daodejing xiii

 

favour and disgrace are like being startled

honour is a great trouble like your body

what is meant by saying that favour and disgrace are like being startled?

favour being that which when bestowed on a subject serves to startle as much as when withdrawn

this is what is meant by saying that favour and disgrace are like being startled

what is meant by saying that honour is a great trouble like your body?

the reason i have great trouble is that i have a body

when i no longer have a body, what trouble do i have?

hence one who values putting its person in order more than putting the empire in order can be given the custody of the empire

one who grudges using its person for putting the empire in order can be entrusted with the empire.

dear thirteens,

this is the initial wellness that we ran away from for a false wellness. neither spa nor gym, personal fitness coach nor metime advocate. not to support a career or lifestyle or advancement or relationship

these cycles of winners and losers, ruling and being ruled are for a humanity that only knows how to abuse its gifts, destroy its value, exterminate life, treat death lightly. another humanity hides in this one and in this age when a warring and consumptive destruction pervades normalized societal structures and rituals, who would uncover itself?

this putting its person in order is of a different order than the orders given us in our homes and schools and workplaces and medias and bedrooms. but hardly one absent from the world – it is most present if we would stop and listen to our myriad peers (few of them human) in life – yet one we have violently suppressed to serve our appetites for extinction

oh human who cannot be entrusted with the empire. oh human who lusts after influence, who believes its voice is innately and rationally superior. oh human who has senses and consciousness and does not use them except for its own extension and comfort and obesity. what are you doing on earth and why are you asserting your rights when you have not shown yourself worthy of honour or your body or the empire or trust or life?

daodejing xii

 

the five colours make a human’s eyes blind

riding and hunting make its mind go wild with excitement

goods hard to come by serve to hinder its progress

the five tastes injure a human’s palate

the five notes make its ears deaf

hence in her rule the sage is for the belly not for the eye

therefore he discards the one and takes the other

dear twelves,

feed the people. don’t let them get hungry or thirsty. give them clean water and sufficient shelter. provide them with entertainment poking fun at remote leaders and providing hope that the human will become something other than itself. show them love as some soft cuddly attainable thing. separate good and evil and let the former vanquish. mute their senses and dull their minds. put them in front of screens from the earliest age and in desks as soon as possible. teach them to behave and to be good citizens and not to question too much and to obey authority and to put actions in one place and words in another, for such compartments are necessary for an orderly life. destroy wildness and incarcerate enthusiasm. blind vision and make values tools of sedation. let education be a process of conformity and the home a fortress of coddled fear. numb all excess and thinking, eradicate the imagination, discard vitality

indulge your appetites, enforce order, and adapt your behaviour, emotions, attitudes and thoughts to the dominant social environment in which you find yourself

work it out that on occasion when a true work of art or an outsider of some sort manages to get past the barriers of acceptability and be heard that their subversive messages and forms will be transformed through money and abstraction such that they will not be heard, that through their success they will be brought into the happiness of the dominant, and the people will laugh at themselves without realizing it or effecting any change

daodejing xi

 

thirty spokes share one hub

make the nothing therein appropriate

and you will have the use of the cart

knead clay in order to make a vessel

make the nothing therein appropriate

and you will have the use of the clay vessel

cut out doors and windows in order to make a room

make the nothing therein appropriate

and you will have the use of the room

thus we gain by making it something

but we have the use by making it nothing

dear elevens,

here’s a life goal for the dispossessed and innovative: describe the procedures and policies of making nothing appropriate. write a manual. develop curricula. institute degrees and esteemed places of higher learning. compose a society, careers, aesthetic and mystical subversions, religions and laws, the corollary outcast and imprisoned and abused and unacceptably alternative. write a novel describing it. form a political party promoting it. die defending it

a little bit extreme though, isn’t it, for any relations between something and nothing – which, after all, are just everything and are here, existing, in my aubergine and spectacles

daodejing x

 

when carrying on your head your perplexed bodily soul can you hold in your arms the one and not let go?

in concentrating your breath can you become as supple as a baby?

can you polish your dark mirror and leave no blemish?

in loving the people and bringing life to the state are you capable of not resorting to knowledge?

when the gates of heaven open and shut are you capable of keeping to the role of the female?

when your discernment penetrates the four quarters are you capable of not resorting to knowledge?

it gives them life and rears them

it gives them life without claiming to possess them

it is the steward yet exercises no authority over them

such is called dark virtue

dear tens,

isn’t the answer to all six questions, no? and how could there be a yes other than among those anachronistic gurus and enlightenment charlatans, who uphold a light virtue, a knowable goodness, a complete knowledge, an effective practice. we are all dao and one and two and three and many. we are polypolar, each of us, and those who process their innumerabilities into a mask of monism walk against dao and even if their names are nailed to some wall of honour yet they will not survive in the coded dream. true, some are more of dao or one, some more of two or three, some more of many and dao, and such is diversity

but show me the one who holds the one and does not let go. not the one who claims but the one who does not. not the one who manages appearances and performs that magic but the one in its everythingness, in all its unseenness. anyone with a bit of practice can become supple for a moment, maybe a day. but suppleness held becomes a rigidity. the act of polishing is itself a blemish and the dark mirror shows nothing – that ruse. loving and governing are actions. the role of the female has been rolled. we now don't know and know enough to know of the knowing of not knowing and the not knowing of knowing. i play with words you say. words play with me. there is no other play. and even the stages of cruelty and absurdity and gesture are plays of words, words bare and marrow, spurting their ruthless truths

yes i am capable. yes i can hold and become. yes i can not know and keep and love. even as i play a fool of dirty energy and cast the shifting cast of my wandering breath, unfocused and confused, across the mirrors of myself

for the only one is the one we cannot grasp, being too many ourselves, possessing myriad hands at diverse purposes, having become comprised of a limitless knowledge bound by flesh's merciless spherical court, its shadowy walls, gloamed lighting, its axe

the river rushes faster as it nears the ocean. and who could stay still in the current? who could be silent in the ever-open theater of words? 

oh you of daoless dao – for dao is too far from us now (and was as soon as it was uttered) – who slips and doesn’t resort, whose blemishes are uncountable and unmeasured … we cannot see your virtue, we do not know your name, we cannot walk your way

daodejing ix

 

rather than fill it to the brim by keeping it upright better to have stopped in time

hammer it to a point and the sharpness cannot be preserved always

there may be gold and jade filling the chamber but there is none who can keep them safe

to be overbearing when one has position and wealth is to bring calamity upon oneself

to retire when the task is accomplished is the way of heaven

dear nines,

an odd vision for a pervasively rapacious species

while some humans advocate for reason, justice, equality, balance, almost all are impressed with excess – the reaches of human strength, power, goodness, domination, fame, wealth – resulting in scenarios we now face: of seeking to establish ourselves on other planets even though we have demonstrated little capacity to live well on this one

dao shrugs, inclined to being impressed with individuals and species oriented to more mature processes than striving for increase and clinging to positions of superiority. while the dao de jing is a text articulated by human minds it seeks to express, in an inevitably limited way, the complex and nuanced fleshy principles of nature that all things and creatures in the universe are bound to, regardless of any hubris or talent or constructs

dao’s task is typically antithetical to what we are taught and rewarded for – of limiting ourselves individually and collectively in the context of all that exists. the human – regardless of its rhetoric – does otherwise. so we see those travelling the globe preaching ecology, those amassing goods preaching spirituality and wellness, those complicit in myriad abuses through wilful blindness while preaching justice and peace. and the many – practical, happy perhaps, productive – who go about their hopefully expanding businesses and portfolios with few ideals

and all these primitive horrors of inequalities and hypocrisies, of hierarchies within our species and our species over others, of endless paternalisms and barbaric enforcements ... how are we to live let alone find a way?

dao says stop when you should stop. how do i know when to stop? by means of this

stopping is a practice, not some glamorous announcement

how will the nations and the corporations and the artists and the people do such a thing when any model for such a thing only seems as if it were there? by developing practices of intimacy with unseen things? less the unseen things of my emotions, memories, desires, abuses – these archaeologies of therapy – and more the unseen things of the myriad creatures returning to their roots in a nameless way?

and why are we not taught of these practices in our homes and schools and businesses and entertainments, instead encouraged to practice increase and excess and volitional solidity? is the human a voice that has become so overbearing in its massive clamourings that calamity has become inevitable as a corollary?

what if humanity retired from its rapacity – not through weakness but strength, not through force but discernment, not through setting too much store by life or treating death lightly but some other relation of vitalities? how would we ever in this morass of ourselves find a way out of our obese greed and satisfied fullness? who or what outside or inside would teach us? and who among us would put language and law in their place, and learn? and how do we grow beyond our infantility and adolescence, rechannelling our prodigious energies into not-hoarding, not-promoting, not-desiring, not-severing, not as acts of masochism or self-abnegation but as movements of dark energy on time’s synthesized tracks? will technology and policy do this for us? will law or religion? will money or love?

daodejing viii

 

that which is most good is like water

it is because water is not only good at benefiting the myriad creatures but also vies to dwell in the place detested by the multitude that it comes close to the way

in a dwelling it is the site that is valued

in quality of mind it is depth that is valued

in giving it is being like heaven that is valued

in speech it is good faith that is valued

in government it is order that is valued

in affairs it is ability that is valued

in action it is timeliness that is valued

it is because it does not contend that it is never at fault

dear eights,

the most good is not power or beauty or pleasure or comfort or virtue but a kind of slipperiness, an out-of-the-wayness, a struggling not for the common aspirations of the human, a thing that doesn’t present itself as most or good

water, sometimes solid, often evaporating, accepting all manner of things within its very being including more of itself, disturbs our hierarchical preferences for the superiority of solidities

look at the table of elements. is zinc better than bromine? gallium than argon? barium than flerovium? and yet it is the way of the human to prefer solid things. perhaps as a significant majority of elements are solid, so humans, and as things prefer themselves, so solidity reigns. but a world without flow, without diffusion, without plasmatic resonance and quirkiness would not be a world

solidity is good for solidity but when it extends its reaches to what it is not and attempts to impose its own constituent qualities on what it is not the world degrades. and this is what we are seeing

depth of mind is hardly important in a home’s construction. order is not necessarily desirable in giving. the site of talking is less important than its integrity. and so good government – if it could exist – would take what things are for what they are and not presume with an evangelistic dogmatism that the codes of some – even if a majority, even if with force – should dominate

what kind of leader could effect such style? water. flow and vastness and flexibility and no need to do much but fit into the forms that present themselves

water may occasionally kill. it may sometimes carry disease. it is indifferent and often cold. water is not the way for nothing is the way but the way and even the way is not the way. water is not the only tangible thing that comes close to the way – so too the baby, the shadow, the valley, confused wandering, silence, …

i see the images of humans pass through me like a grammar of incomprehensible dreams. i do not fight my decay, my enemy, my humiliation. they are only the gurgle of the charismatic stillness of my forgetting what shape i am meant to be

daodejing vii

 

heaven and earth are enduring

the reason why heaven and earth can be enduring is that they do not give themselves life

hence they are able to be long lived

hence the sage puts her person back and it comes to the fore

treats its person as extraneous and it is preserved

is it not because she is without thought of self that she is able to accomplish her private ends?

dear sevens,

my book. my name. my will. my reputation. my things. my children. my home. my partner. my job. my ideas. my assets. my lover. my art. my feelings. my video. my dreams. my power. my story. my friend. my land. my body. my brand. my style. my self

hence here flows from the daoical orientation toward humanity as just another species: unprivileged, ungraced, ungoded, unsmarted … while skilled in a number of sectors, not overall superior or inferior to others. and so death is not something to be sought or spurned, hastened or avoided. and so too life. and so too all

what is a human doing as it clings and promotes and subjugates and kills and asserts and knows? what are its assumptions and fears? what has changed among us since one who thought weeping wrote the fairest universe is but a heap of sweepings poured out aimlessly?

dao is the most subversive intelligent witty thing i know

extraneous, external, strange, outside, unknown, alien, curious, without, distant, separated, foreign, surprising, other.

the average person is insulted when you criticize his ideas, his tastes, feelings, body. he identifies his self with his identity, thoughts, worth, life. he finds himself in resentments and seeks retreat or revenge. but the sage is uncertain of identity, this worth – not in those cheap psychological ways of worthlessness that are simply the same notions of worth positioned differently … the loci of the emotional and cognitive flows that many say occur within the self seem difficult to place, the self that many say should be valued, protected, loved, known, even defined, is instead more of a gift of a plaything, highlighting humanity’s greatest and most abused attribute – what we could call consciousness or a shapeless image

some 2500 years ago as humans navigated certain early spasms of language, a nascent potential to dominate this planet, seductions of instrumental reason, dao might be a dark blueprint of an intuition of how to deal with these notable challenges in creative, contextual, intelligent ways that would assert humanity not through assertion, that would show humanity not through conspicuousness, that would distinguish humanity not through distinction, that would empower humanity not through instrumental reason and domination, that would dissolve disputes not through disputation

but instead we have become rabidly assertive, grossly conspicuous, pathetically distinct, hyper-rational and forcefully dominant, argumentative to no effect. and through these gargantuanly clever and comprehensively stupid

dao is nothing, a point, circular, spherical, hyperspherical …

before and after follow each other

the way that leads forward seems to lead backward

what is put in the back comes to the fore

but not a fore in that sense of a midden of twitter followers. these are different fores, backs, ends, different selves. and how do we find them if not in the classroom, the pecuniary therapist's chair, the youtube, the research grant (yet they are there too)?

would we not in our hard selves desire to learn of the intelligences of the many things? for has not the human already been tried by time’s ruthless court and not been found worthy of the earth and the gifts it finds on it and in itself? does not even the regretful colonizer conform in new ways to its presumptuous ancestral patterns? and where the manual to move in these twitchy days? and what the aims and why the shadows?

daodejing vi

 

the spirit of the valley never dies

this is called the dark female

the entry into the dark female

is called the root of heaven and earth

tenuous it seems as if it were there

yet use will never exhaust it

dear sixes,

dao is not a descent and ascent or ascent and descent or ascent or descent, a season in hell, a mountaintop experience, a retreat, a place or system or status or argument, a destination or map, an i can help you or take you there, a self-denial, even a here or there, an escape or virtue, a process particularly, certainly not a product or tribe or people or religion or movement or a thing (though it too is a thing, though indistinct, a substance in crepuscular dimness). it might be a moving and a moving and movings 

it acknowledges all and sides with all and simultaneously and mostly prefers valleys, darkness, roots, heaven (no christian or otherworldly heaven), not meddling, certain constructions of muliebrity, suppleness, nonharm, stillness

one of the legends of the birth of laozi relates how an old woman becomes pregnant after drinking a drop of sweet dew. she carries the baby for 80 years but only during the daytime … at night baby leaves the womb to study dao. when he is finally fully born (through his mother’s armpit some say) he already has a long white beard and is able to walk. seeing this strange old child (laozi means old master but homophonically & metaphorically suggests old child) the mother takes fright and dies. thus in this genesis of laozi – from gender neutral divine being to woman to child, there is no father

dao is not very comforting. it puts everything at risk. we pile others and things and words around ourselves and forget the world is much more threatening than we want to admit. everything is always at risk and one of dao stays still in this everything. we could say this staying still in this everything is entry into the dark female

again, so soon … it seems as if it were there. and watch for these repetitions of phrases, words, themes as they move and morph through the 81 poems, appearing and disappearing in varied contexts, even as do our varied selves and shapes in lives

she is not this or that. heaven in its compassion or earth in its barbarisms. both are present but they do not battle. in not the valley but the valley’s spirit. in not a woman but the darkness of an entry

so the sage dies, not from exhaustion. a loved body is over. an ambivalent life ends. a sage dies, as all, and the spirit of the dark valley, root and unusable, continues as it is, seeming

daodejing v

heaven and earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs

the sage is ruthless; she 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

to hear much will lead only to a dead end

better to hold fast to what is within

dear fives,

in contrast to reward and punishment mythologies, moralities of good and evil … in contrast to any sentimental gods or god who assume goodness, compassion, love – offsetting cruelty, hate, malice to other forces … in contrast to the childish capricious powers of many – forceful infants of the heavens …  shrugging at ideas of benevolence and ritualistic conformity (whether the rites are prescribed institutionally or in the heave of society), dao doesn’t even posit a god (or at least a god more than a common tansy or brinjal masala). here are heaven and earth – the way of dark virtue and the way of simian prescribed rites – the people, the sage

the sage, who is later dismissed as unworthy and risible. the people, who are routinely presented as a pulsing conglomerate of necessary followers. the impossible way of heaven. the pervasively enforced expectations of earth

here heaven, earth, and sages form a strange alliance, of which the people are not a part, contractually bound by ancient models to a dna of indifference. the people though get excited or discouraged by constructions of amorality, immorality, blood and barbarism, difference, the vestments and scripts of hierarchical power and status, their passions expressed in moral systems, tedious schadenfreude and its organized siblings (government and war), integrity and transgression

and what is this indifference  – detachment or fate or enlightenment or geometry or discernment or silence or intelligence or something else or puerility?  – a magnificent disdain for the mores of a species which has consistently demonstrated through its nightmare, history, that it cannot act except through severings, genocides, rapaciousness, and an alert purposiveness?

love is mentioned few times in these 81 vignettes and when it is always in a way that subverts our common orientations. dao doesn’t say love but ruthlessness. not a ruthlessness apart from love as it is not apart from anything. dao does not do apart. (to not take this word or text or any and raise it to an all)

not that ruthlessness of presidents and entrepreneurs that is called expediency and pragmatism, not that squabbling fortress of mothers and fathers and lovers and spouses that is called love, not that ruthlessness of a member of the myriad creatures as it goes about its entertained scrimmage of a life, a ruthlessness called whatever it is called, but some other kind that is not defined by the images in your mind but by dao, undefined, in its inexplicabilities

love, that drippy word, may be destroying us. for the way we practice it is not large. it does not reach beyond our little interests of self and species, around the earth and out to heaven, past the breathing of the infinite spaces between, and further still, something at hand, a vital emptiness

dao acknowledges the paths – of reading all the books, collecting all the lovers, helping all the poor, responding to all the messages, listening to all the podcasts and videos, amassing all the wealth, assuming all the power, knowing all the references and magic tricks, displaying all the beauty … and of holding assiduously to that vitality

and where are the measures and graphs and peer-reviewed articles to show the how and what and why of this? how do i tell that one holds fast to that?

by means of dark virtue, by means of old paths, by means of confused turnings, by means of muddledness and listlessness, by means of this 

daodejing iv

 

the way is empty yet when used there is something that does not make it full

deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures

blunt the sharpness

untangle the knots

soften the glare

follow along old wheel tracks

darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there

i don’t know whose child it is – 

it images the foreparent of god

dear fours,

long before simulation replaced reality and images the word, before surfaces usurped the deep and the seen became the only rule of truth, idontknow of dao loitered in existence’s confused corridors

long before natality and genealogy were questioned by the revolutionary doors of modernity, before causation was sublimated and identity defined, mud and murkiness presented themselves in shadows and indistinctions at an unmarked crossroads of history and nothing

god here is not some omniscient omnipresent omnipotent conscious or unconscious good or indifferent or malicious creator that bred a world and left, forgot, neglected it, merged with it … even some totality of opposites ... but just a bump and a ride on a carousel of vague forms, an orphan of emptiness

pointedness. entanglement. brightness. novelty. a quaternity of desirable attributes which dao in its almost comic nonchalance suggests we don’t particularly esteem or nurture. hardly advocating idiocy, dullness, conservatism or tradition, simpleness … hardly articulating a fourstep plan to wellness, success, happiness, enlightenment, knowledge … hardly inducting you into any arcane esoteric arts … lacking teleological thrust, highlighting a constructing through notconstructing, leading through following (not any idea, person, thing, text, feeling), an ising through seeming, a way through notway

it only seems

it only seems as if

it only seems as if it were

there

i reach into infinite hereness of soul and what do i sense but an appearing to, an if that moves around itself in shimmering vacuity

i don’t know how to embrace such elusiveness. i don’t know if it is full or nearly full or empty or running out. i don’t know if it is a thing or what it is or is not. i don’t know how it is related. i don’t know its accomplishments. i don’t know if it is worthy or real or an it or a joke or imbecility, a reflection of an archaic absolute or a bending of a line, an allaying, an untangling, a softening …

daodejing iii

 

not to honour humans of excellence will keep the people from contention

not to value goods that are hard to come by will keep the people from theft

not to display what is desirable will keep the people from being unsettled

hence in its rule the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies

weakens their purpose but strengthens their bones

it constantly keeps the people innocent of knowledge and free from desire

and causes the clever not to dare

it simply takes no action and everything is in order

dear threes,

in this age of action, will, desire, coveted goods, displayings, knowledge, cleverness, purpose, strength, guilt, daring, prizes … how could we ever respond to such a piece of trivial comedy?

in a world that calls for increasingly accelerated action, that fears and seeks disorder, that could be said to inhabit – and require for its shaky presentations of sanity – a constantly expanding ever-full so-busy amusement park of mind … what are we to conjure from this text other than laughter and a quick return to facebook?

the people. contentious. stealing. unsettled. ignorantly purposive. banally knowledgeable. conventionally clever. orgasmically active

the sage. emptying, filling. weakening, strengthening. keeping, freeing, causing. all not for all but for not

three nots begin. not to honour. not to value. not to display. not as commandments. these are not do nots. rather these are apophatic infinitives

and the dao de jing belongs in a tradition of extreme erotic animation, of unbounded limitless vitality, not of any of these cheap pejorative unthinking labels of sublimation, denial, repression, puritanism, prudery spawning from an inquisitional technochristian psychology … but through immersions in life flows that will not be dammed, ossified, monetized, monumentalized. its negations and seeming absurdities – which are truly absurdities seen from within the crammed and camera’d tourist lookout of monuments – arise from a natural aversion to the apparent positivity of construction and objective … as things that have forgotten their not-thingness

here is a not-self. look at the selves in it. here is a not-word. see the words

not a discipline or even a practice but maybe an experience, sensation, attraction, response

and the rule? what do we say about this? do we posit an esotaticized empire in which its people are the myriad voices of a collective psychic history pulsing through the vast empty spaces of modern interiority? do we messianically or otherwise dream of a singularity or set of singularities that might slip through the heaping clutters of meddling sectarian politics to impossibly model dao in a world of technology – that knowledge made overwhelming and necessitous environment?

what are these questions but the mind that has neither emptied nor overflowed, set in its irrigation canals for the mawed input pipes of gorged epistemological factories?

dao is a form of radical freedom, of an orientation toward and placement in desire such that all possible objects of desire are already present and fulfilled, presenting and fulfilling, to be presented and fulfilled, tenses and modes of wandering … of identities relentlessly morphing and morphed into one another, of mutation not being a precipitator and product of fear but these very seconds of air we breathe

so humans. take your hierarchies of people and things and don’t invert them – inverted hierarchies, twisted hierarchies, flattened hierarchies, transmuted and transformed hierarchies are still hierarchies. just simply not and no and an order that slips through the ordering ordered orders may manifest

daodejing ii

 

the whole world knows the beautiful as the beautiful and this is only the ugly

it knows the good as the good and this is indeed the bad

something and nothing producing each other

the difficult and the easy complementing each other

the long and the short offsetting each other

the high and the low filling out each other

note and sound harmonizing with each other

before and after following each other

these are in accordance with what is constant

hence the sage dwells in the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words

it makes the myriad creatures without being their initiator

it benefits them without exacting any gratitude for this

it accomplishes its task without claiming any merit for this

it is because it lays claim to no merit that its merit never deserts it

dear twos,

as nature – now animate only as use and sentiment, raw material for stories and human aggrandizement, whether in the manufactured forests of the dead wilderness or the pedicured sexiness of the homo sapiens fleshed ecosystems: a critical aspect, as erect penises and wet vaginas in namesake pornography, in the international conglomerate of that much larger necessitated pornographic environment in which we now all breathe and participate – is remote to the point of abolition, as perhaps art is becoming, so may be dao

what dao would think of this – being given to shadowy presences, murkiness, namelessness, and root – who would assume to know? for even this commentary is a reflection of shadows of shadows and we claim at most (though we do not claim even this) an attempted transcription of the smoke of notknowing as it rises from dark and untraceable fires into the vast farnear unreliable orbits of words around infinite nonexistent centers

much is said of balance in the sacred blather of the day. but dao takes it to levels of discomfort that could, without rare mitigation, easily consume. for the people live devoting much of their predictable lives to practices of offsetting that they euphemize as balance and the bulk accepts the euphemisms as they do, for nonacceptance implies modifications who would want (other than in fact many of the myriad creatures)?

we have something and nothing. difficult and easy. before and after. high and low. and the list could go on far beyond what is listed, as lists can. and isn’t society the struggle to hoard as much easy, high, and something to oneself while offsetting as much difficult, nothing, and low to others? and this very tendency, so endemic to humans, a core stupidity? and balance in the annals of polite and commonplace discourse a virtued concept to launder what is now an acceptable pandemic? perhaps not. but why would we not include these as possibilities as viable as those others so dominant and ubiquitous? (surely little so far of conventional thought and practice is working, other than in a technical-unto-death kind of way)

but who among us could escape the elements of this offsetting in a rabidly blabbing world? and dao if anything might be remnantly here not for escape or even offsetting but as a dark technique of reorienting to these elements

in an increasingly homogenous culture that seduces even diversity into its gargantuan bed, volition and communication are at or near the apex of today’s (as always) slavebuilt pyramids. what then do we do with a text not only in a world of image but one that points to practices of nonaction and nonspeaking, not as cowardices, retreats, passivities, indolences, but as something else, a something else we can hardly name not simply because of its elusive nature in linguistic and semantic realms but as our addiction to our pornographic environment (this severing called balance) is unacknowledged

these something elses are not places to vacationally, retreatedly, yogaclassly visit but the places where the sage dwells – her home and family apart from yet in the pornography of the world. an oldnew nature. a dao

and you can think if you wish that the citizened productive family, owning home and smiles and civilities, producers and appreciators of good policies and procedures, is our societal mainstay, our regulated levee against the disorders and nights of nature, art, dao. and from a certain (pornographic) perspective, this is not untrue. but the beautiful is only the ugly and good the bad – not in that stupid way the nazis interpreted nietzsches insights, still so prosaically common when the masses encounter intelligent doubt – but in the way of dao, this way of ways, which, lost like nature, as maybe it must be, brings the empire, the myriad creatures, ruthlessness and benevolence, the family and the hermit, the tree and the hadron collider, disgrace and honour … all these irreconcilable things … into the empire of the soul, thisthat plural singularity, and there … daos them