I’m starting a new project that will be part of this blog for the foreseeable future, to narrate and interpret my favorite chapter of a book that has fascinated me for the past year or so. There are a number of different threads of interest that this project ties together.
First and foremost, when I was a graduate student, I edited and co-produced a podcast for the journal American Anthropologist. During that time, I learned the nuts and bolts of DIY podcasting, from recording tape, to sound mixing, editing, montaging, publishing, promotion, and so on. As part of that learning process, I came up with numerous experimental concepts that ultimately did not become realized in that show, which—for a variety of practical reasons related to our technical and logistical limitations—became a fairly standard format interview talk-show. At any rate, one of the limits that many podcasters come up against early in the run of their shows is that popular hosting platforms constrain the amount of “air-time” that you can upload for free. In the case of SoundCloud, that threshold is 180 minutes. I always thought it would be fun to take this limit as a formal constraint, and to see what would be possible to conceptualize as a complete show with just three hours of content. I imagined an entire run of different podcast-experiments, on all sorts of topics, but I hadn’t found something I felt compelled to make. Until now.
The topic that has grabbed my attention and fired me up is the chapter of the Zhuangzi titled Dá shēng 達生 (variously translated as "Mastering Life,” “Understanding Life,” or “The Full Understanding of Life”). I first encountered the Zhuangzi—one of the foundational texts of Daoist philosophy—as part of my play of the Feelings Collector with flow in 2020, which planted the seed of an interest in Daoism. The literature on flow is (ahem) overflowing (pardon me) with references to the concept of wu wei (variously translated as “effortless action,” “non-doing,” “doing nothing,” “inaction,” or “not-forcing”). Insofar as wu wei is a psychological state, it is closely related to, partially overlaps with, but distinct from flow. I will certainly be writing more about this later, but for now, the important point is that on one of my Julia Cameron-inspired Artist’s Dates last year, I went to my local used bookstore and happened across a copy of Victor Mair’s masterful translation of the Zhuangzi, and off I went. I have since read quite a lot about early Daoism, but certain texts and passages have consistently held my attention. Dá shēng is one of them.
Dá shēng consists of several stories, all of which are concerned with the cultivation of wu wei and the effects that the attainment of wu wei can have on a life. The stories are largely but not exclusively skill narratives, featuring characters who have achieved high levels of inner cultivation, bringing them not only supreme skill but also long-lasting, satisfying lives. Famous among them are the story of Qing the bell-stand carver, the hunchback cicada carver, and the diver of Spinebridge Falls—all of whom accomplish astonishing feats that appear, at turns, divinely-inspired and absurd. Indeed, the stories may be interpreted as demonstrations of what is possible in the long-term if one develops the autotelic personality associated with the pursuit of flow activities. There are several other related stories throughout the Zhuangzi that to my mind are birds of a feather with the narratives presented in Chapter 19, which may get included in this project, such as Ding the Butcher and The Drunk on the Carriage. But for now, the coherence of the different verses (11 in the Mair translation, 14 in Legge) as a set is a good enough starting place.
So, the project is this: I plan to use my weekly blogging practice to develop scripts for this podcast. The episodes would involve minimally a reading of the text—the Legge translation of the chapter is approximately 4000 words, the Mair, slightly shorter. Even at a slow pace of 100 words per minute (most podcasts are in the 130-160 words per minute range), this is only 40 minutes of content. So, for each episode, I would plan to at least provide some interpretation of the text, drawing on my accumulating body of secondary sources. Assuming that I use the Mair translation (which is more literary, contemporary, and to my liking), with an introductory and concluding episode, this leaves me with 13 episodes and about half of my free air-time on SoundCloud.
So, to make it to the full three hours, other ideas I am kicking around include: finding someone to read the text in Chinese (whether preceding, succeeding, or interwoven with the English reading) and, perhaps most excitingly, to interview subject-matter experts to bring their perspectives to bear on each story. I find this latter prospect particularly exciting, because many of the scholars whose translations and works I have drawn upon in developing this interest are still alive and active! Moreover, there are a number of younger content-creators on YouTube and elsewhere who are also interested in Daoism that I would love to collaborate with.
I hope this project will be as fun to birth as it has been to conceive. For now, I will leave you with a few of my favorite illustrations of stories from the Zhuangzi—perhaps you will find them as enchanting as I have. Catching Cicadas is by Tsai Chih Chung and the Woodcarver by Andy Wales.
