Daoist Hand Gestures, downloaded from longhumountain.com
Sometime around 1970 -- yes, that long ago! -- Marshall McLuhan, the influential Canadian media and technology theorist, published a subscription newsletter, in which he wrote about current research interests and divulged up-to-the-minute information and insights -- "early warnings", as it were -- reflecting his current thinking. That newsletter was only available by postal or "snail mail" in those days, and would occasionally arrive packaged with some very interesting, non-print materials. One of those adjuncts was a deck of playing cards, which McLuhan titled "Distant Early Warning". Each card in the deck was printed with an image, along with a brief, pithy quotation from the musings of the master himself – something on the order of his book, War and Peace in the Global Village. One of those cards – now lost to time and to multiple household relocations -- featured an image, long forgotten, and was decorated with the following text: "Where the hand of man never set foot." This was likely intended as tongue-in-cheek, but it expressed a profoundly important idea regarding the not-altogether-salutary impact of homo sapiens on planetary well-being, then and now.
Flash forward to the present moment, when in Tai Chi class one day a student asked the teacher, "What do I do with my thumb?" I believe that any practitioner of Tai Chi would understand the significance of this seemingly innocuous question, and it did indeed prompt an interesting (and helpful) peroration from the teacher. Who noted -- summarizing here -- that the thumb is, for the most part, the root of evil in the world, enabling, as it does, the grasping hand -- the hand that plunders, the hand that "taketh away". Which is to say, the very hand that McLuhan was invoking that many years ago. In Tai Chi, rather, the thumb is deemphasized, the hand open, not clenched, throughout much of the form. In Tai Chi, the more appropriate analogy is the infant's fist, which conveys softness -- and receptivity.
It may be helpful to know that Tai Chi is grounded in the Dao, and more specifically, in the Dao De Jing, the profoundly significant Daoist work produced during China's Warring States Period (roughly the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE). That text is attributed to the mysterious Laozi, about whom not much is known outside of legend, except that he was contemporary with Confucius, may even have met and conversed with the better-known sage, and thus was likely active on the front end of that highly significant historical period. Alongside Tao Chi practice per se, there is a system of hand or finger signals associated with Daoist religion, and more specifically with Daoist magic. The illustration reproduced here depicts four of these gestures, or mudras. Note that the thumb is not prominent, or is suppressed, in at least three of the four frames (with the possible exception of the one in the bottom left quadrant).
With these mudras in mind, consider the following couplet from Cheng Man Ch'ing, a Tai Chi master, from a book titled The Essence of Tai Chi Ch'uan:
The whole body is a hand
and the hand is not a hand.
An alternative, possibly, to McLuhan's epigram! Then the foot enters the scene, also thanks to Master Cheng, who takes the next step, as it were:
When the foot wants to advance
first shift backwards.
Samuel Johnson's dictionary offers the following definition of 'thumb':
The hand is divided into four fingers bending forwards, and one opposite bending backwards, called the thumb, to join with them severally or united, whereby it is fitted to lay hold of objects.
This entry does not align with Tai Chi philosophy (or with McLuhan), but I do like Johnson's reference to the "backward tilt" of the thumb. (There is another word, "pollex", which is the more formal anatomical term for the thumb. There's no entry for "pollex" in Johnson.) I also like the blunter sound of the word thumb, which I think is the key word in the following poem. When I first wrote the words down, they struck me as a sort of nonsense verse, on the order of Edward Lear, perhaps. But I suspect they may mean other than that.
There is current interest in something called "walking Tai Chi", just as several decades ago, "walking meditation" was in vogue, popularized by the late Vietnamese monk Thich Nach Hahn. There's also "walking breath", yet another meditative practice, with breathing adjusted to rhythmic stepping. I had none of these in mind when the following poem came along. But I've long been interested in "walking poetry", a centuries-old tradition in Japan (think Matsuo Basho). This is a deeply-rooted practice, possibly not unlike the others mentioned here. I interviewed a chainsaw carver a decade or two ago, and wrote a profile of him for a museum exhibit and catalog. In that piece, trying to grasp the deeply integrated nature of his work, I wrote, "Standing barefoot amidst the dust and danger of the spewing saw, he acquires a rough patina of chippings, embodying his own process." This may be what the Japanese walking poets do: embody their process; their poiesis. And I think this poem may gesture towards that embodiment, among other possible entanglements.
One foot
Next foot
Where foot go?
Foot go together
Foot go apart
Foot go somewhere
Foot go nowhere
Mean something
Mean nothing
One word
Next word
Where word go?
Word go together
Word go apart
Word go nowhere
Word go somewhere
Mean something
Mean nothing
Foot
Word
May be same
But word have thumb