Other people say yes, they say no.
They talk about what’s good and what’s bad.
Can anyone tell me the difference?
What frightens the others
Should it frighten me too? 5
So confused, so barren!
And there’s no end in sight.
All of them run to their chi-chi parties
Like they were crashing some epic buffet.
I alone keep still 10
Eyes barely blinking
As if I were an infant
Who’s too young even to smile.
How tiresome it all is!
I’m left feeling as though I were homeless. 15
They all grab their share and more
While I come off like a chump
Empty handed and clueless.
All they want is to dazzle each other
And I get dimmer by the day. 20
They play this angle against that angle
But it all seems the same to me.
I have come unmoored.
I drift and get tossed about, a skiff at sea in a gale.
All of them keep busy, pursuing their own agendas 25
And I’m like some dumb yokel.
I remain different from all the rest.
I treasure the milk from the mother’s breast.
***
COMMENTARY
This remarkable first-person poem is one of the most celebrated in the Dao De Jing. While it is unique for its sustained confessional quality, poem 20 is also acutely aware of social realities, and Laozi describes in bitter detail how you appear to the herd once you stop running with it. Because when you sit in the center of the track rather than chase some mechanical rabbit, the pack thinks you’re a jerk; so do the people in the stands, making and losing their money on the pack’s labor. All of them pride themselves on not being babies, yet the non-discriminating mental state given voice in poem 20 is not unlike the way an infant sees the world, as we’re told in lines 12 and 13. That’s why Laozi asks in poem 10, can you become the newborn, and devotes poem 55 to the power bestowed upon infancy, the stage when the human mind is most free of conditioned responses. It’s natural for him therefore to end poem 20 with the image of a nursing infant.
Links To:
The Classic of Dao and De by Laozi: Contents
For more on Daoism, see:
Film Dreams: Frank Capra
Music: KALW Radio Show #3, Ancient China in 20th-Century Music
Music: SFCR Radio Show #8, Daoism in Western Music, part 1
Music: SFCR Radio Show #9, Daoism in Western Music, part 2
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 