The Zen of Freedom to Act

Buried deep in the Hagakure is a snatch of commentary which captures, almost perfectly, the essence of the mentality of the whole. It appears in the popular version as a curt, almost redacted looking item, and in the manuscript is buried amongst dozens of similar comments and dialogues. In both cases, it sits with virtually no explanation

The passage runs thusly:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall was this one:  'Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.' Master Ittei commented, 'Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.'"

There is a surprising amount of internet discussion surrounding this little quotation. It appears it's not just scholars who have sensed its fundamental importance. It's indicative of the modern mindset, however, that the most accepted interpretations are based around "matters of great concern" being understood as complex anxieties, and the quotation as a whole being taken as a recommendation to pursue simple answers to problems we tend to overthink. I believe there is a much deeper meaning to both the maxim and the commentary - one which requires some synthesis and contextualisation to grasp, and which goes beyond Tsunemoto's somewhat crude interpretation of the maxim as being in praise of the value of research before action.

It's fair to say that the Zen mind can be seen as profoundly transcendental, in that it is underpinned by a belief in the illusory nature of the tangible universe. Put simply, the world which we perceive is seen as a trick played by the senses on our conscious mind. This isn't, of course, exclusive to eastern philosophies, and is well attested in a great variety of other schools of thought. The great majority of the arguments regarding immanence and transcendence in western philosophy, for example, centre around the question of whether the 'veritas rerum', or the real truth of things, is or is not accessible to our consciousness.

It can therefore be posited that a world seen in this way is one in which that which is most important - the veritas rerum, or that which is 'of great concern' - is not just beyond our understanding, but also our agency. Basically, the core of things and existence is something which we cannot comprehend consciously or consciously affect. This is an uncomfortable doctrine for the western mind, I think, being in direct opposition to the deep roots of enlightenment thinking and Aquinas' old idea that the 'veritas rerum' is not only accessible, but a path to truth through observation.

For a mind geared to the absolute necessity for action, which basically includes anyone who dedicates their time to some type of work or other, this world view is balm to the soul, for what it means is that the ineffable truth of things is not only inaccessible, it's also irrelevant. What a philosophy of this kind provides is the freedom to act. There is no necessity to weigh or predict the effects of our miniscule agency - all that really matters is the application thereof. It is the tiny, insignificant actions of our ant-like lives which are the 'matters of small concern', and yet, despite their ephemeral unimportance, they are still the most significant aspect of our limited selves.

This is best appreciated in conjunction with this idea:

"The way of revenge lies in simply forcing one's way into a place and being cut down ... By considering things like how many men the enemy has, time piles up; in the end you will give up. No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end. You will finish the greater part of it."

How often are we paralysed by the contemplation of things we can't control? Why should I act when my effects will be so tiny? Why should anyone do anything, given the high likelihood of failure and the certainty of pain and death? It's simple - it's because what we do is one of the very, very few things over which we have any control at all. So while it may be a matter of small concern, it should therefore be treated with the utmost seriousness.

Deep Narratives of Childhood

One of the first books I ever read in English was a children's version of the story cycle of the great Irish hero Cuchulain. Cuchulain remains to this day one of my favourite heroes, the bloody comedy of his origins and early career, and the intensely heroic fatalism of his end, literally dying on his feet and fighting to his last breath, made a deep and positive impression on my forming mind. Alongside this was an illustrated and hideously expensive leather-bound tome of Sir James Knowles' interpretation of the King Arthur stories which, though far from being the best iteration of the Arthurian legends, is still a moving and evocative account.

What these books did for me as a child went far beyond the juvenile escapism usually associated with fantasy. These stories provided me with my first introduction to the concept of honour, the importance of good faith in our dealings with others, the reality of absolute obligation, broad principles of the limited and justified use of force, and models for living fiercely and well in the face of certain mortality. Of course, I'm not claiming that my infant mind identified or understood these concepts in these terms or anything like them, but what's important here is that these stories fundamentally influenced the shape of my inner world. They provided the beginnings of shape and definition to my notions of society, and of the nature of good and evil. This, I believe, was largely due to the way that myth is generally based on some kind of deep truth - the perception of this truth made these stories feel utterly real to me, and thus, by extension, the values and precepts contained within them. 

There are quite a few people who are of the opinion that these stories were a shockingly inappropriate basis for such ideation, but that strikes me as being beside the point. The point, as I see it, is that the earliest and most important step in a child's understanding of the world comes through narrative. Stories are fundamental to the human experience for many reasons, and their etiological role in the education of children is one of the most important. 

This being the case, it's important to recognise the critical role fiction in book, film and game form plays in the formation of world view. Western culture is notable for having shed tribalism, ancestral veneration, oral history and, to a large extent, God. While I firmly believe that shedding all of these things has been to our net benefit, there remains the fact that it leaves a worrying gap. With myths, legends, family or clan mnemo-narratives, and even bible stories largely absent, we are faced with a situation where the world view of our children is founded on Pixar films and picture books which don't really seem to have any deep content at all. 

I think it's important to remember that the primary model for any child's world view, and therefore the shape of our future world, is to be found within the stories they're told. This is one of the reasons for my unreasonable hatred of the monocultural superficiality of Disney/Pixar 'family movies', and the blatant propaganda contained in most cartoons and children's fiction today. I think there's a strong argument for retaining at least some of the core narratives from humanity's history. I don't really care which ones, just so long as the dominant voice is not puerile, breathtakingly shallow, trend-driven, mass produced garbage which, though reportedly brilliant as entertainment, is deeply suspect as early education. 

How to Peel Off a Dead Man's Face - Information and Meaning

Within the Hagakure, sitting rather oddly amongst its spiritual and social exhortations and aphorisms, is the following passage:

"If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured."

A great many people have expressed serious confusion over the apparent incongruity of this passage. There's a wealth of groping and ill-informed commentary floating around in internetland, as none of the commentators seem to be aware of two important facts. The first of these facts, accessible by simply reading the introduction of the popular edition, is that this version is heavily abridged. The MS form of the Hagakure is more than 1000 pages long, and seriously eclectic. The popular abridgement is a thin paperback focussed on Zen teachings and parable-like reminiscences. The editor/translator points specifically to this passage and says it was included as a representative example of a whole volume within the original. The second of these facts is that the Samurai, at various stages in their history, were in the habit of collecting trophies, especially heads, from their fallen foes.

Given the knowledge of these two facts, the passage above and its inclusion need not present an enigma at all - understanding of the source and context result in its meaning becoming perfectly comprehensible. And this is my point, really - more often than not, understanding what something actually means requires more than just reading it.

Quite a few people have been talking about the 'post-truth' era, where facts don't matter, apparently because Trump. I think this is flawed thinking (and not a little bit of sour grapes). The truth of the matter is that Trump is not so much a cause as he is a symptom. Facts have never really mattered - they have always been a more or less secondary concomitant to interpretation and meaning.

There is a worrying tendency these days to absorb a fact and then immediately interpret it through a rigid ideological lens, and then, more often than not, to proceed immediately to hysterical outrage. A single incident, such as somebody saying something in public, is immediately warped to serve some orthodoxy or other, and the loudest shouters win, thus setting immutably a current 'truth' which is generally absolute, juvenile, laden with dire consequences and, most worryingly, so ephemeral that it is essentially uncorrectable in that by the time proper analysis is applied, the reactionary juggernaut has moved on and forgotten it.

This, above all else, is the primary malaise of the current era. This refusal or inability to actually think things through is by far and away the most toxic aspect of our current dialogue. And it's worth noting that the responsibility for this does not lie with politicians, mainstream or alternative media or anyone else - it lies solely with us, the public. As long as we persist in this angry, reactionary obtuseness, we will continue to be burdened with exactly the quality of leadership, public discourse and society which we deserve.

An Important New Year's Resolution

There once was a dream which was Rome. That dream was best elucidated by the famous words "When men of goodwill gather round a table to talk, there is no problem which cannot be solved." As you all know, this was first and most famously said by King Grover of Sesame Street, who reigned for eighteen thousand years in Ur of the Chaldees, beginning in 7000BCE and ending at some point in the future when he was deposed by lizard aliens from Sumeria or something.

If you have any kind of problem with the paragraph above, you urgently need to join me in my new year's resolution. Let me explain.

The world has changed. The establishment has been told in no uncertain terms that it will no longer be tolerated, and has therefore been replaced by an establishment from several decades ago. Tired of being locked out of making important decisions due to ignorance, incompetence, and mental incapacity, the silent majority has somewhat paradoxically decided to speak, and we now live in a world where priorities are very different.

What's important these days is not the common weal, or careful action with consideration for the future, or any of that pansy guff. Yes, I said 'pansy' you PC Nazis, so just deal with it. But don't you dare call me a bigot. Anyway, I digress. What's important now isn't any of that over-complicated foolishness, but rather how I personally feel about stuff. That's right, the big agenda setter for the coming year is how I personally feel about stuff. And if I lack the mental equipment to express that clearly or consistently, that's your fault, not mine.

As such, we have a number of urgent priorities:

• Drain the swamp whilst not draining the swamp. If you don't know what the 'swamp' is, you must be one of those uni educated poofters who reckons words should mean stuff, so I'm not talking to you anyway.
• Protect the sanctity of life by calling for the death of all hunters and Muslims and anyone else who ends up on an angry meme.
• Make stuff great again - you know what I mean so stop pretending my slogan's so vague it's meaningless. You're just trying to trick and confuse me.
• End the conspiracy. You know the one - it's got something to do with Hilary, kids, and possibly 9/11.

And there's only one way to achieve all this. We need to destroy the old world order and create a new world, where half-baked opinions composed of equal parts fantasy and ignorance are once again the sovereign force in complex state politics - just like it used to be in that time which never happened, but must have because I saw it in a movie once.

So yeah, that's my resolution. What actually was it, you ask? If you don't know, you clearly haven't been listening to me, and I'm the people, goddamit.

The Insidious Passivity of Marvel

It's generally agreed that myth is fundamentally conservative. One of its main functions, aside from explanation of the world, is support of the established order. In any kind of organised society, the question is eventually going to be asked, "Why do I give so much of my stuff to the warrior elite/aristocracy/king/elected government?" Myth provides the answer, in a subliminal sort of way. Myth says it's because these people are the sons of gods and heroes, because they really are special and will provide you with protection. Assuming, of course, that you keep paying for it.

The Marvel universe, like most other comic book oeuvres, draws heavily and openly on myth. From entities as venerable as the Annunaki, to relatively (stress on relatively) newer deities such as Thor, Marvel's connection with the elder gods is close and overt. And what this means is that the comic book world is essentially conservative. I don't necessarily mean socially conservative, but more in the sense that comic book stories are similar to myth not just in the characters they use, but in the fact that they tend to support the established order. Comic books have been generally used to uphold ideas of law and justice and civilised society and, in more particular cases, the Allied war effort and the global monetary system. There's a deeper message inherent in comic books, however, and I don't think it's a necessarily good one.

Sometimes they're references, sometimes they're not

I recently watched Dr Strange, which wasn't at all a bad film. Sure, it's another Marvel 'product' rather than a story with any kind of soul, but I don't look to Marvel for my life changing moments. That'd just be juvenile. What I want from Marvel is wisecracks, explosions, and the comforting sense that the world as we know it, and all the people in it, are worth saving. What I don't want, however, is mental enslavement. 

Okay, so that sounds a bit extreme, but stay with me. Leading on from the obvious connection between Marvel and myth, we can take a step further in our thinking and unpack what all these gods and heroes saving the world actually means. Dr Strange is a very good case in point. In this film, there is the usual American hack and slash job done on Eastern culture, and we see that there is a secret order of wizard-type people who spend all their time defending the Earth from some unthinkable threat. The operative word here is 'secret'. The rest of the world goes on with their petty, day to day lives while this elite cadre of superhumans holds the line in a series of locations which are either hidden or actually non-existent for our given quantity of reality.

This fish wearing dude is Oannes

The strong implication of this is that we can just carry on. That it doesn't matter what's wrong in the world, what the threat is or what needs to change - gods and heroes will provide. Not only are the threats we face beyond our power to meet, we can trust in the idea that there are people out there who are better than us, who will rise to the occasion and save us. And we don't even have to live in such a way that merits saving. They will save us because it is their raison d'etre. This is an insidious and dangerous idea. It's reflected in our attitudes to elites of all kinds. Problem in North Korea? Why not send a SEAL team? Worried about China/Iran/Russia or whoever this week's enemy is? The US Military will provide. Economy up the spout? Let's vote in a larger than life billionaire who promises he has a magic wand.

Let's compare this with something like, say, Doctor Who. The Doctor isn't so much a god in the vein of Thor or Ishtar, but more of a culture hero, like Oannes. Sure, he saves us and promises to protect us, but most of the time he's relying on ordinary people to step up, and sometimes to sacrifice themselves, as a necessary element in any attempt to change the shape of the world for the better. Compare, if you will, these two philosophies, and it shouldn't be too hard to figure out where my preference lies.

We need to guard against world views that reflect our own feelings of marginalisation. It's no coincidence that we have a rash of superheroes in pop culture at the moment. If we look at critical points in history when gods and heroes were most prominent in the last couple of centuries, they've always been the times when the threats being faced were unimaginably powerful and complex. It's vitally important, to my mind, that we don't let pardonable escapism translate into fundamental world view. As fun as powerful, god-like superheroes are, we need to remind ourselves where power truly needs to be apportioned in order to guarantee our future.

Christmas - Feast, Famine and Fiction

I'd say I've always hated Christmas, but that's not really the whole truth. I've been in love with the abstraction of Christmas ever since the ghost of Jacob Marley scared the bejesus out of me by staring out at an oblivious Scrooge in the form of a doorknocker. It's the December/January shut down I hate. I usually find myself in one of two situations during this period - either paid to do nothing, or not. In the one instance idleness drives me to find new and creative ways to ruin my life and prospects, and in the other, I starve. This year is different. This year, I find myself with quite a lot of work to do and, somewhat unusually, receiving moneys to do it.

While I've always looked on the enforced good will of this season with a somewhat jaded eye, someone who loved Christmas with a fanaticism worthy of a better cause was Charles Dickens. A prolific author at the best of times, he seems to have extended himself when it came to seasonal fiction, his productions ranging from the unmemorable (and practically unreadable) Cricket on the Hearth, to his iconic Christmas Carol. It's in this second work where we see Dickens at his effulgent, heavy-handed best. This is really the man's true mêtier - a morality tale, simple to the point of crudity, hammered home with a variety of blunt instruments ranging from the pathetic (Tiny Tim) to the grotesque (Marley).

It's curious to note just how utterly childlike Dickens seems to have been. His adults, never particularly convincing, are even less so here. What anchors and redeems the novella is his disconcertingly keen insight into the inner lives of children. His description of the lone child at boarding school, Scrooge's grand nephews and nieces, are poignantly verisimilitudinous. And on another level, his conception of Christianity and ideal human relationships has more than a touch of the Mediaeval about it, an adolescent era if ever there was one. The whole book is, in fact, pre-modern, and not just because of its didactic insistence on the evils of modern commercialism. That heady mixture of fear, awe, pure love and open-handed patronage is classic, extravagant Mediaevalism writ large. This is what gives the book its most enduring quality - a keen, bittersweet sense of nostalgia. A yearning for simpler times, larger souls and purer hearts.

Compare this cockeyed idealism with the author I've always thought of as Dickens' modern-day counterpart, Terry Pratchett. The late great Pratchett had the same prolific imagination and focus on domestic detail. Both Dickens and Pratchett wrote quite a lot, hammered out quick and rough for money, but their works are saved from being trash by a core of keen humanity, intelligence and observation. But whereas Dickens pursues a childish fantasy of a decent world filled with decent people, Pratchett likes to look at deep origins - his fantasy is one of unbroken continuity. His Christmas book, Hogfather, inverts the feast in much the same way as the Carol, using Death as a flaneur to examine its traditions, but his focus is on paganism. Blood, ritual murder and snow. One gets the sense of a horde of blinkered, ignorant human cattle going through ritual motions they know not why. But it's vitally important they go through these motions because, if they don't, the conceptual world as we know it would end. Humanity is made of ideas, and it doesn't matter, according to Pratchett, whether we really understand them at all.

We see that where Dickens looks back with the eye of love, Pratchett looks beneath with a kindly, but sneering assumption of intellectual superiority. If Dickens is a mediaevalist, Pratchett is very much a benevolent Tory. Where both of them meet, however, is in pointing an accusatory finger at the essential hypocrisy of the season. Of a time when we all spout generosity and goodwill and lock ourselves in suburban fastnesses to gorge on plenty and ignore everything beyond our own little circles. Both of them point to the uncomfortable truth that care for the poor and downtrodden probably isn't supposed to be confined to a few weeks at the end of the year, and nor should it be limited to unobjectionable and photogenic little match-selling girls dying in the snow.

It's a bit dichotomous, this whole Christmas thing, and I think that's what I find most distasteful about it. That simultaneity of generosity and mendacity, the idea of households eating their fill in simulated joy while, just a couple of streets away, December is despair, empty pockets and a deep sense of failure. A season where you're significantly more likely to both get smiled at in the street and murdered by your partner. It's this dichotomy which generally flings me into such a slough of despond over the season. So it's a good thing, really, that I've got a bunch of work to do and will be far too busy to dwell on that sort of thing this year.

'Beowulf', Myth, and the 'Tears of Things'

Listen!
We have heard of the thriving of the Danish kings,
How they flourished in days long past,
How those royal athelings earned their glory!

With this adjuration to 'Listen!' begins one of the most important stories in English letters. Any serious student of literature will have spent a great deal of time living and breathing this poem, as will a whole range of other bookish types - historians, archaeologists, philologists and so on, but it's not this experience of Beowulf I'm really talking about. Sure, it's important as the genesis of storytelling in English, for its verifiable glimpses of the material culture and mentality of Dark Age Saxons, and for the understanding of the language we all speak and write, but to my mind, these are really its least important aspects.

The central thing about Beowulf is that it tells the oldest and most fundamental story of humanity. It is a tale of civilisation's light against the dark of the ancient wild, of the hero, the cost of that heroism, and of the 'lacrimae rerum' - the tears of things: the tragedy inherent in inevitable death and decay. For a storyteller, an author of fiction, there are few stories it is more important to understand. For what story worth reading is not about heroes, order against chaos, the search for meaning as we hurtle toward oblivion?

The poem can be a little daunting to those uninitiated in the study of literature, and who therefore see reading as an enjoyable activity rather than a kind of intellectual self-flagellation. It begins with a genealogy, and the story of a magical child found without clothes, taken in by a kind family, who rises to become king. This may seem irrelevant, but it is important for establishing the relationships later in the story. More than this, however, it lays down the essence and core of what the whole tale is about. Of Scyld Shefing the poet declares, 'Þæt wæs god cyning!' He was a good king! It is in the exploration of what makes a 'good king' that we find inquiries into what it is to be a good man, of what consist the good things in life, and of our absolute duty to fight the darkness that lives beyond the light of the hearth - the evil which dwells at the edges of our minds.

This evil takes the form of Grendel, descendant of Cain and hater of human works - of light and conversation, of built things and of the songs in which history and memory are preserved. Grendel is the 'feond en helle', the fiend of hell, and he stalks the marshes, the fell and fen - the wild places unsettled by man. But it's not his otherworldliness which is Grendel's most horrific feature - it is his familiarity. He is a liminal creature, the personification of our own beast nature, and of the edges of civilisation within our own selves. The war between Beowulf and Grendel is emblematic on every level of the core struggle of humanity over its entire time here on Earth.

After Grendel comes Grendel's mother, an inverse portrait of a fundamental human instinct. Feminine imagery abounds in this section, and we can see that old warrior-cult dread of the female 'other', with our hero diving into deep caves and piercing the monster with a magical sword. But beyond this archaic misogyny is a progression of responsibility. The defeat of Grendel is a fine, pure beserk frenzy - power over power - as Beowulf rips off the creature's arm. But here, at the cave of Grendel's mother, the hero is required to plunge, cold-minded, into the pool of his probable death. This is our middle age, where we become aware of the costs and risks of what we do and, if we are worth anything at all, go on to do it anyway. Beowulf teaches us with what grace and good cheer we may face our fears, and our doom.

And then finally, with a strange skip in time, the poem takes us to old age, where Beowulf himself has risen to be a 'god cyning', a good king, his kingdom menaced by a dragon. As he eases his creaking body into his armour we feel the deep sadness of his predicament. He knows he rides to his death, but he is determined to do so with courage. And, immolated in the dragon's fury as he is, he meets his end not with vainglory, but with a grim determination to protect that which is good - his works, kingdom and people. And if the dragon represent death, what more powerful image than that of old Beowulf, clutched in its jaws, stabbing his knife deep into its heart even as it kills him?

It's classic stuff. In fact, it is the classic tale. Anyone can string pretty words or a complex plot into a more or less unified whole. Any idiot can place a thrilling sequence of events into line, and many do. But the most valuable stories are those which resonate with our deepest selves - which feel real at the most important level: the one which has nothing to do with objective detail, and everything to do with a recognition of our deepest nature and inmost struggles. Which is why I think it's compulsory for every author or would-be author to study old myths like Beowulf, and thereby understand the root and branch of storytelling: what it is, what it's about and, most importantly, what it's for.