Quote of the Season

[randy_byers]

'Hereditary time is time structured in generational tiers: Confucian time, historical time, heavenly time, calendrical time. Dao time is seasonal and cyclical, collapsed into the dead and the living, and so past generations cannot reach across the limit of their life spans to affect the living generations, who have unmediated access to the Way. "[T]he ghosts of the dead shall have no force" (stanza 60). Having no parent, the Way is not parental and expects no ritual offering from its offspring. They have no debt to repay to a Dao that did them no favor in creating them. Neither does the Way reward or punish. "Heaven and earth refuse kin-kindness: / Treating all things as dogs of straw" (stanza 5). The Way is thus a concept devised to oppose and subordinate the traditional concept of a heaven reciprocally engaged with authorized descendants or, more broady, with human affairs.'

-- Moss Roberts, introduction to his translation of Laozi's Dao De Jing - The Book of the Way

Comments

vulvae etched into stone

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

'The actual sayings that make up the book may predate Lao Tzu by several centuries, but their origins must go back to the culture's very roots, to a level early enough that a distinctively Chinese culture had yet to emerge, for the philosophy of Tao embodies a cosmology rooted in that most primal and wondrous presence: earth's mysterious generative force. [...] In the Tao Te Ching, this venerable generative force appears most explicitly in Lao Tzu's recurring references to the female principle, such as "mother of all beneath heaven," "nurturing mother," "valley spirit," "dark female-enigma." But its dark mystery is everywhere... It is a joy to imagine that the earliest of the sage-poets woven into Lao Tzu, those responsible for the core regions of his thought, were in fact women from the culture's proto-Chinese Paleolithic roots.

'[...] The most primitive meaning of heaven is simply "sky," a meaning the word continues to have. By extension, it also came to mean "transcendence," for our most primal sense of transcendence must be the simple act of looking up into the sky. By association with the idea of transcendence and that which is beyond us, heaven also comes to mean "fate" or "destiny" (this is the Heaven that had been used in the early Chou to replace the personal monotheistic Shang Ti with a more generalized divine force). This complex of ideas was transformed completely when Lao Tzu added "nature" or "natural process" to the weave of meaning... And so, heaven became an organic sense of destiny: things working out their fates according to their own inborn natures and in interaction with other such destinies. As such, it was almost synonymous with Tao. This dramatic transformation infuses the empirical cosmos with sacred dimensions. In it Heaven becomes earth, and earth Heaven. Earth's natural process is itself both our fate in life and our transcendence, for we will soon take on another of earth's fleeting forms, thereby transcending our present selves. And indeed, our truest self is all and none of earth's fleeting forms simultaneously.'

-- David Hinton, "Tao Te Ching (c. 6th century B.C.E.)," in Chinese Classical Poetry: An Anthology (FSG, New York: 2008)

Against the sun

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

'Lao-tzu says the Tao is between Heaven and Earth, it's Heaven's Gate, it's empty but inexhaustible, it doesn't die, it waxes and wanes, it's distant and dark, it doesn't try to be full, it's the light that doesn't blind, it has thirty spokes and two thirteen-day (visible) phases, it can be strung like a bow or expand and contract like a bellows, it moves the other way (relative to the sun, it appears/rises later and later), it's the great image, the hidden immortal, the crescent soul, the dark union, the dark womb, the dark beyond dark. If this isn't the moon, what is it?'

-- Red Pine, intro to his translation of Lao-Tzu's Taaoteching

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

In New Orleans, once something happens it continues to happen, and the lunar holiday of Mardi Gras in particular is a time machine. New Orleans presents a particular challenge for a writer, because it moves not only in linear time but also cyclical time, a notion I borrow from Egyptologist Jan Assmann. Linear time, representing a progression of numbered years — 2003, 2004, 2005 — coordinates the world; it's the time history takes place in. It's the scale of Christian philosophy, where there is a beginning, middle, and end. But in cyclical time, each year is the same as the last — as in ancient Egypt, where the years weren't numbered. Cyclical time relies on an elaborate schedule of festivals associated with the calendar to reinforce its timelessness, creating a rhythm that propels the year. Cyclical time is pagan, and local; it's the time myth takes place in.
— Ned Sublette, in The Year Before the Flood

In cyclical time the ghosts of the dead are with us. They may have no force over us, but we choose to remember them and to follow the same rituals that they did. When we go to Worldcon, 4e is still with us, standing tall in his green cape. Just as the Nameless Ones were with us a Corflu Zed, and Tucker will lead everyone in a toast of "smooooth" on the flight to Oz.

See also The Year Before The Flood: The Ponderosa Stomp for further comments on cyclical time.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yes, the dead are still with us, still have something to say to us, but apparently we don't still owe them a LOC.