Dorothy Parker and the Tao Te Ching

Source

Source

April is National Poetry Month, so as a seasonally-appropriate diversion,  I've been re-reading Dorothy Parker's Complete Poems.  It's been an easier task than committing to an entire book,  which I can't seem to do lately, but it's also occasionally been a rather depressing exercise.  Her stuff is so good, but it's an equal megadose of hilarious and heartbreaking.  A lot of people find her unnecessarily caustic, but that's really why I love her. She gets the joke.  Always rhyming cleverly, she can comment on life's - or more specifically, love's - most awesome and devastating aspects and she can make you laugh while doing so.  But it's a laugh that you try to catch and stifle on the way out, because, DAMN.  It's hard to admit identifying with her, especially when you do a little background reading on what her life was like.  I've been skimming through biographies of her (see above comment on my own literary brand of commitment issues) and learned that she tried to commit suicide a grand total of four times (I had previously thought she only attempted it once).  She lost her mother as a young child, hated her stepmother, and went through bouts of depression and alcoholism, troubled relationships, and multiple marriages.  And though she ultimately died of natural causes, a woman who tries to off herself four times cannot have had a terribly happy existence.  So all this gives me mixed emotions about reading Parker.  I love her stuff, and get such a charge out of how eloquently she pokes fun at things that annoy her or things that she likes, or even things that have obviously hurt her deeply.  I laugh out loud at her take on the vast human potential for stupidity.  But I can't help feeling like taking so much pleasure in something borne out of so much pain is somehow a bit wrong.  But then again, how much incredible art and music exists largely because of someone's pain?  


So as a kind of counterweight to the above, I've been carrying around a little pocket copy of the Tao Te Ching that my dad gave me and thumbing through it when stuck on public transit (so a whole freaking lot).  And I've been looking for passages to balance out the sad messages of Parker's stuff.  Y'know, peppy prose passages versus Parker's purple poetry?


So for every "General Review of the Sex Situation," which leaves me kinda sad and resigned to a life played out like the lyrics of a Liz Phair song, there's a Taoist passage like this:

The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long,

true power seems weak,

true purity seems tarnished,

true steadfastness seems changeable,

true clarity seems obscure,

the greatest art seems unsophisticated, 

the greatest love seems indifferent,

the greatest wisdom seems childish.

I'm not trying to be deep or profound here, but there's definitely room for that in the above if you're looking for it.  I just think that this passage is a rather reassuring message that life is ridiculously confusing and things - BIG THINGS - aren't always what they seem.  There's so much in this little snippet that can get you through a rough day, and it helps remind you that you can't always look at things in black and white opposition.  Sometimes the black and white flip, and flip so quickly that it all blurs to grey.  But it's all potentially confusing.  For everyone.  Which is a pretty good lesson, I think, and more hopeful than Parker's summation of love in her ending line: "What earthly good can come of it?"  

Which, now that I think more about it, isn't necessarily read as terribly negative.  It's phrased as a question, so you can answer it yourself.  And maybe you can answer it with "a whole lot." Sorry.  If this were an English essay, I would have just contradicted my thesis statement.  Y'know, if I had actually written one.

So then I thought, instead of finding passages and poems that cancelled or balanced each other out, I would try to find ones that had the same message, if approached from different directions, and I think I did. I found this in the Tao te Ching:

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.

Not seeking, not expecting,

she is present, and can welcome all things.

Empty your mind of all thoughts.

Let your heart be at peace.

Watch the turmoil of beings,

but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe

returns to the common source.

Returning to the source is serenity.

Now I don't think Parker ever really screams serenity, but I definitely think she hits on a lot of the same ideas - especially watching the turmoil of other beings and contemplating return - in much of her work, including  "Now at Liberty," which is good reading for anyone who has every been really, really disappointed or felt harshly rejected by a person or PhD program (screw you, Columbia, NYU and CUNY in that order.)

I'm not quite sure about where I was going with this post when I started.  I should have made an outline or something.  It seems like a weird project, comparing these works.  But I guess if I could construct a worldview out of this two books (not that I SHOULD do that, but I COULD do worse), I'd have to aim for where they intersect on a big old philosophical Venn diagram.  I can only do so much Taoist navel-gazing because I can't sit still that long, but I shouldn't embody Parker's bitterness completely, either.  A little of both is a good balance.  Which I think my homegirl D.P. nails in my favorite poem of hers.

OBSERVATION

If I don't drive around the park,

I'm pretty sure I'll make my mark.

If I'm in bed each night by ten,

I may get back my looks again,

If I abstain from fun and such,

I'll probably amount to much,

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.

Check her out, not seeking fulfillment like a straight-up Taoist Master.