VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 7
Handed Down
Six chapters have looked at torment from head to foot, and one heaviest question is still unanswered. Torment is a thing every person suffers under, so why does it go on being handed down, one generation to the next, as though the chain could never break? This chapter opens the secret in that handing down, and its answer turns, in the end, from the most hopeless thing in the book into the most hopeful.
The first section pulls apart two things that pass down two different ways. The craft, the five forms of the fourth chapter, is hammered in, learned in scene after scene of being tormented and watching others be tormented, so that the bullied learn to bully and the blocked learn to block. The heart, the resenting and the scorning of the third chapter, is steeped in, out of the dinner table and the television and the street, out of tones and looks that are never once spoken aloud, down into the deepest layer of the body. Which is why the heart is harder to break than the craft. And the plain lesson under both is that a culture is never handed down by telling, only by soaking. Tell a child to respect everyone while he watches you bark at the guard, and what he learns is the disrespect your body did, not the respect your mouth spoke.
The second section brings in Mozi, who stood in front of a dye vat twenty three centuries ago and said, dyed in blue it comes out blue, dyed in yellow it comes out yellow. A child is a skein of white silk, with no color of its own, dyed the color of whichever vat it soaks in, the vat of the home, the vat of the school, the vat of the whole society. The word dyeing is more exact than teaching, because it happens without your knowing and cannot be guarded against, and deeper than the old account from inborn nature, because it moves the weight off what a person is born and onto which vat he soaks in, onto the one thing a hand can reach and change. So a person who torments was not born bad. He was dyed. And seeing that lays down two things at once, sympathy, because he was once white silk too, and hope, because a color that was dyed on can be dyed over again.
The third section drives home one word, break. The chain seems unbreakable because every link on it is a victim who cannot see clearly, and it is precisely the not seeing that leaves each one with no say. But the position from which the chain breaks is seeing clearly. A person who reads this and sees, all at once, that his sourness at the rich and his frown at the poor are a dyed color and not the person he was born as, and that he is at this moment dyeing that color onto his own child, has opened his eyes and seen the string that pulls him, and can pause in the crucial second and not dye the color on down. That is the break. A father home with a bellyful of anger, about to hurl at his son the very words his own father once hurled at him, sees it clearly, pauses one second, swallows the words, and says instead, Dad is a little tired today, let us clear the desk together, all right. And a chain that ran down who knows how many generations breaks, by one link, at him. Breaking is nothing earth shaking. It is one second, and it is a remarkable thing that every ordinary person can do.
That is the seventh stake. Torment is dyed, so it can without fail be broken, and whether it breaks lies in the hand of each person who has seen clearly. What still stands behind all of this, never yet brought to the front, is the institution. A reader may want to ask, can a good institution, a strict law, not govern torment? The next chapter answers head on, and takes up the boundary of culture that lies between torment and the institution.
SECTION
SECTION 1 The craft hammered in, the heart steeped in
SECTION 2 Mozi, dyed in blue it comes out blue
SECTION 3 Passed on or broken, the choice is yours
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.