Lately, I’ve felt the urge to begin writing again. But after sitting down to try to write something introductory I realized why it’s been so long since I’ve tried. The immensity of that seemingly simple task towered before me, and an overwhelming feeling that there was no place to begin consumed me. Recently, a common theme in my thoughts is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to say something without saying everything else connected to it. In other words, any attempt to explain my experiences or perspectives inherently involves leaving out many, many more things, doing injustice to the totality of experience. My desire to write, connect, and have shared experiences with others is at odds with the impossibility of articulating the entirety of my perspective and context in a meaningful way.
But if we are all one, can there be anything to say or anything to refer to? But since I have already declared that we are “one,” can there be nothing to say or nothing to refer to?¹
The Zhuangzi captures well how I feel in this passage. It’s debilitating trying to explain the vast web of influences and experiences that have, and continue to, shape my life. Yet, I still keep trying. Something compels me to keep trying. The tension between feeling like there isn’t anything that I can say and the intense desire to say something is fertile ground — the tension is generative.
Immediately after the above passage, Zhuangzi says this:
The one and the saying are already two; the two and the original unsaid one are three. Going on like this, even a skilled chronicler, not to mention a lesser man, could not keep up with it.²
This tension, it would seem, is so generative that it reproduces and multiplies too rapidly to keep up with. I often feel that the less I say, the more I have to say; the more I try to describe my entire worldview as one thing, the more it fractures and splinters into smaller and smaller pieces. It becomes impossible to describe them all.
In addition to thinking about the impossibility of communicating my experiences, thoughts of seasons and cycles, the temporal and the spatial, memory and forgetting have been more prominent in my thoughts lately. I don’t know if it’s because it’s spring and the bulbs that we planted last year have been steadfastly pushing their new shoots through the sometimes frost-covered dirt or because I’m now midway through my third year of being a parent and am still in awe of the growth and transformation that takes place at an alarming frequency, or just because I’m getting older and slower and taking longer to do, well, everything. But I find myself revisiting familiar albums, books, places, old patterns, habits, and ways of being.
The spring is, somehow, both reliable and novel. This may seem obvious, and indeed it is, but the implications of that are — for me at least — profound. It isn’t just I’m returning to past interests and past thoughts. It’s like they are new again, right here and right now. The spring has, somehow, recovered what was distant and forgotten and renewed it. One spring, Henry David Thoreau had a similar realization: “For the first time, I perceive this spring that the year is a circle — I see distinctly the spring arc thus far. It is drawn with a firm line.”³ In his book Thoreau’s Morning Work, Daniel Peck observes that this seemingly obvious statement was, for Thoreau, a genuine realization, “a deepening of an already perceived truth.”⁴ That something so obvious and plain as the return of spring and the recurring cycle of seasons should be an occasion for a more profound realization of truth perhaps shouldn’t be so surprising. The obvious is frequently the means by which some truth is illuminated.
A state where ‘this’ and ‘not-this’ — right and wrong — are no longer coupled as opposites is called Course (dao 道) as axis, the axis of all courses (daos 道). When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of ‘rights’ and an endless supply of ‘wrongs.’ Thus I say nothing compares to the Illumination of the Obvious.⁵
In the glossary of his translation of the Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn gives some critical context to the phrase “Illumination of the Obvious.” Ming (明), which is one character of this phrase, can mean brightness or light (and indeed is a combination of the characters for sun and moon), but also “to make manifest, or to understand, or what is manifest, the obvious.”⁶ With this definition in mind, Ziporyn suggests:
[Ming (明)] refers not to a deeper apprehension of the absolute transcendental truth lying beneath the surface of appearances but rather to attentiveness to the surface itself, the most evident and undeniable feature of which is the disagreement between varying perspectives, but also their intrinsic inseparability and unavoidable mutual transformations…⁷
This is where it all comes together for me: the inseparability of the tension between wanting to say something and the impossibility of saying anything on the one hand, and the obvious, reliable, and yet novel transformation of the seasonal changes that endlessly transform and renews on the other.
The totality of my experience is not moving in a straight line but in a seasonal cycle. Even though there is something I call “my experience,” any attempt to describe it instantly fractures it into smaller and smaller pieces so that it becomes impossible to name. Out of this fracturing emerges endless perspectives, constantly regenerated alongside the churning of the seasons, which transform and renew both the past and present, altering my experience of both the past and present. Each new cycle creates new experiences and perspectives, which in turn become impossible to name and describe yet are part of the totality, the oneness, and inseparability, of my experience.
The difficulty I feel in trying to write and share my experiences of the world there is no good entry point for describing what I think and feel without also giving an account of everything that has happened to lead me to those thoughts and feelings, is, it would seem, constitutive of having experiences. My new awareness of the (pronounced) seasonality to my life and my experiences adds to the complexity of trying to describe them: not only is my entire past implicated, and not only is my past experience accumulating with each season, but my present perspective on my past experiences are also transforming which alters my present experiences, etc., etc.
It is overwhelming and debilitating. It’s also why I haven’t written anything for so long. I’m not sure what has changed to help overcome my inertia other than it was the “right” time. So, for now, I will try to go along with this current “right” and hope to continue to be illuminated by the obvious.
notes
- Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn, pg 17.
- Ibid.
- from Thoreau’s Journal, April 18, 1852.
- Daniel Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden, pg 46.
- Zhuangzi, trans. Ziporyn, pg 14–15.
- Ibid., 281.
- Ibid.