Tao for Travelers: Clambering on a Tank

I am slowly venturing here and there from my little home base in Itaewon. Yesterday I got a T-money card, which is good for getting on the subway and buses. Then I took a walk toward an area that is large and green on the map. I thought it might be a park, but it is not. It seems to be a remnant of the US army base that used to be here, now with some museums at the edges. My path took me to the Korean War Memorial. There was a demonstration going on. About thirty people in matching red vests were sitting on mats in orderly rows listening to inspiring songs and speeches. I have no idea what this was about. There were more police than protesters, so I thought of joining just to boost the numbers.  Instead, I walked into the vast area of the War Memorial. It was quite a jumble -- an array of divergent symbols jostled together without creating either grief for those we've lost or the thrill of military might. The giant missile that stood at the opening to the plaza of the Korean War Memorial struck one note. The children clambering around the tanks and planes were an entirely different power move. Several statues of fighting confirmed for me a thought I've had for a long time, which is "don't mess with Koreans." This boy's face, in particular, captured that sense for me.  

And if you shouldn't mess with Koreans, Koreans fighting Koreans is a particularly desperate moment. I am not sure how the two sides will emerge from the impasse of the moment. I did leave the War Memorial even more convinced that they will find a way forward that we cannot imagine from this vantage point. It is the corollary of "don't mess" -- "don't underestimate." 

Tao for Travelers: Reading the Signs

In Korean, there are two forms of the future (that I've learned so far...). One is the definite future -- it will be a holiday tomorrow. The second is the "probable future," that is, all the things that probably will happen, like "I will go to Korea." In Korean this is said, "한극에 간 거예요," meaning it's probable I will go. I personally live in a probable future mentality and this was true long before I got to the probable future in my Korean textbook. With things that will happen in time, I often experience it like the area under the curve which comes up in calculus as an infinite series of steps. We arrive at the answer by integration of the small steps into a single number. In the real world this was most vividly illustrated for me by waiting for 12am, January 1, 2000, and the start of the new millennium. Or would we get stuck in the infinite divisions of time?  I felt like the countdown to my trip was in that space/time trap. Probably I would go, but maybe not.  But then, as Dr. Seuss put it so brilliantly in Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?, "The time had come, so Marvin went." The time had come and so I went, or came, depending on how you look at it. I got to Korea.  

One description of beginning language learners is that they will have trouble understanding and will make mistakes in speaking. This is certainly what is happening to me as I walk around Itaewon, the Seoul neighborhood where I am staying. People are on the kind side -- put it this way, it's not like trying to speak badly accented French in Paris. One thing about my beginner level of proficiency is that I can tackle signs, and there are lots of them. Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is, by now, nearly as invisible to me as the Latin alphabet. I rarely know what the words mean, but I can say them, at least quietly to myself. And I love the way the signs are written. Korean is composed in syllables, and signs play with syllables in an infinite variety of ways. Having only recently come to appreciate the syllable, I am delighted by this, like a baby with a mobile. 

Which brings me to this encouraging sign I saw on a walk around the neighborhood, happily in English -- "No worries, Br*. It will be fine. D*. Wait. Trust."  

K-drama: From the Hermitage to the Hermit Country

Well, while I have not been in a hermitage for the past 3 years, I have not been jetting around the way I used to. And Korea is not the "Hermit Country" anymore, by any means. In fact, on the street where I'll be staying are all kinds of businesses representing the whole world, including a Converse store, Italian Optical, and Global Dentist. But in leaving one place and going to another, I do have a bit of uprooting and reconnecting to do. My spiritual director said that monks who move from one monastery to another have a "transfer of vows." One of the reasons travel is so important is that visiting another place creates connection -- new vows of concern -- with that place. We can read this in Michael Kimmelman's beautiful piece on the earthquake in Turkey, which has killed more than 40,000 at this point. He noted, 

You may rightly ask about the logic of rebuilding time and again in these risky places. The notion comes up around a different threat: climate change. Scientists predict large-scale migrations in the coming years from zones where rising seas, floods, droughts and extreme weather will make life increasingly difficult or impossible. Already, climate change has displaced millions of people around the world.

But logic is not the point.

Cities are only nominally bricks and mortar, after all. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a photograph — collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community. 

Which is to say that I am loosening my connection to my daily life here in New Jersey and settling in Seoul for three months, God willing and the creek don't rise. It will be a lot the same -- morning coffee and reading the Times. But it will also be different in ways that I don't even know yet but am curious to learn. In the heart of catastrophe, we learn how much place means to us, and teaches us both how precious home is and how deeply meaningful it is go to another place and get to meet it as well. At Girl Scout camp, we sang the song, "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other's gold."

Sorrow in Seoul

This evening I took my "constitutional" -- my 30 minute walk around the neighborhood -- at around 5 pm, when hordes of kids were out, going from house to house in the rituals of Halloween. I was reminded of my love for a neighbor who gave us little bags of candy. The serenity of a New Jersey early evening, dressed as in your Hogwart's uniform, with a wand in your hand, or strange skeleton features drawn on your face, the leaves crunching, the piles of candy, the neighbors recreating this event from the memories of our own joy at so much sugar! A friend in France, incensed that Halloween was infiltrating their country, berated the commercialism of the holiday. I tried to explain, but she just got madder and madder. "What is good about a holiday on which children are given too much candy?" 

I tried to explain about the satisfaction to the human spirit of this strange festival -- deciding what to be, where to go, how to say "Trick or treat." Halloween is the ultimate city festival, a triumph of the collective imagination and an expression -- as all events are -- of the fears and joys that are on our minds, like the explosion of fake tombstones this year, which must be because we are in collective mourning for more than a million Americans lost to Covid. 

It is against this backdrop of our custom, which has been embraced by Seoulites, and especially this year, after two years without this moment of the human spirit, that the profound tragedy hit: More than 150 dead, and an equal number injured. And thousands more who were there, some of whom will be haunted by their own role in the tragedy: the ones who yelled "Push" and the ones who stepped on others. Like Lady MacBeth, they will be wiping the death off to no avail.  

Korea is a country is with suspicions of mental health treatments -- they are only coming to have and use them. Yet they have other resources. The national government immediately declared a week of mourning and lowered all the flags to half mast, erected public mourning sites, with the traditional white carnations, opened a vast investigation into what happened so that they might prevent it. 

While people might not think of it as a resource, K-drama is surely playing a part in this moment. The show, Just between Lovers/Rain or Shine, is concerned with the torment experienced by people in the aftermath of a building collapse -- not the same dynamics as the crush of a crowd, but nonetheless carefully showing the suffering. To be trauma-informed as a society is not a small matter at a time like this. The tormented souls who scream in their sleep or can't concentrate at work will be understood by their family, co-workers and society. People may not know the way out of pain, but they will know that there is pain. 

This is fundamental because it prevents all the harms of secondary traumatization when people are told that their pain is not real or not important. I don't think that Korean society will fall into that trap, because they have been so clearly and consistently shown the harms of trauma through their nightly television programs. 

But in walking my neighborhood -- which is not a mile from where I grew up -- what was on my mind tonight were all the Halloweens of my childhood when I roamed for candy, crunching Snickers bars and fall leaves. These events that happen year after year all live in our bodies. A few weeks ago, seemingly out of the blue, I started to remember how the shaking of the building I was in during the 1989 World Series Earthquake felt. A few days later, Bob Fullilove, who was also there, reminded me that it was the anniversary of that event. And so next year, when Halloween comes, this will be on the minds and in the bodies of Koreans, not with the joy that I have, but with horror and grief. 

For the first anniversary after 9/11, our NYC RECOVERS project created a month of observances -- mainly to keep us from freaking out about the single horrible day. We called it "September Wellness" and people created all kinds of events that felt right, from walking labyrinths to free yoga lessons. From that experience we were all convinced that collective recovery held promise for keeping the population well through very difficult times. It is why we proposed it to so many colleagues as we went through the fear and loneliness of Covid.  

Sending love to Korea, that they be healed and that Halloween be healed for them, and that it grow into the kind of day of the human spirit that we have enjoyed for so many decades.  

The Potter's Wheel

Michael Lally helped me so much with the Main Street project, particularly by having lunch with me on the Main Street in Maplewood, NJ. His comments were always very Zen, words to provoke thought. Zen pushes us in outward spirals that are not "answers" -- as I like to think of answers (2 aspirin for a headache and call me in the morning) -- but openings for a deeper engagement with the world as it is. I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon with him, talking about this and that, including my new project on the Tao of K-drama. We talked a lot about the emotions associated with the trip to Korea I'm planning for the spring semester: the long time away from home, the fear of loneliness, the vagueness of my task. As the afternoon wore on, he said, "I have a Zen story for you." 

This is what he told me:

There was a period when Korea was shutoff from Japan. During that time, the Japanese were not able to access a particular kind of Korean pottery that they prized. In the absence of trade with Korea, they tried to duplicate the work. They set up an academy that worked on the problem but could not achieve the special effects that were so admired. When relations were reestablished, the academy sent a delegation to Korea to visit with the makers of this special pottery. They learned that, when the potters there made a wheel, they did not measure, they made it by eyeballing. None of them were even.

My heart leapt up -- to riff on Gerard Manley Hopkins: My heart in hiding Stirred for a story, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!  

     

K-drama: Is the Tao (of K-drama) inherently subversive?

My mentor, Rod Wallace, always reminds me that Confucius said to strip the peasants' of their wealth every ten years to prevent them for gaining too much power. He compares this to the policies of the US government that had displaced poor populations on average every ten years. We called this process "serial forced displacement." 

Confucius, it is said, met Lao-Tzu, who is credited with being the founder of Taoism. The two reflect, I think, a fairly deep contradiction between religions that authorize empire and those that strive for inclusion and balance. Buddhism was the dominant religion of Korea, but Confucianism pushed it aside, and became the justification for further class and gender oppression. For example, women lost many of their rights, such as the right to own land. Such traditions have lost some, but not all, of their power. The restoration of balance -- in opposition to Confucianism -- calls for new philosophies. Those, in turn, take from the older religious ideas, including shamanism, Taoism and Buddhism.  

K-drama is fascinated by this trope in the culture. Romance is a Bonus Book, for example, examines the profound difficulties of a woman trying to reenter the workforce after staying home with her child. Misaeng deals with the struggles of young man trying to enter the business world without formal education. Itaewon Class deals with a young man who, having spent time in prison, is working to get on his feet and avenge the death of his father. He is highly stigmatized for having been convicted of a crime. He is joined by others who are ostracized by Korean society, including a transwoman and an African man. Their ultimate triumph is built on their ability to include others. 

The concept of the Tao is that everything -- everything in the world -- is included and in relationship. The Itaewon five-some represent the force of inclusion in the face of the exclusions of the larger society. We could interpret the success of the group as a modest shift -- what they want is to become capitalists like the dominant group in society. 

But some ideas are so powerful that they actually shift the whole world. One example is the idea of "inequality." This idea was developed and promulgated by the ruling oligarchy of the southern colonies -- Virginia, South Carolina, etc -- to justify the institution of slavery. It was inserted into every system of the society. Bishop Rev William Barber has described this as the "seven sins of the United States." This "inequality" has been countered by the concept of "equality," with some success. More recently the concepts of diversity and inclusion -- which are the heart of the Tao -- have been put forward. 

What happens when an idea like "inclusion" starts to work in a society in a time like this? As the world is in deep crisis because of our abuse of the ecosystem, we are forced to rethink our relationship to the All, and certainly to the sentient beings. Once we start to ask about sentience -- as an example -- the ground shifts under our feet. All people -- including ex-convicts, orphans, Africans and transwomen and men are sentient -- of course. But whales and dolphins are also sentient, and so are dogs and cats. Trees, it seems, communicate via networks of fungi, so that the whole system of the forest is perhaps a sentient being. There is no stopping an idea whose time has come, and this is the moment in which "inclusion" is moving into that space. 

 

T-drama: Starring Teo and Taiwan

Sometimes we are watching a show and get to meet a really special person -- in this case, watching A Thousand Goodnights and meeting Nicholas Teo. Teo is a Malaysian Chinese actor and singer who works in Taiwan. He stars in the 2019 Taiwan series, and sang on the soundtrack. The show, despite its many strengths, is confused and confusing. Teo stands at its center, holding it together with his spirit. The character he is playing is able to take in advice on his own unhappy family situation, at the same time as he is able to ferret out the problems in other's lives and help them move on. His gentle persistence in supporting others is heartening. It is in his very special smile and careful gestures that he communicates his faith in relationship. He holds up values of love and independence. He is constantly fending off his mother's desires for his life. At one point, he says very firmly, "Will you stop using emotional blackmail?" He chips away at her impossible position, which liberates them both. In addition to the warmth of his acting, I love the song he sings, Holy Tree. 

One critic said that the confusion of the show could best be understood by acknowledging that the show is really a Valentine to Taiwan. It uses the wonderful aerial photography of Chi Po-lin, whose 2013 film, Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, won many awards. It addressed the environmental crisis of the world, as well as the beauty of Taiwan. The shots are so breathtaking and charming that I could not help but wish to visit Taiwan.  At a fraught time in the history of the island, it is good to get to know the people and the place in contention.