Will Buckingham's Blog, page 14

India!

The last few days have been pretty busy, as I’ve been putting everything in order for my forthcoming trip to India. I’m going to be doing an event at the Kolkata Book Fair, where I’ll be launching the paperback of my novel, The Descent of the Lyre. Kolkata Book Fair is an interesting event, in particular because of the strong emphasis that it puts on the relationship between readers and writers. But I’m also taking advantage of being in India to head up to Santiniketan, where I’ll pay my respects to the memory of Rabindranath Tagore, and to do a bit of research for a couple of forthcoming projects in Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, and around the Buddhist pilgrimage sites.

I was last in India — and Bodh Gaya — in 1998, and so I’m expecting that things will have changed quite a lot. But I’m looking forward to being back, and to getting to grips with India again (and to spending a bit more time than usual writing and meditating).

I’ll be posting updates on this blog whilst I’m away — I generally write more when I’m on the move. In the mean-time, there are bags to pack, things to organise, and classes to be taught…

Complete Write a Novel Launch Event — photos

Last night I launched my book, Teach Yourself: Complete Write a Novel at De Montfort University, so here are a few images of the launch event. Niki Valentine (Nicola Monaghan) was asking the questions, and it was great to talk about novel-writing in front of an audience of friends, strangers, and some absolutely fabulous writers.

[image error] Before the launch[image error] The Bookstall[image error] Niki Valentine interviewing [image error] Signing books with award-winning writers Niki Valentine and Mahsuda Snaith[image error] Simon Perril — course leader and temporary barman[image error] Students, staff & friends after the launch[image error] Event poster[image error] Books for sale[image error] Before the launch

Images © Ambrose Musiyiwa — with thanks!

New Events Page

I’ve just set up a new events page, which can be found here. This will give a list of upcoming events that I’m involved in, and should also keep the blog clear for more substantive content.

I’m still testing it, so let me know if there are any glitches.

A. C. Graham on the Uses of Divination

I thought that this was worth sharing. It comes from A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao, and is about the creative potential of divination techniques such as the Yijing, even if we accept (as I do) that the divinatory process is simply an exercise in playing with randomness.

 

An openness to chance influences loosing thought from preconceptions is indispensable to creative thinking. In responding to new and complex situations it is a practical necessity to shake up habitual schemes and wake to new correlations of similarities and connexions […] There is no reason to doubt that divination systems do help many people to reach appropriate decision in situations with too many unknown factors, and that the Yi is among the more successful of them.  Unless we are to follow Jung in postulating an a-causal principle of synchronicity, we must suppose that the Yi serves to break down preconceptions by forcing the diviner to correlate his situation with a chance sequence of six prognostications. If their meaning were unambiguous, the overwhelming probability would be that the prognostications would be either obviously inapplicable or grossly misleading. Since on the contrary the hexagrams open up an indefinite range of patters for correlation, in the calm of withdrawal into sacred space and time, the effect is to free the mind to take account of all information whether or not it conflicts with preconceptions, awaken it to unnoticed similarities and connexions, and guide it to a settled decision adequate to the complexity of factors. This is conceived not as discursive thinking but as a synthesising act in which the diviner sees into and responds to everything at once, with a lucidity mysterious to himself. The Yi is not a book which pretends to offer clear predictions but hides away in tantalising obscurities; it assumes in the diviner that kind of intelligence we have discussed in connexion with Chuang-tzu, opening out and responding to stimulation in perfect tranquility, lucidity and flexibility. (p. 368-370)

 

Image: Grinding Cinnabar and Annotating the Yijing.

Guard-Dogs and Sausages

Tomorrow the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework are to be announced, and in universities up and down the country, anxieties are running high. For those who don’t know, the REF is an exercise that aims to evaluate the quality of university research outputs. At best, this is an affair of dubious value: not only does it create enormous and widespread stress amongst university staff, but it is also expensive, it spreads discord and tension, and it has been linked to an increase in bullying within universities. Worst of all, given all of this, it doesn’t even necessarily do what it claims to do—which is to encourage research excellence (see the articles here, and here).

This is all pretty lamentable. And yet, even before the frenzy of the announcement of the REF2014 results, universities are gearing up for REF2020, in six years time. And despite the increasing evidence that the REF, whilst it may be beneficial to the few, is ruinous to the many, universities are all playing along, desperate to be winners in a race in which the vast preponderance of participants are losers.

This is dispiriting stuff, and it would take a brave university to step out of line, not least because funding is linked to REF outcomes (although with a general election looming, there is no guarantee that things here in the UK won’t go truly weird in 2015). With the threat of withdrawal of research funding, universities and individual departments are understandably worried about their balance sheets.

But in surrendering all the the REF, it seems to me that universities are throwing broader, more expansive sets of values out of the window. I have friends who are already sighing about having to write “REF-able” papers for the next exercise—papers that they don’t really want to write, and that they don’t think anybody will really want to read, but that they think might manage to be high-ranked in REF2020. Not good papers, in other words, but papers that are deemed to be good within the framework of a narrow and fundamentally flawed exercise. And I also know people who are not writing the things that they really want to write—the things that they feel, on the basis of their experience, their reading and their interactions with students, are most important and urgent—because this will take them away from the REF sausage-machine.

So what is to be done? Given the ruinousness of the REF for the many, it seems to me that at the very least we should have the decency not to take the whole exercise as seriously as it takes itself. We should have the common sense not to internalise the values of the REF within university structures, recognising that in internalising these values we increase their destructiveness. Not only this, but we should also be willing to laugh at the REF, to poke fun at it, to lampoon it, to lobby against it, to hold out for alternative values amid the maelstrom; and whilst doing so, we should to support a culture of research, teaching, scholarship and service to the broader community, that is wider, more open, more generous, and better than the REF.

Of course, whilst the REF still exists, it may be necessary to be pragmatic. We may not be able to escape the demand for sausage-machine academic productivity entirely (and sausages, as everybody knows, are on average 83% entrails, sawdust and crud). But if we have to make a few sausages on the side, then we might as well make them as tasty as possible. Then, when we are done, we should toss them to the guard-dogs of the REF to distract them, and sneak on by into our offices and our labs where we can start cooking up other, more interesting things, things of more substantial and lasting nutritional value.

As for myself, I am fortunate to have several sausages tucked up my sleeves ready for REF2020. They seem pretty tasty to me, although I don’t know if the guard-dogs will like them or not (I’m not very good at second-guessing these things, and the guard-dogs are fickle). But nevertheless, I worry for the bigger picture. I worry about a university that produces only sausages. I worry that feeding the dogs has become an end in itself. And I worry that this is a self-perpetuating system in which 83% of any given sausage ends up being simply the ground-up remains of other sausages.

It would be nice to see the day when the dogs are at last retired. It would be nice see universities putting the REF in its place, saying that other things matter, and that perhaps they matter more. And it would be nice, one day, to find myself sitting in a university meeting, and talking about research, and finding that we are talking about something other than sausages.

Complete Write a Novel Course: Out Next Week

I’m very pleased to say that my Teach Yourself: Complete Write a Novel Course is due out next week, and so is the ideal Christmas present for any aspiring novelists in your life. It’s designed to be a sort of travel-guide to the whole territory of novel-writing, exploring not only how to craft and ultimately publish your novel, but also how to keep sane and keep food on the table whilst doing so. Of course, if you do have any aspiring novelists in your life, they are likely to be sensitive souls, so it is in your interests too that they keep sane.

If you want to get a copy and you are in the UK, then it’s best to order the book from Hive.co.uk using the link here, as this helps support your local bookstore. If you are further afield then you can try Amazon.

On Failing to Understand the Yijing

How do you culturally translate a text when one of the most striking things about the text is that it is either misunderstood, or simply not understood, in its original language? This is a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time with respect to the Yijing (I Ching 易經) or Book of Changes. The question is particularly pressing as I have been attempting to carry out just such a cultural translation for my forthcoming book, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes. And so I’m very pleased to have just published a paper on this topic in JOMEC journal’s special issue on Cultural Translation and East Asia.

Alongside questions of cultural translation, this paper also discusses fish, fish-traps, Zhuangzi, understanding Derrida, not understanding Derrida, the terror of the English when faced with that strangest of French contraptions, the bidet (“what is it for?”), tango dancing in Hong Kong and three-legged birds made of bronze that turn into fish. In other words, it covers most of the things that are of pressing contemporary concern.

You can get hold of it as a PDF (nicely open access) by clicking this link.

To Philosophise is to Learn How to Live

To philosophise, Michel de Montaigne famously said, is to learn to die. This is a thought that can be traced back through Cicero to Plato’s dialogues. So in the Phaedo we see Socrates arguing (not very plausibly, incidentally) that death should not be considered a bad thing because it is either a kind of sleep, or else it is a relocation to another world where you can get to hang out and chat with Orpheus, Hesiod, Homer and the gang.

From the very beginning, in other words, Western philosophy has seen death both as a philosophical problem (how do we think about death?), and as a philosophical opportunity (how, either through thinking in the right way about death, or through dying in the right way, might we be elevated to a higher philosophical position?).

But recently I’ve been thinking about the weirdness of the idea that the philosopher is somebody who is particularly good at dying. This is, it increasingly seems to me, a rather strange job-description. And the more I have thought about this, particularly in the light of Chinese philosophy, the more there has seemed to me to be something seriously out-of-kilter here.

In the classic Western philosophical picture that emerges from Socrates to Montaigne and beyond, death is taken as the background against which life unfolds (“our little life is rounded with a sleep”). Thus, if we are really concerned with thinking hard about life (which, we are to presume, is to some extent what philosophy is about), then we have to first think very hard about this background. So, for thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, knowledge of life proceeds from knowledge of death (or, as Heidegger might say, it proceeds from one’s “comportment towards death”). Death is the main issue; and it is only in facing up to this main issue that we really face up to the secondary issue of life. One implication of this kind of thinking is that death can easily take on a greater weight or reality than life — and life can be diminished, made illusory or insignificant. This is something that also happens in Buddhism. Wherever it appears, I’m increasingly sceptical of it.

Turning to Chinese traditions of thought (at least, to non-Buddhist traditions from China), things often look rather different. Here’s Confucius, for example.

季路問事鬼神。子曰：「未能事人，焉能事鬼？」敢問死。曰：「未知生，焉知死？」

Ji Lu asked about serving spirits of the dead and gods. The master said, “You are still not capable of serving human beings, how could you serve spirits?” [Then Ji Lu said] “But dare I ask about death?” Confucius said, “You do not yet know life. How could you know death?”

In Chinese thought, life is the main issue. And if death is a concern for us, its mattering can only be seen against the background of life itself. This is perhaps why, in Edmund Ryden’s translation of the excellent “Key Concepts of Chinese Philosophy” (中國古典哲學概念範疇要論) by Zhang Dainian (張岱年), the character for life, sheng 生, is listed, but not the character for death, si 死.

In the various traditions of Chinese thought, life and death are rarely posed as grand metaphysical problems. Instead, the processes of generation (which is another meaning of sheng 生, the character representing a sprouting plant) and of dying are both seen as a part of the endless transformation of the ten thousand things. To the extent that they are opposed forces, living or generation and dying or dissolution are equally aspects of life itself. And if they exist in opposition, it is an opposition that is fundamentally complementary rather than antagonistic. In the section called ‘Knowledge Wandering in the North’ (Zhi bei you 知北遊), found in the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi, this mutual entanglement of life and death is put like this:

生也死之徒，死也生之始，孰知其紀！人之生，氣之聚也，聚則為生，散則為死。

Life is that which follows death; death is that which begins with life. Who knows how they are interwoven? Human life is the accumulation of vitality: it is accumulated and thus there is generation, it is scattered and thus there is death.

In this picture, death is not a thing. It is not some terrible metaphysical event that we have to face up to if we are to get to grips with life at all. And certainly, it is not something that, if we are to be good philosophers or good sages, we have to learn how to do. Nobody needs to learn how to die. One of the few good things about dying is that it takes no special skill. So to philosophise, or to study the way of the sages, is not to learn how to die. Instead, it is to learn how to deal with a life in which there is endless generation and dissolution, in which there is the perpetual accumulation and dispersal of vitality, in which the ten thousand things (and ourselves, as things amongst things) transform themselves again and again. To philosophise is to learn how to live.

Here it seems fitting to end with a lovely quote from early Qing dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (王夫之), taken from Zhang’s book. The quote comes from Wang’s Outer Commentary on the Book of Changes (周易外傳). It could be read, as Zhang points out, as a riposte to the Buddhist advocates of the unreality of life. It is also perfectly possible to read it as a riposte to Platonists and all others who claim that life is somehow insubstantial. It reads like this:

夫可依者有也，至常者生也。皆无妄而不可謂之妄也… 夫然其常而可依者皆其生而有；其生而有者，非妄而必真。

That which can be depended upon is existence; that which is most constant is life. These things are without unreality, and one cannot call them unreal… And so the things that are constant and can be relied upon, these things are life and existence. Life and existence — these are not unreal, and are necessarily true.

Tanimbar Medicine on Medium

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks, so although I’ve got a couple of blog posts brewing, I’ve not had time to actually get them properly written. In the mean-time, my piece on Tanimbarese medicine — an extract from a book-length work-in-progress that I’ve been busy with — has been published by Unmapped Magazine over on Medium. It’s a story of possession, exorcism, crazed nuns, and stomach-dwelling octopuses. The article is free to access, and you can get hold of it from the link here.

An Afternoon of Uselessness

What better way to spend a rainy afternoon than talking idly about Chinese philosophy over a good cup of tea? Today we had our first East-West Salon here at DMU where I work. It’s been a fun event. I decided to set up a salon with my colleague Sam Bamkin after his return from the ‘Infusing Asian Studies’ institute at the East-West centre in Hawaii (www.eastwestcente.org). Our aim is to provide a forum for looking at East Asian thought, and mulling over the implications of taking East Asian traditions seriously for how we go about thinking, teaching and leading our lives.

Our first session was free-ranging, starting from the first chapter of Sarah Allan’s wonderful book The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue, and talking about root metaphors in Chinese and Western thought. We had long and interesting excursions into contemporary politics — in particular Xi Jinping’s notion of the “China Dream” (中国梦), thanks to Dr. Amy Barnes’s reflections on the recent conference of the same name at the University of Leicester — whilst also drawing connections with deeper-rooted philosophical themes.

We set up the group quite deliberately as something open-ended, something that serves no particular agenda, and something that is part of no wider ‘research strategy’. The group was born out of an concern in having interesting conversations. And no more.

This calculated uselessness may turn out to have its benefits. As Zhuangzi puts it, “人皆知有用之用，而莫知無用之用也,” or, “Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful, but there is none who knows the usefulness of the useless.” Which means, of course, that our non-strategy may be, in truth, some kind of strategy after all…

Next up, we may be talking about the addiction to knowledge, which seems a potentially worthwhile thing to talk about in a university, where the corridors are haunted by knowledge-junkies who wander about like hungry ghosts. I’m looking forward to it.