On Kingdoms
By Joanna Klink
Who is ever at home in oneself.
Land without mercy. Interstates
set flickering by night. When I speak to you
I can feel a storm falling blackly to the roads,
the pelting rains the instant they
hit. Devotion is full of arrows.
Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls
in the room where we sit, or I am blind to clocks,
restless, off-guard, accomplice to the weathers
that burn and flee, foamless, across a sky
that was my past, that is
what I was. I am always too close.
I am not sure I will ever be
wholly alive. Still—we are faithful.
Small birds hook their flights into the fog.
The heat crosses in shoals over these roads
and this evening the cottonwoods may sway
with that slow darkgold wind
beyond all urgency. I am listening to you.
I’m listening to thunder as I write this. Thunder happens when lightning’s rapid change to the air temperature and pressure sends shockwaves through the air—the shockwaves bounce off each other, low clouds, and surrounding hills, in a series of rolling rumbles. It’s a beautiful sound, worthy of taking an afternoon to just listen to the air. I’ve been thinking about what it means to listen. To really listen to something. I remember putting shells up to my ears and believing they held the sound of the ocean inside. Knowing that it’s just the ambient sound of air bouncing off the curves of the shell like a concert hall makes it no less remarkable.
Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script. Despite our advanced natural sciences, we are neither prepared nor trained to really look at things, being rather at loggerheads with nature.
- Herman Hesse
I recently read a short piece of writing by Herman Hesse about what we can learn from butterflies, not as a metaphor but as a fact in the world. Throughout the essay, Hesse talks about the language of the natural world as a language we’ve forgotten to read in our haste and waste as a species. “A sense of nature’s language, a sense of joy in the diversity displayed at every turn by life that begets life, and the drive to divine this varied language—or, rather, the drive to find answers—are as old as humankind itself.” Though Hesse wrote long before catastrophic wildfires, his words bear particular weight, now, of what’s at stake for losing the language of the more than human world.
We look at the simpler relationship earlier generations had with nature and feel nostalgic now and then, or even envious, yet we prove unwilling to take our own times more seriously than warranted; nor do we wish to complain that our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom and that, rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach—the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved…
As an educator, I see his distinction between schools of wisdom and schools of knowledge is an important and necessary one. When I think about what it really means to listen, it is a kind of learning, a kind of deeper understanding. I think of how much I’ve learned from listening to birds’ different calls than I could have from a book or university course and how that knowledge from listening touches on a kind of wisdom that I can only describe as understanding the life of the bird. I was recently sitting by a river, listening, and heard a nuthatch somewhere in a bit white pine above me. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was hopping in a spiral around the trunk pulling insects out of the creases in the bark, and as I looked up and listened, I had the briefest flash of seeing the pine from the nuthatch’s perspective: a monumental architecture, an ecosystem in itself, a being in itself inextricably linked to the life of the nuthatchwith sugars, nutrients, and water coursing through the sapwood fibers. Could the nuthatch hear the pine’s language?
(Here is the sound of a Scots pine from Marcus Maeder’s trees project. It’s what you hear if you listen to trees with special devices that let you hear them.)
Anyway, in his lifetime of pursuing butterflies, Hesse found wisdom in the language of their wings, “this little door to the ineffable, this lovely and effortless pathway to awe.”
A butterfly does not live to eat and grow old; its sole purpose is to make love and multiply. To that end, it is clad in magnificent finery. Its wings, several times larger than the body, divulge the secret of its existence in contours and color, scales and fuzz, a language both refined and varied, all in order that it may live out this existence with greater intensity, put on a more magical and tempting display for the opposite sex and glory in the celebration of procreation. People across the ages have known the significance of butterflies and their splendor; the butterfly is simply a revelation. Furthermore, because the butterfly is a festive lover and stunning shape-shifter, it has come to symbolize both impermanence and eternal persistence; from time immemorial, humans have embraced the butterfly as an allegorical and heraldic figure of the soul.
It’s an enormous amount of wisdom about living and dying to be found in a wing weighing no more than .04 grams. You must be very quiet to hear the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, very patient to learn the language of it. Perhaps you can imagine what a thunderous meaning you might perceive.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Chinese young people began following the concept of tang ping, or “lying flat,” a protest against demanding work culture and consumerism. It means doing nothing. Having no ambitions to pursue traditional markers of success. It means slowing down. Just being. It’s a form of passive resistance. The Chinese government sees the behavior as radical, a threat to the country’s prosperity narrative, and has censored mentions of tang ping in Chinese media. On the surface, tang ping bears similarities to America’s “Great Resignation,” which began around the same time under the pressures of the pandemic, rising housing costs, and stagnating wages. Both movements seem like an obvious result of economies in which the wealthiest make money off of the labor of others, profit is prioritized over people, and “value” is measured by the abstraction of money rather than what value something actually adds to the planet and it’s people. I am not Chinese and cannot speak from cultural experience, but tang ping seems to me more revolutionary than the US version—it’s not just quitting to look for something better, it’s a rejection of the whole system, a broader revisioning of how to live. It also seems very spiritual to me—a tacit acknowledgement of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and a practical, modern turn toward the Eightfold Path. At the heart of “lying flat” is a refusal to do work that brings harm to the world (right livelihood and right action) and instead be mindful, present, take care (right thought, right effort, right mindfulness). Tang ping has gotten some international coverage, often with the inevitable comparisons to America’s Great Resignation, but the distinctions between the two movements strikes me as an example of why we should seek perspectives and worldviews different from our own. It’s not just about building empathy or expanding ideas, but about a way of seeing and thinking that cannot be an exact translation translation.
Thinking about tang ping reminds me of one of my favorite little books, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, in which Elliot Weinberger picks apart 19 translations of a single poem, each attempting to square an the English language’s self-centrism (we must have a subject doing the action/verb in our sentences) with Chinese linguistic non-self (sentences center on verbs or actions which simply exist in the world separate from a subject/actor). Each translation gets a little closer to the original meaning, and each translation Weinbeger looks at provides a different facet or side of the same poem, giving us a multi-dimensional view of the greater whole. The experience of reading this tiny book is a journey of getting gradually closer to a different way of seeing and being in the world. Getting closer to stillness.
Here’s Gary Snyder’s version of the poem in question:
Empty mountains;
no one to be seen.
Yet—hear—
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;
Again shining
on the green moss, above.
Watching this mini-documentary of the Japanese artist, Yuri Shimojo’s, work is itself a meditative experience. It’s a reminder art is a process not a product. Art is an act of witnessing. In the filmmaker and Shimojo’s work, art’s witness is a kind of listening to silence.
Let’s not try to figure out everything at once.
beautiful!