VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 33
Living labor
Start in an eating house, with two men carrying plates. The first sets the plate down with no look on his face, his eyes off the guest, his mind elsewhere, enduring eight hours until he can be off, and at day’s end he does not know how many plates he carried. The second, setting the same plates, glances at whether the table holds more old folk or children, moves the hottest plate where it will not be knocked over, remembers that the guest who often comes cannot take hot spice. Weigh the two by the six rules from before and they come out much the same, one same hours, one same count of pieces. But take one meal in each house and you know at once these two shares of labor stand apart as heaven from earth. One is dead, one is alive, and no rule before could weigh that apart, though it is the most needful thing in labor. The front half of the term weighed and divided and flowed labor and mapped its bound, and this chapter closes a floor under all of it by asking the root question it had left pressed down: one same share of labor, why alive in this hand and dead in that.
Section one cuts the alive and dead open and clears away the first wrong notion, that it goes by whether the work is high or low. It does not. A plate carrier can do his labor living and warm, a man in a high tower can do his dead as ash, and the alive and dead has nothing to do with the dearness or meanness of the work, it is not in what you do but in how you do it. And the how parts on three things, whether the heart is put in or only the body set there, whether the eye holds the man you serve and the thing you do or holds only the pay slip and the hour to be off, and whether you can see a little meaning in it or feel it is purely trading your life for money. Then Qing the carpenter is called back from last term to stand as the very extreme of living labor. The frame he made for the bells struck those who saw it as the work of a god, and asked his secret he said only, I fast to still the heart, fasting until he forgot reward and fame, then the praise and blame of others, then that he had a body at all, until nothing was left but the block of wood and the frame, and then he went into the mountain to find the tree born already grown to that shape. His heart wholly in, the man and the thing joined into one, and no rule can weigh that aliveness, yet it is the whole reason the frame astonishes. And the guide gives the two reasons living labor is needful. To the doer, because a man spends the greater part of his waking hours at labor and whether he passes them living or endures them dead are two different lives. To others and the group, because living labor spills over and warms a houseful and dead labor barely gets the thing done and can give no more.
Section two lands living labor and counts nine kinds, and it is worth naming them because none asks high work or great skill. The first three draw the heart into the thing, the heart in, the fixed mind that does not run off, the not letting go that will not make do, and even sweeping a street with these three is alive. The middle three move the heart out onto others and the thing, the eye holding the man you serve, the eye holding the thing itself coming off, and the holding of measure that grips the one right way among many, as Qing saw at a glance which tree was the frame. The last three drive deep and grow high, the taking on that carries a thing gone wrong rather than dodging it, the pressing forward that pushes the craft one inch further year on year, and at the bottom the seeing of meaning, the one that lights the other eight, so that a man who cannot see why his labor is worth doing stays empty though he reach the first eight, and a man who can is lit though the work be mean. Strung together the nine are one road, in from the self, out onto others, and up into meaning, the whole road of a labor from dead to alive and small to large, and equal to all men, since a plate carrier and a street sweeper and, two thousand years ago, an ox slaughterer and a carpenter all reached it. The Doctrine of the Mean sets the floor, keep to your position and act, rest in the position you are now in and do it alive there, so that living labor is not in the next better work but in the one thing in your hand at this moment.
Section three closes the last floor of the front half by asking what lights those nine kinds. And it turns first to what cannot. The institution of distribution by labor is dead, it lays down who takes how much but turns no labor alive. The six rules are dead, they weigh a number but not whether a man worked with the heart in or drifting. The two frames are dead, they fold labor into a share but cannot touch its alive and dead. The whole apparatus of the front half is a fine exact machine for weighing and dividing, and a machine however fine cannot turn a dead labor living. What can is the man, the living man standing behind the labor, since one same set of rules handed to two men makes one dead labor and one alive, and what parts Qing from another carpenter is not the craft but his heart. So the whole apparatus serves the man behind the labor, the institution is for the man and not the man for the institution. And this is why the by labor cannot be the whole, because its machine owns only the labor it can weigh and asks forever only worth how much, divide how much, and cannot touch the warmth or the meaning, so that a world left with only the by labor reckons everything to the finest count and turns the moved plate and the mother’s bowl of rice into things that cannot go on the account, though these are exactly what let a man live like a man. The Doctrine of the Mean seals the floor and opens the door, the kind, that is the man, buttoning kind and man into one, so that what in the man turns labor alive is the kind, which a machine and a set of rules have not, and which is the lead player of the back half.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to run the whole front half up to its own ceiling and find that every rule and frame and institution it built is dead, and then to name the one live thing they were all serving and could never replace, the person, and under the person the kind. What you carry out is two things you can hold the same day. First, a plain test for your own working hours, not what work you do but how, the heart in or only the body there, the eye on the person and the thing or only on the clock, the meaning seen or the life merely traded for money, and the knowledge that you can do the one task in your hand alive right where you stand without waiting for a better one. Second, the reason the term now turns, that a world of pure reckoning leaves out exactly the warmth that lets a group be more than a cold machine, so the by labor can be only one half and there must be another. The chapter closes the whole front half of the term on that word kind, and names the door it opens, the other half that was argued over and laughed at for a hundred years and has lived all along in the bowl of rice your mother left, which the next chapter approaches from where it is most mistaken, that communism is not a kind of state but a kind of element.
SECTIONS
Section 1, Is the labor alive, or dead
Section 2, Nine kinds of living labor
Section 3, What makes labor come alive is the man standing behind it
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.