Waiting for a Ride
“…it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night sky slips away,
not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky…”
— Gary Snyder, “Waiting for a Ride” from Danger on Peaks¹
Immense comfort with what might be considered uncertainty in the eye of a more fearful person in Snyder’s words: “…not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later…”
Snyder conveys a moment of atheism accompanied by a moment of agnosticism accompanied by a moment of transcendence — such flippant unconcern to pin down a clear decisiveness on the matter of the hereafter that is commonly unbearable even often to myself at times, and yet it seems such an attitude is utterly tenable.
There is no virtue in certainty over circumstances that can be neither proven nor disproven, which is to say nothing of the pretense of a deliberate option on such matters. Snyder disarms this apparent conflict with a nonchalance that makes me smile about these circumstances of existence.
In a lesser writer, these lines would have warranted of me a shoulder shrug at the display of apparent worried hesitation, but Snyder’s shoulder shrug is practiced and determined. It conveys a gravity that lacks gravity, and a lack of gravity that is gravity.
It seems that he has forgotten how to try, how to force into supposed categories what are category-less and intended only as signposts or waypoints.
As Bruce Lee advises by his musing on the nature of Tao:
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”
You will be broken if you crash when you would do well to flow and you would be thoroughly divided when you would do well to crash.
It seems a paradox to the western mind which is so needful of distinguishing between polarities as either logical or illogical. The western mind is possessed by the ideal of logical or not, right or wrong, either/or: an inheritance that is derived from a long and storied history mulling over the concept that there must be or, rather, that there is one true, all-powerful and perfect answer.
A problem with logic per se is that it supposes a closed system of influence, which is to say the algorithm of logic only functions according to the variables that are made available to to it.
Its common everyday user’s often unknowingly suppose there is a static and personally knowable range of applicability. But what we don’t suppose — given our assumptions based on a previous use of a particular application of logic — is that what was once right isn’t always right. A world that is ever-presently fluctuating, changing, expanding, retracting, cooling, heating, tending toward chaos, tending toward order is actually the case. That being said, however likely it is the case that what was once useful will again prove to be useful, does not also mean that a “likeliness” of circumstance will warrant perfect certainty in it.
There is a need to put the definitions of these words — obviously bred by the concept of change — into use. Nonetheless, the west has accounted for this, though it seems more of a distant footnote to our day to day lives than a way of understanding the implicit functioning of our circumstances in the changing present.
How easily we get lost in the day to day rigmarole that days, weeks, months, even years slip by until one day we wake up and realize that we have forgotten to live and that what worked for us at one time is now the primary cause of our suffering. And how often do we see this behavior in others who just will not let go of an old way of thinking that is no longer serving them?
In the west, this often conventionally footnoted answer to stasis and stagnation, however integral it may be to science, is the process of induction.
Induction in terms of logic means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “the inference of a general law from particular instances.” Though I would scarcely infer a law from it aside from the inevitability of change, itself, between polarities, which is a matter by which to make one’s way around.
Lao Tzu speaks of this footnoted answer as the answer itself. In his Tao Te Ching he writes:
“The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.”²
What seems a paradox or conflict between “polarities” — and here I am using quotes in an ironic sense — is more easily grasped as, again, signposts or waypoints by which to make one’s way around. As Stephen Mitchel translates Lao Tzu:
“True words seem paradoxical.”
The point it seems is that the truth lies among the possible answers, not in one.
Footnotes for further attribution:
- Gary Snyder’s poem “Waiting for a Ride” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47752/waiting-for-a-ride
- A translation of Lao Tzu that seemed to better grasp my purposes for this writing as quoted above can be found here: https://wedgeblade.net/gold_path/data/worc/10034103.htm#:~:text=Water%20gives%20life%20to%20the,go%20deep%20in%20the%20heart.
