He sits on a bench by night and is immersed in a universe of strange and wondrous questions

So I'd been cooped up indoors all day, pouring over a number of books on Daoist cosmology, the Yi Jing, and a few resources related to, what, something I've heard referred to as Confucian Geomancy, though that's a terrible misnomer. I decided to go for a walk.

I've been writing, rather researching, this paper on, again words fail me. Maybe that just means my thesis lacks focus. It's about directions, and how the Japanese at the turn of the last millenium thought about them. Like anything and everything about old Japan, I've had to turn to ancient Chinese sources, hence the Yi Jing. It was written a profoundly long time ago, like two and a half millenia ago. It predates, say, Christ by about 500 years. Buddha by about 250, Confucius the same. It's methuselan.

I've been maybe hitting the books a bit too much lately. It's what I deserve I guess, for not really doing any work while my parents were here. This report I'm writing, I've changed the subject twice now - “narrowing” is the verb I used with my academic advisor. I started writing about geomancy in Japanese gardens, but got kind of sidetracked and now I'm writing ostensibly about the shijin, these four guardian beasts of the cardinal points. It's fascinating.

I took a walk. I went south, because I haven't been south of my house yet, not past the highway anyway. I made it all the way down to the ocean only to discover that there was a tenuous peninsula stretching out hoizontally before the horizon, and in any case the shoreline was concrete and caltrops. I found a bench. I sat.

The Dao De Jing is an absorbing read. I've heard that much of it's appeal comes from its ambiguity, its uncomplaining subservience to interpretation. I've seen excerpts that read like realpolitik, I've seen excerpts that read like the Bible. And I've seen excerpts that read like this.

Compassion cannot fight without conquering or guard without saving. Heaven arms with compassion those whom it would not see destroyed.

That is Lao Tzu at his most eloquent, his most sympathetic, and his most transparent. The rest of the time I get the feeling that Lao Tzu is grounded in some intellectual system that is beyond me. His writing is prone to great leaps of fancy, forcing connections between things that don't have any, jumping from one concept to the next to the next in a merciless stream of consciousness that is almost symbolic, almost metaphysical.

Tao gave birth to the One; the One gave birth successively to two things, three things, up to ten thousand. These ten thousand creatures cannot turn their backs to shade without having the sun on their bellies, and it is on this blending of breaths that their harmony depends.

Sometimes, when I've spent a day locked away in a dark corner contemplating the Shangqing Cosmology, other people become just as untenable. I went to a party Friday night, lots of drinks and chatter and people I've come to deeply care about. The chatter was something foreign though. I couldn't get into it, couldn't see ahead to the terminals of dialectic, trialectic, couldn't make the leaps of free association required for lively conversations, kept coming back to that line about compassion. That line and Mobius Loops and Klein Bottles. Don't you just hate it when you're trying to think of something clever to say to a girl you like and all you can think about are topological pheonomena that only exist in four dimensions?

Wanna hear something else that doesn't make sense? Classical Chinese doesn't have punctuation. Period. When translators look at something like the Yi Jing or the Yu Jing or the Wuxing Dayi or the Dao De Jing they have to determine for themselves where one sentence begins and another ends. They have to arbitrarily assign groupings of words, or rather, divisions between concepts. It's like doing algebra without the zero, speaking a language that lacks a present perfect progressive tense. So not only is the Dao De Jing flagrantly ambiguous, (e.g. “He who acts harms, he who grabs lets slip.”) it's also stubbornly unclear. Wringing sense from the Dao De Jing is practically sysiphisian. And yet. And yet.

I sat on a bench, and I looked out at this spit of land that stood between me and my horizon. Then I got lost on my way home.

Incidentally, Japanese lacks a present perfect progressive.