There Is Still a Potential

Long, long ago I promised to write a blog entry on potentiality. Well, I've been trying to write it for the past three days. The essay that I have written has potential, but it has still not quite made it into actuality. The more I write, the more I realize that I don't understand the topic well enough. I'll keep thinking about it, and maybe someday I'll be ready to post it.

But I'll post something else a little later, something a little easier to write about and something which I have strong opinions about: Chinese bathrooms.

The Job Might Have Seemed to Have Taken Forever.

Imagine that you are flying around in a spaceship. You see a big pyramid far away, so you fly towards it. When you arrive, you see that it is much bigger than you had imagined. Some workers are putting the final stone on the top of the great space pyramid, finally finishing their massive construction. You stop and ask them how long this task has taken, and they say that it has taken an eternity, that the base of the pyramid is infinitely far away and that their task is done at long last. Can you imagine that?

In this imaginary scenario we have a problem: there is a project that has been from eternity past drawing nearer to its completion finally coming to an end. This is inconceivable. It is reasonable to say that there are two lines that start from one point and go eternally in two different directions, but it is not reasonable to say that you have been from eternity drawing two lines towards each other and will soon bring them to their meeting point. If the starting points are infinitely distant in space from one another, then the lines being drawn can never in finite time meet each other. However, in the sentence above the words “starting points” are nonsense because, of course, there is no starting point. Imagine falling into a bottomless well, and when you reach the bottom, you start to climb out. The preceding sentence contradicts itself.

This is the problem that a worldview falls into that says that all living things are inhabited by spirits which are repeatedly reincarnated from eternity past until they finally reach their goal. If the spirits have been nearing their goal from eternity past, they are like those builders who are getting ready to put the final stone on that great space pyramid.

I think this is accurate. If anybody sees a problem in my reasoning above, I would love to be corrected. If this is right, then I wouldn’t mind if somebody let me know I’m not off my rocker.

T

Sunday night I invited some of my brothers over for tea. Actually I invited all of my brothers living in this apartment building to come over, but only three of them—J, M and R—could make it. We had a good time talking about various things. There wasn’t anything really noteworthy that we talked about that I can remember. However the occasion, just being together with some brothers, was wonderful.

Fellowship with one’s brothers is vitally important to one’s spiritual health, yet I had had little time with my brothers for a long time. It was refreshing to have a long evening chat with them. I just wish more of them could have come over.

Two Questions

Before I had these brothers over to have tea with me, I had been thinking about two things: first, how to entertain people and second, what to do about my hobby of tea drinking.

Regarding entertaining people, I wanted to invite people over to my house for a long time, but I am not a cook. Since it is usually expected to serve food to people when they come to your house, I figured it was hard for me to entertain people.

Regarding my hobby of drinking tea, I had noticed that it was actually isolating me from other people rather than providing a bridge for me to reach out to people, and anything that separates me from other people rather than bringing me closer to people actually prevents me from fulfilling my purpose in life. I was wondering what I should do about this. Should I quit drinking tea altogether? Or how could I use it to come closer to people rather than further?

The solution to my two questions was a no-brainer: invite folks over for tea.

No Frilly Laces

Maybe to Western ears it might sound funny to have guys over for tea because teatime is considered a girl thing. But having tea in China is definitely a guy thing. In the West teatime is marked by frilly laces and delicate flowered teacups, but in China it is not so. In fact, in China you can find stores all over that sell three products that are viewed as macho things here: vodka, cigarettes and tea.

In China the process of tea and the utensils are a fine art. On Sunday evening I did my best to brew tea fit for an emperor. I brewed some Iron Goddess oolong tea in my little (4 ounces?) green Yixing pot, and I brewed some Tenfu brand Yunan black tea from Xiaguan City in my gaiwan (a china cup with a lid and a small platter). The teacups I used for the oolong and the black tea were only one ounce and two ounce cups respectively.

You might think that a four-ounce teapot and a one-ounce teacup cannot hold much tea, but actually the size is perfect for brewing and drinking fine tea. A four-ounce teapot allows the flavor to develop better than a large teapot, probably because one brews the tea in it for only about ten to thirty seconds. One should time each infusion carefully to make sure that the tea is not too strong or too weak, and the time depends on how many infusions you have done already. Each successive infusion should be longer than the last one. And each successive infusion tastes a little differently than the last. That is why the teapot and the teacups are so small, so that the drinkers can taste the flavor developing from infusion to infusion.

On Sunday evening we quaffed so many infusions that I lost count. I don’t know if all that caffeine had kept anyone up late afterwards, but I’m pretty sure of one thing. I’m pretty sure that all of them after leaving my house went straight to the bathroom.

A Few o My Favorite Links

This is another text copied over from my other (now deleted) blog.

Anywhere that I can get full texts of classic works for free is a great place in my opinion. In the following place you can download classic works from church history. For example, you can read Thomas a Kempis' famous book there.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kempis/imitation.i.html

I get a kick out of G.K. Chesterton.
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/index.html
http://www.chesterton.org/discover/who.html

The Stanford Encl. of Philosophy is kinda thick stuff, but it is good information about all kinds of ideas.
http://plato.stanford.edu/

This page has links to lots of free texts that you might not find in your local library. One fellow here that I have heard about for many years but never read is John Chrysostom. I'm interested in learning more about Medieval thought. It can't be as dark as people say it is.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook2.html

A good page to find full texts of literature.
http://bartleby.com/

Eggs

As I was shutting down an old blog I had, I moved some of the posts over to my current one. Below is one of them.

I came across a couple quotes from G.K. as I was reading his book on St. Thomas Aquinas. In the first one he was talking about how it was in vogue for philosophers to get all caught up in epistemology and start doubting if things they perceive actually exist.

"I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in a professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it."

This is a quotation from the same book. It is a simple comparison of various viewpoints' takes on eggs.

"Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."

B&W

The lives of those who have lived in China through the past seventy years are very interesting to me. They were alive to see the birth of a nation. Their parents and grandparents talked around the dinner table about the emperors and the fall of a dynasty. They have seen their nation go from a weak one that was abused by western nations to one that all the western nations look to for help when dealing with troublesome locals such as North Korea and Burma.

My wife's grandparents are such people. Her grandfather was a child living in the countryside near Changchun City when Mao Zedong came and besieged it, starving out the Japanese occupiers. He remembers Japanese soldiers, intent on winning the hearts of the Chinese in the northern occupied regions, giving him and other Chinese children candy: one piece of candy for speaking one word or phrase in Japanese, two pieces for two words or a longer phrase.

For a long time I had been wanting to see Grandparent's old memorabilia. Finally, during the recent vacation, they showed us their old pictures. Grandma sat and mended an old quilt and talked about her memories while my wife and I looked at the pictures.

The earliest pictures are from the 1950s when Grandparents were in their 20s. There were only three or four pictures going back that early. One of them was a formal portrait of Grandfather’s father. He wore a dark blue or charcoal colored traditional Chinese shirt (Tangzhuang) that buttoned up all the way to the top and had no collar. He looked like your stereotypical old Chinese man with his thin white goatee.

He was a landowner in the old days before “landowner” was a bad word in China and was pretty well off. However, almost all of his wealth was in the form of land rather than money. After the revolution landlords were denounced and their lands were redistributed, so he and his family lost most of their possessions. If he had had his wealth in cash, he would have possibly been able to keep it. Some landlords were very clever before the revolution and, seeing that the future leaders would be Marxist, sold all their lands and stored up the cash. After the revolution, these former landlords could keep all their wealth and go around denouncing other landlords with the rest of the people.

While my wife and I were talking about her grandfather’s family, her grandmother looked up from her mending and said smiling that her husband’s class status had put her through a lot of trouble. She was born to a poor family in the countryside, but then she married a son of a landowner. After the revolution, she wanted to join the party, but they suspected her, because she was married to someone who belonged to the landlord class. She said that she went through twenty years of observation and testing before they finally let her join the party.

I guess she did pretty well for herself in the party when she finally got to join. She was a party leader of some kind in her workplace. There were a couple pictures of her sitting behind a speaker, who was speaking at some sort of party function in the factory. There was another picture of her at work, where she assembled an electrical component for cars. On the wall behind her was a large picture of Chairman Mao inscribed with an exhortation to work hard for the sake of society.

From looking at the photo album I could guess the family’s favorite vacation destination: Beijing. There were four or five pictures of various family members standing in front of Tiananmen, the red gate over which the painting of Mao Zedong hangs. The earliest Tiananmen pictures were from 1958(?), and in them you can see that the name of the country is written in traditional Chinese characters rather than the newer simplified characters. There were also pictures from the 1970s of the Summer Palace and the Beijing train station. The old Beijing train station was a beautiful building. It had had two clock towers on either side of the front entrance. Above the doors, framed in a large arched window, was a big painting of Mao Zedong.

There was a variety of settings, but not a variety of clothing. Almost everyone wore dark blue or green or grey Mao suits. Several people wore green military hats with a red star on the front. Everyone wore dark colors. This was the patriotic way.

In fact, the whole album exuded patriotism. Right beside the photo of Uncle So-and-so was a photo of Chairman Mao sitting at his desk with a calligraphy brush in his hand. It was as if he was one of the members of the family.

Commonly the pictures were developed with Chinese writing on the front that told the date of the picture and/or a description of the picture. Sometimes the description reflected the political fervor of the time. One picture of Grandfather and two of his friends said, “A Revolutionary Friendship.” Another interesting one was a baby picture of my wife’s aunt. The baby wore a white dress and a big metallic medallion with the chairman’s face on it. To the side of the picture it had three sentences going from top to bottom. They said something like, “Forever support Mao Zedong. Forever follow Mao Zedong thought. Forever fight for the revolution.”

Next time I go to Grandparents house I'll have to ask Grandpa if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Communists. Or better yet, ask Grandpa's brother if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Nationalists.

Breakfast

This week my wife and I went to visit her mother and grandparents. We just relaxed and talked most of the time. And ate. Whenever we go to grandparents house we eat a ton of good food.

For breakfast today there were 12 different dishes on the table.

• 1st there was some roast rabbit. Delicious.
• 2nd there was a big bowl of little bitty shrimp. Each little crustacean was about one centimeter long. You eat them tail, shell, legs, tentacles and all.
  
• 3rd some soybean sauce. Very strong tasting and salty. Tasty, but it smells distinctly like socks.
• 4th hot pepper condiment-like dish.
• 5th Pickled duck eggs. Very salty. These are a condiment too.
• 6th cooked bean sprouts
• 7th an enormous fish.
• 8th a basket full of different kinds of small cakes.
• 9th a mushroom dish with wuhuarou. Wuhuarou is a thick cut of meat that includes a little meat at one end, a bunch of fat in the middle and skin at the other end.
• 10th garlic eggplant. Eaten as a condiment.
• 11th fermented bean curd. Eaten as a condiment.
• 12th something. I couldn't tell what it was.

Each person at the table had a bowl of rice porridge or a bowl of tangyuanr. Tangyuanr are a favorite breakfast food of mine. They are balls of sticky rice with a sweet filling of nuts or sesame inside.

This was not an unusual breakfast. This was a typical kind of breakfast for us to eat at Grandparents' house. I'm used to this kind of breakfast now, but I still remember in the early days when I first came here how I was shocked at the breakfast fare.

It was a lot of work for Grandma to put out this big spread, but it wasn't as much as you might think. These were all leftovers from supper the night before. Almost always when I have eaten breakfast with any Chinese family, they simply warm up the leftovers from supper and eat those in the morning. Americans usually have the idea that breakfast must be something sweet, or if it's not sweet, it needs to be an omelet and sausage. Chinese people however don't have this idea. They don't tend to put their nose up at even a spicy dish in the morning.