I must be a cosmologist, since I know I'm not anything else. I was, apparently, born this way. I might as well be an alien from another planet.
Let's say that it's true that life is but a blink in the cosmic scheme of things. That the time frame for Earth's survival is not significantly different from the life span which ends with anthropogenic destruction. That life of the type that we call humanity is always brutish and brief throughout everywhere and everything and across all time, once time is part of the equation.
So what? I ask you. So what? Says Trump about Pence's safety.
Time was never part of any equation until we started to count it. Which was so recent as not really to even matter. Coterminous with humanity? Whatever.
So I was invited to attend the New York Conference on Asian Studies, by a friend who took the job directing the Confucius Institute which I, cloddishly, refused at the last minute after it was offered to me. I'd applied previously when the Institute was first established, and was told that I was number two among the choices. At that time, the University was paying a living wage. The second time, they no longer were, and I'd very lately received an offer from a different college which did pay a living wage and which involved travel to China.
So, apart from being a cosmologist, I already felt out of place as an interloper to a place I'd turned my back on.
There was quite a range of panels, among which I chose at random. The first regarded 20th Century Chinese history. Mostly young scholars presented on seemingly minute topics ranging through China's shattering cosmos, and especially its new triumphal revolution through the twentieth century.
The first paper dealt with the history of emotion, as seen through the lens of the sudden funeral for the last empress dowager, Longyu. I learned that study of the history of emotion is a trending topic in academia. Who knew? As you know, dear reader, emotion is a topic of cosmic significance to me. The presenter had my fullest attention.
The second presenter, likely an advisee of my old friend at Ohio State with whom I began my own study of Chinese language at this self-same university, was talking about the advent of a publication industry in Shanghai, and in particular the new brand of geographic knowledge being promulgated. China had a new sense of self.
Already, the moderator had remarked about the resonances between presentation one and presentation two as regards China's identity as a nation.
Then there was a paper about the evolution of fire protection systems in Guangzhou, and how civil government was taking over what had been local privately organized systems. Suddenly, there was a distribution of fire-houses developed from on high, and now strangely disjointed from actual needs on the ground. It wasn't easy to trust government. To let go of local responsibility. To see the privileged districts get more privilege.
The final paper regarded photography, and took us right up toward the present regarding a photo craze driven by cameras as an early blush of consumerism, and more recently by ubiquitous smartphones (not dealt with explicitly in this paper yet).
I saw my very first selfie stick in Shanghai when I returned for my first time since celebrating my 30th (??) birthday at the Peace Hotel, where I and my socially prominent charges were regaled by the old men rehabilitated in their jazz band, for foreign tourists like us. We were lucky to catch the first private taxi in China, or we might not have made it back to our guest house.
It was the general public which inaugurated a photographic profession, also absorbed into state apparatus for the sake of a new kind of socialist realism. Authenticity was suddenly at stake.
Now I almost didn't go to the conference, even though it was held almost literally next door to where I live. I haven't been sleeping well, and didn't feel well, but my interest won out over my torpor. My mind was also freed to roam
Perhaps even more than the moderator, I was struck by how each paper was about the same thing. A transformation of the Chinese collective psyche. I wanted to raise my hand and make a comment about how these twentieth century changes overturned the givens of the Chinese cosmology I'd learned as a student of classical Chinese poetry. Poetics is, after all, a kind of cosmology. No poet, I am yet a student of poetics; of making.
I am loathe to remake received forms, and so I am a second rate maker. I repair and rebuild old boats old houses, and I only know how to read old poetry. I interpret rather than create. I am not so very certain of the implicit goodness of so-called "progress."
Despite their embeddedness in elitist social structures, surrounded by a sea of immiserated hoi polloi, I still honor the ancient masters, East and West. Church or state, Martha, Church or state?
I like boats that were made by craftsmen, and not those drafted on a table. But alas, I am priced out. And I cannot be a craftsman and a cosmologist both.
Anyhow, listening as I was, listlessly and anonymously, the presentations were all one. I wondered to what extent these young presenters had present in their own consciousness how "heart" in China includes both emotive and cognitive centers in one word. How the imperial exam stressed knowledge of poetry as a test of sorts regarding the trueness of the examinee's heart.
How the term for geography mirrors the term of the ordering of the heavens, and how man has a role in the center, at the heart, on Earth, to bring heaven's order down to chaotic Earth. Heaven's pattern is given the Name of literature. Mindless and without heart though it is when bereft of humans.
How emotions tendered toward the emperor, or his proxy, often took on romantic fronts, where subversion could be coyly cloaked.
And Geography is a sort of knowledge necessary to empire, to exploration, to conquest. But for China the incursions were made explicit, and the empire could be envisioned as a static state with shadings where there was trouble on the frontier.
Art was never representative in China, the painter replicating with brush strokes - the same brush strokes used in writing - replicating the qi the anima the essence of the living thing he painted. And so what would photography mean? The composition of representative oil painting which had some fame was replicated in a photo still-life, itself containing a photo and which was somehow derided for the fraud of attribution's explicit lack?
I had no way to make my cosmic observations, which would be in praise of the scope of the panel. I am not part of academic discourse. I supposed that there must be a kind of taboo against sophomoric echoing of grander patterns than those which could rightly be comprehended by young minds.
To be a cosmologist is to be a perpetual sophomore, which is a pretty fine description of me.
And yet there is truth which cannot be spoken, which cannot be trued by words, because it is not a part of the orthodox which means ordering of knowledge that must prevail for society even to exist.
But our earth, the geographic whole, is changing in ways for more consequential and chaotic and traumatic than even China's changes across the twentieth century. We've seen the Earth from space. Photographically real.
And yet our cosmology remains locked into the ancient forms of religion, of materialism, or certainty that emotion is entirely separate from mind. That the cosmos is bereft except for the chance occurrence of life here. Or there. Or neither.
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