Welcome to Arriving Yesterday

A note on the meaning of the blog name and the posts to come

To arrive yesterday is to travel to the past. The ancient Confucian thinker Xunzi describes how the early Chinese would impersonate their deceased relatives at ritual banquets held in their honour: The host of the banquet would act the part of the deceased throughout the banquet, sacrificing food and raising toasts, until he saw off the guests and changed out of his ritual costume. At that point, he would weep as if the deceased had left with the other guests. In this way, for Xunzi, “[one] serves the dead as if one were serving the living, and one serves the departed as if one were serving a surviving person.”¹ The departed in question may have died long years prior, prior even to the living memory of their surviving relatives. But to the impersonator of the dead, their death may as well have been yesterday, so affecting is this ritual by which “[one] gives a shape to that which is without physical substance and magnificently accomplishes proper form.”² To ‘arrive yesterday’, then, can mean to make ourselves passable to the past through efforts of imagination.

To arrive yesterday is to be adrift. Courier services might tell you that your package is “arriving yesterday” when it’s lost in a warehouse in an unknown country, nameless and numberless, beyond the reach of their automated accounting. You arrive yesterday (relative to your starting point) when you fly against the sun, crossing the Pacific from Asia to North America, and pass the International Date Line at just the right time. If you were on United Airlines 890 several years back, says a Quora power-poster in a post I saw the other day, you even arrived last year: the flight left Shanghai on New Year's Day, 2017, and arrived in LA on New Year’s Eve, 2016. To ‘arrive yesterday’ then, can mean to pass not just between times but between worlds: between a world where office workers burn incense for their ancestors, to one where late-arriving strivers wait in line to audition for a streaming series on a platform your parents subscribe to; between a world where rental bikes of three different brands jostle against scooters and electric cars as they cross a newly repaired bridge, to one where old packhorse Fords stalled on the freeway expire in the sun.

To arrive yesterday is to mess around with words. Where Xunzi was a sober theorist, developing systematic accounts of the function of ritual and language, his near-contemporary Huizi was a philosophic trickster. Huizi took joy in paradox, in exploiting vagaries of language and shifts in perspective to assert the nonsensical. Though his writings were said to fill five carriages, they survive only as pithy quotations, such as the following: “Heaven is as low as earth, mountains are level with marshes”; “The dimensionless cannot be piled up, its size is a thousand miles”; and the one from which the name of this newsletter is taken, “[I am] leaving for Yue today but arriving yesterday.”³ We can only imagine the sly rhetoric that the ancient dialectician would have employed to defend these doctrines in courtly debates. To the birds above, he might have said, mountains and marshes look equally flat, therefore they are (virtually) level. An infinitesimal point has no area (and so “cannot be piled up”), but many such points add up to great distances. What we now give the name ‘yesterday’, we only just referred to as ‘today’, so there is nothing infelicitous in asserting that one is ‘leaving today but arriving yesterday’. To ‘arrive yesterday’, then, can mean to delight in indexicals, in how they float carefree from one referent to another, modest reminders of the contingency of perspective and the great flux of names.

This is to be a newsletter about “arriving yesterday” in the three senses I was just playing with: about attending to the past, about crossing between worlds, and about delighting in language. Expect notes on: early Chinese thought and its contemporary legacy (especially my man Xunzi), comparative philosophy and cross-cultural intellectual exchange, world literature and theatre, life abroad, and sundry other topics. Expect insouciant blogging and the occasional take, too, as the mood takes me. Maybe even some attempts at fiction. Give me your email, dear reader, internet stranger, and join me in arriving yesterday.

1. Eric L. Hutton (trans.), Xunzi 19.596-598.

2. Hutton, Xunzi 19.598-600.

3. See the last book of the Zhuangzi, “The World”, for these and the rest of Huizi’s “ten theses”.