Tai Chi Player Flows into Symphonic Way
The Knight of 1000 eyes
By Michael Lyons
HITMOTEL PRESS; 319 PAGES;$25
The Knight of1000 eyes is the third novel of a trilogy that takes place on a farm near Austin Texas, where the main character, Walker Underwood, is growing pot in a magical garden. The trilogy is not sequential. The later two books, The Secret of the Cicadas' Song and The Knight of1000 eyes drill down into time and expand moments in the main story, Cultivating the Texas Twister Hybrid. Here, in Knight of1000 eyes, Walker, an over-educated, underemployed slacker in a sharecropping situation has to protect his patch from pot thieves. After his partner considers various booby-traps, Walker decides to teach himself a martial art: Tai Chi. Except there's no master out in the prairie so he has to teach himself out of a book, a humorous and endearing undertaking. The novel is a student's journal in the 1st person POV as Walker undergoes the profound influences of this ancient, holistic, spiritual, awakening. The Knight of1000 eyes is in three sections, each related to the sense of deepening consciousness as one goes further into the form, and reflecting the states of progression of the student of Tai Chi.
The first section of the novel, called the Fixed Frame, (about a 1/6th of the book) recounts Walker's beginning in Tai Chi, through struggling with the detail of the moves, during which his memory and balance is challenged and overwhelmed by their strangeness but gradually the encouraging feelings of being grounded start to emerge. Walker (for whom feeling good in his body, in his being, in his kinetic self is a very foreign concept) gets quite intellectual as a kind of defense that stops the feelings of the new sense of being that he is experiencing. We watch as the beginner struggles to find the essential basic concepts underlying his practice but it leads to mathematical reductionism. He attempts to develop a kind of mnemonic theatre of movement to help with remembering the gestures. And to cover up his embarrassment over not having a real master, he facetiously invents his own sifu Yum Chi. We follow as Walker gets further into his practice and he starts experiencing the generosity of nature and other experiences of enlightenment. Some of these he writes about in the form of prose poems; others in an effort to get outside of himself and see himself through the much longer perspective of Big Time in the form of "bookmovies" and solo theatre play. For example, one day while walking through the woods he learns about stillness, camouflage and invisibility from a dragonfly (in 6 Post). I was shocked to find a poem (7Word as Object) based on the C++ (programming language) syntax. Lyons used this syntax because of its declarative, gestural and implicative possibilities. He is trying to get past the poem to the object under consideration the way music does: by being logical and mimetic simultaneously. Later, in another movement, Walker starts doing ocean sounds to time his breathing and synch it up with his movements to experience a more rhapsodic performance in doing his Tai Chi (in 16 Sound Cadas for Solo Form).
From being told in the opening, and from seeing that some of the chapters exactly map up to the name and number of Tai Chi moves in the classical Yang Long Form sequence, we understand that the premise of this book is philosophical: a man contemplates Taoist time-expansion during the 30 minute journey of performing a Tai Chi set. The journey uses the enquiry into Tai Chi form as a platform for Lyons to speak through many literary forms about how form emerges in our world, in a Taoist sense. This book is about language: it seeks to read gesture to find authentic movement and, to find modern expression in an ancient spiritual idiom. Tai Chi is considered as a tuning movement, using body alignment, and visualization to entrain perception and to help the player be part of the flow through sound. The player seeks ecstasy through union with the Way.
The second section of the novel, called the Lively Frame (1/3 of the book) is about moving into the journeyman level of Tai Chi practice. We experience the intermediate player beginning to improvise with his balance and movement as he comes to feel the support and nurturing of the physical world. One night in a dream, an entity engages Walker in push hands. Later, his dream diary, Walker realizes it is his own somatic intelligence communicating with him through whole body kinesthetic, visual, tactile images (in 27 Slantingly Flying). Lyons is a mythopoeic writer who personifies the self (as distinct from the individual ego) as the Automorph. The underlying the tension of the novel the contrast between Walker Underwood and the Taoist adept player he wants to become sifu Yum Chi starts to take on a more real significance, a kind of possession by a somatic intelligence beyond the personal. Walker sets himself the task of recording what the somatic intelligence is teaching him. He personifies it as Yum Chi by and together the two begin a collaboration on a manual about Tai Chi (in 30 Somatic Intelligence Users Guide). But this is no ordinary manual. It presents Tai Chi as a way to play the body as a kind of virtual instrument. The manual presents the pa kua the ancient geomancer's compass as a kind of keyboard for playing this virtual instrument (in 32 The Music of Awareness). This gets pursued further into a kind of notation based on Laban, the great poet/ scientist of human movement and dance from the 1930s. What a perceptive connection! Yum Chi in technical writer mode delivers the exposition in the simple declaratives sentences of the manual, (Lyons is a Technical Writer in real life). The material on Newtonian bio-mechanics clarifies misconceptions from the old poetical / holistic physics of the Taoists, and provides a basis for the shifting of point of view to the center of mass that develops in the experienced player.
The movement pattern of the book reflects its central subject matter: how intelligence emerges in a hierarchy from the dichotomous interaction of opposites. Each chapter /movement is exploring an experience of enlightenment or is a pulling together of the knowledge necessary (in the form of a manual written by the voice of experience) make possible further deepening experiences of enlightenment. The two, Walker and Yum Chi are roped together, climbing the escarpment of enlightenment. Later we see these as separation and amplification of the player's psychic structure. We slip out of Yum Chi's exposition in the manual into the bookmovie, a very visual, readable, movie-script form developed by Kerouac and perfected by Burroughs. Here we observe Walker from outside as he contemplates the human machine and how it evolved in the presence of the great organizer while performing with the human machine (in 40The Tao is Gravity).
When he is with Yum Chi, Walker is in awe of feeling himself a part of the flow, but as Lyons explains, (in 42Yum Chi seizes me and we enter the Tao).
But no. Walker pulled back from Yum Chi, pulled back from being in the Form. It can't be this good, this fine, he tells himself. It can't be this simple, this easy.It is man's lot to struggle and be frustrated.
Letting layers of tension fall away I had mixed with an entity and merged then separated. But I learned something: if you move very slow and steady you can feel this body mind, the Somatic Intelligence what are we calling it? taking over the Automorph. And it wants to speak to you in its own language, which is a kind of telepathy of images. Yet it seems so strange and far off we have forgotten it so much,
Then we are back in the manual again as it uses the concept of the human inertia tensor, to get a wonderful interpretation of the ancient suppleness of Tai Chi and to set the stage for a very incisive distinction between the beginner and the advanced player with the concept of inverse kinematics. This reflects the increasing level of sophistication in the journeyman player as he moves into the 2nd part of the set. Walker, trying to understand flow, takes naturally to the exposition of it given by Laban in his space-time-weight grid (in 50 Effort and Qualities of Being). In Walker's quest to retain what in dance is called the "phrases of a dance movement," he invents a new idiom that is an amalgam of word-objects, sigils, and glyphs a kind of concrete poetry. He is trying to be in poetry the way music is about pattern, as dance is about pattern too; the way falling leaves swirl, like vortices in a pool. He is trying to understand being in the pool of existence. He attempts to emulate the gestures of the Chinese language he sees in translations and transliterations of the Lao Tsu, thinking it will help him get past the Worf limit that language imposes on perception (in 53 Knight's Walk and the Cadas of Energy Splitting).
What is the meaning of this grid, and the way it is extended into a fractalated, tessellated, visual poetry? It is a spatialization of categories and attributes. It honors the modern sensibility (post Einstein) of being able to visualizes multidimensional space (even if only abstractly in the database sense). In modern art we think of Picasso and Braque exploding the grid in cubism to reflect relativity and the energy of space, a grid that was started with the monks and their manuscripts and the development of perspective in the renaissance. The Knight of 1000 eyes, with the manual and its illustrations, and the little flip-animations on the corner of manual pages (showing Tai Chi ideograms moving) becomes a kind of worked-by-hand illuminated manuscript. After all we are talking about Chi here, and Chi is the force animating beings. Other reflections are the Knights Walk in chess. And Mallarme's <Un Coup de Dice> and the end of writing, where writing approaches the inchoate silence of the Way.
The second half of the book records Walkers time as it dips into synchronicity. Tai Chi is ultimately a meditation technique for raising consciousness. This third and last section of the novel, called the Changing Frame, is analogous to the mental state possible after one have pushed passed body fatigue in doing the Tai Chi Long Form, toward the end of the set. It is a state of unity within a space-time that is much larger than the one you started out in. This is about having a sense of being with the Tao, being with the flow of creation, getting out of yourself and being in what the Buddhists call Big Time. The symbol for this world is the oracular hexagram of the I Ching and its Wings, with its myriad little hexagram ladders climbing the synchronic. The I Ching and its commentaries is a lexicon of the oracular. And as Jung did, Lyons reads the oracular as communicating with the Self. Now the plot of Knight of 1000 eyes starts getting really post-modern as Lyons sees the role of the artist and deconstructionist intertwined and these two collaborators Walker, the self and Yum Chi, the Self (an archetype of order reflecting the purposiveness of the universe) set about deconstructing synchronicity.
Yum Chi starts a great exposition of the I Ching in another technical manual subtitled: A New Commentary on the I Ching (in 61 Yum Chi's Commentary on the I Ching). What temerity to attempt that! And Lyons delivers. This new commentary actually gives us the secret of the I Ching! and deserves to be one of the classical Wings or at least a preface on a par with Jung. The secret is that the I Ching is a representation of the dichotomous branching nature of reality. The binary tree. Lyons is the first I have seen to point out that the I Ching is a binomial distribution. He presents this very succinctly, invoking Pascal's triangle from the very beginning. Even though we see how Lyons loves the poetry of the I Ching, and admires the assiduous perspicacity of the ancient sages trying to understand form and chaos, he does not gloss over the mathematics, and finds this ancient energy system isomorphic to and emblematic of a modern (quantum mechanic) world view based on probability, a larger world than the causal: the synchronistic.
The pattern of moving from experience to exposition continues. Walker is enchanted by the poetry of the I Ching. The motif of the push and pull of guide and organization to follow the guide continues. In a solo theatre piece Walker reconstructs the apocryphal story of Wen in his jail cell learning to see through the bars / blinds as they become hexagrams (in 63 The Prisoner of Mind). This sifu is a penetrating modern scholar of the I Ching. He goes right to the mystical heart of the work (in 78 The Spiritual Intelligence in the 8th Wing).
The Divine Plant is mentioned here. Literalist interpret it as something the old philosophers ate or smoked. But the plant is an image of the bifurcating intelligence of a system seeking to maintain the largest possible number of possibilities at each step of its evolution. The "growing" of hexagrams is exactly this kind of manifold system. The ancient scholars of the I Ching present the agency behind the operation of the oracular, as a hierarchical tree of implicative causal relations. The name for these agents is the Kwei-Shan (in Mandarin or in Cantonese: Guai Sung) which scholars and philosophers translate as the <Spiritual Agents> at work between the earth and the heavens, and which ordinary folk translate as <God of Ghosts>.
In this chapter to we get the great connection between the spiritual intelligence at the heart of the operation of the world and it is fractal. We see evolution as a fractal or chaotic process. The texts Walker and Yum Chi use for this deconstruction of the synchronic are the I Ching with its Image, and Text and Interpretation and Symbol. The plot now tracks the impact of the I Ching on the development of Jung's psychology of personality particularly the Basic Four Functions model of Sensing, Intuiting, Thinking, Feeling, which are shown to be branchings of development. Indeed they set about a plausible reconstruction of Jung' psychology from literary interpretation of the I Ching (in the personality is an awareness hexagram, and in reality matrix of the self). Walker finds himself looking for reflections of a days hexagram in his world on the farm, and these symbolic objects from the ancient oracle find their way subliminally into Walker's very realistic perception as he moves through his days activities (in 81Reading in all directions ). Next we see Walker engaged in a kind of whole-being feeling meditation at the pond; and know we are getting closer to the Source (in The Frog Symphony).Walker finds the Tao for our time in the modern insight into chaos and fractals (in 90 Chi is the Free Energy Available) . He collaborates with Yum Chi a final time in a strange and marvelous and hubris-filled philosophical tract about apotheosis (in 91 Hexotranspiration and Onto(/)slahsology ) and (in 93The Fractal Way) this is a stunning piece of writing, using the sinewy syntax (in homage to Joyce) of one long concatenating sentence that goes on for pages in celebrating the uses and insights of fractals and chaos. Walker is moving his Tai Chi into the level of ritual and the Taoist "walk" while changing and dancing an algorhythm for the emergence of the hexagram as well as great play on moment (as instant of time and spread from mean) (in 99The Hexagram as Exponent of the Moment).
The writing and poetry in this book is filled with Walker's longing to feel himself in the presence of the Tao, the Automorph, Yum Chi these creations are the names of God, the great source and sustainer of life. To rediscover the spirit, and invent a new spiritual poetic idiom, Lyons looks to the great scientific achievements of his time: chaos and fractals. He faces the problem of bringing the sacred into his works in the traditional way poets have always done it, by projecting divinity onto nature, and evoking it in their poems. Here is one brief example (in 100 Self-similarity in a salmon egg):
I come to know the comprehension of fish
by looking at a salmon egg under a microscope.
We see a big red vein carrying moving blood cells
into a delta. . .
The salmon egg is like a small planet
with its rivers of blood
that flow back down to the albumen sea.
The salmon are like blood cells
moving in a river that is a vein on the planetegg.It is like the ocean
flowing through the salmon
is cresting in a long wave,
flowing back up rivers,
through transformations
into food for bears and birds and fertilizer for the soil,
then flows back down the rivers
in the forms of eggs, then hatchlings, then salmon
to the sea. Until the cycle begins again.The salmon is an expression
of the ocean's love and support for the land.
This third section expands outward from the program of understanding balance of the human body matrix in section two, to understanding balance in the social space, the space of existence as we come to feeling the matrix of support that is the universe and the world carrying us all, and into which we are emerging through the interface between inside and outside across boundaries of our personalities (in 102Shadowboxing the Enatiomorph [). In this, the last chapter of the manual, Yum Chi reviews several theories of personality typology through humours, astrology, MBTI, into the development theories of Erickson, Maslo, Horney showing how it is based on a bifurcating tree of experience starting with basic issues of trust. He develops this into the beginning of a fractal psychology based on assigning a fractal dimension to the boundaries in Kurt Lewin's topological psychology of groups. Then we get a change from this scholarly tour de force as Walker is possessed by Yum Chi when he tries acting in a solo theatre performances (in 103Yum off of, off of, off Broadway).
As the book and the set are drawing to close were are treated to some beautiful plaintive cosmic writing from the Taoist perspective of Big Time. The themes of the book are pulled (in 106Weighty Thoughts on a Dust Mote which looks at the relationship of man to the earth, and also contains a (classical 17th century) proof that the universe is not infinite. Then (in 107 Supernal Night) we get a great feeling transcendence into the dark universal night as the true power of the novel is used to pull together the tenants of the book and knocks down all the walls between them, firing off all their energy at once like stars exploding. We are asked to imagine and see God as a writhing sun of chaos, but one in which the hierarchy of knowing and causality and connection emerges like light touching all living processes on earth, through matter by sub-sumption (from the bottom up) hierarchies of embedding and being embedded. Finally in the last chapter Conclusion and Grand Terminus, we come to the end of the Tai Chi set and we are back to where we started in the night on the land. The novel, as Tai Chi does, bring us back to the place we started from. At that point we realize how much we have been drawn into Walker's perception. We have struggled with him as he leaves the everyday world, moves into a connection with his own somatic intelligence, becomes a sentient being playing with his balance, realizes the gift he has been given in his body. We have transcended that to the great branching intelligence pushing the world into emergence. We have felt our buoyancy in time and now we are back to the realities.
You come to know the wind out here, when you live in the country, you become kin to the wind, listening in to everything coming because you don't want anything to come up and surprise you. Maybe it was paranoia, maybe feral sensitivity, but I became preternaturally aware while I was doing Tai Chi. I began to be able to use the wind as an ally for its ability to carry awareness.
We come to see the Taoist continuity brought forward through a modern interpretation of the Way as a kind of Universal Fractal, which can be known through the feeling whole being meditation of Tai Chi and written about and studied and expressed through a kind of mythopoeic and pattern-feeling synesthesia.