Zeldin: 'Conversation'

 Theodore Zeldin says that we can talk about the weather. When we exchange information, that’s a talk. But when we have a conversation, we open ourselves to changing the way we see things.

Zeldin, a historian, says this has happened several times in humanity’s history. One example is the way we have talked about women. The conversations we’ve had on that subject have changed the way we see women and have changed the “we” of that conversation, including women in the concept of humanity in ways that were once unthinkable.

Zeldin says the history of that conversation is instructive. Originally, women were something to be won. A show of power was preferable, but brute force would do. Then women were something to be wooed, courted, won over.

This way of looking at women eventually led to the notion of romantic love — that what happened between men and women was inexplicable, beyond the control of individuals. The feelings couldn’t be understood, much less expressed.

That idea has not worn well, and Zeldin says new conversations are needed to find new ways of seeing relationships between people.

If we can see the possibility of something better, we can act on it. And Zeldin sees conversations as a useful response when we found ourselves stuck. If we’re stuck, we need to broaden our conversation, inviting people who might offer views we haven’t considered before.

I read Zeldin’s brief book because I treasure conversations. I like sitting across the table from someone who might change the way I see things. The idea that a friend might say something that changes the way I think — that changes me — is one of the thrills that doesn’t fade with age.

I still talk to the neighbors about the weather and the garden. But conversations seem especially valuable now. Even as an old man, I begin a conversation with hope.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

An immigrant family's tale

 Imagine this tale of an immigrant family. The teller said his grandfather came to America, looking for better opportunities.

The teller was educated in American schools and raised on American books, music, drama and ideas. It didn’t dawn on him that he wasn’t an American — that in some way he was a foreigner.

But the teller’s grandfather was from Germany. During World War I, people of German descent were targeted. The government, although it represented a democracy, used the tools of power, including the Justice Department, to make life miserable for many.

The teller of this tale was H.L. Mencken. He said the experience cleared his head about democracy, at least the kind practiced in this country. It made him realize he was an outsider — in some way a foreigner.

He also said that he thought his grandfather, the hopeful immigrant, had made a mistake.

You can read the story in Andrew Holter’s Mencken Day lecture, which was published in the Boston Review.

Mencken wrote some wonderful things and some hideous things. Holter argues that the part of Mencken we ought to hold on to is his capacity for “social outrage.” (The phrase is from Murry Kempton, another newspaper guy for Baltimore.)

I like the word social, where we might expect political. As outrageous as our politics can be, it’s our social attitudes that get us into trouble — the kind of trouble that no political system can salvage or redeem.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” is code that all the old social attitudes that created such horrific problems are really OK, even virtuous. That we shouldn’t feel guilty about exploiting others to satisfy our greed. That we shouldn’t hesitate to trample the civil rights of people we don’t like.

This social movement is an argument that we should, like the proverbial dog, return to our vomit.

The proper response is to decline.

• Source: Andrew Halter, “Mencken Agonistes”; Boston Review, Oct. 6, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/mencken-agonistes/

Names, ages, identity

 Baisaō spent almost 40 years as Gekkai Genshō. The Buddhist names were given to him when he became a monk at 11.

He was known by Gekkai, or Moon Ocean, to his fellow monks. Genshō was his true name, given to him by his teacher. It wasn’t used routinely.

When Gekkai Genshō resigned his Buddhist names, he called himself Kō Yūgai or Layman Yūgai. Kō is literally high, with high-minded understood. Yugai suggests some kind of search beyond.

Later he called himself Baisaō, a kind of nickname, pen name, stage name. I learned in a footnote that he was known as Kikusen, or Chrysanthemum Spring, as a child.

In reading Norman Waddell’s biography, I was struck by how differently a person’s identity was viewed in 18^th-century Japan.

In addition to religious, secular and pen names, there were posthumous names. When their mother died, The Old Tea Seller and his sister began referring to her using a different name, reflecting a different relationship or a different way of relating.

The differences in the way people thought about identity go beyond naming. Age is part of identity. In The Old Tea Seller’s culture, a child was a year old at birth. (How else do you account for time in the womb?) The poems celebrating The Old Tea Seller’s 80^th birthday were written when he was 79, in our way of reckoning.

The Western idea of a birthday did not become common in Japan until the 1950s. In The Old Tea Seller’s day, you — and everyone else — became a year older on New Year’s Day.

The year was common — the way the community reckoned time. Everyone gained an extra year at the same time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.

A shaggy crank

 I should have given some samples of Baisaō’s poetry. Here are the first and third parts of “Three Verses on a Tea-Selling Life”:

 

I’m not a Buddhist or Taoist 

not a Confucianist either

I’m a brownfaced whitehaired

hard-up old man.

people think I just prowl

the streets peddling tea,

I’ve got the whole universe

in this tea caddy of mine.

 

Seventy years of Zen

got me nowhere at all

shed my black robe

became a shaggy crank.

now I have no business

with sacred or profane

just simmer tea for folks

and hold starvation back.

 

Gary Snyder loved the line about the shaggy crank.

I love lines scattered through The Old Tea Seller’s poems about the ordinary business of life. He fed his brazier with pinecones. “Pine wind” was the combination of smoke and steam that rose from his fire, the smell competing with the aroma of the tea.

During his years in Kyoto, The Old Tea Seller rented several tiny places. Here’s his note on moving:

 

Having learned the ways of silence

within the noise of urban life

I take life as it comes to me

and everywhere I am is true.

 

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on pp. 53 and 36. 

An odd business model

 I’ve been trying to imagine the Old Tea Seller’s business.

I would love to know what a professor or a theorist would say about it, whether the Old Tea Seller’s practices could be analyzed in any way that could be discussed at a university’s business school.

The Old Tea Seller did not charge a fixed price for a cup of tea. Instead, he had bamboo donation tubes. One had this inscription:

 

The price of this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that’s all right too. I’m only sorry I can’t let you have it for less.

 

A physician named Nagatomi Dokushōan, who wrote a book called Little-known Examples of Hidden Radiance, said that the Old Tea Seller would continue selling only until 20 sen had been collected in the bamboo tube.

Twenty sen a day was close-to-starvation income. The Old Tea Seller wrote repeatedly about being hungry and the humiliation of having to beg. But he also wrote about the joy of doing as he pleased and living as he liked.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on p. 33. 

The Old Tea Seller

 One of the books I took up the mountain was Norman Waddell’s account of Baisaō, the Japanese poet.

Baisaō means Old Tea Seller, so that’s what I’m going to call him. The Old Tea Seller lived from 1675 to 1763, under various names. (That’s another story for another day.)

I’m interested in him for two reasons.

First, he undermined the dominant paradigm of his culture, as scholars would say. Or, as the hippies put it, he undercut the Establishment.

Second, he changed his own life, at least a couple of times, when he was no longer young. Now that I’m old, I’m interested in people who can do that — who can look at changing themselves rather than trying to change the world.

The Old Tea Seller spent most of his life as a Buddhist priest. He lived during a period of military rule, the Shogunate. It was a period when conservative militarists were discouraging individual expression and encouraging order and conformity.

In all societies, respect for religious institutions ebbs and flows. The Old Tea Seller mourned that monks, who were once revered for seeking enlightenment, were despised as parasites.

The problem, he thought, was with the idea that seekers should be free to seek — that doing work takes them away from seeking.

If one monk in a community spends his whole life seeking, perhaps a village will love the idea and will feel charitable when the monk shows up asking for food. If 400 monks in a monastery hit the streets looking for food, the community sees a plague and feels something other than charity.

The Old Tea Seller was a Zen master. He was in line to be abbot of his monastery. When his teacher died, The Old Tea Seller found another candidate for the job and hit the road. He wandered for 10 years, learning from other teachers. He also wanted to think things through.

The Old Tea Seller eventually settled in Kyoto, the capital. Instead of begging for charity, he supported himself by selling tea.

Working for a living was strictly forbidden, and The Old Tea Seller resigned his priesthood and his Buddhist names. Old men who lived on the fringes of society by selling refreshments were called old tea sellers — and the Old Tea Seller appropriated the name.

Many people who have heard of Baisaō are interested in how he changed the way people thought about tea. At the time, people drank matcha, a kind of powdered tea, in elaborate ceremonies.

The Old Tea Seller brewed loose leaves, known as sencha, with little ceremony. The informal conversation at his stall attracted artists and writers. Can you imagine having a Zen master for a barista?

In an era when individual expression was discouraged and conformity was demanded, The Old Tea Seller ignored the social pressure and the rules. He took what he found valuable about Zen and spread it through the streets of the capital, a cup at a time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Waddell’s book is in two parts. The first is a biography, quoting heavily from The Old Tea Seller’s poems and letters. The second includes translations of The Old Tea Seller’s work.

How do you know a poet?

 What does it mean to know a poet? Does it count if you could write a letter off the top of your head introducing a friend to the poet’s work? Do you have to have entire poems or at least some lines committed to memory?

The political advertisements in Georgia are such an assault on my sensibilities that I was trying to imagine whether any of the candidates read poetry. If so, which poets do they know?

It seems as if that would be telling — a good thing to know.

That question led me to Elizabeth Harball’s essay about a dozen U.S. presidents who read poetry.

Jimmy Carter was a fan of Dylan Thomas. He lobbied to have a memorial installed in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Abraham Lincoln was a fan of Robert Burns. People knew that invited the president to make a toast at a dinner honoring the poet. Lincoln declined, saying he could say nothing worthy of the poet’s genius.

Harry Truman carried some lines from Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” in his wallet. The paper with the copied lines kept wearing out, and Truman kept recopying — 20 or 30 times.

Truman’s devotion to a poem strikes me as admirable. His choice of poem strikes me as creepy, meaning it’s telling. I’m not sure I’d vote for a candidate who had the sensibilities needed to love that poem.

• Source: Elizabeth Harball, “Poetic Presidents: We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief with the poets that inspired them”; Poetry Foundation, Oct. 31, 2012. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69875/poetic-presidents