The Years of Rice and Salt (80 page)

“For we see immediately that what we call history has at least two meanings to it: first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in time, and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.

“These stories are of different kinds, of course, and people like Rabindra and Scholar White have categorized them. First come eyewitness accounts and chronicles of events made soon after things happened, also documents and records—these are history as wheat still in the field, as yet unharvested or baked, thus given beginnings or ends or causes. Only later come these baked histories that attempt to coordinate and reconcile source materials, that not only describe but explain.

“Later still come the works that eat and digest these baked accounts, and attempt to reveal what they are doing, what their relationship to reality is, how we use them, that kind of thing—philosophies of history, epistemologies, what have you. Many digestions use methods pioneered by Ibrahim al-Lanzhou, even when they denounce his results. Certainly there is great sustenance in going back to al-Lanzhou's texts and seeing what he had to say. In one useful passage, for instance, he points out that we can differentiate between explicit arguments, and more deeply hidden unconscious ideological biases. These latter can be teased out by identifying the mode of emplotment chosen to tell the tale. The emplotment scheme al-Lanzhou used comes from Rabindra's typology of story types, a rather simplistic scheme, but fortunately, as al-Lanzhou pointed out, historians are often fairly naive storytellers, and use one or another of Rabindra's basic types of emplotment rather schematically, compared to the great novelists like Cao Xueqin or Murasaki, who constantly mix them. Thus a history like Than Oo's is what some call ‘Burmese history,' rather literally in this case, but that I would prefer to call ‘dharma history,' being a romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being. It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana successfully achieved. Thus Burmese history, or Shambala tales, or any teleological history that asserts we are all progressing in some way, is dharma history.

“The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to the Five Great Pessimisms, or the nihilism of Shu Shen, or the antidharma of Buddha's rival Purana Kassapa, people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born.

“These two modes of emplotment represent end-point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. It might be thought these then represent the only two possible modes, but inside these extremes Rabindra identified two other modes of emplotment, which he called tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers, and Rabindra suggested they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan—this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring.

“Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. Scholar White said of them, they tell the story of humanity face-to-face with reality itself, therefore facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, there is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be.”

At this point in his lecture Zhu Isao paused, and looked around the room until he had located Bao, and nodded at him; and though it seemed they had only been speaking of abstract things, of the shapes stories took, Bao felt his heart clench within him.

Zhu proceeded: “Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists' yin-yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness.

“The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn't take up the challenge, it isn't life speaking.

“But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will.

“This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy.” Zhu stopped, held up his hands, perplexed. “Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.”

Zhu Isao's own predilection
was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature. He was always inviting Bao and some others from the class, including the league's Minister for Health of the Natural World, to the rooms provided for him during his stay, and these small gatherings were sparked by his laughter and curiosity about things. Even his research amused him. He had had a great many books shipped down from Beijing, so that every room of his apartment was filled like a warehouse. Because of his growing conviction that history should be the story of everyone who had ever lived, he was now studying anthologies of biography as a genre, and he had many examples of the form in his apartment. This explained the tremendous number of volumes standing everywhere, in tall unsteady stacks. Zhu picked up one huge tome, almost too heavy for him to lift: “This is a first volume,” he said with a grin, “but I've never found the rest of the series. A book like this is only the antechamber to an entire unwritten library.”

The collection-of-lives genre seemed to have begun, he said as he tapped the piles affectionately, in religious literatures: collections of the lives of Christian saints and Islamic martyrs, also Buddhist texts that described lives through long sequences of reincarnations, a speculative exercise that Zhu clearly enjoyed very much: “Dharma history at its purest, a kind of protopolitics. Plus they can be so funny. You see a literalist like Dhu Hsien trying to match up his subjects' death and birth dates exactly, so that he creates strings of prominent historical actors through several reincarnations, asserting that he can tell they have always been one soul by what they do, but the difficulties of getting the dates to match up cause him in the end to select some odd additions to his sequences to make them all match life to life. Finally he has to theorize a ‘work hard then relax' pattern in these immortals, to justify those who alternate lives as geniuses and generals with careers as minor portrait artists or cobblers. But the dates always match up!” Zhu grinned delightedly.

He tapped other tall piles that were examples of the genre he was studying: Ganghadara's “Forty-six Transmigrations,” the Tibetan text “Twelve Manifestations of Padmasambhava,” the guru who established Buddhism in Tibet; also the “Biography of the Gyatso Rimpoche, Lives One Through Nineteen,” which brought the Dalai Lama up to the present; Bao had once met this man, and had not realized then that his full biography would take up so many volumes.

Zhu Isao also had in his apartment copies of Plutarch's “Lives,” and Liu Xiang's “Biographies of Exemplary Women,” from about the same time as the Plutarch; but he admitted that he was finding these texts not as interesting as the reincarnation chronicles, which in certain cases spent as much time on their subjects' time in the bardo and the other five lokas as they did on their time as humans. He also liked the “Autobiography of the Wandering Jew,” and the “Testaments of the Trivicum Jati,” and a beautiful volume, “Two Hundred and Fifty-three Travelers,” as well as a scurrilous-looking collection, possibly pornographic, called “Tantric Thief Across Five Centuries.” All of these Zhu described to his visitors with great enthusiasm. They seemed to him to hold some kind of key to the human story, assuming there could be any such thing: history as a simple accumulation of lives. “After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.”

This moment, Zhu said, had become the organizing principle and perhaps the obsession of the Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink, who had collected the lives in his reincarnation compendium using something like the clinamen moment to choose his exemplars, as each entry in his collection contained a moment when the subjects, always reincarnated with names that began with the same letters, came to crossroads in their lives and made a swerve away from what they might have been expected to do.

“I like the naming device,” Bao remarked, leafing through one volume of this collection.

“Well, Old Red Ink explains in one marginalia that it is merely a mnemonic for the ease of the reader, and that of course in reality every soul comes back with every physical particular changed. No telltale rings, no birthmarks, no same names—he would not have you think his method was anything like the old folk tales, oh no.”

The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had gotten into the habit of buying any books he came across that seemed required by their subject matter to be short, often so short that their titles would scarcely fit on their spines. Thus “Secrets to Successful Marriage,” or “Good Reasons to Have Hope for the Future,” or “Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts.”

“But I have not read them, I must admit. They exist only for their titles, which say it all. They could be blank inside.”

Later, outside on his balcony, Bao sat next to Zhu watching the city flow beneath them. They drank cup after cup of green tea, talking about many different things, and as the night grew late, and Zhu feeling pensive, it seemed, Bao said to him, “Do you ever think of Kung Jianguo? Do you ever think of those times anymore?”

“No, not very often,” Zhu admitted, looking at him directly. “Do you?”

Bao shook his head. “I don't know why. It's not like it's so very painful to recall. But it seems so long ago.”

“Yes. Very long.”

“I see you still have a bit of a limp from that day.”

“Yes, I do. I don't like it. I walk slower and it's not so bad. But it is still there. I set off metal detectors in the high-security zones.” He laughed. “But it is a long time ago. So many lives ago—I get them all confused, don't you?” And he smiled.

One of Zhu Isao's last sessions
was a discussion of what purpose the study of history might have, and how it might help them now in their current predicament.

Zhu was tentative in this matter. “It may be no help at all,” he said. “Even if we gained a complete understanding of what happened in the past, it might not help us. We are still constrained in our actions in the present. In a way we can say that the past has mortgaged the future, or bought it, or tied it up, in laws and institutions and habits. But perhaps it helps to know as much as we can, just to suggest ways forward. You know, this matter of residual and emergent that we discussed—that each period in history is composed of residual elements of past cultures, and emergent elements that later on will come more fully into being—this is a powerful lens. And only the study of history allows one to make this distinction, if it is possible at all. Thus we can look at the world we live in, and say, these things are residual laws from the age of the Four Great Inequalities, still binding us. They must go. On the other hand we can look at more unfamiliar elements of our time, like China's communal ownership of land, and say, perhaps these are emergent qualities that will be more prominent in the future; they look helpful; I will support these. Then again, there may be residual elements that have always helped us, and need to be retained. So it is not as simple a matter as ‘new is good, old is bad.' Distinctions need to be made. But the more we understand, the finer we can make the distinctions.

“I begin to think that this matter of ‘late emergent properties' that the physicists talk about when they discuss complexity and cascading sensitivities is an important concept for historians. Justice may be a late emergent property. And maybe we can glimpse the beginnings of it emerging; or maybe it emerged long ago, among the primates and protohumans, and is only now gaining leverage in the world, aided by the material possibility of postscarcity. It is hard to say.”

He smiled again his little smile. “Good words to end this session.”

His final meeting
was called “What Remains to Be Explained,” and consisted of questions that he was still mulling over after all his years of study and contemplation. He made comments on his list of questions, but not many, and Bao had to write as fast as he could to get the questions themselves recorded: