It's always something of a delight to see the moon in the daytime. I don't know why... I guess that slight uncanniness is appealing.
A slight uncanniness has been dealt to me lately by my thinking and noticing.
I have been thinking a lot about the body, the minded-body rather than the bodied-mind. And the distributed intelligence/efficacy of the body. My left hand has come to my attention as a creature of remarkable flair and aptitude when I have long thought of it as rather useless (which it is with typing, for example). But it just gets on with some very intricate tasks (as when I am cleaning the slippery, awkward and somewhat delicate dentures) in a rather joyful way that I have only just started to attend to. Maybe it’s joyous because I am attending? I don’t know.
This reminded me of the way the whole body wants “me” to get “out of the way” when I am doing boxing. I inhibit it. I have to "switch off" the master control who wants to tell the body what to do and when. The body knows the master control can't keep up, because the master controller is an illusion: a post hoc description of what is happening is revealed to the controller by the body-mind and the controller then pretends to impact the movement and does in fact impact movement, but only so as to impede it. Ah yes, this is that story of the butcher in the Dao...
Cook Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wenhui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ding and learned how to care for life!”
It's that first paragraph that I'm taking about. Anyway, and on the other hand (!!!), “I’ assist the body by imagining the strength of trees when I have to lift weights... So the mind can stregthen the body by convincing the body that it is a tree. I had a similar experience running on treadmills at a gym. I'd run next to someone a little faster and I'd watch their feet. My body-mind said, "Huh. There's no effort involved in moving those [the other person's] feet." And that seemed to lessen the effort of moving my feet. I'd run faster and for longer with less fatigue.
This bodiment - and the way the body responds to certain trees as “climbable” and just gets on with it, while my mind is thinking “oh can I do that/how do I do that” - is leading me to consider intelligence/mind/efficacy/problem-solving as both empowered and constrained by form.
Another two things - I read this in David Wood's book:
Is there a genuine “opportunity” to be found in focusing on the silence of animals at their own suffering, or the widespread silence on the part of humans concerning the suffering we cause
them? Or is this largely irremediable tragedy? What, for example, are we to make of the silence of exterminated species?
How far could philosophy itself (as a discourse of sovereignty) be said to rest on the repressive silencing of those without power, especially the nonhuman? Could a thinking that broke with that tradition ever be more than a corrective to what would continue to be an inevitable practice?
The silence of the already extinct. Now that is deep. And the inadequacy of philosophy.. Ha! We are left looking at the finger and not the moon!
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