Post #162: The Pooh Way

26 Nov. 2024

“Do without doing.

Strive without effort.”

—Tao Te Ching, ch. 63

     I expected to be in for a big treat when I picked up Benjamin Hoff’s book for the first time a few weeks ago.* Like others I was familiar with Winnie and his friends mostly through the illustrations by E.H. Shepherd via Disney, but what I knew of the bear was endearing enough, and I thought the connection with the Tao quite promising as a premise.

     Given my high state of anticipation, I was unpleasantly surprised to encounter (along with much that was more to the point) Mr. Hoff’s crude settling of scores with killjoy Puritans ancestors, fidgety pioneers, lonely cowboys, and other unappreciative strangers to the “fresh green paradise” of the New World and its supposedly friendly and harmonious native ways (no mention of tribal warfare or winter starvation)—mean-spirited invaders, all of them apparently, who bequeathed to their unfortunate progeny a tradition of rigidity, combative fanaticism, and tight-fistedness. The result today? A once quietly desperate people (it was already a smug and condescending thing to say around Walden Pond, and it hasn’t gotten any better with time) whose desperation has since risen to deafening levels (pp. 102–105, 133). Yada yada.

     If only we could see how easy the solution is to all of this unwarranted difficulty: all we need to do, in Mr. Hoff’s version of the Tao, is to relax on our own arrogance. The complexity we are imagining everywhere can be safely discarded, since the Truth is very simple: “Life is Fun” (pp. 20, 113). (The habit of bizarre over-capitalization is one of the author’s signature affectation.) The problems we imagine around us only look like mistakes, you see; they may call for correction before our eyes, but in reality Mother Nature does not make mistakes (p. 69)—except perhaps when she allowed certain monkey-descendants to evolve such over-heavy brains that they would think of emancipating themselves from her unconditional love in the shape of death in childbirth, or during infancy and childhood (the norm, not the exception, until human being began to get a handle on these not-mistakes), to say nothing of such blessings as her gifts of smallpox, late-stage syphilis, and the black plague.

     Unlike silly Piglet and other friends of Winnie’s, who think that it would be a good idea to have reasons occasionally for doing what we do in life (“thinking too much,” Mr. Hoff calls this ludicrous notion), Pooh doesn’t have much of a brain, nor does he need one (p. 21). When he wanders about, thinking of doing this, then doing that, then eating some honey, then going on to do something different altogether, it all resolves itself with the ease of a little song he sings to himself by the creek (p. 87). How nice. The reason for his good fortune is not hard to discern: like an Olympian god, he never comes to harm, and the silly things he does always turn out right because he has, at bottom, nothing to lose (p. 21). Which is all very nice for a fluff-stuffed cuddly-toy like him, who has no bones to break, no blood to spill, no sickness or ageing or death to fear.

     Alas, for those of us who are not cartoonish bears, the prime fact of our existence is how exposed and vulnerable we are in this world. If we don’t use what brains we’ve been given to protect and provide for ourselves, we surely will come to harm. When we permit ourselves to imagine that clowning around is enough, we usually have a wake-up call coming to us very quickly in the form of some acute embarrassment or disaster—unless, of course, such silliness has made its way into the social contract and there is enough wealth around to cushion us and prolong adolescence indefinitely, at times all the way to senescence.

     The result of exerting only minimal effort, or of just letting things happen (p. 69–70), at least in the adult realm where no one is responsible for shielding us from the results of our own failures and omissions, is usually that nothing happens—or nothing good anyway. We live in a world governed by a tendency towards entropy, in which energy needs to be continuously invested to keep things in those very few states that are conducive and congenial to human life, as against the near-infinite other ones that are not. “No stress, no struggle,” the dream of a world that provides for us easily, a promised land of milk and honey where the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the fatted calf, shall lie down together, with no need for toil or conflict or any difficult choices to be made between painful trade-offs (pp. 75, 86), is no very profound vision, at least when it is applied to our dimensions, not some unearthly paradise. On this blue planet of ours, it is no more than an infantile fantasy, however widespread and seductive the variations on the theme may be.

     But wait, how can I say such severe things about Mr. Hoff’s book and still consider myself a Taoist too, in part at least? Does not the Tao Te Ching remind us (in chapter 49) that while all the world strains its senses, striving and struggling for survival and advantage, “The Sage only smiles like an amused infant”? And did I not myself assign Hoff’s chapter on wu-wei (“The Pooh Way”) to my introductory philosophy class last week? So let me be clear: I am not denying that Mr. Hoff illustrates some things quite well, nor am I saying that there is nothing to his angle on the Tao. Mere nonsense by a then-obscure author would not have sold a million copies.

     It is not necessary to review what is good about the book; let its many appreciative readers speak to that aspect of things; there are enough of them to assure that Mr. Hoff will receive his due. What bothers me is not that he gets the Tao so wrong overall (he probably doesn’t), but that he fosters an impression that looks, to me, like the heart of a dangerous misunderstanding: namely that the Tao really is such an easy-going, childlike affair as it may appear at first glance. It would be missing the point of Taoist sagacity entirely if one overlooked that the smiling, childlike face in question is in fact wrinkled with age, and that what looks so playful and effortless is the fruit of a long lifetime’s training and experience—a renewed innocence, not the original one.

     The Taoist may permit himself some laughs at Confucius and his overly earnest scholars (“busy ants spoiling the picnic of life,” p. 24), but no true sage will do this with serious disdain or intent to mock, because he knows very well that if it were not for the foundation of conventional morality, of rigorous everyday discipline and lifelong training in excellences of all kinds, he would not have a springboard with which to propel himself beyond such rigidities.

     It’s all very well to cite the Taoist story of the old man who survives a seemingly deadly plunge into the churning currents of a waterfall not by struggling against the water’s superior power, but by “following it and forgetting himself” (pp. 68–69). Alas, the meaning of the tale depends entirely on what is not said, because the Taoist takes it for granted: namely that when you find yourself in danger of drowning, it is not usually “the principle of minimal effort” that will save you, but rather your strength and stamina in swimming for your life!

     That is to say, what we are talking about here has nothing to do with casually picking up the musical instrument of life and goofing off with it. To turn such clowning into music that others might want to hear is not beginner’s work, but, on the contrary, perhaps the greatest test of proficiency there is. You cannot learn to play an instrument without spending years practicing your scales, and even the greatest experts are never done with such mundane exercises. Only after decades of training is it conceivable for some of the very best players to sit down at a piano and play spontaneously and seemingly without effort, perhaps improvising before a live audience like Keith Jarrett and making it sound better than many a written-out concert, or deciding on a whim, like Glenn Gould, to play the British and the American national anthems superimposed one upon the other. Monkey-acts like playing upside down, as in Amadeus, come off right only when someone has learned all the monkey-tricks, like Mozart, during many dreary years of being drilled and passed around by his father as a child prodigy.

     I quite agree that it is an important reminder (especially at the end of a fairly heavy introductory philosophy course: hence my assignment) that we do not live by the hard bread of our intellectual labors alone. The reasoning mind demands its proper due; but wisdom goes beyond ratiocination. Thinking and feeling-intuiting, effort and ease, doing and letting-happen, and many more such pairs of seeming opposites, really do flow together in our lives in complicated ways, and need to do so for us to flourish, or even to get by.

     The Tao is not about siding with one part of these equations as if it were a matter of either-or, but about the intricate, ever-shifting balance between the poles—a graceful high-wire act, ideally, or a dance between the whites and blacks that remain forever side-by-side, even as they blend together into grays. As I’ve said before, with a view to the yin-yang, even when we may not notice any white, it remains an active presence in the black, and vice versa, which is quite a different proposition from perceiving the world through a blur of gray-shades or mutually exclusive hues only (#153).

     We are never done with either side, in other words: neither with the need for thinking hard, nor with the need to trust our feelings and intuitions at the right moment; neither with determined effort, nor with relaxation; neither with the inevitability of conflict, nor with the imperative towards harmony; neither with struggle and stress, nor with the dangers of trying too hard and overdoing things; neither with making tough decisions consciously and rationally, nor with letting them make themselves sometimes; neither with the rigorous philosopher, nor with the holy fool; neither with the inner gray-beard, nor with the inner child.

     How much easier life would be if we could, instead, live it by ready formula, on one side of these equations, without doing harm to the other; and so we can, on occasion, or even frequently enough to give rules of thumb a certain credibility. Nonetheless, such balances have a way of shifting, and new constellations keep requiring new calibrations. How hard this can be on us, we all know: who has not sometimes yearned for an easier way that would relieve us of the burden of judgment, a fun and playful way that does not expose us so much to error?

     And so we dream of a return to the imagined innocence of childhood days that were in fact much more difficult and brutal than we remember them in hindsight. However beautiful the drawings of small children may be to adult eyes, they are also exercises in frustration: not a child in the world that would not trade the scribbles it can make for a more technically competent rendition, no matter how banal. What looks so cute and innocent to us is as serious a matter as the martial cries of songbirds marking their territory that we find so peaceful. Children strive quite desperately to draw what they see, as correctly as they can; they are simply not able, and they are painfully aware.

     Let us beware of thinking that we understand the Tao, lest the Way of Pooh turn into the way of poo in our hands. Such bodily matter has its place too, and a real Taoist master will be ready to laugh at it; but he also knows how to wipe properly, to flush, and to wash his hands, as many a child of nature does not. I would not expect Mr. Hoff to disagree with me there, and we would probably find plenty of common ground if we could get past our initial disagreements. What jumps out at you most is not always what matters most.

     I do not know much about Mr. Hoff, except that he is evidently a brother on the Path, broadly understood, and a fellow writer, the depths of whose exasperation with the woeful world of mainstream publishing I can well imagine. Even if we turned out to be as contrary as white and black (which would surprise me), the writerly yin-yang, like that of life, leaves plenty of room for us both, and what separates us, eye-catching as it is, should not be allowed to distract unduly from what we have in common. And that goes not just for Mr. Hoff and me, but for all of us.

*All page references to The Tao of Pooh in the Farshore 2018 paperback edition.