Arts Cook Ding
posted by on November 10 at 12:03 PM
No other story in human history gets as close to the heart of what art is about than the story of Cook Ding from The Way of Chuang Tzu. Burton Watson’s translation:
Cook Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-Hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee-zip! Zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-Hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the [way], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year—because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month—because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room—more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone….”
Lord Wen-Hui said, “This is it! My cook has shown me how I ought to live my own life!”
Two things: The importantance of this story is in the image of Cook Ding dancing as he cuts up the dead ox. At bottom, this is all art can ever be: a set of moves, steps, slides, sways, taps around death. Death is always there but art, the dance, has for a moment defeated it. And we, the audience, stand in amazement and say: `Ah, this is marvelous!’
The other point has to do with how Cook Ding cuts the ox. It is not in the Chinese manner of democratic hacks that don’t privilege any part of the animal’s body. It is, instead, a western way of cutting an animal—according to joints, limbs, the shape of the thing.
Finally, Cook Ding recalls in my memory the poem “The Thrashing Doves” by Jack Kerouac. He describes the sound of butchers cutting up chickens in “the back of [a] dark Chinese store” as “ching, ching, jazz.”
Life is Art - as beautiful as bovine slaughter.
To apply the story only to producing art is to exercise inadequate ambition. This story is not about "art" as you perceive it, but about life as art. It has nothing ot do with praise or the audience; artists' lives are often a mess because they can only "find the space between the joints" when producing their art, but not in everyday life; this is egoic art. The message here is to LIVE like the cook, not to just make art like the cook. Clearly the lord understands the story in this way.
And thus was Benihana's born.
Or as Marco Pierre White describes the butcher from whom he learned his knife skills: "I love the way he opens a piece of meat up with his hands, using his palms and fingers, the whole thing so effortless, and how he then rides the knife through, as though it's a part of his hand. Forget the knife. It's like this. These are your fingertips, right? They just glide through. That's knife discipline. That's what it's all about. And I used to stand next to this old boy--I was sixteen, and he was in his fifties--and watch him, until finally I'd learned enough that I was told I could do the turkey legs, to bone them and take out the sinews. It was my first important job, and I'd learned how to do it from hours of watching. Then I tied up the legs--to get used to working with string--massaging the meat first, to even it out. It was so difficult at the beginning, you're so uncoordinated, until it becomes natural, as if someone has programmed your fingers."
And no cod Eastern Spirituality to gum it up.
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