Written by Michael Tishman
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
—Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Canadian Poet & Novelist
1939 --
I read Tao Te Ching, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain and Tao, the Watercourse Way in 1974, just after graduating from University; wanting to find the secret to life and tremendously unsatisfied with what a formal education had to offer.
To my mind, Lao Tsu, Alan Watts and Chungliang Al Huang were all equally exotic -- distant and mythical creatures who wrote from Ithaca and sent their writings into the universe as encouragement to me that wonderful things can indeed come about, and that I could play a personal role in making them happen.
To my experience, Shakespeare, Watts, Lao Tsu and Huang were all equally distant celestial bodies, shining down on my humble experience and encouraging me to dream...
Authors were Gods. People were people. New Graduates were hungry, unemployed people, searching through the history of the martial arts, the human potential movement and Asian philosophy like a beggar seeking sustenance...
It never occurred to me that any of these Godlike creatures ("Authors") might yet live... It never occurred to me that I might simply pick up the phone and contact one (or more) of them in person.
Call Chungliang? That took another 40 years...
When the coin dropped, I was -- at sixty two -- less deferential to "Gods", and less impressed by authors, because I had become an author myself out of necessity -- one word, sentence, article and
book at a time... Books were what intelligent people do to pass along the wisdom the muse -- at her discretion -- makes available...
Also, after a lifetime of martial practice, I was more inured to Sifu Worship, more accepting of human ego and the tendency to keep the kids in the dark. I had my heroes, all of whom were not only great, but also alcoholic, addicted, misogynist, egotistical, financially strapped, narcissistic, manipulative, greedy, lazy, filthy, demanding and self absorbed... Let's say my expectations had been "annealed" by a lifetime of up close and personal experience. Gods may yet live on Olympus, but human beings write, and live right here... Experience had suitably evaporated the distinction.
So it was that I picked up a treasured old book and discovered, in a moment of curiosity and internet "explore-action" that Chungliang Al Huang was both mythical and alive, but also teaching, in two weeks time, a mere seven hundred miles south of where I was re-reading Embrace Tiger... (When the student is ready...) Which led to that phone call...
Assembling my gear, I packed the car and set off down the Oregon coast to visit Living Tao, meet the Master and sample the pâté...
To be continued...
