Reading, reading...

(Books sent me by Richard) Zen poetry, and lives of the poets, of Han Shan, Basho and Ryokan, especially the last.  Zen poetry translated from another tongue seems doomed to lack both Zen and poetry, but Ryokan,  for all his appalling diarrhea and the crudity of his behavior during the Tea Ceremony, was a conscientious monk with a firm grasp of the non-arising and a marvelous way with kids.  From the library, I'm reading one James Geach's Galaxy, a perfectly delicious book by a real astronomer about the present state of the universe, for which I vote our author the Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle Prize for rendering a sometimes abstruse subject charmingly lucid--even, I imagine, to members of the Sex.

But there is more to say.  Firstly regarding Confucius and Confucianism.  I am, I dare say, one of the few Westerners (Round Eyes, Long Ears, Butter Stinks) who is actually fitted by nature to understand Confucius and appreciate where he's coming from, even while, on the whole, I rather abhor the doctrinaire ethico/esthetic moral code that has been erected around the few (and basically, I believe, wrong) tenets of his personal philosophy.  I do believe, for example, that the parent/child relationship is primary; but I think that Master 'Kung Fu-tzu stood things on their head by saying that it is the parents who ought to be venerated, when, in my view, it is the child quo magna reverentia debetur.  Most significantly, however, I fully get why music and ritual are (or should be) important in our lives and in our politics--only in place of the music of Shao, which Confucius found utterly perfect, "beautiful and good," I would put the music of Western Europe from approximately 1400 C.E. to December 22, 1894 (when Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune was first performed, and which was, arguably, the last occasion on which the first performance of a piece of Occidental Music was beautiful).  I don't agree with my alter ego that music (even Wagner) can be both beautiful and bad:  If it's beautiful it's good. At any rate, I understand from reading several biographies of Ryokan-san, that Confucianism, for all its inevitable god-awful inherent cruelty to women and children, is an academic subject which is studied, and for which institutions of higher learning issue degrees of certified competence--and I am as astonished and perplexed by this as I am to have learned that Marxism and Dialectical Materialism has a similar academic status--and that the lovely and intelligent Raïsa Gorbachev, to name but one, was actually a professor of Marxism.  How can things which basically aren't be academic disciplines?

Well then, secondly, I am deeply perturbed by Dr. Geach's enlightening exposition of the subject of Dark Matter, based as it inexorably is on the speed of rotation of the galactic disk--and either you believe Kepler's Third Law or you don't, and I as a rational person have no choice but to do so.  And there are even pictures of halos of Dark Matter, which I find utterly persuasive.  So.  But "The Physics has just not caught up with the fact of Dark Matter," makes me want to shout "Epicycles!"