Hangzhou Lovin’

Best comment ever

I’ve decided to translate the 道德经 , (that’s the Tao Te Ching for all you wade-giles fans out there. I’ve read a couple other translations and I wasn’t really satisfied, especially when I saw the original and it didn’t really match up. So I figured I’d give it a go myself, because it will help my Chinese and I have a lot of time on my hands.

I will try to stick to the original structure of the道德经, I won’t try to add anything or make drastic changes to the sentence structure, but I am not really going for historical accuracy. Basically I’m interpreting it from my own philosophy, which is basically a Humean empirical skepticism. Coming from this philosophy is a dislike of mysticism, (because it is bullshit), and the emphasis on mysticism and mysteries was what turned me off about other translations.

Like I said before, I’m not very interested in historical accuracy (though the more I translate, the more I care what the original words actually meant), and I am not a scholar of classical Chinese, hell I can’t even speak modern Chinese that well. So this attempt shouldn’t be seen as trying to produce a definitive document.

Starting with the Title, I translated道德经 as “The Practice of Virtue”, or more colloquially, “How to be a Good Person.” I intentionally avoided translating “Dao” as “way,” because it had been done so many times, and “practice” conveys more of a sense of action. I also chose it because it links Daoism up with Zen, where they are always talking about “right practice. But a way of doing something and a practice of doing something are really just the same thing.

It seems like there are a couple versions in Chinese out there. I’ve tried to stick to the one on this site (which is a ridiculously awesome site for classical Chinese texts). That site has English translations as well but I’ve stayed pretty far away from them. Here it is in simplified characters.

The 1st section:

道可道非常道
Practicing a practice is not living the practice
名可名非常名
Naming a name is not speaking the name
无名天地之始
The beginnings of existence cannot be named
有名万物之母
Yet we are able to name the origins of everything we encounter
故常无欲以观其妙
To be perceptive, always ignore your desires
常有欲以观其徼
To have good fortune, always embrace your desires
此两者同出而异名
These two thoughts jointly emerge, yet use different words
同谓之玄。玄之又玄
Spoken together, they are quite mysterious, a mystery on top of mysteries
众妙之门。
The door to a multitude of perceptions

Notes: This first section just lays out what he is going to tell us; What Dao is, how we speak, and how to lead a good life. The last couple lines are rather tongue in cheek, Laozi is being mischievous. I’m trying to make this applicable to my godless modern life, and took some liberties with some words. For example changed heaven to existence, (which I’m not really happy with but I can’t think of anything else).

The first four lines are hard to translate because of the 可 and the 常. Even in modern Chinese I don’t know what to make of 可. Its basic meaning is “can,” but it is used in many other ways. I took it here to mean an action is taking place. The 常 is strange because it has two rather contradictory meanings, “everyday” or “usual,” and “infinite”. Most translations take the “infinite” reading, I go the other route. I’m still not sure if I got 妙 and 徼 right.

The whole 道德经 is surprisingly Wittgenstein. There is a lot of talk about how we speak and how we can communicate. “Naming a name is not speaking” means that just defining something (“naming a name”) is not the same as speaking. In the same way just practicing The Dao, in order to be daoist, is not necessarily living your life in a daoist manner.

The 2nd section

天下皆知美之为美斯恶已
Because all can recognize beauty, ugliness already exists
皆知善之为善，斯不善已。
Because one can recognize kindness, evil already exists
有无相生
Existence and nothingness are created together
难易相成
Difficulty and ease complete each other
长短相形
Long and short are a pair of forms
高下相倾
Height leans on what is below it
音声相和
Pitch and rhythm unite in harmony
前后相随
Front and back follow one another

是以圣人处无为之事，
A wise man’s place is to take no side in matters
行不言之教
and move to teach with no words
万物作焉而不辞
Everything he encounters is made fresh and never rejected
生而不有
What he produces he does not own
为而不恃
What he supports he does not rely on
功成而弗居
What we has accomplishes he does not settle into
夫唯弗居是以不去
Only he who dwells in nothing, will be never cast aside

Notes: This one is all about how humans are the ones who put form on the world, and that these forms are not necessarily the correct ones. The first part was pretty straight forward. After “a wise man’s place…” it was a little more difficult but I am quite pleased with how it turned out, especially the last two lines. Other translations of these lines I’ve read are particularly unsatisfying.

毛孩儿 a great chinese photojournalist

Ms. July 1959, I’m in love with somebody’s grandma.

I’m back on land, been here for about 2 weeks, gained about 15 pounds and I’m starting to pine for the open waters. I was absurdly productive on the boat. I adhered to a grueling schedule; up at 6 or earlier depending on when the sun came up, on watch at 6:10, break at 8 where I messed around on the internet, back on watch at 9, a 2 hour break at 12, where I usually skipped lunch and went to the gym for some running, rowing or weight lifting, then I’d be back on watch till dinner at 5:45. At night I’d watch a little TV, write up the days notes, then turn in for some reading and meditation. I was a Zen master on that boat, the living and breathing bastard son of Buddha and Jesus. I also read about 6 books and before I forget what they are about I might as well put a little review of them up here for posterity.

1 and 2. Patrick O’Brian The Yellow admiral and Blue at the Mizzen. These were the last two books in the Aubrey Maturin series, which is about the British Royal navy in the Napelionic era. They were good and contained all the classic O’Brian goodness. Naval maneuvering, political espionage, good food, scientific naturalzing and familial conflicts, but I felt that he was on cruise control. To much went right for Jack and the plots almost seemed a bit formulaic. Still this series is still probably my all time favorite and I look forward to starting over again with the first book in the series soon.

2. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It’s been described as a a smart man’s version of The Davinci code, which is accurate enough. The characters were presented very well and there was lots of fun facts about medivieal secret societies. The problem was that the mysterious underworld presented in the book was just as inane as the Da Vinci code. (I’ve never actually read the D’ Vince code but I’ve absorbed enough of it through my vast powers of culturally absorbtion to be able to basicically rewrite the book. (jesus had kid with Mary M. They went to france, some dashing young archeologist/reporter/theologian figures this shit out but has yet to figure out the awesome consequences of these facts, some shadowy organization tries to kill him, Adventures!, a hot female love interest who either has a sexy accent or glasses but not both, finally an anticlimactic revelation about how somebody bad was good or visa versa)). Ok back to the Eco book, the characters in it where great and I wish it had simply been a book about life in Italy during the 60s and 70’s. During the last third the book starting getting silly; page after page of conspiracy theories filled with obscure references ranging from Shakespearian England to the Jewish community in Prague to the assassins (but not enough assassins, you can never have to many references to the assassins). The major conceit of the book was that all these conspiracies were just made up by the characters to amuse themselves. This starts to piss you off after plowing through 50 pages of their crap. Then ending reminded me of the ending of Pay it Forward, a stupid needless death scene that made me feel like I’d been cheated out of something.

3. The long walk by some polish guy. Cool but fake. It’s about a polish cavalry officer who is taken prisoner by the Russians at the start of world war two and sent to a gulag in Siberia. From there he escapes and makes his way south, past lake Bikal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi desert, over Tibet and finally to India. And he sees a yeti along the way. It’s a great read, but after I finished it about 5 minutes of googling revealed that most of it was probably made up.

4. Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonneget, Vonnegut’s war novel about the fire bombing of Dresden which he witnessed from the epoumynous slaughter house. It’s a Vonnegut book. You can never tell if the shit he is saying is trite or brilliant, but it’s honest and surprisingly zen like, and most zen works have that same quality of seeming to be trite and deeply true at the same time.

5. A walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I’ve been recommended this Bryson book several times, I tried to read the one where he drives around America before but I found him to be annoying. This one was much better, a nice little story about his attempt to walk the Appalachian trial with an ex alcoholic friend of his. It’s funny and American and should be made into a movie.

6. Jarhead by some marine, Speaking of books made into movies, this book was made into one of my favorite movies of last year. I’ve always thought that the saying “the book is always better that the movie” is dead wrong. It’s usually said as a way of showing you are culturally superior to someone else and is rarely said with any consideration. I would say with most pop bestsellers made into movies, the movies are often better for the simple fact that the movies are shorter. Now with Jarhead I would say that the movie and the book are about equally good, but they are very different. The book does not have much narrative consitency and jumps around the author’s life, while the movie takes several character and scenes from the book and combines them to make a more straight forward story. They both do a good job showing what young men are like when they are surrounded by a bunch of other young men and guns. Which is what any good war novel should do.

7. Some meditation book. I haven’t finished this book yet, but it is about how to do mindfulness mediation. A worthy goal, as meditation is basically exercise for your mind. I’ll probably write more about meditation later, but I’ll just say that this book was horribly written. It could have been half as long and still would have contained the same amount of information. Still writing isn’t everything and the main points of the book were interesting. I actually kind of liked the shitty writing because it made you react. It was like reading a book from the 17th or 18th century where you have to slog through a bunch of nonsense before you figure out what the real point is.

I’ll add links to amazon if I feel like it but I’m lazy

While I’ve been out here on the boat, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands and with that free time I’ve solved one of the greatest porblems of mankind. What language will the comeing galatic federation speak?

I’ve come up with a galatic pidgin that is easy to learn and pronounce in most possible alien languages, as long as they are vocalized.

In order for it to be easy to say I’ve limited it to 3 begining consonants, and 3 vowels. Thats it. Then you have a totality of 9 possible sylabes. This may seem like not enough to have a languge but if you combine these into words with a max of 4 sylables you have over 6000 possible words. The special english that the VOA uses only has 1500 words. Since this is just a basic language to make sure you don’t blow up each others starcruisers or when you met an alien in a bar you can order him/her a drink it dosn’t have to get too complicated.

So The three consonants should be easy to pronounce. I would suggest t, s, and m, I don’t know the lingusitic terms but all these are produced in different ways and are not easily confused (t and k are both produced in similar ways and thus could be easily confused). Alien races would then select consants that are similar to those three. For vowels I would have 0, A and E, but you could do three different tones if you wanted to get all chinese about it.

The grammer is an interesting question. SInce many words would sound similar, it woul dbe useful to have word endings, perhaps to indicate what part of speech a word is, or tense, but this wouldn’t be neccessary.

Writing in this language is even easier than speeking it. It’s alphabet is simply 1-9, each number coresponding to a predefined syllable. So even no vocal species could communicate using numbers.

More work needs to be done, but we are well on our way to completing a workable intergalatic language.

we laugh so we don’t cry

You know what I don’t liek, PBR. It’s the bullshit common man’s beer that some NY indie bitches started drinking cause they wanted to be hard like us motherfuckers from milwaukee. But guess what? We don’t drink that pisswater even though those PBR fools claim it comes from our town. We drink High Life, the champagne, when we want to get drunk we drink High life Ice and when we are watching our weight we drink high life lite.

At least drink some Old Style that is a beer with class. Fucking PBR, what a joke.

You know what else I hate. “owwwing” Like on any tv show where something slightly exicting goes on, americans always got to go “owwwww” it’s stupid. I hate it.shut your mouth stupid americans

There was something else I didn’t like but know I forgot, damn it

I’m gonna grow a mustache then was it, yeah who is indi rock now!!!!!???!?!?!?!!?

I’m in the middle of the Gulf of mexico, there is a lot of water out here. Man.

The first day I got here the sea was 4-7 meters, It felt like I had a bowl full of jelly in my belly, which I do. So I puked, but now it is noce and calm and I watch the water a lot every day and think strange thoughts. Like the other day I had the idea that you coul dfigure out the distance to the sun by measuring the angle of it’s rays coming through the clouds, I was really excited. But then I had a lot more time to stare at the water and I figured out I was wrong. Havn’t seen any whales yet, saw some Dolphins and a sea turtle and some birds, and a shit load of flying fish.

Yes my friends and loyal readers, that is the name of the proud vessel on which I am to set out upon. The Veritas Vantage, the most truthful, the most superior, the most alliterative ship in whole goddamn gulf of mexico!