I've been seeing clouds differently lately. Every sky has been so vivid, so entrancingly, hypnotically lovely. Nearly every day, I've been awe-stopped in my tracks by the formations, never the same, never boring, never staying put for even an instant.
It is not in my nature, however, to leave such feelings of awe and gratitude alone. My mind invariably tries to pour those feelings into little test tubes and swirl them around with reactants to see what they mean, or portend, or reveal. In this case, the result has been the question, "What must the ancestors have thought when they had moments like this? What were clouds to them?"
Old paintings show a version of clouds with puffing cheeks, bringing the wind, themselves agents of change and movement. I can't put myself in the mind that would have interpreted them this way though. I can't see that version of clouds. To me, and maybe to whatever ancestors gave me this way of thinking, they are more like flowers, growing, budding, blooming and disappearing in a time-lapsed, aerial Spring.
Of course whatever version of clouds the ancestors knew, it was wrong. Clouds are not now the mystery that they once must have been. Whatever was said about clouds--and about blood, and rain, and water, and fire, for that matter--is now manifestly ridiculous. If my ancestors had spoken up and said, "Clouds are not like gods; they are more like plants," they might have been seen as visionaries, or at the very least iconoclasts. But their version would have been as wrong as the one they purported to correct.
Which is the only way to see Wang Ch'ung. A beacon of clarity, he dared to contravert the contemporary understanding of the natural world. He saw inconsistency, and where others were content to leave it in a limbo of cognitive dissonance, he was not; he dragged reality flailing into the light, submitted it to rigorous questioning, and left it in what was to him a purer form.
It's easy for us to look back at his writing and see that, for all his questioning of convention, he was never really escaped it. He may have poked a few tiny holes in the assumptions of his time, but remains encased in inconsistent, ludicrous, or circular reasoning. In the section 雷虛篇, for example, he interrogates the idea that lightning strikes are the result of divine anger, and comes to the conclusion that lightning and thunder are indiscriminate, and not tied to anyone's good or bad behavior. This is demonstrably true, and far ahead of its time. Well done. For every misguided understanding that he untangles, however, he replaces it with another, equally tangled one. In the case of lightning and thunder, and with fate in general, he cannot free himself from his assumptions and asserts that they are the result of to much or too little of the heavenly liquid. He has reasoned himself out of a blind well, and stumbled immediately into another. Perhaps more accurately, he has escaped one box and satisfied himself that the larger box he finds himself in does not exist.
It is frustrating to the reader to witness. "You are so close! Keep going! Keep questioning!" I found myself cheering. But he never does. The version of reality that Wang Ch'ung posits is just as convoluted as the one he criticizes. Clouds are not huffing and puffing gods, but neither are they flowers, and wrong is wrong.
As I look at my path, the myriad things I have unlearned, and the things with which I have replaced them, I cannot help but assume the same of myself. The religion I escaped has no power over me. But are the beliefs and perceptions with which I have replaced it any different? In how many boxes am I sealed, and is there any escape possible?
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