So Bao travelled, and talked, and wrote, and travelled again. For most of his career he worked for the League's Agency for Harmony with Nature, trying for several years to coordinate efforts in the Old World and the New to keep some of the greater mammals alive; many of them were going extinct, and without action they would lose most of them, in an anthropogenic extinction event to rival even the global crashes now being found in the fossil record.
He came back from these diplomatic missions to Pyinkayaing, after travelling in the big new airships that were a combination of blimp and flyer, hovercraft and catamaran, skating over the water or in the air depending on weather conditions and freight loads. He looked down on the world from his apartment, and saw the human relationship to nature drawn in the calligraphy of the water taxis' wakes, the airships' contrails, the great canyons formed by the city's skyscrapers. This was his world, changing every year; and when he visited Beijing and tried to remember his youth, or went to Kwinana in Aozhou, to see his son Zhao and family there, or when he tried to remember Pan Xichun – even when he visited Fangzhang once, the actual site of those years – he could scarcely call them to mind. Or, to be more precise – for he could remember a great many things that had happened – it was the feeling for these things that was gone away, leached out by the years. They if they had happened to someone else. As if they had been were as if previous incarnations.
It was someone else in the League offices who thought to invite Zhu Isao himself to Pyinkayaing, and teach a set of classes to the League workers and anyone else who cared to attend. Bao was surprised when he saw this notice; he had assumed that somewhere along the way Zhu must have died, it had been so long since they had all changed China together; and Zhu had been ancient then. But that turned out to have been a youthful mistake on Bao's part; Zhu was about ninety now, he was informed, meaning he had been only about seventy years old at that time. Bao had to laugh at his youthful miscalculation, so characteristic of the young. He signed up for the course with great anticipation.
Zhu Isao turned out to be a sprightly white haired old man, small but no smaller than he had been all those years before, with a lively curious look in his eye. He shook Bao's hand when Bao went up before the introductory lecture, and smiled a slight but friendly smile: 'I remember you,' he said. 'One of Kung Jianguo's officers, isn't that right?' And Bao gripped his hand hard, ducking his head in assent. He sat down feeling warm. The old man still walked with the ghost of a limp from that terrible day. But he had been happy to see Bao.
In his first lecture he outlined his plan for the course, which he hoped would be a series of conversations on history, discussing how it was constructed, and what it meant, and how they might use it to help them plot their course forwards through the next difficult decades, 'when we have to learn at last how to inhabit the Earth'.
Bao kept notes as he listened to the old man, tapping at his little hand lectern, as did many others in the class. Zhu explained that he hoped first to describe and discuss the various theories of history that had been proposed through the centuries, and then to analyse those theories, not only by testing them in the description of actual events, 'difficult since events as such are remembered for how well they prop up the various theories', but also for how the theories themselves were structured, and what sort of futures they implied, 'this being their chief use to us. I take it that what matters in a history is what there is in it we can put to use.'
So, over the next few months a pattern was set, and every third day the group would meet in a room high in one of the League buildings overlooking the Irrawaddy: a few score diplomats, local students, and younger historians from everywhere, many of whom had come to Pyinkayaing specifically for this class. All sat and listened to Zhu talk, and though Zhu kept encouraging them to enter the discussion and make of it a large conversation, they were mostly content to listen to him think aloud, only egging him on with their questions. 'Well, but I am here to listen too,' he would object, and then, when pressed to continue, would relent. 'I must be like Pao Ssu, I suppose, who used to say "I am a good listener, I listen by talking".'
So they made their way through discussions of the four civilizations theory, made famous by al Katalan; and al Lanzhou's collision of cultures theory, of progress by conflict ('clearly accurate in some sense, as there has been much conflict and much progress'); the somewhat similar conjunction theories, by which unnoticed conjunctions of developments, often in unrelated fields of endeavour, had great consequences. Zhu's many examples of this included one he presented with a small smile: the introduction of coffee and printing presses at around the same time in caliphate Iran, causing a great outpouring of literature. They discussed the theory of the eternal return, which combined Hindu cosmologies with the latest in physics to suggest that the universe was so vast and ancient that everything possible had not only happened, but had happened an infinite number of times ('limited usefulness to that one, except to explain the feeling you get that things have happened before'); and the other cyclical theories, often based on the cycle of the seasons, or the life of the body.
Then he mentioned 'dharma history' or 'Burmese history', meaning any history that believed there was progress towards some goal making itself manifest in the world, or in plans for the future; also 'Bodhisattva history', which suggested that there were enlightened cultures that had sprung ahead somehow, and then gone back to the rest and worked to bring them forwards – early China, Travancore, the Hodenosaunee, the Japanese diaspora, Iran – all these cultures had been proposed as possible examples of this pattern, 'though it seems to be a matter of individual or cultural judgment, which is less than useful to historians seeking a global pattern. Although it is a weak criticism to call them tautological, for the truth is every theory is tautological. Our reality itself is a tautology.'
Someone brought up the old question of whether the 'great man' or mass movements' were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. 'We are all great men, yes?'
'Maybe you are,' muttered the person sitting next to Bao.
What has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is.
'Also, this formulation "the great man" of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling micro parasites and macro parasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?'
He smiled at this, and went on to discuss the struggle against the Four Great Inequalities, and other concepts grown out of the work of Kang and al Lanzhou.
After that, Zhu took a few sessions to describe various 'phase change moments' in global history that he thought significant – the Japanese diaspora, the independence of the Hodenosaunee, the shift of trade from land to sea, the Samarqand Flowering, and so forth. He also spent quite a few sessions discussing the latest movement among historians and social scientists, which he called 'animal history', the study of humanity in biological terms, so that it became not a matter of religions and philosophies, but more a study of primates struggling for food and territory.
It was many weeks into the course when he said, 'Now we are ready to come to what interests me extremely these days, which is not history's content, but its form.
'For we see immediately that what we call history has at least two meanings to it, first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in
time – and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.
'These stories are of different kinds, of course, and people like Rabindra and Scholar White have categorized them. First come eyewitness accounts, and chronicles of events made soon after things happened, also documents and records – these are history as wheat still in the field, as yet unharvested or baked, thus given beginnings or ends, or causes. Only later come these baked histories, that attempt to coordinate and reconcile source materials, that not only describe but explain.
'Later still come the works that eat and digest these baked accounts, and attempt to reveal what they are doing, what their relationship to reality is, how we use them, that kind of thing – philosophies of history, epistemologies, what have you. Many digestions use methods pioneered by Ibrahim al Lanzhou, even when they denounce his results. Certainly there is great sustenance in going back to al Lanzhou's texts and seeing what he had to say. In one useful passage, for instance, he points out that we can differentiate between explicit arguments, and more deeply hidden unconscious ideological biases. These latter can be teased out by identifying the mode of emplotment chosen to tell the tale. The emplotment scheme al Lanzhou used comes from Rabindra's typology of story types, a rather simplistic scheme, but fortunately, as al Lanzhou pointed out, historians are often fairly naive storytellers, and use one or another of Rabindra's basic types of emplotment rather schematically, compared to the great novelists like Cao Xueqin or Murasaki, who constantly mix them. Thus a history like Than Oo's is what some call "Burmese history", rather literally in this case, but that I would prefer to call "dharma history", being a romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being. It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana successfully achieved. Thus Burmese history, or Shambala tales, or any teleological history that asserts we are all progressing in some way, are dharma histories.
'The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to the Five Great Pessimisms, or the nihilism of Shu Shen, or the antidharma of Buddha's rival Purana Kassapa, people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born.
'These two modes of emplotment represent end point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. It might be thought these then represent the only two possible modes, but inside these extremes Rabindra identified two other modes of emplotment, which he called tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers, and Rabindra suggested they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan – this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring.
'Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. Scholar White said of them, they tell the story of humanity face to face with reality itself, therefore facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, there is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be.'
At this point in his lecture Zhu Isao paused, and looked around the room until he had located Bao, and nodded at him; and though it seemed they had only been speaking of abstract things, of the shapes stories took, Bao felt his heart clench within him.
Zhu proceeded: 'Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists' yin yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with a dark dot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness.
'The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn't take up the challenge, it isn't life speaking.
'But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will.
'This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy.' Zhu stopped, held up his hands, perplexed. 'Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.'
Zhu Isao's own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature. He was always inviting Bao and some others from the class, including the League's Minister for Health of the Natural World, to the rooms provided for him during his stay, and these small gatherings were sparked by his laughter and curiosity about things. Even his research amused him. He had had a great many books shipped down from Beijing, so that every room of his apartment was filled like a warehouse. Because of his growing conviction that history should be the story of everyone who had ever lived, he was now studying anthologies of biography as a genre, and he had many examples of the form in his apartment. This explained the tremendous number of volumes standing everywhere, in tall unsteady stacks. Zhu picked up one huge tome, almost too heavy for him to lift: 'This is a first volume,' he said with a grin, 'but I've never found the rest of the series. A book like this is only the antechamber to an entire unwritten library.'
The collection of lives genre seemed to have begun, he said as he tapped the piles affectionately, in religious literatures: collections of the lives of Christian saints and Islamic martyrs, also Buddhist texts that described lives through long sequences of reincarnations, a speculative exercise that Zhu clearly enjoyed very much: 'Dharma history at its purest, a kind of proto politics. Plus they can be so funny. You see a literalist like Dhu Hsien trying to match up his subjects' death and birth dates exactly, so that he creates strings of prominent historical actors through several reincarnations, asserting that he can tell they have always been one soul by what they do, but the difficulties of getting the dates to match up cause him in the end to select some odd additions to his sequences to make them all match life to life. Finally he has to theorize a "work hard then relax" pattern in these immortals, to justify those who alternate lives as geniuses and generals with careers as minor portrait artists or cobblers. But the dates always match up!' Zhu grinned delightedly.
He tapped other tall piles that were examples of the genre he was studying: Ganghadara's. 'Forty six Transmigrations', the Tibetan text 'Twelve Manifestations of Padmasambhava', the guru who established Buddhism in Tibet; also the 'Biography of the Gyatso Rimpoche, Lives One Through Nineteen', which brought the Dalai Lama up to the present; Bao had once met this man, and had not realized then that his full biography would take up so many volumes.
Zhu Isao also had in his apartment copies of Plutarch's 'Lives'
, and Liu Xiang's 'Biographies of Exemplary Women', from about the same time as the Plutarch; but he admitted that he was finding these texts not as interesting as the reincarnation chronicles, which in certain cases spent as much time on their subjects' time in the bardo and the other five lokas as they did on their time as humans. He also liked the 'Autobiography of the Wandering Jew', and the 'Testaments of the Trivicurn jati', and a beautiful volume, 'Two Hundred and Fifty-three Travellers', as well as a scurrilous looking collection, possibly pornographic, called 'Tantric Thief Across Five Centuries'. All of these Zhu described to his visitors with great enthusiasm. They seemed to him to hold some kind of key to the human story, assuming there could be any such thing: history as a simple accumulation of lives. 'After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 69
