Day Dream in Far off Dystopia

Are you the advanced one?

The one spotting inconsistencies

The one who’s jumped from cage to cage

Suspecting there is no way

But not sure

But not sure

And why do you jump, Pilgrim?

We are such fragile things

Pillows are what we crave

And a nice bottle of ease

You’ve jumped long enough to know

On days like this

The forward effort

Takes so much

Depends on white chickens

On red wheelbarrows

Yet they never turn up

It would seem

It would seem

Probably you wonder

How does anyone do a damn thing

When their hero has turned out a coward?

You mull it over

Get distracted by it at lunch

An hour with the windy park wind

Tearing through your sandwich

Hair over your face

Nose runny

Not sure if perpetuating

The ape shit routine

The trajectory of the suppose-to

Means you’ve changed

And: Have you changed?

And the suspicion comes up with the laundry

Is the whole thing a whirling junk?

Some natural stain

Pathogen of energy

Do you look upon your old account

As the stumbling discord

Of some mature dog:

Beat up coat

Ragged yellow teeth

Wistfully thinking

The course of events

Is not karmic

Not a lesson wrapped in pain

But the dead end

Dead end

But the dead end

Of happenstance chaos

Of sordid laughter

And does a longing develop, Pilgrim?

A day dream

In far off dystopia

Where the underground sends for you

Oh, you want it so bad

The channels finally alerted

To your soft honesty

That deep trying

That story telling

Always present in the back of the mind

A few tests

They locate your resolve:

You clean up some evidence

You don’t snitch

And when a note is left

You follow it

Immediately

The heart up your throat

Up above the overcast

Up some urban slum

Shambled, empty

Hope on your sleeve

The butterfly euphoria

Atop the roof

A figure waits

And there!

An angel dressed in dungarees

An elderly man smiles

Smiles with his eyes

My God! With his eyes!

Reveals the whole thing

The Angel speaks:

Do you want to know the reason

For our failing schools

Our failing nerves

Do you want to know the reason

The reason you cannot go on

In this whirling shit

Like a caged

Cage

Like a caged

Yes

Yes I do

I know you seek intensity because I seek it too: a poem

Remember always and everywhere

Why you do what you do

I want to tell myself this

I want to scream it

Like a car alarm at midnight

Keeping the pulse piqued and aware

The mind searching for it

All the being concentrated

Imaging what it is

And I want to be solemn

Like a boy on his bicycle

Having for the first time in his life

Felt threatened and lucky

Missing the car by inches

Flying down the slope

Hands glued before him

Sorry and guilty

In new territory

Not sure that he should tell his parents

Everything still moving slowly

Except that shaking of the torso

Like winter

Most-Basic Vocabulary: a poem

You are a liar

If you’ve felt so confident

Eternally flat footed

Participating in this unraveling happening

Not confused from the head down

I doubt you

Very much

I distrust you

As a politician

As a teenage smirk

But somewhere we are not liars

You and I

We and they

The summer months

A vital clarity

Some dangerous dodge

Or whatever peak of heaven you please

The hairs of your arms and neck

Sobering up

And your being follows

For me: that place where the grass grows high

Grows straw colored

Where it blows in the wind

Endearingly

The soft wind alone

The gentle golden hills alive

I only ruminate of shy young women

Or those of soft grinning wisdom

With the same unflinching affection

And there, off the well-traveled freeways

Along lonely one-laners

I make my way

To those vistas and meadows

Those places that are mine somehow

And they welcome me as an ally

Here, my highest rituals I embrace:

Trying to remember the central things

That nothing’s ever truly personal

That resentment is a child’s fiction

That if you want to improve yourself

Be content to look stupid and foolish

And out here, I come to rest

Come to retrieve the rudimentary

Some most-basic vocabulary

That appears fully pronounced

When I make the effort

Coming back

To me

Like the smells of my childhood

And true rest is never with others

Not yet

For I wish the lot of them away

All those interruptions

All that arresting of my development

They don’t give off quiet

What all my veins long for

Where I may hear the source of things

Hear and feel the wind

Know the wind

Of this self I am among

That’s what I want

For compromise never really suits the appetite

The stomach never settles

The noise lingers on

And breakfast, so hard to eat

The mind

Turning over

The enslaving duties yet to be done

The body already resistant

For the food cannot be taken

With the worthy spirit

Of a hungry man

The sacred respect it deserves

If you’d ask me sincerely

I’d say that I want to be flying

Absolutely at the front of the game

Developing the damned thing myself

Fuck the benefit

I want to feel it, I’d say

Through the veins

When I breathe

It’ll be there

At-hand

Birds gotta fly

I’ve gotta fly

Far beyond the bullshit:

That entrapped enlightenment

Prescribed by the smart,

Well-adjusted fucks within the institution

And out there

On the edge of the thing

All warm and soft with kerosene

I’m swaying with the golden grass

Breathing it in

Sick with health

Melting in violent balance

The health of having nowhere to go

Having no one to please

I make me way

To my most-basic vocabulary

Like a man who finds himself interesting

After the second or third drink

Conjuring up that thing I was to be getting on with

That thing I meant to do

Have meant to do

That thing daydreams often storied

The quiet of real work hungered for

That true education

That emendation of the intellect

Remember

You’ve sat against yourself

In the screaming body of a victim

Your body

So many years

Always digging yourself out

The body like a wet towel twisted dry

And the familiar disease we call consciousness

The crippling possession by worried thought

That continual negation wherein the energy escapes

Every thought checked by another

Possessed by the community

Itself split and dead

Never able to swim wholeheartedly

In your most deliberate moments

The only felt problem worth addressing:

How to overcome destructive thinking

You would do well to remember, Pilgrim

If you want to play your card

Forget that you are injured

It does no good

To leave the highest trajectory

For another time

Play that damn card

Nod at it like you nod at a good wine

All there is can be summed up thus:

Unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing

And so nod at it

And throw everything into it

There is nothing else to do

And only when you throw it all in

All your energy spent

Are you hit by that absurdly good news

That health the wind relies upon

That sees everything as an art

As an endearing art

Grow a mirror, Pilgrim, and remember what you look like: a poem

Always explode out like a light

And cut out the false

The gossip, the habits of centuries

Direct the ascent with word

But first with deed

Learn to be wholehearted

Johnny will sag and sag

For the weakness of the ages lies with the easy

The easy with second hand

The second hand with out-of-touchness:

The feet broken, casted, and shriveled

Carried around, limp, here to there

The eyes watery, bagged, and dull

Careless billiard balls, homogenized sicknesses

Johnny is a dead end

Perhaps there is no way

But you shall not know coiled up

Sucking upon the second hand of centuries

The buildup of the easy

Honesty is to be your highest value

The sword of wholeheartedness

All of your being at hand

Into the tip of its blade

You do not know this

But your nature flourishes at this blade

Attack toward the source of your most basicness

That central thing you daydream of doing

Encountered again when hand to hand

The artist draws you out’

That you there under the fog

Toward that thing you were supposed to do

When time permitted

That thing you forgot

Yet it rushes to the surface

Fully enunciated, immaculate, daring

As you blink away the weariness

As you let your feet feel the wind or the water

Expecting easy flourishing

Is low vitality’s rut

Within those hazy doldrums

What we’ve come to call normal

Reality too far away to understand

Burdened, no breathing room

When you look out and cannot see

Here, you long for this and this alone

And long you will unequipped with a good mirror

Zhuangzi as Outsider: an essay

The Zhuangzi: From Where Wang Ni is Coming, and Where Wang Ni is Going

I would wager that among sensitive and intelligent persons it is perhaps a near universal experience to have been baffled to notice, at least once in their lives and more probably too many times than one can count, that any proposition or statement put forth by whomsoever can be seen ultimately to be a statement more revelatory about the person talking than about the content referenced. In a very crude way, the fervent religious believer talks of God being around every corner, the poet talks of how all things turn toward their source, like the flower turning toward the sun which is its God and life force, while the botanist, coming at the flower from within a finer, more exact, and narrow subcultural value system, remarks that the flower “tracks” the sun so as to, in turn, attract insects to its warmth for the transpiring of pollination. Each naturally carries with them a hyper personalized perspective: a narrative of “what is the case” and from this an account of “what one is to do with oneself”, so informed from their inherited biological traits mixed with the range of experiences, memories, passions, and inherited cultural (and subcultural) values that allow them to interpret and carry on with life. The religious believer serves what she counts to be God, the poet what she counts to be beautiful, the scientist or academic what she counts to be verifiable and peer-reviewed “knowledge”, and you too fall somewhere. And so, in the interior of the sensitive person, the epistemological questions arise: How is one to tell “what is genuinely the case” if each is so ensnared, and more vitally, how is one to get any insight in regard to “what one is suppose to do with oneself” if ultimately one is viewing everything as framed through some filtering mechanism, singular to oneself? Is there a way out of this mess? 

Zhuangzi was rather hip to this curious self-referentialness in human discourse, and has often been assumed to be an epistemological skeptic or perspectivist because of certain statements of his, which seem to revel in the diversity of the possibilities of points of view. For instance:

You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog – he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect – he’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the way with a cramped scholar – he’s shacked by his doctrines” (trans. Watson 97).

Karyn Lai points out in her An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy that, “Zhuangzi’s epistemological questions cast doubt on the picture of knowledge as primarily content-based. In his (Zhuangzi’s) view, ‘knowledge is always a kind of interpretation rather than a copy or representation’” (Lai 167). She also states that, “One gets a sense from Zhuangzi’s allegories that each perspective is a ‘lodged’ perspective; in other words, each individual can only understand the world from within his or her place” (Lai 151). Furthermore, a statement is not simply a revelation about a person; it is also a revelation about language and the group of persons utilizing one amongst themselves, the result of which is the formation of a collective societal culture[1]. This can be glimpsed with pungent flavor when Zhuangzi points out:

What is acceptable we call acceptable; what is unacceptable we call unacceptable. A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. What makes them so? Making them so makes them so. Things all must have that which is so; things all must have that which is acceptable. There is nothing that is not so, nothing that is not acceptable. (trans. Watson 36)  

In other words, every view is reasonable or acceptable from some particular perspective, and can even appear more reasonable and acceptable because it is socially constructed to be so notable. Some roads may look un-navigatable to some – those who perhaps do not wish to get dirty (and they may have fine reasons for not getting dirty) – and so it does not appear to be a road. While others find the road necessary, or even quite suitable, in order to get to where they are going, and as such they see that it is in fact a road. And from these two perspectives a road is so, or not so – that is, is a road or is not a road. The natural question is: How far does this go? Is it turtle shells all the way down: everything acceptable and equally true, nothing finally able to be asserted as impartially correct? What is Zhuangzi asserting with such comments? While most contemporary scientists and philosophers do not take such questions seriously, finding that it leads to the infinite loops and dead-ends of nihilism, relativism, and solipsism (and so there must be something mistaken in the formulation and underlying assumptions inherent in the question), there is something to be said for the questions if they are asked from a certain place, and this is what I aim to make evident with the rest of this paper.

Zhuangzi can be shown to be skeptical of his contemporaries’ intellectual formulations, of how their terminologies are related to reality when they can be both simultaneously reasonable yet in opposition fundamentally with one another. Might this reveal that their methods are inadequate for approximating insight into the nature of things? He is also concerned with how their conceptions lend themselves to establishments of codes of constraining and confused, non-spontaneous societal conduct: “The way I see it, the rules of benevolence and righteousness and the paths of right (shi) and wrong (fei) are all hopelessly snarled and jumbled. How could I know anything about such discriminations?” (trans. Watson 41). And in another section: “When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and Mohists. What one calls right the other calls wrong; what one calls wrong the other calls right” (trans. Watson 34). The Confucians and Mohists argued for a particular structure of society based on their own reasonable criterions, and yet they are rarely in agreement in even simple matters. Which is one to trust? Karyn Lai points out that “...in the Confucian programme, especially in Confucius’ theory of names (zhengming)…he advocated that a person’s commitment and behavior must accord with his title (ming)…” Yet, Zhuangzi takes it that “such one-to-one correspondence oversimplifies the diversity of the world,” and, “it can also mask the issue of how these normative (Confucian) standards might be justified” (Lai 149) – something Zhuangzi would like to unmask so as to come in contact directly with the Great Thoroughfare, the Way. Moreover:

Zhuangzi disagrees with the approach taken by some of the Mingjia that resort to examinations of terms in order to resolve disagreements. This approach assumes some combinations of assumptions including that the meanings of names are objective, that they have a fixed relation with the world, and that a more accurate understanding of them will settle disagreements. (Lai 149)

Zhuangzi directs our attention to the great diversity and entrenched-ness of perspectives and declines to admit that names have any fixed or absolutely certain correlation to the world. One persons right is another’s wrong. The well-frogs common environment precludes not only impartial discussion of the sea, but any comprehension of its vastness. Zhuangzi says he is muddled upon hearing the intellectuals views (trans. Watson 34), and finds that the disputers (Mohists/ Mingjia) and scholar-officials (Confucians) both “cling to their positions as though they had sworn before the gods, sure that they are holding on to victory” (trans. Watson 32). In a particularly significant passage that follows, Zhuangzi observes that

“Everything has its ‘that,’ everything has its ‘this.’ From the point of view of ‘that’ you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it. So I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends upon ‘that’ – which is to say that ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other. But where there is birth there must be death; where there is death there must be birth. Where there is acceptability there must be unacceptability; where there is unacceptability there must be acceptability. Where there is recognition of right there must be recognition of wrong; where there is recognition of wrong there must be recognition of right” (trans. Watson 35).

When ‘this’ particular perspective does not see the interior and reasonableness of ‘that’ particular perspective, one counts the other unacceptable and wrong while counting its own view as acceptable and right. From the other side the same process holds, too. In effect, it can be asserted that when a boundary becomes evident and aware – when a consciousness is conscious – between the ‘this’ and ‘that,’ such is the birth of the two sides, together. Zhuangzi says, opposites engender one another: the Yin gives birth to the Yang, the Yang to the Yin. And in the Yang we can find the “incipient” Yin, and in the Yin we can find the “incipient” Yang (Ames/Thompson 17-18). This enables us to “recognize a ‘this’, but a ‘this’ which is also a ‘that’, a ‘that’ which is also a ‘this’” (trans. Watson 35). This is undoubtedly a new perspective, a perspective that recognizes the distinctive features of both interiors, and is able to sincerely relate to both.

But where would this lead us? We are apt to avow that this new perspective does not really tell us much about “what is the case’ and “what is one to do with oneself.” As far as we can tell it is still the case that “You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar – he’s shackled by his doctrines” and not to mention that their “words rely on [a] vain show.” The elite intellects are out of touch with the way, defending mere perspectives, and jabbering on and on about terms far removed from experience, about white horses not being white horses and the like. It’s felt that society has been built on this “out of touchness” from the top down. That the car is on fire and there is no driver at the wheel. Not only this, but it has seeped into your interior, has gotten a hold of you. For instance, you speak the language, walk the so-called ‘roads,’ recognize the interior of the ‘right’, and breath in the mustiness of the ‘well.’ And now it occurs to you that the road is not a road, that it is only so-called because of the assent of the collective that it is ‘so’. You’ve spent your life sprinting on and on down that ubiquitous ‘road,’ jumping through endless hoops, acquiring certificates and materials. And now, in full sprint down the so-called road, it occurs to you that the Olympic games, the whole damned thing, houses a broad illusion, even though you can’t quite put your fingers on exactly why this is so. However, you have had welcome leisure in the past, experiences of flow or vitalness. You recognize that:

Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy. Great words are clear and limpid; little words are shrill and quarrelsome. In sleep, men’s spirits go visiting; in waking hours, their bodies hustle. With everything they meet they become entangled. Day after day they use their minds in strife, sometimes grandiose, sometimes petty. Their little fears are mean and trembly; their great fears are stunned and overwhelming. They bound off like an arrow or a crossbow pellet, certain that they are the arbiters of right and wrong… They drown in what they do – you cannot make them turn back. They grow dark, as though sealed with seals – such are the excess of their old age. And when their minds draw near to death, nothing can restore them to the light (trans. Watson 32-33).

Since it is recognized that we, ourselves, are out of touch with the Way, and that strife follows from this “out of touchness,” we must turn away from the so-called road and its disputes – whatsoever perpetuates the hurry in our being – and become Way-farers, intent on quiet, deliberate, honest, and direct contact with the source of “what is the case” and “what is one to do with oneself.”

In British philosopher Colin Wilson’s second book Religion and the Rebel he sums up what a Way-farer is in just the sense we are talking about. Wilson refers to the Way-farer as the Outsider, for reasons that will become more clear below.

My vision of our civilization was a vision of cheapness and futility, the degrading of all intellectual standards. In contrast to this, the Outsider seemed to be the man who…felt himself lonely in the crowd of the second-rate. As I conceived him, he could be a maniac carrying a knife in a black bag, taking pride in appearing harmless and normal to other people; he could be a saint or a visionary, caring for nothing but one moment in which he seemed to understand the world, and see into the heart of nature and of God. The more I considered the Outsider, the more I felt him to be a symptom of our time and age. Essentially, he seemed to be a rebel; and what he was in rebellion against was the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilization…An individual tends to be what his environment makes him. If a civilization is spiritually sick, the individual suffers from the same sickness. If he is healthy enough to put up a fight, he becomes an Outsider (Wilson 1957: 1-2)

Familiar with the second-rate, those who merely disputed words, Zhuangzi would have sympathized with the Outsider, that type of person intent upon razing from within the sickness of their age, a sickness that has poisoned and contaminated them, and from here, fighting their way back to resonating with the Dao, if it is really there. The great bird Peng at the start of the Zhuangzi gets slack from the more conventional minded little quail when it learn of Peng’s ambitions:

The little quail laughs at him, saying ‘Where does he think he’s going? I give a great leap and fly up, but I never get more than ten or twelve yards before I come down fluttering among the weeds and brambles. And that’s the best kind of flying anyway! Where does he think he’s going?’

Such is the difference between the big and little. Therefore a man who has wisdom enough to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler, or talent enough to be called into service in one state, has the same kind of self-pride as these little creatures” (trans. Watson 25-26).

What is obvious is that it is a lonesome hike, and that is why they are called Outsider’s. The questions they ask may be well known, clichéd, and perennial but they are not mere questions. They embody all the energy of the person. When they speak, they speak wholeheartedly, intensely, and individualistically. For they are coming from a sense of groundlessness of things, and they have reached a threshold, marked by the epistemological questions.  Karyn Lai remarks that “Zhuangzi did not engage in speculative epistemology for its own sake” (Lai 166). Elsewhere, she says, “the aim of Zhuangzi’s liberation entails freedom not from life in the world but from its conventions and ideologies” (Lai 161). For Zhuangzi, epistemological questions are not things to be asked in a philosophy course, and written about to secure a good grade, for the possibility of a good job, for a stable and good life, etc., etc, and on an on down that rabbit hole. Like the Outsider he cannot be truly motivated by such things, because he cannot feel that they are “what one ought to be doing with oneself,” seeing that their path originates with the so-called road, and that the so-called road is so because it is heavily trodden and called so. The question burns within the Outsider: What is really important? Zhuangzi is an Outsider because he is radically life affirming – he has glimpsed the curious unsubstantiatedness of the so-called and can no longer treat it as anything else –and because this is so, the way out of the mess is spotted: one must get dirty, get off the so-called road, drop the second-hand conceptions of others, and turn oneself into a compass of the Way with all of the intensity and concentration at one’s disposal.       

            A particularly significant section of the second chapter of the Zhuangzi features an advanced Outsider named Wang Ni. Wang Ni is asked a question by a fellow Way-farer named Nie Que: “Do you know what all things agree in calling right?” Wang Ni say’s “How would I now that?” Nie Que tries again: “Do you know that you don’t know it?” Wang Ni provides the same response. “Then do things know nothing?” Wang Ni considers this and then addresses it at length. He asks his kin skeptically, “How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? How do I know that what I call ignorance is not knowing?” (trans. Graham 58). Wang Ni goes on to assert the familiar diversity of perspective and the difficulty of ascertaining unchanging truth following from recognition of this diversity. He speaks with first-hand clarity:

If a man sleeps in a damp place, his back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of the loach? If he lives in a tree he is terrified and shakes with fright, but is this true of the monkey? Of these three creatures, then, which one knows the proper place to live? Men eat the flesh of grass-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons relish mice. Of these four, which knows how to fix the standard of beauty for the world? (trans. Watson 41)

In different terms, Wang Ni is asserting that human beings are not merely socially conditioned to assume that the so-called road is a road. In fact, he speaking from a further epistemological skepticism: all things and creatures alike believe themselves to be the observers of truth and the final judges of beauty. He asks in effect, How are we to tell “what is the case” and “what is one to do with oneself” if being a human being means that the world is ‘humanified’ upon looking at it through human eyes? Even though one can tell that others are muddled and second-rate, that they are trapped in a ‘this’ without having seen that it is a ‘this’, how can one proceed when there is notation that even when one is attuned to ‘this’ and ‘that’ and has transcended it, that there is even further and further traps?

Nie Que hears this and wonders aloud, “If you don’t know what is profitable or harmful, then does the Perfect Man likewise know nothing of such things?” Wang Ni’s reply is revelatory:

The Perfect Man is godlike. Though the great swamps blaze, they cannot burn him; though the great rivers freeze, they cannot chill him; though swift lightning splits the hills and howling gales shake the sea, they cannot frighten him. A man like this rides the clouds and mist straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four seas. Even life and death have no effect on him, much less the rules of profit and loss!” (trans. Watson 41).

This is quite an affirmation for an epistemological skeptic, for someone who evidently feels the weight of such a question as “How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance?” And so, what are we to make of this? Wang Ni clearly understands the perspectival problems, and even asks questions beyond them. He is being honest about his confusion, claiming that he is not sure if things know anything. But at the conclusion of this dialogue he declares beyond question that there is the Perfect Man – who perhaps Wang Ni has encountered or who has perhaps sometimes been felt smiling in Wang Ni himself – and the Perfect Man is unshaken by the unaccountable weirdness of being.

Wang Ni has driven with all his might into the groundlessness of things, and has not gone insane with fright, nor evidently fallen submissive to some dogma for comfort. He could affirm a sentence two sections before his in the Zhuangzi: “The torch of chaos and doubt – this is what the stage steers by” (trans. Watson 38). Irrespective of how the distance along the path of “far reaching vision” Wang Ni has trodden, he has at least divested with the so-called road and overcome resentment toward it, deliberated into himself honestly, and turned himself into a compass of the way. Otherwise, he would not take the Perfect Man seriously, still coming from an interior that is trapped in the epistemological skepticism, that he can be shown to be able to wield. The Outsider must walk a fine line out there on the edge of the abyss, but it is ultimately the only thing worth doing. 

Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument. Forget the years; forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home! (trans. Watson 44).

In the Zhuangzi we are offered an invitation into the interior of persons who had found themselves to be muddled in the distant past, and who had, consequently, resolved to find their way out. The epistemological questions arise no matter when it is, so long as there is a sensitive consciousness there to be muddled by the unaccountable weirdness of being alive, and who are willing to drop everything and carefully take them apart (in spite of the endless frustrations that comes along with such a task). Karyn Lai remarks that, “Zhuangzi’s philosophy of ‘perspectivism’ enables people to ‘free themselves from the grip of tradition and the rational mind’ in order to ‘perceive and accord with an ethical scheme inherent in the world’”[2] (Lai 161). One starts as a skeptic, asking the epistemological questions, carefully discerning what assumptions lie below what assumptions, and it is easy to forget that the whole point was to find out what is worth trusting, i.e. What is one to do with oneself? or What is important? As Colin Wilson sums up in The Outsider, “…the problem for the individual always will be…the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint” (Wilson 1956: 281).

Works Cited

Ames, Roger T., and Kirill O. Thompson. "What is the Reason of Failure or Success? The Fisherman's Song Goes Deep into the River: Fisherman in the Zhuangzi." Wandering at ease in the Zhuangzi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 15-34. Print.

Graham, A. C., and Zhou Zhuang. Chuang-tzŭ: The inner chapters. London u.a.: Unwin, 1989. Print.

Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary political philosophy: an introduction. Oxford [England: Clarendon Press ;, 1990. Print.

Lai, Karyn. "Zhuangzi's Philosophy." An introduction to Chinese philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 172-195. Print.

Watson, Burton. Zhuangzi: basic writings. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003. Print.

Wilson, Colin. The outsider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Print.

Wilson, Colin. Religion and the rebel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Print.

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[1] “…A territorially concentrated culture, centered on a shared language which is used in a wide range of societal institutions, in both public and private life” (Kymlicka 346).  

[2] The inner quotes being from Phillip Ivanhoes “Zhuangzi on Skepticism, Skill and the Ineffable Dao”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 61, no. 4: 639-54

That Violent Balance: a poem

I want to be flying

Absolutely at the front of the game

Developing the damned thing myself

Fuck the benefit

I want to feel it

Through the veins

When I breathe it’ll be there

At-hand

Berdyaev and Colin Wilson

Gurdjieff and the real Zhuangzi.

Gotta fly gotta fly gotta fly.

Far beyond the bullshit:

That entrapped enlightenment prescribed by the smart, well-adjusted, fucks within the institution.

Gotta fly gotta fly gotta fly

And out there

On the edge of the thing

All warm and soft with kerosene

I’ll breath it in

Sick with health

Melting in Violent Balance

The Pulse Somewhere Hidden, a poem

Lonesome hike, that dragging, sagging will

And on and on into that ubiquitous Form

That stabs at warm, soft, stories alive

That quiets the Pulse somewhere hidden

That makes small the world

Consider: what is the greatest error?

Is it going on without Passion?

Being swayed to pose and pattern Form?

Lacking suspicion when forlorn?

Perpetuating mind and body to perpetuate mind and body?

Where we can we ought to be honest:

Man is no integral “I”

But focused horses migrating focused directions

Asleep and shackled in prison

Blood a dismal yellow

Isn't it strange?

That Great Evolutionary Pull

That drive toward ease

That brought single-cells toward surplus and city

Should now leave us neurotic and dis-eased

Observe the endless Pull

To tame the river, beast, seed

To eclipse the dirt, and branch

To harness the sun and wind

And still those veins pull to lead

I doubt that there is a single germ, which doesn’t feel it

The pulse to overcome and ascend

And yet how peculiar

Man situates his home and his hobbies

Situates to eat and groom and Sleep

He drives on, eyelids drooping

Steers from Formal hoop to hoop

Certified in poses, etiquette, and casual meek

This expansive menagerie doesn’t come cheep

Panic and enslave, perpetuate them bodies and minds

Grand Boredom, Confusion, and Waste

Acquaintances tired and stressed

Unconnected to a clear aim

We float from Form to Form

Suspicious that the effort is vain

Come, lets burn them tracks away

Pull up and befriend our poor inner arguments

We could migrate or stay

Dispense with the Formal Faults

Only Do what we mean, Be what we deem

Come, Divest with the political

Supercede the material

And from a leisurely gate

Stroll down the road

All quiet and sacred

Have you not glimmered whilst migrating north, south, east, west?

I remember the timeless

Into that ‘whatever is the case’

Outside of the City, State, World

Fresh with Vitality, Strength, Self-evidence

And from this I know that I ought to leave

Start from scratch.

From hand to mouth

Directly from the Source

Back to that vital Pulse somewhere hidden

To Depart, get off down that track to the reservoir

Voluntariness is my religion

If there are Formal Faults

A squashing of Pulsing will

To examine slowly, honestly, deliberate

To justify self-evidently

To trim and discipline

Quiet and peel away

From the ever distracting

Beyond that super secret-entropy

And on and on down that insightful exhaustion

I’ll envelop with the warmth and mutual disclosure

Bear the Cold Suffocating Frustrated Hard

Listen for the Pulse ringing in my ears

An alarm from deep sleep