dao de jing lxiv

 

It is easy to maintain a situation while it is still secure.

It is easy to deal with a situation before symptoms develop.

It is easy to break a thing when it is yet brittle.

It is easy to dissolve a thing when it is yet minute.

Deal with a thing while it is still nothing.

Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.

A tree that can fill the span of a man’s arms grows from a downy tip.

A terrace nine storeys high rises from hodfuls of earth.

A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one’s feet.

Whoever does anything to it will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it.

Therefore the sage, because he does nothing, never ruins anything and, because he does not lay hold of anything, loses nothing.

In their enterprises the people always ruin them when on the verge of success.

Be as careful at the end as at the beginning and there will be no ruined enterprises.

Therefore the sage desires not to desire

And does not value goods which are hard to come by.

Learns to be without learning

And makes good the mistakes of the multitude

In order to help the myriad creatures to be natural and to refrain from daring to act.

Always in the Dao a fish, deeply set, sensed, known, perhaps even loved, by the sage.  Below, some membrane separating words and things.  Is it feral?  Whose desire is it for it to be set free, to be loosed into the human circus:  another flood, another olympian drama?  Can anything be done to it? Can it be ruined?  Is it possible even to stretch one’s hand through the membrane and touch it?  What are the methods for its description?  Is this stretching, this setting free, the reason for humanity, its being and becoming, the arc of history, time’s timeless blood?

We exist on a murky equilibrium, an unseen fulcrum.  The sage knows the feel of the pivot as life whirls around and she is somehow not undone.   For to deal with a thing while it is still nothing, you must know nothing.  You must know how it feels to attempt to get the fish to leave, to grasp its scales, to know ruin, to have attempted to have become the slippery spirit of desire, suck on its piscine heart, been spat back to land, unloved, unnamed, unbecome.

But, in that Daoist twist, the scales—those energies of all seduction—are not known by grasping or doing but by grasping not-grasping and doing not-doing.  The sage does not lay hold, but lies on the membrane, watching the fish, watching the grasping, watching the watching watching the fish.  The sage does not seduce or is not seduced in the usual ways, but through the eyes on the membrane on the fish on the deep.  So things get done, though no one really knows how.  So ways are walked, and the walking is not a method, a program, a measure, but a step, and another, and another, and that is all:  this the vision and the eyes and the learning and the care.

In the Dao a fish and in a fish the Dao.  Untouched, bound, and in its binding free.

dao de jing lxiii

 

Do that which consists in taking no action, pursue that which is not meddlesome, savor that which has no flavor.

Make the small big and the few many.  Do good to him who has done you an injury.

Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult.  Make something big by starting with it when small.

Difficult things in the world must have their beginnings in the easy.  Big things must have their beginnings in the small.

Therefore it is because the sage never attempts to be great that he succeeds in becoming great.

One who makes promises rashly rarely keeps good faith.  One who is in the habit of considering things easy meets with frequent difficulties.

Therefore even the sage treats some things as difficult.  That is why in the end no difficulties can get the better of him.

The Dao is a self-sustaining spiritual ecosystem, using the materials of destruction to destroy destruction, enabled to do this through its core use:  using use to achieve non-use.  For doing is usually active, pursuing meddlesome, savoring flavorful.  The small is usually just small, the few few, and greatness a result of effort.  What is this spiritual magic show, pulling big from small, many from few, good from injury, greatness from nothing, action from no-action, and flavor from no-flavor?  A linguistic game, an inane delusion, a mind so imbalanced it’s upside down, hanging from itself?

Perhaps.  But it could simply be a graceful imaginative act:  seeing the world in your beloved or without stirring abroad.

The Dao itself is a manual for this seeming sleight-of-hand:  using word to get beyond word, language to deconstruct language (long before deconstructionism).  But once language is deconstructed through the Dao, there is not nothingness but a way of nothing, not emptiness but an empty path.

Unlike the dominant forms of religious and secular moralities, the Dao never attempts to be good or to eradicate or condemn evil; instead it asks how great the distance is between the two and in asking, in not defining, dissolves the duality.  It pursues non-pursuit, creates by turning back to old ruts.

I wait at Yonge and Bloor for the scramble to open.  In waiting and in scrambling i immerse myself, naturally, with minimal cost, in the waiting and scrambling that comprises life.  This little waiting becomes the waiting the bureaucrat does for the president, the general for the enemy to finish a mistake, the universe to end or expand, the pain of unrequited love; this little scrambling becomes the way through, the cessation of unsustainable pollution, an order of chaos.

This smallness is not done from volition, from frivolity, self-effacement, inferiority or ressentiment, from spiritual principles or guidelines, some text, but from an almost unthinking unwilled unassuming efficiency of nature—this self-sustaining ecosystem called Dao which the world tries vainly to emulate visibly through green technologies and spiritual systems.

Yet here it is.

the turin horse

 

Bela Tarr, king of transforming existential bleakness into cinematic beauty, surpasses himself in his reputedly last film, The Turin Horse.  While the 7.5 hour Sátántangó remains his masterpiece and one of the crown jewels of cinema, Tarr’s finale consummates his grim vision and is, perhaps, the most relentlessly perfect depiction of monotony and futility on screen, blended through the bleak fusion of music, image and word.

Musically, the same droning bars drone in the endless wind—ponderous, becoming almost unheard in their heavy repetition, a litany of endless necessity.  Imagistically black and white with Tarr’s characteristic long takes, the unredeemable darkness of existence is redeemed only through the beauty of artifice the creator constructs, the gap being infinite—our source of irony, despair, hope and emptiness.  Verbally, silence dominates—a silence so rich in its persistent presence, so wholly aligned with the grave muteness of the father’s and daughter’s eyes, that dialogue between them, when it sparsely happens, broaches comedy.

Yet comedy, of a kind, assumes center stage during the three intrusions from the external world:  the vatic booze-obtaining Nietzsche-paraphrasing neighbour; the bawdy vaudevillian descent of the gypsies; and the rough reading of the book, seemingly a manual for cleansing violated sacred spaces.  Prophecy, violation, procedural cleansing—perhaps a mythic allusion to the 120 years between Nietzsche’s collapse and the filming of Tarr’s slow minimalist serene finale.

But little shocks from within the hopelessly enclosed world of the two protagonists remain scattered around the three larger ones:  the almost perverse eroticism of the daughter putting on her stockings, the endless potatoes and the variations of their eating, the reversals and blendings (the horse once leading is now led, the occasional merging of daughter and horse through empathy, the shift from looking through the daughter’s eyes through the window to looking through the window at her following the escape failure, the binding of father and horse through struggle, the insular union of father and daughter), and perhaps most intensely the father’s face (perfectly chosen, it embodies the film’s central theme of chiseled void and, like the theme, like the void itself, one encounters each time a kind of vertigo upon seeing it). 

The six days of the film mirror the six days of biblical creation, but unlike the latter account—for which the final creative day is the climactic transcendent production of humans—The Turin Horse’s final day is brief, encased in darkness, portending death, the trees of knowledge and life withered and silent.

Tarr’s films demand deep empathy and attention; there is no escape, as in Hollywood, from the stark brutalities of existence.  Like reading The Four Quartets, one escapes instead to life’s poetic center—which only feels like an escape from life because we so frequently devote ourselves to sheltering ourselves from it.

Ostensibly, by being in the title and dominating the opening take, the horse that Nietzsche wept over (in Turin just prior to his descent into madness) is the film’s protagonist.  As the story progresses, however, the viewer begins to suspect that—no—the father and daughter jointly share the lead.  But by the end, when nothing has happened and everything has happened, it’s hard not to conclude that futility itself plays the central role—as in some of the great works of Western literature:  The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, and Blood Meridian.  Which curiously brings us back to the horse as the obscure center:  dumb, violated, forever irredeemably monotonously itself. 

Does art, does beauty, provide the grace required to redeem necessity’s omnipresent horrors?  We know what Simone Weil would say.  But I might only allow Tarr to respond with his films.

tarkovsky

 

In the last month I’ve watched Tarkovsky’s oeuvre of seven films (I ignored his student work and his later documentary).  Three (Stalker, Solaris, Mirror) I had seen multiple times before; Stalker remains, for me, a masterpiece and the one to watch if you simply want to dip briefly into Tarkovsky ... but a dipping would be a mistake.  He’s a director to lingeringly bathe in.  Like Joyce in literature, Tarkovsky doesn’t produce any mediocrity.  There are forces of nature in art which produce works prodigiously:  some, like Balzac, at over 90 novels, leave me consistently cool; others, like Hitchcock, with over 50 films, create a few masterpieces, with the rest largely competent or good.  But each of Tarkovsky’s films is a distinctive jewel, a provocative mystic-meditative emotionally potent exploration of human existence.  His technical trademarks—long takes, silence and water (who does water like he?), a periodic and strategic use of colour—and his grounded big themes—god, love, death, desire, suffering, innocence, hope—combine enticingly, seamlessly; I am frequently awed by the Rembrandt-beauty of his images:  impeccably nuanced, stunning, eternal.

Many of his films feature a child at their spiritual center.  Both Stalker and The Sacrifice end with such a fusion of futility and hope through the character of a child that this impossible union seems to become (but is it?) the very noblest aim of art and spirit.

In The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky stretches his typical themes—our themes—further into Western myth, particularly through the end of the cycle of the Word (the death of God, the threat to patriarchy, the puncturing of monism and the One).  It ends, after an apocalyptic descent somewhat reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Ran (the Lear figure, broken, mad, his world in flames), with the child by the dead tree his father planted for him, having told him the story before his descent, in fairytale fashion, of how a monk had watered a dead tree daily for three years, at which point it was found one morning alive and blossoming.  His father now mad and gone, the apocalypse seemingly averted, the child lies on his back beneath the tree after having watered it and muses,

In the beginning was the Word.  Why is that, Papa?

I have a sense that the boy sets the question aside as largely irrelevant (a historical curiosity, to use language he wouldn’t use) and instead calmly, slowly, engages in his dream of faith in a dead tree that, through patience and hope, comes alive.

Curiously and perhaps aptly, Tarkovsky died shortly after The Sacrifice was completed; the film is dedicated to his son.