I noticed yesterday that my watch battery had entered that capricious stage that marks the end of its efficacy, stopping for stretches of time, then starting up again.This anomaly came in handy in this morning's Zhuangzi class, which began as scheduled at 10:00. But my watch said 6:18 and I told the class so - and why, and that I didn't know if this was 6:18am or 6:18pm. As the class progressed I looked to my watch reflexively, as I usually do, monitoring the unfolding of our discussion over our allotted time. 6:51! 7:10! Sometimes I checked my laptop for EST time but sometimes I also announced the time on my watch. 7:40! As we had knock-down-drag-out discussions of passages like
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, "Your words are useless."
Zhuangzi said, "It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time only uses as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?"
Huizi said, "It would be useless."
Zhuangzi said, "Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious."
(from the probably not Zhuangzi-penned "Miscellaneous" chapter 26; Ziporyn 112) my untimely timekeeping went from a jarring interruption to a joke to feeling like something more profound. (We did the same with that passage, reading it as profound and then as a SNL parody of profundity - and then it was profound. The profoundness of the faux-profound should be quite obvious.)
This was our last session just reading the Zhuangzi together and Huizi's question was on all our lips. It recaps a conversation which appears already at the end of ch. 1 when Zhuangzi's sophist friend fatefully compares Zhuangzi's words to a huge useless tree, setting up one of the text's abiding images. What better illustration of the Dao than a tree so useless that noone thinks to cut it down? An analogous tree actually says so in a carpenter's dream at 4.17: If I were useful, do you think that I could have grown to be so great? (Ziporyn 30).
But really: what use is any of this? I'm afraid the question was to more than this text, this class, extending to all texts and all classes, and beyond! What use is there in questioning usefulness? And in a wounded world of needy people, including ourselves, isn't it irresponsible to pursue such questions? It was a more frustrated discussion than our last ones, but productively (I won't say usefully!) so. Perhaps we're learning to recognize all words (and claims and texts and classes) as what in ch. 27 are called spillover goblet words 卮言 (explained by Ziporyn as hinged vessels that tip and empty when they get too full), giving forth [new meanings] constantly, harmonizing them all through their Heavenly Transitions (Ziporyn 114).
If we learn to expect and welcome that tipping we're back on Course! Our world is itself at a tipping point; might the Zhuangzi's end-run around usefulness disclose more sustainable ways of being part of it?
