They Mimic the Flow

Lin Yutang’s great.  I’d read his “The Importance of Living,” which had sat on my shelf forever and a day, just this time last year, after coming across a reference to him in a history of Chinese humor. Indeed he gets credit for the Chinese loan word youmo: 幽默.  I was suitably enthralled with that dry witty and dated attempt to explain China to the west that I promptly bought something else by him that I found on line: “My Country and My People.”  This managed to sit on my shelf for the last year and today allowed myself the time to finish it off. 

Written in 1935, when things for China were bad about to get a lot worse, there is the marvel of considering his educated perspective about China’s fate when things seemed hopeless.  He notes that it will take something revolutionary to redeem, but he doesn’t seem to see where it will come from.  Rather, he tries to explain the reasons behind what appear to be China’s fate as passive victims, who love life in spite of it all. 

There are some very interesting summaries of Confucianism’s juxtaposition to Daoism and the strange overlay of Buddhist rigor that happens with Zhuxi during the Song.  The attempts to explain the role of women in that transitionary period the traditions of foot binding and concubinage are insightful and of course, particularly dated.  The explanation of the arts had some take-aways that will remain:  Of course, something like Beijing Opera is loud and shrill because they were traditionally performed in loud, open, urban areas not unlike what a raucous sixteenth century evening at London's Globe Theatre must have been like and jingju sounds as odd to western ears as a screaming saxophone does to the Chinaman of 1935.  Chinese roofs look the way they do, because they mimic the flow of calligraphy, and though I’ve probably learned it before I doubt I will forget now how Li Bai perished, slipping from a boat, drunk no doubt, reaching for the shadow of the moon. 

At the end of the work, writing from Manhattan, he let’s what hair he has down and, despite a presumed obligatory exoneration of the Nationalist government he launches into an indictment of the venal rule in China and rapacious imperialist expansion in his home:   

“And if one is a Chinese, one feels like saying with Hamlet that the time is sadly out of joint and cursed are we born to set it right, or crying out with the Hebrews, “O Lord!  How long?” and it is a cry of despair which is not mere petulance, but a despair based on an intimate knowledge of present-day China as no foreigners know it.”

Oddly, he pinpoints the pressing need for a change in "ideology" and all but predicts much of what is about to happen, over the next few decades.

             The family minded Chinese must be changed into social-minded Chinese, and the pet ideas age-old,                    of face, favour and privilege and official success and robbing the nation to clarify the family must be                 overthrown."

Written in June of 1935, Mao and the CCP, still plodding along on their Long March, wouldn't reach Yan'an till October, were certainly of the same mind.  

Still enjoying this live Mingus from 1973 there in Detroit, perhaps down the road from where Iggy and the Stooges were recording their final show and what would become “Metallic Knockout.” (O.K.  I looked.  The Mingus was from February.  And the Stooges set was from October.  Indeed the “last” show was actually from 1974.  The two locations were, however, literally right down the road from each other . . . a little over one mile down Woodward Ave.)  And it has consistently been about digging the whirling drums of Mssr. Roy Brooks as I’ve continued my sampling.  There doesn’t seem to be much of any live video of Roy Brooks to sample from the vintage period, though there is a clip from 1989 and it is visually satisfying and explanatory to watch him create that phenomenal wildebeest thunderclap of sound with only two hands, two feet and one trap set.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTAZLbnmBnQ

Saturday, 5/11/19