I am seeing Taoism in just about everything these days, even this short piece in today’s NYT:

Charles Simic, a writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, is to be named the country’s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress today.

 Here’s what brought Chuang Tzu to mind:

James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, will announce Mr.
Simic’s appointment. Mr. Billington said he chose Mr. Simic from a
short list of 15 poets because of “the rather stunning and original
quality of his poetry,” adding: “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s
a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in
dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to
the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears.”

     A reality beyond our perception.  A blurry boundary between dream and reality… I try not to make too much about the famous Chuang Tzu quote about dreaming of the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming of Chuang Tzu. Too much is made of it, almost to Disney cartoon proportions.  I even have a t-shirt which misattributes the butterfly image to "Lao Tzu."   But how could you not think of Chuang Tzu here?

      I was also struck with this quote:

Reviewing his collection “The Voice at 3:00 A.M.” (Harcourt) for The
New York Times Book Review in 2003, David Orr said Mr. Simic was “a
surrealist with a purpose: the disconcerting shifts and sinister
imagery that characterize his work are always intended to suggest —
however obliquely — the existential questions that trouble our
day-to-day lives.”

       "A surrealist with a purpose"?  Is that possible?  To which Chuang Tzu might reply, "sure, why not?"  My assumption that surrealism must, by definition, defy purposefulness, is a construction of my own mind, an analytic distinction that obstructs my view of the fullness of Way. "Surreal" and "purpose" are both elements of Way and, thus, can be arrayed next to each other – that might be what Chuang Tzu would say….

     And finding the "existential questions that trouble our day-to-day lives"?  We might want to take issue with "trouble."  What of all of the other ways that existential questions work through and play with and dwell in our everyday lives?  For all of that is what, I believe, Chuang Tzu means to conjure up when he tells us to "dwell in the ordinary."

      I wonder if Simic has read any Taoism along his Way…..?