Apple Orchard and Back

 

I knew I would enjoy it and I did.  Yesterday I read the first half and today I finished this only recently published volume of the Cambridge History of China: “Volume 2. The Six Dynasties, 220-589.”  Yesterday traced the complex political narrative, as the ‘age of division’ unfolds during the romantic Three Kingdoms period.  It is impossible to read about Liu Bei and Zhugeliang and not think of the old (1994) CCTV soap opera serial we had the kids watch fifteen years ago.  The one where Guanyu’s beard looks like it will fall off if he strokes just once more. Cao Cao, and his off spring aren’t archvillains but rather sagacious, forward thinking men of letters.  And eventually it is the Wei that triumph but not for long enough to hold off the Sima clan and the founding of the Western Jin.  And I told myself that I was not allowed to through around the term “Six Dynasties” unless) could actually name them. (They are the six successive dynastic efforts that had their capitals in Jiankang, modern day Nanjing: Wu, Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen). 

 

I’ve taught this age of division, before.  Can’t wait to do this anew.  All that I’d yet to learn.  The northern refugees who wouldn’t marry with the southerners.  The Xianbei and the Xiongnu steeping, sino-sizing themselves over time, as is evidenced by what the Yungang Buddhist carvings appeared when the early capital was up in Datong and what the Longmen Grottos looked like later, after the capital had moved down to Luoyang.  The battle for the Fei River.  The Liang emperor XuanZe who amasses a massive collection of scrolls and then burns them all as it become clear he will lose control.

 

This morning I read about the prose and the music and the artwork, the waning influence of Confucianism, the growing importance of both Daoism and Buddhism as well as the enigmatic alchemy of xuanxue “dark learning.”  And while it is helpful to map parallels from the period after the Han Dynasty to the fall of Rome, the Six Dynasties was politically tumultuous but intellectually anything but a ‘dark age.’   I took to writing down the name of the author of every one of the disparate chapters into Amazon and tagging books by the authors.  When a text or a poet or a figure of note was mentioned I threw them into Amazon as well and mostly was faced with Chinese language versions of the texts.  How can I read the “Orchid Pavilion Collection” or Bao Zhao or Xie Tiao.  How do I get to read more of Cao Zhi?  And after a while I became overwhelmed by all that there still was to learn.    

It’s Sunday and there is a big storm falling just now.  Lots of big flakes falling heavily out y window.  It’s cold.  There isn’t any chance of this melting today and so when I go out to ski. I’ll need to dress warmly, certainly but also be attentive to my fingers which will become numb, quickly.  I want to go up to the apple orchard and back, as fast as I can and feel my heartbeat and then come back inside and take a hot shower.  Perhaps then I can start to get ready for all the work ahead this week. 

 

 

 

Sunday, 02/07/21

The Museum Was Open

 

I think I’m finally getting the motion down properly on the cross country skiing I attempt.  I had the sun at my back yesterday and I could see my shadow.  There, like a dancer, I could see how the motion wasn’t fluid.  I could approximate what I wanted to see.  Slide longer. Hold that heel-down position for longer if you can.  Hard on the calf, but that’s the point.  In my mind I have a bass line I follow to give myself rhythm to lose myself within.  And this particular afro-beat groove that I have in my head was moving too fast, I realized.  I’d need to slow it way down to imitate the confident Olympiad I saw moving in my mind. 

 

“Into the Afterlife:  Han and Sic Dynasties Chinese Tomb Sculpture from the Schloss Collection,” which I impulse purchased, when I was searching for Six Dynasty work on Amazon the other day, arrived amidst some other packages today.  Turns out Ms. Schloss was a Vassar alum and this show was hosted at the Vassar College Art Gallery, back in 1990, when China wasn’t anywhere on my mind, beyond a vague sympathy for the protesters who were so violently expelled from the Square the previous summer. I checked online and some of this collection was still on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.  And indeed, the museum was open to the public, today.

My little one had floated the idea of BurgerFi: can we pick up some burgerfi to go?  Apparently they’re open again.  My wife had asked, we need something to do as a family today.  I proposed we head to the museum and then go across the street to the old Juliet Theater where this burger joint was and grab out to-go meal on the ride home.  I asked the Mrs. to drive and I read most of the book on the way over.  I tried to sort out how I felt about someone of means buying up lots of two thousand year-old funerary objects. I recall seeing an Dynasty objet d'art in the elegant Chinese restaurant at the Miyako Hotel in Shirokanedai.  I assumed they were looted during the war.  What of these objects of the Schloss collection that were simply purchased?

 

We parked and walked up to find what I assumed to be the entrance closed.  A sign on the adjoining building seemed to suggest that no one without a Vassar I.D. would be admitted. But it had said they were open on the web?  Over at the guard house the gent directed me to the proper interest that was outside the main gate.  “You see those towers?  That’s an attempt to represent the Norman architecture of England.”  My daughter looked at me as though she’d heard all this before. 

Inside there were a few wonderful pieces from the book.  One of those remarkable Han towers and a Northern Wei Buddha.  Regardless, it is a marvelous collection for soon I was looking at one of hundred views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai, and an Egyptian carving from Abydos where we’d been the summer before last.  Speaking of Egypt, there was a Fredric Church painting of the Nile and a dozen other Hudson River school canvasses, including a Shattuck that looked just liked the sunset my older one had painted out our window.  Not sure how I’d made it through fifty-four globe spins without ever properly bouncing around in here.  What a marvelous watering hole here in my ancestral turf.

 

 

 

Saturday, 02/06//21

I Was Never There

 

Deer aren’t nocturnal.  I believe that to be true.  I presume they just lay down out there, somewhere in the woods, on the snowy ground if they must, huddled together if they’re smart, staying as close as they can.  But deer also experience hunger, and there ain’t much to eat out there.  I came out to this room around 1:00AM to do a call I noticed that there was a single, deer down there, raiding the fridge, as it were.  He didn’t notice the light, but as soon as I moved he must have caught the shadow and darted off. The snow around the yard is generally pristine just now, but down below my window where the seed is thrown, all has been trampled, and all is deer tracks. 

My dad and I spoke yesterday.  He wasn’t inclined to meet for a walk today as we usually do.  I didn’t really have any good ideas other than walking around clumsily in the snow behind my house.  But then he suggested we meet on the other rail trail they have, the Empire Trail that extends from New Paltz over to the Mid-Hudson Bridge.  “It’s completely plowed”, he mentioned. Fine with me.  We’ll meet there in about four hours. 

My call with Sydney and Perth, and KL and Beijing, and Seoul, it went fine.  I like all of the people on that bridge and we’ve done this for a while now.  When it was over, I was up.  Tired but up.  I sat and meditated for thirty minutes and tellingly I did not fall asleep.  I could hear my wife wind up her late night movie viewing and I assumed she’d pop in here, even though it was dark.  She went instead back to our room and began talking to what she presumed to be me.  Then she walked out again.  Returned.  And then this time came out in a huff.  “Why did you leave the bedroom?”  “I was never there.  I’ve been here the whole time.”  This took a moment for her to process.  “I thought you were in the bed.”  “Yes.  I know.  I could hear you in the distance.”  “Come to bed.”  She demanded. But I told her I wanted to finish this meditation. 

 

I’ve a collection of Sonny Rollins on which are many things I’ve known through the years.  It’s the second time I’ve queued it up in the last twenty-four hours, as there are still many things I don’t immediately recognize.  “Swingin’ for Busmsy” from the 1956 album “Moving Out” has Sonny joined by Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Elmo Hope on keys, Percy Heath on bass and the inimitable Art Blakey on drums, who creates these remarkable pauses at the end of one solo, that leads to a crash, as the next one begins.  Blakey’s Jazz Messengers was formed the previous year, but this is all credited as a Sonny Rollins date.  Ahh, I’m glad the weekend is here again.  Yes indeed. 

 

 

 

Friday, 02/05/21

That's a Fine Way

 

I don’t generally “watch” the news.  I’d rather read it.  Reading it today, in the Washington Post I was drawn in by an article about House review of Congresswoman Greene’s right to sit on committee’s given her pockmarked past of endorsement for racist and violent conspiracy theories, which drew attention to the speech given by Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.)  I found it on Youtube and I was glad I did.  He speaks well, rising sonorously to the theme.  The theatre of his pedagogy, walking around the floor with a picture of Ms. Greene with an automatic weapon and the faces of three Congresswomen, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib suggesting they, “the squad”’s worst nightmare was an armed Ms. Greene, was also rather effective.  And still only eleven, of the two-hundred-plus Republicans in the House were swayed.  It is impossible to reconcile how they could rationalize that this wasn’t something worth of censure.

On to another collection of medieval Chinese poetry.  This collection “New Songs from a Jade Terrace” was a collection of Love Poetry spanning the previous four hundred years, compiled by the Southern Liang Dynasty emperor’s son, the court poet Xu Ling, around the year 545 CE. Woman are idealized, adorned, left pining for men who run hot and cold.  Even when they're true, as they are, sometimes unto death, there is usually a cruel mother figure who rejects the married daughter, disrupting bliss, rendering marriage impossible. Pre Tang Dynasty, (608 – 906 CE.) this also antedates the popularization of foot binding and helps as well, to inform the great poetry of the subsequent period.

 

I didn’t read nearly as much as I would have liked.  I spent most of the day running through my list of to-dos.  A conference call at ten.  They are all in London or the Bay Area.  My colleague was in Perth.  This was my first time meeting these people, but we all seemed to know many people in common and before long we were exchanging invites on LinkedIn.  One of my Chinese New Year resolutions is to clean up the antiquated mess that is my LinkedIn page.  I have lots of new clients, have shed a number of old ones.  I don’t use the tool much, but other people do.  They go there and form an impression.  China will be down for two weeks starting next week.  I should use this time to get something I otherwise wouldn’t do done. 

I should mention that the day started out well.  I opened a big envelope from the bank that had, until last month held my mortgage and found that when the new bank settled on the refinance they overpaid and so the old bank was sending me $7.5K.  I’ll take it.  That’s a fine way to start the day.  If every day began that way, I could get used to it.  And then, after a spell, I’m sure I’d want more.  I drove over to the bank today and deposited this check, after a late afternoon session of cross-country skiing.  And on the way, driving over I called my older one who is back at college.  Today she turns twenty and like any father at that mile marker, you spin your head and wonder where the years went.  

 

 

 

Thursday, 02/04/21

Planted My Poles Down

Unexpectedly, I spent some time this morning with a late fourth early fifth century explorer, Fa Xian. (337 – 422 CE.) I was reading a collection entitled: “Poetry and Prose of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties”, published in 1986 by Panda Books in Beijing.  Towards the end was a long section with entries from “A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms” by the intrepid Chinese monk of the late fourth, early fifth centuries.  Traveling an extraordinary pathway through Central Asia, through modern day Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka he returns by sailing, is shipwrecked in Java he eventually makes it back to China, overshooting his target and landing near modern day Qingdao.  Foreign ideology, Buddhism enflames Fa Xian’s curiosity bring knowledge form outside China back home. 

 

He visits India during the Gupta Dynasty, a period of strong unified rule, notably different from the chaotic period of the Six Dynasties and Jin rule that Fa Xian knew in China.  Chandragupta II is portrayed as an effective, benevolent ruler, we learn about the untouchables who are well established component of society.  Everywhere there are Buddhist miracles, in Sri Lanka there is a dragon and every new entry starts with a statement of how many yojanas (a day’s march) they travelled and in which direction.  After a time, the entries become a bit repetitive and I wondered if this collection was missing much or how good the translation was.  Online there is, what appears to be a complete translation by Herbert Giles. The sparse Amazon entry states prominently “Unknown Binding – January 1, 1832” which is intriguing, especially when one considers that H. A. Giles was born in 1845.  

Reading Fa Xian, I was reminded of the narrative of St. Cuthbert who lived two hundred and some years in the future on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, spreading the Christian faith in early medieval Europe.  Cuthbert was proselytizing to the heathens in pagan Europe and Fa Xian was on his way to the heart and the home of Buddhism, but in style they are both didactic and full of fantastic, divine intervention.  Fa Xian’s travels, over the Himalayas, across the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, covered much more ground than the pilgrimage of someone in Europe to Jerusalem.  And one assumes that both passages were known to people of this time.  He headed back east, by sea, seemingly without fear that he was heading in the right direction, and not towards the end of the earth.

I got some skiing in today, out on the trail.  Someone, or something had beaten down a reasonably wide path which worked well for sliding along.  By way of comparison, I tried cutting through the virgin snow as well, but with the caked over top layer of freeze, it wasn’t easy going.  My wife joined me on foot but threw in the towel after the first hundred yards or so.  I kept going all the way down to Sojourner Truth Park, where the trail meets Plains Road and as I went I hummed an old Afro Beat bass line and planted my poles down on every half beat, counting away in cycles of one hundred.  I met a skier couple coming the other direction as I returned.  I fumbled and got my mask on.  The gentleman apologized for not having one.  “It’s nice out here.” I suggested.  “It’s perfect” was his reply. 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 02/03/21 

Snow-Covered Cypress Skeletons

The Han under emperor WuDi used state monopolies to fund successful expansionist efforts that helped disrupt then defeat the Xiongnu to the north and push out into the Ferghana region of Central Asia and over into the Korean peninsula and down into Vietnam.  The people who encouraged the emperor in these efforts were known as the “modernists”,  “We are the mods, we are mods,” Another group of Confucianists who ultimately won the upper hand were the reformists and they thought the state shouldn’t be involved in matters the private sector could otherwise account for. Raising money for expansionist efforts was money wasted.  Focus on improving the realm and what was core to China.  And though this debate continues today, “modernists” are still, practically concerned within their immediate neighborhood. 

 

I read a Burton Watson translation of Fu poetry or the poetry of rhapsody that seems to have originated in the early Han.  Sima Qian had a lengthy quote of the Sima Xiangru exaltation of “Sir Fantasy” and the flowery hunt that is better in every subsequent kingdom until the sagacious poet pops the balloon.  I have another translation of some of the same material.  Comparing them you realize the remarkable range that Chinese ideographs must present the for the builder, constructing sentences in English.   Somber, the poem by Pan Yue, A.D. 300 who wrote the “Idle Life” about whiling away a refined life “Cherishing my ineptness, I shall live carefree till the end.” Is the final line.  The introduction brings our attention to the fact that Pan Yue; “accused by a disgruntled rival, was executed on charges of treason.  According to the harsh custom of the age, his mother, brothers, and other close kin were al obliged to share his fate.”

 

Midday I approached the little one and said: “when you were young you used to come up to me in my office and say: ‘come play!’ Now I’m coming to you; ‘come play.’”  And I could tell within a moment that she would at least go outside, though I’d have to plead for a while.  I did.  She did.  And soon we were walking over the five feet high pile of snow that the plow had made.  Over this challenge she and my wife literally followed in my footsteps down the back yard and into the woods.  My destination was the trail but before we could get there, standing agape in the somber silence of the snow-covered cypress skeletons, she decided to turn around and go back. The Mrs. and I carried on, slowly. 

Now I’m going to head across the river and see how my mom and stepdad are doing. It is odd working with people from around the world who wouldn’t know about or be concerned with local weather.  But I don’t see much of anyone in the area so it’s easy to pretend it is just a hyper-local things.  Down below the deer are trying to nibble on the juniper.  They hate eating that but I suppose in the winter they’ll take anything.  The snow is up to their chests.  The snow is falling once again.  Apparently, there is more coming later in the week.  My deer friend and jazz mentor of my teens had recommended Hubert Laws, but most of what I listened to just now sounded like fuzak. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 02/02/21 

Knocking, Accommodating the White

Snow man.  Snow.  It snowed today.  We were waiting for it all night and it never started.  But I was up before five and it was clearly underway by then.  It’s about twelve hours later just now and it hasn’t stopped.  It’s intensified.  Big, puffy flakes, falling, rising, whipped around in the wind. 

 

I had calls today with people in Nairobi, Beijing, Tokyo, Bristol, London, Madrid, Toronto and Los Angeles.  It wasn’t snowing in any of those places.  But here, that’s all there really is to talk about.  My mom and stepdad are safe.  My dad and stepmom are safe.  We have our electricity on, so do they.  Out in the living room is a fire in the fireplace. 

I decided to finish of the Sima Qian’s “Shiji” today.  So many anecdotes of fearless officials, and cowardly officials of sagacious leaders and inept kings.  The most common way to account for things is to offer your life or be told yours is to be taken, only to have it commuted for a fine, and be reduced to a commoner.  I’ve often wondered about the evolution of a post-modern Chinese sense of morals in the absence of proper communist ideology.  To read Sima Qian is to be reminded of what a deep moral webbing underlay reaches out, informing a contemporary Chinese sense of ethics, of what decency and sacrifice and nobility all mean. 

As I binged my way through the final hundred and thirty pages of this two-volume, nine-hundred-page, abridged version, I noticed it was starting to get dark and when I was done, and confirmed that it was already four-fifteen, I suited up and headed outside.  Earlier in the day, I’d imagined cross country skiing, and that will come, but for today, just ambling down the back yard out to the rail trail was a sufficient adventure.  Down on the trail; remarkable. A foot of snow absorbing all the sound.  The soft layering, deceiving you into thinking you could jump down ten feet and land softly.  The wind blowing strongly, and the trees occasionally knocking, accommodating the white weight and the sturdy gusts.  There is no one else down here.

 

 

 

Monday, 02/01/21