Lao Tzu Was A Hero To Most, But He Never Meant Shit To Me (Mostly Because I Had No Idea What The Fuck Any Of It Could Possibly Mean)

When we were adolescents we read a lot of books that as adults we never would have considered reading. The Bell Jar sticks out in my mind. I remember slogging through the Tao Te Ching, too, except that it wasn't really a slog on account of me allowing myself to let my mind wander freely while my eyes skimmed some words on the page; I sort of think that I shouldn't even say that I "read" it, more than displayed it on a bookshelf for however long until my parents moved out of my childhood home and the book disappeared to I don't know where while I was living thousands of miles away.

Reading a book and understanding like none of it is kind of a crummy feeling. Part of me wonders whether high school English instructors keep teaching Shakespeare just to tweak children; they just seem to really enjoy explaining what stuff like "the beast with two backs" means. Me, I hate riddles. And all that is faux-homespun. Like I said, you can feel real crummy sometimes.

Which is why I eventually gave in to my insecurities and at some point decided that I really shouldn't care that I don't "get" Lao Tzu. And once you do that, it's just a slippery slope down past Pynchon, Joyce and whatever else until you one day realize that you summarily dismissed Blue Valentine after 45 minutes on account of it not seeming to have much of a plot: "Don't give a fuck; can we please just watch Breaking Amish already?"

All of which is to say, it wasn't all that clear to me after finishing Herbert Read's The Green Child how much time I needed to spend thinking about all that I didn't understand about the book. I decided it wasn't worth that much time.

Basically, there's a world with no weather where ex-dictators go to stare at crystals and die.

I remember talking to Frank's dad about Edward Albee's The Goat a while back when it was on Broadway and he was just exasperated: "I don't get it; it's a goat! He's bonking a goat!" He didn't use the word "bonk." I don't remember him using a more robust word, either, but you could see it in his soul: Edward Albee wrote a whole play about a guy who fucks a goat. And we're supposed to care why?

The Wikipedia page for Green has a couple of funny moments. One is a relatively recent remembrance of the novel, which I think can be boiled down to something along the lines of, "If you're going to write one novel in your life, you might as well make it fucking ridiculous." (Actually it said, "But The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original." Go big or go home!)

The other funny thing in the Wikipedia entry is the Orville Prescott The New York Times review of the book, which is basically this: "But, in spite of the limpid grace of his writing, his parable is ridiculous as well as vexatious. One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." It's funny how contemporary reviewers feel like they need to really represent a book. I don't know that you have to spend that much time thinking about a lot of stuff, but it's good someone does.

The other thing Prescott rips is Kenneth Rexroth's "pretentious introduction of uncommon density." I read it after finishing the book and thought that I must have really missed something. It's a hoot:

There has been a great proliferation of fiction in our day. There has been an even greater decline in quality. Since Ulysses, if you accept Ulysses as a great novel, there have been very few really great novels in English. Lady Chatterly, The Rainbow and Women in Love; Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens series, really one novel; some of Sherwood Anderson; the unfinished promise of William Carlos Williams' First Act; a few others. The Green Child is fully the equal of any of these, although it is of a rather more special kind. Graham Greene speaks of it as surcharged with a sense of glory — gloire — that special lustre and effulgence which Aquinas marks out as the sign manifest of great works of art. . . .

It goes on like that — for less than two pages, though it seems like 20 given how many names are dropped: Landor, Bagehot, Mill, Clerk, Maxwell, Walton, Gilbert White — you're like, fuck, was I high or something through undergrad? But this is the kicker:

I am not going to tell you the meaning of Read's allegory — the secret of his myth. At Eleusis the priestess rose from the subterranean marriage bed of the hierosgamos and exhibited an ear of barley, and today, scholars in their ivied halls by the Cam and Thames and Charles dispute about what she means. . . . What does it mean: What does the Tao Te Ching mean? What does the Book of Changes, that immemoriably subtile document, mean? All myth, all deep insight, means the same as and no more than the falling of the solar system on its long parabola through space.

Say what now?

So then of course I went down a rabbit hole about Kenneth Rexroth. What a charmed life! I mean, sure, he lost both parents before he really hit puberty and then got locked up in jail after being accused of running a brothel, but when you think about the way life goes, there are way worse outcomes than hitchhiking around the country, bumming around Paris, Mexico, South America and Greenwich Village before moving to San Francisco and becoming a poet. A poet! Who does that?! It's awesome. I mean these days running a food truck is considered "edgy." Artisanal mayonnaise, on the other hand . . .