Harmonious wok

The word for “peace” in Mandarin Chinese is a two-character compound, heping. The second character, ping, is the one most often cited by Westerners as the character for peace, and perhaps it does most closely approximate our notion of peace as a calm, settled condition. As a meaning element in various other compounds, it connotes equality, ordinariness, steadiness, or flatness (as in pingmian, a mathematical plane).

The first character in heping expresses a more active conception of peace. I was struck by the following analysis, which I just discovered in the glossary of Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall’s Daodejing: A Philosophical Translation. This is the book I wrote about last week in Primordial wonton. Apparently, the influence of culinary conceptions on Chinese philosophy is more pervasive than I realized. Since most people won’t have Chinese characters ennabled, I lifted a graphic from a commercial site:

he. He is conventionally translated “harmony,” and we follow that rendering. The etymology of the character is culinary, harmony being the art of combining and blending two or more ingredients so that they enhance one another without losing their distinctive flavors. Throughout the early corpus, the preparation of food is appealed to as a gloss on this sense of elegant harmony. Harmony so considered entails both the “integrity” of the particular ingredient and its “integration” into some larger whole. Signatory of this harmony is the persistence of the individual ingredients, their full self-disclosure in their collaborative relationship with the other ingredients, and the aesthetic nature of the resulting harmony – an elegant order that emerges out of the artful contextualization of intrinsically related details as they maximize the unique contribution of each one.

As Chapter 55 of the Daodejing illustrates, this he may not always be compatible with ping. In Ames and Hall’s translation:

[A newborn baby] screams through the entire day
And yet his voice does not get hoarse:
Such is the height of harmony.

This is in the context of describing an infant as “an image of the fullness of potency: a robustness that makes it immune from environing evils,” as the translators explain in their commentary. “What gives the baby its vigor is its capacity to respond from the center, being supple yet firm, flexible yet potent. The baby, unconsciously and without motivation, is the embodiment of harmony and equilibrium.”

In modern Mandarin, he appears in words such as hejie, reconciliation; hejian, a tie or draw in a contest; heqi, gentle, friendly, good-natured; and hejian, fornication. Actually, I have no idea how widespread that last term might be, but the fact that it exists and is common enough to list in my Chinese-English dictionary (published in Taiwan in 1971) seems significant. After all, what preserves “both the integrity of the particular ingredient and its integration into some larger whole” better than sex?

Cibola 20

This entry is part 20 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Esteban (1) (cont’d)

He’d met a palmer once who told him
that Mount Zion itself–Jacob’s ladder,
the zero point where three religions
intersect–that holiest
of holy spots, he said,
was nothing but a bump.
A little hiccup of earth, overtopped
by forests of minarets.

These mountains at least
don’t require a steady diet of blood
to keep their power: see
how godlike, how impossibly complete
their shifts from red
to brown
to blue–
like actors changing costume.
No, like sorcerers changing shape
with the turn
of an unmoored phrase–
man into jackal, jackal into termite mound–
or rock, or colorful comb
for some maiden to find & carry
home in her hair.
                            The bread
& butter of marabouts, those stories.
La illaha illa’llah might be the All in-
All, but human ears
still crave a bit of spice.

Though Esteban, having read Avicenna
& Plotinus, Maimonides & Dionysius,
neither believes nor disavows
such wonders.
Three years ago he would’ve
owned himself a mystic,
firm in his faith.
Then Mexico:
tableaus of misery, cruelty,
sickness in every shape
& his New World visions faded.
Though he persisted there
as a curandero, the medicine gourd
& his heart-felt songs & prayers
had little effect. In every corner
of New Spain the Indians kept dying.
He felt again like the child
on the beach at Azemmour
learning his letters, scrawling
the lines of holy script
over & over for the waves
to erase. Let the ocean redeem
your imperfect words
,
his teacher’s favorite saying–
the one quarter of Creation
that was never cursed.

__________

a palmer: A pilgrim to the Holy Land.

with the turn of an unmoored phrase: One of the distinguishing features of magical speech in West Africa (and elsewhere) is a sense of complete non sequitor. As a performative speech act, a charm or spell should never assume the quality of rote recitation. As with an effective prayer or curse, every syllable must carry the speaker’s full intention.

marabouts: The West African term for dervishes of various orders, who served a variety of social roles: entertainers, diviners, scribes and missionaries for Islam. (Below, I imagine Esteban having had a marabout for a teacher as a child.)

La illaha illa’llah: The pervasive Muslim confession of faith, “There is no God but God.”

having read Avicenna & Plotinus, Maimonides & Dionysius: In other words, having spent equal time studying the rationalists (Avicenna, Maimonides) and the mystics (Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius).

Mexico: Then only the Valley of Mexico, dominated by Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City – the capital of New Spain.

New World visions: The use of the term “New World” (Nuevo Mundo) carried a strong teleological flavor at the time, and was controversial. The idealists viewed the Americas as something of a blank slate whose inhabitants dwelt in pre-lapsarian innocence. According to this view, Spain’s divinely ordained mission was to lead the Indians in the construction of a Christian utopia. Cabeza de Vaca was an especially strong exponent of this view, so it’s reasonable to suppose that Esteban shared his enthusiasm, at least for a time.

curandero: A healer. The term is still widely used in Latin America to denote a Native or mestizo healer, though contemporary evangelical Christians and some devout Catholics may scorn curanderos (other than strict faith healers) as practitioners of witchcraft.

medicine gourd: A small gourd rattle, a prominent implement of African and Native American healers alike in the 16th century (and down to the present day). Esteban’s gourd rattle is described in some detail in contemporary sources.

the one quarter of Creation that was never cursed: I.e., by the Biblical Flood. This belief seems to have influenced the ancient use of a fish symbol for the Son of God.

Bearings

The formerly 20-foot-tall juniper tree (a.k.a. eastern red cedar) that had stood proudly erect beside my front portico has been bowed and humbled. The big ice storm back on January 6 left it canted at a 30-degree angle from the side of the house in a pose that strikes me by turns as humorous, ominous or obscene. I still do a double-take every time I come back from a walk and see the thing leaning out like that. It’s very disorienting.

The last time my friend A. stopped by, in late December, she said that the house reminded her of a ship. Well, now the ship has a figurehead. That’s what I was thinking just now as I glanced out at the juniper swaying in the breeze with snowflakes swirling all around: it’s like a headless figurehead, green and maternal – at least to the birds that take shelter in it each night. It faces southwest, more or less into the weather, as I suppose a good figurehead should.

But actually, A. didn’t specify which side of the house corresponded to the bow in her mind. In my own view, the house has two fronts, or at least two front doors: the one just mentioned with its portico on the southwest side, and the other that leads out onto the front porch, facing southeast toward the woods. Like the other main buildings of this old farm, it’s aligned with the ridges on either side. Thus, to confuse things still further, the front porch of the main house, a hundred feet away on top of a little hill, faces straight back in this direction – toward my front portico and the leaning juniper. An older, larger juniper tree leans out from the side of the main house, as well, though not at such an extreme angle. It faces southeast. Back behind it, on the same side of the house, is the small back porch off my parents’ kitchen.

In other words, though both houses have precisely the same alignment, the back porch on one faces the same direction as the front porch on the other. And though the houses otherwise look nothing alike, these two southeast-facing porches are almost architectural mates. Each house sits within a large, right-angled bend of the driveway that passes between them. Some combination of the internal arrangement of rooms and the external orientation toward the driveway seems, in each case, to account for our sense of which is the back and which is the front. The hollow itself faces northeast.

So it’s no wonder I’m still resting at anchor here on the old farm. I couldn’t begin to chart a route out of the harbor.

Cibola 19

This entry is part 19 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Esteban (1) (cont’d)

Single-file they set out
through the scrub: no choice
but to keep to the narrow road
in this wilderness where everything
wears a thorn. Only up
in the hills can they range
more widely, rambling
through the open woods
that match the image he carries in his head
based on his mother’s stories
of the African savanna.
Outlaws & sorcerers, wild beasts
& other famished beings
make their homes in the bush:
that’s why the people keep
to their towns, risking slave raids
by impoverished kings.
As far
as he can figure, the highest
points of earth throughout
his mother’s country
must have been the termite mounds.
That’s where the strongest prayers
were aimed, it seemed–
where the oracles most often preached
the saving blood of roosters.
If mountains didn’t exist . . .

Shouts from the vanguard:
some sharp-eyed hunter
has shot a quail where she sat
motionless on her eggs
in the middle of a thicket:
prelude, he knows, to another
morning of killing, too casual
to call a hunt. These men know
how to fish for rabbits in their burrows
with sharpened sticks,
can run down any deer
so careless as to have left
its tracks in the road.
This he remembers from before,
this traveling light & trusting
in Whomever: the holy way.

Snow sky

It’s 7:00 a.m., and something is coughing under my house. It’s a racking, consumptive cough – and no wonder, really, considering how dry and deep the dust is down there where no rain has fallen in 150 years. Perhaps it’s the porcupine that I saw last night in the top branches of the pear tree out back. I was taking a leak off the side of the porch around 9:30 when I heard the chewing, looked over and saw a slowly moving blob silhouetted against the sky. Puffed out against the cold, it was as round as a photographic negative of the almost full moon, itself hidden by a thick blanket of clouds. The storm was almost over; only a few snowflakes were still coming down.

Earlier I had gone for a walk, right at dusk. It’s easy going through the nine inches or so of light powder, and I’m well up into the woods before I stop my mental chatter long enough to notice the immense silence. I mean, it’s quiet. Surely the snow plows and cinder trucks must be out making their rounds in the valleys below? But the snow acts as a muffler, and I guess the low temperature – 11 degrees – prevents sounds from travelling very far. I love it when that happens. Suddenly I regret that I left my supper heating on the electric range. If I didn’t have to worry about the chile sticking and burning, I could walk all night.

Although this snow is exceptionally dry, the air’s been still enough all afternoon to allow some accumulation on the mountain laurel, which forms a dense understory throughout the oak woods on Laurel Ridge. The fresh tracks of a white-tailed deer wander back and forth across the trail. I’m reminded of something that happened many years ago on this very trail, less than a hundred yards away. When you have as many deer as we do, you wouldn’t expect that seeing one more under any circumstances could ever be too big a thrill. But this stuck with me. As I later wrote,

A doe stepped into the trail
in front of me one morning
after a heavy snowfall.
She was so close, I could count
the puffs of breath rising
from her nostrils: five.
She turned her head to look
beyond me, & slow as thought
turned it back. And when
again the thick laurel closed
around her, if she had dislodged
a single twigful of snow,
I would’ve seen it.

Of course, that wasn’t an evening walk but an early morning one. Mornings, I do see things differently, and perhaps a deer would, too.

This morning it’s drifting hard, so no more snow piled up on leaves and branches. But perhaps the sky will make up for that: the high winds promise fast-moving patches of blue and white and gray. I think of my friend Tom Montag out there in Wisconsin, taking note of the sky every day for five years in his Morning Drive Journal. It makes sense that skies would be like snowflakes, with no two exactly alike. In either case, it’s nothing more or less than water waxing poetic.

(envoi)

The sky after snow
speaks volumes denied to
the ground. You can walk
for miles without looking
once at your feet, like
this doe to whom I am nothing
but a tree among trees.
Like me: to myself
a single letter i. Or even
less: a diacritical mark,
say, an open quote.
Some minor detail
in whatever poem remains
when the world’s messy prose
gets edited out.

*

So whence this urge now to keep the prose intact? There’s so much more I could say about all this, and I have yet to mention the spider that I found out walking on top of the snow last week. Back in the middle of December I wrote about spotting a spider spinning a web. But that was at a relatively balmy 40 degrees; now it was 20.

This one wasn’t moving quickly, but she was moving, stepping with great seeming deliberation like someone walking on thin ice. A needle-thin abdomen rode high on delicate legs. Her small size and gracile build undoubtedly promoted the supercooling of body tissues that would otherwise be torn apart by the formation of ice crystals. I thought of the wood frogs that let themselves freeze solid wherever they happen to be when the cold strikes, their hearts suddenly working like fury to flood their tissues with glucose – a 200-fold increase in a matter of hours – even as the body freezes. In less than 24 hours the heart stops beating, all breathing ceases, and 65 percent of the frog has turned to ice.

With no more than a thin skim of fallen leaves over them, wood frogs depend on a good snow pack to survive sub-zero temperatures. I think of them down there, neither dead nor alive, with the snow for a sheltering sky. Perhaps if I had more time, I could write about the notion many American Indians have of a shaman as someone who can grow crystals in his chest and live. But I’d better get going if I don’t want to miss the morning.

If you’re going out, be careful
where you step. The wind
has been everywhere, erasing
its own tracks. Who knows
what the snow might hide.

Still more peaceful peoples

Here’s one more sampling of excerpts from the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies at the new website Peaceful Societies: Alternatives to Violence and War. See Thursday’s post for more details.

Comments and reactions should prove very helpful in helping my father and his collaborators decide what additional materials to put on the site. Judging from the few comments received here yesterday, I’d say it sounds as if putting up some more general, theoretical essays and papers ought to be a high priority.

I should perhaps have made it clear from the outset that none of these societies are intended to serve as models for some ideal utopia. Personally, I think there are always trade-offs, and that some qualities we tend to value positively, such as bravery and personal ambition, may not be all that compatible with true social harmony. In any case, folks interested in attempts by secular Westerners to build peaceful and environmentally responsible communities might want to check out the book Gaviotas, for starters. The Tristan Islanders, one of the peoples included on the Peaceful Societies website, are the descendents of another such successful effort, inspired originally by 19th-century socialist ideals. And on a much larger scale, countries such as Iceland and Finland might now also satisfy the website’s definitions of a peaceful society.

I haven’t done a fraction of the research on these societies that my father has, so my own generalizations should be taken with a grain of salt. But I will say this: while the absence of physical conflict may seem like a very minimal definition of peace, I would submit that having such a minimal definition is precisely what makes this survey so inclusive and interesting. It admits of an immense variation in worldviews and approaches to practical concerns such as childrearing and marital arrangements, allowing one to see that there is far from one way for human beings to be civilized.

Because really, peacefulness, so defined, is not an end but a beginning – a threshold. I would argue that another, closely related first step toward a more civilized society would be to accept limits to our desires – to learn and inculcate the values of self-control and self-denial. No – as in no violence, no self-indulgence – is an extremely powerful word. I know this goes against the grain of the American emphasis on positive thinking. Love, we like to think, is all we really need to make everything wonderful. Some days, I believe that myself. But as I see it, what we call love is often just another word for the pathology that is killing the planet. And I suspect that many people in places like Central America and the Middle East might have a lot more to say about what it means to be on the receiving end of American benevolence and charity.

The bottom line, for me, is that until human beings in the societies that now dominate the planet can learn to get along without resorting to violence against each other and against the earth, we are, quite simply, fucked.

The Mbuti view their forest as a sacred, peaceful place to live–they constantly refer to it with not only reverence but adoration. They sing songs to it, in appreciation for the care and goodness they feel they get from it. If something goes wrong in their camp at night, such as an invasion of army ants, the problem is that the forest is sleeping, so they sing to awaken it. Their songs of rejoicing, devotion, and praise serve to make the forest happy. They do not believe in evil spirits or sorcery from the forest as the nearby villagers do–their forest world is kinder than that….

Normally the Mbuti settle conflicts with quick actions. One of their major strategies is laughter, jokes, and ridicule. The camp clown, an individual who assumes the responsibility of trying to end conflicts through ridicule, uses mime and antics to re-focus the conflict on himself, to get everyone laughing and ridiculing, in order to divert attention from the issue of the moment.

*

The Nubians place a high value on resolving village disputes right within the community. When minor disputes arise, such as a fight between two unrelated children that brings the mothers and their kin out onto the street to support their own, neutral bystanders will normally rush in to end the conflict. When more serious conflicts threaten, third parties who may be respected by both parties to a dispute will intervene. Serious conflicts are discussed after the Friday prayers in the mosque by the men of the congregation. Networks of reciprocal relationships that bind people to others outside their own families also help militate against factional conflicts.

*

The Paliyans extend their injunction against violence to a prohibition of competition, which arises, they feel, from rivalries and desires for superiority or control. They feel competition leads to social disharmony and threatens self-reliance and egalitarianism. Since they expect to be self-sufficient, individualistic, and socially anarchistic, they also don’t cooperate much. They disapprove of any behavior that appears, to them, to hamper the autonomy of an individual, such as cooperation or competition. Such behavior is disrespectful–or, in their terms, it appears to lower someone’s status.

*

The Piaroa believe in a violently creative mythic past when their gods achieved material and technological prosperity only through competition, violence, greed, arrogance, and lust, traits that, they believe, poisoned peaceful relations within and between communities. Their present society fosters its creativity by controlling that mythic period and by focusing on individuals who live peacefully together–the antidote to those past excesses of wanton wildness. Their communities, in fact, are almost completely peaceful, but they still face the threatened violence of their mythic past. In order to control that violence, the shaman chants every night and blows his words into water and honey which, consumed the next morning by adults and children, will keep them safe for another day.

*

The high degree of politeness that the Thai villagers show toward one another at all times has both positive and negative aspects. It contributes to their toleration of deviant behavior, nonconformity, and failures by some people to not abide by the social standards. The shortcomings of villagers who have serious faults are their own business and should not be ridiculed–they are accepted for what they are. On the negative side, however, the requirement for total politeness tends to dampen spontaneity and genuineness. Politeness enhances positive qualities at the same time it hides them.

*

Despite the fact that they have a highly nonviolent society, when some Semai men were recruited in the early 1950s to help the British army fight a communist guerrilla insurgency, some became aggressive fighters, though when they returned to their own settlements they returned to their peaceful, nonviolent ways. While violent homicides are abhorrent to the Semai, there have been a few recorded instances of murders. Undoubtedly, the introduction of firearms and alcohol is becoming a problem that threatens Semai peacefulness. Furthermore, while some Semai maintain that they will die before fighting against outsiders who are taking away their lands, others feel their nonviolence cannot last forever against outside aggression and alcohol.

*

Tahitians do not believe they have any control over nature or the behavior of other people; in fact, they believe that trying to change the nature of reality inevitably causes a rebound that destroys the initiator. People are optimistic but passive, a condition produced by their socialization practices and reinforced by other values in their society. Their universe is less frustrating cognitively than one where individuals believe they are able to change things….

The Tahitian word for love, here, has an emphasis on action and active belief in the relationship. It implies that, for heterosexual couples, they want to be together, both with their bodies and their minds. The man who only has physical desire for a woman, even if he lives with her, does not properly have a feeling of here unless the totality of his thinking is focused on her. The word also is used for parent-child, sibling, and friendship relations–it relates not so much to intentions as it does to actions and actual behavior.

*

One of [the Tristan Islanders’] primary strategies for avoiding violence and conflict is nonviolent resistance. A good example of this strategy occurred in the 1930s when they had to cope with an imperious, dictatorial minister who tried to run their lives. They could never confront him; they would always buckle under to his will with a meek “yes, Father,” out of respect for his power and high office. But they did perfect the practice of nonviolent resistance by accepting his orders as much as necessary to placate him–and ignoring everything else that they could get away with. They felt that his actions were simply part of the fun he enjoyed in being among them. Besides, in a few years another minister with different ideas would probably replace him.

*

If [Yanadi] parents were to punish children, or even make them do something against their will, a god might punish the children by making them ill. Parents therefore must tolerate cranky children and put up with their misdeeds, but they must never spank them. They even hesitate to yell at them. Parents cannot even force their children to attend school–the children make their own choices since they have the freedom to do as they wish. Parents do sometimes discipline children with the threat of bogeys–ghosts, devils, police, or non-Yanadi may get them.

*

Three Zapotec illness concepts in La Paz serve as mechanisms for diffusing deeply-felt emotions such as hostility that might lead to violence. Muina is a mild illness or indisposition that people may feel when they are angry toward others; the cure is to get rid of the anger. People rarely make distinctions about whether or not the anger is justifiable. Coraje, courage or passion, is a more advanced stage of illness where the expression of muina has advanced to verbal abuse or even blows. Bilis, bile, is an organic imbalance in the gall bladder brought on by frustration, abuse, or mistreatment by another. This condition is produced by someone’s inability to dissipate anger. People afflicted with these illnesses need sympathy and treatment, not condemnation and punishment.

Cibola 18

This entry is part 18 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Esteban (1) (cont’d)

Men repair straps, tighten tumplines.
The women bend to their grinding
of the day’s cornmeal,
casting a hurried handful on
the sun’s road. Esteban stirs
the dead ashes with his finger:
thirteen days since Marcos
sent me on ahead: this must already be
the 37th day of Lent.
Maundy Thursday.

An unbidden vision of the viceroy
in all his robes & ruffles making
a show of doffing his hat,
cradling the foot of one
symbolic beggar in
his soft white hands,
scattering a few drops of rosewater
on the already scrubbed
& perfumed skin,
while an obsequious Minister
Provincial of the Order
of Friars Minor
crouches at his side.
Holding up a gilded bowl
to guard the carpet.

His face must show it:
the women nearest him
have paused at their metates, eyes
large with concern.
“It’s nothing,” he says,
making the sign for memories.
Then smiling he chants
the hymn for Holy Thursday:
Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis
mysterium . . .

The plainsong–or his half-serious
version of it–brings him
back to the present.
This cloudless dawn, worth more
than any reverie. These mountains.
Sing, my tongue, the glorious
body’s mystery . . .

__________

the foot of one symbolic beggar: Mutual foot-washing was a prominent part of the traditional celebration of Maundy Thursday, and Western European rulers used to participate in the manner described.

Minister Provincial of the Order of Friars Minor: The head of the Franciscan order for New Spain, the position that Marcos de Niza would subsequently assume, after his return from “Cibola.”