Will Buckingham's Blog, page 16

Strange Happenings in Yangzhou

Whilst doing research on my forthcoming book, A Book of Changes: Sixty-four Chance Pieces, I came across a curious little tale in The Dream Pool Essays (Mengxi Bitan / 夢溪筆談), written in the eleventh century by Shen Kuo (沈括). The tale was about the miraculous appearance of a celestial pearl, and is an entertaining and intriguing read.

My interest in the story was provoked when I was reflecting upon a curious encounter I had back in 2010 with a man in a coffee shop in the city of Baoji in China, a man who swore that he was an alien (you can read the story of this encounter here)… So, although I have zero confidence in the veracity of tales of extraterrestrial visitors, I thought I’d have a stab at translating the passage.



 

In Yangzhou, during Jiayou era, there was an extremely large pearl that everybody could see when the sky was dark. It first emerged from the marshes of Tianchang, and then it turned towards Bishe lake, and only then disappeared into Xinkai lake. Over a period of ten years, it was quite normal for those who lived there and for travellers passing by to see it. I had a friend whose studio was by the lake, and one evening he suddenly saw this pearl. It was very close. It slightly opened its door, and from the opening light shot out. It was like a ray of golden light. And then, all at once, from inside the shell — now it was as large as half a seating-mat — there was a white light like silver, and a pearl as big as a fist. Its brilliance was such that it could not be looked at straight-on. For ten li, the trees all cast shadows, and light shone like the rising sun, but in the distance the sky was the crimson of wild fires. Then suddenly it disappeared into the distance, going on its way as if it was flying, floating amongst the waves, after which it dimmed like the sun.

 

And here, just for the fun of it, is the original Chinese, which comes from the twenty-first folio on the subject of strange happenings (the Project Gutenberg link is here).

 

嘉祐中，揚州有一珠，甚大，天晦多見。初出於天長縣陂澤中，後轉入甓社湖，又後乃在新開湖中，凡十餘處，居民行人常常見之。余友人書齋在湖上，一夜忽見其珠，甚近。初微開其房，光自吻中出。如橫一金線。俄頃忽張殼，其大如半席，殼中白光如銀，珠大如拳，爛然不可正視。十餘里間林木皆有影，如初日所照；遠處但見天赤如野火；倏然遠去，其行如飛；浮於波中，杳杳如日。

This tale has been doing the rounds in China since the 1970s, and apparently some quite eminent figures have claimed it as clear evidence of extra-terrestial visitors. I take this as clear evidence that eminence and credulity are not mutually exclusive.

I myself knocked out this translation of the passage from the Dream Pool Essays some time towards the beginning of this year. However, it seems that in the last few months the story has broken out in the English-speaking world and has been picked up by a number of UFO sites. Although I remain unconvinced, when I’m next in China, should I run into any other coffee-shop aliens, I will make sure that I recommend they head straight to Guangzhou, where the mothership, I assume, will be waiting.

Image: Shen Kuo, from the Beijing Observatory, courtesy of Hans A. Rosbach. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons.

Productivity and Failure with Éireann Lorsung

For all those who are concerned with their writerly productivity, you absolutely need to listen to this terrific talk by the writer, Éireann Lorsung, given recently at the University of Iowa. It’s a hugely thoughtful reflection on the problems with the issue of productivity, the obsession with publishable outcomes, the importance of dormancy, and the role of failure in life and writing.  “I’d encourage you, if you can, to try to conceive of periods of low productivity, or of not writing… as times where the work you are doing is invisible, rather than nonexistent.”

So put your to-do list to one side, put down your manuscript, take a break, and have a listen. It sounds like there’s also some great doodling taking place on the blackboard as the talk unfolds: but the talk is only audio, so you’ll just have to imagine the doodles!

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this blog post is called “Idleness Opening the Door for the Lover” and dates from 1405. I like the idea that what I take for idleness may actually be opening doors. Find out more about the image here).

The Art of Staring into Space

I spent much of my schooling staring out of the window. This was not because there was anything interesting happening outside; instead it was because of a certain detachment from the world around me, a tendency to daydream. In fact, I wasn’t really staring out of the window. I was looking at some indeterminate point in the middle distance (I discovered early on that you need a window, and a sense of far distance, if you are to find the optimum point in the middle distance at which to stare). At the time, this was considered a serious moral flaw, of course. There were more pressing demands upon me, after all. But looking back, I think that there was considerable value (and still is) to be found in staring into space (see, for example, this article).

So I thought I’d share the following, from the Chinese thinker Liu Xie (劉勰), and his wonderful book The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin Diaolong 文心雕龍). The Wenxin Diaolong was written around the beginning of the sixth century, and is a fascinating text, mixing Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist perspectives to explore the question of what it might mean to imagine, to think and to write. Anyway, this comes from the famous shensi (神思), or “spirit-thinking” chapter, and it’s a passage — more or less — about the virtues of staring into space.

 

文之思也，其神遠矣。故寂然凝慮，思接千載；悄焉動容，視通萬里。吟詠之間，吐納珠玉之聲；眉睫之前，卷舒風云之色；其思理之致乎！ 故思理為妙，神與物游。

神居胸臆，而志氣統其關鍵；物沿 耳目，而辭令管其樞機。樞機方通，則物無隱貌；關鍵將塞，則神有遁心。

 

In literary thought the spirit is far away. Thus silently staring and contemplating, your thoughts reach across one thousand years. Quietly, your expression deeply moved, you can see across ten thousand miles. Amid the recitation of verses, you can hear the spitting out of pearls and jade; before your eyebrows and eyelashes, the wind rolls and the clouds unfurl. This is the delicate operation of thought! Thus the operation of thought is subtle, and the spirit journeys alongside things.

The spirit resides in the chest and the heart: the keys to this spirit are your intentions and your vital breath. Things become present to your ears and eyes, and use of language is the hinge around which they turn. When this hinge is correctly aligned, then things will appear without concealment; but when the keys become obstructed, then spirit has already fled one’s heart and mind.

 

Image: Nhá Chica by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior. Wikimedia commons.

A Book of Changes

I’m very pleased to be able to announce that I’ve just signed the contract on my novel-of-sorts, “A Book of Changes: Sixty-four Chance Pieces” with the excellent Earnshaw Books, purveyors of all good things China-related.

The book should be out some time in the first quarter of next year, and will be available in the UK, USA and East Asia. This project has been a long time in the making — it started out seven or eight years ago with an interest with Calvino’s literary experiments, and the idea of playing with the I Ching (易經) as a literature machine capable of generating new and surprising stories: because what is divination, I asked myself, if not the creation of new and surprising stories?

At that point, I knew next to nothing about the I Ching; but once I’d got started, I found myself getting drawn in to learning Chinese — something that had never been a part of the plan — and then later, conducting research in China. Some books are black holes: get too close and they suck you in. The I Ching is such a book.

The final novel, A Book of Changes, has sixty-four chapters, one for each of the hexagrams or gua (卦) of the original I Ching. It is also a book that blends fiction and non-fiction (as well as footnotes and other scholarly apparatus) in a fashion that is, frankly, pretty close to indecent in a novel.

Anyway, the launch is still a way off, but I’ll post a picture of the cover when that has been decided on, and more news towards the time that the book is published.

This book of changes has been one of those projects that has far outstripped my initial intentions. It has led me into all kinds of fun China-related avenues, and as a result of embarking upon that idea some seven or more years ago, I now spend a good deal of my time working on Chinese texts and thinking about Chinese literature and philosophy. There are, in other words, further projects brewing, but I will leave those, too, for future blog posts…

Because we are too menny?

A couple of weeks back, the novelist Javier Marías wrote an article for the Independent on the subject of why to not write novels (and one reason why you might want to write them). Briefly, the reasons were these: i) because there are too many novels in the world; ii) because more or less anyone can do it; iii) because it’s unlikely to make you rich; iv) because it’s a hopeless way of courting fame; v) because neither will it bring you immortality; vi) because it is not flattering to the ego; and vii) because of the sheer suffering that it involves. As for the sole reason for writing novels, Marías says, “Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.”

I’ve mentioned the torment and suffering before, in a recent blog post, so I won’t go back over that. And there’s a lot that could be said about the rest of the list as well (particularly the peculiar reason Marías gives in favour of writing novels). But what I want to talk about here is the idea that there are too many novels in the world.

The claim that there are too many novels is not unique to Marías. In fact, it is a protest that I stumble across again and again. It is also a complaint that is often made against the teaching of creative writing: some people fear that teaching writing may lead — may the gods prevent such a thing coming to pass! — to people actually writing more books, when it is clear that we already have quite enough books in the world.

However, if you are writing a novel yourself, before you go and burn your manuscript, leaving behind a scrawled note reading “Done because we are too menny…”, it is worth pausing to ask whether it is really true that there are too many books. This is what Marías says:

Not only do those [novels] already written continue to exist and demand to be eternally read, but thousands more entirely new novels keep appearing in publishers’ catalogues and in bookshops around the world; then there are the many thousands rejected by publishers that never reach the bookshops, but which nonetheless exist. It is, then, a commonplace activity, one that is, in theory, within the grasp of anyone who learnt to write at school, and for which no higher education or special training is required.

Leaving aside the fraught questions of what “too menny” might mean, what the criterion might be for judging the optimum number of novels that there should be, and how all of this might be policed, there are several reasons that one might bemoan the fact that novels are too numerous in the world.

The first reason is that this proliferation mitigates against having a synoptic, overall knowledge of the literary world. Sure, you might assiduously read the latest Booker long-list, you might scour the arts pages of the broadsheet press, you might pride yourself on being an industry professional, you might have a sense of trends and currents in the book world: but the sheer volume of words, the impossibility of reading even the tiniest part of this great tide of storytelling, means that you cannot be an expert on literature in general. The proliferation of novels perhaps means the death of a particular kind of expertise.

Another reason you might lament the sheer number of novels is the fear that there might not be enough readers to go round. If you read my novel (and you should, of course, but then I would say that…), then you might not have the time to read Marías’s novel. Time is a limited resource, and many writers and critics fret over the notion that the dwindling pie of readers’ attention is being divided between more and more writers, more and more books. As a sorrowful literature professor where I work said to me a few weeks ago: “Everybody wants to write, but nobody wants to read”.

A third reason you might want to protest that there are too many books is that you are a good capitalist who is interested, above all, in shifting units into the hands of consumers; and as a good capitalist, it makes more sense to sell hundreds and thousands of one thing to an undiscerning public, rather than selling only thousands of one hundred things to a more discerning public. Think of the efficiency-savings! So what you want (actually, it isn’t really what you want, but only what you think you want; but because you are a good capitalist, you don’t have much imagination) is a monoculture: you want everybody to be reading the same damn thing, and you want it to be your damn thing.

But these, I think, are all bad reasons to argue that there are too many books. In fact, it seem to me that most of the arguments that “we are too menny” are unconvincing. We can take the three arguments I have given above in turn.

Firstly, when it comes to the question of expertise and the impossibility of developing a synoptic, overall knowledge of the literary world, whilst this might put paid to the consoling thought that one is an expert, it is perfectly possible to see this as a liberating and invigorating thing. The realisation that the world is a vast proliferation of stuff that we don’t know about, and that we never will, the fact that our knowledge is always partial, might perhaps seem alarming; but it also means that there is always a possibility of discovering something new and exciting, something from outside of the narrow circle of those things that we have hitherto known.

As for people reading but not writing, in general I’m not sure that this is true. It may be that there is a shifting in the balance between how much people are reading and how much they are writing. Time is a limited resource. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I would be able to read more. That is a simple fact. The activities support each other, but you can only do one thing at a time. So whilst this balance may be shifting, with more people spending more time writing than at any time in history (which, I think, is irrefutable), this again shouldn’t be seen as some apocalyptic event. Reading is probably a pretty good way to spend your time, but then so is writing. Both seem to me to be worthwhile creative activities. The professor of literature was wrong, I think, in assuming that people want to read but do not want to write. Most people who write want to both read and write. They have an increasing range of tools and technologies not only to access things to read, but also to put their writing out into the world. They want to make use of these possibilities, balancing reading and writing together. More power to them, I say.

As for monocultures, there will always be books that sell in their millions, books that sell in their hundreds of thousands, books that sell in their thousands, books that sell in their hundreds, and books that hardly sell at all; and although heads of sales departments may go home and dream sweet dreams of the One Novel to Rule them All, the reality is never like this. These dreams always remain unfulfilled. And this is a good thing. We don’t need monocultures. Monocultures make for bad ecosystems.

Are we “too menny”? I don’t think so. So if you are writing, my advice would be to keep on writing, and to ignore the warnings of the likes of Marías. Write the best books you can, get them out there as best you can. Keep the ecosystem alive. Human beings are built for communication, we are evolved to be natural storytellers, and the proliferation of novels is a part of this. Novelists shouldn’t be protesting at the proliferations of novels as some kind of apocalypse. Perhaps they should be celebrating this Burgess Shale of literary abundance. Who knows? We might look back — or future generations might look back — and see our present, with all its anxieties about the future of the novel, as some kind of golden age.

Interview in Eva.bg Magazine (Bulgarian)

A couple of weeks back, Eva magazine in Bulgaria published online a short interview, where we talked about several topics including: my novel The Descent of the Lyre / Произходът на лирата; the English; and what I think of the Queen. The interview is in Bulgarian and can be found here.

On Drinking Tea

My good friend Annie Pecheva has just published a wonderful blog post, translating a list of the twenty-four best situations in which to drink tea, taken from the Tea Report 《茶疏》 by Ming Dynasty scholar, Xu Cishu 許次紓. Here are the first six from the list:

1. 心手閑適 when you are idle and relaxing

2.披詠疲倦 when tired of reading poetry

3. 意緒棼亂 in time of confused thoughts

4. 聽歌聞曲 when listening songs and melodies

5. 歌罷曲終 when the music has finished

6. 杜門避事 when alone

The last one of these is particularly nice, meaning literally something like “with the door closed, avoiding [external] affairs”.

It strikes me that the English, who have a very different tea culture from that of the Chinese, could extend this list still further. I know people for whom there is no situation in which it not appropriate to drink a cup of tea. This can, at times, cause confusion. A Swedish friend who had been living over here for years once went through a horrible break-up with her boyfriend. As she was wailing in anguish, a sympathetic English friend patted her arm and asked her, “Would you like a nice cup of tea?”

“Did I say I was thirsty?” wailed my Swedish friend, convinced that her anguish was not being taken seriously enough. But the truth of the matter is this: in England, there is no way of taking anguish more seriously than offering to make a cup of tea…

You can read the rest of the list on Annie’s blog here.

 

Knowing, not knowing and teaching

I’ve just been sending off the edits for a paper that I’ve been writing for China Media Research, who are running a special issue on communication and Chinese philosophy. The paper is about education as a matter of communicating not just knowing, but also not-knowing, something that I’m arguing through a reading of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.

In talking about not-knowing, I am not, I think, advocating anything particularly mysterious or mystical. Instead I am more interested in the fact that most of our lives are lived in what I am calling epistemological chaos, in which knowing and not-knowing exist alongside each other, and in which we don’t always know what we know, what we don’t know, or what the boundary is between the two (unlike Socrates, who always seems mightily—one might say ‘improbably‘—certain of his lack of knowledge). I’ll post here again when the paper is published, but here is a very short extract.

a rich educational context is one in which knowing and not-knowing, assurance and non-assurance swirl around each other chaotically; and teaching is as much about communicating not-knowing, tentativeness, uncertainty, flights of fancy, hypotheses, puzzles, conundrums, bafflements and confusions, as it is about communicating knowing, assurance, certainty, well-mapped paths, proofs, solutions, clarifications, illuminations and clarities.

Storytellers and Anthropologists

I’m currently in the middle of editing a book that I’ve been working on about the Tanimbar islands in Indonesia. I was in Tanimbar some twenty years ago as a fledgling anthropologist, and it was in Tanimbar that I started writing seriously. In fact, I find it hard to disentangle my time in Tanimbar from my life as a writer. This, in part, has been why I have found this book so tricky to write, and why it has taken long.

When I travelled to Tanimbar I did so thinking that I would one day find myself becoming an anthropologist. It had not occurred to me that I might become a writer instead. Both, I think, are storytellers of a sort — certainly the kind of anthropology I have always enjoyed reading had a strong element of storytelling (I’m thinking of books like Jean L. Briggs’s wonderful Never in Anger, and Edward L. Schieffelin’s The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers). Now, many years on, I am coming back to the same material I was thinking about back then, but with a very different agenda, and the relationship between the two—between storytelling and anthropology—is something that I am finding both troubling and perplexing.

As I fashion and refashion the book (which I am seeing a ‘creative non-fiction’, but not as ethnography in any real sense) I find myself doing the kind of things that a good social science researcher would never do. I am tweaking things here and there, allowing the demands of storytelling to outstrip factual accuracy, making changes, conflating events. This is partly out of a kind of pragmatic necessity: in the years after coming back from Tanimbar, I moved house many times, and somewhere along the way I lost my field notes, so I am having to reconstruct memories and stories from various fragments. I don’t know what the gaps are, and so I have to fill them in as best I am able. But this is also out of another kind of necessity, one that is arguably less pragmatic: the necessity of telling a story that works. This is a story in which objective and subjective worlds overlap, sometimes in ways that I can’t quite disentangle, one in which I’m not even sure myself, having told and retold these stories many times over the years, whether I am remembering or confabulating or both at the same time (all memory, I think, involves a large degree of confabulation. In fact, all perception involves a large degree of confabulation, so there is no escape…). Sometimes, even, I find myself simply making things up—introducing characters who never existed or conversations I never had—because in this way I can communicate economically something that a directly factual account couldn’t, or not without going to great and testing lengths.

I am aware that there are barrages of ethical questions here. I’m conscious, not least, that this book may one day be read by those I knew in Indonesia. Their memories will not be my memories. They will be very different. Perhaps they have told and retold some of the same stories, but in very different ways. So as I write, I am trying to make sure that in whatever I write and whatever I say, I do not misrepresent the people at the heart of this story, trying to make sure that my account is fair and generous-of-spirit.

But beyond these ethical questions, there is something else that intrigues me here: something about the ability of stories to push further in the communication of truth than can any number of learned academic treatises. Here I find myself thinking of Michel Serres’s wonderful The Troubadour of Knowledge, in which Serres writes of how, ‘Blindly understood, narrative gets through where philosophy repeats and stagnates.’ For years I have wrestled with more scholarly ways of thinking about Tanimbar, and none have managed to really say what I want them to say. So I’m taking Serres’s advice when he writes, ‘If [philosophical] meditation fails, why not try narrative?

Many years ago now, I met an anthropologist who had worked for several decades amongst aboriginal communities in Australia. He spoke several aboriginal languages, had a copious understanding of the complexities of aboriginal culture and kinship networks, and had a wide grasp of anthropological theory. And yet he told me that he felt he had never done justice to all of this richness in his writing. ‘You know what the best book is on aboriginal culture?’ he asked me. I shook my head. ‘Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines,’ he said. ‘Sure, its all over the place. The book is a mess, its frequently plain wrong. But it beats everything else that has been written hands down.’

I do not know if what he said was true (nor can I be certain that I am properly remembering this conversation…), but if it was true, and if my memory does not fail me entirely, this raises some interesting questions. Chatwin, of course, was not an anthropologist. He spoke no local languages. Instead, he hurtled through central Australia for a few weeks in a pickup truck with Salman Rushdie (imagine that!), his head full of a rag-bag of reading about nomadism, bringing with him a smattering of local knowledge; and along the way he cast a storyteller’s eye over the people whom he met. Then he put all this down in fictionalised form, in a big, sprawling mess of an unclassifiable  not-quite-novel. And somehow, this not-quite-novel managed to capture something of Aboriginal culture—something that this careful, determined anthropologist claimed to recognise as having the ring of truth to it.

I don’t know why this is so. Perhaps it is because, as Serres says, stories work by the adding-together of knowledge, whilst scholarship pries different strands of knowledge apart: our knowing, after all, is always made up of multiple, tangled threads. Or perhaps Chatwin just hit it lucky, and by chance managed to outbalance his errors, his waywardness and his inaccuracies with genuine insights. I don’t know. But as I write this book on Tanimbar, I’m bearing all of this in mind, and hoping for the best. And, above all, I’m trying to make sure that what I write does justice to Tanimbar as it was, to the people that I once met, and to the person who I was back then. Because — as the Tanimbarese themselves know — whatever one does, it pays to do honour to the ancestors.

The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing

There’s a spectacularly stupid quote attributed to Hemingway that seems to be everywhere on the internet these days. It goes like this, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” It turns out that Hemingway probably never said this (although he may have said other spectacularly stupid things), although that has not stopped the quote appearing here and there on writing blogs with all the persistence of Japanese knotweed. 

One thing that annoys me about this quote is that it seems to me to support a common myth that certain kinds of self-regarding writers like to perpetuate: the myth that writing — that real, serious, grown-up writing — is pain, misery, suffering and so on, and that a writer is a kind of shaman who journeys into this terrible darkness to bring back deeper understandings for the rest of us.

However, I think we could do without this kind of thing. Writing can be difficult, of course. Anybody who has tried to put together a story, a poem, a novel, or a birthday limerick will know that writing can be difficult. But then, anything worthwhile, interesting or enriching can be difficult. Snowboarding can be difficult. Playing the tuba can be difficult. Solving quadratic equations can be difficult. Solving quadratic equations whilst snowboarding and playing the tuba is, I hear, exceedingly difficult. But difficulty is not something in itself that we should shun, and neither is difficulty something that people in general do tend to shun. The world is full of people doing difficult things. It’s astonishing. The prevailing orthodoxy that people are, at root, lazy — as if human beings are little Aristotelian universes, and need some kind of outside prompting, some primum mobile, to get things going — is simply nonsense. Sometimes, to be sure, people are doing difficult things out of necessity; but very often, people are doing difficult things because difficulty can be fun.

Recently I’ve been reading Tove Jansson’s biography by Boel Westin, and one thing that is striking is that Westin’s  book is how much it highlights the extent to which Jansson was driven in her work by pleasure. Jansson painted and wrote because she loved painting and writing, because it was a way of seeking out pleasure. It seems to me that many writers are like this. Sure, writing is difficulty. But it is also pleasurable difficulty (whilst opening your veins over your typewriter is not pleasurable, particularly if you are the one who has to mop up afterwards). Writers, I suspect, don’t like to admit this, because it makes them shallow. Much better to look like a shaman, a martyr, a prophet; much better to look like One Who Suffers than to admit that this whole writing business might be pleasurable. But there is nothing shallow about pleasure. Pleasure is about engagement with the world, it is about richness and, yes, it is also about depth.

Very often, when writers talk about pleasure, they like to give it a tinge of bloody, excessive, Dionysian darkness, because that seems so much more grown-up and serious. Academics, incidentally, are the same, with all their harping on about Bataille and Lacan and jouissance, and all that malarkey (I have tried to read Lacan many times, and in my view there are few things less pleasurable). But pleasure is not just wild Dionysian ferment. It is also delight, and fascination, it is lightness and play.

As somebody who not only writes, but who also teaches writing, it seems to me that all of this stuff about typewriters and open veins, this notion of the suffering writer, is counter-productive and leads (more often than not) to bad writing. My view, increasingly, is this: that the task of somebody who teaches writing is, in part, to help students to find out where the pleasure and fascination may lie, leading them to begin to delight in new forms of difficulty, and providing — amongst many other things — richer pleasures both for themselves and for their readers.