I am fascinated by words in other languages that express concepts you really can't in ours. The Chinese word li can be roughly translated as beauty. However, doing so misses out on the complexity of the idea. Li also directly means the pattern of colors in a piece of jade or the grain of a piece of wood. It means beauty, but beauty of a specific type, such as you would find in these things. It's sort of an order in disorder in order thing, raised to another power when you consider that you can only see the li in a piece of jade when it is cut and polished and the li of a piece of wood if it has been cut from a tree and worked by human hands.
In Xenocide (*spoilers*), Qing-Jao is directly connected to li by her compulsions to trace the path of wood grains. In a way, she is writing what is unwritable, the beauty of these grains. However, for as long as we get to see her, she doesn't comprehend the li. She approached the wood grains, not for their own sake or for the beauty the have, but as a means to an end. To do so is, at least in her life, to destroy li. By applying the wood grains to another purpose, she denies their meaning and the meaning of their li.
However, she was not free when we saw her. She was a slave to her OCD. Meaning can only come from someone who is free. Meaning is the secret heart of the individual. The central human capacity, that which separates us from animals, is our ability to create meaning. An animal or someone who is a slave in their own mind cannot see li. To them it is just meaningless variations in color or lines on a board.
Beyond that, an animal cannot experience li in themselves. In their world, there is no order to the chaos. Each action they take is determined by the how they are made and what they experienced before. It is only when a person can see or rather create meaning from the apparent disconnected disordered parts of their life that they can really be said to be free, that they can see their life's li.
While she was a slave, Qing-Jao could not see li. She could not see beyond the reality of Jane as a computer program, of Jane as a pattern of electric storage and ansible connections whose only meaning is given to her by the people who made her or by the experiences that she's had. Since, for Qing-Jao, Jane has no li, she has no life. Ironically it is Wang-mu, the servant girl, who shows herself to be more a free person than her enslaved mistress. She grasps a part of Jane's li.
Our view of Qing-Jao's inner life ends while she is still a slave, even though she's been freed of her physical bonds. However, we learn that she continues to trace the wood grains.
There's the thing, though. She chooses to continue her tracing. Is this a sign of her freedom? Perhaps not right away. However, as the years move on does she not change from the enslaved girl she was? She encounters li every day and now her external reasons are fading away. Could she not come to appreciate the task for it's own sake? Does she not begin to comprehend li in the wood grains that she ceaselessly traces? Does she not come, little by little, to give her life meaning outside of a submission to outside forces?
I hope and believe she does. If li can be seen in any thing, it must be able to be seen in all things. Qing-Jao's life had some major flaws, but, if you see those flaws as part of the pattern, you see them as part of her li.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
It is clear that under the OCD the Godspoken were more profoundly slaves than the servant class. However after the OCD was gone Qing-Jao continued to trace woodgrains out of vanity not desire for beauty.
Her motives are outlined, she could not bear to have been wrong, about Jane, about Congress, about the OCD. It came down to pride in being the one with the strength to win, even though Wang-mu was the source of so many key insights.
So Path ended up with a goddess that is vain, prideful, resentful, secretly envious, and finally set an example of wasting her potential. Not quite as bad as our God leaving us the example of Suicide but still bad enough.
After a time her Tracing was just habit, deliberate insanity, no more holy then walking the dog at 3:30 every day. If there was anyone who cared about her, including Jane or Wang-mu or her father they would have drugged her, taken her away from wood grain floors and beaten her until she performed some useful function and achieved enough humility to admit to being wrong.
She died a spoiled little girl.
BC
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Walking the dog at 3:30 is not meaningful?
If they cared for her they would have beaten her? (edit: I put "loved" by mistake)
My perspective on Qing-jao is that her father promised her mother to raise her to serve the gods. Fei-tzu, the father, reviled the gods for the illness and death of his wife. I "blame" this situation for Qing-jao's disconnectedness from the truth.
But even Qing-jao's betrayal of the truth in ordering Jane's destruction brought about Jane's liberation in leaving the ansible net, in addition to giving Peter and young Val souls. Is that what she meant to do? Of course not. But then, the brothers of Joseph (of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) were trying to kill him also.
[ February 12, 2004, 12:37 AM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
Yes Beaten, Spare the rod and spoil the child is not just a pretty phrase it is hard common sense.
I do not Condemn her for what she did, I am not saying beat her for exposing Jane, I am saying correct her from wasting her life and potential on a meaningless ritual.
Walking the dog may have meaning, it certainly does to the dog, however it is not Holy.
I would have had my daughter declared Non Comp Mentis and relocated by Jane to some other world. Perhaps one where nobody brought her food or water to allow her to continue her vain stupidity. At least she would die quickly for continuing instead of lingering as a cruel joke.
BC
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
When the "child" is 16, it is a little late, don't you think?
Though I forget, can folks be transported involuntarily using Outside travel? It seems this might have happened toward the end of COTM. The fact that Quara can be transported without noticing it even happened suggests personality defects are not a barrier.
[ February 12, 2004, 03:50 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Suneun (Member # 3247) on :
It's been a while since I've read the quartet, but I think I respected Qing-Jao when she remained steadfastly bound to the grain-drawing. There's something so spiritual to remain with a ritual when the compulsion is gone.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Whereas I found it deeply tragic, and ironic that a religion grew up around her foolish self-delusion.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
quote: Whereas I found it deeply tragic, and ironic that a religion grew up around her foolish self-delusion.
Amen to that.
quote: When the "child" is 16, it is a little late, don't you think?
5 years old or 16 a parent is still responsible, she might have been "emancipated" because of her professional ability to support herself, however that ended when she began tracing wood grains at all times, since it is not a job.
Any society that would not try to bring a 16 year old girl of great potential back from insane behavior is sick.
Of course after the plague brilliant young girls were as common as mud.
At the least I would have expected Jane to go to her in her Val body and shown her that she was wrong, that Jane must be a living soul to inhabit a body. Then a demonstration of her dazzling powers might have been able to give the impression of divinity to shatter her fixation.
I find it out of character that Jane did not at least try, perhaps in a sequal we will see Jane make the attempt and why she was thwarted.
BC
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
So if a person is very stubborn, it is the community's responsibility to reform them?
:Locks Bean Counter in an isolation chamber:
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
There is a differnce between Stubborn and Insane behavior. The Community has no responsibility to take action against any functioning adult. However the point that you have chosen to overlook is the fact that she was no longer functioning.
IE. She was not supporting herself, she was not cooking her own food, paying her bills, cleaning the toilets etc.
Nor was she an Adult.
IE. 16, living with Father, no formal Job (not by our standards anyway)
Her behavior was enabled by superstition rather then inhibited by compassion. When society has to take care of you, it gets to proscribe your activities.
Have I made this point or do you still not get it?
Her life was an intolerable waste. Her greatest achievement was not her own and it was undone anyway. A prophet in the desert living on honey and grasshoppers at least has to catch them. If they are brought to him by the faithful then he needs to prophesy for them. As near as I can tell she was a side show for years, a geek, until the people began to think her holy and thus locked her behavior into their myth system. She was vain but did not deserve her end.
BC
Posted by blacwolve (Member # 2972) on :
And yet society tolerated and even venerated her actions.
I have to honor someone who is so faithful to what she believes, even if it is false.
Posted by TheClone (Member # 6141) on :
Take her away from her wood grain floors and make a martyr of her? The one person who still heard the gods was being punished for it? How would the public see it? The godspoken had been tainted and were no longer hearing the voices of the gods, and the only one who did was locked up? They weren't seen as being crippled by their OCD, they were seen as leaders and heros in the public eye. What would they be more willing to accept, everything they were based on was a lie? Or that their godspoken had been, save for one young girl, rejected.
I think that what she did was foolish, but that her upbringing left that as her only path. Not to say that she couldn't have helped Jane instead of hurting her, but had she done that, it would have been out of her character.
Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :
Li is fractality. Fractality is a strong force shaping reality. It may well be that Qing-Jao could see the greater reality through study of the small fractal portion represented in the wood grain.
BTW - Both Japanese sand/gravel gardens and JacksonPollock paintings are strongly fractal. As is Nature.
Posted by Spike (Member # 6198) on :
Qing-Jao was falsely raised, as were many of the people, and she bit devotion into what she was taught. With that their are two problems, the girl was so involved and strict to adhering to her religions rules, especially since she was God-spoken, that nothing anyone could say would affect how she felt about it. The second is that the religion itself called for no opportune for the people to have an open minded, reformative or defiant qualties in themselves. So the religion called for Qing-Jao to allow no other possibilities, and Qing-Jao followed the religion strictly.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
What everyone believes is false to some extent. And yet from these false beliefs, people can bring forth some amazing stuff. I don't know, I feel like, in later life, Qing-Jao was not entirely deluded, that over time she came to understand...something. I think that the people who collected her spoken thoughts did so at least in part because they found true wisdom in them.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
I assume Bean Counter was making a grim joke when he considered it better to starve your child to death than permit her to continue in what seems like madness.
Is she causing anyone harm? Does she derive satisfaction from what she is doing?
History is full of hermits and ascetics who withdrew themselves from human society or from all rational comforts and associations. Were they insane, or holy? What's the dividing line?
Children do many things that strike their parents as insane or tragic. You realize, don't you, that in making the case for compulsion because of this "madness," you are making the case for compulsion of a child who "insanely" refuses heterosexual mating, or to accept the parent-chosen spouse, or any number of other behaviors that have been accounted "insane" by frustrated parents.
I think Han Qing-jao's continuing in her stubborn faith has a kind of holiness to it, not because the religion she serves is true, but because she is true to it.
Meanwhile, I absolutely loved the view of Qing-Jao and her "li" that was set forth at the beginning of this thread.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
"I think Han Qing-jao's continuing in her stubborn faith has a kind of holiness to it, not because the religion she serves is true, but because she is true to it."
Sincerity is a virtue. But that's all it is. Sincerity is not holy.
Sincerity in service to truth, now, that comes closer.
Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
quote: I think Han Qing-jao's continuing in her stubborn faith has a kind of holiness to it, not because the religion she serves is true, but because she is true to it.
Man, no one can sum things up in one sentence like Mr. Card.
I remember reading the first chapters of Pastwatch, and was sitting there wondering why these people living in a Utopia would sacrifice everything in their world to change the past. Everthing turned out ok in the end, right? Going and changing things could conceivable prevent the utopia from existing. But, then I read Tagiri's last thoughts from that chapter:
"Tagiri looked at her husband, her children, and more than once she thought, What if some stranger from a faraway place came and stole my son from me and made a slave of him, and I never saw him again? What if a conquering army from a place unheard of came and murdered my husband and raped my daughter? And what if, in some other place, happy people watched us as it happened, and did nothing to help us, for fear it might endanger their own happiness? What would I think of them? What kind of people would they be?"
Wham! When I read that, all of my questions and objections and arguments vanished in a puff of perspective.
Ahh, the power of cogent writing. How I envy you, Mr. Card.
Posted by mothertree (Member # 4999) on :
quote: Sincerity is not holy.
What do you define as holy, for frame of reference? I believe in balance of course, that the object of devotion be as true as the zealot is to it. Many people think terrorists are more sincere than those who live their lives through with all its obstacles, uncertainty, and complication.
I would say, rather than sincere, that Han Qing-Jiao was submitted her whole self to the grain tracing. She was like an addict who was "magically" relieved of her addiction but continued in it anyway. The question is whether it was a bad addiction or a good addiction (as Dr. Andrew Weil puts it). What is the difference between Han Qing-Jiao and the woman who bought the happiness potion from the slick medicine man instead of the authentic peddler? Because Han Qing-Jiao was using her free will while the happiest day woman had none.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
There comes a point when belief in a cause ceases to be a virtue, and degrades into mere stubbornness or fanaticism. Without comparison otherwise, what can we call the actions of the German soldiers who fought on even in the very streets of Berlin? They must have known their cause was utterly lost, yet they struggled to the last merely to kill one more Slavic 'Untermensch'. Devotion to a cause, certainly. Admirable? I think not.
Edit : Indeed, there is much to be said for the philosophy of the Hawaian-derived culture in COTM. Sooner or later you have to say "Enough, already!" Being able to recognise that point, now there's a virtue.
[ May 03, 2005, 08:08 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
Posted by mothertree (Member # 4999) on :
I guess it's been a while since we had a Godwin's Law refresher. I don't know if This thread is any good, but in came up in the search. But as to your content, the goose-stepping morons choose not to exercise their free will. I'm saying Han did.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
But they did choose! It takes a deliberate act of will to keep fighting; the natural human instinct is to find a comfy hole and sit it out. You can hardly claim that the Nazi control apparatus was so skilful that it could keep tabs on every soldier in the chaos of the fighting in Berlin.
In fact, I'm not sure how you can claim that someone did not, in any given situation, use their free will. Even if someone is holding a gun to your head, you can choose to be shot rather than obey. Isn't that free will? Likewise, you choose to obey a mad dictator, or to gas Jews, or whatever. These are not good choices by any means, but they are free-willed choices.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
"But as to your content, the goose-stepping morons choose not to exercise their free will. I'm saying Han did."
I'm not sure I like the Nazi reference, here -- but I think it's clear that those Nazis who chose to fight to the last man were using their free will, out of a "noble" dedication to their flawed cause. They were clearly sincere in their devotion to nation and duty -- and more clear-headed about it than Qing-Jao, who merely refused to acknowledge the truth; these Nazis knew they were going to lose, but fought anyway, while Qing-Jao just transferred her motivation from genetics to self-delusion.
I think it's a shame that sincerity and devotion are such rare things nowadays that we respect them whenever they appear, even in service to the Unmaker.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
quote: I assume Bean Counter was making a grim joke when he considered it better to starve your child to death than permit her to continue in what seems like madness.
A sixteen year old girl who is perfectly capable of feeding herself but refuses to is throwing a temper tantrum. I would have gone limp on her, pulled the staff, and at least forced her to perform the needful functions of everday life, forced her to earn enough money to stay alive, then if she wanted to trace wood grains in her spare time, more power too her.
quote:Is she causing anyone harm? Does she derive satisfaction from what she is doing
Hmmm this is not really a moral standard, this is a moral floor. A moral standard should derive from the question 'is this the best that she could do?' In effect by denying her genius to her fellow man, she may have caused incalculable harm, is it not the ultimate sin to turn ones back on ones fellow man?
quote:History is full of hermits and ascetics who withdrew themselves from human society or from all rational comforts and associations. Were they insane, or holy? What's the dividing line
Hermits are self supporting, I love hermits, I have a great plan to become one that involves a mansion, an acre or so of photo-votalic cells, a dish and a forty acre farm. Holy men, well as a Catholic I think of Nuns and Monks both of which live lives of service too the world. Going into the desert and living off bugs and lizards is self sufficiant I will grant, but until you come back and write the 'On Walden Pond' of the pole sitting dude in the desert, you are not a holy man, so I guess it comes down to this, the answer to your question is the all to familiar "When he gets published!"
BC
Posted by mothertree (Member # 4999) on :
I think Han was a tragic figure- not uniquely admirable- and I don't hold with the notion that she was simply being a brat. Besides, I'm sure Starways Congress gave her ample remuneration for her service in identifying Jane. (As far as Bean Counter's objections go). And as for the Nazi thing... uh, whatever. You're right. Everyone is a Nazi but you.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Now, mothertree, that's not what I said. Why don't you read my post, and see if you can come up with an actual response? If you want a different example of devotion in an obviously false cause, how about suicide bombers? Or even those American politicians who blocked civil-rights legislation for such a long time?
Incidentally, lest you think my examples contrived, I have to choose something that we both agree is wrong. If I were arguing with someone rational, I would point to people who dies for the Christian faith, but I doubt you'd agree their actions were idiotic.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
"I think Han was a tragic figure- not uniquely admirable- and I don't hold with the notion that she was simply being a brat."
I don't think anyone here is really suggesting that she was just being bratty, pooka. Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Maybe I'm not saying what I mean well (or people just don't agree).
I don't think that there's reason to be sure that Qing-Jao was mor enlightened when she died than when we leave her perspective in the book. I'm more sort of hoping that she is. We are all of us constantly deluded, by others and by ourselves, and we all do things that we really shouldn't. That's life. It's not a cartesian line. It's a lot more like the path of grains on a piece of wood.
Were Qing-Jao to continue to perform her devotions as this incomprehensible action that the gods want her to, I don't she would have grasped li at all. however, I don't think that this is likely. She had an active, inquisitive mind. It seems likely to me that she would have changed a great deal over time and that, as her entire life was now formed around these wood grains, that she could have come to an understanding of the concept of li and how it relates to things beyond the boards she was tracing.
Mindless devotion, no matter how strong, achieves nothing more than what a robot could do. It's a board with straight lines. But an active, creative mind attached to a devotional frame, no matter what it is, is something that I can see as being very productive.
---
The question that comes to my mind when reading over this thread is, "What makes a prayer false or misguided?" Positing one true god (which I'm not willing to actually grant), are there still not prayers to other gods that are true, productive and valid? And aren't there still plenty of prayers to that God that even while of the right form, are false?
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
To throw another issue into the mix, consider the Polish soldiers during World War II. They fought German tanks and automatic weapons with horses, non-automatic guns, and swords. They were devoted to a cause too and fought against certain defeat. Are they the same as the Nazi's fighting on the ruined streets of Berlin? If not, what makes them different?
Heck, the Norse culture held that only through death in a fight again overwhelming odds could one become a hero. Their ideal was the person who refused to yield no matter what forces were arrayed again him.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
I'm not sure how you're using li there emerac. The way I'm reading it, it's coming across to me more like duty. I'm not sure how the concept of beauty coming from the disorder coming from the order coming from the disorder fits in. Could you explain how you meant that.
And yeah, I wasn't all that impressed with that column, even excepting the false statement he made about my alma mater.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
emerac, I still don't see it, but that certainly doesn't mean you're wrong. To me the statements you are talking about show her treating tracing as a tool and her relationship to it as one of submission, not one of appreciation of beauty.
I'd forgotten about the tracing lines in her flesh thing. That's interesting. Thanks for reminding me.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
emerac, I can see beauty in that, but I don't see li. If the experience is just a tool used to achieve some end, it's not li. Li only comes from an appreciation of the experience itself.
In Qing-Jao's case, I don't see either. Her "meaning" is a submissive self-delusion that she herself is meaningless. Nothing, no learning, no understanding, comes of it but more submissiveness and psychological self-mutilation. She's not closer to the gods or her mother; she only thinks that they way to get clsoe to them is to find herself worthless and perform a meaningless ritual.
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