“Every overseas Chinese is a warrior!”
China’s leaders, in 2020, writing to useful idiots and secret agents—call them prostitutes—who are physically living in Canada, but without love of Canada.
Hello reader,
Got beauty?
Leaving last week’s land of thought police, (Part One)
I go to (Part Two) seeing beauty, with Asia in the background.
I’m feeling contemplative.
Before me is a thing of beauty.
Here is traditional Chinese bookbinding, a method developed during the Ming dynasty. (1338-1644) Scarlet ribbons are stitched across the spine, the thick-stock pages folded in half with the printing on the outside only, pages with both nice calligraphy and print. The cover is black with gold lettering; yet not as stark as that sounds, being offset by a red plaque, with gold calligraphy, pasted into an indentation.
The volume, from the Amherst press, is The Art of War by Sun Zu. (Sunzi) I’ve long owned a paperback copy, in English. This new translation, 2011, is by James Trapp. Does the world need yet another translation of this 2,500 year old text? Actually, yes. I’ll explain below. For now, I’m just contemplating this piece, dipping into it, and thanking another James, one James Clavell.
Clavell, once a starving prisoner of war of the Japanese, is best known to the TV watching public for the mini series Shogun, of old Japan, featuring the handsome actor from the weekly TV series Doctor Kildare, Richard Chamberlain. A huge tome, Shogun is about as thick as a paperback can ever be, a best seller, a book that might especially appeal to fans of Star Trek or history, with its intricate fantastical depictions of a lone Englishman cast ashore, a stranger in a strange land: Castles, ninjas, even great public bathhouses—it’s all good.
I remember, in the 1970’s, lending the book to two brothers still living on our old homestead. When I returned I found my book battered and wilted, like it had been through a whirlwind. “What the heck happened?” I asked. “We both read it, twice.”
I never did return to Shogun, but I read Clavell’s Tai Pan (colonizing Hong Kong) and King Rat (P.O.W.s of the Japanese) twice each.
Remembering how the Chinese have a cradle-to-grave belief against democracy, and against the democracy of Taiwan… what I also have read twice—later as a little book, first as a Reader’s Digest article—is James Clavell’s grim and controversial The Children’s Story. It’s set down home in the USA. They called Clavell a communist for that one.
I dimly recall the Readers Digest people having to defend themselves in the next issue. They said the story of poor Johnny, who’s father had been taken away for re-education, was only to dramatize how easily children can be led, and not for any other purpose. This would have been during the good old Kennedy or Johnson years. (Wikipedia mistakenly says 1981)
For me, it’s nice to contemplate the beauty of Clavell’s idealism. Besides his best sellers, he also took time to write independently, to do what he thought was right.
As I see it, Clavell wanted to help inform his fellow citizens, realizing that many people know about only their own town and family, and maybe don’t care to know much more. In contrast, I remember when some of us, at least, cared about South Africa’s practice of apartheid, (apart hate) and we helped to stop it, with college students arguing over sanctions. Caring may not be the default, yet it readily follows after efforts by others who do care.
Clavell realized something: The average educated Chinese housewife knew The Art of War as well as she and her American counterpart both knew a work of English literature, but the American housewife, at the same time, had never heard of The Art of War, and she didn’t have any of its classic concepts as part of her vocabulary. Over here, no one did.
In the west, as best I can judge by the writings before-and-after World War II of Captain Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, even army officers did not read the book. Not even during the conflicts in French Indochina and Vietnam.
(Nor during the war in Malaysia, where the British would ultimately defeat the Chinese communist guerrillas, partly because the British cared enough to design their armoured cars to fit between rows of rubber trees, mostly because the Chinese insurgents were too chauvinist to convert the surrounding nonChinese to communism)
What the Europeans did read, unfortunately, was a famous book, On War, by Karl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian staff officer who encouraged “blood.”
Westerners, when I was a boy, would have thought I was crazy if, agreeing with Sun Tzu, I tried to say the highest form of generalship is to get the opposing army to surrender without any bloodshed.
It’s queer to contemplate how—I’m thinking of the US Civil War and the First World War— the westernmost powers might have avoided so many, many sorry casualties if only the husbands and wives, in the U.S. North and among the Allies, had chosen an “anaconda plan” (as one lonely Union general did in fact advise) of naval blockade and sanctions without fighting.
(Note: At the end of both the Civil War and WWI, both losing armies were starving—as were, come to think of it, the WWII Japanese armies in the Pacific. Out there, awful things happened. An imperial soldier was ordered to report to the cookhouse without his rice tin: He promptly deserted—he didn’t want to be cannibalized)
But about the only translation, in the west, was by a Jesuit priest long ago. And so matters remained, even when I was a boy.
Then something happened. Today there is a mainstream movie, starring Wesley Snipes, called Art of War, and the business section of a bookstore stocks Sun Zu’s classic as surely as it stocks books about samurai businessmen (‘swords’ and ‘rings’)… such books as would never have sold during my boyhood, by the way. Not back when “made in Japan” meant poor quality.
(As in Back to the Future where the 1950’s professor says something (I forget) like, ‘No wonder your time machine broke down, Marty, this part is made in Japan.’
One of my friction cars from Christmas, when I was a boy, was from a tin can showing fruit and Japanese writing within, but turned inside out and painted like an automobile)
Over in the social studies area of the local big box store, one evening last April, while I don’t remember if I specifically counted the actual number of translators, I know I counted eleven different editions of the work. Well! The western world has sure heard of it now!
What happened was classic: One man made a difference. Someday I will read again James Clavell’s desperate forward to the first modern Art of War. I would have read it at a community college around 1981-ish. (Wikipedia has the date wrong) First Clavell began having various characters, in his various best selling “Asian novels,” mention the book. And he worked on a translation. Then he had to persuade an otherwise sane editor that a book ostensibly about warfare, about long dead guys with bows and armor, would sell enough copies to break even. The rest is history. The irony, to me, as I looked in vain, was that not one of those eleven editions I found that April evening was the first one with the introduction by James Clavell. How sad. He knew Chinese communism, and he had seen close up what happened to Japan in defeat, and so he desperately told how important national survival is, and how the book of Sun Tzu could help. Poor Prometheus!
Never mind the bows and armoured horses. What makes Sun Tzu’s (Sunzi’s) work suitable for the business section, and other parts of the bookstore too, is, as James Trapp puts it: “…the elegance of the prose and the underlying Daoist principles.”
James Trapp has crafted an elegant translation, a much more humane one than the old standard translation on my shelf. Yes, plainly there is room in the world for a translation as clear and lyrical as this one.
I think I would like to meet Trapp, with his interesting artistic past, a past that must have fed his soul, not just his bank account. His specialties include Bronze Age art and early Buddhist sculpture. Today he works part-time at the British Museum, and also as a consultant to the UK school system for integrating China studies.
Dipping into the piece before me, I like Trapp’s choice of footnotes, useful yet concise. In a footnote to page one of the final chapter, Using Spies, Trapp writes, “Sunzi’s understanding of the necessity of an effective intelligence network, its efficient organization and the various levels of expendability of its agents is chillingly calculating…and modern.”
James Trapp’s introduction ends, “In the eyes of Sunzi a general is no mere jobbing soldier: he is a scholar, gentleman and philosopher. The depth of meaning which this element of mysticism imparts is undoubtedly responsible for the work’s continuing and universal appeal.”
Now I contemplate citizenship; I cherish the responsible competence of James, James and Sun Tzu… And I truly appreciate the beauty of the work of art before me.
Art and Music Of Japan and Germany
As for Asians knowing The Art of War, tonight I was watching the Japanese animated (anime) series Ghost in the Shell, (2nd Gig) dubbed with English subtitles. In one episode the major shows up at a den, with luxurious furniture, of three wealthy old criminals. She is there to retrieve something stolen. Three angry young hoodlums are there too. One of the old men asks the major, “Are you the same race as Roh?”
She answers, “Can’t you tell?” Meaning: Yes, the major has a full prosthetic body. So formidable!
The major backs away with her prize and the hoodlums want to chase after her. The old man forbids them, and quotes Sun Zu: When you know your enemy and you know yourself (voice over as the major flees into a taxi) you can fight a hundred battles without defeat.” The implication being: The hoods can’t know how powerful the major’s prosthetics are.
Beauty onscreen:
Did you ever see the 1980’s German art-house movie, with Peter Falk as a human, filmed in black and white, called Wings of Desire, about invisible angels on the roofs of East and West Berlin? In the very next episode of Ghost In the Shell, Battou is in Berlin, on stakeout on the roofs, near the major, using his invisibility thing—but a girl in a wheelchair can look up and see him. In homage, the TV episode was given the movie title. I thought the whole episode, with an angel motif, was well done.
The Americans once attempted a remake of the German movie, for mainstream audiences, starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan: Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “But it's not really a remake. It's more of a formula story that benefits from some of Wenders' imagery (solitary angels standing in high places, solemnly regarding humanity) and his central story idea…”
At least the remake was better than the live action remake, (2 stars) staring Scarlet Johansen, of the anime feature movie (3 stars) Ghost in the Shell.
I like the artful words of Roger Ebert, a pulitzer prize winner, as he reviews Wings of Desire. “The film evokes a mood of reverie, elegy and meditation. It doesn’t rush headlong into plot, but has the patience of its angels. It suggests what it would be like to see everything but not participate in it…. For me, the film is like music or a landscape: It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions… ”
Review of the Peter Falk movie (4 stars)
Review of the Nicolas Cage movie (3 stars)
Music:
The Japanese, once fascist, now welcome the world. Here the incomparable Origa sings in Russian, graced with Latin, over graphics for the TV opening of the Ghost in the Shell series.
Here Origa sings in half Russian, half English, a song of determination, over the opening of the second series—anime truly not intended for the “Saturday morning cartoons” of children, nor for adults on their couches wanting a relaxed evening cartoon sitcom.
I like how the joy of music, like a thirst for peace, is worldwide. In Japan, here is a choir like in Bulgaria, and instruments like in my local philharmonic. For 18 minutes of something completely different, a Japanese symphony plays music of the original Ghost in the Shell movie. (which I still haven’t seen)
I’m no passive angel up high, I walk down in the world, a world where a sadder, now wiser German said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
This week, I see beauty.
Last week, I looked at the ugly Chinese leaders being un-truthful, with their agents operating secretly in dirty shadows in Canada.
This day, my eyes are clear… in my own words, after John Keats,
Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth. And that’s all we know, or need to know.
Sean Crawford
Alberta,
May,
2020
Footnotes:
~“Remember Taiwan.” Here’s what the various liberal party Members of Parliament don’t want you to see. “Speak truth to power.”
~Are you still thinking of last week’s post? I am. You know what? The Chinese can keep their thought police. It’s time to recognize Taiwan.
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