history

Maybe We Should Be Copying

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Think about how much of human knowledge was dependent on Some Person With A Pen. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was Person With A Pen copying books stroke by stroke, word by word.

Even as technology advanced, Person With A Pen was important (and after a point, Person With A Typewriter). Print shops, printing devices might be carefully controlled by the government or just unavailable due to cost. Person With A Pen was there, and knowledge continued outside of official sources.

Others might have copied things for which a printing press might be excessive. Among my library of Taoist literature is a book on massage and energy exercises called Immortal Fang’s Longevity Quigong. The original book is rather small and illustrated, so people passing around these exercises might find it easier to copy them. The book seemed to have been passed among friends, so that was probably the norm.

There are doubtlessly many motivations for Person with a Pen, but one common thing they all share is that they are getting very intimate with a book. Imagine what it’s like to copy a book, how it sits in your head, how it’s burned into your mind. Imagine what it’s like to do it more than once.

It has to drive the knowledge into your head, to make you understand it more. I’ve often heard stories of people borrowing books to copy them, some people making both a copy for themselves and another for someone else. Imagine what it’s like for religious and spiritual professionals to copy a holy text, the words settling into their souls.

Now of course it’s usually easy to get books. If it’s not in stock you can probably get it print on demand or find it used. Looking at my own library I’m grateful for how many people made this possible.

But, and you can guess where I’m going, I wonder if maybe some of us spiritual and religious types should give copying a book a shot now and then.

I’ve thought of doing this with a few Taoist works – at the top of the list are The Secret of the Golden Flower and maybe a composite of my favorite Tao Te Ching translations. Even typing them up – let alone writing them – would make me evaluate words, remember them, live them. I wonder what I’d learn, retain, and feel if I just copied some of the worlds that have influenced me.

I’m not sure I’d do it, but hey three years ago I wasn’t thinking of zines.

Maybe it’s an exercise some of us should try. Imagine taking time, like a weekend away, just to copy a spiritual work that’s important to you. Imagine reliving the role of Person With a Pen and connecting not just to the work in question, but with our history.

–Xenofact

Who We Were In Time

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I was recently reading Thomas Cleary’s The Tao of Politics. These are extracts from the heavily Taoist document the Huainanzi. Having read another set of extracts (Original Tao), I thought it would be a refresher, and helps convince me to buy a full translation which is 1000 pages long. As of this writing, it’s in the mail, so I got convinced.

However, beyond my compulsion and Cleary’s ever-excellent translations, he made an interesting comment on the Huainanzi and Taoism. The Huainanzi was written in a time of rebuilding after a painful period of war, a look back and a plan for the future. Cleary noted other formative Taoist documents, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-tzu were written in times of war, and were affected as such. These were Taoist documents but written in radically different times.

That got me thinking about history and the words of wisdom we seek. Yes, we all know writings we partake in are written “of the time,” under certain conditions, and so forth. We accept that, but Cleary’s comment made me think that we know that but maybe we really need to think about it.

We may read books and scripture and so on that are written of their time, but even books of the same lineage like these Taoist documents are written under radically different situations. This isn’t different generations alone, these are people who wrote between war and peace, destruction, and construction, dying randomly from civil strife or having a chance to not do so.

I think it really behooves us to look at documents of our philosophical and mystical efforts and when we see something of it’s time, pause and reflect on that. Maybe we don’t just read and admire and learn from the great minds and philosophers in our library but ask what were they going through and seeing. History is experienced.

It’s said that Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching wrote it while hightailing it out of a city in disgust with the age. Sure, it’s probably mythical-metaphorical, but people of the time might get it as wise guys were saying “screw this, I’m riding a buffalo into the mountain” because things sucked.

It’ll help us better understand what we read because we get the time, the who, and the why. It’ll also let us have some empathy on those we seek to learn from. That above comment about bugging out of society makes me feel some sympathy for Lao Tzu even if he is a pen name or metaphor. Sometimes I want that buffalo – and boy do I get Chuang-Tzu’s desire to be poetically sarcastic as hell.

But another advantage to this? When you look at philosophical lineages – again like Taoism – across time, the writings occur in radically different situations. However among those books and essays across centuries you read, there are consistent patterns. Those consistent patterns are lessons that have survived different times, places, events – they’re worth learning from.

None of us are outside of history. When understanding timeless wisdom, we need to understand history to learn what’s transcended it – and understand what people went through. The timeless and the specific together.

-Xenofact

Hand The Book Across Time

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There are tales I’ve heard about Chinese scholars hiding their books in the walls of their home. Barring a fire, and even then, their writings would be be preserved. As I look at our troubled world here in the 21st century, I can understand that mindset. I die, the book lives on.

There’s something about humans saving knowledge.

We transmit stories by tales and song and riddles. We handed off culture in a marathon race among minds before we could write. What words and stories that are in your brain have passed on in some permutation since our ancestors hunted with stone-tipped spears?

How many archaeological digs find caches of wisdom? Scrolls in pots, carefully preserved bamboo strips, lovingly hidden paper, passionately engraved stone. Untold millions of people leaving behind their knowledge.

Then there are the transcriptionists and later the press. People copying book after book after book, at first by hand, then by block and plate, and today by computer and printer. There are people who’s lives are just the transmission or keeping of documents.

Think of the humorous findings by translators and relic-hunters, things preserved because people just keep records. How the internet laughs at terrible copper merchant Ea-Nasir. How we laugh in agreement at young Japanese Emperor Uda lovingly writing about his cat. Humans just keep records, and those so often outlive us – and today we shake our head at that merchant or pet our cat and feel connected to the ruler of a country long dead.

When evil threatens, we hide and preserve and transmit and print. For all that is lost to history, to time, to paper that frays and ink that fades, we have saved so much. We have opposed tyrants and we have avoided censorship, often at the cost of lives. We will die – or kill – to save information.

There is something so human in preserving the word. Something that is transcendent of the individual. To be human is to be information, to be transmission. The you that you are now, the me that I am now, are just momentary permutations of something much larger.

When I look at the world and all its suffering and problems, then back to all these singers and writers and printers, I think I understand. We’ve all been handing things off down the line since we could first think and communicate. Even as we find new ways to burn our planet and destroy each other, that urge lives on.

We hide the book in the walls, we sing the song, for that will build or save the future despite the present.

–Xenofact