Rubbing To Burn
When wood is rubbed against wood
it begins to burn;
when metal is heated
it melts.
When yin and yang are out of balance, heaven and earth
are perturbed. Then comes the crash of thunder, and from the rain,
lightning sets the locust trees on fire.
With men, it is still worse.
They stand distraught
between two pitfalls of gain and loss
which they cannot avoid.
They fret
and cannot bring things to completion.
Their minds are as if hung up between heaven and earth.
Alternating between assurance and dejection,
they are sunk in perplexities.
Gain and harm rub
against each other
and start a great fire
within them.
The inner harmony is destroyed in the multitude of men.
The light of their mind, like the moon,
cannot overcome the fire.
They disintegrate
and lose
their course.
Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Chapter 26 External Things
To decide the title of a post can consume energy/time. There are occasions which I simply select a phrase without any sense of which is best. This moment is one of those occasions. I just pick one. Friction and fire is the idea. Pick a “bullet-point” conveying the breath taking tragedy of this, an all-too-common outcome.
The conflagration that bites you in the ass.
The slow motion dis-integration of a marriage that you couldn’t save, and truth be told, do you truly desire rehab Humpty-Dumpty? The daoist POV of such condition is an imbalance of the yin and yang. I mean dual, different, necessary, and complementary sides of a relationship, or the administration of a nation, that suffers eccentric vibration. Difference is essential to life: heat and cold. light and dark, male and female. The variety of ways to be in error, to get in your own own way, to fuck-up, are infinite. Harmony is a sweet spot. It’s balance, ‘give and take’ that works well enough, even if not perfect. (What does ‘perfect’ even mean?) The are many ways to start a fire, to burn a relationship to the ground, to kill an organization, to destroy an entire society.
Titles that could have served:
- Tire-Shake (reference to drag racing)
- Pitfalls Ahead
- Hung-up
- The Fire Within
- Dis-Integration
2 thoughts on “Rubbing To Burn”
As much as I see the benefits of embracing a Taoist sense of life, our environment, and ourselves, I seem to only be able to view it from a distance. I nod my head in agreement when I read a passage from your current book and know that if I truly wanted to find peace of mind and balance it is there, waving to me.
But my anxiety about life and the world at large precludes my incorporating this philosophy. I cannot find the bridge between what I view as an existential march towards extinction and a peaceful inner self. If I close my eyes to the destruction of our planet in order to find that inner balance, it seems it would be a very selfish pursuit. I have to ask myself what my purpose in being alive might be (not that there is some omniscient thing that has dictated a reason for my existence ).
As I’ve noted in many other responses and in my own writing, the drive to maintain our species is a force that keeps me focused on making a difference. Or at least trying to make a difference. And yet, in many ways, that mindset appears to be a fool’s errand. So what is my alternative? Seek inner peace or feel the weight of the world on my shoulders? Neither is what I would call a practical solution.
Tobin, I no longer perceive the taoist offer as any kind of refuge or safe haven from the many sided catastrophe that emerges day by day. Rather I take the description of forces essential (yin & yang) to reality, a dynamic, indescribable scenario that must entail dissolution. A dimension of dissolution/decay is built in and certainly cannot be offset by brute force, or perhaps by any measure at all… Am I going to die? I expect so, no matter my lifestyle or anything else. The good news: life and death are no antithesis. Negative space is essential.
Will our species continue for a while longer? Perhaps. What about indefinitely? There’s no doubt “we” will not.