Vain for Effective Ming

Tonight, I taught my daughters the first half of the Ming.  The indignity of foreign rule that had lasted seventy-nine years, was washed clean by the bright and shining Ming.  Yuan rule is probably the shortest reigning dynasty that afforded top billing. The Sui unify the nation and set things up for the Tang glory, but after two emperors and a mere thirty-six years, they are swept aside. 

A trot through, Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, all other’s involve centuries of unification with the exception of the Qin, which was such a seminal event that it’s the exception to the rule with only fifteen years of governance and one major emperor and his ill-fated son. 

It’s all worth considering me-thinks, as the CCP is only now just entering into its seventy-first year of rule.  The Guomindang only ruled the country for a modest twenty-two years.  Numerologically attuned, as Chinese necessarily are, there are almost certainly internal memos mentioning unspoken significance of eclipsing Yuan longevity.  I wonder if it will be part of the atmosphere in 2028 when the mile marker is lapped.  What is the next shortest dynasty to follow?  If we penalize the Song, when they lost the north, they would presumably be the next target.  A quick check suggests as much:  the Northern Song “only” made it for one-hundred-and-sixty-seven years, the Ming for two-hundred-and-seventy-six, the Tang for two-hundred-and-eighty-nine years. 

How long do the CCP assume they’ll rule for?  Outwardly facing every ruling body can only but project that it will lead forever.  Inwardly one assumes that this sort of discussion must take place.  To be granted an august and proper remembrance one must certainly outpace the Yuan Dynasty.  And then, at some time which cannot be known until it is too late, the mandate of heaven will pass, as it always does and that which is together, must break apart. 

And I tell my girls about Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, Ming Taizu who rose from poverty, one of the few emperors who knew anything about impoverishment.  Taizu had trust issues.  Whereas the founder of the Song, Zhao Kuangyin was famous for having said that “no one should fear being put to death for disagreeing with me,” Ming Taizu was quite content to punish people in the morning and punish them some more in the afternoon, because no one ruled in the fashion that he required.  No one was especially interested in telling him, or the usurper successor Yong Le anything the least contrarian and those that did were removed.  As a result, one searches in vain for effective Ming emperors to match Kangxi or Qianlong in the dynasty that follows. 

Thursday, 7/02/20

Sell Some Swell Cheese

Late in the morning my mom and I drove out through La Grange towards the Taconic Parkway.  We passed Sprout Creek Farm where both my daughters and their cousin and learned to milk cows, take care of sheep in summers gone by.  They used to sell some swell cheese there in the little shop they had.  My mom reminded me that, not unlike the Poughkeepsie Day School which my sister had attended and which I’d considered sending my little one to, as recently as this time last year, had closed permanently, during the pandemic. 

First proposed by FDR himself, in 1925, the Taconic State Parkway wasn’t fully completed until 1963.  Apparently, FDR was one of the first politicians to tour the state in a car during his 1910 state senate campaign.  After he lost use of his legs to polio in 1920, he became more reliant on automobiles than ever and it was apparently at this time he began to consider a north-south highway connecting New York with the eastern Hudson Valley. 

Scenic, certainly.  Drawn up and over mountainous woodlands, with thin lanes and tight corners, the parkway was originally envisioned for day tripping, sight seers, not as a major thoroughfare with drivers taking mountain turns at eighty-five miles per hour.  Fortunately, there are no trucks allowed on this particular artery, just cars, some of which are content proceed well below the limit and others, sometime me, barrel through in the speeding lane trying to get where they’re going as quickly as can be reasonably legitimated.

My friend grew up near the Parkway at the bend in the valley near a turn off for Peekskill.  I can remember a graduation party at her house, the only time I ever visited, and we all put candles in paper boats out into a pond that lay near her home once the evening drew on.  She passed away a few years back, one of the earliest of my friends to go and I think of her and her father every time we angle by here.

Wednesday, 7/01/20

The Consequence of Predication

W. E. B. Du Bois had a lot to say about other people’s fiction, in this Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  Reviewing Claude McKay’s “Home to Harlem” he said, made him want to take a bath.  Concerning Carl Van Vetchen’s “Nigger Heaven” he counsels the reader to put the book down and simply read the “Police Gazette” instead.  In 1928 the grand man of African American letter penned one of his five historical novels: “The Dark Princess” which I read a section of today.  Critics suggested and I guess I too felt like the setting was “melodramatic” and “bewildering.” 

The only other thing I’d read from the tradition during this particular gorging that was similarly “Afro-futuristic” was “Of One Blood” by Pauline Hopkins which was written a life time earlier in 1902.  Indeed, even then, W. E. B. Du Bois was Ms. Hopkins' mentor in that project.  Reading DuBois about the intrepid Mathew Towns’ improbable romance with the Indian princess Kautilya and their son who will one day lead the Great Council of Darker People, the core of a future world government, I was intrigued by the possible, and wondered if I couldn’t hear Claude McKay snickering as Dubois labors to keep things exciting and romantic without stooping to anything carnal or untoward. 

I’ve never read the eight volume futuristic series by David Wingrove “Chung Kuo” about a world two hundred years in the future where China dominates the earth, though I’ve heard good things about the series from people whose China perspective I appreciate.  Kang Youwei who shared time on earth with Dubois, dying in 1928, also tried to reimagine the world to respectfully accommodate imperiled ethnicity.  I’m not sure if Kang Youwei’s “Da Tong Shu” has ever been translated into English (it has, Laurence G. Tohmpson had translated “The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-Wei” in 1958)  but that is perhaps the better comparison of a contemporary trying to imagine glory and dignity for one’s people in the future, beyond a world, which then seemed dominated by western European science and prejudice.   Perhaps the only safe way to sketch out a future that isn’t quickly rendered irrelevant is to be like H. G. Wells and cast the future out so far, that devolution has begun, and you are unbound from the consequence of prediction.

Down and back today.  And then down and back to Westchester once again in the afternoon.   Each trip is a little over and hour.  They say my stepdad will be discharged tomorrow so the end of this is near.  But by the time I drop my mom off in the afternoon, I’m exhausted.  People will be expecting me on a call soon and my older daughter has a shopping list for me.  I call her and tell her it will have to wait till tomorrow.  I’m not shopping this evening.  I’m going home. 

Tuesday 6/30/20

Were Passing With Weather

In China, I never drove anywhere.  We had a car.  Sometimes I’d pick the kids up from school or head out for groceries.  But Didi’s were ubiquitous and there was really no need to get behind the wheel.  Today I spent about seven hours behind the wheel.  Tomorrow I’ll do the same.  My stepdad is in the hospital two counties down and I need to take my mom down to see him in the morning and pick her up in the evening.  It will only be a few more days, certainly.  He’s rapidly improving from this wretched tick-born Babesiosis.  Truly, I do not know how truckers do this.

It’s Monday.  Of course, you assume you should be able to get work done.  “I’ll call people.”  I have a rudimentary call service that Toyota provides in-vehicle.  Press a button and the virtual woman chimes in.  The woman always pronounces my surname wrong.  She pronounces my wife’s first name wrong.  She doesn’t recognize the name of someone she recognized yesterday.  She says: “I’m sorry,” in a decrescendo that makes me hate her.  I repeat the name.  She tells me she’s sorry again.  I raise my voice.  She is sorry in the same manner she was when I spoke in a plain voice.  And at sixty-five miles per hour, I just pick up the phone, thumb through the directory and press dial on the number I need.

There was hail at home.  Frozen golf balls all over the summer lawn.  When they stopped, I headed out.  But the bad weather is following me.  I haven’t driven in rain this hard in a while.  The car feels steady, but who knows about all these other idiots I’m sharing the two-laned New York State throughway with.  Off in the distance to the east there is a clearing.  But its’ a tease.  It’s moving away from me.  The path ahead is dark.  Now there is lightening to the west and the thunder is right behind it.  Once upon a time you might wonder if the mandate of heaven were passing with weather like this. 

At the Mario Cuomo Bridge, I cut across to the eastern shore and finally there is a break in the rain.  By the time I reach the Westchester Medical Center there’s even a patch of sun.  I apologized to my mom and blamed the weather.  She brushed it aside and said she was glad to see me as there was apparently horrible storm that had made its way down from Albany along the Hudson.  She'd heard on the news.  Indeed, there was.  The ride back home was up the Taconic and it rained a lot along that winding, mountainous parkway, as well. 

Monday, 6/29/20

Self-Referential, Self-Destructive

There’s a conversation going on in our front yard.  For the Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae to reproduce, an apple or a quince tree needs to be within a few hundred feet of a juniper tree and out front they’d only need to cross the driveway to make contact.  My wife pointed out a number of dripping, fingered ball sacks on the cedar tree, which I was able to identify as Juniper-apple Rust, a parasite that forms these oddly colored galls that expand dry out and release spores.  Their sole purpose is to find an apple tree to latch  upon.  What a peculiar requirement for reproduction.  One imagines that if humans were victims to gall sack growth a cure would have been found early as they are remarkably unattractive.

I believe I’d mentioned a few weeks back that I’d stopped my daughter, while we were on the way to the post office to mail back some books she’d read for her course.   The mandatory Humanities course all Reed freshman take spent the first half of the year on the corner stones of Western Civilization, the Old Testament, Herodotus, Plato.  I read them along with her.  In the spring they began and then continued remotely, a prolonged look at the Harlem Renaissance.  Presumably there were long debates that resulted in these two areas of focus to the detriment of the rest of human written record, but once again, I was glad to hear she’d gain an understanding of that period.  These books could be sold to next year’s students as used books.  Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and a “Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader” were all there in the seat.  “Don’t do that.” I said.  “We’ll keep those.”

It must have been some similar course, though an elective certainly, that first exposed me to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.  I’d never read “Cane” and though I’d never normally think to get a portable reader on some topic, this was the logical destination after spending time with Charles Chestnut and Paul Laurence Dunbar who precede the period.  This morning I continued to make my way through this seven-hundred-and-seventy-page collection, which starts off with essays by the various luminaries, introduces poetry and then prose. The scene was self-referential, self-destructive and like any proper renaissance, seemed to be a time, between the wars, when anything was possible.

And indeed, like any renaissance worth considering the spirit is infectious.  Riding my bike up I was considering short stories one could assemble, to explain this particularly odd time we’re living through and the voices one could try to master the dictation of, and the odd juxtapositions of sentimentality and irony.  Up at the bridge over the Walkill I paused and photographed the water itself and tried to capture the motion in a still.  And all the way home my mind was alight, anxious to write.

Sunday, 6/28/20

He Probably Paid Extra

Sampling the different luminaries of the “Talented Tenth” in this Harlem Renaissance Reader one writer who immediately appealed to me is Claude MacKay.  Born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica in 1889, arriving, leaving and returning to Harlem from France, Spain, Morocco, Russia, his voice is necessarily more international than any of his other  Renaissance cohort.  There’s an essay in the compendium of that period I’m going through, from his 1937 “A Long Way From Home” that that demanded immediate attention.  In the first few paragraphs, he lionizes W. E. B Debois as a writer and then disposes of him as an individual when he finally gets to meet him.  We’re introduced to the Talented Tenth from his perspective, he’s befriended, use, promoted, disposed of.  I’ve piled half a dozen novels and non-fiction into my list of next-purchases.

I wonder if we’re in a micro-climate of some sort here in New Paltz, right below the Shawangunks.  The clouds drop down, blow over the ridge and shift left rand right and hesitation before rising up over the hill behind me.   We get a lot of rain.  I kinda love it.  If you’re growing things it seems like a blessing.  Surely one can have too much precipitation but of late it has been coming and unloading and moving aside for sun, which is something like the weather of the tropics, where afternoon rains are ferocious but temporal.  My mom over in Poughkeepsie, a scant fifteen-minute drive from here says it didn’t rain at all today. 

My stepdad is down in the hospital in Westchester, right near where I grew up.  My sister took my mom down this morning and I’ll go to pick her up.  My daughter’s join me today and we are told to go first to my mom’s house as my to pick up the gardening pornography my sister has purchased to help my step dad pass the time while he’s recovering.  Later, when I’m somewhere over the bridge she writes me to say there is no reason for me to come by and pick it up as it could just as easily be accomplished tomorrow.  It’s too late for all that.  I take what she’s got and rather than the quicker, steady ride down the New York Throughway on the western side of the Hudson we head out to the Taconic which is the same twisting road we’ll take back up. 

"Write your Grandma and tell her we’ll be there closer to six."  Passing Fahnestock State Park, you twist past a sign that Donald Trump paid for, which names a park in the area after our current president.  I’ve seen photos of this very sign colorfully defaced.  But for now, the sign is pristine.  Not long after there is a sign, I remember from my youth, for an FDR Park, and then, there is another Trump park sign.  It occurs to me that he probably paid extra to have his name appear before and after that for FDR.  You, however Don, are a name which will live in infamy.

Saturday, 6/27/20

Big Owl Just Landed

My wife has pointed out I have an even shorter temper than usual when I fast.  I’m not so sure.  But she’s probably right.  I presume I’m always being reasonable.   But it doesn’t take much, to make me want to swat away perceived annoyances, when I’m hungry, when I’m keeping my mind off food. 

Snapping turtles must be attracted to long stretches of trail.  There must be something about this landscape that suits a snapping turtle when it’s choosing a place to bury eggs.  I think of snapping turtles topping the food chain in any given pond and lurking in the bottom, eating up whatever it so pleased to consume.  But this is the second such turtle I’ve seen quite a ways, from any obvious pond.  If the last one I saw was ten pounds this one must have been fifteen.  She tolerated me as I walked around, well out of snapping range, photographing her remarkable neck and shell. 

A big owl just landed in the back yard.  He’s about fifty yards down sitting on the lawn like an impassive sphinx, turning his head this way and then that.  If you didn’t know any better he looks, from this distance like an enormous cat, maybe a lynx.  There are at least a few birds up in the trees that are not happy to have him there.  They are squawking what I assume to be the “be careful yo’, there’s an owl!” squawk.  And then, with wings that seem more like a great shawl, he makes his way up into a tree and out of the sun. 

Reading through a book my older one was going to return to her school, as a used book to get a refund on.  Not so fast.  “The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader”?  There is a remarkable trove of material, little to none of which was I familiar with.  “Louise Thompson Patterson’s article “With Langston Hughes in the USSR,” written in 1932 is a remarkable window into that tumultuous year when the U.S. was in the depths of The Great Depression and famine brought on, part by collectivization was sweeping the Soviet Union, and the cream of the Talented Tenth were invited to come to the USSR to make a movie about racial injustice in the U.S.A.  They are feted with banquets and Champaign and introduced to a nonsense script which Langston Hughes suggests is not redeemable.  Some want to stay and learn about socialism, while others have no interest.  It certainly helps to explain poems like “Goodbye, Christ” which he wrote that year.  The trip certainly made an impact on him. 

Friday, 6/26/20