Notes Toward a Dao of Writing – Part I
Eric Darton
Within the mind there is yet another mind.
That mind within the mind: it is an awareness that precedes words.
—from Nei-yeh (Inward Training) XIV[1]
This preliminary essay, and those with which I intend to follow it, depart from a common observation: the reciprocal processes of reading and writing creates an efficacy that operates invisibly beneath style and above narrative structure. This efficacy is rooted in literature’s capacity to both reflect and to grant access to reality in a way that is distinct from other modes of expression. Literary practice offers a potentiating space within the mind, connecting the individual to her or himself and to the larger culture.
These pages bear witness to the merger of two streams of awareness within my own lived experience which, in conjoining, have allowed me to hear Kipling’s famous dictum Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet… differently. Though it is a line I remember and repeat – being far too syntactally powerful not to resonate – the words ring false every time. Put simply, they do not describe reality as I sense it, wherein polarities constantly intersect, interpenetrate and intertwine.
My lifelong enmeshment in the English language has, for the last fifteen years, been linked to the practice of Ba Gua Zhang, a martial art whose roots extend back to predynastic China. At the core of Ba Gua Zhang are qi gongs: internal exercises that cultivate an integrated awareness of the flow of change in and around one’s body. The coming together of these seemingly opposing modalities – European language-thought and Asian body-mind awareness – presented me with an opportunity to harmonize my work as a reader-writer with techniques of movement, breathing and meditation. I have found that the “twain” of East and West, of yin and yang forces, need not, and in fact do not, operate at loggerheads, or even dialectically. Rather their constant interaction forms a co-generative dynamic.
Thus my cultural grounding in the Western tradition of theological, philosophic and scientific thought has shifted in response to a deeply embodied practice that, knowing no duality, never evolved a distinct separation between spirit and matter, being and non-being, subject and object. In Daoist thought there can be no yin that does not contain yang, no yang that does not incorporate yin, nor vice versa. Rather, a reciprocal, mutually sustaining function bridges polarities, and animates the world in which we live, and breathe.
My engagement in Ba Gua Zhang has confirmed a long-held suspicion that in European culture, poetry, and by extension, the novel and other literary forms have constituted and still preserve a kind of East-within-the-West, a zone of non-dualistic practice that neither philosophy, religion, scientific rationalism, nor a mania for the “new” have been able to fully occupy. By virtue of its tilt, albeit ever so slightly, toward the processive over the deterministic, literature continues to generate a compossibility otherwise foreclosed by a tendency toward focalization, whether on the aesthetic, analytic, or technical aspects of writing practice. Thus the thumb of literature rests lightly on the scale of awareness tilting it gently toward impartiality, allowing reader and writer access to the fount from which forms arise, achieve concretion, and into which they disperse, only to return as “new” forms. Recognizing this, it was borne in upon me that part of what I have always valued most in Western writing is its embrace of a capacity to exceed its own ideas. It is not going too far to say that this aspect of literary practice has has allowed me to keep my sanity. Further, it has imbued me with a profound sense of freedom on the page, when other aspects of my life seemed painfully constrained. I have used literature as a means to wedge myself into the “real world” I despised because I thought it had no use for me.
By eluding the Scylla of faith on one hand and the Charybdis of reason on the other, writing and reading — imbued as they are with the qualities of respiration — have provided and continue to offer a potentiating space in which a limitless play of sense-emotionality may emerge and deploy. Viewed this way, literary practice becomes less a matter of representation and more a manifestation of the life forces permeating and animating the world around and within us. The arising of a sentence becomes analagous to a shower of rain: the palpable result of a cycle of concentration, evaporation and condensation.
It is not, therefore, solely via her powers of perception that the writer grants us access to an enhanced awareness of the personal, the social or the natural, nor by virtue of her creativity, imagination, or inventiveness per se, but also as a result of her capacity to connect herself to the world via the bridge of written language. The linearity of alphabetic thought, tending always toward the algorithmic, the Revelation, the culminative end, is mediated by a cyclical inward and outward push-pull, an arising-sinking, a coming-going.
Detour, Access and Letting Pass
I would like to briefly explore, without at once getting mired in comparisons, a key divergence between “Western” and “Eastern” approaches to language. Put succinctly, where we prize the direct, immediate and precise, the Chinese tend toward the oblique, the indirect, the allusive. [2]
The Zhuangzi, a foundational 3rd century BCE anthology of Daoist thought, speaks of “fluctuating words”: words which refrain from partiality. According to François Jullien, a contemporary French sinologist, such words “do not grant access to something else, such as a sense of a beyond on another level – a metaphysical or religious conception of the heavens – as the allegorization in Greek myths or biblical tales does. Words need only overflow the limitations of language, no longer approaching the real in a compartmentalized and arrested way – in short, they need only ceaselessly be an allusive variation to allow us to rejoin the spontaneous coexistence of things and to give us access to the natural.”[3]
The allusive mode allows space for meaning to remain open, hence the capacity for communication and movement within a text, as within the structures of a human body. On the other hand, much “bad” writing evidences a failure not just of language but of intention. As when the writer’s attempt to overdetermine meaning forecloses the process from which meaning emerges. If cognition becomes fixed, meaning has no space in which to potentiate. Language turns necrotic, impermeable – its structure unable to “breathe,” or act as a conduit for the fluid energy of thought and feeling.
One further instance of the efficacy of indirection will suffice for the present. According to Jin Shengtan, a seventeenth century theorist, it is via “meandering concatenation” that the theme of a profound literary work may gradually appear. He cites an eighth century poem by Du Fu, “The Jade Flower Palace,” whose first lines describe the narrator’s discovery of a ruined royal temple:
At the bend in the stream – the wind in the pines [stretches] far,
Rats slip by – [under] ancient tiles.
I know not what king owns this temple…
Here, the reader is led along a “natural” succession which, image by image, sensitizes one to the state of abandonment. “A less skillful poet, Jin concludes, would have described the temple in the first line ‘by exclamation.’”[4]
Such images may trigger all sorts of associations. Two that immediately come to my mind are those of the fog-laden river Thames, occurring early on in Dickens’ Bleak House, and the false clarity in the opening lines of Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” While the indistinction and muckiness in Bleak House serves both allegorical and allusive purposes, it also works to short-circuit any premature moves on the reader’s part toward partiality and determination. In “Benito Cereno,” the narrator’s flat, depositional accounting of circumstances and a nearly clinical focalization on the details of sky and sea – in short an extreme lack of atmospherics – undermines our faith in the veracity of what is presented and pushes us toward more “primitive,” gut mechanisms of knowing. In both cases, we are drawn into the narrative more by something akin to smell or taste than via the externally-directed power of the analytic eye. Here is Western dualism in a nutshell, for excessive fog and “severe clear” can equally blind one to the nature of the unfolding phenomena. Our view is obscured, encouraging projection, or else too penetrating for true discernment to cohere.[5] The gaze is either spongy, or too aggressive.
One further idea I want to introduce will bring matters closer to home. The journal for which this essay was originally written has a motto, a well-intended one, designed to signal openness and inclusivity: We hold the gate open.[6] These words evoke a happy image, particularly for the writer weary of being rebuffed by the cold, indifferent and often invisible gate-keepers of the literary world.
The choice of this metaphor reveals and demarcates the border between East and West, for to “hold the gate open” means to apply concerted effort – perhaps even a heroic feat of strength and will. What if the holder-open ceases to exert sufficient force? How long one maintain one’s grip? Via the unstated premises packed in a single sentence, we have traversed millennia of cultural topography to arrive, once again, at the siege of Troy.
By comparison, the traditional Chinese character for “between” 間 presents an another image of the gate. Jullien writes that “according to the etymological commentary, the main gate has to be closed at night but, though it is closed, you can still perceive the brightness of the moon because there is a median space between the leaves of the gate that allow the moon’s rays to pass through. That internal emptiness – opening or fissure – that lets light through is also what allows for play within the very articulations structuring beings and things.”[7]
In relation to the body, Chinese physiology and Daoist meditation practices locate several “gates” along the ren and du meridians, which respectively run down the front and up the back of the human body. These gates regulate passage of qi-breath and open and shut naturally with our respiration. Forcing qi-breath through them, or restricting its passage can be equally harmful.
Returning to Jullien: “Neither ‘without’ nor ‘in’ but between: that ‘between’ is the modality of the nonontological. Whereas without makes us abandon the concrete and deprives us of it, and the in makes us stick to the concrete and get bogged down in it, between lets us move freely (spiritually) through the concrete and keeps it communicating-operative. Early on, [beginning in the 5th century] the Chinese treatises on painting gave a name to the virtue of that between, which opens the thing wide from the inside and, allowing passage through it, keeps it deployed. …[But] it is not really a name but a binomial, implying play between the two terms and letting pass: qi-yun, ‘breath-resonance’ (or ‘energy consonance’).”[8]
This “breath-resonance” confers “life and movement,” in this case within painted images, but applicable as well (without exerting effort) to those evoked in the poetics of prose.
The Cycle of Breath
In light of the above, I want to touch again on the theme that will act as the main current of these notes. The goal of Daoist inner cultivation via breathing meditation is not to draw us into another world, or establish a transcendent plane of existence, but to connect us as fully as possible with the here and now. In focusing on the respiratory cycle, on the qi/breath that animates heaven, earth and the “ten thousand things” emanating from yin and yang, these practices establish a unity between our internal environment and the external world so we can engage with life in a clear and present way. I believe that this has profound implications for those of us whose practice lies in expressing our sense of reality on the page.
Like profound writing, such an image bypasses everyday language formulations and thought patterns. It shifts our consciousness subtly at a deep level. In this sense it is subversive of all established orders. In Daoist thought, images are inseparable from texts: they are manifestations of the same energy in different states.
In the most basic way, imagining and performing respiratory inner cultivation techniques re-turns us to a place of non-differentiation, wu-ji, where, amidst the myriad stresses, distractions, and partialities of the world, the known and the knower are one. It is here that breath initiates movement, whether of the pen across the page, the play of fingers on a keyboard, or in opening the door to a room of one’s own.
It is by virtue of its cyclic, ongoing nature: inhalation shading into exhalation in successive waves, that breath-awareness moves us upstream of any clear subject-object divide. It works to mediate the dualism inherent in our language with another coherence: that of a unitary consciousness.
Will these techniques and the awareness they potentiate make us more powerful writers? Deeper readers? I would sidestep any opportunity to defend that line. Rather, I would suggest that breath awareness changes our idea of writing and reading by shifting our emphasis subtly from events to processes; from the “why?” of causality to the “so…” of incitement-arousal; from the static line to an ever-transforming structure. Further, the non-partiality of a respiratory logic – by decentering the primacy of visual perception – may actually clarify our observations, allowing the breath-energy of the world to more readily flow through our awareness, and into words.
It will be an enduring paradox of this writing that the “spiritual” dimension of breath-energy, rather than being transcendent, remains immanent within literary practice and helps constitute its efficacy and lends it power. In future essays, I will expand on, and hopefully elucidate, some of the concepts introduced here. As these notes unscroll, I hope readers will feel free to correspond with me at [email protected]
______________________
Within the mind there is yet another mind.
That mind within the mind: it is an awareness that precedes words.
—from Nei-yeh (Inward Training) XIV[1]
This preliminary essay, and those with which I intend to follow it, depart from a common observation: the reciprocal processes of reading and writing creates an efficacy that operates invisibly beneath style and above narrative structure. This efficacy is rooted in literature’s capacity to both reflect and to grant access to reality in a way that is distinct from other modes of expression. Literary practice offers a potentiating space within the mind, connecting the individual to her or himself and to the larger culture.
These pages bear witness to the merger of two streams of awareness within my own lived experience which, in conjoining, have allowed me to hear Kipling’s famous dictum Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet… differently. Though it is a line I remember and repeat – being far too syntactally powerful not to resonate – the words ring false every time. Put simply, they do not describe reality as I sense it, wherein polarities constantly intersect, interpenetrate and intertwine.
My lifelong enmeshment in the English language has, for the last fifteen years, been linked to the practice of Ba Gua Zhang, a martial art whose roots extend back to predynastic China. At the core of Ba Gua Zhang are qi gongs: internal exercises that cultivate an integrated awareness of the flow of change in and around one’s body. The coming together of these seemingly opposing modalities – European language-thought and Asian body-mind awareness – presented me with an opportunity to harmonize my work as a reader-writer with techniques of movement, breathing and meditation. I have found that the “twain” of East and West, of yin and yang forces, need not, and in fact do not, operate at loggerheads, or even dialectically. Rather their constant interaction forms a co-generative dynamic.
Thus my cultural grounding in the Western tradition of theological, philosophic and scientific thought has shifted in response to a deeply embodied practice that, knowing no duality, never evolved a distinct separation between spirit and matter, being and non-being, subject and object. In Daoist thought there can be no yin that does not contain yang, no yang that does not incorporate yin, nor vice versa. Rather, a reciprocal, mutually sustaining function bridges polarities, and animates the world in which we live, and breathe.
My engagement in Ba Gua Zhang has confirmed a long-held suspicion that in European culture, poetry, and by extension, the novel and other literary forms have constituted and still preserve a kind of East-within-the-West, a zone of non-dualistic practice that neither philosophy, religion, scientific rationalism, nor a mania for the “new” have been able to fully occupy. By virtue of its tilt, albeit ever so slightly, toward the processive over the deterministic, literature continues to generate a compossibility otherwise foreclosed by a tendency toward focalization, whether on the aesthetic, analytic, or technical aspects of writing practice. Thus the thumb of literature rests lightly on the scale of awareness tilting it gently toward impartiality, allowing reader and writer access to the fount from which forms arise, achieve concretion, and into which they disperse, only to return as “new” forms. Recognizing this, it was borne in upon me that part of what I have always valued most in Western writing is its embrace of a capacity to exceed its own ideas. It is not going too far to say that this aspect of literary practice has has allowed me to keep my sanity. Further, it has imbued me with a profound sense of freedom on the page, when other aspects of my life seemed painfully constrained. I have used literature as a means to wedge myself into the “real world” I despised because I thought it had no use for me.
By eluding the Scylla of faith on one hand and the Charybdis of reason on the other, writing and reading — imbued as they are with the qualities of respiration — have provided and continue to offer a potentiating space in which a limitless play of sense-emotionality may emerge and deploy. Viewed this way, literary practice becomes less a matter of representation and more a manifestation of the life forces permeating and animating the world around and within us. The arising of a sentence becomes analagous to a shower of rain: the palpable result of a cycle of concentration, evaporation and condensation.
It is not, therefore, solely via her powers of perception that the writer grants us access to an enhanced awareness of the personal, the social or the natural, nor by virtue of her creativity, imagination, or inventiveness per se, but also as a result of her capacity to connect herself to the world via the bridge of written language. The linearity of alphabetic thought, tending always toward the algorithmic, the Revelation, the culminative end, is mediated by a cyclical inward and outward push-pull, an arising-sinking, a coming-going.
Detour, Access and Letting Pass
I would like to briefly explore, without at once getting mired in comparisons, a key divergence between “Western” and “Eastern” approaches to language. Put succinctly, where we prize the direct, immediate and precise, the Chinese tend toward the oblique, the indirect, the allusive. [2]
The Zhuangzi, a foundational 3rd century BCE anthology of Daoist thought, speaks of “fluctuating words”: words which refrain from partiality. According to François Jullien, a contemporary French sinologist, such words “do not grant access to something else, such as a sense of a beyond on another level – a metaphysical or religious conception of the heavens – as the allegorization in Greek myths or biblical tales does. Words need only overflow the limitations of language, no longer approaching the real in a compartmentalized and arrested way – in short, they need only ceaselessly be an allusive variation to allow us to rejoin the spontaneous coexistence of things and to give us access to the natural.”[3]
The allusive mode allows space for meaning to remain open, hence the capacity for communication and movement within a text, as within the structures of a human body. On the other hand, much “bad” writing evidences a failure not just of language but of intention. As when the writer’s attempt to overdetermine meaning forecloses the process from which meaning emerges. If cognition becomes fixed, meaning has no space in which to potentiate. Language turns necrotic, impermeable – its structure unable to “breathe,” or act as a conduit for the fluid energy of thought and feeling.
One further instance of the efficacy of indirection will suffice for the present. According to Jin Shengtan, a seventeenth century theorist, it is via “meandering concatenation” that the theme of a profound literary work may gradually appear. He cites an eighth century poem by Du Fu, “The Jade Flower Palace,” whose first lines describe the narrator’s discovery of a ruined royal temple:
At the bend in the stream – the wind in the pines [stretches] far,
Rats slip by – [under] ancient tiles.
I know not what king owns this temple…
Here, the reader is led along a “natural” succession which, image by image, sensitizes one to the state of abandonment. “A less skillful poet, Jin concludes, would have described the temple in the first line ‘by exclamation.’”[4]
Such images may trigger all sorts of associations. Two that immediately come to my mind are those of the fog-laden river Thames, occurring early on in Dickens’ Bleak House, and the false clarity in the opening lines of Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” While the indistinction and muckiness in Bleak House serves both allegorical and allusive purposes, it also works to short-circuit any premature moves on the reader’s part toward partiality and determination. In “Benito Cereno,” the narrator’s flat, depositional accounting of circumstances and a nearly clinical focalization on the details of sky and sea – in short an extreme lack of atmospherics – undermines our faith in the veracity of what is presented and pushes us toward more “primitive,” gut mechanisms of knowing. In both cases, we are drawn into the narrative more by something akin to smell or taste than via the externally-directed power of the analytic eye. Here is Western dualism in a nutshell, for excessive fog and “severe clear” can equally blind one to the nature of the unfolding phenomena. Our view is obscured, encouraging projection, or else too penetrating for true discernment to cohere.[5] The gaze is either spongy, or too aggressive.
One further idea I want to introduce will bring matters closer to home. The journal for which this essay was originally written has a motto, a well-intended one, designed to signal openness and inclusivity: We hold the gate open.[6] These words evoke a happy image, particularly for the writer weary of being rebuffed by the cold, indifferent and often invisible gate-keepers of the literary world.
The choice of this metaphor reveals and demarcates the border between East and West, for to “hold the gate open” means to apply concerted effort – perhaps even a heroic feat of strength and will. What if the holder-open ceases to exert sufficient force? How long one maintain one’s grip? Via the unstated premises packed in a single sentence, we have traversed millennia of cultural topography to arrive, once again, at the siege of Troy.
By comparison, the traditional Chinese character for “between” 間 presents an another image of the gate. Jullien writes that “according to the etymological commentary, the main gate has to be closed at night but, though it is closed, you can still perceive the brightness of the moon because there is a median space between the leaves of the gate that allow the moon’s rays to pass through. That internal emptiness – opening or fissure – that lets light through is also what allows for play within the very articulations structuring beings and things.”[7]
In relation to the body, Chinese physiology and Daoist meditation practices locate several “gates” along the ren and du meridians, which respectively run down the front and up the back of the human body. These gates regulate passage of qi-breath and open and shut naturally with our respiration. Forcing qi-breath through them, or restricting its passage can be equally harmful.
Returning to Jullien: “Neither ‘without’ nor ‘in’ but between: that ‘between’ is the modality of the nonontological. Whereas without makes us abandon the concrete and deprives us of it, and the in makes us stick to the concrete and get bogged down in it, between lets us move freely (spiritually) through the concrete and keeps it communicating-operative. Early on, [beginning in the 5th century] the Chinese treatises on painting gave a name to the virtue of that between, which opens the thing wide from the inside and, allowing passage through it, keeps it deployed. …[But] it is not really a name but a binomial, implying play between the two terms and letting pass: qi-yun, ‘breath-resonance’ (or ‘energy consonance’).”[8]
This “breath-resonance” confers “life and movement,” in this case within painted images, but applicable as well (without exerting effort) to those evoked in the poetics of prose.
The Cycle of Breath
In light of the above, I want to touch again on the theme that will act as the main current of these notes. The goal of Daoist inner cultivation via breathing meditation is not to draw us into another world, or establish a transcendent plane of existence, but to connect us as fully as possible with the here and now. In focusing on the respiratory cycle, on the qi/breath that animates heaven, earth and the “ten thousand things” emanating from yin and yang, these practices establish a unity between our internal environment and the external world so we can engage with life in a clear and present way. I believe that this has profound implications for those of us whose practice lies in expressing our sense of reality on the page.
Like profound writing, such an image bypasses everyday language formulations and thought patterns. It shifts our consciousness subtly at a deep level. In this sense it is subversive of all established orders. In Daoist thought, images are inseparable from texts: they are manifestations of the same energy in different states.
In the most basic way, imagining and performing respiratory inner cultivation techniques re-turns us to a place of non-differentiation, wu-ji, where, amidst the myriad stresses, distractions, and partialities of the world, the known and the knower are one. It is here that breath initiates movement, whether of the pen across the page, the play of fingers on a keyboard, or in opening the door to a room of one’s own.
It is by virtue of its cyclic, ongoing nature: inhalation shading into exhalation in successive waves, that breath-awareness moves us upstream of any clear subject-object divide. It works to mediate the dualism inherent in our language with another coherence: that of a unitary consciousness.
Will these techniques and the awareness they potentiate make us more powerful writers? Deeper readers? I would sidestep any opportunity to defend that line. Rather, I would suggest that breath awareness changes our idea of writing and reading by shifting our emphasis subtly from events to processes; from the “why?” of causality to the “so…” of incitement-arousal; from the static line to an ever-transforming structure. Further, the non-partiality of a respiratory logic – by decentering the primacy of visual perception – may actually clarify our observations, allowing the breath-energy of the world to more readily flow through our awareness, and into words.
It will be an enduring paradox of this writing that the “spiritual” dimension of breath-energy, rather than being transcendent, remains immanent within literary practice and helps constitute its efficacy and lends it power. In future essays, I will expand on, and hopefully elucidate, some of the concepts introduced here. As these notes unscroll, I hope readers will feel free to correspond with me at [email protected]
______________________