Dynasties, elephants and clouds

A rumble of thunder and the sound of falling water woke us up to the realisation that the blue skies of yesterday would be full of cloud today, so we wouldn't be going flying. Instead we met our friends at the usual rainy day spot, an eatery on Montreal Road, with the unlikely name of Dynasty. I had a very good, crispy waffle with fresh fruit with my coffee, but that's by the way. Now that I've been to that exhibition I wrote about in my other blog, I'd normally associate dynasties with the history of China—Zhou, Tang, Mung, Ming, Song, Qin, and so on.

I wanted an excuse to come back to this topic, so as to record some more of what I learned about the ancient Chinese. How at around the time of Plato, Chinese philosophers were proclaiming:

Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.

What a demonstration of confidence that is. It would be nice if more of us thought like that nowadays. Confucius, explained the exhibition notes, was the Chinese people's guiding light for some two-thousand years, who advocated a sense of responsibility, obedience and loyalty, championing meritocracy.

Imperial China endured from 221BC until 1911AD, and I'm ashamed to say I know hardly anything about it beyond their building of the Great Wall at the time of Hannibal and his elephants in Europe and the burying of the terracotta warriors at the time of Julius Caesar.

I know nothing about the ten schools of Chinese Buddhism, either, and as it says on that website, "if one tries to talk about Chinese culture without touching on Buddhism, one will be in the position of a blind man as told in the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant". The Chinese are a poetic people. The Dharmalaksana sect claims that "Everything is void, like the reflection of moonlight on water."

Which brings me back to clouds, because, "according to ancient Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, Cumulus clouds are the spiritual cousins of elephants" and "eighty elephants weigh about as much as the water droplets in a medium-sized Cumulus [...] would if you added them all together." I got that fact from the eccentric and unforgettable book, The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, which Chris and I bought in England earlier this year and which my mother read from cover to cover while she was staying with us.

Mr Pretor-Pinney says just about all that can be said about clouds, but one thing he doesn't include in his book, though I see that he does quote from it in translation in the Cloud Appreciation Society's manifesto, is a favourite poem of mine by Charles Baudelaire, from his Petits poèmes en prose of 1864, which goes as follows:

- Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme enigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta soeur ou ton frère?
- Je n'ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère.
- Tes amis?
-Vous vous servez là d'une parole dont le sens m'est resté jusqu'à ce jour inconnu.
- Ta patrie?
- J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
- La beauté?
- Je l'aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.
- L'or?
- Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.
- Eh! qu'aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger?
- J'aime les nuages... les nuages qui passent... là-bas... là-bas... les merveilleux nuages!