Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind

Footnotes to Hygge and Niksen: An Inquiry into Comfort and Contentment

March 15th, 2021
2021/12/07 Notes (and one apology) about this article: I began this inquiry as a response to a book that I found at the local public library in my community. I read the book over the course of a few days, expecting to find little other than a standard, light-reading, member of the trendy “wellness” self-help genre. My expectations were mostly fulfilled. But the book managed to extend slightly beyond those expectations, occasionally, to include some ideas that seemed to be worth deeper consideration. The original essay was titled “Footnotes to Niksen: An inquiry into Doing Nothing” but has been expanded to include ideas from other sources. There is an audio version (somehwat varied from what you may see here) of the essay available on the Zensylvania Podcast. As the topic seems to be rather timeless, I expect to update this article in near future. As for the apology – admittedly, at this moment, this essay is a bit of a mess as I’ve been updating the draft from three different original sources.

While I may not be a particularly devout individual, I have a kind of practical ongoing interest in literature which attempts to systemically explore and define how certain core ideas and practices may be useful for living one’s life. I can trace this interest back to a chance reading of Moses Hadas‘ Essential Works of Stoicism (1961). That book offered-up several very practical ideas that I have always found to be particularly useful to navigating life. It is no small coincidence, therefore, that I might begin an essay about focusing on comfort and contentment as life goals by referencing stoicism in general and that book in particular. A focus on contentment was certainly one of the things advocated by the stoics. Thank you Moses Hadas. Thank you Epictetus. Thank you Marcus Aurelius…and all the countless others who ensured that stoic ideas and principles have been communicated forward through the millennia.

The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking is exactly one of the bits of literature that I’m interested in. It takes a core idea and explores how that idea can be applied to enrich people’s lives. I learned about Wiking’s book and exposition on hygge earlier this year when I read Olga Mecking’s Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing (2021). So I’m featuring both of these books in a common exploration.

I am not entirely certain whether these were lifestyle fads that had previously escaped my attention or if I’m commenting while the fad is still growing. Not that it matters all that much. A good and valuable idea for living life ought not to have a best-by date.

Based almost entirely on the books, “hygge” seems to be the term used in Denmark for particular forms and presentations of low-keyed and cozy comfort which brings happiness. Niksen, on the other hand, is billed as a Dutch form of idleness, which also contributes to happiness.

The Dutch-themed book seems to focus on occupational or dynamic details of life while the Danish-themed book focuses on static or environmental aspects. In this way, the two books and their attendant concepts seem to situationally complement each other. Viewed as an outsider, neither concept seems genuinely complete without the other.

A few days after reading Mecking’s book, I learned via a search of Goodreads that no fewer than eight books dedicated to the matter of niksen have been published in recent years. At this time, I have no clear idea of how many popular or academic articles on the topic may exist. Neither can I determine whether Mecking’s book achieves anything more (or less) than the others that have been published. For now, my exposure to niksen is limited to Mecking’s version and a very small sampling of online articles; similarly, I almost entirely reliant on Wiking for my understanding of hygge.

As with my other Footnotes essays…(such as my Footnotes to Be Water, My Friend by Shannon Lee)… the following notes and comments are not intended to be a formal book review of these books. There won’t be a detailed summary or regurgitation of the books’ contents. I won’t comment on the font, binding, writing style nor any other aesthetic features of the artifacts and documents. I won’t even suggest that my comments will reflect on all that the authors may have to offer. Instead, I am merely taking note of certain ideas and themes as they relate to my own particular pre-occupations and interests. This isn’t a criticism environment.

On this occasion, I am curious about what it means to…do nothing; and, to focus on coziness and comfort. You’ll note that I haven’t adopted the term “happiness” despite the fact that both of the books feature happiness as a kind of goal or end-point. In other words, it appears to be Wiking and Mecking’s views that one utilizes niksen and hygge in order to be happy. For me, that premise is problematic.

It is currently my perspective that use of the term “happiness” as an over-arching life-objective would be a misunderstanding, or at the very least a misapplication, of one of the most essential concepts that the word “happiness” invokes. From my perspective, happiness is a kind of engaged, activated or excited state. During states of happiness, neurons are actively firing based on agreeable, pleasurable inputs. Particular neurochemicals have been activated. As such and activated state, happiness seems like something one ought to pursue on a discontinuous basis.

Certainly, I will have more to say about that a little later on. But I think it is appropriate to note that this difference in focus is my reaction to reading these two books and is not intended as a reflection of any sentiments that either Mecking or Wiking may have.

Mecking spends considerable effort in praise of the Netherlands and makes the argument that Dutch people are “happy”, to some un-specified extent, due to the presence of niksen in the Dutch culture.

Meanwhile, Wiking explains in his book that he is a researcher at the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen; clearly much of the book is based-upon insights gleaned through that organization’s work – set as it seems to be within a Danish setting.

How do these claims stack up to independent evaluations? The 2021 iteration of the United Nations’ World Happiness Report places Denmark in second and the Netherlands in fifth place among nations – snugly amid several other Nordic countries.

Mecking doesn’t provide much verifiable evidence that it is the niksen which produces all this Dutch happiness. And for all of Wikings depictions of hygge comforts, I finished his book without much clarity whether the hygge is a cause of happiness or whether it’s presence is a kind of correlated manifestation of the happiness that is documented in Denmark.

According to the UN’s report, the top twenty “happiest” countries are Finland; Demark; Switzerland; Iceland; The Netherlands; Norway; Sweden; Luxembourg; New Zealand; Austria; Australia; Israel; Germany; Canada; Ireland; Costa Rica; United Kingdom; The Czech Republic; United States; and Belgium.

Given how many of these countries are so-called Nordic countries..and being a Canadian who has spent more than a few winters in the chillier regions of my home province of Ontario, it is tempting to suggest the cause of all this happiness may well be the snow and cold. Although that clearly can’t be the case with Russia currently sitting in 68^th position on that United Nations report. But the focus on “happiness”, whether I agree with it or not, brings forward more than one area of examination.

For example,

To what extent is the focus on happiness and these attendant explorations of niksen (disengaged nothingness, idle relaxation) and hygge (cozy comforts) a “first world problem”? Or more accurately, a wealthy person, community or nation’s problem? That seems to be a relevant question. The person who has leisure to spend a considerable portion of their day figuring out basic survival may not have quite as much time to worry about the “wellness” benefits that may accrue via acting on distinctions between “niksen”, “hanging out with friends”, or any other form of idleness one may wish to consider. Nor with whether or not a room’s lighting is just the right colour temperature to support comfort and coziness.

These things could be viewed as a kind of extreme luxury of spending resources not required to meet basic needs and, perhaps indeed focused on achieving the engaged, activated or excited state of mind known as happiness that I described earlier. This also may serve as some perspective on Russia’s ranking of 68, despite all the snow that Russia sees every year. But it might also quite simply be a demonstration of different cultural approaches or interpretations of “happiness” versus “comfort” and “contentment”…and approaches to these things.

It’s not that I’m against happiness. Clearly we tend to prefer to be happy over many of the alternative states of mind that one may experience. Happiness, however, seems to me to be a dynamic (active and engaged) state of mind that is not continuously maintainable. It is my opinion that human biology isn’t set up for ongoing and continuous happiness.

As something that cannot be maintained, it is an unreliable goal.

Idleness, comfort and contentment, however seem to be reliable goals as they are more static and un-engaged, perhaps even dis-engaged states of mind. Comfort and contentment are not the opposite of happiness…they are a baseline from which we rise to happiness and other positively excited states or fall to unhappiness and other negatively excited states.

It seems to me that the “nothingness” which zen meditation stives toward is strongly aligned with this notion of “comfort and contentment” which I am advocating. Comfort and contentment is not a state of excited enjoyment from which there is an inevitable decline and it is not a state of agitated anguish or depression from which there is a requisite struggle to arise from. It is an emotional and biological baseline position from which the highs of enjoyment and the lows of suffering can be observed and judged.

This “comfort and contentment” that I advocate for as a goal seems sensible to me as it seems to me that it is a recipe for frustration to be constantly on the hunt for a state of stimulated happiness and probably disastrous to live life constantly on the defensive from hurts of various kinds.

The terminology of these books and the subject matter they cover seem to be adjacent, if not fairly thoroughly overlapping. As indicated earlier, the Dutch-themed book seems to focus more on occupational or dynamic aspects while the Danish-themed book focuses on more static or environmental aspects.

The word “hygge” is cited in many places as a Danish and Norwegian term for a mood of coziness and comfort. Interestingly, “hygge” seems to be cognate with or derive its origin from a variety of Old Norse terms that referred to comfort…and ultimately with “thinking and consideration”. All of this etymology and background provides a kingdof linguistic and cultural setting for the book. To project forward into the language of Zensylvania, let us also add the terms meditation and meditative.

In the meantime, Mecking has presented the word “niksen” as the Dutch term for a particular form of idleness. Mecking’s book and, by extension – the wider trend of niksen-oriented writing is based on a principle or argument that there are distinct kinds of idleness. And further that this particular version of doing nothing is beneficial to people. Perhaps even uniquely beneficial to people. A problem of approaching an idea like this is establishing a clear and precise description of this form of idleness and how it may be differentiated from other forms of idleness. Perhaps forms that may not be beneficial to people. In other words, what makes niksen qualitatively unique or different from: laziness, sleeping, watching TV, meditating or even in engaging in non-productive recreation?

This may seem to be a superficial and unimportant distinction on a superficial and unimportant topic. But I don’t think it is. Particularly as this distinction relates to that second component of Mecking’s argument – that “niksen” may be beneficial to those who engage in it. Niksen may well be a particular kind of idleness…but is that particular kind of idleness actually beneficial. And is it any more or less beneficial than other forms of idleness. This line of inquiry may provide valuable insights into contemporary life. Even if the insights turn out not to be staggeringly fresh, consideration of the role of rest in the maintenance of a healthy life is not unimportant.

Whether the Netherlands’ version of idle relaxation is any more or less of an art form is also a matter for consideration. But first things first.

Mecking acknowledges that she has critics who accuse her of attempting to capitalize on a trendy subject. And it may well be that that the current proliferation of niksen-themed lifestyle literature is all a matter of sustaining a trend out of nothing. Pun intended.

I’m not entirely certain that whether Mecking or Wiking have proved that their niksen or hygge elements are the golden keys to the city of happiness. It seems to me that these things are probably complementary factors with a correlational relationship rather than a causal one. I think Mecking and Wiking are really leaning heavily on one or two happiness indicators that have some cultural cache in a few specific nations.

Indeed, Mecking cites several similar trends that have present similar or adjacent social phenomena: Wellness, Mindfulness, Zen, Hygge/Koselig/Gemutlichkeit, Konmari, Dostadning (Swedish Death Cleaning), Ikigai, Nunchi. These are all examples of trendy social and lifestyle practices that have been documented and promoted across various media.

While I intended to avoid literary criticism, the title of the book Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing carries a faint echo of one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as it attempts to establish how a central daily practice or ritual, and its underlying principles, may be perceived as an “art”. I can’t refrain, therefore from observing a particular use of language.

Mecking’s use of “art” and Pirsig’s definition of “art” would be different. I expect Mecking’s definition to hove-to contemporary usage of art as defining a primarily aesthetic and appreciative practice rather than art as Pirsig intended the term. Pirsig used art as a term for the craftsperson’s creative procedures and practices. It is valuable to explore these types of distinctions as advocating a distinction is what the book attempts to do…a distinction in forms of idleness.

On page 28, Mecking explains that “niks” is Dutch for “nothing” and that niksen is a verb form of the same word. Niksen is therefore “to do nothing”. Mecking provides explnations of how niksen may be interpreted and provides connections to other concepts. Included in Meckig’s list of related concepts and conceptualists is the english world “idle” and the British movement of “idlers”. This is aa term I’ve already used in this essay and which has particular cultural and literary roots that I enjoy. As a sidebar, a few glances at the eighteenth-century The Idler essays may convince you that Samuel Johnson and essayists throughout the ages would have been thrilled with the blogging format.

What is Niksen?

In the first chapter of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, I can’t find any place where Mecking has provided a specific and concise definition of niksen. I was only able to locate that at the end of the book where Mecking provided a slightly campy manifesto advocating niksen as a lifestyle practice. But the definition is concise and worth quoting. Here it is: “Niksen is a Dutch lifestyle philosophy that emphasizes doing nothing without a purpose. Just because.”

There are some problems here that don’t actually help Mecking’s argument that her presentation of niksen is more than a merely a capitalization on a trendy lifestyle term. Maybe that’s why the definition was held back so long in the book. But I’m going to set that judgement aside in consideration of the potential value of the niksen activity itself.

From my own day-to-day life, niksen seems to be the term which would apply to… (particularly solitary)… time spent sitting on the porch. For me, that is a time when I do not actively engage in anything either internally…. (within myself)… nor externally (outside of myself). It is like meditation, but without the struggle of attempting to avoid actively engaging in my thoughts and without attempting to direct my attention as an observer of my own resting mental activity.

Is There Ever A Time When We Do Nothing?

Mecking spends some time in capitulation to the fact that there is never a time in one’s life when NOTHING occurs. There are always physiological processes occurring. However, there are times when an individual is not engaged in doing things. To present an alternate definition of niksen that establishes the activity in context of conscious activity, I suggest that niksen is “idle relaxation of a person’s physical and mental activity where the individual is in a process of disengaged nothingness.”

The closest we seem to come to doing nothing is when sleeping. Clearly our bodies are extremely busy with necessary functions and maintenance even while we’re sleeping – but that’s not really in the spirt of the discussion.

Perhaps the definition of niksen ought to be ““idle relaxation of a person’s physical and mental activity where the individual is in a process of disengaged nothingness while remaining awake.”

It seems to me that the definition brings us inevitably to meditation… excepting that my definition might have to be re-arranged to say ”idle relaxation of a person’s physical and mental activity where the individual is in a process of disengaged nothingness while remaining awake and observing of the activity of one’s own mind.”

In this way, it is clear that niksen is adjacent to meditation and some principles of zen.

Comforting Light

Very early in my adult life, I spent some time working in a retail store which specialized in the sales and installation of lighting fixtures and materials of all kinds. We sold and serviced everything from table lamps and shades to commercial lighting and installed fixtures. It was a very instructive and in many regards, formative, period in my career. In fact, purchasing lightbulbs or (more rarely) lighting fixtures is still something I draw particular satisfaction from. Wiking’s book offers some reminders of the importance of lighting to establish comfort and contentment.

In recent decades, and particularly in response to the proliferation of various screen-based technologies like smart-phones and tablets, the impact of light on our physical and mental health has been the subject of more and more study. Indeed, it is now rather commonplace for people to be aware of, if not entirely concerned with such things as colour temperatures that they expose themselves to – and when they expose themselves to them.

Wiking includes a significant focus on lighting and candles. There is a suggestion that lower colour temperatures for lighting, let’s say around 1500K-2000k, temperature/colour is important to cultivate a cozy feeling. While colour temperature is somewhat cumbersome to navigate, a short version is that reds, oranges and even gold/yellow are relatively low temperatures while greens and blues are relatively high. Bright sunny daylight is in the 5000 to 6500K…and fluorescent bulbs you’ll find in office settings are around 4000K.

When I have needed to work under the glare of flourescent tubes, I have often found it to be a painful experience. Throughout my adult life, I have always preferred instead to use table-lamps. At one time, my office was referred to as a cave as I used only a single table-lamp. I have also used amber coloured glasses to bring the glare of office environments down. Currently, I used a moderately high temperature mini-led flood which reflects off the walls and ceiling and supplements outdoor natural light as needed. I don’t need more light.

In my Hallowe’en story (visit the Zensylvania podcast episode released October 2021), I contrasted the low-pressure sodium lights that dominated in the 1970s to 1990s…they were around 2200K while modern LEDs are 3000k to 4000k. Our city streets are less cozy than they used to be.

Eric’s plan to do…include more candles and revisit coal oil lamp; much of my first book of poetry was written by the light of an old-fashioned oil lamp. House in Thunder Bay we consciously employed lower light levels. Current 100-year old house, I have begun to convert the old fireplace into a candle area and re-organized furniture to focus on this and it has made the room cozier. The colour temperature of a candle is in the 1600-2000k range that I mentioned earlier.

Wiking suggests creating pools of light rather than focus on overall lighting. In other words, focus on indirect sources of light rather than a central overhead fixture. Switching bulbs to colour temperatures that are more suitable doesn’t need to be an expensive endeavour…and positioning a lamp so that it creates a pool of light also seems fairly achievable.

Manifestos

In their respective books, both Mecking and Wiking provide what they call a “manifesto” of their area of focus…for Mecking, that is niksen; for Wiking, hygge. A manifesto is a kind of formal declaration of intentions, attrributions and goals. In the corporate world, the term “mission statement” would be roughly equivalent. I’m not certain how seriously one ought to take a manifesto for a life practice. Particularly for a life practice aimed at comfort and contentment. There is something a bit too rigid and, well, formal about assigning formality to something like that.

I’m not certain how seriously they take it either….

Mecking provided a slightly campy manifesto advocating niksen as a lifestyle practice. But the definition is concise and worth quoting. Here it is: “Niksen is a Dutch lifestyle philosophy that emphasizes doing nothing without a purpose. Just because.” According to the book, Mecking lives in the Netherlands and has many connections to the nation but is not Dutch. The book is a useful tool to identify a few features of Dutch culture that may be of general value. As far as I can determine, Mecking believes these to be: a) Be normal (i.e. not fake, exaggerated or artificially and gregariously excitable) b) Seek contentedness rather than happiness c) Be direct in social interactions d) Be critical of ideas.

Similarly Wiking provides a manifesto via a list of requisite ingredients…with those being: atmosphere, presence, pleasure, equality; gratitude, harmony, comfort, truce, togetherness, shelter

So neither seem to approach the idea of a manifesto as an overly serious affair- still, they included the concept which means there is at least an element of earnestness about what they’ve each offered. It reminds me of the literature I’ve read of zen and it is a matter that I think requires some consideration. To what extent should doctrine of any sort – even a campy manifesto for kicking back – be considered to be anything more than a finger pointing at the moon? Are the static ideas in the manifesto of importance or is the dynamic experience of comfort and contentment the true measure?

Dutch Prescription According to the book, Mecking lives in the Netherlands and has many connections to the nation but is not Dutch. The book is a useful tool to identify a few features of Dutch culture that may be of general value. As far as I can determine, Mecking believes these to be: a) Be normal (i.e. not fake, exaggerated or artificially and gregariously excitable) b) Seek contentedness rather than happines c) Be direct in social interactions d) Be critical of ideas.

Is Calvinism to Blame?

The most interesting feature of the third Chapter is Mecking’s interest to pin the responsibility for the modern pre-occupation with being busy on Calvinism.

Mecking also enumerates the emergence of something called “New Thought” in the 19th century. She suggests this new thought allowed a move away from Calvinism and that one result of this break was the development of the wellness industry. Mecking further references Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and conspicuous consumption and eventually gets around to the irony of contemporary digital technology which promises individual liberty but actually undermines it.

This is interesting as a tracing of the philosophical tensions that arise as a result of considering “doing nothing for no reason at all.”

In The Meeting of East and West by FSC Northrop, there is a contrast of values between what Northrop describes as the colour-rich culture of Mexico (set within a kind of medieval Catholicism) and the colour-thin culture of protestant cultures…particularly Anglophones. Describes protestant churches as largely grey/white….no colour, little statuary…etc. There seems to be an interesting link here to minimalism trends…no reason that minimalism must be white or grey except that this conceptually aligns with an aesthetic of omission.

It may well be critical to examine the ideas that underpin our choices. If Mecking and Northorp are correct that that certain theological and philosophical ideals have directed individual and collective choices….it seems to be a valuable exercise to consider whether “happiness” is a reasonable goal or whether “comfort and contentment” may be better…to consider whether in fact my own assertion that one may be comfortable and content without being happy but one cannot be happy without first having access to comfort and contentment…is a valid observation.

These observations may well inform our approach to things like:
- How we behave from day to day
- How we interact with others and what we expect from them
- What we seek in our day
- The food we choose to eat
- Our approach to health
- Our approach to consumerism
- Our approach to life
Biology

Chapter four is largely an argument in favour of disengaging and allowing the brain to continue to work on a problem while you’re attention is disengaged. Mecking makes an argument that idle relaxation works with a person’s brain.

There is also an appeal to intuition which is a growing and somewhat troubling trend as it can lead people to the conclusion that “doing nothing” (intellectually) has a high probability of an intuitive process producing a valid and reliable (ie. correct) insight or solution. This is problematic for those who may in fact be intellectually lazy and therefore fail to ensure that their intuitive processes have reliable information in the first place. Garbage in, Garbage out. This appears to intuition also indicates nothing about alternate biological drivers (determinants) that may produce intuitive outcomes that have less relation to a given problem than some other matter that the subconscious sees value-in.

As with Shannon Lee’s book, Mecking leans on Czikmentmihalyi’s concept of flow. It is a popular concept. There isn’t that much science in Mecking’s book and mentioning flow is an easy way to connect with other trends.

Mecking’s Exceptions

Mecking acknowledges that some concepts from other cultures won’t work because the necessary support is not there for the transplant. What may work for some people in the Netherlands may not work for a different group of people in your town.

Wellness books are targeted to individual action not a broad social structure.

Mecking’s Conclusion

Mecking’s conclusion is focused on busy-ness…overall the book is an argument that busy-ness is a problem to be solved. The origin of the busy-ness problem is (at least partially) pinned on Calvinism. Mecking also suggests that ambition and flawlessness as ideals are growing in the Netherlands. Mecking argues that niksen has arisen as a tool to manage the complexity and stress of a busy life. Managing the complexity of contemporary life is one of many significant pre-occupations (or motivators) of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Mecking’s version of niksen is an appeal for periods of reduced busy-ness…more idle time that is focussed on leisure. Mecking also argues that worth/value is not connected to the number of hours that a person expends on an activity nor what is produced. Interestingly, Mecking has not recommended that stress and complexity be eliminated. Only managed.

It would have been poignant if Mecking had concluded, “If anything I’ve described here makes sense, then do nothing.” Instead, Mecking asks for people to join her social media group. Life in the 2020’s has its ironies.

Provisional Summary

In Surfing with Sartre (2017), Aaron James suggested that individuals would be better off, and that the the world would be better off – if more people were surfers who spent large chunks of time sitting on or near the water doing nothing much. Not being productive. While there are extremely reasonable objections to James’ opinion, the underlying notion is that disengaged nothingness is a valuable feature of human existence and possibly an essential one in the twenty-first century.

For Mecking, James and others, doing nothing is a necessary human process.

And yet, there are features of human existence which conflict with disengaged nothingness. Survival. Earning a living. Social structures, institutions and circumstances with their own requirements and agendas.

Disengaged nothingness (as exemplified by niksen) is different from engaged nothingness (as exemplified by meditation). One wonders if disengaged nothingness is actually a goal of engaged nothingness.

Sitting on a shady porch on a spring or summer day. Staring into a crackling fire on a winter’s day. Lying on the beach.

Niksen is a kind of rest. It is disengagement from urgent and non-urgent demands of life and living. It is freedom-from. I suspect we all need more freedom-from.

Early in the essay, I indicated that I was unwilling to align with “happiness” as an end goal. In part this is because happiness as a goal seems unreliable. A foundation principle of the US “the pursuit of happiness” is ultimately unreliable because the bar always moves and it is fundamentally unmaintainable. A pursuit of contentment would probably result in more actual happiness…more peace of mind. A pursuit of comfort is not all that bad because it isn’t an all or nothing proposition. It is reasoned. Comfort and contentment are calm states where happiness is an excited or activated state.

In Zen, the goal or practice of “just sitting” known as “zazen” seems to be a closely aligned doctrine. Kodo Sawaki said “Zen is good for nothing”. So zazen is a process to achieve niksen.

If you’re interested to learn more about hygge, niksen or the sources that I used while researching this topic, you may wish to visit the sources page on https://zensylvania.com/contact/sources/ and search for this article.

Zensylvania Copyright © 2020-2022 by Eric Adriaans. All rights reserved.
Footnotes to Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Part One)

February 21st, 2021
Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a series of essay examinations (also available as an audio podcast) of Robert Pirsig’s famous 1974 book.
Original Essay

See Also

References & Notes

External Links
1966 Honda Super Hawk.
Original Essay

I’m no longer completely certain when or how I first became aware of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Robert Pirsig. I do know that it was never on the reading list for any high-school or university courses that I took during my academic days in the 1980’s and early 90’s. It seems probable that I came across references to it in some of the car and motorcycle magazines that I seemed to be continuously buying during early decades of my life. It is my certain memory that my first attempt to read the book occurred in that same period. The first copy that I picked-up had a pink cover with the wrench-as-lotus flower logo perched atop the book’s title which was printed in a bold black font. I recall that as clearly as I recall that I abandoned the book part-way through as a waste of time and energy. I had no use for whatever the guy was on about. It took perhaps another six to ten years to pass before I was ready to try it a second time.

What I want to do now is try to share some of the reasons that I enjoy the book so much as well as the ways that I think Zen and the Art is a much more sophisticated and accomplished book than it is often given credit for. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book “of Zen”, “of philosophy” and “of motorcycling”. And in this essay, I’m going to start right at the beginning with the title to demonstrate some of my points.

Over the course of several readings since March 2014, the date of my second attempt to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it has become one of my favorite books. It has also been the launching-point for several personally-meaningful literary and philosophical inquiries. Before we go any further, let’s give the book its complete title and deal with the matter of repeating that title. The full title is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. In this essay and other places, I expect to contract that rather large mouthful to ZAMM. That contraction is not my creation but it is extremely convenient. Upon occasion. I may also say simply Zen and the Art.

Why do I enjoy this book so much? Perhaps, its arrival in my attention on that second go-round was ideally timed to my needs and to issues that seemed to be playing a big part in my life. Some might argue that I was just looking for the opportunity to indulge in some faux intellectualization and lifestyle-posing. I’m not going to quibble over the extent that such an argument might true. Let the critics have their fun. That’s the pose that they prefer to strike.

Instead, after considerable self-examination, I’m going to say that I think I enjoy Zen and the Art because of how accomplished the book is in its design and intent. And also how effective and evocative the book’s metaphors are. As a piece of literature, Zen and the Art seems capable of being linked to and celebrated with many of the English language’s literary classics. But I’m already leaping far ahead of where I really want to be. It’s also pretty fun to explore motorcycles, zen and philosophy.

Given how frequently the book has been ignored, rejected and scorned by critics of various types; and, given the significant amount of time that has passed since its publication – an admission of affection for the book could be considered something of a sidelining move. Does anybody take the book seriously? Almost certainly not in academia. I am aware of only a tiny handful of efforts to address Pirsig’s work by serious academics in the decades since it was first published. Most of those have focussed on the philosophical content and nature of the book rather than any literary merits it may have. When I say this, I’m referring almost wholly to Dr. Anthony McWatt’s academic thesis work and to Ronald DiSanto and Thomas J. Steele’s Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorycle Maintenance and the online MOQ.org pages devoted to developing Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Pirsig is just about as completely ignored by serious academic philosophy departments as he is by serious literature departments. I really have no idea whether serious Zen scholars or practitioners may be similarly disinterested.

And yet, there’s never seemed to be a shortage of people who are interested in the book and its ideas. Search the internet and there seems to be a substantial and growing number of articles, reviews, videos and indeed podcasts which engage with the book, the author and the philosophy.

That Pirsig’s philosophy is largely ignored or dismissed was not only anticipated by Pirsig, he covered it within the book. In fact, academic scorn (and, by the way, scorn for academia) are central considerations of Zen And The Art (ZAMM), so maybe this is all entirely appropriate to my state of affairs in deciding to devote so much time to it.

So what is ZAMM? There are plenty of resources that provide a brief plot summary or philosophical synopsis of the book. These resources will advise that ZAMM is a semi-fictional narrative about a cross-country father/son motorcycle vacation; that it is a critique of the human condition contemporary to the second half of the twentieth century. Some will suggest that it is a cultural exploration and a work of philosophy. Not manyof these sources will will suggest that it is actually a book of Zen nor that it is an attempt by a serious intellectual to develop an original metaphysical philosophy. Fewer still will mention that ZAMM is a critique of both Eastern and European Philosophy and Academia. Almost nobody talks about ZAMM as a critique of religion – particularly messianic religion. I haven’t seen anyone call ZAMM an epic monster story or supernatural thriller. It is rarely, if ever, declared a tightly-connected literary work. I would content that it is all of these things.

Many first-time readers find the book frustrating, challenging, annoying, offensive, dated or boring and the narrator to be frequently un-appealing. Perspectives of this type are likely to increase as time passes and we get further from the times in which Pirsig lived.

While many first time readers (myself included) are alienated by the book, many others have found it uniquely compelling. Millions of copies of the book have been sold since it was first published in 1974. Brand new copies may still be purchased at most bookstores on any day you may visit. More than forty -five years later. Pirsig and others will claim that there isn’t another book of philosophy that has been published in larger numbers. I’m not sure that this claim entirely holds-up. It seems to be a kind of superlative that suits marketing purposes. But then again, I haven’t yet seen anybody demonstrate the claim to be false.

Another thing that causes first-time readers concern (particularly reader in the twenty-first century) is the relative un-likeability of the book’s central character. ZAMM’s central character seems to be Robert Pirsig. The book seems to be a personal memoir of a particular motorcycle journey that Pirsig took with his son, Chris. Simultaneously it appears to be a memoir of Pirsig’s intellectual development over the first couple of decades of his adult life. But those perspectives may only be partially true. There’s every reason to believe its a bad idea to over-simplify what the book is.

It is probably more accurate to say that Pirsig used ZAMM to float a mythologized version of himself at different stages of live as a depiction of some ideas the wanted to showcase. I think of the book this way: Robert Pirsig was the actual author who cast an un-named narrator to tell the story of a mythologized earlier self. The mythologized earlier self is named Phaedrus – a name borrowed from the writings of Plato.

It should not go un-noticed or un-mentioned that the story’s narrator is never directly named. It is the narrator who takes pains to identify the earlier self as “Phaedrus”. It seems entirely likely that Pirsig was demonstrating some very Zen-consistent notions about the concept of “self” while also signaling that the narrator is not quite Robert Pirsig.

The narrator that conveys the story via a series of what he calls Chautauqua meditations. In contemporary internet-based culture, you can find any number of people that post “video blogs” (VLOGs) of their own Chautauqua’s as they ride their motorcycles.

The narrator remains un-named throughout the story and may be considered to be significantly closer to non-existence. It is an interesting entrée to Pirsig’s approach to consider what Pirsig may have been attempting to convey in this method of presenting and portraying identity. Which bring us back to the relative unlike-ability of the central character. It seems extremely unlikely that Pirsig, the real life author, was unaware of how off-putting the character is. Let’s pack that away for another day’s deeper consideration – but I want to suggest that there’s more to it than a lack of self-awareness on Pirsig’s part; let me also suggest that when a reader gets stuck on whether they “like’ a book’s narrator or for that matter, the earlier Phaedrus persona, this may result in a failure to proceed to a demonstrated point about the nature of persona. Perhaps also a demonstrated point about whether likability is a valid pre-requisite to insight or wisdom.

Despite anything nay-sayers may argue about ZAMM, it is an extraordinarily subtle and integrated creation from cover to cover. I would argue that it is too subtle to fully catch everything the book has to offer the first time through. At least, that has been my experience.

So let us begin before the beginning of the story with the title and author’s note of the book. It seems to me that, before the Chautauqua’s have even begun, this small collection of words provides a kind of lens or filter for approaching the book.

One of the classic images of Robert Pirsig, one of the classic ZAMM book covers and his Honda CB77 Super Hawk

The full title is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Immediately, the juxtaposition of two different and disconnected themes is set out. These are “Zen’ on the one side and “motorcycle maintenance” on the other. But it is important to note that Pirsig did not put the two terms in opposition to each other. He joined them by using the word “and”. It is Zen AND the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In needs to be clear that Pirsig’s use of the word “and” is not solely a bit of connect grammar. Certainly the word “and” is a necessary linguistic feature. It is a conjunction which helps us to understand that “Zen” is somehow distinct from “The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

But the word “and” is also a logical term. An “AND gate” is a basic digital logic feature which allows that a specific output is only allowed when multiple specific inputs are provided. In other words, Pirsig’s title allows placement of “Zen” as one input and “the art of motorcycle maintenance” as another at the front end of logic gate. The two are brought together for an output. They are synthesized.

By viewing the words, “Zen AND the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in mathematical terms, there is an interesting and elegant demonstration of the kind of inquiry that takes place in the book. A central theme of Zen philosophy is a rejection of dualism. It is reasonable in Zen to argue that “Zen” and “The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” are not separate and distinct from each other. Viewing the title as an “AND gate”, as a synthesis makes this point explicitly. You just have to be familiar with the language and be open to reconsidering your perspective.

This type of layered language carries on throughout the book. It is fundamental to Pirsig’s philosophical and rhetorical approach. For readers who are not comfortable with juggling a variety of conceptual notions while following a narrative process, this ought to be taken as a warning that things may be more complex than they may initially seem.

But let’s take a step back from logic gates and get back to those two initial themes.

In 19874, when the book was published, Zen was still a very new and mysterious topic in North America. Consider that Bruce Lee, who did so much to familiarize North America with Kung Fu and some basic Eastern Philosophy concepts had died in 1973. Similarly the book Zen Mind Beginners Mind, a collection of teachings of Shunryu Suzuki had been published in 1970. Zen Mind Beginners Mind is one of the earliest books published about Zen for the American market and is considered a classic.

In using “zen” in the title of his book, Pirsig was, essentially, an avant garde writer who was citing trends and information that was, too his initial audience, still foreign and rather mysterious.

Even now, some (rounded) fifty years later, mentioning Zen is marginally less exotic to a great many people on the American continents. In North America, perhaps 1% of the population may be identified as Buddhist and certainly not all of those are “Zen” Buddhists. While Zen may now be more familiar to Western culture than it was in the middle of the last century, if you mention Zen to most people, several stereotypical connotations may come up in conversation. Nature and peaceful, relaxed environments, such as Zen gardens. Perhaps minimalist home design, meditation and strangely paradoxical puzzle-stories. Contemplation. Further conversation may yield the question “Is Zen a religion or a practice?” (Yes.) And the Zen enthusiast? Maybe someone wearing pajamas or a robe sitting in meditation or telling paradox puzzle-stories with gnomish humour. Pristine, clean and sipping green tea.

As we’ve already noted, juxtaposed to the Zen is motorcycle maintenance. Chemicals, wrenches, oil & grease, noisy machines, stinky exhaust. A motorcyclist? OK let’s re-phrase that….a “biker”? Wild. Unpredictable. Violent. The most likely interaction scenario probably involves a fear of physical or verbal assault. Unkempt and barbarian-like, a biker will probably be described as wearing some combination of denim and leather; the biker, so the stereotype will go, guzzles beer (at least). While they may not be real any longer, these conceptions do need to be noted. Not long ago, one of North American televisions most popular shows exploited exactly these stereotypes.

The commonplace ideas of Zen and the commonplace ideas of motorcycles seem to be opposites to each other. They don’t seem to be the kind of things that one would require as simultaneous inputs to an “AND gate” philosophy.

But then again, Pirsig took pains to show off his Honda CB77 Super Hawk in publicity photos, even though the specific model of his bike wasn’t actually mentioned in the story. It’s a nice-looking bike. The CB77 was manufactured from 1961 through to 1967 with a 305cc parallel twin engine which produced just under thirty horsepower. Pirsig’s was all chrome and black and he considered it a highway machine. It was, compared to other Japanese bikes of the day, relatively small. Today, the bike would be considered rather small. The choice of a chrome and black bike Japanese bike doesn’t seem like an uncalculated decision.

In 1966 Honda had a popular advertising campaign built around the slogan “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda”. This wasn’t the veterans of World War II who established the biker image with Harley Davidsons and Indians. This was a shiny little Japanese bike. A friendly and engaging bike. To extend the point I’m trying to make in literary terms, Robert Pirsig’s generation and ethos should not b confused with Jack Kerouac and the bohemian hedonism of the beat generation…though they may have, metaphorically speaking, travelled some similar roads. At the time the book was presented, Pirsig was a 40-something year old father with a job and short vacation. He presents himself as a former academic and a middle-aged man with the challenges and pre-occupations that this implies. He presents himself as an educated everyman.

It also doesn’t hurt that his bike, like his Zen comes from Japan.

This difference is as essential to placing Pirsig in North American literation as is Pirsig’s AND gate juxtapositioning of seemingly separate things. To read ZAMM, you must be prepared to attempt to reconcile and synthesize concepts which you may have previously considered mutually exclusive. The book is anti-dogmatic, in its own way. Already in the title, there is a lesson in its philosophy. The title warns that the reader should be thinking about and through a Zen-like perspective. But also about and through a modern scientific, technological perspective.

Alexander Langland’s Craeft: Not the only book to follow ZAMM in investigation of the relationship of the individual to technology in modern society.

However, even in the simple matter of the book ‘s title Pirsig is still not quite done. Right in the middle of the title, Pirsig used the term “art” to foreshadow investigation of concepts from European Philosophy. Particularly Plato and Aristotle. He uses the word “art” as we might currently use the word “craft”. Art in this title and the book is not a throw-away word. It is a functioning and significant philosophical term. It establishes that the book will consider the matter of craftsmanship and aesthetics in a philosophical and practical context.

Considering Pirsig’s use of the word “art” brings to mind Alexander Langlands’ book Craeft: On How Traditional Crafts Are About More than Just Making, which explores several related concepts and reaches many similar conclusions. For that matter, ZAMM also came decades before a number of other books which either follow it’s formula or several of its themes. To list a few: RIchard Sennet’s The Craftsman, Matthew Crawford‘s Shop Class as Soul Craft, Alexander Langlands Craeft, Aaron James Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into the Meaning of Life, John Kaag’s Hiking with Neitzche: On Becoming Who You Are.

But we’re not done exploring the layers of the book’s title.

The subtitle is “An Inquiry into Values”. This subtitle’s use of the term “Inquiry” establishes ZAMM as a philosophical exploration while “values” sets the book within a particular area of philosophy dealing with ethics and aesthetics. So what is ZAMM? According to the title, it is a philosophical inquiry into values.

This is an important observation of the inclusion of the explanatory subtitle. Pirsig and the publishers did not set the book as a work of narrative fiction. Nor as an adventure travel book. Nor as a memoir. It was to be taken primarily as a work of philosophy.

With all of this happening on title page, the first thing one finds inside the book is an Author’s Note:

Author’s Note: What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.

As with the title page, every sentence and phrase here requires attention that can help the diligent reader to understand and follow the book. I contend that this author’s note is a kind of Zen koan (those paradoxical puzzles) for the reader.

A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality – Arguably, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism is the setting for Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality”

That this passage is called the “author’s note” hints at one of the challenging features of the book: identity. Over the course of ZAMM, the main character of the book is never explicitly named or referenced as “Robert Pirsig”. In most discussions of ZAMM, there is reference to “the narrator” and to “Pheadrus”. Through the course of the book, Phaedrus is revealed as younger and different version of the narrator. Generally, it is presumed that Robert Pirsig (the author) is both the narrator and Phaedrus. However, with the book’s inherent emphasis of separate identities, it cannot be assumed that the characters in the book are genuine depictions of Robert Pirsig and his friends and family.

The author’s note states that the events of the book are based on actual occurrences. So we can be reasonably confident that Robert Pirsig took a motorcycle trip with his son, Chris and a few friends. Indeed there are readily-available photographs of the trips as well as external interviews of people upon-whom characters in the book are based. Interestingly and tellingly, the term “actual occurrences” is strikingly similar to Alfred North Whitehead’s term“actual entities” from a book that is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and dense books of twentieth-centurty European philosophy, Process and Reality. Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” (what resulted in at least one recognized philosophical offshoot called Process Theology) is deeply embedded in Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Pirsig mentions Whitehead in ZAMM, though the reference is brief and may not at first be noted as a significant clue to Pirsig’s philosophy.

Another great classic ZAMM cover, you can almost miss “An Inquiry into Values”.

The author’s note states that the events have been altered for rhetorical purposes, but are basically true. Pirsig spends considerable time defending rhetoric in ZAMM. In reading ZAMM, it isn’t unreasonable to consider it a work of rhetorical argument. That this term is included in the author’s note is another hint of things to expect in the book.

Pirsig then ends by commenting that the book is not to be confused with an explanation of Zen or Motorcycles. Pirsig is playing a bit of a game here. ZAMM does not spend much time in explaining or analyze these things. Instead ZAMM demonstrates them in action. If meditation is Buddhism in practice, Pirsig presents motorcycling as an alternate practical form of Zen.

When discussing ZAMM it is difficult to avoid talking about one part of the book without also talking about other parts, as I have been trying to do. But I will break with my attempt to mention that Pirsig has used the idea of a “motorcycle” as a metaphor of the self. So when you read just about any passage that talks about motorcycles, you need to be simultaneously thinking about how those concepts relate to the self. So “the art of motorcycle maintenance” may be literally true about motorcycles but Pirsig is also exploring how the concepts and realities are also true of “the art of self maintenance.” With that bit of information, the title, “Zen and the Art of Self Care” might seem to be a more direct way to convey the subject. But that wouldn’t really have been in the spirit of Zen…and it wouldn’t have been as iconic as a title. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is memorable. Zen and the art of Self Care is forgettable.

Pirsig positioned ZAMM such that it should not be considered as fiction nor as non-fiction. As occurs frequently in ZAMM, Pirsig demonstrates a rejection of dualism in preference to synthesis. The book is neither fiction nor is it non-fiction. Like any mythology, it is both. He placed the book as a book of philosophy that depicts, rather than explains its philosophy.

At the beginning of this article, I argued that ZAMM is a book “of philosophy” and “of Zen”. I used that phrasing to indicate that the book is a product of those traditions and perspective. It is an outcome. It is a rhetorical depiction. It is an effect of those causes. It is the other side of the “AND gate”.

Even if I am correct about my interpretations of ZAMM as a book, none of that gives any good reason to take it seriously some fifty years after its publication. Certainly there has been much change in society that could displace any relevance that it might have had. But I think that ZAMM still has something to teach about our current times, even if those teachings are not always wholly correct or reliable. But then, isn’t that reasonably true about any philosophy or perspective that you care to mention? Primarily, I think the world needs much more ” AND gate”, synthesis-oriented thinking. I think Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality and its connection to Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism have insights that are needed by the world today. And, though it may not be very factual about them…the bits about Zen and motorcycles are fun too.

In many ways, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a much better book than many of its academic and non-academic critics, whether literary or philosophic give it credit for. If you haven’t read it – and if anything in this brief introduction tweaks your interest, maybe you should give it a try. Maybe you’ll find some unexpected insights that help you to live the kind of life you want to live and be the kind of person you want to be.

See Also
- Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 2
- Motorcycle Zen
- Quality
- Cosmology
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
References & Notes
- Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London. 1925.
- Granger, David A. John Dewey, Robert Pirsig and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. 2006.
- James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. The Macmillan Company. New York. 1898.
- James, William. The Meaning of Truth. 1909.
- Mitchell, Stephen. Gilgamesh: A New English Version. Free Press. 2004.
- Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. William Morrow Company (Harper Collins). New York City. 1974.
- Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books. New York City. 2020.
- Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. London. 1818.
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Footnotes To Buddhism’s Four Seals

February 18th, 2021
This essay was originally drafted as a reaction to Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s 2008 book What Makes You Not a Buddhist. I did not enjoy the book the first time I read it. Probably, I wanted it to be something other than it is. Now, a few years later, I appreciate it significantly more by taking an altered perspective. While I still don’t agree with or support what seem to be Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s motives in publishing the book nor some of his insights, the author does a reasonably good job of explaining the the “four seals” for a non-Buddhist to consider. There may be better and/or more authoritative books on Buddhism, but it is a place to start.

Khyentse suggests a number of ways that a person may not be a Buddhist but the main theme of the book is that affirmation of the “four seals” is the fundamental and essential gatekeeper. According to Khyentse, if you don’t endorse the fundamental doctrine, that makes you not a Buddhist.

“Four Seals” is another way of saying “four central doctrine” or “four dogmatic beliefs”. So what are they?
- All compounded things are impermanent.
- All emotions are pain.
- All things have not inherent existence.
- Nirvana is beyond concepts
Khyentse spends 125 pages explaining these doctrines and how they might apply to various aspects of contemporary human experience. As with my inquiry into the Lee Family Philosophy, this is not a book-review and I do not intend to reproduce the book in encapsulated form. This is an inquiry into the “four seals”.

Herman Hesse

Early in the book Khyentse suggests that these doctrine should be taken in a literal way rather than a metaphorical or mystical way. If one accepts that the authoritative definition of a Buddhist is a person who believes (affirms, acknowledges, supports or whatever term one might prefer) these four doctrine on a literal level, then I am certainly not a Buddhist. Mind you, there’s no particular reason to expect me to be a Buddhist. I didn’t grow up in a Buddhist culture or home. I’ve had relatively limited exposure to Buddhist practices (diverse as they certainly are). Even my literary and philosophical investigation of Buddhist-oriented literature is extremely narrow. I don’t even have an active ambition to prove myself to be any particular “ist”. But I have an active and respectful interest in Buddhist perspectives which has occupied a fractional part of my attention over several decades. Initially this interest began as a literary interest stimulated by Robert Pirsig’s books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila) on the one hand and Herman Hesse’s books ( Siddharta, Magister Ludi, Der Steppenwolf, etc) on the other. Perhaps it also comes of growing up during the 1970’s.

So the four seals.

What makes me not a Buddhist (per Khyentse) is that I can’t give all four of the doctrine a full and complete literal pass. That is to say, if we are to set metaphorical, mystical, rhetorical and other referential “truth perspectives” aside, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to affirm these doctrine. Two of the doctrine don’t provide reliable information while a third requires some grudging qualification of the terminology.

Terminoloy is a significant factor. There’s no certainty that the specific phrasing of the “seals” that Khyentse’s book presents is adequate to whatever may be intended of the concepts. Certainly, one may wonder, as with any text, whether the particular words, as rendered in one’s contemporary language contain the same meanings as in some other language and/or time. What if its just a bad translation? What if Khyentse’s definition of “emotion” or “pain” is different than mine? All philosophy must, tediously, begin with a definition of terms. However, given the assertion that the doctrine be taken literally, it must be assumed that some significant care was taken in word choice when the book was published.

Tentatively, however, moving forward with a generous (and perhaps mistaken) assumption that the language is precise, accurate, authoritative and may be taken literally, let’s have a look.

All Compounded Things Are Impermanent

This doctrine is, in my opinion, the most concrete and supportable of the four truths. The two sides of the equation that one has to deal with are “compounded things” and “impermanent”. It may be a quirk of my own that I find the most certainty in a doctrine which focuses on physics. Here we have space, matter, processes and time.

A.N. Whitehead

In Process and Reality, A.N. Whitehead used the term “actual entity” as a rough equivalent to “all compounded things”. Physics, specifically particle physics, shows how our reality of matter, space and process are composed of interactions and combinations of particles. This is “compounding”. Particle and interaction. Matter and process. Two particles combine or repel and there is a result. The result is a compound thing (entity). That compound thing may then further compound to result in an even more compound thing. Particle. Atom. Element. Molecule. Organism. Consciousness. Society.

Whitehead called his philosophy a “Philosophy of Organism”. This seems to be a philosophy of the doctrine that “all compounded things are impermanent” where the term “organism” may be roughly equated to “compounded things.”

The second factor in the term is more easily dealt with. Time. Duration. Buddhism, Whitehead and Physics all seem to be on the same page. Things that exist (compounded things, actual entities) are not timeless. They are not infinite. They have a quality of duration. They are “of time”. I would further suggest that time is equally “of compound things”. They are inseparable and inherent qualities of the same thing.

Score: If the “four seals” are considered each to be of equal value, I would rank my acceptance of “all compounded things are impermanent”, as so far explored, to be a full twenty-five out of twenty-five points.

All Emotions are Pain

This doctrine is, in my opinion, one that is least defensible as a literal statement. The terms “emotion” and “pain”, while occupying adjacent conceptual space to one another, do not necessarily refer to the same things.

Emotions include happiness, sadness, anger and other familiar concepts, but emotion also includes more complicated concepts such as curiosity. It seems simple to reconcile some of the more familiar emotions with pain, but there are a variety of emotional concepts which cannot readily be reduced to “pain”.

So what is “pain”. Physically pain is a kind of negatively experienced sensory input suggesting harm or potential harm to the organism within-which the pain is experienced. It is a neurological warning signal recommending aversive action. There are a variety of ways that the term “pain” is extended from this neurological-based definition to include other negative experiences. Whether it is appropriate and correct to lump all negatively-perceived experiences as pain or not may well be “to the point” of this doctrine. I tend to think this becomes an over-simplification.

For purposes of this doctrine, it also seems to be an over-simplification to suggest that all emotions are a warning of coming “pain”. It is an unreasonable extension. “Sooner or later you’ll suffer” or even the ability to extrapolate future suffering from the limited duration of pleasure is not the same thing.

It would seem to be more precise and accurate to articulate the doctrine as “all emotions eventually result in pain”, “all emotions lead to suffering” or even “ all emotional states should be perceived as a reminder of coming pain and suffering”. But that is not the doctrine, as typically rendered.

Note that I have used the term “suffering” but the doctrine does not. Pain and suffering are adjacent but separate concepts. Suffering is an emotion. To suggest that all emotions lead to the emotion of suffering is not as indefensible as all emotions are pain.

Score: “All emotions are pain” can’t earn a full twenty five points. There’s too much that requires qualification and/or re-definition of the concepts. That being said, some of these qualifications provide a valuable window to view human existence and experience. Provisional as any scoring might be, I’ll give this maxim ten out of twenty-five.

All Things Have No Inherent Existence

This doctrine seems to be a corollary of “All compounded things are impermanent”, or at least dealing with the same physics. The two factors are “things” and “inherent existence”.

Monism: one substance or two?

This statement of reality breaks down, as many things do, at the subatomic level. There is a suggestion here of monism – that everything is really a single substance. It is this single originating substance that has been compounded in different ways to result in the appearance of diverse substances. This hinges on explaining what “things” means.

A.N. Whitehead used the term “entity” and “actual entity”. If “all things” means there is nothing that isn’t compounded, there is the problem of how to categorize the pre-compounded monist substance. If the definition of “thing” excludes this substance, then that is a convenient way to validate this doctrine. Whitehead describes a primordial entity as an allowance.

Similarly, if existence is taken to mean “truly is”, it is paradoxical, at best, to argue for a monism where something both does exist and does not exist. Buddhist philosophy isn’t uncomfortable with paradox.

Score: as with the previous maxim, a problem I have with “All things have no inherent existence” is the absolute scale of the statement. I am able to full-on accept “all compounded things are impermanent” based on the qualification that the statement covers only “compounded things“. Still, this doctrine is largely, if not wholly, a corollary of the first. Fifteen points out of twenty-five.

Nirvana is Beyond Concepts

This is also a difficult doctrine as a statement of reality. “Nirvana” is a concept. It could be argued that “nirvana is a concept of that which is beyond concepts”. Khyentse’s urging that the doctrine be taken literally runs afoul of a doctrine which refutes that it can be taken literally.

Here it is almost impossible not to reference Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Philosophicus argument that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If one describes “nirvana” as a state of being, it is within conceptualization. And it also becomes fair game to examine. But all of mysticism hinges on some element being placed outside of understanding or comprehension.

Score: Buddhism, Zen and a variety of mystical fields often derive their attraction from their paradoxical-seeming principles. A suggestion that “human language is not adequate” should , in most cases, be modified to say “human language is not yet adequate”. That any given speaker or listener isn’t competent to explain at a certain point in time, does not mean there will never be competent speakers and listeners. Additionally, I don’t think this version of the doctrine is well-phrased by what may be intended by the doctrine. “Nirvana is beyond concepts” ranks lower than other versions of this doctrine that I’ve seen. If the doctrine were “Nirvana needs to be experienced, not explained”, then it would rank much more highly with me. As currently expressed, five out of twenty five.

Provisional Summary

Clearly, I am not an expert in Buddhist philosophy nor of the religions and practices that have been built upon it. I doubt that it is common practice to rank one’s relation to the doctrine as a percentage-score. But I like to quantify things, including the degree to which I am likely to integrate ideas into my thinking. That I agree with about fifty-five percent of these doctrine is interesting information.

It is also interesting to observe that if the “four seals” are taken to be the absolute foundation upon-which all the rest of reality is built, then there remains a great deal to be reconciled in the provided “literal statements”. I do not assert that these doctrine are “wrong” nor that those who may uphold them to be accurate literal statements of fact are in error. However, as statements of literal truth (fact), I find that they do not convince me beyond a generously weighted 55%. As predicted by the book title, I am not a Buddhist.

However, as cultural, metaphorical, rhetorical, mystical or referential statements, these doctrine are interesting and offer a particular kind of window to introspection – not to exclude the fact that some Buddhist practices upon which these doctrine are founded (eg. meditation) are extremely beneficial and worth exploration quite apart from the doctrine.

None of my reluctance to fully affirm the four seals as accurate, factual statements takes away from these statements as extremely helpful in an investigation of reality and existence. Quite the opposite – I recommend serious consideration of these assertions as a useful metaphysical starting point.

Engaging with ideas and ideals that may be different from your own may be a thing that needs to be done over the course of several discrete and separate exposures. In this way, it is possible to see how an idea different than you’re own may have applications that you can appreciate and understand.

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Footnotes to a Process: An Inquiry into Meditation

February 11th, 2021

On February 11, 2021, I decided to explore the practice of meditation. This is what happened and how I proceeded. In the lyrics Tragically Hip song, Courage, there is a passage which goes “There’s no simple explanation for anything important any of us do.” And with that observation in mind, I find the roots of my investigation of meditation in earlier events of my life.

For me, 2014 was a year of significant change stimulated by what seemed to be a multi-fronted storm of events in the previous twelve to fifteen months. 2014 was a year that I began to respond to all of the difficulties that I had encountered. I increased my pursuit of a number of philosophical and practical matters. In February of 2014, I decided that it would be the year I found out what it was like to ride a motorcycle – so I bought a 1980 Yamaha Maxim 550 XJ (images of the motorbike that may be seen on the virtual pages of this website). In March of that year, I also picked up Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to see what it was all about. It seemed to be a suitably hoakie “bike” thing to do. I didn’t expect to discover a book that would help me down several unexpected and delightful conceptual paths – including, eventually, meditation.

While I had some very limited awareness of Zen Buddhism and meditation earlier in my earlier life, I can comfortably trace my current exploration back to reading that particular book in that particular year.

So fast-forward a few years.

Immediately prior to my first genuine attempt to meditate, I had begun a second reading of Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. My first reading of the book was in 2017, when it was first published. I appreciated Wright’s examination of meditation and the (Buddhist) philosophical principles upon-which meditation is based.

Here I will note that I do not consider myself to be Buddhist (see Footnotes to Buddhism’s Four Seals). I did not grow up in a Buddhist household or culture; I don’t participate in any Buddhist organizations; I have a relatively limited knowledge of Buddhist thought, having read only a handful of contemporary books about Buddhism. But none of that suggests to me that meditation isn’t capable of observable impacts. Indeed, Wright lists several practical reasons why meditation may be a beneficial daily practice. I recommend reading Wright’s arguments.

I had also recently read an article where the author attempted to savage both meditation as a practice and contemporary western Buddhism as a religious context. In this article, the author’s primary argument against Buddhism (broadly) and meditation particularly is anecdotal evidence that may be summed up as “all that happened for me is that I fell asleep“. This was augmented by suggesting that other anecdotal evidence amounts to a lot of over-educated Western elites who appreciate the aesthetic experience of a Buddhist lifestyle. A reduction of the argument: it’s all a bunch of pretentious twaddle with no science backing it.

If I’m honest, I found the article easily as pretentious as those it criticized. Reading a small handful of books with practical tips and a serious mind would have prevented both falling asleep and approaching meditation with expectations of major change on a few occasions. Wright’s book also provides a starting point to investigate scientifically-validated evidence that meditation does have an impact-to or alteration-of brain activity.

And a starting point to attempt meditation as a practical experiment.

Anything I experience will necessarily be anecdotal evidence. I don’t have any clear expectations. But here’s the thing. I have decided that I will place my meditation at a strategic position in my day. None of this…let’s try it at bed time stuff(meditation is not sleep preparation) nor any let’s start the day with it malarkey (it’s not gonna happen – plus I’ve already attempted to schedule Tai Chi exercises in the morning – see Tai Chi in the Morning). No. I am scheduling the meditation exercise at the end of my formal work-day and before the evening’s chores and recreation begins.

Currently, I work in a home office and therefore stepping away from my desk and toward an appropriate place to meditate will be simpler than during the several decades of commuting that I used to engage and endure. Then again, maybe all that driving functioned as a form of meditation.

At that time of day, I am usually still alert, though often fatigued and in need of time away from a screen.

Up-front acknowledgement: my early meditation attempts have not been “daily” but have been frequent enough to be a meaningful routine, if not quite a full-on habit.

Before launching into the documentation of my various experiences with meditation, it may be useful to explain what it is exactly that I am “doing” when meditating. This seems particularly useful as it seems to me that there are different forms of meditation – that is to say, different sets of cognitive processes that people undertake when referring to meditation. Since there are different processes, what I’m calling meditation may be significantly different than what someone else calls meditation.

Coming to this process as I am from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I typically take as my objective, the Zen meditation process called zazen, or “seated meditation”. More particularly, I am following the Soto form called shikantaza or “just sitting.” I don’t have any particular story (in Zen, koan or guided meditation) nor external stimulus (for example music or hertz-based tones) that I focus on. My objective is to sit and watch as thoughts (what I sometimes think of as distractions) come and avoid engaging in them. It is a process of concentrating on not-thinking. With that being said, I often find that it is useful to engage some tactics, particularly early in the sitting session to calm my mental activity.

Meditation One

On my first day of meditation, I approached the activity with as much pragmatism (practicality) as possible. Even though it wasn’t a regular work day for me, at approximately the same time as I would usually finish work, I prepared for the meditation. For me, this meant putting on loose-fitting track pants, a t-shirt and a zip-up hoodie. It’s the same stuff I wear for Tai Chi in the morning.

Next, I chose a quiet room in the house where I could sit reasonably comfortably for the session. I chose to darken the room by closing the curtains. I also chose to forgo any kind of background music or sounds. My plan is to reduce external stimulation to a minimum. I expect this to boost my ability to focus on my breathing. During this session, there was little outside or distracting sound. Essentially all I had was the periodic shuffling of the dog competing with my tinnitus.

With meditation, particularly Zen meditation, the matter of posture seems to be a big thing. As an outsider, it even seems as though it has been ritualized. I’m tempted to consider this an exaggerated issue. Per the previously cited criticism, I’m not looking to replicate an iconic pose nor reproduce an aspirational “lifestyle”. I want to see if meditation seems to have an effect on me.

I found the Zen Mountain Monastery web-page on the subject to be a comforting and valuable resource. Not least because practical and reasonable arguments are included for adopting one of several postures. Foremost of these is that meditation requires a person to be aware, awake and relaxed. The objective is an engaged attempt to observe one’s mind (also noted in Wright’s book). Second, by sitting with a straight back, I may be able to breathe in a different way than when sprawled, reclined or even laying down. Diaphragm expansion. These seem practical reasons.

“Homeless” Kodo Sawaki Roshi

It is difficult to tell whether Kodo Sawaki, pictured here, is in a full lotus or something else. Sawaki, a renowned figure in Japanese Zen Buddhism has been cited as saying zazen is good for nothing. That’s pretty much a Zen puzzle and seems to deal with at least one of Buddhism’s four seals. I’ve also referenced Sawaki in titling these writings as “footnotes” (see On Footnotes). He argued that all of Buddhism is a footnote to zazen (meditation).

But back to posture.

Even in my more-flexible youth, I could never comfortably sit in the full or half Lotus positions for more than a few seconds. Now, at more than fifty years of age, it isn’t going to happen. However, I can achieve something that approximates the recommended Burmese position and that seems to have worked. I manage to remain in essentially the same position for half an hour to forty-five minutes. I was relaxed and awake. Great start.

As for the duration and as already noted. First session: half an hour. I’m not sure whether thirty minutes is a recommended duration for a meditation session. Practically, however, it makes sense. It is long enough to be a meaningful period of time but not so long that it is likely to be interrupted or filled with an is-it-over-yet anxiousness.

Once in the position, There was an adjustment period to let my body relax. Shift the legs a bit. Notice my hunched, tensed shoulders. Deal with the perpetual sinus issues. Distraction by the tinnitus in both ears. Physical discomforts. I usually deal with these kinds of things reasonably well, anyway. As we get older, we settle into our discomforts.

As to thoughts. Again, I am reasonably well-aware of how thoughts and emotions come and go. Even in my teens, I was aware of the volatility of emotions and recognized a personal need to detach and self-dampen the urgency of emotions. I wasn’t surprised or irritated with myself when thoughts came. Nor was I particularly surprised by their contents. It was unbidden material, but mostly predictable stuff from my day-to-day life. But I also didn’t pursue these thoughts for long. Only once during the thirty minutes did I find that one thought had led to another and another before I was aware that it had happened.

In Robert Wright’s book, he referred to thoughts thinking themselves. It’s this observation that your brain is producing thoughts without the active direction of your pre-frontal cortex. Unbidden thoughts.

For many years, I have discarded physical objects which I believe may bring with them unbidden emotion. Relating this to unbidden thoughts, Wright refers to “affective associations”. It is the “baggage” that people will (usually derisively) talk about. I actively eliminate physical objects that may bring unwanted “affective associations”. If meditation allows one to similarly discard unbidden thoughts and emotions (and their affective associations), then that would be a valuable outcome of meditation.

I found myself exploring the different places in my body where breathing occurs. How it feels. Diaphragm. Lungs. Nose. Mouth. This was a kind of thinking as well. Having experienced pneumonia, a pulmonary embolism and a chronic cough, I’m already well-tuned to notice the various physical sensations that accompany my own breathing, Indeed, during my morning Tai Chi, I have incorporated some deep-breathing in an attempt to improve the experience. Noticing isn’t a problem.

I’m not an overly mental-image-driven person. I thoroughly enjoy art, architecture and the collective wonders of light and vision but vivid “movies” of my life or experiences don’t play for me when I close my eyes. I can, with concentration, create images but my thoughts are not driven by visual images.

I ended the session feeling positive, relaxed and aware. Thirty minutes of engaged non-stimulation. A bit refreshing.

February 2021 Meditation Two

On my second day of meditation, I was able to replicate all of the preparatory details and the duration of the meditation period. Indeed, the duration may have been slightly longer.

My second day was a regular work day for me and this may have impacted the experience. I found it more difficult to become physically settled, although the hunched shoulders were no better or worse. My cough was slightly worse, probably a factor of medication timing. Overall, more thoughts distracted me from focusing on and counting breaths. The thoughts continued slightly more frequently, though I don’t think they were any more pressing or urgent. The content of the thoughts was little different, being related to my day-to-day affairs and the relatively small number of people I have personally met and interacted with in recent years.

What was most distracting was thoughts that arose as a kind of answer to the question “what will my brain come up with as I avoid trying to think about anything”. It is a ludicrous proposition. Overall, I focused on my breath less than I did the first time. I easily had a ten-to-one ration of fuss and distraction to concentration. For a period of time I had success studying the grainy blackness that appears when I close my eyes in a darkened room. The tinnitus in my ears was less intrusive. I did not end feeling as refreshed as the previous day, but I felt slightly more relaxed and energized than spending the same number of minutes with a screen of some kind.

February 2021 Meditation Three

For this meditation, I delayed the activity approximately one hour, which time was spent walking the dog plus a brief interval of screen time after the walk. I needed a bit of time to shake off the cold February air before trying to meditate.

Again, things didn’t go as well as my first day, but better than my second. I would rate my fuss and distraction (F&D) to concentration as seven to one. My range of thoughts remained dominantly within my day-to-day but I had a few more distant memories occur and a longer sequence of thoughts that seemed to take over a period of time. I had recalled a car I once owned (automotive pre-occupations are a familiar thing for me) and recalled certain features of the car. The interior, the overall exterior design, the motions of the manual transmission.. Notwithstanding the extended distraction, I would rate my focus as reasonable.

The most interesting barrier to concentration has been the dilemma of anticipating that I am about to experience some unplanned thought and wondering what it might be. This anticipation, although not directed at any particular thing, is interesting because it seems to be counter-productive yet it also seems to be part of the process.

February 2021 Meditation Four

This experience seemed to be slightly more aligned with my first meditation than the intervening two. I was able to remain detached from thinking for longer periods. Within the forty minute period, there was one fifteen minute period when my persistent throat irritation as well as my tinnitus went essentially out of my attention. I began by attempting to observe different part of my body and noticed I was able to isolate and observe various parts of my my body. First the tension around my eyes. Now the position and feel of my shoulders and arms. Then the posture of my abdomen, And so on. This directly led to physical irritations receding in my awareness. Strangely, I had one incredible urge to make a distorted face.There didn’t seem to be a preceding reason or thought to this urge.

Thoughts persisted to arrive with one extended period which challenged me to consider the difference between a dream and a pursues thought. Generally satisfying.

February 2021: Meditations Five To Ten

These sessions have been either a waste of time or have shown no real reason to offer further comment. On one session, I wasn’t ready-to-go and so it was a half-an-hour in a dark room. Another session I completed a 20-minute Tai Chi practice immediately prior to the meditation. I found the time to be more restful on that occasion.

I even tried a routine of lifting weights for twenty-time minutes, practicing Tai Chi for twenty minutes and finishing with a thirty-minute meditation session. This routine seemed as though it might yield a maximum effect of meditation as the exercise could provide both a clearing of physical tensions as well as a period to let stray mental activity have their play. It didn’t quite work out.

Periods of Not Meditating

Following an initial enthusiastic plunge into meditation, I encountered a bit of a lull in my daily commitment. This is to be expected as any new routine can take a while to establish itself. In my case, the habit was broken-off as a result of far-more established life patterns asserting dominance over my time.

During this first period of not meditating, did I notice any difference in my thinking, feelings or general sense of health? Not that I could attribute specifically to not meditating. There was some disappointment in myself for letting the practice slide. Self-recrimination for an ambition not properly pursued. Certainly also that time went to other things, some of which may have been an even bigger waste of time and energy. So which is the real affect in that scenario…the absence of one practice (meditation) or the presence of the substitute (other stuff). That’s a bit of a problem that is difficult to solve when the study population is one.

Well I had a bit of a break. Time to re-assume the position!

Onwards Meditations 11- ? – A One-Year Synopsis

Over the course of my first year of attempting a regular meditation routine, the most significant barrier I encountered was the seemingly simple task of making the meditation a priority at some part of my day. Even in a life as manageable as mine is, I will find other things to occupy my time. My initial optimistic plan to schedule meditation to occur after the work-day was rendered impractical when an alteration of my work schedule saw me occupied with the demands for eleven consecutive hours per day. At the end of that schedule, I simply wasn’t up to other kinds of activities. As 2022 begins, this temporary scenario altered and I find that I can again plan to meditate in the early evening hours after the work day is finished.

When reading about or speaking-to people about meditation, I have often come across statements that people find attempts to meditate lead to falling-asleep. Since my conception of meditation centers on remaining alert and focussed, but not engaged, this has seemed to be an awkward and counter-productive situation. Fortunately, I’ve only had it occur once. My error was to attempt meditation immediately after completing an exercise routine of cycle-training and weight-lifting. While I wasn’t completely fatigued, I thought that meditating after this activity might work. as I would be more physically relaxed. It turns out, I ended up essentially falling asleep while sitting-up – something that normally doesn’t happen. So it makes sense to avoid meditation at certain times of the day when maintaining and alertness consciousness may not be easy.

Welcome New Year

Interim Summary

I do not have a prescribed end-date for this experiment. I’ll let it go as long as it is interesting. I still have little doubt that incorporating a routing of meditation in my day-to-day activities may provide real and measurable benefits. I can’t conclude, yet, however, how this may best be implemented. This essay will be updated from time to time as I have more (or different) things to say.
Footnotes to Plato: An Inquiry into The Apology of Socrates

February 4th, 2021
The Apology of Socrates. How does a professed non-expert, non-academic person of the twenty-first century begin a meaningful inquiry into one of European philosophy’s most archetypal stories? It may be reasonable to assume that professional philosophers and academics have said or written all that can be, or at least needs to be, written about it.

And yet, I am motivated to examine the text and the subject matter from the perspective of my own particular perspectives. Perhaps it is the fact of being a non-expert, non-professional inquirer, that entitles me to the observations that follow. Well, I guess we shall see if I have some observations that are worth their own weight.

My copy was printed in 1980!

Before we get into the meat of this essay, I’ve posted a reading of Benjamin Jowett’s 1877 translation to the podcast. No doubt there are better and more professional dramatizations of the Apology available out there…but I hope that what I’ve put together is a modest credit to the podcast and worth a listen.

When I read translations of Plato, Epictetus or some other ancient work of literature (and indeed literary philosophy), I’m somewhat reluctant to spend much time worrying about whether the wording has been faithfully and accurately rendered. I want the text to be approachable and pleasant but I’m not looking for precision. I want the translator to get the situations and the context right more. If the picture is clear, I’m willing to forgive a certain loss of granularity. This is how I am looking at this work now. If I were attempting to work through a different kind of text, I might want far more granularity and be willing to let the overall clarity go. So we’re going to be looking at the overall situation and the rhetorical intents more than on how any single idea may have been phrased.

Let’s start with the basic question of what leads me to inspect Plato‘s The Apology Of Socrates at this time. Well first, I recently finished a reasonably detailed examination of the first Chapter of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I need to take a break from that. It seemed like a good idea to get as far away from the twentieth, and indeed this twenty-first, century as I could while maintaining some connection or perspective on Pirsig’s work and insights that may be useful in living the kind of life I want to live. Well it seems at though I can reasonably go back about 2500 years or so to Socrates, Plato and the Sophists.

Image (and Featured Image) Courtesy of an image search via a search engine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

One of my favorite history of philosophy books is titled The Story of Philosophy and was published by Will Durant in 1926. The first time I read it, I had a soft-covered edition. Currently I have a 1953 hard-cover edition put out by Simon and Schuster. I read it from cover to cover every few years. Not only do I continue to appreciate Durant’s writing style, the book contains a diagram that I find almost endlessly compelling. It provides a schematic and timeline of the relationships between various philosophers:

I’m mentioning this because the chart provides a simplified – and perhaps oversimplified – diagram to trace relatively contemporary thinkers and their perspectives back through centuries of time and layers of thought to earlier manifestations or iterations of the same or substantially similar ideas.

There’s a similar function if you look into anyone who appears, for example on Wikipedia,…you can find not only depictions and explanations of their life and thoughts but also links to who they influenced and who influenced them. And eventually you can trace these things back to their earliest knowable influence. If this were archaeology, it is a dig into the relics of an ancient civilization. Each layer of detritus revealing what it can. If this were geology, its the laying-bare of layers of sentiment as though they were layers of sediment.

None of this is to suggest that ancient roots of an ideology convey or substantiate any kind of validity to any given perspective. I’m not suggesting that a thought communicated by a long-dead person is either more or less supportable because its been around for a long time. Quite the contrary, there’s every reason to think that centuries of investigation and knowledge have provided any given thinker with access to more information to reach better conclusions. However, it is valuable to see how generations of thought evolve over time as one thinker after another tests and pushes at ideas. It’s also useful in the case of this particular work to see how some very human situations don’t actually seem to have altered in their fundamental character – though the particularities of the times may have.

These charts are interesting to trace the history of ideas that influence your own thoughts and perspectives and help to inform you where you are. Taking a comment from my observations of Zen and the Art – Pirsig’s narrator used the metaphor of dead-reckoning as his primary method of navigation yet still carrying a compass in his pocket for times when it may be needed. We can be comfortable and even confident with our ability to navigate our lives based on our own understanding of our thoughts, ideas, emotions and the rest of it. But sometimes it is handy to have a compass to lend some independent perspective on how far we’ve come. We can look at the events and issues of The Apology of Socrates and judge where we are relative to these things and also against the contemporary events and circumstances.

If Durant’s chart were to be updated to include a new layer at the bottom, I might suggest that lines be drawn from Bergson to Alfred North Whitehead and FSC Northrop and thereby to Robert Pirsig. Another line might connect Russell and Whitehead. Perhaps the names of James and Dewey would be accompanied by Charles Sanders Peirce. Perhaps also the name Thoreau might be pencilled-in. And all of that says nothing of the Zen (or more broadly, Eastern) names and lines that would need to be drawn. Nor the more conspicuous literary figures either.

As I have explained in other articles, my interest in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM) has taken me down many different roads. Certainly ZAMM includes several direct and indirect references to Plato. But it also includes reference to, and draws significant inspiration from, Alfred North Whitehead – particularly his comment that all of [Western] philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. The chart in Durant’s book provides some perspective, on what Whitehead meant, how Pirsig’s philosophy may relate to other philosophies and why I think “footnotes” is such a relevant term for my explorations.

There are other works by Plato that are more directly connected-to, or aligned-with, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance than The Apology of Socrates. I’m thinking here of the Phaedrus dialogue and I expect to eventually complete an examination of Phaedrus, but The Apology of Socrates (along with Crito and Phaedo) seems to be Plato’s acknowledgment that all of Plato is a footnote to Socrates. For that reason, I’m going to start there and get to The Phaedrus later.

Further to this, the Apology of Socrates seems to be a text that is extremely relevant to contemporary events and society. My own recent review of the apology reminds me of certain evergreen concerns and situations that we encounter.

What is an Apology?

Currently, when we use the word “apology”, we usually refer to an expression of regret. Perhaps we have failed to fulfill an obligation or we have offended someone. As a Canadian, I’m very conscious of the stereotype that Canadians are often ready to be apologetic and it is in this sense of the word “apology” that the Canadian trope arises. Here in 2022, Canadians have plenty of cause to examine this stereotype and our national attitude toward many of the issues in this ancient story.

Given that Socrates was on trial for corrupting the youth and for not believing in the gods of his state, it would be reasonable, based on our contemporary understanding of the word, to assume that an apology by Socrates might be an expression of regret for his failings and/or offences. But it isn’t.

In the context of this text, the word apology uses an alternate meaning – which is a formal and reasoned argument, an explanation or defense of a theory or doctrine. While reading The Apology of Socrates, what we find is an address intended to defend Socrates against legal, and frankly – ideological, charges and accusations.

This is a significant difference in meaning, given that an expression of regret implies that an apology-offeror acknowledges, to one extent or another, not only the fact of a failing or an offence – but also some culpability (or blame) for that failing or offence.

An explanation or defense of a theory does not necessarily imply these things. The Apology of Socrates, in our more contemporary language might more insightfully titled The Justification of Socrates. And indeed, the secondary connotations of the word “justification” and it’s root, justice would give a title like that some added irony and punch.

Given that Socrates was on trial for corrupting the youth and for not believing the pervasive doctrine(s) of his day (i.e. not believing in the gods and ideologies of his fellow citizens), the distinction between the two potential meanings of apology is vital to a reading of the text and perhaps also to our experience of matters in our contemporary society which variously: require explanation ; require an expression of regret; mandate some form of culpability. It is a matter which Plato included in the final passages when he takes time to argue that he never intended any harm to his fellow citizens, though he was quite aware that he did offend him. We really should struggle with the relationship between intent and culpability.

Before we dig into that….

Who was Socrates?

I’m not going to offer any kind of historical perspective or thesis of who Socrates was within the context of Athenian society beyond what is available within the Apology. Not because it’s not an interesting subject, but because the Apology sets out the critical details that we need to know. I’m going to use contemporary language to drive home my points:
- Socrates was the child of blue-collar parents but was not himself one of these;
- Socrates was not a public official but had a history of military and public service;
- Socrates was not a journalist nor any kind of paid writer;
- Socrates was not a tenured professor; nor a professor emeritus;
- by the time of Socrates’ death, the family wealth was either modest;
- at the time of the Apology, Socrates was a septuagenarian
Based on these characteristics, it is clear, whether using ancient Athenian or modern standards, Socrates was not a member of the powerful circles of society but had nonetheless lived a reasonably comfortable life.

Socrates had influence and followers. People, particularly young people, listened to Socrates and enjoyed hearing him tear down the powerful who claimed to be wise. In essence, Socrates was a counter-authoritarian. That is not the terminology that Plato used to describe him, but that is what he was.

Socrates was not a professional comedian. He wasn’t a poet or satirist. But, people found entertainment in Socrates’ ability to pick apart the presumptions of those who would set themselves up as authorities. He was not merely a critic, in the contemporary sense because he didn’t set himself as an expert pointing out other people’s wrongs. He was a non-expert who recognized his own inexpert status without feeling that this non-expert status required that he concede authority to those who did perceive themselves as experts deserving of respect and deference.

Now I’ve mentioned several disparate things that may deserve to be tied-up together and I’m going to do that in a few moments, but before I dig into those problematic themes…I have a brief motorcycle-themed interlude that I’m calling….

Aprilia Pegaso – Socrates may have considered one in his younger days.

What Would Socrates Ride?

I’m going to allow myself a frivolous and frankly ridiculous line of speculation at this point. What Would Socrates Ride (WWSR)? Socrates didn’t leave Athens, except during his military service, so he wouldn’t have needed nor probably been interested in big touring bikes, adventure bikes or dirt-bikes. Although it is tempting to wonder if Socrates might have appreciated a side-car rig. So let’s set those aside. I think we can also discount supersports for similar reasons. I’m tempted to suggest that Socrates would have done well on an old Aermacchi or a Vespa125 Supersport (or even better a 250 GTV). But these don’t honestly sit well.

What actually comes to mind, in fact is some kind of road-owning trike. The kind of rig that Billy Connolly rode in his exploration of the United States: Billy Connolly’s Route 66. An unapologetically kicked-back chariot to brave political predators and take up residence in the Prytaneum.

What Would Socrates Ride?

Now that we have Socrates thundering along on a suitable ride…let’s get back to those problematic themes that I suggested needing tying-together. To recap, what we have in The Apology of Socrates is a play about the justification of a child of blue-collar society who happens also to be a non-professional critic of the powerful and the presumptive ideologies they profess. Socrates is a counter-authoritarian – one whose goal is not to oppose authority but instead to limit it’s ascent.

Well here in 2022, there may well be renewed reason to consider our attitudes toward those serious-minded individuals who do not hold themselves out as authoritative experts but feel there remains a vital need to limit the relentless ambition of the powerful. There may be plenty of reason to ask ourselves if Socrates position that it is better to know that you don’t know than to proclaim that you do know when in fact you don’t. I expect those are quite enough hints why examining The Apology of Socrates in 2022 is an important feature of Zensylvania,

Culpability

With that slight diversion satisfied, let’s get back to the matter of culpability.

Near the end of the Apology, Socrates states that he did not intentionally wrong anyone. That is not the same as saying he did not intend to offend anyone.

Socrates’ position seems to be that offending others, if it is the result of an attempt to do them good, is not a wrong. Seeking truth and exposing over-reaching or un-supported authoritarianism is not, in Socrates’ view – anything that carries culpability.

Socrates was trying to “right” others – even if it offended them. And this is an important point. Are we culpable for offence when it is not intended? Are we capable of offense when it is intended?

Are we culpable for our influence on others when we speak publicly? To what extent are we the stewards of our effect on others, whether those effects are intended or not? For Socrates it was a matter of death. Today it may be the matter of a person’s career and livelihood – that is to say the ritual/symbolic public death (the equivalent of banishment, the ancient origins of “cancel culture”) that is achieved via financial and social ruination.

What Was Socrates Accused-Of?

The trial of Socrates suggests that some citizens in his state felt that he was culpable for not believing in the gods of his state and for corrupting the youth. These are such distant accusations, that it is valuable to restate them in something more familiar and precise.

Not believing in the gods of his state. Buried within this accusation is an accusation of atheism. That is a red-herring which Socrates uncovers in the text. More accurately, Socrates is accused of not following the pervasive and authoritative doctrines(s). Implied by this accusation is a failure to submit to the public claims to authority and wisdom if he found them to be insufficient.

The accusation of “corrupting the youth” is a veiled objection to Socrates’ freedom of speech. The real suggestion is that Socrates has communicated things that some of his contemporaries do not approve and that this has a negative effect on the community, Particularly the youth.

But what Socrates was on trial for – the technical crimes he was charged-of are not fully and earnestly the reason Socrates was on trial. Early in the work he establishes that his accusers aren’t earnestly concerned with these matters. They have feigned a concern with these things in order to be able to attack Socrates.

What Was it that Led to Socrates Being on Trial

Socrates was on trial because he failed to
- recognize;
- defer to;
- respect;
- submit to;
- acquiesce to;
- obey
the claimed wisdom and authority of people who claimed to be wise and authoritative experts and leaders. More problematically, he openly challenged and exposed others to ridicule.

Socrates’ story is an ancient version of “I won’t behave as you want me to.”

I neither know nor think that I know… the vast majority of evidence of Socrates behaviour is from Plato and there’s no reason to believe that Plato was an impartial witness. It seems hardly likely that Socrates didn’t think that he knew…or he wouldn’t have developed a dialectic method and habit designed to tear into other peoples. ideas. The practical evidence is that he did think that he knew when someone else was wrong…there are no dialogues by Plato of the many time that Socrates had conversations with people who knew what they were talking about.

It is possible that Socrates wasn’t just disrespectful, but also discourteous….have a go at others, entertain the kids. But no hint that he was productive.

Socrates’ product o output is not characterized by Plato as friendly and persuasive mentorship. Socrates’ trade was derision and humiliation. Who were his friends…the rich kids. Oh great…..A kind of Falstaff…..no?

Image Courtesy of Flickr

Gadfly

For those who study philosophy, Plato’s use of the gadfly metaphor is a favorite. The goading questioner.

Socrates’ claim to be a gadfly is compelling today because we can readily imagine an irritating biting, stinging insect. It was even more compelling in 399 BCE. Socrates’ gadfly is in fact a metaphor drawn from the Greek theology of his day – what most of us call Greek mythology today.

Aermacchi Chimera
(A leading contender in the WWSR competition)

Bellerophon was one of Greek mythology’s favorite characters. He was a slayer of monsters. His greatest feat was killing the Chimera, a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s and a serpent’s tail. Bellerophon was the character that captured and rode Pegasus, the winged horse. His divine assistant was Athena, who provided a magic bridle. Bellerophon was such a big deal that he eventually got too big for his britches and decided to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus to be among the gods. The gods (i.e. that is to say, the authoritarians), didn’t appreciate it. Bellerophon was being arrogant. He presumed too much. So Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus which soon had Bellerophon falling off his winged horse and falling back to earth. Fellerophon, who had been blinded after falling into a thorn bush, lived out his life in misery, “devouring his own soul”, until he died.

Pegasus, by the way, completed the flight to Olympus where Zeus used him as a pack horse for his thunderbolts. So it didn’t end so well for the winged-horse either.

Nobody seems to be clear on what happened to the gadfly.

Bellerophon and Pegasus

Socrates claim to be a gadfly is a kind of culturally-appropriate and theologically-grounded explanation of his role within his society. In justice, he should not be considered guilty of standing outside the pervasive doctrine when he is able to place his behaviour within that doctrine. It was a clever ploy to escape the charge of rejecting his society’s gods. Even though it didn’t work.

It didn’t work because the trial was never about the gods – it was about not showing deference and respect to those who set themselves up as authorities.

Politicians , philosophers, poets, artisans

Socrates makes clear that he knew he was irritating to just about everyone he encountered. It didn’t seem to matter who you were: poet, artisan, politician – Socrates didn’t mind having a go at you. As a character in a story, someone like that is valuable rhetorical device for exposing information. In real life, however, a person like this can be a pain in the ass and unwelcome company. So, in the spirit of considering all sides of the story – it is worth a thought or two about Socrates as a prospective family member or neighbour.

Socrates is a fellow who seems to be living off some kind of inheritance or other laid-away wealth. There’s little or no evidence that he has any practical occupation that requires his attention. In the apology, he claims that trying to find someone wiser than himself has been a full-time occupation. He does seem to have spent a bit of time in public service and feels comfortable grilling whomever he pleases with the goal of showing them just how smart they aren’t. And he knew it was annoying.

So how do we feel about someone in this position. No real job, just goes around grilling everyone. Socrates was as comfortable wiggling out the pretentious wisdom of politicians, poets and average workers. Of the latter, he says, ..because they were good workmen, they thought that they knew all sorts of high matters. Socrates, or perhaps in this case, Plato, seems to be suggesting that good workmen ought not to be getting above their pay-grade with opinions about high matters. I’m not going to spend any time exploring how this comment relates to matters Plato delved more extensively in The Republic, but we can acknowledge that the connection is there. Noble lies and all the rest of it.

Sooner or later, someone who has nothing better to do than prove just how smart everyone else isn’t is going to find some trouble. The snidely good advice that you ought to do something to improve yourself rather than wasting your time being annoyed by someone who pointed out your deficiencies doesn’t is no real kind of obstacle to taking a metaphorical or literal poke at the self-righteous arse.

Well, some folks decided they’d had enough of Socrates. They availed themselves of the opportunity to take a poke. Socrates says that …a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying , he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong… and is Socrates right to make it his occupation to, usually rudely, point out others’ deficiecies? Well in contemporary society we have comedians and we generally appreciate their work unless j(or until) we’re the target of it.

There may be a truth that …if you kill me you will not find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadly, given to the state by the god; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life…...but then again, how much wisdom does it take to be aware that the Socratic method doesn’t really work.

It’s arrogant and is more likely to lead to a bloody nose (literal or metaphorical) on the practitioner than a thankful embracing of self-improvement by the subject.

Refuses to Whimper and Snivel

Some of the most powerful and compelling lines in The Apology of Socrates is when the character declares that he is unwilling to cower, snivel and pander to evade punishment by the court. While there are two significant passages, the second is I think the better:

…I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting and saying and doing many things which….are unworthy of me…I would rather die having spoken after my manner than speak in your manner and live.

In a person’s life, it is probable that they will face moments when some person or persons in authority are standing before them in what can only be termed confrontational judgement. At those times, that authoritarian carries the courage of their power and position. For most of us, those situations will not be life and death matters, as thye were for Socrates. Perhaps more common scenarios might be an employer in some disciplinary moment, a police officer when handing out a ticket for some minor infraction, or a teacher, journalist or some other public official when dispensing some social expectation. Whichever it may be, who is not aware that some of these authority-dispensers expect sniveling compliance and not dignified rejection of such behaviour?

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I cheated in that heading. It should say “Lila”, “Metaphysics of Quality” or even “Robert Pirsig” rather than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But ZAMM is the more familiar reference and I’ve used it for that reason and also because Zensylvania promises to spend time on motorcycle zen.

In Lila, Pirsig describes a community outlier in the character of the “Brujo”. This is a person who is both a member of the community and an outsider. A member of the community who is also a challenger to the established traditions and authorities of the community. The brujo may be sensitive and suited to a possible future of the community rather than its present. I suspect that Pirsig viewed himself as a “brujo”. Socrates is a kind of “brujo”.

Socrates describes having visited an oracle who set him on his journey to prove that he is not wisest man and in the end determines that the only wisdom is knowing that you don’t know much -if anything at all. In ZAMM, Pirsig’s oracle-visit moment occurs when a member of the faculty asks Pirsig if he will be teaching “quality’. Pirsig slams up against something that he’s supposed to be teaching but can’t. So Pirsig, if we’re to believe that his books are genuinely based on his life, found himself in a Socrates-like predicament. Even if Pirsig’s character’s felt themselves to be aligned with the Sophists rather than with the Academics.

It may surprise anyone who hasn’t read ZAMM that the book seems to spend far more time on questions of pedagogy and a questioning of academic authority and beaurocracy than it does on motorcycle maintenance.

Always when considering ZAMM, its essential to recall that it is a book about maintaining your self. The Apology of Socrates presents a kind of ultimate ideological dilemma for any idealist to consider. Socrates key declarations:
- I’d rather speak in my own manner and die, than live and speak after yours;
- An un-examined life is not worth living;
- Authoritarians need their loyalty challengers – the alternative is worse;
There are plenty of ideologically-oriented people out there who will argue that a person must have a metaphorical hill they’re willing to die on.

The vast majority of ZAMM is the story of the Phaedrus character – a character who was so un-able to maintain himself that he was treated with electro-convulsive shock therapy and had his personality liquidated. The story is told by the un-named narrator who appears to have rather better at self-maintenance – to the extent that he managed, in the final pages of the book, to re-integrate the ghost of his earlier identity and to achieve a kind of reparation of the alienation from his son. Pirsig’s narrator doesn’t drink the hemlock. So true to his thesis that we don’t have to pick between the dualistic horns of bull-headed dilemma. Dying by our own word or living by someone else’s aren’t the only options. There may be choices other than kool-aid on the one hand and hemlock on the other.

A life may well be worth living regardless of the examination.

The Apology of Socrates remains an extraordinarily relevant text for anyone that may wish to examine the ideological disputes of their day. Indeed, it is an “evergreen” text that will remain a pervasive and persuasive text. Largely because it appeals to a kind of romantic idealism – it carries a certain bittersweet disappointment in “the times that we’re in”. Disappointment in the fact that these will always be the times that we’re in. There will always be cabals making exclusive and exclusionary claims to authority and wisdom; there will always be individuals who refuse to blindly and deferentially capitulate to the claimed authorities. Whether we call them gadflies or brujos hardly seems to matter.

Zensylvania Copyright © 2020-2022 by Eric Adriaans. All rights reserved.
Footnotes: Tai Chi and Movement as Metaphor

January 26th, 2021

Who hasn’t heard or seen Tai Chi described as meditative movement? It’s an extremely appealing description. As a beginner, I can’t claim to have attained a meditative state. After six or eight months of not-quite-daily practice, the flailing of my limbs is starting to require less conscious effort and feels less awkward. When I think of the movements and even while performing the movements, I am struck by the metaphorical nature of Tai Chi.

To help explain what I mean by the metaphorical nature of Tai Chi, I’m going to posit a definition of Tai Chi. At the most practical and fundamental level, Tai Chi is a formal collection of 108 human movements. This practical definition is a denotative type of definition. It describes only the thing in itself. Just the movements of Tai Chi without anything else. The most basic fact of Tai Chi. All of the elements of meaning contained in my suggested definition refer only to the physical practice of Tai Chi.

Any definition that would move beyond this basic, practical definition would have to include elements of meaning outside of the physical practice. Any extended definition would be more connotative in content and would communicate information about the broader world.

For example, if I modified my definition to say Tai Chi is a formal collection of 108 specific human martial arts movements, the definition becomes dependent upon what “martial arts” may mean. To say “martial arts movements” connotes (infers, imbues) additional meaning that has nothing to do with the movements themselves.

Such added connotative elements of meaning would be relational or metaphorical in nature. Tai Chi is replete with these connotative and metaphorical meanings.

The Movements Themselves

108 movements is a lot of movements and I will not attempt to evaluate them all in this article. But I do think it is worth exploring the metaphor of one or two of the movements.

One of the most iconic of Tai Chi’s movements is “Single Whip”. Even if a person doesn’t know the name and hasn’t practiced the motion, it is instantly recognizable as Tai Chi. Of itself, the motion is just a motion. The arms and legs moved in a particular set of patterns. But observing it immediately conveys “Tai Chi” and/or “martial arts” to whoever the witness may be. It probably also suggests a number of other things, based on that witness’s experience. But at the barest minimum, it says “Tai Chi”. This one motion is a symbol of Tai Chi and a symbol, if not quite a metaphor, for martial arts. By suggesting “Tai Chi” or “martial arts”, the single whip movement communicates information not only about itself, but about the broader cultural world.

Singe Whip Image Courtesty of Wikipedia: Tai Chi Single Whip (or Taichi Single Whip) is an outdoor sculpture by Taiwanese artist Ju Ming, installed in Montreal‘s Victoria Square, in Quebec, Canada

Consider also “Calming Waters” or “Calming the Waters”. This simple movement is one of my favorites exactly because of the metaphorical value that the movement communicates. In this movement, the Tai Chi practitioner stands in a ready position – legs slightly apart, feet pointed straight ahead and apart. The feet may be only slightly apart or perhaps up to 12-18 inches apart. The arms are in a resting position. Then one raises their hands up to shoulder height, palms out and slowly lowers them to a horizontal position with the arms not extended. There is no pressure or tension through the arms. As one of the feet steps forward and about 35 to 45 degrees to one side, the arms extend. At the apex of the step, the arms are at their maximum extension within the movement without having stretched or locked the arms. There’s no tension in the movement. At the apex, the arms begin to withdraw from the extension with a slight outward circular motion, remaining in the horizontal, where each hand traces a half circle and returns to nearly meet at the body. During this motion, the Tai Chi practitioner shifts their weight from the ball of their foot to the heal and the toes are raised from the floor. The motion of extending arms is repeated and weight is shifted back to the ball of the foot. The movement’s entire cycle is repeated as long as seems needed and then the Tai Chi practitioner returns their arms and legs to their ready position. The same motion for the other side may be attempted or some other motion in the Tai Chi practitioner’s routine may follow-up.

This is “calming the waters”. The motion is a metaphor of calming or smoothing out a horizontal surface. Observing the motion, it is an elegantly simple routine. Performing the motion is wonderfully easy and relaxing. It also conveys the idea of smoothing out a surface. Of itself, “calming the waters” is a sequence of movements. When observed or performed, it suggests other matters. Perhaps it calls to mind walking in a shallow pool. Perhaps it suggests smoothing out the difficulties and hassles of daily life.

Naming of the Movements

108 is a lot of different movements to remember, so they aren’t denoted by numbers. Instead, each of the movements has been given an evocative name such as “single whip”, “brush knee” or “calming the waters”. It is much easier to remember the movement referred to as “brush knee” than if it had been called “Movement 23”. “Brush knee” is a connotative name that conveys an idea of what the movement might be. “Movement 23” would be a denotative name that could be found in a nicely-ordered manual, but the name itself wouldn’t tell you anything about the movement.

The names of the movements, as a function of their mnemonic value, have a metaphorical value. The names are memorable because they are metaphorical – they refer to something else. They connote meaning. When I perform the movement called “calming the waters”, I am not literally (denotatively) calming any water. The movement is not even a pantomime of calming water The movement refers to the action only as a mnemonic device and as a metaphorical ideal.

Tai Chi as Poetry of Movement

Each movement within the 108 movement set known as Tai Chi is both itself, the denoted movement and the metaphorical name that has been applied to it. This is the beginning of the poetry within Tai Chi.

In an art where each movement has imbued metaphorical values, the complicated dance that emerges from combinations of these movements approaches a poetry. Instead of aural rhymes and rhythms, there are rhymes and rhythms of movement. During my practice, I include frequent returns to “calming waters” as that seems to be what my Tai Chi is currently about.

Tai Chi as Metaphor for Physical Combat and Living

As a martial art, Tai Chi is a symbolic representation of physical combat. It is not physical combat. Indeed, there are martial arts critics who are enthusiastic to indicate that Tai Chi is not an effective physical combat methodology. To whatever extent this is correct, I am not terribly concerned about whether Tai Chi makes for good combat. What cannot be denied is that Tai Chi is a movement metaphor for physical combat. It is an idealized form of what combat may be. By extension, Tai Chi is also a metaphor for living and engaging with the challenges and problems of life. Not everyone actively views life as a set of conflicts and problems to be engaged, but Tai Chi provides a set of physical movements to express whatever may be their perspective and experience.

As a symbolic or metaphorical representation of engaging with life, Tai Chi is a wonderfully expressive art form.

Tai Chi as Meditation in Movement

I’ve already admitted that a meditative state while practicing Tai Chi is currently outside my ability. I simply haven’t put the hours in for the movements to be comfortable, natural and effortless. For those who do attain a meditative state during their practice, I expect that the metaphorical qualities of the movements must either entirely subside or entirely transcend during the practice.
On Footnotes

January 23rd, 2021
A footnote is a brief reference, explanation, or comment which is usually placed below the text on a printed page or a subordinate part of an occurrence, work, or field of interest.
Original Essay

See Also

References & Notes

External Links
Signs of a passing.
Original Essay

Every now and then in Zensylvania, we get a bit meta and referential about things. You’ll notice that many of the essays and inquiries are titled as “Footnotes to”….something. Footnotes to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Footnotes to Niksen. Footnotes to Being Water. Etcetera. While all of this footnoting may seem a bit overdone and repetitive, it isn’t without much consideration and, I hope, good reason.

In philosophical, religious and broader academic studies, it is fairly common for works to be titled or subtitled as “inquiries”, “studies” or “meditations”. While these are all valuable terms within their academic traditions, in Zensylvania, we have some reluctance to imply that our non-expert and generalist musings are a part of any kind of expert studies. Neither are essays in Zensylvania necessarily intended to be criticisms, reviews or polemics. If you’re looking for expert opinions, they aren’t to be found here. What you’ll find here are footnotes.

So, what exactly is a “footnote” and why are there footnotes (dare I stay, footprints?) all over Zensylvania?

Merriam-Webster defines a footnote as… “a note of reference, explanation, or comment…usually placed below the text on a printed page“. A secondary definition says that a footnote is something “that is a relatively subordinate or minor part of an event, work, or field of interest.“

In Zensylvania, inquiries and contemplations about living a life are not considered to be the life itself. Whether we’re exploring zen, tai chi, motorcycle, literature or any other matter of life, these musings are really only footnotes and minor parts of the real thing. Life is the real thing.

Designating the collection of observations, musings and insights as footnotes was inspired by two disparate and, at least for me, inextricably linked areas of investigation. More particularly, I am citing specific comments by two very different thinkers from the early twentieth century. Alfred North Whitehead and (Homeless) Kodo Sawaki.

Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. While Whitehead’s name may not be overly familiar today, in 1929 Whitehead published one of the twentieth century’s most startling, sophisticated and complex works of original philosophy…Process and Reality.

In Process and Reality, Whitehead wrote that…”The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Wow! What a line. For a philosopher, that was a collection of sharp words indeed. And, it was not Whitehead’s only insightful comment in the book.

The second inspiration for placing so much emphasis on footnoting comes from Japanese thinker, Kodo Sawaki.

(Homeless) Kodo Sawaki Roshi was one of Zen Buddhism’s most highly regarded contemporary(ish) teachers. Sawaki has been widely attributed with the comment that…”All of Buddhism is a footnote to zazen.” Like Whitehead…that wasn’t Sawaki’s only profoundly insightful comment.

I have no information about whether Whitehead and Sawaki were aware of each other’s work or perspectives. What strikes me is….the similarity between the two comments. It can’t be ignored.

Separated as they were by only 20-years in age, the two thinkers appear to me as if they were contemporaries. This perception is probably almost wholly incorrect. Whitehead worked as a philosopher and mathematician in England and Sawaki was a Zen Buddhist priest in Japan. But they both used that metaphor of a footnote to convey something about their work.

Their comments were directed to utterly different genres of thought and philosophical traditions. Still, it is entertaining to think that Sawaki and Whitehead might have appreciated each other’s outlook – if only they’d been aware of each other’s work. Indeed, based upon the modest exposure I’ve had to their respective writings, I expect they would have found agreement on several other matters as well.

The sameness of their comments is an elegant and profound underscoring of the similarities and differences between the Buddhist…and perhaps more broadly, Eastern…. philosophy and the European…and again, perhaps more broadly, Western… philosophy. The emphasis on action and practice in the east. The emphasis on theory and words in the west.

“Footnotes” seems to be the most apt explanation of what Zensylvania articles are all about. They are explanations and explorations. They are references. They are comments. They are subordinate parts to the subjects that they cover. They are documentary footprints to living a life.

For all of that, I hope that they are have some interest and value for visitors to Zensylvania.

See Also
References & Notes
- Item
External Links
1. https://www.etymonline.com/word/cycle?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_521
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Footnotes to Being Water: An Inquiry into The Lee Family Philosophy

December 6th, 2020

As a happy coincidence to my decision to practice of Tai Chi, I stumbled-upon Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee at my local public library. The book clearly acts as much as a bridge to Shannon Lee’s podcast as it does the Lee family’s legacy and philosophy. Naturally, all of these things are interconnected. This broader connectedness led me to title this essay as An inquiry into the Lee Family Philosophy (LFP).

It is the rare person that does not have at least a passing awareness of Bruce Lee, the martial artist and cultural icon. Notwithstanding a general awareness of Bruce Lee and his family, I have completed no other study of Bruce Lee or his ideas as they may have been originally documented or expressed. Shannon Lee’s book serves, therefore, as the initial and primary conduit to whatever I may learn of (or through) Bruce Lee and the LFP.

This outlook is not intended as neither a slight to Bruce Lee nor a particular compliment to Shannon Lee. Clearly the book identifies Bruce Lee as the primary source and inspiration of its themes and ideas. Equally clearly, Shannon Lee is the book’s author and the current curator of the ideas it contains. It is an acknowledgement of their several roles and contributions to suggest that the book is a king of collaboration between these two Lee family members. Collaborated may seem an odd term to use given that Shannon Lee did not have the opportunity to discuss these ideas with a father who died in 1973. It is however, the best term to convey a unique intimacy of ideas as they have eddied through a family over the course of multiple generations.I feel justified in this approach given that Shannon Lee wrote in the introduction of the book, “It might surprise you that I am not that precious about the material. I’m not a Bruce Lee purest about anything other than his energy. I do not practice an academic exactitude with his words. Where I have found it useful to illustrate what I want to say, I have combined quotes and edited quotes to make them more digestible.” (pg. 7) More on this a bit later, but I am pleased to follow a similarly non-academic position.

As mentioned, I decided to read Be Water, My Friend as an extension of a personal objective to learn and practice Tai Chi. Bruce Lee is famous for having practiced and trained in Kung Fug as well as for developing his own martial arts system, Jeet Kune Do (JKD). Be Water, My Friend, is not a book which explicitly promotes JKD, nor is it a deeply detailed book about the martial arts. For me this is fortunate, as I am almost wholly devoid of interest in physical combat. Excepting where LFP utilizes physical combat as an operative metaphor, there seems to be little reason to spend much effort to maintain JKD as an irreplaceable element of LFP. The book does argue that there is Importance in having a physical manifestation of one’s philosophy. For Bruce Lee, that was JKD. For others , something else may be more appropriate.

The book would comfortably be considered a “self-help” genre book. It is about a particular perspective of life and living. Shannon Lee seems to have ambitions that Be Water, My Friend be considered a book of philosophy. Such an ambition may or may not be a reasonable desire, depending upon what a person considers “philosophy”. That is a genuine consideration. There are professional philosophers who reject popular and non-academic approaches. However, if one considers the attributed writing of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius (the Stoics) to be books of philosophy, then there’s good reason to label Shannon Lee’s book the same way.

LFP concepts, ideas and expressions are frequently similar to ideas I have encountered or investigated elsewhere, even if not (yet) documented on this website. What Shannon Lee has done in Be Water, My Friend is to collect and re-present her family’s interpretation of these ideas that anyone may find with a certain degree of investigation. It is a curated and customized collection of wisdom.

I do not intend to try to reproduce every salient point of Shannon Lee’s book nor will I pretend to present all that there may be within the Lee Family Philosophy. This isn’t a recitation of someone else’s ideas nor is this a book review. This essay is an interpretation of what one person has found in the LFP and how it connects with related notions and inquiries. These are footnotes.

The LFP Foundational Maxim

Following the handful of nearly-blank title pages that sits at the beginning of most books, Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee begins with an exhortation, presumably written by (but not expressly attributed to) Bruce Lee. The exhortation functions as a foundational maxim of the Lee Family Philosophy:

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. You put it into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. Now water can flow, or it can crash! Be water, my friend.”

As printed in the book, the above exhortation appears as lines of a poem might. In this essay, I have reformatted the exhortation as a paragraph because it seems to suit the exhortation better than the format I found in the boo

Does the form of this small passage matter? It does and it doesn’t.

It may be reasonable for the passage to be considered a poem given that it uses imagery-laden language and metaphor to convey a particular message or meaning. The words also seem to have been chosen with some care to be evocative and memorable. There is a rhythm. However the reach me like a prose paragraph. As a poem, I would not be satisfied.

The passage feels like a technical instruction. There is a linearity to the communication that is not as playful and exploratory as a poem ought to be. I appreciate the explanation that water may take on the shapes of the containers it is poured into. I consider the ways that this applies to my practice of Tai Chi or my way of experiencing and living.

However, it does not matter how the words are conveyed on paper. The words are only a stand-in for a view of reality that is being described. The poetry or prose doesn’t matter…it’s an understanding of the need for fluidity that is important. As will be explored later, the words are just a finger pointing to the moon. To get caught up in the gesture of the hand misses the point.

This difference of possible presentations – poetry versus prose helps to feature a difference between Tai Chi and other martial arts. I would say that Tai Chi is a poetry of martial arts where Jeet Kune Do, karate and many others are the practical prose of martial arts.

Tai Chi is a formal system and collection of movements that serve as a metaphor of combat; many other martial arts are combat.

Be Water

Clearly, the central Lee metaphor is to “be water”. The introductory exhortation is a call to the audience to personify the flexibility of water as it responds to its environment. The depictions of water within various vessels is to suggest that people should adapt to the circumstances within which they may find themselves. It is an exhortation against inflexibility and rigidity.

In Philosophy for Polar Explorers, Erling Kagge re-tells what he calls a “Classic Zen Buddhist pilgrim’s tale” about a wrestler named O-Nami. You may currently find a version of the story on “The Liar” blog. The tale describes a wrestler who visits a Zen teacher where he learns to meditate and overcome personal obstacles. O-nami, which means “Great Waves” was given a similar message to “be waves”. The similarity of LFP’s “Be Water” and O-Nami’s “be waves” is to establish that each is a particular version of a metaphor within a larger archetype.

Empty Your Mind

The entreaty to ”empty your mind”, is a familiar refrain from Buddhism, meditation and other methods or philosophies. It is a requirement to adopt an attitude of openness, or a beginner’s mind. The concept that “emptying” of one’s mind of pre-conceived notions, judgments and expectations is requisite to progress is not unique to LFP. Nor exclusive to Asian philosophies. Certainly Rene Descartes required this at the beginning of Meditations on First Philosophy.

“Some years ago I was struck by how many false things I had believed, and by how doubtful was the structure of beliefs that I had based on them. I realized that if I wanted to establish anything in the sciences that was stable and likely to last, I needed—just once in my life—to demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations.“

There is a similar requirement for receptivity, though expressed in very different terms, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria:

“it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith“

Daoism, Zen, Buddhism

LFP is clearly linked to Daoist Philosophy through Bruce Lee’s teacher, Yip Man. This connection is clearly demonstrated in the exhortation to “be whole”. This is a reference to ideas of the completeness of yin and yang.

The second chapter of Be Water, My friend is largely devoted to the requirement to empty one’s mind. There seems also to be a strong connection to Zen concepts. Shannon Lee also states that her father followed (Jiddu?) Krishnamurti.

On page 43, Lee writes “There is only ever the right here and the right now.” As a stand-alone statement, I orient this as LFP but heavily drawn from Daoism and Buddhism.

LFP as a Process Philosophy

According to Bruce Lee, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” (pg. 8). This position recalls various perspectives of reality and even tends to suggest the notion of being as “becoming”. In this, I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. A thorough review of that book is currently beyond the scope of these brief notes. For now, I will merely observe that “life is a process” is not inconsistent with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.

In Be Water, My Friend, LFP asserts that a physical practice, or implementation, is essential to any philosophy of living. As a martial artist, Bruce Lee’s physical implementation was Jeet Kune Do; for Robert Pirsig, the practice of riding a motorcycle was the manifestation; for another person, it may be painting, sitting in Zazen, practicing Tai Chi or some other process. The reality is the physical practice, the process.

Flow

In the book and on the podcast, Shannon Lee spends considerable time on “flow”. In my investigations of this concept, I found psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which he seems to have been promoting in an academic environment since the 1970s. Certainly contemporary to Bruce Lee’s practical approach to the same subject matter. With the rather rigorous investigations of flow as part of physical, and by this I may actually emphasize athletic, experience, it is no surprise that the concept is found in LFP, which emphasizes a need for a physical enactment of the philosophy.

LFP as Metaphorical Expression of Life

The configuration of the LFP within a set of metaphors is not novel nor are its individual precepts entirely unique. That really isn’t the point. The LFP is a particular tributary of larger bodies of thought.

A personal philosophy (and one may almost interchangeably use the term “personal mythology“) functions, for the individual adherent, as a lake fed by the tributaries of concurrent and previous iterations of the philosophy. In turn, the personal philosophy may function as an estuary to a larger sea of cultural mythologies and ultimately the global oceans of universal human mythologies. This reminds me of an essay by Umberto Eco titled The Liquid Society. Eco had drawn the term, Liquid Society, from Zygmont Bauman as a depiction of contemporary society. The essay is work reading.

Shannon Lee argues that “martial arts is a perfect metaphor for life. There are few disciplines where the stakes are so personal and so high as in a fight…..the threat of physical harm.” (pg. 11). While I do not fully agree with this position, it is a compelling argument. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig uses motorcycling as a metaphor for living – emphasizing motorcycling’s inherent dangers as the symbols of life as inherently dangerous. Similarly, Jules Evans published Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations in 2012. There is something odd about this trend to view life and living as inherently dangerous, or in the case of LFP as inherently a situation of competition and conflict.

When Shannon Lee suggests that martial arts is a perfect metaphor for life, or when Robert Pirsig does the same with the motorcycle as a metaphor of the person, they are offering a lens through which they believe insights may be gained.

Lee’s depiction of the martial artist as an ”artist of movement, expressing yourself powerfully in the immediate, unfolding present with absolute freedom and certainty” is romantic and, perhaps exciting but nothing about this passage suggests that competition and conflict is necessary. It could as readily refer to a figure skater or a Tai Chi practitioner.

Translating philosophy from ideas to action. Avatars not metaphors.

There is, however, a parallel communication, and that is the LFP as avatar of Bruce and Shannon Lee and “the metaphysics of quality” as avatar of Robert Pirsig. These philosophies “are” Bruce Lee and Robert Pirsig. When Shannon Lee states that she is a purist of her father’s energy, she is talking about the avatar of Bruce Lee. The philosophies are informational artifacts of the person. They remain in the place of the people after they are gone. In a note that Pirsig wrote about his books Lila and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he described a “pattern” of people after they had died – in his case, he was describing his reactions to his son’s death. The pattern he described is that avatar that I describe and the “energy” that Shannon Lee is a purist of.

Certainly other kinds of avatars can and do exist. Some people leave a great many avatars, others none or almost none. Any artifact may be an avatar. In the case of Bruce Lee, his films are an avatar. How he moved and acted on the screen, embodying his martial arts is translation of his ideas into action. Robert Pirsig’s Honda CB77 Superhawk is an avatar. It’s functioning as a machine is a translation of his ideas into action. Any crafted thing, and here I include written documents and poetry (especially poetry), is a translation of ideas into action.

Provisional Summary

The LFP contains several deeply-embedded cultural sources, but attempts to set itself apart. Shannon Lee shares a story of Bruce Lee’s early attempts to share and teach a modified version of Wing Chun Kung Fu. He wanted to shake off what he called a “Classical Mess” to include his own innovations. In this sense, Bruce Lee was a modernist.

Bruce Lee brought Asian martial arts to North America but also sought to innovate within those traditions. Lee studied philosophy at the University of Washington to help him to “infuse the spirit of philosophy into martial arts.” Lee had a drive to connect the physical practice of his life. The process of his life with a coherent philosophy. Shannon Lee helps to communicate that drive (albeit, using terminology from Czikmentmihalyi) when she wrote “This state of constant independent inquiry that leads to new discoveries will be the means by which we uncover our potential and thus find our flow”

For LFP, the literal translation of Kung Fu as a skill achieved through hard work and discipline connects to another exhortation to “be yourself”. The specific metaphor….motorycles, JKD, Tai Chi, or whatever it may be is not the essential thing. “Man the living creature , the creating individual, is always more important than the established style or system.”
Footnotes to an Archetype: An Inquiry into “Leviathan”

December 2nd, 2020

In 2016, I published a small collection of poems which I titled Leviathan: The Biographia Isocratica of Adrian Kun. The title poem, my “Leviathan”, continues to be one of my personal favourites. I wrote the first draft of that poem about twenty years earlier. “Leviathan”, the word and image that I used as the poem’s title is a metaphor and archetype drawn from a vast source of cultural reference. This essay is my renewed exploration of the mythologies of great sea monsters, under whatever name they may be found. To me, they are all “Leviathan”.

My poem is a convenient and personal point of departure to explore how and why humanity relates to the world through the metaphor of the great sea beasts, real and imagined. I expect the essay to grow over time as I am able to devote time to this particular inquiry. Whatever you may find here today could be altered tomorrow.

What is Leviathan?

Leviathan is, potentially, any great sea monster or beast. Leviathan may be a sea dragon, the great white shark, Moby Dick, the kraken, megalodon, the kun form of the kun-peng.

The leviathan is one of the primal human archetypal concepts with origins in pre-historic societies. Quite possibly the archetype is hundreds of thousands of years older than the civilizations of humanity. I am convince that it is an archetype rooted in our evolutionary ancestors’ understanding of their natural world. My expectation is that a conscious and intelligent awareness of vast and powerful sea creatures pre-dates the Homo sapiens species. I doubt there has been a version of humanity that has not been aware of, and wary of, the creatures of the deep.

Self-absorbed as humanity tends to be, it may be valuable to recall to our own attention that there had been creatures of the deep long before there was a Homo sapiens. Sharks appear in the fossil record before trees. 450 million years. Primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago. Homo sapiens, what we might call “contemporary humans” have existed for about 300,000 years. Leviathan are the creatures that came before us.

These vast and preceding entities which humanity has so rarely understood….these archetypes of primordiality….necessarily became a fundamental metaphor of human experience which was exploited by a wide variety of individuals and cultures. Leviathan is a primary-order symbol that acts as a foundation for other symbols and metaphors.

Shark as (safely) seen at Ripley’s Aquarium in Toronto circa 2013

Eric’s Leviathan

Despite the deep-roots of the leviathan metaphor that I was exploiting, the poem was not originally written with any intent to explore natural history. Instead the poem was an attempt to invert and re-position notions of the individual within a social and political structure as presented in Thomas Hobbes’ work of political philosphy.

My poem ends with a claim that “I am massive, I am Leviathan.” This declaration is a staked claim to the common and universal potentials of humanity; it is also an acknowledgement of the unseen components of my self that I sense swirling beneath the surface of my immediate awareness.

When I was a young student of literature, I focused my attention on Canadian and British literature and was not aware of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself when I wrote my Leviathan poem. Today, it would be a foolish endeavour (beyond humbling) to compare Whitman’s tremendous poem to my brief scribble. However, I see that I was expressing similar notions to Whitman when I read his extraordinarily similar line, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

As “Leviathan”, individuals have the potential to be more, and different than what may be seen. The metaphor draws on an inversion of a concept employed by Thomas Hobbes in his political philosophy book, also titled Leviathan.

Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published a massive work of political theory through which he re-purposed the Leviathan metaphor. Hobbes’s use of the metaphor was to describe a national collective as the “Leviathan”. When all of the people are combined and united, they are a monstrously-powerful force, symbolically headed by a monarch. Hobbes’ Leviathan is an argument for monarchy but it is also an argument for a social contract that recognizes all people within a society.

Why did Hobbes use a monster to represent the human collective rather than some other metaphor? And why a sea monster rather than a land monster, such as Behemoth – another awe-inspiring Biblical creature that would have been familiar to his contemporary readers?

The choice of Leviathan seems, in part, to be based on the etymology (linguistic background) of the word itself which may be broken into root words of “lavah” (to connect or join” and “thannin” (a serpent or dragon”. The first root word establishes interconnectedness of the people. This was an important feature of Hobbes’s philosophy. The second root word has deeper cultural roots.

Clearly, basing the metaphor on a biblical source was familiar to his audience. For a Christian nation, as England certainly was at the time, the Biblical Leviathan was a familiar concept. Serpents and dragons are ancient concepts in England’s mythology such as St. George and the Dragon, Beowulf and other ancient tales. Symbolically, Hobbes extends the English (British) identity beyond merely slaying the dragon, to embodying and superseding the dragon. Hobbes is saying, when we unite, we are the monster others may fear….or as in the Biblical quote “no greater power”.

The use of sea monster also established a connection to the sea as a place of power for Britain.

Underpinning all of these associations is a awareness and sense of awe for the mysterious, immense and powerful creatures of the ocean.

Artist Not Known: This is one of the rare “Leviathan” depictions I’ve found online which I think captures the sentiments of Job 41:1 with a retained sense of naturalism.

Leviathan of Job 41:1

Given Hobbes’ use of the word “Leviathan” and the massive influence of the Bible on global culture and literature, it would be beyond reason to omit the depiction of Leviathan in Job 41:1. Despite this being a biblical passage, we will set aside any theological analysis and focus on the awe-invoking depiction of amonster of the deeps:

“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house? Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears? If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing it is false; the mere sight of it is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse it. Who then is able to stand against me? Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me. I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs, its strength and its graceful form. Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth? Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between. They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted. Its snorting throws out flashes of light; its eyes are like the rays of dawn. Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds. Its breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from its mouth. Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. The folds of its flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable. Its chest is hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone. When it rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before its thrashing. The sword that reaches it has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin. Iron it treats like straw and bronze like rotten wood. Arrows do not make it flee; slingstones are like chaff to it. A club seems to it but a piece of straw; it laughs at the rattling of the lance. Its undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge. It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment. It leaves a glistening wake behind it; one would think the deep had white hair. Nothing on earth is its equal- a creature without fear. It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud.“

In Job 41:1, Leviathan is specifically named. There are a variety of other biblical references which seem to equate Leviathan to dragons and sea monsters.

It is clear that the creature being invoked was expected to be familiar to its contemporary readers as something as far beyond human conquest. This was power and strength incarnate. Unbeatable.

It is easy to see how and why Hobbes’ might want to invoke this image as something the British people might aspire-to. In a time when Hobbes described the average human existence as nasty, brutish and short, a political treatise offering to make the British people a nation of kings over all that are proud would have been appealing.

Howell D. Chickering, Jr.’s Dual Language edition of Beowulf.

Beowulf

Considered to have been originally composed in the eighth century, Beowulf is a gate-keeper to English literature. Not long ago, most students of the literature of the English language were expected to study the poem. While that kind of literary attention may or may not still be a feature of contemporary literary studies, this epic poem absolutely contains a valuable usage of the Leviathan archetype. And I’m not talking about the dragon that Beowulf fights at the end – though, there is a fundamental link between “leviathan” and “dragons”.

Beowulf, the character, is a prototypical warrior-king. Over the course of the epic poem, Beowulf’s heroic deeds are recounted. A lengthy depiction of derring-do. Beowulf is a “hero” in the sense of that the character is presented as a kind of ideal. A person of action, intelligence, courage, strength, humour and loyalty. Within the context of the eighth-century (if not entirely in the twenty-first), Beowulf is the person who would and should be a king.

A Karl Kopinski Artwork: An image that may not be dircectly inspired-by Beowulf, but which captures many of the key elements of human grappling with Leviathan.

Early in the story, Beowulf recounts a youthful swimming dare between he and a rival named Breca. The two young warriors challenged each-other to swim in the cold Atlantic. For Beowulf, the dare resulted in a deadly fight with sea-monsters.

I possess about a dozen different versions of Beowulf from various author/translators, including two copies of Howell D Chickering, Jr.’s excellent dual-language edition of the poem (Anchor Books). The following passage is taken from the Chickering version of Beowulf, though without the line formatting:

“But to tell the true story, I had more sea-strength, power in swimming, and also more hardship, than any other man. To each other we said, as boys will boast – we were both still young – that we two alone would swim out to sea, to the open ocean, dare risk out lives, and we did as we said. We held taken swords hard in our hands as we sawm on the sea; thought to protect us from whales’ tusks. He could not glide, swim farther from me, away on the surge, the heaving waves, no swifter in water, nor would I leave him. Five nights we swam, together on the ocean, till it drove us apart in its churning, sliding; that coldest weather turned against us, dark night and water, the north wind war-sharp. Rougher were the waves and angry sea-beasts had been stirred-up. Then my body-armor, hard-linked, hand-joined, did me some service, against their attack; my chain-metal war-shirt, worked with gold, covered my chest. A fierce sea-monster dragged me down deep, held me on the bottom in his cruel grip. However it was granted that my point reached him; I stabbed as I could with my sharp sword, with battle-thrust kille dth huge sea-beast by my own hand. Again and again the angry monsters made fierce attacks. I served them well with my noble blade, as was only fitting. Small pleasure they had in such a sword-feast, dark things in the sea that meant to eat me, sit round their banquet on the deep sea-floor. Instead, in the morning, they lay on the beach, asleep from my sword, the tide-marks bloodied from their deep gashes, and never again did they trouble the passage of seafaring men across the ocean. Light came from the east, God’s bright beacon, and the seas calmed, till I saw at last the sea-cliffs, headlands, the windy shore. So fate often saves an undoomed man when his courage holds. However it was, I had chanced to kill some nine sea-beasts. I never have heard of a harder night-fight under heaven’s vault, of a man more oppressed on the ocean streams. Yet I survived those clutches and lived, weary in my venture…“

Within the structure of the poem, this brief anecdote helps to establish Beowulf’s character as a fearless warrior and athlete but it also helps to convey and reinforce an established cultural connection between water and dreadfulness. The youthful sea-fight is a foreshadowing of the dive that Beowulf must undertake to combat Grendel’s mother as well as a foreshadowing of the land-based dragon that Beowulf must face at the end of his life. As with the biblical leviathan references, it is often difficult to separate ocean-dwelling leviathan from dragon myths of sea, land and air.

Alternate cover of Howell D. Chickering’s dual language version of Beowulf.

Beowulf’s final battle of the epic poem, Beowulf describes his dress in similar manner to his dress when facing the sea-beasts at the beginning of of the story: “I would not carry sword or weapons against the serpent if I knew how else to grapple proudly, wrestle the monster, as I did with Grendel; but here I expect the heat of war-flames, his poisonous breath, and so I am dressed in shield and armour…” and establishes, with Beowulf’s death an expected close when combatting Leviathan. One cannot expect to survive such an ordeal more than once.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1797/98. As with Beowulf, it is a major feature of English literature and contains key themes: sea-monsters/creatures and an exploration of man’s relationship to the power of nature (and the supernatural). It is one of my favorite poems and stylistic elements of Rime of the Ancient Mariner are included in my Leviathan.

An Illustration of Rime of The Ancient Mariner

Coleridge’s poem was written to be included as a part of a co-authored collection of poems with William Wordsworth – the Lyrical Ballads. The story of the collection of the poems is, perhaps, equally or more engaging than many of the poems themselves. In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge wrote:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life…In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. … With this view I wrote the ‘Ancient Mariner’

As an aside, I titled my first collection of poems “Leviathan: The Biographia Isocratica” as a somewhat ironic imitation of Coleridge’s literary biography. In their experiment in producing Lyrical Ballada, Coleridge and Wordsworth played-out within a volume of poetry a social battle that continues to wage under various names. Coleridge explains the battle, and his side in it, in many sections of Biographia Literaria. The argument may most succinctly be described as humanism versus supernaturalism

Wordsworth wrote that,

“The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.“

But Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to be appreciated by many people today. Like Leviathan, it continues to swim within the culture. Coleridge’s poem helped to renew the literary theme of the struggle between humanity and fearsome oceanic powers for other works of literature such as: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Ernest Hemingway’s The old Man and the Sea (1951) and others.

Moby Dick

Section Coming Soon

The Old Man and the Sea

Section Coming Soon

Jaws

The Peter Benchley novel, Jaws was published in 1974. The movie followed in ’75. There may not be a more relevant and important iteration of leviathan in the twentieth-century film – nor in the modern conception of what leviathan means. Jaws established sharks in general, and the great white in particular as the sea beast that humans most dread. In 1978, the film Orca (based on Arthur Herzog‘s 1977 book) attempted to include the killer whale as an alternate leviathan representation. But Orca was derivative and didn’t capture public imagination as the sharks of Jaws had.

An important feature of the shark in Jaws is the enormous size of the fish. It is huge. One of the most dramatic and unforgettable moments in the film is when Roy Scheider’s character (Martin Brody) catches a first-glimpse of the shark and says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

The Jaws film also clearly demonstrates that leviathan is a creature against which heroes may measure their deeds and mettle. Just as Beowulf recounted his swimming competition and struggles in Hrothgar’s court, Robert Shaw (as Quint) and Richard Dreyfuss (as Matt Hooper) compare scars and stories of their encounters with the dangerous creatures of the sea while drinking in the boat’s galley.

The scene in reminiscent, also of the opening of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the narrator and his audience gather to share stories. Monsters and the void of the sea are deeply and permanently linked.

Quint’s lines call to Mind Friedrich Nietzche’s famous passage, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

These are notions and insights of the leviathan mythology. The relationship between humanity and the monsters that it chooses to fight.

Provisional Conclusion

My leviathan poem and this essay is a small contribution to the vast and wonderful human heritage which contemplates the vast and powerful . Humanity’s relationship to the monsters of the deep is one of the primal orientations that occupies our species. Leviathan is the vast and unseen predator that can crush us, as individuals or as a collective. Our awe, dread, fear, respect, admiration totemic aspiration or whatever other affect we may put upon Leviathan are a fundamental motivating force in our lives.

We are leviathan.

Do you know of a ”Leviathan” poem or reference that should be included here?

Let me know using the contact page.
Tai Chi in the Morning

November 25th, 2020

Around 1971 or 1972, Townes Van Zandt wrote and recorded a hauntingly beautiful song called “Highway Kind”. Several terrific versions by different artists are out there ready to be enjoyed. The song first came to my attention via one of Lyle Lovett’s album, Step Inside This House. Lovett’s version is still my favorite, but other versions also have their appeal. In my opinion, a close second place goes to a version by a recording artist going by the name Twin Shadow (Live on KEXP), posted on Youtube back in 2014. It seems to me to deserve far more than the few thousand views than it has received so far.

Even before I was aware of Van Zandt’s rather troubled life and regrettably early death, the opening lines of “Highway Kind” rarely failed to establish in me an ambiance suitable to quiet, and perhaps even sombre, introspective deep dives.

“My days, they are the highway kind. They only come to leave; the leaving I don’t mind, it’s the coming that I crave. Pour the sun upon the ground, stand to throw a shadow; watch it grow into a night and fill the spinnin’ sky. Time among the pine trees, it felt like breath of air. Usually I just walk these streets and tell myself to care. Sometimes I believe me and sometimes I don’t hear. Sometimes the shape I’m in won’t let me go.”

Bask in the desolating warmth of these lovely lyrics and the haunting melody as I may, this is a kind of sentiment that I’m unlikely to ever conceive or experience. I have never craved mornings and I don’t expect to ever develop an appetite for them beyond a recognition that they are an established fact of life. Most typically, I will doggedly cling to a warm bed and the last wonderful sensations of a dark and comfortingly quiet night. What is among my cravings, however, is to find and develop new connections within and understandings of life and myself. That craving makes this song an easy and valuable meditative partner for morning Tai Chi routines.

In my Zensylvania essay and installment titled “Learning”, I talked a bit about beginning to learn Tai Chi as a 50-plus-year-old beginner. Among other things, deciding to learn and experience this martial art was a way for me to re-establish a positive learning state of mind while also coping with what turns out to have been a not-quite-fathomed COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. It has been a social situation that I still don’t quite see the end of and whose psychological impact on individuals and society xx. The global situation and circumstances of COVID seem to have had a Highway Kind-ing type of effect across many, if not all, parts of society. There seems to be a part of us all that has felt a desolating disconnection with our days. I’m sure that study of the effects of these still indeterminate months will be the work of various academics over the course of the coming decade or two. While that may be, taking up the practice of Tai Chi has been a method to be an active agent in the disruptive period of time has on me as an individual. I guess I’m saying that coping with stress, change and circumstantial adversity is not merely the deployment of passive (static) unconscious resiliencies but is also involves a dynamic and consciously engaged set of behaviours.

Initially, I tackled the learning of Tai Chi as a kind of “do-it-when-I-remember-to” routine. Since I was using online resources as my tools, there were no classes to attend and no schedule of learning to adhere to. Once per day or once per week didn’t matter since there was no kind of external or circumstantial accountability. This initial routine that I was following, if you care to call it that, carried on for several weeks.

Finally, when I realized that my do-it-when-I-remember-to Tai Chi schedule did not qualify as a commitment and that my learning process wasn’t actually proceeding, I started to consider what I could and should do about it. I decided that I needed to set a regular schedule for the activity that I could stick to. I also wanted a routine that would help me to maximize any potential benefit that I might derive from the practice.

After deciding that I needed a specific part of the day that would include Tai Chi, the next problem I faced was when that time might be. Even in the lock-down pandemic days and working from home as I was, my daily routine provided only a two relatively narrow windows of opportunity: before work in the morning and after dinner in the evening.

In my case, I settled-on what is typically the worst part of my day. Mornings. It makes a kind of sense…if this is my worst time of day, maybe including Tai Chi could be an improvement. Maybe I could capture some of that pour the sun upon the ground enthusiasm that Townes Van Zandt had described.

My usual morning, and still my first inclination, is a groggy, grudging, reluctant kind of affair. For instance, I’m rarely able to consider food for several hours. On most occasions, a hot shower and a hot beverage are the two requisite items to get me going. Upon occasion one or the other of these two things may be skipped. Never both. This tendency of mine is a very old predilection. It seems entirely probable that there are reasons why mornings are the most consistently challenging part of my day. Some of those reasons are probably behavioural while others may be rooted in biological processes. The human condition is certainly a complicated morass of causes of causes and effects of effects. While there are some people who want to believe they thoroughly understand the causes of the causes and the effects of the effects, mostly I just want to find practical ways to make the present richer and more enjoyable.

Waking has always been a trial. Particularly now that I’ve solidly entered, if not absolutely passed, mid-life. Grisly as it certainly is, waking and rising in the morning, I seem to viscerally experience the fact that my lungs and circulatory system are not the strong, healthy systems I enjoyed as a younger person. I seem to feel an ever-thickening sludge pooling in my chest and limbs like the dirty black oil of an engine that’s 100,000 kilometers overdue for service. Despite a self-image (or perhaps I should say self-delusion) of being a reasonably healthy individual….after all I don’t carry too many extra pounds, I eat pretty well and I’m reasonably active with dog-walks, bike rides, occasional weight lifting….. this kind of feeling has grown, occasionally to awful proportions, in recent years.

One morning, while still coming to terms with the idea of a morning Tai Chi practice, I recalled the bouts of pneumonia that I’d experienced over the years. Wave after wave of liquid infection that left me wheezing and panting for weeks and months afterward. I also recalled the embolism that drizzled into my lungs and choked-off my youthful feelings of vitality just a few years ago. That morning, I decided that I’d rather get up and do some Tai Chi than watch myself decline into a medicated yet still unhealthy version of myself.

A 2016 study by Patricia Huston and Bruce McFarlane which you can find on the National Library of Medicine says that the authors conducted a literature review on the benefits of tai chi for 25 specific conditions, as well as for general health and fitness. This was done to update a 2014 review of systematic reviews. Systematic reviews and recent clinical trials were assessed and organized into 5 different groups: evidence of benefit as excellent, good, fair, or preliminary, or evidence of no direct benefit.

According to Huston and McFarlane’s work, during the past 45 years more than 500 trials and 120 systematic reviews have been published on the health benefits of tai chi. Systematic reviews of tai chi for specific conditions indicate excellent evidence of benefit for preventing falls, osteoarthritis, Parkinson disease, rehabilitation for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and improving cognitive capacity in older adults. There is good evidence of benefit for depression, cardiac and stroke rehabilitation, and dementia. There is fair evidence of benefit for improving quality of life for cancer patients, fibromyalgia, hypertension, and osteoporosis. Current evidence indicates no direct benefit for diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, or chronic heart failure. Systematic reviews of general health and fitness benefits show excellent evidence of benefit for improving balance and aerobic capacity in those with poor fitness. There is good evidence for increased strength in the lower limbs. There is fair evidence for increased well-being and improved sleep. There were no studies that found tai chi worsened a condition. A recent systematic review on the safety of tai chi found adverse events were typically minor and primarily musculoskeletal; no intervention-related serious adverse events have been reported.

The researchers concluded that there is abundant evidence on health and fitness effects of tai chi. Based on this, physicians can now offer evidence-based recommendations to their patients, noting that tai chi is still an area of active research, and patients should continue to receive medical follow-up for any clinical conditions.

I am not a researcher nor am I a physician. I am a non-expert who navigates the world mostly making and taking responsibility for my own decisions; and usually trusting my own experience and observational skills. Sometimes I draw from the work and opinions of experts as I may need them. It is interesting to know that some formal investigation occurred which validates Tai Chi as a healthy activity. But I’m not entirely certain that I particularly needed a systemic review of systemic reviews to come to that conclusion. It seems like directly observable sense that including a variety of low-impact movements in a person’s day is better than not having them. I will be interested to learn whether there are formal studies which indicate whether morning Tai Chis is healthier or more sustainable than Tai Chi practiced at some other time during the day…in the meantime:

Rather than hunkering miserably on a chair while the morning beverage came together, I acted. I ran through the Tai Chi moves I had been learning. Calming the Water. Over the drum. Brush Knee. Single whip. Several others. In fact, I was surprised by how many came to mind. I won’t claim that they felt natural and smooth. But they were there for me. I simply stood in the kitchen and ran through what I could.

At this point, I should mention that my earliest practice sessions were based on a twenty-minute YouTube video called “Daily Tai Chi for Beginners and Seniors with Don Fiore“. Fiore’s video is very approachable and is paced well. On Fiore’s website there’s a short passage which outlook on Tai Chi which resonated with what I felt that I wanted out of the exercise: “Although many people consider Tai Chi as a martial art, our videos are focused on the meditative value when doing slow, repetitious, simplified movements with deep breathing.”

Fiore’s focus on deep breathing and meditation matched my objectives for myself. I decided it would be an interesting opportunity to bring some deep breathing into my day. Since I spend most of my day (metaphorically) tethered to the tools of my professional day, I don’t get as much cardiovascular exercise as I probably need. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic environment, I began to work from home and lost the meager bit of walking that used to be a part of my commute. Tai Chi and bicycle trainer at home are part of my plan to overcome a mostly stationary lifestyle.

By combining the Tai Chi movements with the deepest breathing I can muster in the morning, I’m expecting to derive some benefit. It’s not going to replace a good 40-minute bike ride or any of the other genuine cardio activities you care to mention, but it must be better than what I had previously been doing: nothing. So now most mornings, I get between fifteen and twenty minutes of movement and deep breathing.

In the morning, I find it easier to synchronize deep full breaths with the practice of the Tai Chi moves. This is partly because I’m focused on wanting those deep breaths. I am better-able to allow my breathing to guide the movement. I pay less attention to the movement to focus on the breathing. As a result the movement seems to flow easier.

Morning still isn’t the best part of my day and even after a year of working on this project, I find that most mornings I’d rather curl up and wait for that first hot beverage of the day to be ready. But most mornings I manage to run through a few motions. While I may not actually feel good in the morning. I think that I feel good about the Tai Chi. So instead of curling up in that convenient and comfortable chair beside the kitchen, I stand in the kitchen and practice a few moves.

Within a few steps of my morning Tai Chi station, are two large glass, south-facing doors. On many mornings I am able to see and feel the sun filtering through the branches and foliage of a diverse and lush arboreal panorama. Our century-old home is fortunately situated on a big old city block that gives us a view of at least a dozen different varieties of tree..including our own 40-foot fir tree. The scene through our back doors recalls for me both Van Zandt’s Highway Kind lyrics and, when I’m practicing Tai Chi, a particular scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wherein the narrator describes waking and engaging with the morning with some exercise.

“But pines and sunlight are stronger than any dreams and the wondering goes away. Good old reality…..To warm myself I speed up to a jog and move up the road briskly. Good, good, good, good, good. The word keeps time with the jogging. Some birds fly up from the shadowy hill into the sunlight and I watch them until they’re out of sight. Good, good, good, good, good. Crunchy gravel on the road. Good, good. Bright yellow sand in the sun. Good, good, good.“

In this passage, Robert Pirsig has captured a poetic rhythm between the coming of his day, the activity of his morning jog and the philosophy he attempts to describe and depict in the book.

My morning Tai Chi routine usually begins by standing with my feet about shoulder width apart and parallel to each other. It takes several moment to just stand there and pay attention to my posture. To try to correct anything that doesn’t feel right. Sometimes to connect with some part of my body that doesn’t feel the way it should. The first movement I usually do is “Separating Heaven & Earth”. I picked this movement not from Tai Chi’s traditional 108 movements but from Fiore’s daily Qijong video. I’m not above mixing something into my routine that suits me. And this movement seems to set a Tai Chi mood for me, so I do it.

It goes like this. From that initial basic loose standing position, I bring the palms of my hands up to face each other about six inches from my chest and about four inches from each other. This allows for my fingers and arms to be loose. My arms are at about a thirty-degree angle from the floor. While bringing my arms into that position, I also bring in a fairly deep breath – but not so deep that I struggle with it. After holding the breath and hands in this position for one to two seconds, I begin to release the breath as I raise one hand toward the ceiling and the other toward the floor. My objective here is to have each hand slowly turn to face the surface it is approaching and for the breath to be fully exhaled when my arm reaches its extension. I wait a second or two, then I reverse that motion with an inhalation that ends with my hands facing each other and my arms at a thirty-degree angle as they were at the start of the motion. The next motion is a repetition of this motion and breathing routine except that I alternate which hand reaches for the ceiling and which reaches for the floor. The hand which first reached for the ceiling will reach for the floor. In this way, my arms become like the piston’s of an engine…moving up then down in their repeating cycle. Throughout all of this movement, I often find my awareness or attention spotlighting different sensations in my back and abdomen.

I do this movement five or six times. When I extend my arms, the first repetition is not quite a “stretching”. The first repetition is to remind myself of what I’m doing. On subsequent repetitions, I might try out a bit of stretching or I might combine the motion with a bit of knee-bending. Something that is not quite a full-on squat exercise. Usually, I this movement will start to give me feedback about how different parts of my body feel. Are my shoulders and back feeling stiff or loose? Do my knees want to bend or are they sore?

That reasonably simple movement has also come to be a communication within myself that says I’m going to do a bit of Tai Chi. The specific movements that come afterward this first movement don’t seem to matter much to me. I do the ones that come to mind.

Within the first weeks of my experiment with morning Tai Chi, I found that moving slowly, an important part of Tai Chi, is easier in the morning. I’m certain that this is partly a result of the focus on breathing; I also suspect that the pace of the day…the build up of the day’s demands, frustrations, excitements and all of the rest of it have not yet usurped authority over my pace. In the morning, I’m not yet reacting or responding to any part of the day. It’s about as much of a blank slate as I’m ever likely to find in my day.

Another significant observation I had in my first few weeks was that my deep breaths were not nearly as deep as they probably ought to have been. I felt how shallowly and light my regular breathing was. I coughed a lot and took it as an indication that I was working a system that needed to be worked. But also in the first weeks, I felt that improvements were occurring. Perhaps each breath should be accompanied by the mantra: Good, good, good, good, good.

As time has passed and adding a variety of more rigourous cardio-vascular activities (particularly cycling on my mountain-bike and/or using my indoor bicycle trainer setup) has helped to strengthen my heart and lungs, the morning routine has become easier. Also, as I practiced more, I found that I could detach from the whole movement and pay attention to different parts of the movement. The angle of my hand when reaching for the floor or ceiling, the set of my shoulders, how far apart of my feet were and the angles that they might be pointing at. I was also able to pay more attention to the comforting view through the glass doors.

While I recognize in my own experience the desperate, delicate and meditative qualities of Highway Kind, my days are not the highway kind that Van Zandt wrote about. They don’t come to leave. Instead, after living a life of many decades, I find that my days are a succession of continuously present moments and that I am more continuously present in them. Recently I have learned that I feel better and more content when I am in the habit of practicing Tai Chi in the morning than when I do not.