Mythic Imagination Institute

Mythic Passages - the magazine of imagination

"The Hidden Span"
Prose poem from Karmic Traces (published by New Directions)
© Eliot Weinberger and used with permission

Lao-tzu and his buffalo The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take 400 years to transmit from sage to student; others, 4,000; others, 40,000. It is said that Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent 81 years in the womb.

Taoist ritual begins with the construction of an altar that is a calendar and a map of this universe. At its perimeter, twenty-four pickets, the Twenty-Four Energy Nodes, each representing fifteen days, to form a year of 360 days. Within, a proliferation of markers for the Two Principles (yin and yang), the Three Energies, the Three Irrational Powers, the Five Elements, the Five Tones, the Six Rectors, the Eight Trigrams and Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching, the Nine Palaces and the Nine Halls, the Ten Stems, the Twelve Branches . . . Each is a supernatural being, a gate, a direction, a part of the body, a measurement of time, a philosophical concept, an alchemical substance. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao created one, one gave birth to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things."

Typically of Taoism, this system has an inherent flaw: a hole in time, called the Irrational Opening. If, at a certain moment, which is always changing, one walks backward through the various gates in a certain order, one can escape time and enter the Hidden Span. In this other time beyond all the other times, one finds oneself in the holy mountains; there one can gather healing herbs, magic mushrooms, and elixirs that bring immortality.

The technique was first taught to the Yellow Emperor by the six calendrical Jade Maidens, who in turn learned it from the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, also known as the Lady of the Ultimate Yin. Its most famous practitioner was a very real military strategist, Chu-ko Liang (181-234). To repel an invading army, he placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape.

Eliot Weinberger's books of literary writings include Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Written Reaction, Karmic Traces, The Stars, Muhammad, and the forthcoming An Elemental Thing. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages.

His political articles are collected in 9/12, What I Heard About Iraq, and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism and selected for the Times Literary Supplement's "International Books of the Year." The Guardian (UK) said of What I Heard About Iraq: "Every war has its classic antiwar book, and here is Iraq's." It has been adapted into a prize-winning theater piece, two cantatas, two radio plays, a dance performance, and various art installations; has appeared on some 100,000 websites; and was read or performed in nearly one hundred events throughout the world on 20 March 2006, the anniversary of the invasion.

The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the translator of Unlock by the exiled poet Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, also a TLS "International Book of the Year."

He is the editor of the anthologies American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders and World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions. His many translations of the work of Octavio Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among his other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges' Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism.

In 1992, he was the first recipient of the PEN/Kolovakos Award for his promotion of Hispanic literature in the U.S.; in 2000, he became the only American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. He is prominently featured in the Visitor's Key to Iceland, and was chosen by the German organization Dropping Knowledge as one of the "world's most innovative thinkers." At the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival, he was presented as a "post-national writer." He lives in New York City.