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

Art and Entertainment: an excerpt from an essay on Cinema as an Institution

Everyday-life tends to make us mechanical and out of touch with ourselves. Art provides a background for slowing down, stepping back, and seeing our situation, as well as our self, in a way that clarifies or stimulates a searching for clarity. Since we are often out of touch with why we are doing what we are doing, and what is important to us, art cuts away the noise, filth, and the functional nihilism of everyday life. It brings up that thing we were suppose to do but didn’t have time to do. The secret-simple-thing. That thing we forgot. The artist says: do you remember?

Art and its ‘reminder’ can be contrasted to entertainment, for while art and the artist seeks to turn on the bright light, turning it off marks entertainment. It is distraction from the matter at hand. It is an invitation to forget everything.

She's Alright: A Short Story

I create an ambience of calm with the very pressure on the brake. The car slows in a gradual way. It’s clean inside and out. No cold shrilling squeals, no grinding edge, no musky smells, just the perfection of a stop that can only indicate to nearby drivers that I do not need to be anywhere particularly. I take this really nice breath. In through the nose, then out through the mouth.

It is spoiled soon enough as cars driving by shake the stillness. But it’s ok. The pine smell from the car refresher I bought this afternoon makes things better, feel better. The car wobbles uncomfortably fast then slows while I listen to the Doppler effect. I stare at the red and then at the sudden green. Motion and then deep breathes.

What will we talk about?

My nerves will follow me to the door, I suspect. They are worries of appearance, anxieties of acceptance; and despite the familiar curves in the streets and the calm dark trees with their recognizable roots in the sidewalk, this tension will continue without release. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Pine. I see that I know the way just as one knows one’s way to all of their houses, jobs, and schools, years after. It’s the kind of knowing that lends itself to one’s dreams: you always know the way back school in your dreams.

Left lane, left blinker; red light, slowly stop.

I make a point of looking at a nearby church. I haven’t seen it since I left for school but I remember it well enough. They put these vaguely religious phrases on a large black and white sign and light it with a light bulb. It reads: What have you done for Him lately? I wonder if they are suppose to be jokes after all.

Beside the church and its sign is the shabby park. Next to which is this flower shop that I still wish I could get hired at. Submit application, nothing. Submit application, still nothing.

I pass by the public and private high schools that are opposite one another. They look more like a maze of parking lots and detention halls with high fences and stuffy professionalism. You look down the familiar empty halls for a moment. The suburbs are all such mazes of asphalt, private and public divisions, churches, and doctor offices. Warm alienation - everywhere‘s local specialty.

The lights on the streets come on. Remembrances as well as pieces of sentences, her timbre, and vague feelings that were had in and around this neighborhood. The evolution of shyness, to tasteful bravado, to meaningful intimacy, to controlled aversion, and then to indifference. But it all doesn’t seem to matter so much now. I have some other hopes and optimism. I have humor.

Somewhere inside me says: go and park and look down the row of similar houses, no hurry in face or motions.

Pale tones, sharp tile roofs. Unimpressive small patches of grass that hired gardeners keep up. Excitement and also defensive straight faced-ness. You’ll walk up the concrete path between the grass and then up the steps onto a porch. You’ll ring the bell and wait and try to relax. When she answers, smile when she smiles.

But you can’t prepare for spontaneity. Static and ringing.

We’ll see.

I look both ways, exit the car, up the path, and ding-dong. Dog’s bark, quiet footsteps. The door flies open. She smiles, says hello, and gives a tentative hug. She stands on her toes and her sweater touches my bare neck

Warmth.

Cinnamon.

Itchiness.

We look past her porch at the windy trees and the clean 2-door coupe I borrowed from Paul and then she walks back inside for a heavier coat.

Huh.

I look into her parents’ house through the blurred glass by the door and can’t remember if it looks the same - just tables, a sofa, knick-knacks, and glass and wood cabinets. Plain and warm. Dog still barks, keeps me wary. When she returns, a smart black belted raincoat over her sweater, she locks the door and then jogs to the street with a smirk.

Look at that! Energetic steps. Follow behind her. But please don’t comment. I spot the duality in my motives at once.

She chatters to me and we catch each other up without much trouble. She mentions the grinning fellow I saw her draped upon at the park as well as her father’s newborn daughter - Devin and Alexandria, respectively. I listen as we drive our way into town, remarking very little. I notice a urge to impress her on the one hand, and a movement of boredom on the other. She talks about Devin: she sits next to him in a film class – homework friends and then kissing friends. She talks about her part-time job and the regular customers. She says, Do you know that I work at a coffee shop? I nod and politely say, Yeah, I remember. Politeness is easy with people you don’t really know anymore.

She tells me about a group of homeless people who come during the afternoons. They order tea and sit by the window and just stare, take up space. She says that she talks to them a lot, now. She says that she is thinking of writing a book about each of them. It would be a factual narrative about who they are and how they got to be the way they are.

There’s a tension and hurt. Please repress it, somewhere says.

I get caught up in my thoughts as she talks about the project: Don’t laugh or pout. One can’t remember everything, obviously. But breathe for gods sake. What have you done for Him lately? Smaller than a shadow in the corner of the car. In the cracks with the dark. Don’t you remember! At the Italian deli a few months ago after you spotted me reading in the park, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I was smoking a few minutes earlier, wondering if you realized, we drove separately to the arts and crafts store to get a notebook and some supplies, and you wanted me to go with you to a homeless shelter in Los Angeles in a week or two and interview whoever would want to be apart of the project. And you talked about who you had already interviewed, like that woman who, when you asked what her favorite color was, she said rainbow and who used to live with a guy who abused and raped her and that she only stayed there because she had nowhere else to go, and then she finally left, and you said it was kind of a good thing that she was homeless.

What do they think about this? I ask, suppressing the noise.

I don’t think they mind, she says. They all seem to tell me the basic information.

When we stop at a Mexican restaurant by the freeway she orders for me while I get a table. I’m vaguely proud of myself. Cold breeze, stiff chair.

She asks me in a less polite way how I’ve been as I stare at some loud children free of their parents by our table.

I’ve been fine, I say. You know, calmer, fitter, healthier, and more productive. Like a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Certain sad old men with grimaces and certain worried women with few words, she says, trying to be me.

Poetic, I say. I don’t really know how to answer the question and I say so.

I know that, she says.

And then she smiles like a child. Too large – or maybe cute-naive. She's alright, you think to yourself. Nice even.

It starts to rain as we eat and the ambiance makes me feel warm and vital. We discuss parents some more and our old friends. I refill our sodas and chips. She asks me when I will be leaving.

In a few days.

Cycles and SelcyC dna

You don’t know how it worked out but it came to that you were doing the same things over and over. You’d get up late, feel stupid, feel disgusted about your parents, feel trapped, drink, drink too much, try to chill out, sit and try and get in touch, do this for a while, forget about it, come back to it, feel as if nothing really helps, feel mechanical, feel there is no way out, shut the fuck up, go on a jog, skive off commitments and drive out to the middle of nowhere, work on interpersonal skills, write about that thing that you were reminding yourself to think about, try to get close to someone, feel like its worthless, watch a lot of tv, recall that things don’t really matter, recall that this means that the self doesn’t exist, recall that feeding the self pleasure and shielding it from pain only escalates matters, forget how this makes sense, wash your truck, mow the lawn, clean your room, do the laundry, want to dress better, go to the library to sit quietly, pick out a billion books you won’t read, wish you’d grown up with a different family, masturbate, look at your cell phone to see if anyone called or text, feel lost, feel very depressed, watch old movies, drug yourself to sleep, try to get up really early, feel as though you must exercise much more than normal, think that its all about discipline, read something and think about putting it at the start of a novel or essay, feel stupid and dull, go back to something you wrote, remember how you still have to read this book someone lent you, remember its your mothers birthday soon, feel that you are too old to be disgusted by your parents, their habits, and the environment they bring with them, feel trapped, spend a few days away from home, notice how different you are while not at home, wonder who you are, remember that you never figured it out when you were first burdened by the question, feel stupid because you don’t know what is important, think that sensitivity is a virtue, feel okay, want to destroy the vulgar bullshit in the world, want to throw yourself into a spiritual practice, feel neglected because you haven’t met an experienced practitioner that could help you, resolve to get to sleep earlier, resolve not spend much money, face some fears, feel okay, not feel able, not feel warmth, believe in yourself, hate things, fuck them, notice how weird it is…

A Mediocre Essay for a Film Class

Pulp Fiction: Pop-Culture, Crime, and the Longing for Vitality

Like many postmodern works, Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 box-office and critical hit Pulp Fiction is saturated with pop-culture: fast food (“Royale with Cheese”), The Beatles (“Ringo”), celebrity personas (the waiters and waitresses of Jack Rabbit Slim’s), surf rock and rock-and-roll, the Pepsi-challenge (Amsterdam drugs vs. American drugs), and what is perhaps the biggest pop-culture reference one can make, the Bible – to name a few. Even the use of neo-noir and the gangster content in Pulp Fiction allows for a play upon pop-culture expectations. For instance, the two central thugs in the film, Vincent and Jules, walk into an apartment building to make a hit, and among other things, they intelligently discuss the differences between McDonald’s in America and McDonald’s in France all the while planning to retrieve a mysterious suit case from inadequate business partners. In addition to the constant presence of pop-culture in Pulp Fiction, there is also a constant presence of drugs and violence. The wife of the big-boss of Los Angeles, Mia Wallace, goes to “powder her nose” with cocaine after a lull in conversation while out at a 50’s diner with Vincent Vega, her husbands employee (who shot heroin just before the meal); experienced boxer Butch, after being captured by a pawnshop pervert, breaks free from the ropes tying him down and instead of fleeing the premises, decides to kill his captors and free his boss, but not without first deciding between available weapons – a baseball bat, a chain saw, or a katana. That Tarantino’s main characters all exist on the fringes of society as outsiders, that Tarantino himself was something of an outsider in the industry at the time, and that the narrative is told in a fragmented but extraordinarily humorous way, points to some of the concerns of the postmodern society – namely, that we experience ourselves as alienated, not feeling connected to any order or whole anymore, and that we must work to seek release from this ridiculous state. In constant nearness to pop-culture and against the backdrop of the banalization of drugs and violence, Pulp Fiction points to, basks in, and ultimately seeks to leave behind the televised and alienated mass of Reagan and Bush’s suburban society.

By the 1990’s the convergence of pop-culture and the mass media had been fundamental to the American psyche for some time. For by the end of the 1950’s ninety percent of American homes had television sets, the new suburban “leisured masses” entry into pop-culture (Belton 322-323). One effect of this is that even the outsider, the person who exists on the fringes of society, even she derives identity and substance from pop-culture in a way similar to how the suburban 9-5’er does. The outsider is just as likely to have a television and watch movies as anyone else. Hit man Jules admonishes his partner early on in Pulp Fiction because he says he doesn’t watch TV and doesn’t know what a pilot is. We could say that Tarantino uses pop-culture in Pulp Fiction for seemingly two reasons: to show the pervasiveness of its reach and to make the violent and drug addled gangster world feel relatable and humorous.

Pop-culture, essentially the “transcript” or social-narrative of a culture, may also be thought of as the public value system of a society: “that set of images regarding space, time, relation, evaluation…which is shared by the mass of its people” (Boulding 64). Such a reality forms the background to which we as individuals move around in the world: it is a lens or a filter placed on our senses that focuses everything taken in so that specific associations arise and so that we all can understand one another to an extent impossible without. When we say Marilyn Monroe, for instance, we associate her with Jane Mansfield and other such starlets of past eras. When we pass through the door of an office building we look to see if we may hold the door for anyone. When driving we stay on a designated side of the road. When we need to release our bladder we use a restroom. When making decisions that affect others we collect a census or tally a vote. Traditionally, the pop-culture is passed down from generation to generation via formal education (books and teachers), one’s parents, and one’s peers (informal education). With the development of the motion picture camera and the dissemination of televisions, however, a communicator may literally spread information to everyone in the world as if they were standing in the living room. An effect of this is that images and values could now be spread in a much quicker and palpable manner as well as from subculture to subculture, unifying them in sense. The California gangster and the South African novelist share the same scene, associate images similarly, and observe manners in like ways. Mickey mouse is recognized no matter where one may happen to be. Our world has entered a state of globalization.

Throughout the destabilizing happenings of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the civil rights era, and the woman’s movement, a large group of the American culture found themselves unable to follow the line – that is, the mainstream way of life – anymore. A broad counterculture, a mass that cultivated its own media and its own system of values in contrast to that of the mainstream, bloomed naturally out of this dissatisfaction. The communal lifestyle and beat attitudes of the hippie, her anti-establishment idealism, drug experimentation, and perception that there is an “incoherence which informs the social and cultural reality” of today, such things were eventually stitched into the tapestry of the mainstream pop-culture as the counterculture’s steam faded away (Belton 374). Even though the Reagan and Bush era with which Pulp Fiction’s audience would be most familiar with was marked by economic posterity and produced a cinema in which nostalgia for and rejuvenation in the past reigned supreme (Back to the Future / Indiana Jones, etc.), something remained of the suspicion and deep-seated dissatisfaction which arouse pointedly during the time of the counterculture in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The absurd logic and consequences of Reaganomics, the unsettling arms race, the Iran-Contra, the continued ideological foreign policy resistance to communist groups, and the new spectacle of televised wars, such things irritated the wound (Conlin 818-842). If this carrying over of the counterculture’s dissatisfactions did not find its way into postmodernism and its mainstream, as a people we would not relate to (or find affecting) films like Taxi Driver, Do The Right Thing, The Graduate, and The Matrix: films which address alienation, prejudice, and the desire for transcendence from the humdrum.

As if to reaffirm the dissatisfaction with the social-narrative that has become characteristic in postmodern art, Pulp Fiction begins with two lovers, veteran robbers, eating breakfast in a small coffee shop. In order not to feel cheated by the system, by the alienating labor of daily desk jobs, the couple has learned how to cheat. But even this insight has failed them because it’s become too dangerous to go on robbing liquor stores and gas stations. As with virtually all of Pulp Fiction’s characters, the way out of the unfulfilling and alienating drudgery is to utilize some form of crime. “Well what then,” Honeybunny asks, “day jobs?” “Not in this life,” Pumpkin replies. Life by the rules, the spirit of the counterculture suggests, is a life of the square and the alcoholic (Easy Rider). In other words, it’s a life of slavery. And so a further insight occurs to the couple: they will rob coffee shops, collecting not only the cash register but also the wallets of the customers. And so there, in the sunny vitality of a Los Angeles coffee shop, the two kiss, get up, and declare their criminal intensions jammed full with characteristic profanities. Tarantino freezes on the two, guns out, faces lit with tremendous energy as a classic surf song blazes on the soundtrack. The powerful, subversive, and near adolescent intensity that is achieved with this short introduction paves the way for how to interpret the rest of this film. The outsider is dissolute perhaps, but contains innocence and non-cruel intentions.

In effect, the film is broken down into three separated story lines: The Bonnie Situation, Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife, and The Gold Watch. In the “Bonnie Situation” Vincent makes a hit with Jules (1a), experiences a miracle and helps to clean up Marvin (1b), Pumpkin and Honeybunny plan to rob the coffee shop (1c), Vincent eats breakfast with Jules at the same coffee shop, altering Pumpkin and Honeybunny’s plans (1d), and then they both deliver the suitcase to Marsellus (1e). In “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”, we follow Vincent the day after the happenings of the “Bonnie Situation” as Vincent obtains heroin and shoots up (2a), has Dinner with Mia Wallace (2b), and deals with her O.D (2c). The final segment “The Gold Watch” starts with a flashback regarding the meaning of the watch (3a), moves to Butch making a deal with Marsellus to throw the fight (1e/3b), from here the story is picked up two days later when Butch boxes (3c), drives back to his hotel to see his French girlfriend (3d), wakes in the morning to retrieve his watch, ‘accidentally’ kills Vincent (3e), runs into Marsellus, gets trapped and frees himself at the pawn shop (3f), and rides back to the hotel to pick up his girlfriend on Zed’s motorcycle (3g). However, these three interrelated storylines are stringed together out of order. The film is presented like this: 1c, 1a, 1e/3b, 2a-2c, 3a, 3c-3g, 1b, 1d.

In editing Pulp Fiction in a non-linear manner, Tarantino achieves two things. First, he allows the most transcendent conclusion of the three segments to be the conclusion of the film: (1d) Jules’ expresses his ambivalence about crime, discusses the possibility of ‘walking the earth’, and saves the amateur criminals. Second, the structure functions as an allusion to (or pastiche of) the pulp-fiction magazines of the 30’s and 40’s whose contents typically were arranged with short stories that “began in the front of the magazine, competing for the reader’s attention, and were then continued in the back” (Stone). We are introduced to the hopped-up couple that plans to rob so as to avoid the doldrums of day jobs, and are brought to the conclusion (after having been immersed in the gangster world) that such a ‘way out’ is not ‘righteous’ but ‘weak’. Jules, re-interpreting his bible passage suggests that he, himself has been the ‘the tyranny of evil men’ with his vocation as a professional hit man, but has since felt the presence of ‘God’ in his activities and wants to become the guide “in the name of charity and goodwill [that] shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness…” The valley of darkness is tantamount to the postmodern predicament: the fleeing from the enslaving narratives of the pop-culture by the reactive employment of drugs and destructive activities. Jules dismisses these activities and submits that they are sleep inducing. You got to stop running and start to walk if you are going to flourish. But unlike other films of this time, Pulp Fiction doesn’t end with the reaffirmation of the community or of the family. Rather, Jules reaffirms some aspects of the counterculture and its spiritual path and points to the kung-fu paradigm of mindful being: he’ll ‘walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.’ It is irrelevant if he is called a bum, he’s just Jules. One of the errors of the ‘weak’ is to follow a way of life prescribed by others – consumerism and crime, for instance. You got to ‘calm that bitch down’ in yourself if you are to get past the urge toward drugs and mechanical retaliation against society. The way is beyond society, alienation, and late-capitalism.

The more formal aspects of Pulp Fiction deserve note. The acting style is straight and never over the top despite the ubiquitous humor. Vincent Vega, as Alan A. Stone points out, is a “laid back, get-along kind of guy who is living a depraved and drug-addicted life as a paid killer, but has an astonishingly innocent soul, as do most of Tarantino’s low-life characters.” It is this innocent feature mixed with qualitative humor and compelling intelligence that keeps the film afloat despite the violent content. The use of pop-music and the bright, non-judgmental cinematography incite vitality and clarity, as one might expect a line of cocaine or a big cup of coffee might. We go along with Pulp Fiction diverting our attention away from the baser realities of the gangster world, choosing to play along with this fragmented narrative because it hits all of those deep-seated desires we all carry around with us – namely, to cut out the acquired apathetic tendencies of the armchair anger toward our culture that lies in ourselves, the one that suggests our culture has left underdeveloped our finer fruits and instead made us mechanical and greedy. Pulp Fiction allows us to get high, and to kill and destroy, getting it out of our systems so that we may learn something perhaps in the catharsis.

Works Cited

Boulding, Kenneth E.. The image; knowledge in life and society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Print.

Conlin, Joseph R.. "'Morning in America" & "The Millennuim Years"." Since 1865 . 8. ed. Fort Worth [u.a.: Harcourt College Publ., 2001. 818-842. Print.

John, Belton. "The Film School Generation and Into the Twenty-First Century." American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 339-415. Print.

Stone, Alan A.. "Boston Review: Alan Stone on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction." Boston Review — Home. N.p., 1 Apr. 1995. Web. 5 Aug. 2011. .