The Tao of Putin

~ a poem & notes on the barbarous art of Vladimir Putin ~

The following poem was written in early April, 2022, a few days after the Russians left Bucha, and a couple weeks after Biden called Putin a war criminal, a murderous dictator, a pure thug, and a butcher. It was tempting, and would have been more alliterative, to call the poem The Butcher of Bucha, after Klaus Barbie, The Butcher of Lyon. Yet comparing barbarism in the two cases is a tricky business, and would require more historical knowledge than I possess.

I opted instead to write a more allusive poem, using Zhuangzi’s story about a butcher who uses his knife in a subtle manner, its edge so fine that it can penetrate even the smallest spaces. Putin’s work is the opposite: blunt, easy-to-see, and a colossal mess. For Zhuangzi (4th C. BC), the butcher’s work is an analogy for the operations of the Dao or the Way, which is a mystical, God-like Force. For Putin, the butcher’s work is done with real bullets and shrapnel. 

The final image of a butterfly is also from Zhuangzi: in Chapter Two of what is simply referred to as The Zhuangzi, the Chinese author writes about a man who wakes up from dreaming he was a butterfly, and then wonders if he isn’t a butterfly dreaming he’s a man.

The initial image of the uncarved block is also from Daoism (previously spelled Taoism), and represents simplicity and unity. Detailed notes about this and other allusions can be found after the poem.

🦋

The Tao of Putin

April 7, 2022

In Vladimir Putin’s world, the Russian people are the uncarved block —

Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, stubborn as oxen, they’re all Russian.

To keep the people one, the sage must be a butcher: 

he must cut with the sharpest of blades, extracting the vile Nazi within,

invisibly, finding the empty space between the Slavic bone.

❧

The Goddess looked over his shoulder

(just as once Thetis looked over the shoulder of Hephaestos,

although her beauty was more like that of Guanyin), 

and wondered about the mess the butcher was making. 

She worried about Chairman Xi and the beautiful island,

and about Zhuangzi, now floating here, now flitting there, 

like a butterfly in a nightmare, looking down upon the scene.

🦋

——————

Notes

Title. “The Tao of Putin” plays on the book title, The Tao of Pooh, a popular book on Daoist philosophy, written by Benjamin Hoff in 1982. I allude to this book in order to emphasize the point that one aspect of Daoism resembles Winnie-the-Pooh: simplicity. In the Daodejing (c. 6th C. BC), the legendary author Laozi refers to the uncarved block, which is a symbol for simplicity, wholeness, and unity. Quite conveniently in this context, the uncarved block (or unworked wood) is called pu in Chinese. I start with this symbol in an ironic sense: while the Daoist sage aspires to straightforward simplicity, psychological wholeness, and societal unity, Putin’s lies and manipulations are anything but simple, and all his talk about unity only leads to chaos, division, and war. Putin’s dream may be to unite the Russian people — by which he means Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians — yet his actions merely turn them against each other.

Zhuangzi’s butcher. The positive things Zhuangzi suggests about his butcher take negative meanings with Putin. Zhuangzi’s butcher goes from seeing only the body of the ox to seeing its spirit; for Putin not seeing, discarding sense, and acting as his spirit wills takes on the meanings of blindness, irrationality, and stubborn selfishness. Other aspects of Zhuangzi’s story may also apply ironically:

"What your servant values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the entire carcass. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills. Observing the natural lines, my knife slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the facilities thus presented. My art avoids the membranous ligatures, and much more the great bones. […] Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone. There are the interstices of the joints, and the edge of the knife has no appreciable thickness; when that which is so thin enters where the interstice is, how easily it moves along! The blade has more than room enough." (trans. James Legge)

Zhuangzi’s 19-year timeline indicates an accumulative refinement. Putin’s 19 years start with his butchery in Chechnya and end with his butchery in Ukraine. In a BBC article written 19 years ago, “Grozny is being rebuilt at a frenetic pace... and it's being paid for by Moscow. For the Kremlin the sooner the scars are erased, the sooner the outside world will forget the two brutal wars it fought to keep the rebel republic under Russian control” (Scars Remain Amid Chechen Revival). While it’s doubtful the outside world, let alone the Chechens, will forget Putin, it’s certain Ukrainians won’t.

Achilles Shield & Guanyin. I also use an image from W.H. Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles" (1952), where Thetis looks over the shoulder of Hephaestus as he makes the ill-fated shield for her son Achilles. In my poem, looking over his shoulder is the goddess Guanyin, a widely-worshipped divinity associated with grace. In the following painting, Guanyin in the Tidal Sound Cave at Mt Potala, she waves “a willow branch to sprinkle the water from the vase and reduce the suffering of people”:

In Auden’s poem, Thetis hopes to see images of culture, religion, and art on the shield that Hephaestus is making for her son. Instead, she sees images of totalitarianism, devastation, and war:

She looked over his shoulder / For vines and olive trees, / Marble well-governed cities / And ships upon untamed seas, / But there on the shining metal / His hands had put instead / An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown, / No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, / Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, / Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood / An unintelligible multitude, / A million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face / Proved by statistics that some cause was just / In tones as dry and level as the place: / No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; / Column by column in a cloud of dust / They marched away enduring a belief / Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

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