own set and peering.  A new interdisciplinary sphere becomes a discipline.

So the psychologist speaks from the tribe of psyche—and often a very particular sub-tribe; the businessperson from the tribe of business; the virtuous from the tribe of virtue; the citizen from the tribe of citizenry; the healthy from the tribe of health.  Each is right, each is insufficient.

The way is a strange circle embracing all realms.  Players in the realm of spirit—like all specialists—attempt to warp the geometry of the circle into the line (the female into the male, disgrace into honor, sullied into white, dubious virtue into virtue)—and the myriad creatures are anxious for this warping—devoted to placing names, ideas, and artifacts in piles, with themselves inevitably at the top.  But the one of the way refuses this devotion, this piling, this geometry; refuses not from any effort, desire, force, intelligence, intent, power, or perspicacity, but because this is the way she is.

So all unities are not false, but limited, except the way.  But the way achieves the true unity only by refusing to advocate, refusing to join any realm of names, by not aligning itself with anything but everything.  So all is fulfilled and all is cancelled; it is because this cannot be put into words that the sage uses words sparingly and is shadowy, incapable of being given any particular attribution.

Tao Te Ching XXXII

The way is forever nameless.

Though the uncarved block is small,

no one in the world dare claim its allegiance.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,

the myriad creatures will submit of their own accord,

heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will fall

and the people will be equitable, though no one so decrees.

Only when it is cut are there names.

As soon as there are names,

one ought to know that it is time to stop.

Knowing when to stop, one can be free from danger.

The way is to the world as the river and the sea are to rivulets and streams.

History can be seen as the relentless attempt by humanity to name what cannot be named, to stick large indelible heavy things on what is elusive and fleet.  It’s true—things seem to stick for a time:  ideas, names, artifacts, feelings, desires, lords and princes.  But, in history, heaven and earth will not unite, sweet dew will not fall, and the people will not be equitable without decrees.

The Tao points to a past golden age, outside of history; it does not point to a future utopia.  Whether this past age existed or not is not the point—a debate about what exists outside of history is a debate of academics and fools.  To be outside of history is not necessarily to not have existed; yet, according to our rules of existence—the rules that arise from the cancerous growth of names—it is to not have existed.

Can humanity know when to stop?  Is there evidence of this capability?  Is our increasing love of names inexorable?  Even though humanity may lack such aptitude, are individuals capable of such restraint?  If they are—even if there are one or two—is it sufficient to balance the speed and acceleration of the rest?  Is the effort required for restraint such that it results in strange and almost unnamable energies, a curious and unexpected counterbalance to the more obvious lack of cutting, naming, and desiring?  If we were inclined to names, we might want to say things like, The Way knows, in the way that some say, the Lord knows or your gut knows or that guru knows.  But we do not seem to be so inclined.

To be free from danger is not to be free from danger in the realm of names and knives; it is because the sage has removed herself from the realm of names and knives that she is free from danger.  What happens in that realm is real to her and can strip her of goods, reputation, lovers, and life; but it cannot strip her of dignity, nobility, detachment, and the dark perspicacity of the way.  Thus, she is free from danger.

The way empties into the world.  It can neither be polluted nor exhausted.  Whether this is comforting to polluting, exhausting humanity depends on how one is oriented to it.