Yes, this is a story from the watch. Two days ago, I ordered myself to redirect
attention to China (which I visited many times through 2014), and – no surprise
– relevant improbable things started to happen. At least one improbable thing.
It’s not so coherent as I would like – but entertaining
syncretic stories fit the Chinese theme well enough. Some folks would say that China (like Ireland?) is one of the most “yin” nations on earth – high tolerance
of cognitive dissonance. I certainly met
sincere Catholic druids on the Irish half of my family, talking to plants,
hearing what they say, and connecting to the Virgin Mary with love. Taoist Confucians and Buddhist Marxists also
play important roles in China.
But of all the weird things I have seen, criss-crossing the
earth both in body and in spirit – today’s tale is in SOME ways the weirdest.
Weirdest of all, perhaps: how many of you could imagine
someone NOW truly loving Donald Trump, with sincere glowing love (and not just
a few POSSIBLE members of his family or a few remnants of the crowd lusting for
his cash)? Certainly Donald Trump is one of those people who really needs love,
as psychologists have been saying all over all the networks lately -- and he
hasn’t been getting much of it in his job. Yes, he has lots of strong supporters, whom I
see very often… but when they express support for Trump, they usually do it with
an echoing growl, not a smile of love, and, like Bannon, they may be happy to
bite almost anyone as their form of support.
But … this week… it is odd. And it involves China.
The picture above (actually, a 2D shadow puppet held in a
frame) depicts the Great Pig of the Chinese classic Journey to the West.
Don’t know China? OK, I really should explain, because China
is important, and so is this pig.
When strict Moslems are in a decent state, they often say “Moslems,
Christians and Jews really are brothers in a way, all respected in the Koran.
We are all people of the book. One book,
three books, whatever – Torah, New Testament, Koran.” (And I hear “Book of
Mormon too!” ) Well, Chinese people may have been more literate historically than
other countries were, and THEY had sacred books too, books really central to
Chinese civilization, to Chinese ability to rise above warlords and entropy
(still present!) and the famines they caused. In my view, the two most
important books which made China a powerful civilization were Journey to the
West and the Analects of Confucius. Very different books, both universally
prominent in their own way, and I will not take time to try to compare them here.
This blog will focus on Journey to the West, where the Great Pig is one of the
four central characters.
Of course, the pig of Journey to the West is not the only
pig in Chinese literature. Look at recent newspapers, and you will see lots of
reference to Chinese families trying to have a child born at exactly the right
time which by Chinese astrology makes them a “Golden Pig.” Come to think of it,
I actually am one of those myself, and since I am now the same age as Trump,
maybe he really is a Golden Pig, by the Chinese astrology. I’d say he fits that
role much better than I do!
Long before I traveled to China, I learned how the cartoon
monkey is much beloved by Chinese children, as beloved as Mickey mouse is here
(and there too?). (Don’t underestimate the mouse… but not for this blog.) We
even found some children stories of “the story of monkey.” But traveling in
China, I learned that this popular cartoon monkey is just a popularization of
the “Monkey King,” the central character in the book of a hundred chapters,
Journey to the West. I brought back a serious copy of Journey to the West, with
English and Chinese versions side by side and illustrations, from the big
bookstore in Beijing, not far from Tian An Men square.
I would read a chapter every night to young Chris, as a kind
of bedtime story – and it was clear that the book was intended to be read that
way. This book was one of the Four Great Official books of Chinese Literature,
a great focus of diligent Confucian students who dominated China for at least a
thousand years up to Mao (who himself was a student at the Thousand Year
Academy we visited in Changsha).
One of the four, but by far the most influential. (Perhaps I
will comment on the other three, but perhaps not.)
From 2005 to 2014, I visited China every year, mostly with
Luda and Chris. Several times we visited the Summer Palace in Beijing, where we
walked under long open corridors whose ceilings were covered with intense
colorful pictures of scenes from Journey to the West, one after another. Clearly
those Emperors has their story…
Journey to the West is formally the story of a group of
characters (four most memorable ones) commissioned (by the emperor?) to go to
Tibet, to try to bring back the scrolls of a new and more powerful form of
Buddhism, powerful enough to strengthen the people and the country to be able
to better resist the forces of entropy which have always been a huge problem
for China. (Even under Mao, Mao had huge cultural power, but in political
control of provinces and villages he was much more of a fictitious paper tiger
than Americans understood.) It is one of those classic Chinese style pieces
written with intention of being read at many different levels, from small child
to enlightened sage.
Some of you may remember English classes, where some critic
tries to infer the true meaning hidden in some novel. English speaking
novelists would usually object, and say truthfully that they tried to say what
they meant to everyone. But China has
often been different, perhaps in part because a lot of Chinese letters were
written by people paying more attention to the difference between their
intended readers, their family watching them, and the officials watching them.
But for different reasons, journey to the West clearly is a multi-level construction,
intended as such.
In our travels form 2005 to 2014, we were amazed at how many
of the unlikely places described in the book actually were based on real
places, scattered all over China.
I was of course most interested in the cave where Monkey is
said to have studied under a Taoist Immortal. It seems there may have been MANY
such! In Qing Chen Shan (one of the sacred Daoist mountains, in Sichuan province)
we hiked on a trail to the most likely candidate, only to see a sign: “Sorry,
this school was moved for its protection,” signed Chou En-Lai. I wanted to enter
the cave of the Yellow Immortal, but it was blocked by a sign saying “closed at
4:30. Come back tomorrow.” (Well, I could at least feel into that one.) And
another cave I really could enter, but that was an old dragon cave from further
east, one of the Three Kingdoms places (Wu, I think).
The monkeys do still eat flowers and fruit, I saw…
There IS a tilting tiger tail temple…
The great cudgel in Xinjiang was made up later by fans of the
book, but it IS located in the real burning hot pink desert described in the
book. And so so.
Most important, in Xian – the great main capital from the
Han and Tang dynasties, arguably the greatest ever in Chinese history – we visited
the actual many-story pagoda where the actual scrolls actually were brought back
by the actual monk.
(What was that name? Tanzang? The actual name and the name
in the book were similar, as I recall.)
As we travelled through China, we joked to ourselves (ever
less of a joke) that Luda was playing the role of the monk in that story, the
actual leader, trying to teach the law and seek. Chris, a child at that time,
was playing the role of Monkey, very powerful but in need of instruction and
guidance. And I was clearly the horse. It kept fitting. It was especially
embarrassing when hordes of young children (mostly girls) would crowd around
Chris, giggling, most very friendly, and we encouraged him to learn to respect and
accept it. (I suspect there is also ying yang thing – especially today, when
DNA reports support the theory that Chris is the most purely perfectly yang
among all of us, which says a lot in the Russian-German household we have
here.)
But… in any case… that was long past. Until Luda, in her
local wanderings here in Arlington, runs across an old woman who says: “This is
for you. It was given to me, to pass onto you, the worthy recipient. You only
had the four characters in the party as you travelled, and you need to have the
fourth. Here he is. The beloved pig, who was such a problem in the beginning,
bit grew to be a worthy and beloved member of the party, as he sincerely tried
to learn and overcome his failings and join in the fight against the hordes and
hordes of terrible demons.”
Was that book actually trying to foretell the future? Read
it, and you will get your own impression. I do not remember the pig part, so I
just end it here, incomplete.
Could it be that this is like a personal Book of Revelations
for Donald Trump??
Except. Except for
two add-ons, one on a movie, and one on immortality.
The movie:
Thanks to Alex for his great recommendation to see the
NETFLIX movie Journey to the West, VERY loosely based on the book, by the same
folks who gave us Shao Lin Soccer, another wonderful movie I am glad I saw.
Since that movie was more recent, and vivid, I remember it
better than the book, maybe, in some ways. (I remember more things form the
book, but there was more to remember.) The movie was not as nice to monkey –
but that’s not a story for this blog post. The only pig part I remember was the
vivid horror at all the people who want to EAT pig. (First course, they serve him new health care and tax plans. Next course they serve HIM.) I wonder what Trump would
make of THAT? Certainly there are folks who smile and invite him to dinner with
the intention of eating him.
=================================
Immortality, another ancient and complex theme in China.
In truth, I have at different times in past years felt real
personal love for more than one Chinese woman. I remember a surge of feeling
for an incredibly beautiful woman, the sister of my cousin’s wife, whom I met
only briefly (sigh) in the restaurant of the Jade Palace Hotel (now demolished,
sigh) in Beijing, who gave me two scrolls as a present, one a big character
hanging painting with the character “longevity” in the center, and some serious words of explanation on it.
And so I was a bit startled, after my decision to think
about China a bit, that I received an email totally out of the blue passed on from
a woman of piercing intelligent from the new Western immortality/longevity
movement, asking whether I would want to be interviewed on that subject. Why
me? Why then?
It is true that two days ago, I did observe a livestream
event with just a few sentences form Jose Cordeiro, a leader of the Transhumanists,
saying he will be working with Charles Gray, a leader of the new (medical?)
immortality movement, and saying that he personally intends to live forever. But I was just watching remotely, and said
nothing about this. I have VERY scrupulously refrained from telling people that
I actually did study that literature, found fatal flaws (in some cases truly
fatal, as in Emperor Qin kind of fatal), and found a way to make it work but
ONLY with understanding and use of a level of mathematics which I doubt any of
them even begin to understand.
No, not immortality, not for human bodies. The design is not
so suitable for that. All I could figure out was longevity, about 1000 years I
would guess.
I remember the day when I made that breakthrough, and was so
excited. I started to feel: it is dangerous, but maybe not SO dangerous. (Of
course, I was biased by the shadow of my own personal death, current actuarial statistics
expect 20 years but anywhere from 0 to 30.) That day, however, Senator Mark
Warner came to talk to us (a totally unique event), and gave a talk explaining
how even another 10 or 20 years more would wreak total havoc in the poor
confused world we live in now. Ok. End of that.
So why the call? Is it the recent work on the arrow of time, which I discussed just this
morning in an email to a guy I once met at Tsinghua?
Who knows. Probably just coincidence. Probably just a synchronicity
kind of coincidence.
A final point on this: a Berkeley professor asked us a few
days ago: WHAT kinds of physics would allow WHAT kinds of paranormal or
spiritual phenomena?
Heavy paranormal stuff, I said, would require a new deeper
theory, deeper than my new Modified Quantum Electrodynamics (MQED), the only theory
of physics (aside from general relativity) which I really trust in full detail
for what it predicts. MQED would not allow explanation of the heavy weird
stuff, but MIGHT allow for maybe a little “prescience” (sbort-term
anticipation) and WOULD allow for a whole lot of weird Jungian synchronicity. So Carl Jung is as serious as it gets.
Best of luck, Paul
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