Each Sunday (ok, most Sundays) I have a weekly feature here at You, Simplified where I share my thoughts on a passage of the Tao Te Ching. I’ve dedicated a page of the website to serve as the table of contents for all the musings. Additionally,a blogging friend of mine, Kye Nelson, is joining in on the fun and we invite other bloggers and readers to share their thoughts as well. Together we have are calling this The Tao Project.
Now, on to Passage 11:
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wheel move.
_____
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
_____
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
_____
We work with the being,
but non-being is what we use.
_____
_____
Commentary:
This passage reminded me right away of an interview I read more than twenty years ago with Guitarist Jake E. Lee, who is perhpas most famous for playing on Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon and the Ultimate Sin from the early and mid-1980’s (stay with me here).
I was fifteen at the time, I think, and I can’t find the original interview online anywhere but if you listened to heavy metal music in the 1980’s you know that it was all very busy music. Lee had just left Ozzy Osbourne and was working with his new band, Badlands. The music was decidedly minimalistic comparitively and what he said has stuck with me for every piece of music I’ve written and recorded since.
He said (paraphrasing) the space between the musical notes were more important than the notes themselves.
It is the space between the sounds that gives the music the beauty and form. It is the space in the home that allows us to live.
It is the space in things where we may find ourselves.
It is the things we don’t write as writers that allow the reader to find meaning.
This is what makes the Tao so powerful.
_______________
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
“Music is the space between the notes.” – Claude Debussy.
Neither here nor there, but Jake’s stuff with Ozzy was much better than anything I heard of his after.
That doesn’t dilute the message of the Tao, of course.
Even better, thank you Jill.
Charley, I just want to express my gratitude that you’re still going on with the Sunday Tao reading. Your companionship in this reading means a lot to me, and this post is an example of why it matters.
–Not that I would want you to feel like you had to continue doing it just because it matters to me! But sometimes, just knowing that what we’re doing counts for a lot somewhere, re-infuses the activity with meaning for us. So in that spirit, I want you to know that again with this post, I feel nourished by what you wrote about the chapter.
What in particular was nourishing about what you wrote this week? Partly, that it connects with an experience I had when my own sons were very small. It was at that stage where they would want to hear the same book read to them literally hundreds of times, also that stage where they were interminably asking ‘how come?’ and ‘what’s that?’ and so on–a stage which is beautiful but also mentally exhausting for the parent. Why? Because there’s so little time to think one’s own thoughts.
But suddenly I discovered a vast space for myself–between one word and the next, in those books I’d already read them over and over. That’s what your post reminds me of. That’s when I discovered that I don’t have to have a separate time and place, to enter the big space.
As you write about the space between one note and the next, I feel the generosity of the composer in creating a means for the listener to enter the big space. And also the author, in saying just enough but still leaving room for the reader’s own thoughts. It’s a very special kind of generosity.
So, thank you for instancing that generosity here, with this post.
Indeed. His latest work with Enuff Znuff on the Dissonance record (2009) is awful. Zakk Wylde, on the other hand, is a freakin’ genius.
Really a very sweet and thoughtful comment @Kye. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.