Cutting up an Ox
Prince Wen Hui’s cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright knife murmured
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like “The Mulberry Grove,”
Like ancient harmonies!
“Good work!” the Prince exclaimed,
“Your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
“What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!
“When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
THe whole ox
All in one mass.
“After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.
“But now, I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My knife finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.
“A good cook needs a new knife
Once a year – he cuts
A poor cook needs a new one
Every month – he hacks!
“I have used this same knife
Nineteen eyars.
It has cut up
A thousand oxen.
Its edge is as keen
As if newly sharpened.
“There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this knife nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!
“True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.
“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away.”
Prince Wan Hui said,
“This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!”
What you have there is a bit of Taoist wisdom from the Way of Chuang Tzu. It deals with a certain sensitivity to and innate understanding of natural patterns and flows. I first read this passage about two months ago and it has weighed heavily on my mind since then. I get a lot more meaning out of it now than I did initially, and the meaning I get now is more far-reaching than I probably would have expected it to be.
And the more I read up on and study Taoist philosophy, the more I am amazed at how it applies to photography. This, of course, is not a new idea to me – there is a book on the shelf behind me somewhere called The Tao of Photography that turned me on to the concept initially. I first read it about two years ago, but even now there are moments when I’m reading something in the Chuang Tzu or Tao Te Ching when I just have to say “wow” in reaction to the relation between Taoism and the kind of active seeing one uses in photography and the visual arts.
Photography isn’t a mindless, static sort of activity. Or, rather, it shouldn’t be a mindless activity. If you’re just shooting, then you shouldn’t be shooting at all. It should be an active, dynamic process. When you start out in photography or painting or whatever else, you fumble around clumsily in the dark. You don’t yet learn how to see. Though I have mixed feelings about her, I must now quote Dorthea Lange. Ms Lange said that, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” And how right she was. To those not involved in the visual arts, the proposition that the ordinary person does not know how to see is absurd. Just like if you try to tell a non-runner that getting good at running requires that you learn how to run, you’ll most likely get a weird look from them and some kind of remark along the lines of, “I know perfectly well how to run, you dolt.”
But that’s taking things too simply, too directly. If you have functional eyes, of course you know how to see in that you know you need light and that you have to open your eyelids if you want to get any sort of image. But if you haven’t learned how to see in an active sense, then everything is just passing through you and you’re not really aware of much of anything in your field of view.
When you’ve begun to actively see the world around you, once you’ve started to learn, the way you take in information and process and interpret it begins to change. It begins to evolve. Rather than just using your visual cortex to provide a visual repressentation of what’s in front of you, you start to employ the contemplative, analytical, etc portions of your mind. Seeing begins to change from an unconscious to a conscious sort of thing. It moves away from the realm of mindless process and towards the realm of conscious experience.
When I started doing photography, it was all hit or miss. I just shot frame after frame and hoped something would work. There was no method, no technique – just blind luck. Truly blind because I had not yet learned how to see. Now, I begin to compose the image and in most cases have already made the image in my mind long before I raise the camera to my eye. And yet, I realize that I am still only at a beginning stage in this process. Compared to where I started, I’ve learned to see quite well, but compared to where I will likely be even five years from now, I am still just reaching out with hardly half a vision in the dark blue of the early pre-dawn.
And Taoism fits into all of this quite neatly. Bet you were wondering when I was going to get back to that… Anyhow, Taoism teaches you to open yourself to greater patterns and forces. It teaches you to see such that you’re not simply looking with your eyes. It teaches you things I haven’t yet begun to grasp in the slightest. But the more I study Tao, the more I feel it has to teach me. And the more I am able to learn, the better I’ll be able to see. In ten years, the world should be all the more amazing to behold.
And what will I do with my vision as I continue to refine it? Great things, I hope, though I can never say for sure what might come out of me. One thing is for sure, though – so long as it is in my capacity to keep shooting, keep thinking, keep doing everything I do right now and more, I will do it. What that means in real-life terms, your guess is as good as mine, but dammit I intend to find out.
