Head in the Heavens, Feet on the Earth

(Another post I expect to offer to Rambling Taoists, but you can read it here first.)

I've been thinking, yes, about a little remark Ta-Wan made earlier:

"I live life as it appears to be and I die. My life is full as no time was spent attempting to know what can't be known. I live. I don't think about living."

Which on the surface seems to be very Taoist, very spontaneous and in the moment.  I feel this way whenever I enjoy a maitai under the big banyan tree on the beach in Waikiki, gazing at Diamond Head, watching the surf, hearing the joy of children and laughter of lovers on the sand.  This is about as close to Paradise as I can imagine, but I don't get there as often as I would like.  (Getting to Waikiki is a nuisance.  I can do maitais on my own lanai.)

But in the context of our talk of "philosophical" Taoism, I wonder...philosophy is about asking questions (with no expectation of answers), but still the asking of questions, pondering arguments, seems like a worthwhile pursuit to me.  Or maybe I'm too Socratic.  My feet are on the ground, but my head is in the clouds.

Years ago, maybe 1967, I asked a friend, "Why are you experimenting with all these drugs?"  Experimenting was the term of the time; now people just "do" them, I guess.  Experimentation appealed to me.  It suggested research, discovery and proof. Hypotheses and their testing.  But his answer to my question was, perhaps the most honest thing anyone's ever said to me, "Because it's fun."

And now, I find, decades on, the drugs and alcohol are no longer fun, and if anything they were just fiddling with the fine tuning of the so-called cognitive shen--the sense faculties.  A useful exercise, but it's no wonder we talk about burn-out and flashbacks and distortion.  Like a little kid with a remote and a screwdriver, fool around with the controls too much and you may break the set. And in this case, you can't go to Best Buy and get a replacement.

But I'm not really talking about psychoactive substances here: I'm talking about thinking.  It's fun to think about living, doing logical exercises to test hypotheses about the meaning of life, causality, God, memory, consciousness.  Not expecting answers.  Just filling in some blanks, considering new possibilities.  One is never done.  You don't burn out from thinking. I think.

Which brings me to the real purpose of this post.  Trey asked us if we might suggest ideas for holiday giving, for those inclined to do so in spite of  materialism, the economy and the competitive shopping season, (an issue I leave to others to debate). As a big proponent of lifelong learning and thinking, I direct attention to The Great Courses, products of The Teaching Company.  I am in no way a rep for the organization, although I've certainly earned some frequent thinker miles on my account.  No matter what a person is interested in, there's a top quality lecture series just for them.  "Them" is probably a demographic of reasonably affluent, already well educated people who have been out of school for a long time and who might want to revisit that course, or pick up one that was never offered in their major. Anyone who is a commuter and a thinker, an explorer, would appreciate these on long freeway drives.  I don't like audio books, but lectures are meant to be listened to.  No need to spend the money for DVDs; the audio CDs are compelling, and you can always look up any visuals later on the web.  One caveat: don't spend the "full price"...eventually, everything goes on sale.

And if you don't want to spend that much money, here are some other ideas:  I often give Deng Ming-Dao's 365 Dao as a gift that can keep on giving, year after year, even. (To me, since 1992.)  But this year, a special recommendation: former NPR reporter Eric Weiner's Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine, just out, about the author's exploration of several faith traditions, seeking something he can use.  I think it might appeal to readers of this blog. A self-described gastronomical Jew, he visits Sufis, Buddhists, Taoists, Franciscans, Kabbalahists, Wiccans, Shamanists and Raelians. It's funny, it's serious, it is even more entertaining and thought-provoking than his previous Geography of Bliss.  The fact that I have a minor speaking part in Chapter 5 might be enough to intrigue you.

So those are the under $100, and under $20 categories. If you don't want to spend money, give something from your hand, your  heart or your head.  Homemade jam. Knit a bookmark.  I'm making little brush paintings.

I think it's good to give.

The Master-Student Cycle

When does a student become a master? When does the master need a student? An apprentice?  A disciple?

I've been having a little crisis of ...something... lately, thinking about teaching and learning.   I have been variously absorbed in my brush painting class, Teaching Company commuting lectures, sitting in on a class about Chinese thought and Taoism, and working on a project that involves mentoring of promising students to help them get doctoral degrees.  A certain studiousness has rubbed off on me as a result of my new job in an academic environment.  There is a library just across the road from my office!

What is the differnce between a master (shifu) and a teacher (laoshi)? All masters and teachers surely have a perspective, but perhaps the really good ones leave their personal perspective somewhat hidden? Or not? (Like the Mormon who did just a really superb job on the "Great Minds of the East" Teaching Company course. This is not to be construed as any kind of comment about Mitt Romney.)  Maybe it depends on the level of students and their needs and desires?  A master should not take on a student that is more advanced, or more correctly said, on a different path?  The student should know how to pick the master that's right for him at the time? At what point do the master and student become colleagues, sharing their own perspectives, supporting each other?  All masters are still students?  What does the master learn from the student?  What is mentoring?  Why am I writing all these thoughts as questions?

In the end, one is always a student, trying to master oneself.

After I once again didn't quite copy my painting teacher's example, but brought the assignment forth according to my own taste and previous training, she said, "You know a lot about Chinese painting.  Maybe you don't need a teacher."

Self-teaching does pay off.  Earlier today a Chinese colleague was telling me about a terrible hit-and-run incident involving a Chinese toddler.  "Where?" I asked. "Oh, I don't know, I can only say it in Chinese," he said. "Try me," I said.  "Foshan, near Guangdong."  "Ah, home of wing chun!"  "You know that?"  Yep.  (I watch, and listen carefully to, a lot of martial arts movies.)  He went on to suggest that perhaps people are better in the countryside. "They still have heart."  Sadly, while looking for these links, I discover the child has died about half an hour ago.

"How to Paint
Lifelike Camel"

I know something about Chinese painting, but not a lot, and I still learn...maybe not the precise lessons on offer, but something that justifies the time spent in the studio (which may be more practice than actual learning).   I have come to understand that my teacher is not quite presenting traditional techniques, and her own style is a modern mix of west and east, and not just China, but Japan (the terminally cute brightly colored part) and Korea (the less Chinese part) too.  I showed her the lesson book (at right) I just got from Shandong, instructions and tips on how to paint camels (loutou). Amazing what you can find on eBay. Since I can't read the tips, presented in Chinese with no helpful subtitles, I was hoping she might demonstrate the brush strokes, the direction, the ink loading.

"You can do that at home," she said. I don't know whether she meant I should do that only at home, or that I was competent to do it on my own at home.  She glanced sideways at my chrysanthemums, and said, "I am teaching basics here, so they (the undergraduates taking the class for credit) can do their own art."

I am a disciple without a master.  Here are my chrysanthemums, symbols of autumn, longevity, and a life spent in quiet retirement.  I wish.

Chrysanthemums: Autumn Symbol 

Thursday Painting Class

One for the teacher:

Magnolia

And one for me:

Little Landscape

The magnolia has a seal on it because I "turned it in" as an assignment.  I never would have chosen to paint it myself.  When I finished the floral exercise, I did a quick little ink landscape out of my own head and through my mountain horse brush, but the teacher pretty much ignored it.

I was happy when I got home to find in the mail an album of paintings by Shen Zhou, a Ming Dynasty painter whose work I admire and which I actually copied some of a while back.

My Shen Zhou Copy #1

My Shen Zhou Copy  #2

I was working from a tiny print in a little illustrated volume of the Tao Te Ching, more interesting for the pictures than the translation, unless you really like James Legge's version; I can never decide whether to shelve it with my art books or with my other Tao Te Chings. (Or maybe it's not the source of my models; now that I look at it, I don't see these paintings in it, but there is an awful lot of other nice inspirational art reproduced therein. It would be a very nice gift for a Tao-inclined or Sinophiliac friend.) The Shen Zhou album, direct from Beijing, is a much larger format so I can study the brush strokes more closely.

Funny...my new teacher has admonished me not to copy (a completely proper tradition in learning brush painting)...except when it's her paintings.  The magnolia is based--albeit somewhat loosely--on one of hers.

Back in the Classroom

Yesterday I was stuck in terrible traffic caused by a terrible fatal three-car accident caused by someone who was driving the wrong way on the freeway at 4 in the morning--sounds hard to do, but happens with more frequency than you might expect. The freeway was closed for investigation over several exits, or entrances; apparently the difference is not clear to some. The traffic delay gave me a chance to contemplate the meaning of life even before the teddy bears and plastic flowers are placed on the roadside at the scene: once I discovered why the traffic wasn't moving, I was in a spot where I couldn't change my course and go home to wait it out even if I'd wanted to.

It was the first time I've driven myself to work in over a month, commuting as I have been with the Wizard. Traveling together in his car has given me opportunity to gawk around and use mobile devices with impunity. A passive partner in the passenger seat, I've been listening to HIS Teaching Company lectures, so far learning rather dreary biographical information about Mozart, Mahler, Shostakovich, and Churchill. We have an informal agreement that the driver gets to choose the audio. (I'd rather listen to Mahler than hear about his personal misery, to say nothing of Shostakovich.)

But yesterday, because the Wizard is on the mainland, I had the opportunity to resume my own Teaching Company lessons in my own hot little car (his big car has air-con)--literally, The Meaning of Life, Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions.* I had left off the lectures before leaving for China in May, and then there was another sound system glitch that needed attention. It took some recollection, but I'd stopped just after Zen, and just before Hume--Lecture 22, Taking Stock of the Classical World. Since yesterday morning, I have quickly progressed from Hume to Kant to Mill to Nietzsche, with a little side trip into Tolstoy.

Who knew that The Death of Ivan Ilych could be interpreted as a Taoist fable? All through this journey into modernity and beyond, I was struck by ancient Taoist themes, usually just before the lecturer said, "Now this may remind you of the Taoists... ." Eastern thought is discussed far more --14 out of 36 TC lectures** --in this course than in any of the survey courses like this I took in college. In fact, I don't think Eastern thought was EVER included in my classic liberal arts humanities curriculum. Well, maybe once in a comparative religion class. In any case, I never would have expected to be listening to a lecture on "Nietzsche--Achieving Authenticity" some 40 years later in a traffic jam in Hawaii. Some eight o'clock class!

And now I'm looking forward to the drive home: moving on to Gandhi, Lame Deer, and the Dalai Lama, before the concluding lecture, "So, What Is the Meaning of Life?"

I just can't wait to find out. But it's a question I'll likely be asking until I die.

*The Wizard and I are both fans of The Teaching Company. I should point out that the prices cited on the the site are never what we pay; I can't imagine that anyone would...the ongoing "sales" are far more reasonable, and we expect to donate our collected curriculum to the university we both work at or pass them on to persons in need of education.

**And counting two lectures on Lame Deer, the Lakota Sioux medicine man, I think it adds up to a pretty nice balance of East and West, indigenous and European thinkers.

Searching for Life's Meaning

Dessicated Cicada, Dried Orange Leaves,

Water-worn Fragments of Temple Tiles*

How unusual for me, it's been three weeks since last I posted here. (Not counting a couple of weak movie reviews over on my Yin diary.)

For various reasons including dreary asthmatic weather, moderate illness (even missing a Chinese painting class), and career stress, I have been in quiet retreat with myself. (Still there was an opera, La Traviata, a girls' night out with nice food at Cafe Sistina and pretty music. But without the commitment of a pricey season ticket and female companionship --the Wizard was traveling so missed the Verdi--I might have forgone the show and the very fine martinis served amidst the faux-Michelangelo decor of the the Italian restaurant.)

I have been pensive these weeks, contemplating the meaning of life and vitality (thinking of my father's birthday last week, his 91st, had he not died four years ago)...and in part because my latest Teaching Company course is "Philosophy, Religion and The Meaning of Life,"** which was pretty much my major in college, enhanced by the very interesting available extracurricular activities of the late '60s.

The 18-hour audio course, which probably sets me up to be miserable on arrival at my day-job, is a classic survey of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought and its implications, within a hero/saint framework (do we live for ourselves or others?) to consider the arguments of figures from Plato and Abraham to Jesus...and Mohammed...to Marx, Darwin and Freud, ending with Simone Weil and Hollywood. Last night's lecture on my way home from work, number 20 of 36, on Nietzsche ("The Return of the Tragic Hero") seems to have put me back at the keyboard.

No Buddha or Lao Tzu or Confucius here: Asian thought, which also has much to say about my favorite question, was consciously left out of the course, the way the militant athiests today tend to intentionally ignore the Eastern religious traditions in their rants. The Asian tradition (and Islam) was also largely absent from my undergrad studies as well, except for one survey course on mysticism and the reading of Hesse's Siddhartha in some philosophy class. And the extracurricular decades-long borrowing of The Gospel of Ramakrishna from the humanities library. (I eventually returned it, and I'm sorry I did.) Now revisiting the Western body of thought has been from a somewhat broader perspective; for the past several years I have been deep in exploration of Asian thought, particularly Taoism.

The TC course has really pointed to nothing new for me; when I went to college, at a small "church-related" liberal arts school, it was imperative that we middle-class baby-boom provincials all take a Western Civilization seminar ("Great Epochs in World Culture") on arrival, and in addition, a course on Biblical History. These freshman prerequisites were to expand and correct the narrow views many of us graduated from high school with. There was also a senior concluding seminar called "Integration of Art, Knowledge and Conduct," that was to put the cherry on the top of our education. This was a last ditch effort to dissuade us from those inculcated narrow views. (The actual events of the '60s --civil rights movements, Vietnam, sex, drugs and rock and roll--were probably more effective than that last seminar. Experience was the best teacher, despite the occasional overdose, war casualty, or unintended pregnancy.)

No matter your major, these courses were mandatory. The school at the time distributed its curriculum in three "Divisions." Division One was the humanities (art, history, language, philosophy, theology and religion); Division Three was the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, math). Division Two was the blurry no-man's land, the interface, the "soft" sciences of psychology, sociology, political science and economics, anthropology and...home economics. (My first roommate was a home-ec major; she left the school after her sophomore year to go to a more "party-oriented" university with sororities. Last I heard, she had gotten a job with the Singer Sewing Machine Company.) Apparently this classic Aristotelian division of disciplines has since given way to career-oriented "tracks." As a Division One major (who, in my case, started out in biology but quickly left that world), what jobs could one get apart from continuing in academia or law school? Teaching, journalism (the outcome I was lucky to enjoy, for a time).

So there is a nostalgia as I enjoy the 36 lectures of "P,R & MoF." It is good to have a structured tour of this stuff that I once studied but have not thought of in an integrated way in years. (It must be the appeal of those "learning cruises," also aimed at the demographic the Teaching Company exploits--educated, reasonably well off old farts; nothing makes you feel alive and young like taking a course...without tests and papers. Not the person in the New Yorker cartoon who says to her travel agent, "I'd love to take a cruise, as long as I don't have to learn anything.")

I don't feel like writing a paper (or a blog post) on this course, although I may have something to say later on the hero/saint motif in contrast to Eastern icons. Sage/shaman? Son of Heaven/slave? Enlightened man/wandering ghost?

In any case, this driving study (Commuter Courses) gives me something to think about during the day, when I am bored and blinded by email, spreadsheets and voice messages. In meetings, I look for the heroes and saints (even sages or shamans) in hopes of finding meaning.

And in a saintly attempt, I will begin Lenten fasting come Wednesday, but more heroically to adjust my stagnant liver qi than to earn credit for suffering. I will be thinking about those martinis consumed amid the reproductions of Michelangelo's astonishing naked men at Cafe Sistina. Do I abstain from those martinis for myself or for others? That's a question of the meaning of life.

*I discovered this cicada (a Chinese symbol of immortality) in a brass hulu (bottle-gourd shaped vase, a magical tool in Taoism) I bought in Wudangshan. The tiles were gathered from a stream where fragments of destroyed temple walls had washed down, perhaps from Cultural Revolution damage. The leaves are from an orange that was given to me by an old Taoist hermit. I find some meaning in this "still-life" arrangement.

**Note: If you become a customer of the Teaching Company, which I highly recommend, you can ALWAYS get these courses substantially cheaper than the advertised retail price.