Cooking up signs

In a Zen community, the monk in charge of cooking for the other monks is called the tenzo. Zen master Dogen, in his youth, learned some very important lessons from the tenzo of one community. Later he incorporated those lessons into a manual written as guidance for his own community. Here are two translations of a short passage from Dogen’s Tenzokyokun (Instructions for the Tenzo):

If you cannot even know what categories you fall into, how can you know about others? If you judge others from your own limited point of view, how can you avoid being mistaken? Although the seniors and those who come after differ in appearance, all members of the community are equal. Furthermore, those who had shortcomings yesterday can act correctly today. Who can know what is sacred and what is ordinary?

— Tanahashi 1985, 62

Even the self does not know where the self will settle down; how could others determine where others will settle down? How could it not be a mistake to find others’ faults with our own faults? Although there is a difference between the senior and the junior and the wise and the stupid, as members of the sangha they are the same. Moreover, the wrong in the past may be right in the present, so who could distinguish the sage from the common person?

— Leighton and Okumura 1996, 45

Charles Peirce would regard these as two interpretants of one sign. As he remarked of a proverb, ‘Every time this is written or spoken in English, Greek, or any other language, and every time it is thought of, it is one and the same representamen’ (EP2:203). In Peircean texts like this one, ‘representamen’ and ‘sign’ are two words for the same thing – which is obviously not an existing physical “thing,” since it can be embodied many times in many ways. But each translation, each embodiment, is also a sign in its own right; for ‘every representamen must be capable of contributing to the determination of a representamen different from itself’ (Peirce, same paragraph).

Each person who actually follows Dogen’s guidance has to translate it into a functional part of his or her own habit-system, an interpretant sign which will in turn determine actual behavior. That interpretant behavior may contribute to the guidance systems of other monks … and so on. If that happens, the monk’s potential to be a sign is realized. All of this is part of what it means for Dogen’s expressed thought to mean anything. And part of what it means for you to read the two translations above is to read them as interpretants of one sign even though they are two signs. Try that …

What are you supposed to do?

Cut off learning and there will be nothing more to worry about.

— Dao De Jing 20 (Ames)

Suppose you have no mission to accomplish,
no reason for being here,
nothing to learn from it all.
What difference would it make?

You still have things to do, places to go,
obsessions to absorb your energy,
just nothing to be proud or guilty of.

You play your part unwritten,
unlearn your lines,
dissolve your problems.

Suppose this is it.
Can you stop supposing?

I n I

The meanings of words in English can be described as ‘conventional,’ but in most cases no ‘convention’ was ever called where users of a word got together to decide what those words would express. Many users of the English language never chose to do so, because it was forced upon them along with the colonial rule of the British (or the American) Empire. But some have resisted colonization by consciously creating their own conventions, their own dialect of English.
One good example of such creative cultural transformation is the “patois” of the Rastafarians.

In the past half century, Rastafarian language found its way into globally popular culture through the spread of reggae music and the lyrics of artists such as Bob Marley. His ‘Redemption Song’ is one example:

Old pirates yes they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit …

Standard English would call for “me,” or maybe “us,” instead of “I” here. But this repurposing of “I,” including the Rastafarian use of “I an’ I” for the first person pronoun, has a deep spiritual significance for this religion of ‘love and unity.’ It is part of what Marley calls the ‘I’n’I vibration’ in his song ‘Positive Vibration’, and is connected with the central figure of the religion, Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari is another name for him.)

For many Rastas, the ‘I’ after Selassie is multivalent in its significance. Read as ‘first’, it points to his pre-existence from the beginning and to his preeminence as earth’s ‘rightful ruler’. Read as the first person singular pronoun ‘I’, which is generally how Rastas pronounce it, it becomes an indicator of Selassie’s divinity. From this understanding, Rastas extrapolate that ‘I’ represents the divine essence of humans. They then elaborated the philosophy of InI consciousness (‘Isciousness’) as the realization of one’s own divine identity.

— Edmonds, Ennis B.. Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction (p. 37). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

For instance, to indicate the divinity of “Creation”, Rastas call it “Iration” instead.

In 1983, the year after Bob Marley’s death, Bob Dylan released a song titled ‘I and I’ (on the album Infidels). The chorus goes like this:

I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives

One of the verses tells how it

Took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice’s beautiful face
And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth

This song puts yet another spiritual spin on the Rastafarian expression. Or at least it seems that way to I and I. How about you and you?

Walden dialogue

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.

As deliberately as a locomotive.
Who laid the track?

Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry – determined to make a day of it.

Let the day be determined deliberately.

Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill.

Let us not be crowded.
Let us be downset and underwhelmed.

With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.

Stranger music.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

[point d’appui: ‘point of support’]

Will the lamp-post appear to future ages?
Will they know how to read the Realometer?
Will they get the point?
Will they find their own foundation?
What if reality rocks the bedrock?

If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter [=scimitar], and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

— Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 2

Busy, busy, busy. Deliberately.

(since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of Secondness which would identifide the body never falls)

The primal point

Arthur Green points out that in Kabbalah, wisdom (Hokhmah) is also primordial teaching (like Buddhist dharma) which is a ‘twin process’ with God’s creation of the world.

As the primal point of existence, Hokhmah is symbolized by the yod, the smallest of the letters, the first point from which all the other letters will be written. Here all of Torah, the text and the commentary added to it in every generation—indeed all of human wisdom—is contained within a single yod.

— Green (2004, 40)

Knowledge is a single point, but the ignorant have multiplied it.

— Islamic hadith (“tradition”) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad or the Imám Alí

‘The ignorant’ here includes you and me and all sentient beings subject to explicit knowledge, whose complexity conceals the implicit knowledge by representing it as multiplex. As Voltaire is said to have remarked in a different context, ‘the multitude of books is making us ignorant.’

Another hadith quotes the Imám Alí as saying that

All that is in the world is in the Qur’an, and all that is in the Qur’an is condensed in the first chapter of the Book, and all that is in the first chapter is in the basmala [first verse], and all that is in the basmala is in the bā’ [first letter, ب], and I am the point under the bā’.

(Lawson 2012, 102)

We might read this as a reference to the extreme compression of meaning found in turning signs. They seem to have a magical quality of turning meaning inside out, as it were, so that a single verse says it all: rather than serving as one of many particles in a vast System, it seems to be the point around which the System revolves – the I of the cyclone, in which Author and Reader are one with Scripture. As Northrop Frye puts it (1982, 208-9), ‘Ideally, every sentence is the key to the whole Bible … every sentence is a kind of linguistic monad.’

The Zohar (1:21a) speaks of ‘primordial light prevailing on the first day’; in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi El’azar said that ‘With the light created by the blessed holy one on the first day, one could gaze from one end of the universe to the other’ (ZP I.159).

The whole Truth

In his 1818 preface to Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Arthur Schopenhauer told readers that his whole book was really ‘a single thought,’ which he could find no shorter way of imparting. Despite the linear order imposed by the book format, the real order connecting the parts was ‘organic’:

every part supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole; a connexion in which no part is first and no part last, in which the whole gains in clearness from every part, and even the smallest part cannot be fully understood until the whole has been first understood.’

— Schopenhauer (1859, xii)

His advice to the reader, therefore, was to read the book twice. My advice to the Ideal Reader of Turning Signs is to take the whole thought of the Obverse as context for every point to be presented on the Reverse (and here in the Universe).

Here we have another turn of the hermeneutic circle. But if the ‘single thought’ of the book cannot be expressed in a single sentence, or indeed in any shorter form than the book itself, how can any actual reader see it as a single thought? Can you really see it all at once? This question applies to the meaning cycle in all its guises, because it arises from the very nature of signs, which according to Peirce are of virtually unlimited size and complexity.

Giving to the word sign the full scope that reasonably belongs to it for logical purposes, a whole book is a sign; and a translation of it is a replica of the same sign. A whole literature is a sign.

— Peirce, EP2:303

Nor is the question limited in scope to books, or even to language in all its forms. Every sign is ‘connected with the “Truth,” i.e. the entire Universe of being’ (Peirce, EP2:303). A complete and explicit model of the connections would take up no less meaning space than that Universe itself, ‘perfused with signs.’ But a model working implicitly can be represented by the smallest possible sign, which will then show simply the wholeness of the “Truth.”