dao de jing lxxiii

 

He who is fearless in being bold will meet with his death,

He who is fearless in being timid will stay alive.

Of the two, one leads to good, the other to harm.

Heaven hates what it hates—who knows the reason why!

Therefore even the sage treats some things as difficult.

The way of heaven

Excels in overcoming though it does not contend,

In responding though it does not speak,

In attracting though it does not summon,

In laying plans though it appears slack.

The net of heaven is cast wide.

Though the mesh is not fine, yet nothing ever slips through.

In the city, our now and metal home, our global castle without dimension, our regulated and exclusive club that accepts all and denies all, that squirms in time’s soil and dreams of floods and fire, the rule that rules in our hearts is the rule of humans over humans, seen in the rise of the will, the increase in sales of indulgences of freedom, manuals of success and stories, games of equality and chance.

Dao acknowledges and accepts this rule; it counts it among power’s necessities.  It avoids positing a fantasy to replace it; some duality to overcome it, succumb to it, or eternally struggle with it; a trinity or quaternity or polygopoly to systematize it into ideologies and texts.

But it does not accept this rule as sufficient in the description of the human’s place in the cosmos.  It does not accept the sight and sightlines of the city as the vision with which we are compelled to see, through some straightjacket of history, some oneiric teleology.

It expands power’s scope and nature, neither by negating nor elevating the human but by expanding--by placing the human on a stage so large it counts as one, by means of returning, through the city’s sewers and memories, its sleepy archaeologies, its torn and smelly maps, to the quiet subversions of earth—subversions we might be able to accept in our present screaming ecologies, in the snatches of our destruction, in the omnipresent hide-and-seeking of the grave, its magnificent facades, if we began listening to wind and stones, if we were not so committed to restricting democracy to our selves.

But Dao doesn’t stop at earth, where it could, where we might want it to.  It digs further, past the silence of the worms—not to a christian otherness, not to a no-place of Plato or More or Jobs, some final fantasy, a tweet of such resplendence it would floor the world (at least for 10 seconds), but—to a heaven which might be said to be the silent articulation of the earth, a glimpse of what we might on better nights imagine ourselves to be:  the voices and nurturers of all those without voice, not simply those (as we now tend to be oriented toward, in our metal castle) whose voices have—through some peculiar process—come to be heard as the voices, entitled to devour and drown.  Dao digs to heaven, the sage’s home and eye, and so digs back to itself, the wayless way:  the gift the human is given to see how it might walk.

So who would be bold on such a stage, on which one, in some vast ensemble cast stands and sits and dies alongside butterflies and dinosaurs and Hamlet and time itself?

One is timid not because of an inability to be courageous but through ability.  One is timid because one is one and the numbers never stop.  One is timid because humans rule over humans; earth rules over rulers; heaven, indifferent and compassionate, rules over earth; and Dao, shadowy and indistinct, rules by not-ruling, counts by not-counting, and walks a path without knowing why and without particularly caring about this.  Why?  Because of this.

dao de jing lxii

 

When the people lack a proper sense of awe then some awful visitation will descend upon them.

Do not constrict their living space; do not press down on their means of livelihood.  It is because you do not press down on them that they will not weary of the burden.

Hence the sage knows himself but does not display himself,

Loves himself but does not exalt himself.

Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.

Awe in our world has mostly been diminished to technology (the new, the bright, the virtual, the fast) and humanity (its flesh and flexing:  the beautiful, the powerful, the fast).  Though we may watch Planet Earth, we may go on a whale-sighting tour, we may camp in Algonquin for a week, we may love our cats, a proper sense of awe is not primarily virtual, abstracted from our lives, requiring damage to other species and the planet, legitimizing one aspect of nature over another, dependent on indirect or cognitive knowledge, but directed to what christians call god, daoists call dao, philosophers call being — the diverse contextualized unity of all things.

The shift in the twentieth century from utopian to dystopian fantasies (in art, in individual and collective psyches) reflects our growing knowledge (a spiritual knowledge, deeper than that pumped out from our academies and medias, difficult for us to acknowledge—that is, push into our behaviors—other than through art, our dreams and nightmares, our unconscious) that we may be bringing an awful visitation upon ourselves through our inability to orient ourselves to a proper sense of awe, to a proper sense of our place (our insignificance and significance, equal to the insignificance and significance of all things) in an endlessly vibrating empty-full universe.

Dao favors laissez faire, low regulatory, minimal bureaucratic-litigious, individually (but not systemic) anarchic government—both within the external state of society and the internal state of the self … one in which the best leader is shadowy and indistinct:  the opposite of what our improperly-awed society favors (the imaged and conspicuous, the named and reproduced).

So the sage is not particularly impressed with humanity or herself, does not need to build visible permanent structures, external to herself, to prove to herself or anyone that she exists and is following, like all, the arc from womb to grave, from earth to earth.

So she throws out what most people keep and cherish—the accoutrements of society:  its hard and feeble proofs—and takes what most people discard:  the still and the heavy, the supple and weak.  These are the procedures of awe, the policies of freedom, and the way of a long, animate and ethical life.

dao de jing lxxi

To know yet to think that one does not know is best,

Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.  The sage meets with no difficulty.  It is because he is alive to it that he meets with no difficulty.

What is this game the Dao plays in its heavenly caprice?  What sort of deception does the sage play with knowledge and masks and is knowledge itself a mask and, if so, a mask for what?

Is being alive to difficulty difficult?  Or is it simply becoming alive to difficulty that's difficult?  Are these pieces of knowledge that if one might be acquainted with them one should think one isn’t?

If the sage is alive, she is alive to the relation between knowing and not-knowing, a relation which may be a kind of thinking, an orientation of mind, yet it seems as if the kind of thinking required to transmute not-knowing into knowing may be different than the kind of thinking required to transmute knowing into not-knowing and, if this seeming is so, is the difference in kind also a difference in difficulty and being or becoming alive?

And, in summary (if we can speak of summarizing when there is hardly anything to summarize), is the above questioning—its nature and function—itself, in part at least, a function of the sage saying—or at least the Dao saying or writing or it having been said in the Dao—she meets with no difficulty:  that the rooted speaking of the phrase permits the avoidance and the being and becoming and being alive?

dao de jing lxx

 

My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice.  Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.

It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few,

Those who harm me are honored.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

The language of the Dao understands language:  words, as deeds, are empty in their centers, the distance from the surface of a word to its core is infinite.  Each word spins outward until the memory of the word suffices for the word and we are right to say we know the word and have never known it and can never.

The ancestor of words, the sovereign of deeds, is no human, no god, no other word, no other deed, no recognizable thing; yet words have an ancestor and its blood is in the words, deeds have a sovereign and its policies and procedures circumscribe the deeds.  Only a fool sees words solid and isolated, deeds as independent and free.

Doesn’t the sage sound whiny here—she is not understood! she’s got an esoteric secret! others are dumb!

But this is not some juvenescent we are all eternally separate complaint against existence, not some i am special or especially special and everyone’s out to get me.

Rather, this is the sage’s reversal of societal expectations, not particularly to be subversive or rebellious or cantankerous or obnoxious or anarchist or to be anything really, but because the orders of society are naturally at odds with the orders of the sage, the latter seeming far more natural to the sage than the societal orders, which somehow erect the human above the worm, ideas about life and death above life and death.  Doesn’t Chuang Tzu say— Therefore, the sage sees his role as that of a wanderer, sees knowledge as a curse, convention as a glue, virtue as just a means, and effort as common trade.  The sage has no great plans, so what use has he for knowledge? He makes no divisions, so what use has he for glue? He has no problems, so what use has he for virtue? He has no career, so what need has he for common trade?

Most devote their lives to cladding themselves in jade, concealing homespun:  flaunting cars and homes and girlfriends and knowledge and boyfriends and children and convention and friends and publications and virtue and awards and efforts and nosejobs, concealing their desolation and solitude and haplessness.   But the sage wears her desolation and solitude and haplessness and conceals not cars and awards and plans and children and lovers and nosejobs, though she may, but that which empowers solitude and haplessness and desolation, that which cars and awards and children and lovers and knowledge and nosejobs are often designed to conceal.

So the sage lives in an order that seems disorderly to those who to the sage live in an order that seems disorderly.

amour : a few notes

 

Amour’s protagonist is not ^death (nor any of its humans, impeccable acting though they perform), but ^silence.

Music (always solo piano, either live or on CD) is played on five occasions:  by the student-cum-performer at his Parisian concert, by him again in Anne’s and Georges’ apartment, by Georges briefly, and with CD recordings by the student and possibly Anne.  The final three renderings are brief, interrupted; ^silence is chosen over the music.  Opening and closing credits are done in ^silence - the ^silence of the opening broken by crashing doors to the reek of ^death, the ^silence of the closing preceded by Anne’s ghost speaking the prosaic, Aren’t you taking a coat?

The dialogue is almost mythic in its everyday sparseness, much of the film’s meaning conveyed by gesture, glances, aversions, absence.  There are no answers to or attempts to answer the primary questions of love, family, meaning, suffering, ^death.  They exist on their own; ^silence speaks their murky unspeakable truths.

The melancholic and common analogy between the dependent infant - diapered, babbling - waxing into life, and the dependent geriatric—diapered, babbling - waning from life, is secondary to the more deeply melancholic comparisons established.  While no children are present in the film, Amour highlights life’s arc through youth (Alexandre, the musician, busily and importantly successful; the second nurse, emotionally incompetent in her technical competence) and middle age (Eva, Anne’s and Georges’ daughter, obsessed with money, security, fidelity; the concierge and her husband, respectfully concerned).  A kind of helplessness is everywhere - youth’s inability to comprehend aging; middle age’s inability to construct sufficient defences to dam the lurking terror of decline; the inability of respectable concern, medicine, hired-help to do much of anything - underpinned by the nearly mute and choreographed dance of Georges and Anne.

An aspect of their dance is the ironies and parodies of a once-vital eros, altered through daily scrimmage and subtextual negotiation into a familiar companionship, not unpleasant, the good-enough marriage.  This parody begins with the sexual suggestiveness and rejection upon the couple’s return from the concert (he: shall we have a drink?  she: i’m tired.  he: i fancy another drink. she: do as you please [continues to talk].  he: did i tell you that i thought you looked very pretty tonight. she: what’s gotten into you?  he smiles with familiarity, resignation, goes into the kitchen.  she: the semiquavers in the presto were incredible. what subtlety!)

The wry smile turns to a cringe when they’re in the bathroom together and he pulls up her panties; later, when she touches his hand and the graze almost offends him in pretending to close a gap that has almost opened to infinity.

Then, when Anne says, still with moments of lucidity, when looking through the photographs of her life, Life is beautiful, we can’t help but agree and object.  This ambivalence - life’s ambivalence - threads its way through the film.

One of its threads is the relationship between society’s chitchattiness and nothingness, highlighted almost to the point of laughter (were it not for its familiar pathos) in Anne’s and Georges’ domestic rituals and negotiations (the salt cellar exchange in the kitchen, the newspaper reading and interruptions in the parlour), spiralling outward toward the mute archaeologies of marriage and family, the emotional resonance of space (even we come to identify with the rooms, finally being shown the spare room at the end, when Georges is alone).

Language’s ambivalence is centrally shown during the comic-horrific exchange between Anne and Eva, as the daughter’s seemingly normal but obviously absurd concerns with money contrast with the mother’s fragmented response - seemingly absurd, but pointing to truth (not dissimilar to Lucky’s central speech in Godot).

(While so little of the film is shot in society - most of it intimate, private - the only public social shot, in the opening at the concert, begins with a view of the audience from stage [the detachment of ^death, ^silence], also nodding to The Crowd and strangely mirroring the opening of another very different ’12 film - Holy Motors.)

Perhaps less apparent is the ambivalence between nature and the city:  the faucet, the rain, as backdrops to moments of decline; the pigeon (innocent because without moral knowledge, speechless, rather awkward and stupid) haphazardly intruding into the apartment, captured by Georges in a kind of danse macabre (and we are tense, are we not? will he catch it? kill it? free it? the moment seems pivotal), contrasted with the weight of our knowledge.  Amour is stretched between the discontents of civilization and their dark haphazard unknowing roots (Paris is the perfect environment for this, though we hardly glimpse it, stuck as we are in a cosmic domesticity), and we along with it, elastics as we are, testing our substance on the finger of time, about to snap on the timeless edges of earth.

Sometimes seemingly at the center but orbiting around it is ^death - holy of holies, the door behind the door, Anne flowered and dried, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or is it Nightmare? - we can’t say).

Partially revealed (and isn’t everything in the film partially revealed?) is the West’s sophisticated but sterile treatment of ^death - its clinicization and denial.  Anne knows when she should die and says so to Georges.  She does not have the will to insist; he does not have the will to comply; both operate within societal confines that they have purchased and so limit their vision and action.   Near the end, as his frustration mounts, as he breaks his bond and threatens her with hospitalization (he: they can force-feed you there), an evident contrast between the lack of dignity inherent in our culture of prolonging life (of quantitative willful life over qualitative contextual life) and the dignity embedded in the elder monk’s self-immolation in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.

Georges’ precise recounting of the standard absurdity, stupidity, and brutality in the funeral he attends amplifies modern society’s awkward, technological, schizophrenic and foundationally inhumane and immature relationship with ^death.

Even at Anne’s end, her body rejects its rejection.  Only Georges is calm; Georges, with his three dreams (of his own ^death, of Anne playing the piano, of her in ^death bringing him through a door - to ^death? to life for a time?).

Along with life, ^death, love, family, society, technology, and language, art doesn’t escape the ambivalent thread - the music that surrounds and bolsters the couple’s life together collapses into ^silence, redeeming nothing.

Amour speaks the darkness society avoids.  It speaks it primarily in ^silence, which binds the film and us together, like a ghost, like gravity, like worms and bees.

Here is a more comprehensive and philosophical take on the film - 

http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/love-death-truth-amour/