Ask me who my favorite philosophers are, and I'll say that I have two: Christopher Alexander and Philippe Gaulier.
Alexander is better-known: an architect obsessed with answering, in non-trivial ways, the question of what it means for something to "be alive", in a way that makes room not only for human happiness but for waves crashing to shore and secret little gardens and Harley-Davidson motorcycles with loving paint jobs. He is associated with Catholicism more than with any other religion—strangely, one of my favorite essays of his is published in a conservative religious publication that I otherwise despise—but his ideas are more broadly spiritual, accessible to secular audiences with mathematical minds and to people whose ideas of spirituality borrow more from non-Abrahamic faiths.
Gaulier, on the other hand, is a stranger and more elusive figure: a master clown, tutor to Sasha Baron Cohen of all people, largely obscure, author of a single self-published book that it cost me a small college-age fortune to buy and import. To explain why Gaulier matters so much to me, in fact, I find myself reaching to other thinkers, which I find fitting. From Steve Aylett I steal the idea that trickster gods were where ancient cultures dumped all the traits they couldn't fit into other gods, and thus wound up vastly more complex and human and creative than the gods themselves. From Stewart Lee I take the notion that "clowning" is fundamentally the act of someone attempting to preserve their own dignity, failing to recognize that nobody else is convinced, and that this dynamic holds one of the profoundest truths of human nature. From Richard Boleslavsky, himself a brilliant theatre theorist, I get the idea of drama as being fundamentally about rhythms, the sorts of drastic shifts in which we leap from one frame of mind to another so quickly that for a moment our mind stretches open, and we catch a glimpse of deeper reality than we're used to seeing—an idea which Aristotle called catharsis, and which some Russians I care about deeply turned into a whole other...
But now I'm getting unspooled, which tends to happen around Gaulier. What matters to me is that Gaulier defies even these people who dwell so close to him, as a man who lives his own truths, and whose words, few as they may be, have the potent power to crack the world open by serving as examples of exactly the ideas they claim to be. Gaulier's theory leaps and dances nimbly, playing with itself and with its audience, impossible to understand without acknowledging too the manner in which it's told. Because Gaulier's theory is a theory of theatre, a theory of what Alan Moore—another tangent!—would call magic, then elaborate upon as "that which plays with the phenomenon of consciousness." A theory, in other words, that you can't understand the conscious mind's relationship to the world without understanding consciousness, and that you can't understand how any two people relate to one another without understanding the ways in which those consciousnesses differ and overlap. At which point I feel the need to throw out the name Richard Rorty, sputter a quick bit about Karl Marx, and collapse beneath this self-imposed weight with which I try to make sense of what, to Gaulier, is essentially a joke. And that's the key to him, perhaps: the sheer lightness of theatre, its quickness, the way it captures the spark of humanity within both the heavy sculpture of tragedy and the astonishing hall-of-mirrors brilliance that we call comedy. He can, in a sentence, somehow say it all, because in forms both short and long he never loses sight of that spark, never speaks of anything but the spark, never places the spark anywhere it shouldn't be.
Enough about Gaulier! If he were reading this, he'd have gotten sick of me and my self-indulgence long before now.
The point I was driving at is this: both Alexander and Gaulier live on the fringes of what we might call "religion". Neither puts a singular religion at the center of his teachings, and both have strong and complex feelings about it (Alexander's appropriately well-articulated, Gaulier's similarly-appropriately elusive). But to the extent that I identify with several religious practices, I find myself struggling to resolve the religions' teachings with Alexander's and Gaulier's, and in that tension I find a tremendous amount of insight—along with a fair amount of self-doubt and inner conflict. And I'd be lying if I said that Alexander was half as difficult to reconcile as Gaulier is.
If I want to talk about why I love both Buddhism and Taoism, though, and about why Taoism in particular speaks so profoundly to me, then theatre is perhaps the most useful way I can explain where one diverges from the other, and why the divergence matters.
In short: I struggle with reconciling Buddhism's advocacy of detaching yourself from your desires with, well, my more sensational and materialistic impulses. On the one hand, theatre is the lens by which I view all those leanings: what is desire if not theatrical, and what theatre doesn't on some level deal with matters of desire? On the other hand, I do fundamentally believe in Buddhism's precepts, and struggle with what it means to incorporate them into my life without abandoning life as I know it. A world without desire is not a world I'd like to live in. At the same time, I'd love to live in a world without suffering, and I think that Buddhism's correlation of desire with suffering is more-or-less entirely correct.
In some ways, Taoism becomes the means by which I reconcile the two. It informs my understanding of Buddhism, and helps me practice it in a way that doesn't turn too dogmatic or disconnected from my everyday life. And it informs my understanding of theatre, and of what it might mean to turn theatre into a genuinely spiritual practice, or to infuse my spiritual practice with theatricality.
Is it possible to practice Taoism dogmatically? To me, the question can be posed almost as a joke: the phrase "dogmatic Taoism" ought to be inherently ludicrous. In Thomas Merton's book on Chuang Tzu, I believe, there is a bit about how practicing Taoism's ideas of accepting the world as it is means you can't judge or look down upon people who fail to accept the world as it is. "The world as it is" can be defined as "people failing to accept the world as it is"; to find peace and stability, you have to make peace with the conflict and chaos in the world.
Another bit which I'm fairly certain comes from Merton is: you can't push Taoism on anybody, because whether or not someone wants to explore Taoism is the sole indicator of whether or not they want you to talk Taoism with them. If they are ready for it, you won't have to push it on them; if you have to push it on them, they're not ready for it. (As a born-and-raised Jew, this jibes nicely with the way Judaism handles conversions to the faith: in short, a part of the faith is believing you don't need to rush about letting newcomers in.)
Is it possible to be a dick about Taoism? Absolutely. But to do so would be to refute the pretty-much-dead-center underpinnings of the entire faith. As the first verse of the Tao Te Ching states:
The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.
Taoism is a crude approximation of Taoism. Any practice of Tao is a crude attempt to practice the Tao. The humility with which you remember that is, more or less, the start of any meaningful practice of Taoism.
(An idea and a humor mirrored by the classic line: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”)
Buddhism's central ideas are a bit better-known than Taoism's, partly by design, but if you're unfamiliar, at its heart lie the "four noble truths", which are as follows:
- Suffering is an innate part of existence.
- Suffering arises from desire and attachment.
- To let go of this suffering, detach from these cravings.
- The Eightfold Path leads away from both attachment and suffering.
The Eightfold Path, in turn, articulates a series of practices that gradually lead to "rightness": a way of being that allows for physical, mental, and spiritual freedom. But without delving too deeply into that—I should note here that all this is my rough-and-casual summary of concepts, and should be trusted exactly as much as you'd trust any random dude offering up passionate thoughts at odd hours—I'd say that the Eightfold Path has some parallels to ideas by a psychologist Christopher Alexander is enthusiastic about.
In 1940, Max Wertheimer wrote a parable of sorts titled A Story of Three Days, about a man seeking his own freedom, and realizing that he didn't fully understand what freedom meant. He concludes that freedom is about more than the absence of physical restraints, more than the ability to do as one pleases. The ultimate limiter of freedom is consciousness: you cannot act freely without full knowledge of why you'd want to act, what you're acting upon, and what consequences your actions may have. Beyond that—I forget whether this is Wertheimer's conclusion or one I'm borrowing from those Russians I mentioned way above—limits to your freedom are defined by other people, other consciousnesses, other ignorances and distorted ways of being. You could say that Buddhism's Eightfold Path is an attempt to liberate its practitioners from both themselves and other people, by teaching a way of existing among others that without straying from that goal of peaceful removal.
At times, Buddhism is depicted as a stern, austere faith. I don't love that; I think there are biases at work in portraying Buddhism that way. Buddhism is also, after all, a very funny religion, one full of stories of monks not taking their students' overly-zealous shit; beyond that, there's something inherently humorous to seeing desire as the thing that leads to suffering, something that ties back to that notion that we're all clowns, striving away so ardently, tripping on banana peel after banana peel. There is a difference, here as everywhere, between taking things seriously and being a serious person; the latter, in its earnest dourness and its elimination of play and fun, risks not only dogma but missing the point altogether. There's a difference between "blasphemy" in the sense of taking names in vain and "blasphemy" in the sense of fundamentally not respecting something: I would say that the central ideas of Buddhism are worth taking seriously, even worth living a life by, and that that life can simultaneously be as joyous or frivolous or banal as you please, so long as that life is thought about and cared about and lived with a sense of purpose.
That said, I do struggle, as I said, with reconciling Buddhism's ideas and the many silly things I fill my life with. I care passionately about the arts, and about the potential for media to be art, even in this era where media becomes "content" and is shoveled down our gullets so forcefully you'd think Netflix is secretly making pâté out of us. I love beautiful things, and am drawn to everything from fashion to interior design to web UX because of it. I love poetry, but I also love sitcoms, which feel about as crass a kind of entertainment as you could imagine. I even love, in certain ways, advertising and marketing and politics, all of which is predicated on the instillment of desire, the creation of that thing which Buddhism suggests brings suffering about, and is rooted in the capitalist-and/or-consumerist society we live in today, which prioritizes wealth as a value above all other things, defines wealth as the ability to afford to have our desires met, and largely sees the creation of wealth as a reward for fulfilling other people's desires—whether or not they had those desires before you planted them. This is, suffice it to say, a pretty tricky circle to square.
Is theatre somehow antithetical to Buddhism's idea of nirvana? When I imagine my utopian world as colorful and lurid and theatrical, am I just revealing a failure of my own imagination, an unwillingness to stick to plain and simple things, to appreciate the most basic things in life as "enough"? How do I reconcile the part of me that wants to live off fruits and vegetables and simple grains with the part of me that'd love to visit the French Laundry more than once? Do the things I love actively undermine the fabric of life that I aspire to live?
This doubt suffuses more facets of my life than I can easily enumerate. I hold a powerful belief in computers', and the Internet's, ability to make society better, and aspire to build digital things that improve people's lives. Am I just yoking people to a new captivity? Or, from another angle: when I am drawn to beauty in people, is my own attraction to them a reinforcement of socially-manufactured ideas of beauty, trapping them and myself more deeply in a system which causes suffering? Even more broadly: is the idea of catching attention, the idea of interest itself, somehow disruptive to consciousness? To intentionally seek attention, to draw the eye, to distract, to inject a new thought or feeling into someone's mind like squirting colored ink into clear water... is this all somehow polluting the world?
What's tricky is that the answer is clearly "no", but it's not entirely "no". Sorting out the yesses from the nos without accidentally concluding that communication is a virus, civilization is a plague, humans are inherently unnatural, yadda yadda yadda, is harder work than I'd like it to be. You could just dismiss the question altogether... but the fact remains that the question is worth asking. The process of forming an answer matters more than getting the answer entirely right, or living your life according to the answer you find. And I do think it's important for artists and inventors, visionaries and romantics, poets and engineers, and anyone who lives a life with other people in it, to ask themselves, now and again: to what extent can the things I do be desirable on one level while causing suffering on another? How do I remain aware of the balance between these things? How do I manage to exist in the world, and not only find pleasure in the simple things but bring about new lovelinesses, without somehow fucking everything up forever?
My answer to that starts with another passage from the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Ursula K. Le Guin:
True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear,
after them, those they despise.
To give no trust
is to get no trust.
When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.
The dream, in other words, is a sort of suffusion of the "I" into the "we". To lead while taking the role of leader is to place those you lead beneath you; far better would be to inspire and encourage and help others do the world themselves. To the extent that you can aid other people, you lead and guide them; at the end of the day, however, they remain themselves, their work remains their work, and all you have done is tend to them, in your way.
What does it mean to detach yourself from your desires? Perhaps you don't need to kill all your desires in their cradles—as if you could! (See how that worked out with the Pharaoh and Moses.) Perhaps, instead, detachment means living with your desires, encouraging them as you would encourage others, without defining yourself by them. Let them flourish where they can flourish; let yourself find their limits with calm and grace; cherish both their fulfillment and their accordant longings as parts of what it means to come to life, understanding that not every longing will have a corresponding fulfillment, letting those longings be beautiful without any need for closure.
Perhaps theatre can exist peacefully so long as it gently makes room for both the longing and the fulfillment, celebrating lust for life without identifying too recklessly with that lust for life, leaving room for the silliness of desire, the heartwrench of tragedy that could have been averted, the horrors of what people do to one another when they get too caught up in their own whims.
Perhaps you can be alluring so long as you don't encourage obsession or addiction, engrossing only to the extent that you ought to engross, compelling only so long as you keep in mind that you want to bring your audience to the place where they can say: "Oh, we did it."
Perhaps, by offering up a vision of a better world, at once more peaceful and more imaginative and more romantic and more intimate, you can offer people a haven, of sorts, from the idle entertainments of the world, from the lurid addictions, from the things they seek because they need an escape from the hells they're trapped in every day, even though those things just offer up fresh new hells of their own.
Perhaps the trick is that anything's permissible, anything's allowed, so long as you understand what that thing ought to be, and how it ought to relate to others and to the world. Including yourself—and you are at once "that thing" and "the world" there, actor and audience, creator and consumer.
Is this too banal a way of looking at it? Almost certainly—but it's a banality that fits in the world as we know it today, and that's the world upon which we must act.
In another verse of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu imagines what "people who knew the Way" must have been like. He calls them "subtle, spiritual, mysterious, penetrating, unfathomable."
Since they're inexplicable
I can only say what they seemed like:
Cautious, oh yes, as if wading through a winter river.
Alert, as if afraid of the neighbors.
Polite and quiet, like houseguests.
Elusive, like melting ice.
Blank, like uncut wood.
Empty, like valleys.
Mysterious, oh yes, they were like troubled water.
What a vision of an idealized person! I'm all here for Christianity's ideals of "faith, hope, and love," and don't find them remotely irreconcilable with what Lao Tzu writes here, but "houseguests, afraid of the neighbors, cautiously wading a river, mysterious as troubled water..." Here, Lao Tzu strikes at such an incredible vision of what people ought to be, not even slightly prescriptive or sanctimonious, so funny and yet so clear.
What strikes me above all in Buddhism are the exquisite patterns in its philosophy: its enumeration of values, its separation of one Being into gorgeous and poetic facets. The spidery way it links its philosophies—four truths leading to a path with eight steps, and beyond that countless iterations of fours and eights and threes and sevens and nines—is shockingly modern, to my mind. Half Buzzfeed, half Wikipedia. (If Tim Ferriss wrote slightly less excruciatingly banal books, he might come up with Buddhism all on his own.) And it's that tension between lucidity and subtlety, clear-cut statements crossed with increasingly far-reaching ripples of understanding and perception, that makes Buddhism so valuable. Are you in a place where you need eight solid anchors to study, one-by-one, as you work out where in your life you feel most lost or ill-at-ease? Those are there for you. And when you're ready to escape the dogma of your own rigid belief systems—the point at which your soul cries out for something a bit less blithely certain than the Tim Ferriss version of Buddhism would tempt you to be—you have the gorgeous mandala-like patterns of Buddhist thought to explore, rich and vibrant, far too intricate to truly distill into a listicle.
Yet I'll admit that I'm too-readily drawn to oversimplification. Is my life feeling overwhelming? Clearly what I need is AUSTERITY! Strip everything bare, rip everything from the walls. Sit peacefully among stone walls and wood floors. Observe the sky. And when little nagging thoughts pop into my head, thoughts like "I'd like to talk with my friend" or "I'd love to listen to a song right now," those thoughts are CLEARLY proof of my original sin, proof that I can't truly live a self-contained and stoic life, evidence that I am addicted helplessly to living the way I am used to living, fallen too far from the garden to ever return to that utopian and hypothetical state of being that (I am assured) other people, either deeply spiritual or deeply wealthy, have no doubt reached.
Buddhism tempts me, perversely, into a desire to live a Buddhist live, to think with a Buddhist mind. Do I practice Buddhism, or do I perform it? And is that performance for other people, trying to convince them I have attained what I wish to have attained, what I merely want them to think I have attained? Or is it for myself, a kind of desperate attempt to quiet the murmuring demons in my head, that restless dissatisfaction, that anxiety of a life not-properly lived? Do I believe in Buddhism, or do I pop it like a pill, looking for that quick rush of spiritual cleansing that feels the way Aleve does fifteen minutes after I've swallowed it? Curiously enough, the fact that Buddhism offers such a thing as an Eightfold Path means I can aspire to it, and the fact of my aspiration becomes its own undoing.
Taoism, on the other hand, merely describes and articulates the idea of the Tao, the singular source of being—not being itself, but what lies beneath and beyond and before being, the thing that cannot be properly articulated, which Le Guin insists on exclusively translating simply as "way". Neither noun nor verb, neither space nor time, neither stasis nor motion, but the intricate encapsulation of all these things—and not those things themselves, for "the ten thousand things" are byproducts of the way, rather than necessary components of the way itself.
In contemplating that—in simply trying to think of the way, trying to conceive of it in my own head, trying to articulate it in the wordless language of my own thoughts—I find myself approaching a kind of stillness. It's meditation in the less-common use of the word, meditation on something, a consideration of a thing whose consideration itself clears and focuses the mind, especially because the thing itself is a kind of consideration. Considering considering, conscious of consciousness, because to be a conscious being is to act by means of consciousness, and thus conscious thought becomes our being, so that to contemplate the Tao is to belong to it, to be, to find a momentary harmony with the nature of you and the nature of it. Though by attempting to put it into words I've of course made a hopeless tangle of it, one that I hope you find funny rather than pretentious.
In contrast to Lao Tzu's polite houseguests and concerned neighbors, now, here's Philippe Gaulier:
What is your definition of a tragic actor?
He is a frustrated stammerer. Each syllable that he speaks with wonder carries with it the humanity of someone who has been silenced. A tragic actor knows by heart the dizziness which words create when they jostle around the doorway. [...]
I teach an impossibility of looking: as if always, somewhere else, another image was going to appear. [...] An actor or even a writer or director who does not feel how work was nourished by its uncertain place in the universe would be a disaster. [...]
What do you expect from all that?
Humour. I teach my students that they are children of the speed of light and the rotation of the earth, and that this rotation can vary by 0.001 of a second each year because of the winds which accelerate or decelerate the movement. I teach that the place of the actor is situated somewhere at the precise spot which the violent winds will soon move.
Your mileage may vary, but to me, "frustrated stammerer" lives right up there with Lao Tzu's description of people as a poetic and elusive ideal that strikes chords deep within me.
(It should be noted that this call-and-response is the basic format of Gaulier's book, The Tormentor. I have no proof that Gaulier didn't play both parts himself—especially given how aggressive and confrontational the two almost immediately become.)
What it means to act, according to Gaulier, is to create something in that fraction of a second—to alter the course of the Earth in ever-so-slightly a way, trusting that that ever-so-slightness can itself be as explosive as splitting the atom. He simultaneously advocates drastic effect and suggests that that effect must be accomplished through minuscule nuance—an idea that, strangely, isn't far from that Taoist idea of the leader whose "subjects" never notice her leadership. To act isn't to do something big: it's to bring about big things by finding the words that others feel but don't have, by giving a voice to the voiceless... and by remembering always the confusion that words cause, by relishing the uncertainty by the moment, by understanding that nothing can mean anything except that it happens here and now, that the only truly explosive art must combust right now, in this place, because if it cannot live within this moment then it cannot live at all.
A momentary urgency... and at the same time, an act which is itself impossibly subtle. Gaulier describes this subtlety elsewhere, in an astonishing passage articulating what an actor brings to a line, and how much of what is seen relies on what isn't:
The phrase "Drink, little father", which opens Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya", means that Marina, the nurse, is asking Astov to drink some tea. The rhythm of the phrase spoken by the actress, the rhythms of her walk and of her breath, all different and opposed, announce other uncertainties: time vanishes. Alcohol kills slowly. Perhaps at this very moment a scientist is calculating the speed of light.
When the meaning of words bathes in other rhythms and estranges itself in other lights, more and more meanings, incredibly distant meanings, are suggested. Do the vibrations which ripple endlessly, which vibrate like wild things and which palpitate at the deepest level, go off to rejoin the explosion before the Big Bang? When the meaning of the words loses itself in the fury of the Big Bang, poetry bursts forth joyfully. I will say, to be simple and sophisticated, that an actor amuses himself with the echo of words which have never been spoken. "Oi! Moron! Go beyond the cup of tea!"
It's that "announcing of uncertainties" that leads to that moment wherein "time vanishes". It's those "incredibly distant meanings", that "echo of words which have never been spoken," that matter most. The tea is the focus that opens doorways right up to the universe. Each of the "ten thousand things" reflects the Tao, and the duty of the Taoist is to remember that, and reflect upon it, and let that reflection bring about something a bit closer to a gentle world. The act of practicing theatre and the act of practicing Taoism, through the eyes of Gaulier and Lao Tzu, become one and the same.
Drama, of the sort that catches us up and renders us puppets in its wake, is obviously disruptive. You could paraphrase Buddhism's four noble truths and say: life is drama, drama arises from desire, and drama is inevitably suffering. But theatre is a reflection of drama—not drama in and of itself. Theatre is a playact. It's the place where the silenced someone is finally given words: the tale of the frustrated stammerer. In other words, theatre done properly is detachment: a separation of yourself from your dramas, a transformation of them into something at once illuminating and delightful. And Gaulier, remember, is willing to describe the nature of a tragic actor, but he himself doesn't bother with such lofty things. He confines himself solely to the artistry of clowns.
To make a leap here, this reminds me of nothing more than how Judith Butler describes the process of "performing gender", and why Butler argues that camp is such an important part of that performance. By taking qualities of gender as we know it and exaggerating it, making it ludicrous, making it burlesque, making it fun, we're able to free ourselves from its confines without acting like it no longer exists. To claim that there's such a thing as being wholly "free" from gender is to delude yourself: gender gets mucked up in the bodies we are born in, and in whether or not we are comfortable in those bodies, and in the separation between that comfort and the comfort we do or don't have with the expectations society imposes upon people who look like us, or upon how it wishes we looked instead. You can take issue with the idea of gender, you can struggle with gender, but you can't make gender "go away". Camp, however, by embracing gender to the point of silliness, detaches us from it, reminds us not to subscribe to it as dogma, and perhaps gives us room to start separating whatever "truths" we find in gender and its performance from the "falsenesses" that look nearly identical, at first glance, to the truths.
That's not a bad way, I think, to approach how Buddhism talks about desires and attachment and suffering. There's a difference between identifying yourself as your desires and acknowledging their existence: that whole "awareness" jawn that Buddhists and New Age sorts toss about is pretty much exactly about that distinction. Awareness isn't just that thing you come to when you cross your legs and close your eyes and hear your breath echo from the mountaintop. Awareness is a thing you practice on top of the everyday, on top of the mundane, on top of the toddler screaming at the supermarket, on top of the asshole at the intersection, on top of the shitty people you wish you loved more, on top of the grief you experience at the hands of everyone you will ever truly love. Awareness is not just the part where you stop and remind yourself that everybody's fighting a difficult fight, or whatever you try and tell yourself right up to the point where Everybody calls you a sanctimonious prick and does everything Everybody can do to wriggle right under your skin. Awareness is first and foremost of yourself, and of the many thoughts and feelings which would love very much to call themselves by your name, as if every emotion you've ever felt and every ideology you've ever held is constantly auditioning for the role of You. And awareness is the step where you let those things exist without lending them your name, without letting them steer you into the future, without letting them define that 0.001 of a second every year, as Gaulier describes it, where you might change the turning of the Earth. In that moment, where you might either turn the world towards gentleness and peace or act in ways that push people further from it, are you making the choices? Or are those desires which you let ride with you, shouting at you from the backseat, telling you how to steer?
In other words, theatre can be how you practice Buddhism, how you remain aware, how you go about keeping yourself separate from your "characters", so to speak. All that loudness, all that flashiness, all the lurid and sensual appeals the world can throw your way, might be repurposed and turned into how you find your place of peace within the world. The question is whether you can remain aware of the character you play, and of the characters you have thrust upon you. Are you choosing who to be, or is that choice being made for you, by impulse or ignorance or anger or fear or the compulsions of other people? To act, Gaulier or Max Wertheimer might say, you must be free enough to be able to act. It would be an exaggeration to say that that's the central idea behind the Eightfold Path, but only because the Eightfold Path isn't done justice by that reductive of an articulation.
After describing those "people who knew the Way", Lao Tzo concludes his verse with a question:
Who can by stillness, little by little
make what is troubled grow clear?
Who can by movement, little by little
make what is still grow quick?
To follow the Way
is not to need fulfillment.
Unfulfilled, one may live on
needing no renewal.
Clearing what is troubled, but clearing it by being still. Then, not remaining still, but slowly bringing forth tremendous motion.
Unfulfilled, but not starved; more like impossible to starve, because the hunger never comes.
Perhaps the secret is that: to savor food, in a manner of speaking, without ever hungering for it. To enjoy the lusts of life without letting that lust turn into gnawing compulsion. To live for the theatre of it all, without confusing the theatre for your life.
At a point, the manner of practicing something becomes the thing itself. How you speak it is what it is. How you act a thing out is the thing, inseparable from the thing, so much so that you can't talk about the "thing" without talking about the "how" by which that thing was reached. The way of it, if you will.
Buddhism will always be a part of my life—ideally a part of my life which deepens and grows richer with every passing year. In a similar way, I own quite a number of long and dense books by Christopher Alexander, and they are delightful reads, each short passage or idea opening up countless thoughts and dreams and inspirations, all connecting me to a vision of a world that is both alive and waiting for us to bring it even more to life. But I also watch sitcoms, and I read books titled things like The Time Machine Did It, and I lose my mind over pretty faces, and my vision of a better world doesn't entirely look like burning the world as we know it to the ground. It looks like that slow, patient separation of "true" from "false" and "good" from "bad", even when the two look almost-but-not-quite-exactly the same.
Taoism speaks more to that than any other religious practice I've known. In its subtle, unfathomable, unendingly funny way, it captures something about the world, something about me, something about how I want to be, that feels at once commonplace and mindblowing. So too, does theatre: not just the kind on-stage but the kind that's everywhere, everything, the flashing lights and the pounding hearts and the dancers leaping and the mountains vanishing out into the fog. The yearning lovers, the buried daggers, the towers crumbling to dust, the vanished nations, the fires and the floods, and everywhere clowns, everyone clowns, all those tense and serious faces each daring one another to be the first to break character and laugh.