meddle mettle

unlike the other major religious traditions which operate on schizoid axes of comfort and discomfort, darkness and light, suffering and release, dao does neither in large part because it avoids operating - in multiple senses of the word - it avoids functioning, manufacturing and surgical intervention on others and itself - iow it doesn't meddle - meddling seems to dao a most harmful force and unnecessary orientation

 

it's always through not meddling that the empire's won

should you meddle then you aren't equal to the task of winning the empire (48)

win the empire by not being meddlesome

i'm not meddlesome and the people prosper by themselves (57)
pursue that which isn't meddlesome (63)

yet meddling - call it as easily other things - action will volition concern domination anxiety intervention management strategy policy - is the assumed modus operandi and procendidi - it's become - in addition to the power-driven currencies of sanity and money - not only a chief virtue but reified to an extent that we can consider it a modern sacred - it's unquestioned and if you do question your sanity's immediately questioned - meddling in its many guises is assumed to be a natural inevitable part of the order of things - participate or die

 

but dao - which is all about and in a basic sense only about the natural order of things - questions meddling and does so quite sanely - how does it do this?

 

dao asks not only why meddle with things outside yourself but even with yourself - yet self-meddling - whether through therapy healing drugs pharmaceuticals supplements meditation products allsorts surgery resolutions image modification and coaching repentance retreats correction workshops courses - is as rampant as intervening (regardless of the stated objectives, regardless of the perceived intended or actual goodness) in the external world - and now - hooray! - we have technology meddling and increasing its meddling 

 

don't you feel meddled with not only by technology corporations media governments colleagues acquaintances education but also your closest friends family and intimates? and don't you typically react with more meddling - even if it's a kind of buddhistic meddling with yourself? meddling is habituated normalized enculturated sanctified

 

so what to do if not meddle - surely change (however we define it) seems desirable everywhere

 

but dao's tectonic assumptions and operations are radically alterous to all forms of the will to power (power over others, things, ourselves) and until i'm reoriented in these all i'll be doing is shuffling my existing techniques around - and reorientation isn't achievable through techniques of meddling (which are what we'll see for sale in manifold forms)

 

so how to dao if not meddle?

 

that might be the mettle you might discover in your own way without meddling

 

yet we can't tell you as dao's core isn't relayable through words - the most we can do is rearticulate some principles of dao that may be related to rediscovery that (in naturally sinking into) you may realize in the realm of nonwords and noncognition different ways

 

dao doesn't orient to any particular pole in the core binary of life and death, it dissolves classic tensions between eros and thanatos - it experiences them as the same - it realizes in the manifest world they're different but that the manifest world is one with the unmanifest and in the unmanifest they're not different

 

at most dao favours the feminine - which isn't identical to biological females - subtlety valleys darkness murkiness unknowing nonaction (metaphor indefiniteness tentativity frequently preferred to the copulative)

 

dao avoids entirely - and this may be the crux - placing whonyms (and consequently the individual self) at any centre - it neither apotheosizes nor demonizes whonyms but instead not only doesn't know if it's better or worse to be a whonym than a butterfly but doesn't particularly know if it is a whonym or a butterfly - this doubt not as some academic thought experiment but as a perpetual living reality

i can see everything

somethings

nothings

can cant

the rehearsal and the curse (2020s) - does a work's constant ironic hyperconsciousness of its own savvy cringiness sufficiently redeem it? fielder seems to be wowing many and in some ways we get the grab - they're sort of a buber pataredux (the i-thou put through the grinder of modern identity, social breakdown and hyperized dissimulations) - a guiltified de-innocenced candid camera - shoved through a drugged mirror into our current current's reality in wonderland, its lens spinning hallucinogenically - a viscerally compelling seduction to our complicity in the squeamishness and horror of the omnipresent other (outside and in) - but the further these series go the more they drag - might his 16.10 release hold me tighter in its three hour enclosure

speaking of might - might it be fun to have borat, fielder and allen funt - perhaps with buber and frederick wiseman - live in a house together for six months doing a kind of survivor reality tv - discussing things like authenticity, money, privilege, voyeurism, truth, ecology animal rights and slaughterhouses, misrepresentation ...?

fielder's work primarily draws me not to his subjects (or is it objects?) but to fielder himself (as object ... or is it subject?) - the camera (wherever it's physically pointing) increasingly raising questions about him (or is it me?) (if we've been paying attention, do we learn anything more about eg holmes [or greed, amerika, big tech, lust, gender, hypocrisy, deception] ... are the questions primarily about method and the ubiquity and complicities of vice?)

iow is fielder's investigative aesthetic spiritual trajectory aiming squarely for a series - fielder on fielder - alone in a house with himself and himselves and a thousand cameras, everyone questioning everyone and none of the ones sure of anything - a sort of arrebato twisted into hypertechnomodernized paranoidarama amerikana, closing on the protagonist(s) disappearing into infinite representations

oops, there eye go

harder to get delights

in the manner of smoke (2025) - an almost casually softly subversive exploration of fire lookout life against a far-near backdrop of ecological disaster and spiritual disquiet

 

panic bodies (1998) - an impressive experimental meditation on memory, loss, and life-death diffusion

shorts on features

briefized subjectivized impressions of some films and shows

(mostly features) watched so far this year

the christophers (2025) is a delight to watch solely for mckellen's performance - while coel is a fine foil the movie becomes immediately contemptible after he dies, fulfilling the very cliches it was apparently trying to debunk up to that point - while a forgettable film other than mckellen it's nevertheless better than rivette's la belle noiseuse (1991) on a somewhat similar theme - in which everyone and everything's tedious

 

franz (2025) - a rich appropriately unsettling glimpse into kafka's life and art

*a zed and two noughts (1985) simultaneously distinctively memorable and bad - the visuals great, the dialogue horrible, the themes hint at an appeal which never seems sufficiently explored or satisfied - watch with the sound off - either in silence just for the images or with an alternative soundtrack - perhaps swans soundtracks for the blind* (1996)

 

*in the mood for love (2000) a film where the ambience and images are sufficiently great to ensure the trite dialogue and boring protagonists disappear into them - this and chungking express* (1994) make a fine companion set - my favourite movies from hong kong

 

*in the realm of the senses (1976) a rarity where explicit sex, strong cinematography, fine acting, a good score and story, and genuine comedy and horror all coherently mix - is any porny film (art or not) so much fun to watch

 

anta mujer (1976) art and mind (2019) ghost in the machine (2026) gravitáció (1984) surrealism and dada (1971) - all horrible

 

alpha (2025) annette (2021) martyrs (2008) myth of man (2025) sorry to bother you (2018) the stranger (2025) tar (2022) - i don't have the aesthetic-spiritual patience to finish - my tolerance decreases in proportion to the number of great films i've cumulatively seen

 

alicia en el país de las maravillas (1976) - surely one of the more bizarre filmic takes on alice's adventures in wonderland* (1865) - as if everybody involved were on drugs from the film's first thought until the final edit - not on the worst drugs but also not the best - i stuck with it only because it's so weird

 

vampires and vampires

*daughters of darkness (1971) - seyrig strikes again - all i want is for her to purr her fangs into my soul

*vampira (1971) - strangely seductive

*a girl walks home alone at night (2014) - not quite let the right one in* (2008) but not far off

*only lovers left alive (2013) - cute, cool, but underwhelming

*valerie and her week of wonders (1970) - almost a vampire film but certainly a joyfully distinct experience

 

*marketa lazarova (1967) - the mood, cinematography, surrealism, characters work together to conjure a surprisingly captivating epic

 

mučedníci lásky (1966) - sweet, fun

 

*drawing restraint 9 (2009) and *redoubt (2019) - barney barneys again and again - he stands freakishly gloriously out in global alt.art.cinema as much as jodorowsky deren švankmajer or nick zedd

 

*the wolf house (2018) - a stunning animated piece - worth watching many times

 

vortex (2021) - is this from the same director as enter the void* (2009)

 

lilly and the earth coincidence control office (2025) - if nothing else it made me dislike lilly in the way that lynch the art life (2016) made me dislike lynch and no doubt if i read one of the emerging biographies on cormac mccarthy i'd dislike him too - i hardly need to like the artist behind the art to like the art but other than lynch's earliest work (eraserhead* 1977 blue velvet* 1986) his films have gradually lessened (not due to that doc but maturing cinematic sensibilities on my part) - even as mccarthy - despite his mythic scope and langwich - never quite makes it - he's missing something - that something he says he doesn't get in henry james and marcel proust - we could call it the feminine - and woolf's quite right when she says the best artists are androgynous - exactly what mccarthy couldn't be - and also from a very different and entitled angle - lilly

 

*a spring for the thirsty (1965) - leaks from the eternal rock

 

tarkovsky & parajanov islands (1988) and paradjanov a requiem (1994) - biopsychic squirts for those of us into these two numinal directors

shadows of forgotten ancestors (1965) suram fortress (1984) ashugi quaribi (1988) - while sayat nova (1969) remains parajanov's masterpiece these three films work toward and away, complementing it

 

almanac of fall (1984) *damnation (1988) a man from london (2007) - damnation worth watching in itself - equal perhaps to werckmeister harmonies* (2000) though inferior to the turin horse* (2011) and the world masterpiece sátántangó* (1994) - the 1984 and 2007 films mainly for those very into tarr who need to experience his oeuvre - compelling, particularly visually, for us

 

altered states (1980) - like the devils (1971) histrionic and melodramatic but without some of the humour (intentional or otherwise) of the earlier

 

architecton (2024) - alright fine

 

*earwig (2021) - hadžihalilović's best - everything creepy and perfect - lighting and its absence, sound and its absence, character and its absence, knowledge and its absence - haunting and ungraspable

 

*eyes wide shut (1999) - still just ok

 

il buco (2021) - le quattro volte* (2010) more enticing but this one watchable once

 

into great silence (2005) - hardly a good advertisement for god

 

sleep has her house (2017) - it's not the slowness that makes me sleepy, it's the sleepiness - i'm used to slow films - some are among my favourite - is it that i spend 4 months of the year in the remote wilderness gazing at clouds and trees and another 5 often trekking in forests that a film that virtualizes these visual experiences for me pales - maybe it'll do more for those bound by frenetic cityscapes who need imagistic doses of escape

romería (2025) - yawn, let it be over please

 

*the sea that thinks (2000) - best and most fun on the first watch

 

* seen twice

* seen more than twice

 

micronotes on 21 films

i walk out of two movies (a quiet passion and benediction) in one week, both by terence davies - the first from tedium and to honour the emily he's wanting to honour, the second just from tedium

 

the comedian in annette irritates too much and sleep has her house requires a better larger screen and more darkness so i turn to le quattro volte which delights - vuk the dog in the first phase won a 2010 palm dog award but the goats and ants should have won palm goat and palm ant awards too

 

in each of its four phases something dies a whonym a goatkid a tree charcoal and the films wondrous partially because it accomplishes a rare feat in this world of hyper whonym supremacy in that i feel more empathy and sadness as the goatkid and tree die than the whonym whose death is timely, overshadowed by soft comedy

 

autumns almanac, damnation, the man from london - difficult beautiful films, all flawed pirouettes around satantango

 

altered states - a ridiculous melodrama with all the cheap cliches of amerikana - the devils is likewise but becomes better through its content and setting

 

life of brian (rewatch) - still holds with so many gags that work the equal many that fall flat don't matter that much - the external controversies over sacrilege by religious groups sadly hilarious

 

marketa lazarová czechoslovakia 1967 joins the seventh seal sweden 1957 and andrei rublev russia 1966 as one of the finest medieval films

 

exit 8 - not scary or fun, moving or engaging

 

il buco - its scene near the end of the film, just before the bottom of the cave, squiggling through a narrow passage over 600 metres into the earth - far more terrifying than anything in exit 8

 

into great silence - a bit silly, too much the contrapunt to wall street and so bound to the same sphere - i'd rather the monks than investment bankers - the monks are clearly far less destructive, but their cloistered innocence seems the bifurcated necessity to bifurcated political exigencies

 

the obvious injunction is that we're to admire respect even envy these hermits' lives, yet where's the dirt of the politics, the interiorities ... where there's no mud there's no art and quite possibly no god - what would we be admiring or respecting other than a marketed abstraction

 

and while i'll give sleep has her house an opportunity - these nature solitary films seem too romantic - a kind of religious porn - for those who're detached from inhabiting nature and solitude themselves and so bring it as a microdose of packaged distant otherness

 

then the sea that thinks comes along and says - or the tree it thinks it's thinking says - i am more monk that those monks because i dont try to do ... or maybe not because i don't but just as i don't

 

i dont   this donting is our doo

 

the 2000 dutch films a sieving of nature through whonym consciousness, rather than cloistering nature repressing it channeling it into aggression domination subjugation oppression it stays within its within and allows itself to be blown around in the nature that's been absorbed - through nature's external absence it becomes manifest in minds that avoid doing anything with it other than describing its meteorologies in langwiches that emerge from their experience being possessed by nature - this avoiding describing possessing absorbing we could call art and the sea that thinks not only an amusing friendly example but along with naked lunch one of the better explorations of being debecoming becoming debeing a writer, of being seduced into that swamp sometimes called langwich

 

the wolf house spectacular - a perfect transmutation of horror and suffering, a vital noble application of imaginative energies

道生中的死亡

 

上士闻道勤而行之

中士闻道若存若亡

下士闻道大笑之

 

before i began memorizing the daodejing in english some 20 years ago dao seemed to me something of a distantly enticing joke, having finished memorizing dc lao's translation and roughly two-thirds through memorizing the chinese dao now seems sometimes here sometimes not sometimes false dead flat sometimes alive vital true, but vignette 41 says that the best student practices dao diligently and walks it - it's fickle for the average and risible for the poor student

 

so if things keep going in the same direction maybe in another 20 years i'll be a good student or maybe dead, which for me may or may not be the same thing

 

死而不亡者寿

 

death and life being what they are - in each other and not apart - should they be forced apart things become unnatural decontextual destructive and this is where we are today in our interwoven civilization across the world and often within our interiorities, we've split the adam (אֲדָמָה earth) and so ourselves

 

朴散则为器 

 

when the uncut block (朴 pŭ) breaks up (散 sàn) it becomes tools (器 qì), as we've split the atom (άτομή uncut) so we've become tools of our splitting

 

to return death to life, to seek death in life, is not to continue increasing our warring, carnism, testosterone and its devotees, bifurcations - but to die ourselves while not dying

 

强梁者不得其死

 

yet the violent have no capacity for their death, their only capacity is for death - its projection, abstraction, externalization, objectification

 

名与身孰亲

身与货孰多

得与亡孰病

 

which is the greater calamity - your name or your meat, your meat or your assets, your capacity or your death - dao doesn't know, nor does life - and should i - but that these are eternal unresolving pivots on the forever tottering ambivalence of the day places death in life as life in death, yin in yang as yang in yin, you in me as i in you

 

故坚强者死之徒

柔弱者生之徒

 

therefore by separating life and death the hard and strong are death's disciples, by dying and not dying the pliable and weak are life's disciples 

 

不笑不足以为道

 

if no laughter it would be insufficient as dao - yet there is a laughter with as walking grows even as the laughter evaporates

rambling daos and moving pictures

spaces exist for the precision scientists, the scholars and conventionally studious journalists, to provide commentary according to their expertise - if we find analogies in the art world we could call such commentary realism and realistic representation like everything has its uses and nonuses. but we don't reify the method or knowledge, even as we attempt not to reify anything. our approach is not to try to be scholars, journalists, scientists - for we aren't made for these roles but other equally necessary tasks - neopostimpressionists and patarealists - these other methods and knowledges too, while less certified by the dominant maturities and forces, have their nonuses and uses. the people get scared that if you accept knowledge outside of science and its family you have automatically moved into faith, disinformation, radical relativity, nonsense. but this is largely due to the people having forgotten the arts of listening to the earth and the silences. so we, the doofam, occasionally here provide postneoimpressionistic meditations, patarealistic commentaries, dada devotions, abstract fluxy rehyperoutsider adventures and explorations. they aren't designed to be literal or true, they also aren't designed to be false or unnatural

and as we keep saying nonsense and madness have their truths

 

we draw from film - particularly the global arthouse genres - and dao - particularly the daodejing yet also the zuangzi, we draw from them as a wandering awed chronoconfused penitent might from a well, for sustenance to continue repenting, revering, wandering, perplexing

 

we distinguish here revering and reifying as the latter wrongly objectifying subjectivity and the former walking in rightful dread and respect in relation with the energies pervading the cosmos of which we are only infinitesimal aspects

 

you can here as elsewhere correctly accuse us of ignorance, we call it too ignorance but we also call it the inevitable limits of an abject seeker and see ignorance as our inevitable condition

 

soon some rambles and putterings on 道 and 死