What Do I Think Death Is?

This spring, coming back to Holland after a wonderful carefree winter in Taiwan and Japan, I have been confronted from nearby with a sudden health crisis faced by a 92-year-old friend. The prognosis is still unclear: as the Dutch say, ‘Could freeze, could thaw.’

        Since I live nearby the eye of the storm as it were, I have been sending brief ‘reports’ by email to a few concerned friends. One of them was written shortly after an unflinching conversation in which the possibility of stopping medication was considered. Such discussions involve whatever one does or does not think about The Last Things, and in relating the main points in writing, I found myself formulating with unusual succinctness my own view as of right now (I’m 68).

        In Dutch, what I said was: ‘Ik geloof persoonlijk dat het fysiek-belichaamde leven noch het enige, noch het beste leven is dat er is. Wat de meeste mensen het "sterven" noemen en ik liever The Great Upload, is niet het einde ergens van. Het is het verder waarmaken van een wijder perspectief.’

        Then I got to translating it into English. What I came up with was: ‘Personally, I do not believe that physically embodied life is either the only or the best life there is. What most people call "dying" and I prefer to call The Great Upload, is not the end of anything. It is the continuing substantiation of a wider perspective.’

        As so often, although I felt the translation was a pretty good representation of what I meant, something had been lost in the process. The Dutch word ‘waarmaken,’ which I made into ‘substantiation,’ can or does indeed mean ‘substantiate,’ as well as ‘live up to’ in the sense of ‘living up to a promise.’ But the very structure of the word, its being a combination of ‘waar’ meaning ‘true’ and ‘maken’ meaning ‘make’...somehow conveys an added glint of ‘making it true,’ making something which was only potential into an actuality.

        Does this mean I think you have to die before you become immortal? Certainly not. Like William Blake, I believe the apps that enable our immortality, so to speak, are already installed and running during our life in this visible world. Normally we are not aware of them because the shine or glare of immediate exigencies bears in on us more insistently. But let’s defer that discussion for later. Or for Later...

--Lloyd Haft

April 14, 2015

Spirit Writing in Old Matsu, Anno Now

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 27)

During our recent stay in Matsu, we were lodged in a bed-and-breakfast owned by one of Katie’s former bosses, who is from Matsu. We all call him Brother Tiger because the two characters of his name literally mean Lucky Tiger. Brother Tiger was and is an administrator and advisor of various cultural agencies including one of Taiwan’s most famous traditional-style opera troupes. Like others from this particular part of Matsu, from childhood up he has been a participant in the cult of a local god called ‘The Marshal in Armor’ (in the military sense of a ‘field marshal’).

       The Marshal is a frog spirit. He is called Marshal in Armor because in the local dialect, the word for ‘frog’ sounds like the Mandarin word for ‘armor,’ and being a god, like a field marshal he has power and authority.

       There are several images of the Marshal. The main one is located in a subsidiary altar of the local temple of the ‘Empress of Heaven,’ i.e. the goddess Matsu. The Empress of Heaven, like our Holy Virgin Mary who is also called Queen of Heaven, is said to have been a flesh-and-blood girl during her life on earth. Later she achieved the status of a goddess capable of helping earthlings with many things including saving fishermen in peril, helping women to become pregnant...in short, she is a divine refuge figure who is worshipped by millions and I would say is probably, maybe next to the Buddha in his or her various guises, the single most universal religious focus of the Taiwanese people. I will not now elaborate on the goddess Matsu as that is a whole story in itself...

       As I was saying, there are several images of the Marshal. The main one is worshipped at the Empress of Heaven’s temple, but an important role is also played by a compact mobile image, a wooden thing maybe a foot high, which is mounted on a wooden ‘litter’ or ‘sedan chair’ that can be carried around during processions or...as I will go into shortly...on inspection trips or even airline flights. The sedan chair is carried by four men, two in front and two behind. Besides serving as the Marshal’s vehicle when he needs to go somewhere, it is also the instrument of his ‘spirit writing’ when he chooses to communicate with humans. When this happens, the procedure is that the bearers tilt the whole sedan chair 90 degrees while continuing to hold it from below...the Marshal can’t fall out because he is mounted inside. The writing is done by placing a table under the tilted sedan chair. The table is covered with ash from burnt incense. The bearers bend over somewhat, enough so that a crossbeam of the sedan chair is in close proximity with the top of the table. When a question is asked or the Marshal wishes to make a pronouncement, the whole Ark, so to say, gets to Moverin’...bearers plus chair plus crossbeam get to vibrating, heaving up and down and sideways, till the end of the crossbeam bumps repeatedly into the ash and makes markings in it. The markings are Chinese characters or other familiar signs...although in reporting this, I am taking it on faith because when I looked at the marks, it defied my imagination how anyone could read anything out of them. This point is important, though, as it is a somewhat unusual manner of spirit communication. It is not at all unusual for the Chinese to receive guidance from gods or spirits, but oftentimes either the message is spoken through a medium who is in trance, or writing is done by other means including the ‘planchette,’ which is a mechanical device made up of connected sticks that looks something like a pantograph.

       The Marshal is a testy character and not averse to letting his displeasure be known. One of the stories about him is that when the County Chief was in town, the Marshal demanded he should come to the temple for a visit. At the Marshal’s instruction, a very large glass of the renowned local firewater (116 proof kaoliang) was prepared for the County Chief and he was told to drink up and listen. What the Marshal had to say was that certain repairs were needed on the local scene and would the government please do something about it. (The story does not go on to tell whether the repairs were all subsequently put through.)

       One of the Marshal’s quirks is that he loves opera. About two years ago, when Brother Tiger was in town and went to see the Marshal, he said he was planning to take early retirement. The Marshal said Hey, not so fast now, you’re not done yet. Since you’re a big shot in the opera world, I want you to stay on long enough to arrange a nice opera performance for me to watch. So Brother Tiger agreed! (This was not the Marshal’s first interaction with their family...years previously, when their daughter was having a difficult pregnancy, the Marshal gave a medical prescription, a certain remedy to be drunk by the girl for a certain period of time, after which the trouble disappeared. Another time, when Brother and Auntie Tiger’s son was getting married in Taiwan, the Marshal was a guest at the wedding...he had been flown over to Taiwan, sedan chair and all, in a regular passenger plane.)

       So at the Marshal’s behest, Brother Tiger shelved his early retirement and busily set to work to organize the opera – finding a suitable play, enlisting musicians etc. The Marshal himself designated which performers were to play which roles. This all took time, but by the time we got over to Matsu for a visit a few days ago, things were at an advanced stage and the opera was being rehearsed at a locale provided by a local school. We went to watch. The Marshal was present in his chair rig, watching the whole time.

       After the rehearsal, a table was set up with incense ash on it so that the Marshal could write out his reactions and suggestions. The bearers brought him over, tilted his rig into writing position, and the bumping and marking commenced. Brother Tiger, based on all his professional experience, gave the performance a ‘grade’ – 85 points out of a possible 100. Not good enough, said the Marshal; next time I want you to get it up to 95.

       Certain performers were singled out as needing improvement. This time they got by with a mere admonishment, but on other occasions the Marshal has been known to demand ‘punishment’ in the form of making the deficient performer kneel on the cold stone floor for the time it takes one stick of incense to burn to the end – about one full hour.

       The cult of the Marshal in Armor is not practiced in Taiwan proper or even in Matsu as a whole. It is specific to the locality of Qinbi where we were staying, and (I have been told) to certain spots on the Chinese Mainland.

--Lloyd Haft

February 4, 2015

On the Matsu Shore (poem)

Is this a sound

of water or of wind,

day or night that wakens me,

wants me here

waiting with the wind,

watching over water?

How many centuries,

how many me’s are gathered

in this moment yet to go,

yet to know the we, the way

from all of here to more of here,

ever more of here,

hearing with the sea,

wondering the wind...

--Lloyd Haft

at Qinbi, Beigan, Matsu

February 2, 2015

early morning

Tips for Tired Translators

(1) Yours is one of the most thankless professions in the world You are being paid – if we can even use the word ‘paid’ for the disgusting pittance you are undoubtedly getting – to help somebody else earn money and become famous. Accept it! Publishers will always think of you, if they think of you at all, as a sort of glorified typist. As for authors, take comfort in the words of an Italian sinologist friend of mine who said: ‘The nice thing about translating Ancient Chinese poetry is that the authors are already dead!’

(2) Try to avoid translating authors who know more than five words of your own native language. They will always think they have found mistakes in your translation, and want you to change your text accordingly.

(3) If you can’t see what the damned text MEANS, take a deep breath and just translate what it SAYS. An obscure original has the right to an obscure translation.

(4) Don’t break your back trying to make the original sound better than it is. We are not in business to teach people to write decently.

(5) If you are an American, never expect that one single European, never one single one of them in your lifetime or in all eternity, will ever think you know anything at all about a language called ‘English.’

(6) Don’t assume that just because a word is in the dictionary, it must be wrong.

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 26)

Fundamentals of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, by Wen-Shan Huang who was Justin Stone’s teacher, contains a preface by Justin Stone – just as Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih!, published at about the same time (1974), not only includes a foreword by Huang but is dedicated to him as a ‘friend and teacher.’ Huang’s book, unlike Stone’s brief manual, is an imposing tome, 559 pages in all, more like a reference book for a lifetime. Probably nobody ever read it at one sitting.

       It took me forty years to get around to the Appendices at the back, which are in Chinese. (By that time I had at least a reasonable knowledge of Chinese, though I still had to ask my wife what certain key phrases meant...)

       In the third Appendix, where Huang lists some acknowledgments, he calls Justin Stone by a Chinese name, adding the English name in parentheses. The Chinese name is Shi Dong 石東, the two characters meaning ‘stone’ and ‘east’ respectively. Shi is an existing Chinese family name, and Dong is a plausible first name.  If we rearrange the characters to put the first and last names in the usual Western order (‘Dong Shi’), they mean ‘Oriental Stone’ or ‘Eastern Stone.’ Very appropriate, given Justin’s intense study and assimilation of Oriental meanings and values.

       I have no way of knowing whether it was Wen-Shan Huang himself who gave Justin this name, but it is a reasonable guess. Western students of Chinese things often receive a name from their Chinese teacher. (I did.) And there is a technical detail of ‘Shi Dong’ which adds to my suspicion that Teacher Huang himself gave this name to Teacher Stone. In giving names to foreigners, the Chinese like to select Chinese syllables which are not only meaningful but more or less resemble the original sound of the person’s name. In Southern Chinese speech, ‘Shi Dong’ would likely be pronounced ‘Si Dong,’ or if pronounced very fast – as is usual – ‘S-dong.’ To Chinese ears that would sound very close to ‘Stone.’ And Wen-Shan Huang was of South Chinese origin.

       I don’t know if Justin actually used this Chinese name much. (Incidentally, in the older spelling common in those days, 'Shi Dong’ would have been ‘Shih Tung.’) But maybe there are other students out there who, like me, have been curious as to what his Chinese name might be. If somebody does know of another attested  Chinese name for Justin Stone, please do let me know!

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

If I Had to Edit the Bible

...there’d be some changes made. I would start by entirely omitting the Old Testament. I think two thousand years of trying to construe patriarchalism as spirituality has been enough. Look what it has done for us, or done to us...

       But then. The New. To begin with, I would delete practically all of the first two Gospels. I would make an exception for Chapters Five, Six, and Seven of Matthew so as to get the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer. (And why is the Lord’s Prayer so specifically important? My reference on this is a line from the philosopher Max Scheler: ‘God was not a father till Jesus called him one.’)

Of Luke’s Gospel, I would keep the beginning and the end, those being the sections which emphasize the primary role of women in the Salvation process.

Of John, the most or the only philosophical gospel, I would need to make a more extensive selection. It would certainly include the beginning of the first Chapter – but not without retranslating the all-important first sentence.

The traditional version, so well known that it is used and misused in all sorts of totally secular writings and contexts, is ‘In the beginning was the word.’ I do not have a scholar’s or even a good knowledge of  Greek, but I have studied this passage sufficiently to know that ‘word’ here is way wrong. It is one of the most influentially misleading translations ever made. Whatever exactly the Greek logos means here – and it can have many meanings – it certainly cannot be just ‘word’ in anything like the ordinary sense.[1]

My own version of that passage, the so-called Prologue, is this:

In the beginning was the sense

and the sense was of God,

bespeaking God from ever.

All things have become of that;

nothing not of that becomes.

And the sense is alive:

its life is the light of the human,

breaking the hold that the darkness would have had.

The true light comes into the world

with every one of us,

comes upon its world

that was not aware before:

the sense becoming human,

dwelling where we are.

Going on with John, I would maintain Chapters 15 and 17. By doing so, I would preserve the key passages about the relativity or transcendability of the human person – its ability to morph and merge, hence transcend, in resonance with another person or persons.

       But there are other chapters of John that I would also include – 4, 6, 8, 13, and 18, so as to include Jesus’ famous (or infamous) predicateless ‘I am’ sayings. I wonder if I could resist the temptation to retranslate them so as to sound even more as if they applied not only to Jesus but to every one of us who says ‘I am.’

       But then it would seem strange to exclude the other ‘I am’ sayings, so I suppose I would have to add Chapters 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 19. And would it then make much sense, having put in 16 of the 21 chapters of John, to leave out the other five? So, I guess I would maintain all of John.

       If you are now wondering ‘if you substantially leave out three of the four Gospels, why do you still call it The New Testament at all?’...I’ll just tell you the answer straight out. I do not believe the essential import of the New Testament really comes out in the so-called ‘story of Jesus’ or Synoptic Gospels (i.e. the first three). For me, it is in what comes after: in parts of John, in that thrilling and I think quite believable story we call the Acts of the Apostles, and in the superb, ever-haunting, humanly plausible Letters of Paul.

       I know that in many people’s minds, Paul is the great perverter (or great pervert – ‘didn’t he have something against sex?’) – the one who distorted a supposedly pure-and-pristine ‘real’ Christianity into an alien philosophy. To me, he is the one who made Christianity worth more than passing attention, more than the world’s so-manieth system of unworkable moral pronouncements based on myth-like stories of a bygone Wonder Worker. Paul brings up the side that was lacking in the Gospels: the inner and experiential dimension, the notion of a personal and psychological growth. Above all, he points us to a sophisticated notion of ‘body’ such that the mere individual ‘body of this death’ is subsumed in the surviving, still-growing Body of Christ in which we all, even now, participate. (If you don’t believe this, read 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and the one in which it is all ‘colossally’ expanded to include the cosmos – Colossians.)

       But what about the question of ‘authenticity’: whether the historical Paul of Tarsus was really the one who wrote the texts attributed to him? I say: ignore this. If you don’t, you will lose the glories of the Epistle to the Hebrews, including its Chapter Eleven, the so-called Faith Chapter, in which we are urged to carry on regardless, since even the great champions of faith in the Old Testament never really lived to see their faith fulfilled.

       Faith is not a matter of fulfilment. It is about a sense in living. The living of a sense. A sense that is known in the living of it.

--Lloyd Haft

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[1] Obviously I am not the first person in history to think this. Erasmus, in one of his own versions, treated it as the Latin sermo, meaning something like ‘conversation’ or ‘discourse.’ Many Chinese versions use Dao 道 which in the first instance suggests not so much a ‘word’ as an overall ‘way’ or ‘principle’ or ‘guiding view’ of something. The modern Dutch translator Pieter Oussoren makes it not ‘word’ but ‘speaking.’ The 20^th-century Dutch theologian Miskotte once wrote ‘word is a happening between persons.’

On Ongoing Presence

These days I miss, but am also very aware of the continuing presence of, my Spiritual Advisor. (She departed this physical frame about three years ago at the age of 78.) She was a non-resident or external member (the technical term is ‘oblate’) of a Benedictine monastic organization. Her monastic name was Mary Magdalene. In what follows I will call her Madeleine.

        Before her retirement, in worldly life Madeleine had been active in the world of education as a counselor, administratrix, and textbook editor. She was successful and well known in that world. All this fitted in well with her brand of spirituality, which I would say was of the Active Service rather than the Contemplative type. (Since my own natural bent is incurably the opposite, we sometimes had to work at translating our spiritual experiences into each other’s terms.)

She was tremendously critical of the official Catholic hierarchy and was not afraid to confront even high ‘prelates’ face-to-face. On one occasion, she was talking to one of our notoriously conservative Dutch bishops while both were looking at an Eastern Orthodox icon of the Crucifixion. This type of icon shows the crucified Christ flanked by his mother Mary and St. John the Evangelist, who is traditionally also called ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’[1] Madeleine said to the bishop: ‘You don’t like this one, do you? The ones closest to Jesus are a woman and a homosexual.’

        She once told me she believed Jesus himself had been bisexual. She was proud of the legends associated with her monastic namesake, the original Mary Magdalene, which say that she had been a prostitute. In general, she took a bread-and-butter rather than an exalted view of sexuality. I remember once when I ‘confessed’ to her that in my own prayers I much more often addressed myself to Mary than to Jesus, she said: ‘Well that’s just natural, after all, you’re a man and Mary is a woman!’

        But as far as I know, this matter-of-factness never implied anything outside the straight-and-narrow in Madeleine’s private life. She was a married woman and had vowed to interpret the traditional monastic vow of chastity as commitment to a ‘special’ relationship with her own husband. I think she was one of those people who are perceptively open to all manner of erotic potentials without falling into the trap of thinking they must be put into physical practice at any cost. Personally, I also thoroughly support both clauses of this traditional Pauline attitude (1 Corinthians 6:12) that all things are allowable but not all are expedient.

        The same practicality applied in her approach to etheric and mysterious and invisible things. She believed in them, hoped for them (isn’t that really the same?), and had no problem with her own role in making them actual. Regarding the human personality’s survival of bodily death, she told me frankly that while out driving her car, she often talked out loud to her long-deceased father. And as for the existence of God, to me her classic statement was ‘I just plain want God to exist!’

        Like many people in my church, at home she was liable to pray while standing in front of an icon on the wall. I can still see her (I never saw it objectively) getting up in the morning, feeling as she put it ‘amazed to be still alive,’ pouring her first cup from the automatic coffeemaker, stepping with that cup of coffee in her hand right up to the nearest icon, and greeting the Presence at the beginning of a new day.

--Lloyd Haft

October 2014

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[1] The Bible passages used to support this association, whether or not they are historically valid, are John 19:26, 20:2, 21:7 and 21:20.