“You think too much.”
An observation that’s frequently offered to me—and one that’s as unhelpful as it is true.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll fold one day, and either go mad or go and chop wood, carry water in the countryside. (If the collapse of civilisation doesn’t force that on us all anyway, scrabbling around for remaining trees and clean water in a very unidyllic way.) There’s a few points I can see in my past where I’ve reached a breaking point of some sort; the results haven’t always been expected.
"I can’t take this shit anymore!" he said, mistakenly.
Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid
I remember obsessively covering my bedroom wall as a teenager with images from magazines. I think I got very close to covering the last bit of bare wallpaper, and then flipped. I tore every last one down in a frenzy. I remember that being good.
Then in my first term at university, the pressure of directionless energy hooked up with my waning Buddhism to form an incredibly intense desire to cut myself off from everything I’ve known, and go and live in a monastery in the far east. It didn’t happen; instead I ventured adrift into chemical abandon, which did a pretty good job, if a haphazard and destructive one, of severing my links with all I’d come to accept.
And my last year or two in Leeds, feeling more than a little pre-millennial tension, getting sick of urban confusion, lost as to where my recently evolved thinking, writing and publishing pursuits might be going, were marked by a conviction that I needed to move to rural Ireland for a while: work on an organic farm, that sort of thing. Instead I moved to London!
My more recent swell of urges to shed complications like sophisticated thought and modern life—coming as it does a little later in my years, with less of a sense of building towards some unspecified "Life"—seems to have more intense edges. I think this is why it’s also slightly more submerged, kept just out of range. I wonder if the double-edged nature of my apparent talents for conceptual acrobatics and linguistic clarity and flair is worth the hassle. The very thing that lets me make original connections between old ideas is the same thing that slides me into troughs of paranoia, seeing connections that others don’t. The ability to weave ideas and feelings together into patchworks that people have told me have "saved" them in dark moments when they lose the thread, this same ability often overshoots, and sews me up into a tangled mesh of abstraction and ineffectual knots.
Well, isn’t this the game? Weathering the pros and the cons, ever searching for some balance, or union? Further, can I "go back"? I can’t find the reference, but I remember Terence McKenna saying in a talk once that he saw that some innocents could achieve enlightened states through a kind of non-intellectual effort, but that for Western intellectuals (and I think he used the term pretty broadly to mean people in developed countries with active, educated intellects) the only way is forward. Alan Watts touched on a similar sentiment when he gave his prescription for our culture’s overbearing self-consciousness: more self-consciousness. As Joe Coleman said, "I can’t climb out of the hole I’m in, so I might as well dig myself out."
And when stuck with a hollow feeling of the worthlessness of these musings and evolving concepts, I often recall Hakim Bey’s wonderful essay, ‘Aimless Wandering: Chuang Tzu’s Chaos Linguistics‘.
"The Tao which can be spoken is not the Tao", begins Lao Tzu. Why then did he write the book at all? Why not stick to the silence where all language eventually vanishes, right from the start? One might answer that such a project would amount to precisely the sort of refusal to go with the flow which Taoism most despises. Humans talk, so Taoists talk. This answer might suffice—but a much more interesting response is given by Chuang Tzu.
"Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something," Chuang Tzu asserts—but "the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something? Or have we never said anything?"
Finally this question must remain unanswered, since Chuang Tzu’s uncompromising perspectivalism and linguistic relativism make any categorical attempt to distinguish between "It" and "Other" an act of futility. As the translator (A.C Graham) points out, for Chuang Tzu "all disputation starts from arbitrary acts of naming." Nevertheless, "saying says something" rather than nothing. Language is at once totally "arbitrary" and yet capable of meaning. Otherwise the Taoist would indeed fall silent.
This is certainly not a big thumbs-up to any old crap we care to spill out of our mouths or keyboards. But neither is it some clichéd take on Taoism that simply says, "Enough of those pointless words, already, shut up and be natural!"—whatever that would mean.
I met recently with a guy who had been initiated, several years ago, as a shaman in the Tuvan tradition in Siberia. He happily gave a "pub diagnosis" of my problems. His prescription? A woman with big tits, good bread, cheese, beer, hanging out with trees. Drop all the intellectual nonsense. Well, I’m already there with all but two of those items—no prizes for guessing which ones.
Perhaps, just maybe, I need to fuck off all the "examples" and "advice" given by others and accept that I’ve got my own path to work out. It’s not easy, but it’s mine.
