In preparation of a chapter I've been working on, I found this old school paper, written all the way back in fall 2003 for a course on "self-awareness." It's Chinese moon festival. Who would have guessed what a beautiful moon we are getting in New York. Looking back, despite everything, life is full of God's grace.
The Depths
He rises from the depths. I sense his
coming, sometimes not wanting him,
sometimes welcoming him as a beloved
friend. He has a voice different from
mine: As free but with more colors.
I do not know his name but I know his
heart. I know his mind. His words are like
clear water: pure and untransformable. He
knows what I don't and speaks words which
elude my most labored hopes. I can feel his
truth, tangible, and thick yet light as feathered
gold. It is not my truth but it uses my voice.
He sees my eyes, knows their wonder, their
curiosity, even amusement about the mystery
of our friendship. I have never asked his name.
I let him speak. He is my teacher, my friend.
He rises from the depths, always with a
smile, a laugh, a laugh I love to hear.
He looks at life with unrestrained joy,
knowing no sadness. He has never seen
pain of any kind. He is the sunshine, the
light, the brightness that will never dim.
He rises from the depths, always by
surprise. He cries his own tears, never
seeking solace. He bears life's hurts,
its despair. He feels the pain of humanity,
being its child. He feels with the wounded
and the confused. He walks beside the lost,
being himself lost. He is unafraid of constant
birth and change.
He rises from the depths. He has no home.
He lives at the edge of civilization, where the
fluid is molded into the form, where the water
becomes the ice. He sees the idea become
the doctrine, but keeps silent, knowing the
destiny of confused mind. His life is simple:
a crust of bread, a favored dream, a gadget
to play with. With empty pockets and no
gold chains for yoke, he travels lightly--a
wanderer blown by the winds of change,
of time …[1]
I fell in love with this little poem instantly upon my first encounter, in a relatively uneventful evening of late September. Due to my inner turmoil at that time, I couldn’t immediately identify what struck me most: the rhythm, the distance, or the infinite male imagery. It seemed a mixture of pain and lightness that lulled me into a world of strange, intoxicating solitude. The recurrence of beginning sentence, he rises from the depths, creates a rich substance of smoothness and profundity. Depths, used as a plural, resounding another worddeath, denies any suggestion of threat or gloominess, transforming into a sweet, welcoming dwelling where meanings continually unfolds.
Who is he, the lofty, enigmatic figure? Several familiar faces emerged simultaneously to my mind. The first one was my father who was, in Bowlby’s term, my ‘secure base’ and meant almost everything in my childhood. Who was he, then? I used to think he was God, and it turned out he wasn't. Instead, he died untimely at the peak of his life. Nobody really understood how he had felt for the following series of agonies: loss of his father at seven; loss of his mother upon his commencement, after several years of her bedridden illness; his college sweetheart, whom he had prepared to marry for years; his first baby child; and finally, his freedom and his life. In retrospect, my father was remembered as a man of extraordinary sense of humor, of perspective, of principle and self-denial. Like all Chinese fathers (ominous words!), my father paid a terrible price for that respected title. By experiencing with him, especially his perpetual absence from my life, I came to understand in an intimate way how our culture has been working.
The next image that popped up automatically was my paternal grandfather. One of the anecdotes I often heard about him was how he was traveling around China single-handedly during the Japanese invasion and the liberation wars. An unusually tall and strong figure, he had never been intimidated by anything in his life. So furious about the ‘useless’ pediatricians whom he believed failed to save his two baby sons at an age ‘too young to believe’, he turned himself eventually into a doctor best ever in China’s modern medical history. Upon his mythical death, he had left volumes and volumes of original writings on eclectic acupuncture and medicine.
I could never penetrate my obsession about these two men. Death in its typical way has made it entirely impossible for me to resolve the mystery of them. And I’m doomed to pursue such an impossible cause. Many times I would sit alone daydream a meeting with my father, or my grandfather, or a meeting between the two. My efforts were not completely futile. I have partially come to the root of my very being, my personality, propensities, even some of my most undetectable neurotic, antisocial tendencies. The father and son are now securely anchored in my blood. And I carry them inside me wherever I go, knowing that I shall always be proud and secure, that there is something that has made me uniquely different from all the rest of the humanity.
A striking similarity I had recognized about my heroes is that they are highly curious human beings. Curiosity, in my eyes, is similar to spontaneity. It is prized as a virtue of some highest level. Psychoanalytically it implies that the person has achieved a considerable amount of integration in his personality. He has come to terms with his inner conflicts. To be able to do that, it is assumed, he has to be sufficiently loved and taken cared of, at least in certain critical time of his development, that he can free himself from being constantly on guard to protect himself. He reaches his hand to the outer world. He is free-spirited, supple-minded, unbiased, and undefensive. And his lack of defensiveness in turn allows him less subjection to deception and more freedom, that he is able to experience life in his deep and original way. To use Maslow’s term, he is a human who self-actualizes.
I have noticed with great interest this rare characteristic manifest itself in some adults, my professors, pastors, friends. I have to admit that it’s not this quality that I treasure most. It’s the quality of a relationship it ultimately opens up to, signifies, the relationship I call absolute, or perfect, not one dependent on the other but I and Thou, two infinite interdependent entities (Buber). My relationship with my father, grandfather, with other fellow humans, with the poem, the world, echoes what I have been trying to grasp, the i-thou relationship.
I found the idea i-thou extremely inspiring. It originally came from Martin Buber, a remarkable Jewish philosopher. In Buber’s seminal work, there are two ‘primary words’ in our vocabulary: i-it and i-thou, which are also two basic, opposing ways of dealing with the world.
The experience of i-it is the mode of which we are all familiar. It is a utilitarian, pragmatic way of engaging the world. ‘It’ is an object, a point in time and space, e.g. a tree, a person, or a feeling. ‘It’ is moving, changing, dynamic, transient, something that can be observed, studied, manipulated, or even destroyed. The interacting process is defined as ‘experience’. The observer ‘i’ is basically unmoved, unsympathetic and separated from the observed it.
The encounter of i-thou is the opposite. It's the real meeting of ‘the way i am’ and ‘the way thou are’, in which we actively engage thou with our whole being. We ‘look at’ thou (not ‘observe’ thou), immerse in it, giving our full attention, to figure thou out, no preconditions, no expectations. Thou is not singled out as merely a point in universe but the universe itself and there is nothing else to distract us.
“The unified i and the boundless thou”, says Buber, is the full mutuality between two equal partners. It’s two meeting without manipulating or making use of the other, treating the other as an object, an it.
I and Thou requires distance. An appropriate level of distance is crucial because only with distance one realizes oneself as the unique, autonomous being as well as the other. The distance cannot be too far (we lose sight of the self), or too close (an infusion, in which we over-involve the self). It has to be a subject-to-subject, ‘inter-subjective’ relationship.
It also demands ‘concentration of the soul’. Each enters the relationship focusing on the other, to be fully present, available, to ‘be there’ for the other.
The universal i-thou relationship includes and encompasses all other relationships and defines how we relate to each other, to really ‘meet’ each other. It is against such a relationship all the rest of the relationships in the world have to be examined, interpreted or reinterpreted, and reconciled.
The difference of the two modes of relationship is best illustrated in a case of romantic love. When we 'fall in love', we actually mean that we are willing to open and risk our self and fall 'into' a love relationship with our whole being, to sacrifice our self, to win our ‘other half’. It's an i-thou moment, a genuine, miraculous encounter between two lovers, in which one thoroughly realizes that one differs from the other person not just in degree but in kind, it’s 'one of a kind', an absolute unique existence. This new flash of awareness penetrates our mind, impinges upon us, lightening and transforming our life in a permanent way. And the consequence cannot be erased or cancelled by merely 'falling out of love', when i-thou deteriorates to i-it, the perfect, inseparable thou dissolves into a regular, deplorable it.
Contrary to the common belief, Buber warns us “love is not a feeling”, if we trace the supreme, ontological end of the word. Love involves strong feelings but it is not, and should not to be reduced to a feeling. A feeling is something one has, an object. A feeling takes place inside the isolated self. But one 'dwells in love', surrounded by it. Love takes placebetween i and thou, in the fleeting, exclusive i-thou world. I and Thou can only be connected through love.
This kind of love which I would only attribute to God is something too vast, and too intimate to put into word. It may not even be close to say that it is something like love of a man to a woman (already such a dangerous analogy). Nevertheless, it is the most sacrificial, enduring force. It lies in the deepest of our dreams, sought, consciously or unconsciously, by all of us, but first and foremost, by God Himself. It is also the very thing that is often being ignored, misinterpreted, criticized, just like many other great things, great art and great literature of history.
The curious child is a child in love. He travels through his ordeals, going across the infinitei’s and thou’s feeling overjoyed, but unsatisfied. Love comes back and forth along its parallel lines like a bird. ‘There’s something missing.’ And he prepares himself for that great moment when he will unravel the mystery. Finally he comes to the door, fact to face with the eternal Thou. There he is overcome.
God is the eternal Thou, the archetypal, everlasting, fulfilling presence of love. And He loves us all.
REFERENCES
[1]. The Poetry Shack, http://members.aol.com/VSpen67816/index2.html
Lewis, C.S. [2001] The Problem of Pain, HarperCollins
Buber, M. [1970] I And Thou, Free Press
