| Qin: Editor's Introduction
Even the outrageous understatement of the koan was swamped when the floodgates of the sayable, the speakable, opened in the 1960s. That outburst of childish delight at playing freely with unpleasant or jolting truths was a mere wavelet of what was to come with the growing verbal inundation from uncountable TV channels and, above all, the Internet. Frightened conservatives see this verbal flood as a bad thing. Where, they moan, is respect for the Old Culture, for the Good, the True, the Beautiful? That respect is, we maintain, alive and well (as we try in many ways to show in Magellan's Log). It is just no longer in the rigidly protective hands of a rather tyrannical mandarin class. Liberals and progressives have had just as much trouble with the word flood. Words hurt, words are dangerous, they shout. And of course they are right. What they've forgotten is that laws that control words are far more dangerous. The need for sanity in the social contract (you don't shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater unless there is a fire) is generally recognized and accepted. Where all of us, at both ends of the political spectrum, have gone astray, is in recognizing the need for profound civility. Some words hurt, and the profoundly civil person recognizes and accepts this. But the words exist. And must always, always be available for use by those exploring along the edge of culture. Dangerous? Yes. Possibly hurtful? Yes. But the more verbal prohibitions we construct, the exponentially greater the danger. <> Unquestioning orthodoxy is a problem in all human cultures across time. Because unexamined acceptance of ideas breeds mental sloth, which breeds indifference, and leads finally to political, social, and cultural stagnation of the worst kind. Because the stakes are so high, such orthodoxy appears in its most virulent form in religion. YOUR deity gets a capital "g" as a sign of respect. What about your neighbor's deity? That of course is an almost trivial example when put against the bloody reality of endless religious wars throughout history ("My God is bigger and better than yours"). The 20th century added its own messy, disastrous coda to that history, in the form of vast experiments with politics-as-religion. Yet, if we need examined thought anywhere, surely we need it most at the edge of thinking, the place right beyond which words stop, where the baffling reality of our situation confounds us all, poor, rich, stupid, smart, weak, powerful. It is precisely at that place where organized religions, and ideologies of all sorts (political, philosophical, scientific, economic) erect the most powerfully electrified fences on which they place large signs: DANGER! DO NOT TOUCH! <> In Qin: Jokes from the Chinese, Piongo Pisgah has tried, in the best tradition of heretics, to touch the fence. Taking inspiration from the koan, the fable, the parable, he has attempted to mix the immiscible, creating something that can only be called an approach to the metaphysics of the dirty joke. Is the result helpful, significant, or even entertaining? That's up to you. The fact that this era has produced such a work should, if nothing else, give us a new measure of just how jaded we have become. We tried to get him to write an introduction of his
own. He declined, saying, "Those who think an explanatory introduction is needed have
missed the point." Magellan's Log 14
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