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favour being that which when bestowed on a subject serves to startle as much as when withdrawn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