We appear to have more than one common sense idea of what is and what is not real in this world. First, there is the tangible core of real objects to touch and to measure and to mould with our hands. We know also well that some of these tangibly real things are alive and others are dead. Surrounding this core, there lies a sphere of things already a degree less real to our every day minds: the molecules and elementary particles, weightless light and force fields of which we know predictably through scientific experimentation; far distant galaxies or stars may equally belong to this sphere of reality. Then, still further removed, there is mind, thoughts and feelings, there is information and form. Now we are so far from tangibly real objects that some people have held the view that we have reached another reality altogether, perhaps res cogitans facing off to res extensa, or the accidental dancing on top of the substantial.

The standard scientific worldview orders these spheres of reality somewhat differently, first with mind or form of brains or stars being reduced to cells and other macroscopic things with their dynamics, then to microscopic objects and finally to fields and particles that pop in and out of existence all the time. For example, the form of molecules is seen to be shaped and made real by the strength of atomic bonds and related chemical affinities; and the colourful pattern of the butterfly's wings becomes real through the microscopic diffusion and cross-reactions of molecules in tissues guided by patterns of gene activation. This widely held worldview is ordered by causality and shaped by predictability and controllability, but it retains an uneasy appearance of being incomplete. The aspiration to reach exhaustive reducibility of mind on matter and elementary forces has not yet been demonstrated clearly.

The staggered degrees of reality, whether ordered by causality or by how close things are to use by hand, may have a messy or unsatisfactory appearance. Perhaps for this reason, some people perceive the need to impress the seal of one reality back onto this jumble by putting it into the all embracing hands of one so-called ultimate reality, of one god or one principle. At the other extreme, reality may become evacuated altogether from all things by a proposed reduction to nothing, to the emptiness chanted about in the Lotus Sutra. Both ends of these extreme proposals appear misguided; for we can always take a distinction, such as that of real and not real, and move the dividing line off so far into the distance that the far side of it shrinks and shrinks in our minds until in a final leap to the limit it disappears. But with it then disappears the distinction itself, it becomes of no use to our minds, where all is real or all is nothing. Such approaches will remain barren.

The poem tells us instead that we must live both with real and not real right here in the middle of our world. World is not one or the other; it is both. There is the blank, as the poet says, and there is light in this world. There is me, at a time, and there is not me, at a time. This indeed we all know as well as we may know anything; and yet we do not appear to grasp this as fundamentally as it deserves to be taken. The poem says that right in the middle of our world, there is the blank, suffusing the world and not only being far off perhaps as unfathomable black singularities and faint horizons of the fabric of space and time. The blank is right across a fine line wherever and whenever we look, part of the fabric of reality. And right in the middle, next to it, there is what is not blank, the ten thousand things of the poet Lao Tsu, also suffusing the world and not only far off perhaps as the unfathomable bang of creation. The distinction of real and not real is working its way incessantly right in the middle of our world. Because of it, it is that we can see. It is us who with our minds carry this distinction into the middle of the world, just as this distinction - at work in the middle of the world - carries us with our minds in turn.

Twice the word choice speaks to us in this month's poem. Choice is said to play a role in the unfolding from the quiver blank; it is also called a gangway game. I read it thus: that choice lives right in the middle of our world, too, precisely where the blank and all things under the sun meet everywhere and all the time across a fine line. Famously, Jean Buridan's hungry donkey would not make a choice between two equally distant and equally appetising heaps of hay, and so it died. Not so with our world. Our poet says that it is entwined all as choice, irreducibly and fundamentally, in a game of choosing what shines for a while and what fades, crossing the gangway from what is possible to being actual and back again in its course, with the cuts on cuts of these choices unfolding the ten thousand things from the blank. We build a house, or not. The big cat runs after the gazelle, or not. The chick picks the corn on the right, or not. The lightning bolt strikes our house, or not. The particle of light hits the counter, or not. There is no going behind choice; we will search in vain for a mechanism which might unmask choice as a fake. In this world, choice is reality.

It is striking that the poem is constructed in a formal and very orderly manner, with symmetries and reflexions on several formal and semantic levels. The verses rhyme on the ABBA scheme while their melodies swing on a ABAB pattern. All three stanzas are connected by the common rhyme link of the middle verses, like a back bone. We also find alliterations and rhyming across semantically distant pairs, for example the quest linked to pausing rest. We discover the significance of this if we now perform an usual, yet perfectly necessary logical step: we realise that this poem does not just speak about this world, but that it also is in this world, really, as one of the ten thousand things. If we therefore take it at face value, if the poem is in this world and at the same time speaks correctly about this world and about us in the world, then it must be what it says and say what it is. The poetic form now becomes a message; and the message becomes form.

For example, the ordered form of the poem, with its rhyming back bone across stanzas, now says to us that there is an ordered back bone running through each thing, that there are interlocking symmetries in each thing. The reference to chained events points to the form of all things, including now also that of the poem itself: verses as chained events. The choiceful world is no anarchy. In every choice, we find enchainment and we find discontinuity. This is again the insight that the world knows no absolutes, that we must live in a world of no absolutes. Nowhere is this world either just smooth or just abrupt. We read: The cuts are enchained and in one form caught.

There is a frisson running through these verses which also takes hold of us when we have a close look at this month's photograph, taken by James Henson. There we see in one picture an old man, reading, and in the background a young man shuffling off to some evening entertainment after work, and between them a middle aged man rushing to board a train to take him home, dutifully, after a day's work. Due to the tricks of light reflected and refracted in a window pane, the old man is fleetingly visible only because the middle aged man rushing along behind him. This image condenses the choices before us: carefree youth, how it could be, the alienation of middle age when we have jettisoned choice in favour of duty, the haranguing of old age, how it could have been. We look on in mute unrest, we look at our own choices.

Then the poem transforms this unrest into a sudden image of blinding energy and playfulness: we are a lightning bold, we span an arch from blank back to blank, in one form caught, as the enchained choices that we make. In making our choices, consciously or not, we participate in the gangway game of reality. We live the very fabric of reality. Reality is not primarily what is there to touch or to predict; it is the choices that we make, that are being made all the time and everywhere around us between what is possible and what is actual. We are not just some large macroscopic fluke of dancing elementary particles; we are in and we are like the world, as we live and choose or fail, and the lightning bolt is our relative. And the poem is our relative, as it emerges from the sea of whispering possibility through its versed steps to sink again into the blank sea, arrows sunk and buoyed. There is indeed a cold air in this, frisson, but from it are born responsibility, solace invigorating, and a subtle feeling of being back home. Banished are unrest, gloom or restless loneliness. At the place where the poem ends, we pick up, dust off our shoes and breathe more freely. Enchainment here. Choice.

Valete, Amici.

William A. Wayman
Chief Editor
SEP 2011