#chinoiserie.

[grantimatter]

When there are illnesses, trouble with officials, disputes, or the impoverishment on households, proclaim this scripture and its precepts and command the devils with a divine spell. If there is a single demon who fails to depart and wantonly proclaims himself a great god, and if those receiving tutelary sacrifices in the wilds, the masters of popular temples, the dead generals of defeated armies, or demons who have escaped from the rosters come to aid this evil king, causing illness and pain to the common people and refusing to obey the great law, the killing gods of the ten directions will collect them together and execute them. If they obstinately return, indulging in violence and devoting themselves to spreading suffering, poison, and harm, the demon kings will behead them and the devil kings personally smash them into a myriad pieces. They are not permitted to pardon them. Do this speedily, in accordance with the statutes and commands.

From The Scripture of Divine Spells (Taishang dongyuan shenzhou jing), as quoted by Terry Kleeman in Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities.

Chinese demons - gui - are not totally demonic in the Western sense.

[grantimatter]

Tonino: What exactly do you mean by “wild”? Turner: I mean something that is self-willed, autonomous, self-organized. Basically it’s the opposite of controlled. You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or you can track it in star-forming regions in the Orion Nebula. Wildness is everywhere. It starts with microscopic particles, and it goes more than 13 billion light-years into the cosmos. It’s in the soil and in the air, it’s on our hands, it’s in our immune systems, it’s in our lungs — where there are two thousand bacteria per square centimeter! In a certain respect, much of what we consider us is in fact not us. We breathe, and wildness comes in. We don’t control it. Tonino: You’ve called wildness “an endangered experience.” What do you mean by that? If we’re steeped in wildness, is it just a matter of perception? Turner: It has to do with scale. On one scale you’ve got the Orion Nebula, which is twenty-six light-years across and two thousand times the mass of the sun. At the other extreme is the scale of quantum physics and subatomic particles, zooplankton and proteins. The scale that Henry David Thoreau and the American conservation movement focus on is that of voles and coral reefs and redwoods and whales. We’re particularly interested in wildness at that scale — and for good reason — but that scale doesn’t include all wildness. And here’s the problem: nowadays very few people directly experience voles, coral reefs, redwoods, and whales. You can live in San Francisco, ride a Google bus to work, stare at a screen, come home, stare at a screen, repeat, repeat, repeat. I’ve asked my environmental-studies students how much time each day, on average, they spend in contact with raw wild nature. Thirty minutes, they say. And what are they doing then? Walking between classes. They’ve told me they look at a screen eight to twelve hours a day, on average. These kids have not spent much time hiking in remote areas. They don’t have much personal experience with wild creatures. They also don’t have much experience with isolation. These days parents can hardly get their children to participate in an outdoor program, such as a backpacking trip, because it will cut them off from Facebook for two weeks.

Jack Turner, Chinese philosophy scholar and backwoodsman, interviewed in The Sun.

[grantimatter]

All agreed that the worst abuse was directed at Falun Gong members who refused to renounce their faith. In addition to giving the electric shocks, they said, guards would tie their limbs to four beds and gradually kick the beds farther apart. Many inmates described the time spent in Masanjia’s workshops as a respite from mistreatment or the hours of “re-education classes” that often were endless recitation of camp rules or the singing of patriotic songs while standing in the broiling sun. Much of the work involved producing clothing for the domestic market or uniforms for the People’s Armed Police. But inmates say they also assembled Christmas wreaths, coat linings stuffed with duck feathers that were labeled “Made in Italy” and silk flowers that guards insisted would be sold in the United States.

"In box of decorations, a cry for help from a Chinese labor camp", Seattle Times, 11 June 2013.

[grantimatter]

"Love Story" (Taylor Swift) by Silk Strings Music. On guzheng, the traditional Chinese zither.

[grantimatter]

My wife just noticed this church on her delivery route. She'd never heard of St. Dak.

Neither had I.

[grantimatter]

For International Day of the Woman.

[grantimatter]

Zui Yu Chang Wan (Drunken Fisherman's Night Song)

This traditional Chinese song is linked with the memory of Lu Guimeng:

Lu Guimeng (d. 881), style name Luwang, nicknames Tiansuizi, Fuli Xiangsheng, etc., was an important 9th century poet who abstained from fine food, alcohol, festivities, etc., instead floating on a boat with his books, fishing tackle and equipment for making tea. He was from Changzhou, now part of Suzhou, but after retiring from office he presumably abandoned his Suzhou residence as he is said to have subsequently made his home in Fuli (see further). There is a grave said to be his in Luzhi, modern name for Fuli, near the Wusong River southeast of Suzhou.

Lu is commonly paired with his friend Pi Rixiu and the two of them are particularly known for having created a style of matching rhyme poetry in which first one would compose a poem, then the other would have to reply with a new poem using the same rhyme. Both were also said to have loved wine and boating, with Lu Guimeng in particular noted for preferring a life on rivers and streams.

Eventually Lu Guimeng is said to have given up wine for tea.

(emphasis mine)

Lu and his fishing buddy Pi supposedly heard an old, drunk fisherman singing at dusk and wrote down a poem that went with this song.

This is actually a more recent melody than the original, which goes back at least as far as the 1500s. But whichever melody is played under the title, it's supposed to evoke a guy on his boat not doing much of anything at all. He's got a heater for the water for his tea. An oar to paddle with. Some lines and hooks. A setting sun.

If you want to know how to play the song, this lady will show you.

The song has 10 sections - 10 things it's supposed to evoke:

00.00 1. Rowing through rippling water

00.50 2. Pulling the oars

01.20 3. Knocking on the boat planks (to frighten the fish)

02.01 4. Raising the nets (filled with fish)

02.35 5. The call of a fisherman: ao ai

03.43 6. (The boat settles in) the shallow water along the sandy shore

04.19 7. Forgetting society

04.45 8. A reed flute

05.50 9. Mourning antiquity

06.22 10. A mature man in retirement

06.57 Closing harmonics

07.12 End

The times there come from John Thompson's qin version of the old melody.

Forgetting society. Mourning antiquity. Yeah, I can hear that.

[grantimatter]

Did someone say "old Asian pop records"?