VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 44
Common Life: The Two Hold Each Other and Grow
A plane in hand, a pile of wood carried home on his own back, a whole good craft, and a day of it makes not one decent chair. That is where this chapter starts. The last chapter set coexistence: the four all there, none thrown out, none standing alone, each grown whole. But being on the same ground together is still not a tie, and the things on one street can be unconcerned with one another. This chapter digs one layer down and asks a more solid line: is there any tie between them at all, do they each live their own, or do they still feed one another? It tries the dullest way once, then walks near to look at the two pairs that bite tightest.
The first section pulls one out at a time and sees what comes of the rest. Pull out labor, and by the third month the fastest pair of hands first stops, the rice in the pot thins, the stake loses its hope, and the least-effort way is to send down an order, so the fourth is invited onto the stage. Hold this layer: pull out a rule, and mostly it is not a grid left empty—it is the fourth filling in. Pull out need, and men dare not change trade nor fall sick nor want one more child; they save hard, no one buys in the shops, and that weaver no one catches, and twenty years on no one learns a new craft. Pull out the risk-carrying one, and strength has no place to land. Four pullings share one place: the ache is never in the one pulled out, it is in the ones left. It borrows Xunzi for the root: let desire never be worn out by things, and things never be bent under desire; the two hold each other and grow—and to hold is to prop, two logs leant aslant that stand only together.
The second section looks at capital and labor. A man’s hands with only a plane make one decent chair a day; with a building and a saw behind them, a dozen—so the stake lets one part of strength come out as ten. And the saw grows no chair of itself; the sum on the account turns to no goods without hands. Each holds the half the other lacks. They quarrel over that grid, and it is real, but it is one cake baked together: the stake end wholly winning, the fastest hands walk and the goods lose their shape; the strength end wholly winning, the machine grows old and the orders go to another house. Whoever wholly wins throws the whole shop in. The bound leans on three things: the account can be seen, the talk can be talked over, the man can leave.
The third section looks at labor and need—two reasons that run just opposite, one man in a sickbed owed zero by one rule and more than anyone by the other. Yet they feed one another. That floor-under sum comes from the ones still putting out strength today, so labor is need’s grain. And the thirty-eight-year-old dares push hard because his mother has cover and his child’s schooling is not his alone, so need is labor’s nerve. The bound is drawn solid by three ways—by stretch, by matter, by layer—and all three draw it on the matter, not on the person, for drawn on the person, position turns to identity. And the two watch each other: the strength end’s bit of not-content pulls need back from catching a man till he will not move; the parent’s bit of not-having-the-heart pulls labor back from measuring onto a man who can work no longer.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to show the tie by pulling, not by asserting it, so the student sees for himself that the ache lands on the neighbor. What you carry out is the step below coexistence: common life. The four are not four shops on a street; they are root and trunk and leaf and fruit on one tree. Pull one and the rest sicken, and each pair holds the half the other lacks so that whoever walks to the end throws his own end in. The next chapter speaks of common dwelling, for things that feed one another are the most apt to step over the bound and decide for the other, and each must keep its position and its bound, and the hand that steps past be pulled back.
SECTIONS
One, Pull One Out, and the Other Three All Sicken
Two, Capital and Labor: One End Puts Out Strength, One End Carries Risk
Three, Labor and Need: One Measures What Is Put In, One Measures What Is Needed
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.