4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Ego Tourism: How the Tao Made Me (a bit less) Weird ⭐⭐⭐
Mark Saltveit could have trained to be a lawyer like his mother, his grandfather and his great grandfather; but having read 'The happy fish' tale in a book on Taoist philosophy, which suggests that by letting go of striving and embracing one's natural state, à la a fish in water, one can find fulfilment, he decided not to.
'The fish tale changed my life. I realised you become what you do,' he says. 'I wanted to be happy like a fish.'
Saltveit, 63, the author of three books including 'The Tao of Chip Kelly', which analyses the coaching philosophy of a former National Football League head coach and suggests his leadership style and team-building strategies can be applied in other fields, works in the library at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont, where his wife, Olga, is assistant professor of theatre. He's also 'a palindrome pundit' and, well, as happy as a fish.
A bookish, 'goofy' child, whose parents bought a bargain-priced home in a well-heeled part of Portland, in Oregon, in 1968 after its owners wanted shot of it fearing it had been damaged by work blasting a tunnel for a highway, Saltveit draws lessons from good fortune as well as ill. Landing a $15,000 home in a nice part of town was not great for him as he stood out as gawky and was bullied. However, he was a smart kid. 'I did learn one place bullies will never chase you was into the library.' He spent a lot of time there reading sci-fi and at 13 'stumbled on two books of Chinese philosophy'.
His enthusiasm oozes out in his love letter to the 2,300-year-old (or so) Chinese philosophy that charts his course from a socially awkward eight-year-old to 'a physically worthless, totally in my head' teenager at a working-class Catholic school and on to a motley array of jobs. These included being a crew member on films such as 'Drugstore Cowboy', but realising he was not cut out for 'LA schmooziness' he packed it in and landed a post at Shenzhen University in China as a professor of English, for which he had no training or credentials (but, usefully, an American accent). 'I was never a barrister, but I was a barista,' he says, adding that he became a stand-up comedian at 38 and several years later a sportswriter.
His tales are illustrated by sweet pictures on a spiral-bound sketchpad of him growing up, including one with thick-framed black glasses which his frugal father had got cheaply, and sprinkled with moral-rich readings from Thomas Merton's 'The Way of Chuang Tzu', a spiritual interpretation of the classic philosopher of Taoism. Plus there's slow-mo demonstrations of Saltveit doing tai chi, 'a sort of meditative martial art' (in one of which he accidentally kicked one of the ten-strong audience members in the tiny room), to instrumental music including 'Pigs in Zen' by Jane's Addiction. Jimi Hendrix's 'Midnight' would also have featured but a low battery on Saltveit's technical equipment put paid to that.
There's also a reading from 'The Huainanzi', a collection of teachings from Taoist sages, which is the source of 'The man on the frontier loses his horse' story charting the ups and downs of the loss of a horse, its return with other horses, making its distraught owner suddenly wealthy, the hobbling of his son after a horse-riding accident, followed by the son's inability to serve in the army when a devastating war breaks out. Unintended consequences abound in life; don't make comparisons all-important; be yourself as best you can, Saltveit suggests.
In the middle of it all, in a clever feat of going against the flow, he recalls working his way to the front at Simon and Garfunkel's free benefit concert in Central Park in 1981 by hiding behind trees with a friend to avoid the surging of the 500,000-strong crowd and then moving forwards when the press eased. 'Taoism is the subversive, mischievous, dissident alternative to the mainstream culture of Confucianism, which is the traditional, orderly philosophy of China,' says Saltveit helpfully.
Equally helpfully, he's self-deprecating. 'Welcome to my little patch of mud. I can read social cues better now and I know you're ready for this show to end.'
PBH's Free Fringe @ Carbon (Room 3)
(Aug 7 to 11, 13-18, 20-24)
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