VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

An Honest Bind and Torment, One Word Apart

The last section caught a line and changed two words in it. This section takes the first change on its own. Why torment, and not the softer thing the line started with, making life hard. It is one word of difference. But that one word splits two things that look almost alike and sit in completely different places. So this section takes the word and pulls it apart, slowly, until you can see exactly what it splits.

Start with the softer thing, the honest bind.

What is a bind? A bind is a plain fact about a situation. Your thing did not work out. What you came to do is stuck, it will not go through. That is all it says at the start, a result, a door that will not open.

But notice something about a bind. A bind can happen between equals.

Do friends put each other in a bind? All the time. You want to borrow his car, he is a little reluctant, he hems and haws, and you are in a bind. Two people argue and neither will give an inch, each blocking the other, and both are in a bind. Two coworkers pull in opposite directions, one wants to go east and one west, neither can talk the other over, and the thing sits there stuck. Every one of these is a bind, and every one happens between two people standing on level ground. No one above, no one below. Just two equal people, rubbing against each other, and for the moment the thing will not move. That is ordinary friction. Deal with enough people and you will hit it constantly.

And here is the part that matters most. A bind does not need anyone working against you on purpose. Sometimes the thing is stuck simply because the situation itself is hard. The rain comes down in sheets, the road washes out, and you cannot get home tonight. That is a bind too. But no person is binding you. The weather is. The situation is.

So the word for a bind is a wide word, and a neutral one. It can run between equals. It can be nobody's fault. It can be the world itself pressing on you, with no one standing behind it meaning you harm.

Now the other word. Torment.

Torment is a different animal. Torment is always a matter of position, one person over another. One stands higher, one lower, and one of them holds, in his hand, the little bit of position that can block the other. The one on top uses that bit of position to shut the door on the one below. There is no level ground here. There is only up and down.

Friends do not torment each other, because friends stand level, and neither one holds a position that can shut a door on the other. But walk into a government office and the clerk can torment you, easily, because he holds one thing you do not, the power to stamp the form in front of him or refuse to. He is up. You are down. And that one step of up and down turns an honest bind into something else.

Torment carries one more thing a bind does not. Torment wants you to know it is him. A bind might still hide its face, might still murmur that the policy just happens to be this way. Torment cannot hide the little taste of looking down at you, and often does not try. He wants you to stand there and watch, and understand, that this barrier is one he set, this pointless extra trip is one he sent you on. That flicker of I can do this to you and you cannot touch me is the real center of the thing. Everything else is only decoration around that center.

So torment always comes with method, a way of doing it, and behind the method there is always a particular person, right now, working it. The weather does not torment you. Only a person torments you. And there is where it splits clean off from a bind.

It is worth seeing how much the old language packed into this, because it pressed the whole idea tight a very long time ago. Chinese writes torment with two characters, and it pays to pull them apart. One character means a barrier, a thing set across your path that you cannot get over. On its own that character is neutral. The sky can be hard to cross, the ground can be hard to cross, a task can be hard to cross, and the same character covers all of it. The other character is the sharp one. It means a sly, underhanded little cleverness, the kind of small trick that cannot be shown in daylight, the move a person makes to lay one more stone in the exact spot where you are already stuck.

Put the two together and you have the whole of it. Torment is using a deliberate little trick to manufacture a barrier that never needed to be there. Weigh what is packed inside. There is intent, it is on purpose, not by accident. There is method, it is a made thing, not something the situation did. And there is the barrier itself, set there just for you, when it could just as easily not have been set at all. All three, in one small word. Two characters, and the ancestors pressed that much meaning into them. That is what it means for a single word to be worth its weight in gold.

Set the softer word beside it and you can feel how much lighter it is. To bind is only to make a thing hard. It can be done on purpose or by no one at all, with a trick or with no trick. It is wide, and being wide, it is not exact.

Someone might still shrug. It is just a different word. The meaning is close enough, why split the hair?

Here is why, and it is worth saying plainly. That one word is what cuts the real subject of this whole chapter out of a blur.

Say the greatest evil is putting people in a bind, and the line falls apart in your hands. A bind is too wide. A friend hemming over his car is a bind. Rain washing out a road is a bind. Fold all of that into the greatest evil and the sentence stops making sense. How could a friend hesitating over a favor be the greatest evil in a person?

Say instead the greatest evil is torment, and the line stands up straight. Because torment has already thrown out the friction between equals, already thrown out the blameless situation, and left exactly one thing on the table. A person standing higher, using a deliberate method, to block a person standing lower. That one thing is worth a whole chapter of asking after.

So the single word is not swapped for fun. It grinds the subject sharper. Think of a doctor. Tell the doctor I feel unwell and there is nothing to work with, it is too wide. Tell the doctor it hurts down in my lower right side when you press, and now the spot is exact, and now the doctor can move. A bind is I feel unwell. Torment is it hurts when you press, right here. Getting the word exact is the first step toward getting the position clear.

That, start to finish, is all this is. Not the invention of anything new, only the nudging of one word over to the most exact spot it can sit. Nudged there, a thing that went a few hundred years without being seen clearly shows, for the first time, its clean edge.

Here is where this section leaves us. A bind is wide, and neutral. It can run between equals, it can be the blameless work of a situation, and there need be no one standing inside it at all. Torment is exact, and it carries position. It is always someone higher, using a deliberate method, to block someone lower, and wanting the lower one to know whose hand it is. The old language, packing barrier and sly trick into one small word, pressed the whole idea in tight and solid, a manufactured barrier made by a deliberate trick.

Turning the bind into torment is not a change of wording. It grinds the subject exact, so that the one thing this chapter means to watch steps out of the blur.

And once it has stepped out, one question is left over. This person, the one standing higher and blocking the one below, how high does he actually stand? How big is his office, how tall his position? Is he the head of state? Is he a great tycoon? The next section takes the second change. Why a little power, and not some kind of power. It is stranger than the first. See you there.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

SECTION 3  Some kind of power and a little power, Confucius and do not do unto others