3—
Language and the Real-Life World
Behind many of the language experiments by poets and the discussions on language by philosophers is one central obsession: Can language authenticate experience in the real-life world? My last essay was an attempt to examine, through the lens of classical Chinese language and poetics, the working dynamics in the language adjustments of Anglo-American modernists. I have yet to probe into the philosophical and historical grounding of this obsession. This I will do in the present essay.
Before I go any further, a recapitulation of the problem is necessary. I will use just one brief example. Consider, for a second, the following elements of a given moment in a concrete environment: stream, house, silence, no one around . Consider these elements before you decide the relation of the house to the stream (by the stream? above the stream? overlooking the stream? etc.), before you judge the silence of the general surroundings to contrast with the sound of the stream, before you become aware, even in your own sense of solitude, of your own presence. As we can see, the prepredicative moment belongs to the original, real-life world, beyond human touch, beyond conception, and beyond language; the predicative acts belong to the mediating subject. Meanwhile, the act of predication — the determination and articulation of certain relationships among the indeterminate, emerging objects, and, indeed, thinking itself — becomes, as Hegel has argued, a form of negation of that which is immediately before us.
The immediate question is, then, this: Is it possible to have a line of poetic expression in which the prepredicative givenness can remain
uncontaminated? For example, can we simply give the above-described moment, in English, as such — stream house silence no one — without feeling guilty of having violated some essential law of the English language? And yet, if there is another language that can give it simply as such, as in Chinese,
unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line.[1]
Placing it against the perspective outlined above, the statement could be rephrased into several interrelated questions central to modern philosophy and poetics:
1. Can an original moment of the presencing of the real world come to disclose itself authentically before us through language without being pressed into some kind of Procrustean bed involving syntax, rhetoric, linguistic codes, and so forth?
2. Is originality at all possible, if, by originality, we mean a phrase or a line that is totally free from the restraints of language, which, being historical by nature, usually operates by herding all lived and varied experiences into the proper folds, clear-cut, clean, orderly, and reduced?
3. The limits of language being such, can we really see the world "with an ignorant eye," as Wallace Stevens aspires to?
The Orphic belief that language can call the world into being and Mallarmé's conviction that language is a magic wand that can make an object disappear, leaving itself trembling in communion with totality in the pristine world of nothingness, are examples that attempt to extend language's potentials through a process of mystification. While these views might have been possible, and even realizable, as in primitive society's once marvelous original contact and communication with the animal and plant worlds, language as we now use it, poetical or otherwise, often belies these magical conceptions. Lan-
guage is a prison-house,[2] constantly coding, decoding, and recoding, at once closed as a system (as the structuralists want to see it) and open , changing and growing with overlaying significations, forming a net of continually interweaving and yet restrictive perceptual modes, from which poets who are determined to attain originality must extricate themselves. The prison-house of language is joined with that of thought.
For a new line of poetic expression to assert its independent presence, a poet must, first and foremost, recover the original ground, where we find the given as given, by liberating himself from the accustomed house of thought so that language acts not to disfigure things in their immanent presences but to make them disclose the dimension of their immediate thereness.
But let us return, for a moment, to the initial differences between the English predication of a moment in nature and the Chinese treatment of it. A common-sense Western logic will demand that the line stream house silence no one be rewritten in an order such as the following: "Silent is the hut beside the torrent: There is no one home."[3] In this version the original undetermined spatio-temporal relationships and conditions are now reduced to clear-cut, single perceptual possibilities. Other possibilities, all postreflective acts, include the following (randomly collected from existing translations): "The valley house deserted, no one there — ";[4] "Hidden in a gorge, unnoticed";[5] "Families no longer live in this deserted valley."[6] These and many other possible versions, which are occasioned by the original components, treat those components not as things in their own right but only as versions of real beings, now reduced, changed, restricted. The freedom of the original components, the freedom with which they reach out in indeterminate multiple relationships, has been invalidated by these acts under the pretext of ascertaining their definable outlines and their hermeneutic margins.
However, once we are aware that the fruits of these acts (concepts and linguistic formulations) do not correspond to the original appeal and condition of the existential objects, we can begin to reverse the priority of our ground of understanding. This process of reversal consists of admitting the inadequacy of common sense and conceptual reason and, indeed, the inadequacy of language itself to authenticate the original world; this process of reversal also consists of realizing that the totalizing, ongoing, and changing process of all the prepredicative beings must be continued within their undifferentiated modes, concrete and void of names.
Wu-Yen Tu-Hua and the Taoist Transparency of Language
Reflection on the fundamental facts of the external world will immediately make us see that there is totality, or the totalizing process of the Great Composition of things in Phenomenon, and that this totality is changing and ongoing, whether we want to talk about it or not. From a complete awareness of this totalizing process comes the call to respect and preserve things in their pristine forms as they emerge from and merge into an undifferentiated oneness. Thus, the Taoist world view begins by rejecting the premise that the structure of Phenomenon (Nature), changing and ongoing, is the same as we conceive it. All conscious efforts to generalize, formulate, classify, and order it will necessarily result in some form of restriction, reduction, or even distortion. We impose our conceptions, which, by definition, must be partial and incomplete, upon Phenomenon at the peril of losing touch with the concrete original appeal of the totality of things. All such means of rationalization, Lao-tzu tells us, are deceptions:
Tao, told, is not the constant Tao.
Name, named, is not the constant Name.
Nameless, the beginning of the world.
Naming, the mother of a million things.
Lao, 1[7]
He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.
Lao, 56
The "Tao (Way) told" and the "name named" belong to the realm of concepts and linguistic formulations, from which things and beings are totally free. As Heidegger would put it twenty-three centuries later, "All essents are not affected by concepts."[8] Things self-generate and self-become. Since, strictly speaking, any thought of a thing becomes itself a verbal act, the deverbalized world (wu-yen ,
The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? At that time they did not know that there were things. This is the most perfect; nothing can be added. Next, they were aware of things, but they did not yet make distinctions between them.
Next, they made distinctions, they did not yet judge them.
When judgments were passed, Tao was destroyed.
Chuang, 74
Chuang-tzu is particularly protective of the wholeness of the original cosmic scheme, which classifications and conceptions tend to dissect into separate units. The restrictiveness of words and ideas is further articulated in the book of Chuang-tzu:
What the world values is books. Books contain nothing but words wherein are found values of sorts. What words value is the sense of things. The sense of things reaches into something but that something is not to be conveyed by words. . . . What can be seen by seeing is forms and colors; what can be heard by hearing is names and sounds. How sad! Men of the world think that forms, colors, names, and sounds are adequate means to grasp the full feel of things. But forms, colors, names, and sounds are not adequate to grasp the full feel of things. "He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."
Chuang, 488–89
Words are inadequate either to encompass the entirety or penetrate into the invisible smallest parts:
Viewing large things from the standpoint of the small, one cannot exhaust them. Viewing small things from that of the large, one cannot see them clearly. Fineness is the smallest of the small and the gigantic is the largest of the large; each different in its convenient way — this is natural. The idea of fineness and coarseness is restricted to things with form. Things so fine that they have no visible form cannot be demarcated by numbers. Things so large that we cannot encompass them cannot be exhausted by numbers. What words can speak of is the coarseness of things. What our sense can reach is the fineness of things. That which cannot be spoken of or sensed is that which coarseness and fineness cannot restrict.
Chuang, 572
Inherent in this recognition of the inadequacy of language is the acceptance of humanity as limited and the rejection of the idea of seeing humanity as preeminently the controller or orderer of things, the consequence of which I shall explore presently. In the meantime, let us turn to two contemporary philosophers, William James and A. N. Whitehead, who delineated a world view that echoes, in some
measure, the Taoist holistic view but that also addresses the alienation of modern human beings. James says:
The world's contents are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly . . . picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether — and by picking out from it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say "belong" with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency. . . . Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? . . . We have no organ of faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one another, and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and unite them into . . . anything that means for us a world? Yet, just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it. We break it into arts and we break it into sciences. . . . We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. . . . We discover among its various parts relations that were never given to sense at all . . . and out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and law-giving and ignore the rest . . . [and say] the impressions of sense must give way, must be reduced to the desiderated form.[9]
James fully recognizes that we have no organ to apprehend what he calls the "collateral contemporaneity" of all the beings and events that exist and happen at any given moment. And yet the Western individual insists that they be represented in a way that fits the Western perception of a manageable sequence and order. In the words of Whitehead:
The radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of the fields of actual experience is concealed by the influence of language, molded by science, which foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverance of experience. The result
is that we imagine that we have immediate experience of a world of perfectly defined objects implicated in perfectly defined events. . . . My contention is that this world, neat, trim, tidy, exact, is a world of ideas, and that its internal relations are relations between abstract concepts.[10]
For humans to be able to preserve or partake in the true order before dissecting and recomposing it, Chuang-tzu gives priority to the preconscious, preconceptual, prelinguistic, nonverbal world where its pristine form can come freely to us in its own way. Chuang-tzu exalts the state before knowledge of ancient people, and Lao-tzu calls for the return to childlike correspondence with the world ("Keeping to the constant instinctive virtue, one returns to childlikeness" — Lao, 28). Both "ancient people" (before any polarization took place in their consciousness) and children (in their naive condition) respond directly to, and correspond in natural measure with, the appeal of the concrete world without traversing through or into abstract concepts. This tuned correspondence with the world of objects is described in the book of Chuang-tzu as the Free Flow of Nature:
The people have their constant instinctive nature: to weave for clothing, to till the fields for food. This is their shared virtue, one, total, undivided, and is called the Free Flow of Nature. Therefore, in a time of perfect virtue, people move slowly, their gaze one-minded. In such a time, mountains have no paths, lakes no boats or bridges. A million things emerge simultaneously, one region joining another in a continuum. Birds flock, animals herd; grass and trees flourish. You can tie a cord to birds and animals to lead them along or climb up and peer over the nests of crows and magpies. In this age of perfect virtue, men live co-extensively with birds and animals, group side by side with a million things. Who would try to mark off superior men from inferior men? With the same "no knowledge" (wuchih ), their virtue stays put. With the same "no desire" (wu-yü ), they remain simple and unhewn. Simple and unhewn — there we have the true nature of man.[11]
Chuang, 334–36
It is clear that for Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, Simple and Unhewn (su p'u ) is that realm of our original total consciousness that is open and unblocked to the free flow of things and is lost to most people through their acquisition of knowledge, one of the many forms of systematization imposed upon our original nature. Our original
nature, had it been understood as such from the very beginning, would have continued in close measure with what it was; this would include adjusting our perceptual and expressive strategies.
Before we discuss this important prepredicative mode (and how it conditions perception and language), we must understand some of the key issues involved in the promotion of the Free Flow of Nature and the Simple and Unhewn.
To (re)present the original condition in which things and humans can freely emerge, first and foremost, humans must understand their position in and relation to the Great Composition of things. Since the human race is but one among millions of other beings in the totalizing fabric of Phenomenon ("Sky and earth came into being with us together; the myriad things and us are one" — Chuang, 79), we have no reason to give special privilege to humans and to their mental constructs as the sole authority on a subject that is larger than them and that they have no ability to fully encompass. The rebirth of our original condition depends, therefore, on the removal of formulated categories from our consciousness and on our affirmation of the million things in the concrete world outside concepts and language as "self-so-complete" objects, each functioning, generating, conditioning, and transforming itself according to its own nature. As "the air of nature blows on the million things in a different way so that each can be itself" (Chuang, 50), and as lengthening the duck's legs or shortening the crane's legs means pain and is a result of working against nature (Chuang, 317), we must leave all forms of beings as they are by nature. Each form of being has its own nature and place, just as a tree, by nature, grows upward, a river flows downward, a stone is hard, and water is soft. The legendary P'eng rises ninety-thousand miles (Chuang, 2). A little quail never gets more than ten yards (Chuang, 9). A certain tree lives many centuries, a mushroom only a short time (Chuang, 11). Each performs according to its own nature. How can we take this as subject (principal) and that as object (subordinate)? Merely one form of being among millions of others, what right do we have to classify other forms of beings? How can we impose "our viewpoint" upon others as the right viewpoint, the only right viewpoint? When we do that, are we not like the frog inside the well who claims that the partial sky he sees is the full sky? What right do we have to turn the original nature of another fellow being into something it is not? White clouds are white; green mountains are green. Green mountains cannot blame white clouds for being white. White clouds cannot blame green mountains for being green. The
so-called possible and impossible are possible and impossible because they are said to be so.
The "this" is also "that." The "that" is also "this." According to "that," there is a system of right and wrong. According to "this," there is also a system of right and wrong. Is there really a distinction between "this" and "that"? . . . Not to discriminate "that" and "this" as opposite is the very essence of Tao (Way). There you get the Axis of Tao. There you attain the Central Ring to respond to the endless.
Chuang, 66
Thus, obliterate the distinctions and view things from both "this" and "that" — view things as things view themselves, which is the true balance of nature (Chuang, 70). In the words of Kuo Hsiang, the most important annotator of Chuang-tzu, "All things are what they are without knowing why and how they are . . . although things are different, yet they are the same in that they exist spontaneously as they are." "Since nonbeing is nonbeing, it cannot produce being. When being is not yet produced, it cannot produce other things. Who, then, produces things? They spontaneously produce themselves. . . . Everything produces itself and is not created by others. This is the Way of Nature" (Chuang, 50).
When Chuang-tzu claims that "Tao is everywhere," he does not mean any sort of human-invented concept, such as Logos or Creator, that determines the outlines of the beings in the phenomenal world but the self-realization of each form of being as it is, uninterfered with by abstract concepts or systems. This is the context in which Chuang-tzu says, "Sky and earth came into being with us together; the myriad things and us are one."
With this awareness of humanity's place in the free flow of things, we should turn our attention toward the unspeaking Other world rather than toward the speaking Self, the Other world being, of course, those absolutely lively, self-generating, self-transforming (tu-hua ,
In one, as the ego attempts to explain the nonego, the perceiver constantly imposes ideas or concepts on, or matches them with, images or objects in concrete Phenomenon, but in the other, as the ego loses itself in the undifferentiated mode of existence, into the totalizing flux of events and changes constantly happening before us, to "think" is to respond to the appeal of the presencing of things in their original state of freedom. Whereas the former tends toward the use of analytical, discursive, and even syllogistic progression coupled with a linear and temporal perspective, resulting in a sort of determinate, get-there orientation, the latter tends toward a dramatic nonconnective, simultaneous presencing of the multidimensional, multirelational objects instead of coercing them into some pre-conceived orders or structures. While the Taoist texts are full of parabolic expressions, the internal logic of the Taoist aesthetic leads to the deemphasis of metaphoric thinking and metaphysics, both of which have played a central role in much of Western poetry. A metaphor, on the most basic level, means that we use an object to designate an idea, a vehicle (thing named) for tenor (things meant). Metaphysics means to reach beyond physis , to borrow an interpretation from Heidegger, physis being the emergence of things, their emergence being seen to include both their "being" in the restricted sense of inert duration and "becoming."[12] But things in Phenomenon clearly need neither metaphor nor metaphysics to be what they are. A good example of this articulation is found in a large percentage of Chinese landscape poems such as those of Wang Wei, on which I have written in great detail in my Hiding the Universe and two other essays, "Aesthetic Consciousness of Landscape in Chinese and Anglo-American Poetry" and "The Morphology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Perimeter of Meaning in the Example of Pre-Romantic Concept of Nature."[13] Briefly, these poems are nonmetaphoric and nonsymbolic: The objects presented are nothing more than the objects themselves. The poet does not step in, but, rather, he allows the scenery to speak and act itself out. It is as if the poet has become the objects themselves.
But the complexity of the Taoist aesthetic is not fully circumscribed if we do not confront the subtle interplay of the built-in contradictions throughout the Taoist texts and if we do not try to see in what way the decreative process leads to or becomes the creative. This decreative–creative dialectic appears on the surface in the form of negation or renunciation: The Way of Nature is ineffable; language is inadequate; we should take no action (wu-wei ,
(wu-hsin ,
Do not listen with ears, but with the mind. Do not listen with the mind, but with the vital force (ch'i , or energy flow) within us. The function of the ear ends with hearing; that of the mind, with symbols and ideas. But the vital force is an emptiness ready to receive all things. Tao abides in the emptiness; the emptiness is the fast of mind.
Chuang, 142
Acting in the manner of man, it is easy to be artificial. Acting in the manner of nature, it is difficult to be artificial. I have heard of flying with wings, but not of flying without them. I have heard of knowing with knowledge, but not of knowing without it. Look at that which is empty. In the empty room, there is bright light, there is happiness. If you cannot stop there, your mind is galloping abroad though your body is sitting. If you can keep your ears and eyes to communicate within, and shut out consciousness and knowledge, then even the gods and ghosts will come to dwell with you, not to mention men.
Chuang, 150
Crush limbs and body, drive out hearing and vision, cast off form, do away with knowledge, and become identical with the Great Road – this is called Sitting-in-forgetfulness.
Chuang, 284
Whereas many other modes of apprehending Phenomenon come to it with a handful of ready-made gauges, measuring and matching,
the Taoist mind is blank, so to speak, thereby allowing the original nature of beings to have its full imprint, uninterfered with, undistorted. Such a state has also been compared to still water when it is the clearest (Chuang, 193) — a medium in which beings can mirror themselves. This condition of the mind resembles the trance-like consciousness of the mystics; in particular, it is close to the three stages of self-annihilation, forgetfulness, and the moment of lightning-like illumination or inspiration. Henri Brémond, discoursing on the war between Anima (deeper self, intuitionism) and Animus (surface self, intellectualism), describes the triple process this way: Since pure intelligence cannot reach the ultimate reality, it is by way of the annihilation of the surface self, the retreat of the rational power, that contact with the soul is possible. From the retreat comes a state of forgetfulness, a state in which all obstructions by the surface self are removed when inspiration finally occurs like a spark coming from the deepest source of our soul.[14] In his "On Making Everything Equal," Chuang-tzu describes a sage's state of mind while in communion with the music of nature:
Nan Kuo Tzu Ch'i sat leaning on a table. He looked to heaven and breathed gently, seeming to be in a trance, and unconscious of his body. Yen Ch'eng Tzu Yu, who was in attendance on him, said: "What is this? Can the body become thus like dry wood and the mind like dead ashes? The man leaning on the table is not he who was here before." "Yen," said Tzu Ch'i, "your question is very good. Just now, I lost myself, do you understand? You may have heard of the music of man but not the music of earth; you may have heard of the music of earth, but not the Music of Nature."
Chuang, 43–45
Indeed, the parallel with the three stages described earlier is intriguing. St. Teresa says, for instance, that in her mystical communion she neither sees nor hears. For Plotinus, "Unifying contemplation occurs when the soul closed its door on everything."[15] Blake, St. John of the Cross, Eckhart, and Pascal all have written about the retreat of the self as a precondition for merging with the ultimate. In a wider sense, we must consider the Taoist condition of wu-hsin (no mind) mystical — this is partly why Ch'an Buddhism later wholeheartedly took over this aspect as its central motto. It is at least mystical in William James's sense: "It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence , a perception of what we
may call 'something there ,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed."[16] And yet, the Taoist trance-like consciousness is at root different from Western religious mysticism: It does not work up to a leap into the noumenal or the metaphysical world; to the Taoist, as we may now understand, the phenomenal is the noumenal.
This quasi-mystical state is often described as shen (literally, spirit), a condition of mind after it has entered into the inner mechanism and activity of a thing or things. In Chuang-tzu's "The Fundamentals for the Cultivation of Life," a prince was astounded at a cook's skill in cutting bullocks, not only because every blow was done in perfect rhythm but because he seemed to have seen all the joints and cavities inside the body, for he knew exactly where to turn his blade before he encountered an obstruction. The cook explained, "What I love is Tao, which is more than mere skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole bullocks. At present, I meet it with shen , not with my eyes" (Chuang, 119). Perhaps it is because of this mystical tincture amidst a poetics of the real and the concrete that all later literary and art theorists, Taoist and Confucian alike, from Lu Chi and Liu Hsieh to Chang Yen-yüan, Ssu-k'ung T'u, Su Tung-p'o, Yen Yü, and post-Sung critics, have made it the pivot of their theoretical formulation, for this decreative–creative dialectic helps to identify the ineffable and the real as one without resorting to human-invented dogmas as ways to explain beings and phenomena:
In the beginning, suspend vision, bring back hearing, become lost in contemplation to reach out for contact — there spirit gallops into the eight limits of the cosmos, there the mind glides into millions of miles of space. Reaching the full feel of things, at first, a glimmer gathers into luminosity when all objects are brightened and clarified, each lighting up the other onward.
The mind is cleared to crystallize contemplation.
Trying the Void to demand for Being; knocking upon Profound Silence for sound.[17]
Lu Chi (261–303)
The perceptual activity travels far in spirit (shen ). Completely stilled, contemplation centered, it reaches out to a thousand years. . . . The principle of perceptual activity is miraculous
when the spirit consorts with the external world. . . . To develop one's perceptual activity, the most important thing is emptiness and quiescence when one's five viscera will be cleansed and the spirit purified.[18]
Liu Hsieh (ca. 465–520)
Drawings by rulers are dead. Keep to one's spirit (shen ), concentrate on Oneness, there one finds true paintings. . . . He who moves his thought and brush but is conscious of his painting as painting misses it. He who moves his thought and brush without being conscious of his painting as painting gets it, no sticking in his hand, no stagnation in his mind; it becomes so without knowing how.
Gather one's spirit, think freely — there is miraculous understanding of Nature. With both the external world and one's self forgotten, with form cut off, knowledge done away with, even if one's body becomes dry wood, one's mind, dead ashes, there will be no hindrance to the miraculous principle of Nature. This is the Tao of painting.[19]
Chang Yen-yüan (fl. 847)
Live plainly: wait in silence —
It is here the Scheme is seen.[20]
Ssu-k'ung T'u (837–908)
If you want poetry to be miraculous,
Nothing works better than being empty and tranquil.
In tranquillity, one perceives everything in motion.
In the state of emptiness, one takes in all the aspects.[21]
Su Tung-p'o (1036–1101)
The last attainment of poetry is entering into shen .
The highest kind of poetry is that which does not tread on the path of reason; nor fall into the snare of words. . . . The excellence is in . . . transparency and luminosity, unblurred and unblocked, like sound in air, color in form, moon in water, image in mirror.[22]
Yen Yü (fl. 1180–1235)
There is a self-reflecting world and there is a selfless world. . . . The selfless world is achieved in quiescence and the self-reflecting world is arrested from movement.[23]
Wang Kuo-wei (1877–1927)
The centrality and continuity of the Taoist decreative–creative dialectic is clear here and needs little comment. However, we must pause briefly and return to the initial contradictions. One can say that, within the Taoist activity of consciousness, a complete awareness of things as they originally are can be regained by this decreative–creative process but that the miraculous receptivity to the concrete world achieved by emptying out the trappings of our intellect is a state prior to expression. The ideal Taoist poet, when pushed to the logical end, should be silent and seek no expression, for the affirmation of the nonverbal world cancels out such a possibility. Chuang-tzu himself is fully articulate on this contradiction:
Since all things are one, is there room for speech? Since I have spoken of "one," can there be no speech? One and "speech" make two; two and one make three. Proceeding from this on, even a skillful mathematician cannot exhaust it, let alone an ordinary man! Since, from nonbeing to being, we can get three, how much further we will go, moving from being to being. Thus, move not, let be. Tao knows no boundaries. Speech has no constancy.
Chuang, 79
Tao cannot be told, and yet Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu cannot help but use the word Tao to circumscribe it. While using it, they remind us that it should immediately be forgotten so that we can be one with nature again. The word "Tao" is used as though it were merely a pointer, a spark toward the original real world. But how can language, as a form of human invention, function in this way? What kind of negotiation can we have at all between the prepoem moment of total awareness and the act of expression?
There is an assumption in the Taoist decreative–creative dialectic that when we achieve our original condition and become one with Tao, everything else will follow its natural course. The hand and the mind will felicitously correspond, as in the case of the cook cutting the bullocks, or like the wheelwright chiseling the wheel: Every blow is exactly right (Chuang, 491). When we achieve our original condition, we will have in us a faculty akin to nature itself. To use Chuang-tzu's words: "To stop without knowing how it stops" (Chuang, 70). We all walk, and we walk without being fully conscious of our walking. This is one example of our natural condition. To arrive at this readiness, Chuang-tzu tells us: "Fishes (born in water, growing up in water) forget themselves in water. Men, (born
in Tao, growing up in Tao) will forget themselves being in Tao" (Chuang, 242). Thus, the boatman can row a boat as if it were not there and regards the rapids as though they were dry land (Chuang, 642). And Lü Liang can dive into and emerge from water as if breathing air because, growing up by the water, he has conditioned himself to water's nature (Chuang, 656–58).
It is apt to recall here the idea of tzu-jan (i.e., be-nature-thus-natural). The Chinese poet exalts the moment when we can witness nature working itself out in a poem, one that structures and discloses nature the way nature structures and discloses itself. The tension between nature (effortless emergence of things) and art (human effort) is subtly avoided. In a stricter sense, art, by definition, can never be nature. What the Taoists imply from the very beginning is really restored naturalness or second nature, an activity or expressiveness akin to that of nature.
Bend down — and there it is:
No need to wrest it from others.
With the Way in complete consort —
The mere touch of a hand is spring:
The way we come upon blooming flowers,
The way we see the year renew itself.
What comes this way will stay.
What we get by force will drain away.
A secluded man in an empty mountain,
As rain drops, picks some blade of duckweeds
Freely to feel the flash of dawn:
Leisurely, with natural balance.[24]
Thus, the Taoist concept was echoed and expanded by the ninth-century poet-aesthetician Ssu-k'ung T'u and by many poets and critics throughout the centuries. Sometimes, "readiness," "spontaneity," and "free flow of energy" are synonyms used to describe the condition of becoming nature. In calligraphy or painting, which have to be executed in unhesitatingly quick brushstrokes because of the fluidity of the ink and the absorbency of the rice paper, the energy flowing out from the body to the executing brush must not be blocked. Similarly, in T'ai Chi exercise and movement, it is the free, natural energy flow of the body that we want to emulate in order to achieve a reconditioning of its function. To the Taoists as well as to many calligraphers, painters, and T'ai Chi masters, the unimpeded correspondence and coordination between the hand and the mind — natural
action coming directly from natural condition — is an unshaken faith with nothing mysterious about it.
As we now see, the Taoists believe in the inseparability of consciousness and expression as it is reflected in those arts that emphasize ch'i , or energy flow. But in what way can we make the same claim for the creation of a poem when the poets, too, prize the energy flow as an important hallmark of their naturalness? Can we at all see language as an instinctive part of growth like our ability to walk? While Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu have never explicitly said so, Taoist poet-critics certainly imply this possible comparison. For example, when Su Tung-p'o talks about his own style he paraphrases Chuang-tzu by saying:
Writing should be like moving clouds and flowing water which have no fixed form but move [literally, walk] on where they have to move on and stop where they have to stop.[25]
My writing is like water gushing out from an ample, deep spring. . . . It can move on a thousand miles a day without effort and turns with mountains and rocks and shapes itself according to the objects it encounters. This is something the artist is not conscious of. What he is conscious of is this: that it moves on when it has to move on and it stops when it has to stop.[26]
The suggestion is that expression (the felicity of language) can be as natural as water, an object of nature. In spite of this interesting analogy, there is no way in which we can avoid seeing language as a product of culture. As such, it will always contain predicative elements that are highly obstructive to the attainment of the cosmic measure of things. Our question now is: How are we to liberate ourselves from these elements so as to approximate (if we cannot recreate) the original, real world?
When I gave the example of a Chinese line
Speech is not merely the blowing of winds. It is intending to say something. But what it is intending to say is not absolutely established. Is there really such a thing as speech? Is there really no such thing as speech? Someone considers speech as different from the chirping of young birds. But is there any distinction between them, or is there no distinction? How is Tao obscured that there should be distinction between true or false? How is speech obscured that there should be a distinction between right and wrong? Where is Tao not present? Where is speech not appropriate? Tao is obscured by partiality. Speech is obscured by vain show. Therefore, there are contentions between the Confucianists and the Mohists. Each one of these two schools affirms what the other denies and denies what the other affirms. If we are to affirm what they both deny and deny what they both affirm, there is nothing better than to use transparency.
Chuang, 63
Language, no doubt, cannot be as natural as the blowing of winds or the singing of birds. An interesting thought here, however, is that poetics in both Eastern and Western cultures often likes to compare poetry to winds and bird songs. This perhaps points toward an ideal, the transcendence of the fetters of language so as to disclose more freely. This idea is often advocated by lyricists. In a certain sense, the Taoist vision can perhaps be called "lyrical vision." And yet, even though language cannot become as natural as the blowing of winds and the singing of birds, with a transparent understanding of the relationship between language and the real order of the world, the potentials of language can be adjusted to come closer to the natural measure.
"To view things as things view themselves," considered according to this transparent relationship, implies, then, the following: not to put "I" in the primary position for aesthetic contemplation. This is not difficult to understand: Phenomena do not need "I" to have their existences; they all have their own inner lines, activities, and rhythms to affirm their authenticity as things. Authenticity or truth does not come from "I"; things possess their existences and their forms of beauty and truth before we name them. (We need not know the name of a certain flower before proclaiming it true and beautiful.) Thus, subject and object, principal and subordinate, are categories of superficial demarcation. A thing can be both object and subject at the same time. "I" can be both subject and object. Positions can be freely
changed — subject and object, consciousness and phenomena interpenetrate, intercomplement, interdefine, and interilluminate, appearing simultaneously, with humans corresponding to things, things corresponding to humans, things corresponding to things extending throughout the million phenomena. "I" can view from this point outward, or "I" can view from that point inward, or from this place, this time and from that place, that time. This time, this place, that time, that place — none needs to be connected with another by causal relationship. Distance is not absolute. We can walk toward and from things. In this spatial horizon in which we can move about freely, the so-called distance is paradoxical; it is and is not there. As in many Chinese landscape paintings, perspective evaporates before the viewing eye. In Fan K'uan's "Travelers in the Valley," for example, while the figures, the forests, and rocks and hills in the lower right corner of the foreground of the long, hanging scroll appear very small (indicating that we are viewing them from afar), the mountain in the far distance behind them looms huge and imposing as if right before our eyes. In between, there is the mediation of a stretch of cloud, which is simultaneously solid (as a thing) and empty or void (as a visual unit in the painting), helping to diffuse our sense of distance. This painting shows the attempt to avoid a single, linear perspective so that viewers are allowed to view elements from different angles and moveable spatial relationships.
"To view things as things view themselves" also means this: Before the poet speaks and writes in language, it seems as if he has become each of the independent objects and identified with them, disclosing them according to their inner scheme and activities. To be identified with the million things can also be considered embracing the million things; thus, there is a unique sense of harmony and intimacy in our allowing the million things to change and play themselves out in their original gestures, forms, and appearances. In this kind of transparency between Phenomenon and human beings, there is naturally no clear-cut distinction, no hiding of their presences in abstract thinking characterized by positioning, naming, or conferring of definable and determinable meanings, no arbitrary imposition of right and wrong, no argumentation in "vain show." In this kind of transparency, language as a means of reflecting and tracing the activities of things will easily avoid predicative elements — definition, restrictive time and space, determined relationships — and will also avoid projecting by force self-invented meaning structures and systems upon the simple and unhewn phenomena; language will not
infuse ego-reflecting elements into objects. Language is used to punctuate the vital rhythm and atmosphere of things as they emerge and act themselves out in the real world. What we call vital rhythm or atmosphere is often what we can only feel and not see, and so, it is even more important that it be free from the fetters of words. Thus, the Taoist artist stresses also the emptiness of language. What is written is fixed and solid; what is unwritten is fluid and empty. This empty and fluid wordlessness is an indispensable cooperator with the fixed and solid word. The full activity of language should be like the copresence of the solid and the void in Chinese paintings, allowing the reader to receive not only the words (the written) but also the wordlessness (the unwritten). The negative space, such as the emptiness in a painting and the condition of silence with meanings trembling at the edges of words in a poem, is made into something vastly more significant and positive and, indeed, has become a horizon toward which our aesthetic attention is constantly directed. By continually decreasing discursive and explanatory elements and procedures in the poetic line, by promoting the coextensive presencing of objects, the poets who possess what the Chinese call the "bosom" of Taoist consciousness help to bring forth a special type of nonmediating mediation, leading to an art of noninterference akin to the workings of nature, and a language that points toward the finer interweaving of unspeaking, concrete, changing nature, like the word "Tao," which we are to forget once it is pronounced, like the fish trap that can be forgotten once the fish is caught (Chuang, 944). The words become a spotlight that brightens objects emerging from the real world, showing them in full brilliance.
The Crisis of Language in the West:
Contemplation and Change
When certain poetic lines that eliminate predication appeared in modern Anglo-American poetry with Pound, Williams, cummings, and the Projectivists following in the steps of Mallarmé,[27] people could not help but call them "deviations." In the words of Roland Barthes:
Modern poetry destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things. This implies a reversal in our knowledge of Nature. The interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous Nature, which is revealed only piecemeal. At the very moment when the withdrawal of functions obscures the relations existing in
the world, the object in discourse assumes an exalted place: modern poetry is a poetry of the object. In it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible. . . . The word is left with a vertical object, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and recollections: it is a sign which stands. The poetic word is here an act without immediate past, without environment, and which holds forth only the dense shadow of reflexes from all sources which are associated with it.[28]
With the same attempt to avoid predicative elements, why does modern poetry evoke the sense of deviation? The objects are nothing but unfamiliar, strange, and isolated. We can disagree with Barthes's formulation of nature, which is still one that is controlled and dominated by language, an order made up of what William James called "serials," which necessarily break up the "collateral contemporaneity" of all beings, but most readers still find it difficult to accept poetic lines found in modern poetry as being natural. Why?
Paradoxically and anachronistically, it was the anxiety over the inadequacy of language, over the question whether language can authenticate what is immediately before us, that ushered in the whole movement to reinvent language in the West. Indeed, the language crisis has also been an epistemological crisis, about which modern philosophers, aestheticians, and poets have obsessively agonized. Witness a blunt statement by Albert Camus in his "Sur un philosophie de l'expression": "It's a matter of deciding whether our language is a lie or truth."[29]
From Mallarmé through Stein, from Pound to the postmodernists, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger to Derrida, this question echoes like a call from profundity, at once apocalyptic and divine.
Mallarmé, almost distraught by the inadequacy of language, fitfully attempted to turn the denial into a privileged passage into totality. Languages to him are
imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing . . . the diversity of languages on earth means that no one can utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Itself Incarnate. This is clearly nature's law . . . to the effect that we have no sufficient reason for equating ourselves with God. But then esthetically, I am disappointed when I consider how impossible it is for languages to express things by means of certain keys which would reproduce their brilliance and aura.[30]
Distressed by the impossibility of language, Mallarmé sought to liberate words from their bondage to the original world of objects that conceptual reason has set and to allow them to move into and exist like isolated things trembling in the zero of nothingness, in silence and blank space where both objects and language (in the form received from culture) would be negated, when Beauty, like a bouquet totally new, rises magically and musically out of the words.[31] Through this negative process, he wanted to give back to language its mystic dimension: the Orphic world-creating power.
This attempt to essentialize objects by changing words into props to define the ambience or into players to play themselves out in an empty field or stage is to purge everything palpable of a lived experience. The world so produced has no identification with the real, original world (notice that the flower Mallarmé created is not to be found in the plant world!) but has, instead, become a shadow of the Platonic scheme in reverse. Like the "shut windows" in his poems, if the world is to be known, it can only be intuited through its absence. There is, in this scheme of things, no reentrance into the free flow of objects of the original world; instead, the objects have been taken out of the concrete natural environment in which we find them and then transported by the poet into a new (still conceptual) world of language, in and for themselves, with no reference to the original world for identification. "Everything exists in the world to finally culminate in a book (the world created by the poet's language)."[32] There is no attempt to retrieve the prepredicative appeal of the objects whereby we can regain the original world.
I am travelling . . . but in unknown lands, and if I had fled from the fierce heat of reality and have taken pleasure in cold imagery, it is because for a month now I have been on the purest glaciers of esthetics; because after I had found nothingness, I found beauty.[33]
Here we recall his famous sonnet:
La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.[34]
Mallarmé wants to create a nameless world out of language. Words are like a magic wand by which the relationships between the objects and the original environments in which we find them are made to disappear. Objects are thus alienated from their original grounds and made independent, with no past, no familiar connections to the real world, so as to let them work out freely a new world of their own (an aesthetic domain made from words). Although we can perhaps say here that the swan is a metaphor for the poet himself, it is nevertheless not a swan that we can find in the real world; it can only exist in the aesthetic world of words through which an almost mystical blinding brightness is emitted. This swan, like the flower rising out of the music of Mallarmé, is not an object of the feathered world.
Mallarmé disregarded the appeal of the original world and usurped the position of the Creator. Mallarmé once quoted these words from Genesis, "The word is the world," and by this proclaimed God's work to be his own, placing expression above everything else in the making of a poem. This fact makes his (as well as his followers') dislocation of syntax (which once might have been intended to reach out to the prepredicative immanence of word-objects) come to us as a violent act and as a form of deviation.
We can see, too, that Mallarmé's distrust of language is, at the same time, its promotion to a specially privileged status. This privileged status is at root different from our consideration of language's relation to the original ground, the givenness and presencing of things as they are. But why did Mallarmé (and the subsequent postsymbolists and modernists) do this? What historical changes had brought about this reaction against the existing conceptions of language? Here, we must first explore the complex socio-historical and epistemological crisis in which Mallarmé found himself.
When Plato excommunicated the poet from his Republic, his verdict was that what the poet imitates is only an illusion because his object of imitation, the external world, is constantly changing, and, as such, the appearances of things can only be shadows of some permanent Reality (i.e., Logos, wherein resides the so-called Truth).
Our first reaction to this line of reasoning is that Plato, too, affirms that art is a human construction and hence cannot become nature (god-made). If we follow this line of thinking, we can also reach the conclusion that human intellect is limited and that language is insufficient in representation, but this is not Plato's logic.
In his hierarchy of values, Plato divides knowledge into three modes. The lowest mode is pure perception. It cannot lead to truth, because its objects are constantly changing appearances, which are not a fit locus for Truth. Here, Plato's view is clearly contrary to that of the Taoists, which affirms constant changes as the very Truth itself; Plato attempts to locate Truth somewhere else.
The highest mode in Plato's scheme is the contemplation of the Idea, transcendent and transensuous, by pure intelligence. What is called Truth resides in this abstract world beyond the concrete world of appearances. And only through philosophical thinking, not sense perception, can we expect to reach this Logos. This preference has directly affected the entire spectrum of perceptual (and consequently expressive) modes in the West.
Between Plato's lowest and highest modes is the thinking activity proposed by Pythagoras — mathematical and geometrical thinking — as the only path from pure perception to pure idea. In fact, mathematics and geometry were born from the ancient practices of observing the activities of the heavenly bodies. What they did was to proceed from hypotheses — these were hypotheses — to speculate on the structure of the universe and to measure the movement of its stars. This was the beginning of Western science. Thus, we know that what Plato calls philosophical thinking already contains the seeds of scientific logic. To know the universe involves going through some analytical and syllogistical processes. Such processes have dominated Western use of language ever since.
We must also notice that the so-called Truth (be it abstract Logos or the Law of Movement of the Universe) comes to us only as "notions" of Truth or "hypotheses" of Truth, and as such they are human structures in place of the "real" order of the concrete world of appearances itself. In other words, in Plato's hierarchy of knowledge, order is placed within man's thought or intellect, not in the external world. Plato created Logos, an abstract system, to play against what is given before us in its supposedly unorganized form. To do this is to alienate humanity from its original ground: Humankind is not seen as one of the millions of components that make up the total fabric of being but is promoted to be the paradigm of all orders.
Aristotle subsequently strengthened the centrality of human mental constructs in the cosmic scheme of things. His geocentric view of a finite universe, for example, exerted a long, unchallenged influence in the West. Following Empedocles's view on the various properties of the four elements, he concluded that earth, being the heaviest, therefore occupies the center, while water, air, and fire, being increasingly lighter, form the next three spheres surrounding earth, with a constellation of fixed stars on the outermost sphere, beyond which there is no other world. We now know that this view of the structure of the universe was built upon a mere hypothesis and has been proven wrong, and yet this human-made order dominated almost twenty centuries of Western scientific thinking, including the powerful Christian adoption of it in the Middle Ages, when finite humans and earth were pitched against God, the infinite and beyond. What do we learn from this historical fact? Aristotle conditioned almost all Western thinkers to seek order within humankind and to regard its mental constructs as absolutes. Thus, the "universal and logical structures" that a poet is supposed to be able to provide from existential experiences — an argument Aristotle used to counter Plato's preference of philosophy over poetry and his excommunication of the poet from his Republic — are to be taken as absolutes, when in reality they are nothing but human notions (conceptual worlds after abstraction).
The elevation of the ego's domination of the original world became so strong that even after the Copernican revolution, when both Aristotle's model of a finite universe and the medieval cosmology were supposed to be blasted (as John Donne puts it in his "An Anatomy of the World," "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone"), Bacon could go so far as to proclaim that "the artificial does not differ from the natural in form and essence,"[35] and Descartes could insist that "there are no differences between the machines built by artisans and the diverse bodies that nature alone compose."[36] In fact, even after the seventeenth century, many people continued to explain the universe in terms of machines.
The ego's domination of the original world also had other socio-historical consequences. The principle of domination of nature was transposed to the human realm: Humans dominated other humans on the principle of exchange value (the use value of an object). This further removed the immanence of things as things as well as the immanence of people as people. With industrialization, which capitalized on the domination and exchange principles, the function
of language, which had been suffering from the Platonic-Aristotelian process of abstraction, was further reduced to serving the ideology of a society that values above all the instrumental importance of things and human beings, such as seeing a tree not as a tree but as lumber and seeing a man not according to his natural being but according to his production potentials. The function of language, under this society, is not to approximate, authenticate, or derive animation from the cosmic scheme or the workings of nature but to carry practical knowledge. When Western philosophers and artists talk about the crisis of language, they are not engaging in a frivolous aestheticism; the crisis is directly bound to the crisis of ideology. Here, we must reexamine the ambiguous role of science in the history of consciousness.
Properly speaking, the crisis of modern consciousness began in the seventeenth century with the challenge of the hermeneutical framework underlying the once unified world view and consciousness that dominated medieval and Renaissance Europe, namely the Christian geocentric cosmology together with its hierachical structures. This challenge ushered in the extremely complex and ambiguous role of science. It was ambiguous because this history can be written as the dawn of humanism since the challenge brought with it the challenge of the power structure invested in the church and the prince. In one significant sense, this was the beginning of a process of liberating individuals from arbitrarily "constituted" but at root suppressive "beliefs" — the beginning of the demythologization of the so-called truths. And yet, the writing of this history is not without its biases. With the prioritization of the rational, emphasizing the kind of verifiability natural sciences had offered, a host of other so-called illogical, irrational, but in reality alternative forms of consciousness were exiled. Indeed, any other form of thinking deviating from this new emphasis had to be justified. Thus, we find artists and poets of subsequent centuries had to claim that literature can be as precise as science, as in Pound's "The Serious Artist," or to circle out a separate domain for poetry as in all symbolist and postsymbolist theories.
The crisis of consciousness emerged in yet another disturbing form. While the West must be thankful to Copernicus and Galileo for breaking the medieval mythico-political cosmological framework (since their challenges gave rise to the birth of the Enlightenment, which presented the possibility of leading Western society out of its ego-centered consciousness), the enlightened individual was, paradoxically, left in a new wilderness. Before the break, the world was cohe-
sive; all three levels — the macrocosmic, the earth, and the microcosmic — were rolled into one, with a network of interpretive markers, arbitrarily constituted and antinatural though they were, that were unified and understood throughout Europe. After the break, the truly universal cohesive framework is yet to be found. We see a lot of nostalgia for the so-called unified sensibility in Pound, Eliot, and Hulme, for example. In a sense, all attempts since the seventeenth century, from the Romantics through the symbolists and modernists to the phenomenologists and existentialists, can be considered ways of finding alternative explanatory systems, either working from within or borrowing from non-Western traditions, to replace this lost world. As it turned out, however, post-Enlightenment humanity had to further accelerate the centrality of reason, leading to logical, positivistic objectivity, or to affirm the subjectivity of the self as the site, organically creative, by which the poet not only could know the essences of the universe but could give it a new raison d'être and, at a later stage of development, could make totally new worlds within an ego-reflecting language.
The rise of science, which has fragmented the world, has also fragmented humankind. The demand of postindustrial specialization has led to complex isolated entities of knowledge that the conventional reductionist language can no longer comprehend. Eliot's words characterize this situation well:
We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult . Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.[37]
Similarly, the expressionist painters had to distort forms and shapes of objects to fully comprehend this complexity. Language as an expressive medium (for that matter, the language of all the arts) in the postindustrialized period has many deficiencies. This is the other reason that philosophers and poets desperately sought change and reinvention in "the language of the tribe."
One of the consequences of specialization and compartmentalization in the postindustrialized world is that the poet is left with no role to play. The poet is no longer asked to speak for nature, or to account for God's scheme of things, or to be a source of communication between society and God and between human beings.
Explication of the structure of the universe can be better done by the scientist. Suddenly, overnight, just like the poet in a low pub in one of Baudelaire's prose poems, the poet's halo has fallen into the gutter and is nowhere to be found. The poet has no altar in society. The rise of science and its demand for verifiability of statements about metaphysical or moral truths have put the question of self and values into great jeopardy. A. N. Whitehead epitomizes the discord in one sentence from Tennyson: "The stars blindly run." If the stars run blindly according to the law of celestial movement, do the molecules in our body also run blindly? If they do, we cannot be responsible for our moral actions. If they do, how are we to understand the exact meaning of self? Science has opened up a Pandora's Box. It has driven some to search for the meaning of human life (such as in existentialism, within the larger phenomenological philosophy) or to explore the structures and behavioristic patterns of the psyche (such as in psychoanalysis); it has also led some to recontemplate the relationship between humans and phenomena (such as in phenomenology) or to explain historical phenomena through scientific logical dialecticism (such as in Marxism). All these can be considered attempts to reposition the self in some coherent, meaningful contexts.
It was against the impotence of language to comprehend the fragmented complexities induced by reductionist scientific realism and against the ultimate denial of the poet's place in the cosmic scheme of things by the resultant reification of humankind that the affirmation of subjectivity became imminent. The romantic emphasis on imagination as an active organizing principle of the poet's mind over logic and reason, the mythologizing of nature as a replacement for Logos and God and as a companion model through which the full potential of the poet's mind can be glorified, the symbolist elevation of language as possessing Orphic power, offering a symbolic nature for nature itself (language as world, style as absolute, beauty as religion) — all these efforts must be seen as challenges to the reductionist threat of positivistic philosophy and as a protest against the reification of human beings by withdrawing into a solipsistic world of aesthetics, now proclaimed to be autonomous, complete, and brimming with the spirituality abandoned by postindustrial society.
The so-called reinvention of language was aimed at restoring the perceptual dimensions exiled by reductionist reason and by the reification of human beings. But this restoration could not be achieved by a tour-de-force elevation and mystication of language or by a selfwilled rejection of the original world. The restoration had to begin
with a root understanding of what T. E. Hulme once called the ultimate illness of the Western mind: the invasion and domination of the original world by the ego in numerous arrogant forms:
The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and its impermanence . . . but while they recognized it, they feared it and endeavored to evade it to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them. They had the disease, the passion, for immortality. They wished to construct things which would be proud boasts that they, man, were immortal. We see it in a thousand different forms, materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion and in the hypostatized ideas of Plato.[38]
Even though modern poets, beginning with Mallarmé, attempted to discard the Platonic and Aristotelian discourses, they had not been cured of the disease of positing their ego or self-consciousness as the source of final order at the expense of disfiguring and exiling the original world. This refusal to reenter the immanence of things made impossible any attempt to liberate language from its prison-house.
Here, the Taoist horizon of transparency between consciousness ("I") and the world becomes particularly instructive. A brief recapitulation of this horizon is in order. Between "the world as it is (self-so)" and "the world as it is believed to be," the Taoists turn their attention toward the former and reject the premise that the structure of the world is the same as we conceive it. They understand, first, that naming, meaning, language, and concept are restrictive acts, none of which can fully authenticate the very original state of things, and all of which will, one way or another, distort it; second, that the real world, quite without supervision and explanation by human beings, is totally alive, self-generating, self-conditioning, self-transforming, and self-complete; and third, that humankind, being only one among a million beings, has no prerogative to classify the cosmic scheme. Hence, we should not put "I" in the primary position to dominate and determine the forms and meanings of things; instead, we should allow consciousness and the million things to freely exchange positions so as to coexist, to answer one another, to mutually illuminate and be totally transparent.
In this transparency, because "I" view things as things view themselves, what emerges in the language is the easy avoidance of analytical, discursive, and syllogistic elements, giving us a nonconnective, dramatic presencing of things; because the ego merges with and
diffuses itself in the undifferentiated composition of things, identifying with them and leaving them in the forefront of perception, it can eschew "ego-reflecting" elements and can retain multilinear, multispatial relationships with the ongoing continuity of the composition of things.
When the modern poets in the West attempted to eschew the analytical, the discursive, the syllogistic, the linear, and the determinate, they indeed achieved something quite close to the expressive strategies found in classical Chinese poetry, namely, direct, concrete acting out of objects, spatialization of time, and temporalization of space. These expressive strategies led to visuality of events in coextensive relationships with pictorial and sculptural appeal, indeterminate and nonrestrictive relationships leading to multiple suggestiveness and multifaceted space activity, simultaneity of objects leading to juxtaposition and superimposition.[39] But the full realization of this aim requires simultaneously the loss of self in the free flow of things and the attunement of the ego (self, consciousness) with the original transparent relationships in the total composition of things so as to leave the given as given, to view things as things view themselves in their natural environment. It follows, then, that until Western poets can adjust their perceptual priority and repossess the original real world, their stylistic innovations will not be natural and will be viewed by many readers as "deviations."
The movement to reorient consciousness so as to repossess the original world has been a continuous obsession for modern philosophers and poets in the West. As early as 1844, Kierkegaard questioned the abstract systems of the West (the world of ideas) and opted for concrete existence. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript , he says:
The difficulty that inheres in existence, with which the existing individual is confronted, is one that never really comes to expression in the language of abstract thought, much less receives an explanation. But abstract thought is sub specie aeterni , it ignores the concrete and the temporal, the existential process. . . . The questionable character of abstract thought becomes apparent especially in connection with all existential problems, where abstract thought gets rid of the difficulty by leaving it out, and then proceeds to boast of having explained everything.[40]
Abstract thought cannot comprehend and authenticate concrete existence. This, as we now look back on the first section of this chapter, is
the main theme in William James's insistence upon "collateral contemporaneity" and Whitehead's "immediate deliverance of experience"; both want to prevent the total "real" world from being broken up into serial orders or reduced to "desirated" forms. In later years, Heidegger demanded a return to a pre-Socratic understanding of physis (the emergence of things) instead of indulging in meta-physis . In between came T. E. Hulme's Bergsonian resistance to scientific reduction of the indescribable world into counters, along with the imagists' emphasis (not yet fully articulated) on the real and the natural symbol as adequate symbol.[41]
The various philosophical orientations outlined above suggest a potential for reaffirming the innocence and immanence of things, if it could be made acceptable to postindustrialized humanity. A new "line" of poetic expression (such as those that eschew determinate syntactical relationships) needs a new "mind" to become authentic and natural. It is this need that has made the works of Heidegger meaningful, particularly because of his attempt to recover the original ground of being by pointing toward the given as given, undoing slowly the reductionist concepts, classifications, and logos-centered orders. It is on this level that we find the Taoists and Heidegger sharing, and even speaking, the same language. I will outline here two attempts toward this new orientation, one by Heidegger in philosophy, the other by William Carlos Williams in poetry.
As if to echo one of Chuang-tzu's writings, "On Making Everything Equal," in which most of the Taoists' germinal ideas are articulated, Heidegger says in his Introduction to Metaphysics ,[42] "All essents [beings] are of equal value and we must avoid singling out any particular essent, including man."
For what indeed is man? Consider the earth within the endless darkness of space in the universe. By way of comparison it is a tiny grain of sand; between it and the next grain of its own size there extends a mile or more of emptiness; on the surface of this grain there lives a crawling, bewildered swarm of supposedly intelligent animals, who for a moment have discovered knowledge. And what is the temporal extension of a human life amid all the million years? Scarcely a move of the second hand, a breath. Within the essents as a whole there is no legitimate ground for singling out the essent which we called mankind and to which we ourselves happen to belong.
Introduction to Metaphysics , 3–4
Humankind being such, it should not be placed in the primary position of dominating and controlling the world. In fact, humans do not have this faculty, for the essents are not affected by concepts. "To be sure, the things in the world, the essents, are in no way affected by our asking of the question 'Why are there essents, rather than nothing?' Whether we ask it or not, the planets move in their orbits, the sap of life flows through plant and animal" (5). "Our questioning is after all only a psycho-spiritual process in us which, whatever course it may take, cannot in any way affect the essent itself" (29). Heidegger suggests that we return to the condition before language happened, for "as long as we dwell on the word form and its meaning we have not yet come to the 'thing'" (87) — return to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the chief disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, later called "the world [that] is always 'already there' before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence."[43] When we use the word "being" to discuss this inalienable world, the word escapes us as something intangible. "All the things we have named are , and yet when we wish to apprehend being, it is always as though we were reaching the void. The being after which we inquire is almost like nothing — being remains unfindable . . . in the end, the word 'being' is no more than an empty word. It means nothing real, tangible, material. Its meaning is an unreal vapor" (Introduction to Metaphysics , 35). In a sense, Heidegger feels, like the Taoists, that the word "being" is used only as a provisional pointer: Once we reach the inalienable world of things, the word should be crossed out. (This is comparable to Chuang-tzu's "Forget the words when you get the sense of things; forget the fish trap once the fish is caught.")
Heidegger is deeply aware of the problematics of language. His dialogue with a Japanese (given in chapter 1) is a demonstration of how Westerners have been caught in the prison-house of language. The first step to be taken is to break the concepts of the universe and their restrictive language modes and procedures so that things can return to the condition by which they achieve determinable being by being indeterminate (91). In his "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," Heidegger points out that the poet possesses both the most dangerous and the most precious language. Most dangerous because it often alienates things from their original real condition; most precious because if we can undo the illusions it carries, it can help us disclose the real emergence of things.[44]
As can be expected, one of the first things Heidegger must do is to recover the pristine meaning that exists between name and thing
by an etymological exercise, trying to resurrect some Platonic-Aristotelian concepts in pre-Socratic terms.
1. Physis (the root for the word "physics"): "What does the word physis denote? It denotes self-blossoming emergence (e.g. the blossoming of a rose) opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and preserves and endures in it; in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on . . . emergence . . . in celestial phenomena (the rising in the sun), in the coming forth of man and animal from the womb. . . . This power of emerging and enduring includes 'becoming' as well as 'being.' . . . It is experienced primarily through what in a way imposes itself most immediately on our attention and this was the later, narrower sense of physis: ta physei onta, ta physika , nature.[45] . . . Philosophical inquiry into the realm of being as such is meta ta physika ; this inquiry goes beyond the essent. . . . The fundamental question of this work is of a different kind from the leading question of metaphysics. Taking what was said in Sein und Zeit as a starting point, we inquired into the 'disclosure of being .'" (14; 16–17; 18)
2. Aletheia (often translated as Truth): "Since the essent as such is , it places itself in and stands in unconcealment, aletheia . We translate, and at the same thoughtlessly misinterpret this word as 'Truth'. . . . For the Greek essence of truth is possible only in one with the Greek essence of being as physis . On the strength of the unique and essential relationship between physis and aletheia the Greeks would have said: The essent is true insofar as it is. The true as such is essent. This means: The power that manifests itself stands in unconcealment. . . . Truth is inherent in the essence of being. To be an essent — this comprises to come to light, to appear on the scene, to take one's [its] place, to produce something." (102)
3. Eidos or idea is not something abstract. "They call the appearance of a thing eidos ." (60)
Heidegger's reinterpretation of these concepts is his way of destroying existing closures of meaning so as to recover a pristine understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the world. This gesture reminds us of Kuo Hsiang's commentary on Taoists texts that were mystified over time. Kuo Hsiang helped to clear away the possible mystical as well as metaphysical meanings unduly attributed to the words Tao (which misled many Western translators to
translate it as God or Logos), T'ien , literally sky, now clearly annotated as nature (Chuang, 10), and "Divine Mortals" and "Holy Men," now annotated as names referring to those who understand and allow things to assume their own nature and run their own course (Chuang, 22–25). He unequivocally said in his preface: "Above, there is no Creator; below, things create themselves." This clarification prepared the way for the landscape poets of the Six Dynasties to see mountains as mountains.
Heidegger's efforts can be seen as an attempt to clear away the metaphysical burdens of the past. Like the Taoist return to the original uncarved world, Heidegger encourages the re-recognition of physis , the emergence and unconcealment of things before the closures of abstract meanings (i.e., the prepredicative condition of things). This led him to pronounce a new beginning for Western aesthetics. A poet should not be obsessed with aletheia (in the traditional sense), or concepts, or hypotheses about the real world but should converse and communicate directly with the living appeal of things as they are. In his Poetry, Language, and Thought ,[46] Heidegger has this to say about thought and creativity:
To think "Being" means: to respond to the appeal of its presencing. The response stems from the appeal and releases toward that appeal.
PLT , 183
Poetry calls things, bids them come. . . . Bidding is inviting. It invites things in, so that they may bear upon men as things. . . . The things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth mortals and divinities. This gathering, assembling, letting-stay is the thinging of things. The unitary fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities, which is stayed in the thinging of things, we called — the world. In the naming, the things named are called into the thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones. By thinging, things carry out world. . . . Thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture — gestate — world.
PLT , 199–200
According to Heidegger, between human beings and things, between thing and thing, there is a kind of mirroring that both "sets each of the four free into its own but . . . binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another" (PLT , 179). "World and things do not subsist alongside one another. They pene-
trate each other. Thus, the two traverse a middle. In it, they are at one. Thus at one, they are intimate. . . . The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate — world and thing — divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter , division prevails: a dif-ference " (PLT , 202). Subject and object penetrate each other and are both one and separate. Subject and object are interchangeable.[47]
By affirming the prepredicative condition of things as our perceptual priority, and by rejecting the premise that humankind can or should dominate the original world, Heidegger (the later Heidegger in particular) and the Taoists are speaking the same language. It is clear of course that the mode of presentation adopted by Heidegger is different from that of the Taoists. The latter, and Chuang-tzu in particular, use language of poetic dimension, full of visual imagery or visual events to strike the reader's receptor directly, whereas Heidegger has to use a complex and sophisticated argument to desophisticate. His What Is a Thing ?, for example, is a thick tome in which he tries patiently to undo the logical structures that previous philosophers had artificially constructed.
If we claim that William Carlos Williams's view of poetry and his language strategies are inspired by Heidegger, this is definitely incorrect. On the one hand, his artistic manipulation comes from Mallarmé's double view of language: While denouncing language as inadequate, Mallarmé ordains it with a privileged, world-creating status. In a certain sense, Williams remains a Mallarméan expressionist. He picks up from Gertrude Stein the idea of nullifying grammatical functions so as to retain the multiplicity of meanings in a sentence. This destruction of linearity in part helps him to extend the Mallarméan concept of the supreme language. On the other hand, he has also inherited Hulme's rejection of abstract thought for concreteness and Pound's antidiscursive imagistic thinking. Thus, Williams pronounces "No ideas but in things." But more important, it was William James's emphasis upon the real order of the world and Whitehead's insistence upon "immediate deliverance of experience" that led modern American poets, Williams and the postmodernists in particular, to embrace things as they really are in the original real world. Thus, when he says, "A life that is here and now is timeless. That is the universal I am seeking: to embody in a work of art, a new world that is always 'real.' . . . No symbolism is acceptable," and when he insists on seeing "the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but
with great intensity of perception," we feel that Williams, in his own way, through his specific channels, basically arrived at a perceptual-expressive mode that highlights "what is, is real." I have already discussed in the previous chapter the aesthetic assumptions of the use of space breaks and syntactic breaks in Williams's poetry. However, a full examination of the dialectical relationships between his perceptual orientation and his language strategies must be reserved for another occasion. Here, I find Hillis Miller's analysis of Williams in terms of Heideggerian phenomenology is adequate to bring out Williams's convergence with the Taoist aesthetic disposition. Let me simply summarize from Miller's quotations from Williams.[48]
1. [At twenty, Williams recognized an] "inner security" . . . "a sudden resignation to existence . . . which made everything a unit and at the same time a part of myself" (SL, 147).[49] . . . He abandoned his private consciousness. . . . "Why even speak of 'I' . . . which/interests me almost not at all?" (P, 30)
2. Consciousness permeates the world, and the world has entered into the mind. It is "an identity — it can't be/otherwise an/interpenetration, both ways" (P, 12)
3. The Romantic . . . opposition between inner world of subject and outer world of things . . . disappears. . . . [His is] a space both subjective and objective, a region of copresence in which anywhere is everywhere, and all times are one time. . . . All things exist simultaneously in one realm, and though they may interact they are not related causally. The idea of causal sequence is replaced by the notion of a poetry which "lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity" (SE, 257) [Compare the Taoist idea of self-generating, self-transforming nature.]
4. "I feel as much a part of things as trees and stones" (SL, 127). . . . He belongs to "a wordless/world/ without personality" (CEP, 280) [Compare the Taoist emphasis on "no-self" (wu-wo ) and the nonverbal world (wu-yen ).]
5. "Whenever I say 'I', I mean also you" (SA, 4) [Compare "This is also that, that is also this " of the Taoists.]
These dispositions are no doubt consonant with those of the Taoists and Heidegger, but I am not suggesting that their world views are exactly the same. Although Williams had translated some Chinese poems and had read about the Chinese artistic temperament by way of Pound, there is not enough evidence to believe that Williams read and understood Taoism. Similarly, although Heidegger,
at a later stage of his thinking, read Lao-tzu and, in one interview, even said that had he known the works of the Taoist-derived Ch'an Buddhism he would not have written what he had written, there is no evidence that he made any systematic study of Taoism. But precisely because of this, we feel it even more meaningful that Heidegger and Williams arrived at a similar orientation. Culture, like language's double edges that Heidegger talks about, will, as it develops, no doubt widen the possibility of communication, but it will also create alienation and incommunicativeness. Like any linguistic formulations, culture is established by a process of centering and privileging, thus excluding that which is on the margin, and by circling out a domain for sharper definition, thus rejecting that which freely flows in the open. What does this convergence between an intellectual horizon formed in the third century B.C. in China and those represented by Heidegger and Williams twenty-three centuries afterwards mean? It means a possible ground upon which we can repossess the original, real-life world by sharing the same questions asked concerning our consciousness and the world. But we must also mark this: The reverse of Williams's statement "unless there is/a new mind there cannot be a new/line" must also be true. A new mind needs a new line to be transformed. Without breaking down the prison-walls imposed by certain Western language practices, the sensibility leading toward the repossession of the original world cannot be reborn.