dao de jing vi

 

The spirit of the valley never dies.

This is called the mysterious female.

The gateway of the mysterious female

is called the root of heaven and earth.

Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,

yet use will never drain it.

Who lays claim to the eternal, especially these days of transience and time?  Who proclaims the hidden, especially in an age of explicitness and fame?  As the female morphs into the male and the male into the female, as the cumulative noise of monuments and those who would be monuments crowds the air, who would defend anonymity and silence?  When only the visible, the sensuous, the testable are granted credence by the pomp and powers, the texts and tyrannies, who would whisper to the valleys of night that only the invisible never dies?

Who would confound, not clarify?  Who would lose, not find?  Who would seem dim and ungraspable, not bright and held?  Who would nonchalantly refuse the world’s towering laurels, preferring to rest in the obscure shade of some unnamed cave?  Who would walk through doors not to get somewhere but to go through them?

Is this a timeless woman who has no name?  A woman shrouded in the inarticulate arts of subtle negation?  Or is it no woman, but some epicene who refuses definition?

The questions hover on elusive portals, and are gone.

The Tao removes itself, and removes again.  Doubly removed, for it is not just valley but the spirit of the valley; not just female but the mysterious female.  Then again, not just the mysterious female, but the gateway of the mysterious female.  Not just one name, but two.  Secret, yes, but manifestation and secret; desire and root.

If you would know yourself, the world around you, the arching panoply of power, and the origin of all things, you would remain detached from the myriad specific forms of knowledge and desire.  You would not climb, you would fall.  When you found the valley has no bottom and sex no ground, would you not rest in the dim light of this newly discovered land?  Would you not sing?

dao de jing v

 

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?

It is empty without being exhausted:

the more it works the more comes out.

Much speech leads inevitably to silence.

Better to hold fast to the void.

Nature, leadership, wisdom.  These are all sentimentalized—which is to say falsified—by those who live far from these things.  Who lives in nature (not a cottage in nature) and thinks nature is benevolent?  Who binds human masses to some common goal and thinks leadership is sweet aphorisms on a desk calendar, speeches on a bedside table?  Who has gained the knowledge of rocks and time and, looking at humanity, thinks, What a lovely species!  How beautiful and virtuous!  Calm indifference to all particular things—which is to say, everything—is the hallmark of this detached trinity.

The sage is ruthless not because she struts across the city leaving heads and hearts lolling on the streets but because she doesn’t cater to the people’s infantile fantasies about themselves and the world.  For this refusal, she is considered ruthless.  If one understands heaven and earth—the vast coldness of heaven, the insignificant passions of earth—one also understands one’s self:  a microcosm of this coldness, these passions.  

The sage may laugh at the misfortunes of the world because she laughs at her own.  And only she who laughs at her own may also laugh at the world’s.  For this detachment and humor, she is considered ruthless.  The straw dogs want coddling.  When they have been used for what they are good for and find they are not coddled but cast out, they complain and accuse those who used them, though they were frequently complicit in their being used.  The dog complains, but the sage walks away whistling, setting out to do the next appointed task, even if this be banging pots by a shack until she dies.

The sage is a sage because she mirrors heaven and earth, not the rebellion against them.  The dogs are dogs because they rebel against this primary mirroring, eking out existence in the spiritual garbage heaps of the world.  There, there is another ruthlessness which the dogs call virtue and wisdom and leadership and nature and love.  But the sage is ruthless and her names are nothing but her breath—here, there, and gone.