Chaotic Blob of the Inner Chapters

A healthcare and reading stratagem too clever by half

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading The Complete Zhuangzi, translated by Brook Ziporyn, an anthology of writings attributed to the Daoist philosopher of the Warring States period (4th-century BC). The reading group was organized by my friend, the novelist Sebastian Castillo, and while none of the participants were experts in the subject matter—me too, it goes without saying—I’m still glad that I didn’t tackle the book alone, otherwise I would have truly been lost at sea. There are many baffling passages in Zhuangzhi, especially in the so-called “Inner Chapters”, which consist of writings that can more confidently be attributed to the philosopher or at least to his time period;—like many figures from antiquity, Chinese or otherwise, it’s unclear whether Zhuangzhi was a real historical person. The passages are baffling not so much because of the abstruse terminology within them—though that’s present too, present in abundance—but because of heterogeneous nature of the writing generally speaking. Practical maxims, philosophical metacommentary, and bizzare anecdotes follow one after another—boom, boom, boom—the text making radical changes in authorial voice, genre, and mood within the space of a single line:

Not doing, not being a corpse presiding over your good name:
Not doing, not being a repository of plans and schemes;
Not doing, not being in charge of what happens:
Not doing, not being ruled by your own understanding.

In this way, embody the endlessness and roam where there is no sign, fully living through whatever is received from Heaven without thinking anything has been gained, thus remaining a vacuity, nothing more. The Utmost Person uses his mind like a mirror, rejecting nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Thus he can overcome all things without harm.

The emperor of the Southern Sea was called Swoosh. The emperor of the northern sea was called Oblivion. The emperor of the middle was called Chaotic Blob, who always waited on them quite well. They decided to repay Chaotic Blob for such bounteous virtue. “All men have seven holes in them, by means of which they see, hear, eat, and breathe,” they said. “But this one alone has none. Let’s drill him some.” So every day they drilled another hole.

Seven days later, Chaotic Blob was dead.

What is meant by this anecdote? (Those who suspect the passage is unrepresentative should purchase the book for themselves.) My best guess is that Chaotic Blob and his peers, viewing him an incomplete person, tried to improve his body past its natural limit, killing him. This was wholly unnecessary, Zhuangzi seems to imply, because Chaotic Blob already possessed “bounteous virtue”. Improving on the good is the high road to disaster. But this is just my inexpert opinion. The study of Chinese philosophy is the study of a lifetime and I’ve just read a few introductory and foundational texts in English.

A thoroughgoing puzzlement, intermixed with sporadic readerly enjoyment of one or another of the anecdotes, was more or less the consensus of the group. Few of us had actually finished Zhuangzi once the sessions for it ended. I hadn’t finished the book either, due to mounting health problems, problems which—right after our final session—came to a head, with a weekslong stomach ache escalating into agonizing gut pains that neither antacids, emetics, laxatives, enemas, or strong analgesics could alleviate. I went to the hospital, fearing a bowel obstruction, since that is a known side-effect of GLP-1 drugs I was taking, and still take, for nerve pain.

My wife and I chose to go a hospital in a wealthy suburb, with the hope that we would receive better and more prompt treatment than what we could expect in Philadelphia, but this proved to be, like some anecdote in the Zhuangzi itself, a strategy that was too clever by half, my case being preempted by waiting room filled with indigent patients and two trauma intakes, the exact nature of which I never discovered but were likely driven by social problems in the blighted neighborhoods that existed just over the county line. I had to wait 6 hours to be treated, the end result of which was a dose of morphine, a saline drip, instructions to continue my gastrointestinal routine.

Chaos by Wenceslas Hollar

I didn’t have a bowel obstruction—a positive result but hardly comforting, hardly comforting at all. I was still in agonizing pain, despite the morphine. I was more or less in the same state as when I entered. I couldn’t stay. Hospitals, which will send out patients almost as fast as they enter, will use the narrowest of technicalities as pretext for discharge. It was a circumstance that I had to accept. There was no physician in the emergency room, only a physician’s assistant, and my continued presence was just going to amount to a larger bill at the end. Two days later, my symptoms did clear up, precisely as the physician’s assistant said they would, but I will spare the reader details of exactly how.

The visit to the hospital wasn’t a complete bust, though. I took some books with me, as per habit, the Zhuangzi included, though I was hardly in the state to concentrate on a philosophical text, or any text at all. The presence of books did provide the opportunity for pleasant small talk with the intake nurse. Though not a fan of ancient philosophy, he did enjoy, like me, reading whodunit mysteries, especially as a means to go to sleep; both of us loved Rex Stout for that, the 20^th century streetwise patter of Archie Goodwin and his imperious boss Nero Wolfe being a great soporific.

Further, more uncanny resemblances were also revealed: the nurse remarked that I shared a birthday with his mother, that she, like me, was a Gemini who had a fraternal twin of the opposite sex; that she, like me, had been amused for her whole life by people asking whether I was “identical” to my twin sister. But that was were the similarities ended. The mother of the nurse and I were born into entirely different generations, in entirely different states—boomer and millennial, Ohio and Colorado—and for his part the nurse had pretty much stopped reading for pleasure.

He was somewhat apologetic about that, but also apologetic about what he had read in the past, not just Rex Stout whodunits but also canonical figures in 20^th-century boy literature—Kerouac, Steinbeck, Vonnegut. I said that I enjoyed those authors too, that they were “popular for a reason”—(the pain I was in left me even more skeptical than usual regarding the avoidance of cliché as a literary virtue)—I said that fear of his reading being “too typical” shouldn’t stop him from taking back up what had so obviously been a deep pleasure in his life.

The nurse agreed with me, but I still sensed a bit of hesitancy with the idea of reading again. I didn’t ask him, but I suspected that the nurse’s wife—a romantasy-focused social media influencer—might have played a role in his current reading drought. It seemed to be a consuming interest for her, to the detriment of whatever else the household might read besides—at least that’s what I imagined. In my own experience, romance and romantasy writers have been the most aggressive in asserting the supremacy of their genre, a result, no doubt, of their own reading being denigrated. All too often the people who proclaim “let people enjoy things” are the least inclined to practice that philosophy.

My stratagem to avoid bad hospitals had failed, just as Zhuangzi might have predicted, but the visit was brightened by that conversation with the nurse, though I’m unsure of how persuasive I was in getting him to read again. It doesn’t matter really. It was just a simple conversation about a shared interest, or at least previously-shared interest, only lightly freighted with the sort of topics which consume online literary discourse. I’d rather have not gone to the hospital, for sure, but at least I had a pleasant exchange to show for it, as well as a caution against cleverness, especially when it came to healthcare. Reader, I did have seven holes drilled in me; I didn’t have any. A chaotic blob can still learn.

Conflagration of Chaos in a card from the Grand Etteilla tarot deck, published by H. Pussey in Paris around 1890.