Solitaire

Note: This heavily paraphrases from the Eva Wong translation of the Lieh Tzu in the part describing the three realms. Shambhala published and sells it HERE: http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-57062-899-3.cfm (Pages 90-92) On to the essay.



Lieh Tzu and the Three Realms

In Lieh Tzu's story 'Dreams', he discusses three distant places populated by very different peoples. While clearly mythical, these realms are in fact describing the psyche or internal worlds of different groups of people we can see everywhere in the real world, as is discernible by how they treat dreaming phenomena.

The realms are as follows:

The first is a land untouched by the energies of yin and yang; as a result, the people there dream for fifty days before waking, and do not work, eat, or wear clothing. There is no night or day, and no change in the seasons; you could almost say they live in a perpetual twilight haze. As a result of the circumstances of their existence, they take dreams to be reality and waking life to be a dream.

The second land is a realm like ours; yin and yang energies touch it in perfect balance. As a result, there is division between day and night, and between the seasons; there is a variety of people there, people essentially of all types from all walks of life, who live in an organized society, harvest crops, and have a leader. They spend half of their time dreaming, and half of it awake; as a result of this, they take dreaming to be dreaming, and waking life to be reality.

The third land, however, is a sun scorched wasteland. Nothing is said about the yin and yang energies, but the description states that there is no night; the sun and moon shine on the land at all times, and as a result it is hot, and the land cannot support crops. The people scratch a meager existence from the land by eating fruits and rough tree roots, are very violent, and rarely sleep. As a result, they know nothing of dreams.

Instinctively, the assumption is that none of the three realms are really real. And to tell the truth, none of them can be seen from space. But if you examine them closely, you see that they describe the mental worlds lived in by people along the action/dreaming spectrum. Though Lieh Tzu does not explicitly make this connection, it is visible through example.

On the one hand, we have the dreamers, or those who think, muse, and turn things over in their head; not necessarily in their sleep, either. These people generally get little accomplished, but they certainly are passive and peaceful. Where they err is in thinking that the dream is the reality; the idealist who does not work towards a better world, or the artist who does not create anything, are both examples of this. They are those who dream instead of acting.

At the other far extreme, we have those who act and never dream. Doers, essentially; the soldier who never questions his orders, the ruthless businessman who does anything to make a profit or a quick buck, perhaps people who have left things like dreams, ideals, and visions behind in favor of functionality in the waking world. These are those who act instead of dreaming.

And holding the center, naturally, we find those who work together and cooperate. They both dream and work towards their dreams; as a result, they do not perhaps live in a perfect world, but it's certainly a far cry from a perpetual twilight realm where nothing happens and a blasted wasteland where every man is against everyone else. The difference between them and those at the extremes is rather simple-they both dream and work towards common objectives, dreaming yet not regarding it as real-as is part of the lesson inherent in Lieh Tzu's story-balance is needed between action and dreaming. Those who dream in favor of acting live in an insubstantial, hazy and evanescent world where nothing changes; those who only act and know nothing of dreaming or fantasy eke out a violent existence competing for a meager survival, while those who can live in balance actually build a society that works and live in a land that changes with the seasons.

Lieh Tzu's parting question, however, is a little more elusive.
"What then is the difference between waking and dreaming?"



Anyway, that's the rough draft of the essay. Not sure whether or not I've mentioned this, but it's the start of a nonfiction project I need to finish up on 'radical dreaming'. Huzzah. Don't know whether I'll post the later essays up here yet. And again it's a draft, and I apologize to all involved parties for not really knowing the proper way to post references and such. I'll take this down if anyone things it's infringing copyright laws or something...

Just been writing and drawing. Giving up painting til i'm better at drawing; if I weren't writing, I'd have time to focus on painting and drawing instead, but I need to write. Finally got around to drawing people from life, and did have a kinda amazing experience with it-even though they were moving around and I just did 30 second sketches of their outlines, on the drive back I kept having them flash into my head-their positions, etc, the areas of their bodies I was looking at. I was at a friend's house with some of his friends. We actually all wound up drawing at some point...I think i'm gonna carry a sketchbook around everywhere I go from now on along with my mechanical pencil (yeah, I bought it for detail work, it's .50mm, but it comes with an eraser attached and I don't need to sharpen it ever. I still prefer wooden pencils to it; they're much lighter, and I can put lighter tones down on paper with them.)

Apart from that, i'm noticing the current story i'm writing is heavily uninspired. But I have to slog through it before I can get my character to the next town and next task in the following short stories.

I'm finding myself addicted to Deviantart.com. Go check it out if you haven't already. My page there is at http://akamu23.deviantart.com/ . It's got less photos; I didn't feel like putting the older stuff up on it, so I did not do so. I continue to find myself blown away by what people are capable of in adobe photoshop and illustrator; if you click on digital art in the browsing menu, you'll see what i'm talking about. So, while I think I need to spend oodles of time working with traditional media and want to master them (there's something liberating about using small tools to do delicate work that a computer can't beat, regardless of how good its word processor may be), i'm looking forward to that time in the future when I can mix traditional with computer programs. So far my figures from imagination still (largely) lack form, but I have memorized proportions.

Another thing i'm getting out of the site is a sense of humility. There's so many wildly talented artists out there I can barely dream of ever matching them...

I'm finding most of my art books to be largely useless, though the writing ones are very helpful; I seem to pick up craft 'tools' for fiction subconsciously from reading about it and find myself using them when I need them. It's really bizarre.

Still jobless, and have not gotten any replies to my resume. I'm probably gonna have to be a dishwasher or something for a while (which I don't mind doing so much as I mind working for $6 an hour at my age; I certainly took a salary cut to get my last job). Or make pizzas, or whatever else it is (I probably shouldn't say this, but I will irresponsibly rant tonight) American society damns you to if you don't have a college degree, regardless of your skills (yeah, I know, I fucked up when I dropped out of school and did drugs, but it still pisses me off from time to time). As someone put it to me once, "You know, there's places in the world where they don't let people with potential sit and rot." I don't know how much potential I really have, I do know that i'm willing to work and not ABLE to until I get lucky with something. And I'd gladly go back to school if I could afford it, even if it wasn't for art.

I think i'm breaking my non-whining rule (yep) by saying all of this. Wait, I know what i'm doing wrong (the above paragraph just felt wrong as I wrote it-but i'll leave it there for fun, and educational purposes). I'm blaming outside forces for my problems, when I'm the only one who can change my situation, and otherwise making demands for exceptional treatment while not actually DOING anything to solve the problem (besides sending my resume out). Teehee. There's actually a Taoist story about a donkey and a well that illuminates what's "Wrong" about saying the above. (You can pick up the Tao of Daily Life by Derek Lin if you're interested. Chapter 7. It's a good read.) See, kids?

Maybe I should move to one of those places. Or, more than likely, pick up a trade to feed, clothe, and shelter myself until I can be a professional artist.

All right. Well, that post was different than most. A little bit of everything.

Derek Lin's translation is now online (I'd recommend getting it in paperback, though, as the online page doesn't have all the commentary. Except for the first chapter, which has expanded commentary. I really think this is the most accurate one i've seen so far.)

http://www.taoism.net/ttc/chapters/chap01.htm

For another translation, Peter Merel's:

http://www.religiousworlds.com/taoism/ttcmerel.html

An adaptation from an artistic perspective:

http://hiddensphere.com/hs/index.html

More translations (via an old Ran Prieur posting http://www.ranprieur.com )
http://home.pages.at/onkellotus/TTK/_IndexTTK.html (in multiple languages)
http://wayist.org/ttc%20compared/chap01.htm
http://www.geekfarm.org/cgi-bin/tao.pl?chapter=1&translation=all