I’ve been preparing to offer a workshop on King Lear next week in Tromso, Norway, and at the same time starting to read David Hinton’s new book, Awakened Cosmos (Shambhala, 2019). Hinton returns to and revises one of his earliest translations, Tu Fu (a.k.a. Du Fu in other translations; see especially David Young’s book). Each chapter presents one poem in Chinese characters with literal English translations of each, then Hinton’s translation, and finally a commentary of several pages. It’s a wonderful book, saying again what was said in Hunger Mountain (2012) and Existence (2016), but–and this is the point–there isn’t really that much else to say. What matters is how the poems, and the visual arts in Existence, might allow us actually to hear or see how little needs to be said, or can be said. Paradox is one of Hinton’s themes, as a crucial device of Ch’an teaching: how do you say something about what language cannot express? That idea exists in multiple forms in different traditions, from theology to Wittgenstein.
But my concern is reading Lear alongside Tu Fu, and the key word to that juxtaposition may be Hinton’s usage of wild. Hinton does not attempt to define wild but allows our sense of what he means develop through accumulated usages. In one passage that seems especially important, he writes of “wild forms” that “are not themselves part of our systems of human meaning.” That’s an idea we find elsewhere, but then Hinton adds a layer: “and since our linguistic human meaning-making is just one more of these forms, it too is wild and meaningless”–which seems another paradox. “Hence,” he concludes, adopting an uncharacteristically (ironically?) philosophical turn of speech, “the human is wild, and meaning is meaningless” (42). Tu Fu, at least one aspect of Ch’an, and Hinton’s own work, are about getting us not to nod in agreement at this reasoning, but internalize what wild implies, where it leads us, as a lived practice.
Lear is a terrifying play. It’s not just what humans are shown capable of doing–people do horrible things to each other in other plays. But in Lear there’s no bottom to it. Horatio calls upon flights of angels to sing Hamlet to his rest. No angels at the end of Lear, only the echo of Lear’s dying words: “Thou’lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never” (V.3.326). No wonder the play was presented in rewritten form for 150 years, with Cordelia living to marry Edgar. The wild had to be tamed. That’s the issue we have to confront.
Maynard Mack, whose King Lear in Our Time I find most valuable, quotes approvingly Winifred Nowottny (1960), who writes: “The play is deeply concerned with the inadequacy of language to do justice to feeling or to afford any handhold against abysses of iniquity and suffering” (99). Wild, indeed. Lear is Shakespeare’s dark enigma, which is Hinton’s translation of the emptiness of mind that recognizes emptiness is itself a description, a form, an act of meaning making that is–in my understanding–an evasion of what is. Not what is as Presence, but what is before Presence divides from Absence.
This week I was also writing a blog posting for The Hastings Center and so thinking about bioethics, and I was engaged in conversations about health humanities. So I take these thoughts back to those pursuits. My recurring, comically recurring, objection to much of bioethics as well as much of social scientific research is its failure to reflect on how it positions itself in relation to the wild. Especially the banality of the policy or clinical practice recommendations with which research articles conclude. Well intentioned and often desirable as such recommendations are, they protect writers and readers from the wild that the observations risk opening up. In this denial, they obscure what they ought to make observable: the abysses of iniquity and suffering. Take abyss seriously, in what the word seeks to convey.
My current work depends on the hope that by bringing either Lear or Tu Fu into the conversations, bioethics and health humanities can at least resist acting to repress the wild. I seriously doubt if bioethics could be bioethics–could do its job–if it were, itself, wild. But I also don’t think it can do its job responsibly if it represses the wild, because human life at its extremes tips into the wild; it’s where we end up. That’s what Lear and Tu Fu’s poetry both show, in utterly different ways. Health humanities could be where the wild receives recognition, if we can learn wild reading. Perhaps, in the form of critical response to literature that is distinctive to health humanities, the crucial gesture is silence. But I’m an old man, and it’s winter.
Arthur W. Frank 