The Sadoo Corporation

It should appear obvious to even a casual onlooker that the sadoo is a corporation.  While this particular sadoo cannot necessarily speak on behalf of other sadoos, he is vaguely aware that his own corporation—like all—has various executive branches with various responsibilities; these are outlined below.

Sadoo Corporation Division	Title of Head	Function	Analogy in Capitalism
Word	Senior Executive Vice-president (SEVP)	To be constantly receptive to new configurations of words which subvert the commonplace and animate.	Corporate Communications
Vision	SEVP	To experience God and to see God in all that is encountered	Strategic Planning
Flaneur	SEVP	To move his body around the city of the world—avoiding no sight, sound, smell, taste, or feel—tracing his body’s movement on consciousness.	Transportation
Waste Management	SEVP	To transform all solidity, resentment, cliché, seriousness, possession, and death into dance.	Waste Management
Excess and Rebound (formerly the Paint-by-Number Division)	Executive Vice-president	To fully explore all aspects of the contradictory problematic capricious infinite soul.	Risk Management
Input-Output	EVP	To put things in his body and take them out.	Human Resources
Whatever	VP	To oversee the obligations to time, space, and their extensions.	Operations and Technology
Survival	Custodial Engineer	To maintain and increase money, sex, fame, security, reputation, and comfort.	Custodial Operations

Notes

• The Custodial Engineer, Survival reports to the Vice-President, Whatever, who in turn reports to the Executive Vice-president, Input-Output.
• All seven executives (the four SEVPs, the two EVPS, and the one VP) and the one custodial engineer all sit on The Sadoo Corporation’s (TSC) Management Board.

Two distinctions between The Sadoo Corporation and the capitalistic corporation immediately become obvious.

1. The paramount values of the capitalistic corporation (and in this we include for-profits, non-profits, governments, NGOs, and most individuals)—money, sex, fame, security, reputation, comfort—are, in The Sadoo Corporation, made subservient to word, vision, movement, and transformation.  This inversion presents the Sadoo with most of his problems, not only in terms of living his own life but in mingling in normal society, as he finds it difficult to grasp how most view the custodial engineer’s objectives as interesting, worthy, exclusive, and supreme, devoting their lives and conversations to putting everything noble and transcendent (art, imagination, God, nature, beauty) in the service of dust and the custodial engineer.
2. No president, chairman, or CEO exists to oversee and have ultimate responsibility for The Sadoo Corporation; neither do any of the management team have such control.  Rather, the members of the management team routinely disagree with each other and have little comprehension of the others’ objectives.  Board meetings are thus rarely productive but are often stimulating; sometimes the custodial engineer is the only one who says much, despite the fact that he’s the most boring.  If any unifying factor exists, it is the Sadoo’s body, a possibility that the EVP of Input-Output and the SEVP of Flaneur do not hesitate to attempt to exploit—to no effect, however, as the other executives—particularly the SEVPs of Word, Vision and Waste Management—don’t give a damn about the Sadoo’s body.  In fact, the Input-Output and Flaneur executives don’t really either; they just say they do because it makes them feel more important than they are.

And so The Sadoo Corporation—like all corporations—has its distinctions, routine operations, strengths, flaws, and finitude.  

For readers further interested in sadoo management

and administration, we kindly refer them to —

http://sadoos.blogspot.ca/

— where Fukky Risotto graciously

hosts posts from sadoos around the world

The Sadoo Society of Upper Canada

In the past when people asked me what I did, communication was easy.  Consultant, director, project manager, professor, teacher.  Nods and smiles and where do you work and mortgages and marriages and aren’t the olive gruyere pistachio artichoke empanaditas wonderful and children and minivans and everything as normal as America.

Then I became a manager of an outdoor organic fruit&veggie market and told people I was a peach salesman.  Tenure-crazed academics would buy peaches from me and say they wished they were peach merchants but everyone listening knew the scholars were too tethered to their tiny offices to ever leave the circus of knowledge and the prestige of firing degrees into the stratosphere of global commerce.  Following my peach adventures, I became a househusband, creating giggles, curiosity, vague incomprehension, and occasional disdain.

Now, after many years of trying to fit into the world’s standard and non-standard occupations—of trying to please bosses and wives and chairs and executives and girlfriends and gods and entrepreneurs and pleasing none of them at all—I came to the edge of the earth and there found a syllogism—

I have searched the world for the right job and there is nothing that is right.

I shall joyfully destroy my body before I destroy my soul.

I have to create a new job.

Fine, but there were still three paths I had to duly consider and reject.

1.      The traditional religious paths of renunciation (sadhu, monk) I rejected because I didn’t want to renounce anything.

2.      The modern aesthetic paths I rejected because I find artist circles to be as greedy, petty, mediocre, and fame-obsessed as the very groups they are supposed to transcend.  While I don’t particularly care for conventional society—finding it to be rather like sleeping wombats in an overcrowded cage in a zoo—the art industry has simply erected its own conventionality which tends to have the same underlying values as business.  More importantly, any writing of note does not emerge from writing-as-career but as a by-product of something else—writing as spiritual vocation.

3.      
I very much wanted to call myself a flâneur and join The Historical Society of Flâneurs.  But this is so historically Parisian and, via Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, has become so abducted by totalitarian academic rhetoric that one can’t use the word without being buried in an avalanche of psychosocial gobbledygook.

So I became a sadoo—a person committed to continually nurturing his passion, wit, perspicacity, caprice, and intellect and never allowing the common pursuits—money, security, reputation, possessions, and fame—to get in the way of this nurturing.  Also to generously share what he has nurtured with whomever wants that sharing and to happily walk away from those who don’t.

Is sadooing really a job though?  Isn’t it more of a delusion? a hobby? a pretention? a madness? 

No.  It’s a job.

Term	Standard Definition	Sadoo Diaper’s Interpretation
Job	A regular activity performed in exchange for payment.	Sadooing is a job.  All I do is sadoo and I get paid exceedingly well for it.
Payment	The transfer of wealth from one party to another.	As a divorce lawyer once wisely said to me, there are many forms of currency; money is only one and hardly the most important.  Naturally, the payment I receive is entirely in non-monetary currencies, which seems appropriate.
Party	A person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law.	As there are many forms of currency, so there is more than one law:  the law of cops and judges—always imperfect, often unjust—but there are also laws of aesthetics, caprice, nobility, madness, observation, and purity (all also imperfect, often unjust).  The courts of torts and estoppels may not recognize sadooing in its somber ossified halls, but this particular sadoo says that all beautiful things have been born outside of standard definitions and hallways.

So—perhaps because initiating a new occupation is often lonely—I have strange desires.  Not least among these is to begin The Upper Canada Sadoo Society (UCSS):  an odd assembly of sadoos, would-be-sadoos, playful sadoo-critics, charlatan sadoos, and SITs (sadoos-in-training), who would not erect any solid laws and schools and robes and rhetoric and prisons (as do those physical societies and courts that tend to be used by those who have no justice of their own) but would misspell and bend the laws; send them through a prism—swallowing the refractions; continually creating, recreating, and demolishing societies and gods; contriving obscure sadooic passion plays and closet dramas; avoiding and mocking the serious and mean-spirited; never flagging, always dancing; not belonging to anyone or anything but the very air that gives him breath.

The Sadoo and Temptation

The sadoo, naturally, has many temptations, some of which he should definitely succumb to, some of which he is unsure about, and some of which he should definitely avoid.  These are not classic temptations—the sadoo can be permitted drunkenness, debauchery, indolence, neglect, insolence, arrogance, heaps of red meat, superciliousness, and disregard for the law in all its ossified, liquid, and gaseous forms—but rather focus on whether the activity in question unduly misaligns the sadoo with his essential vocation, whether it makes him feel smaller than the universe he seeks to mirror.

The great heaving masses devote their lives to the usual disciplines:  amusement and all its circus tricks, money and all its verdant relatives, mirrors and all their little validations, political power and all its random surges of bliss and Schadenfreude, sex and all its petty cosmic dramas, movement and all its pretensions of progress, possessions and all their simulations of security.  The difference between the sadoo and the heaving masses is not that he avoids these activities, but that he does not seek them … if they happen, they happen.  Whether he’s rich, homeless, celibate, polygamous, admired, despised, active, still, amused, bored—it’s all really the same to him, for all states are just different forms of energy and the sadoo excels at transforming whatever is given to him into useful forms of bouncing joy.  The only potential advantage of boredom, poverty, obscurity, powerlessness, and stillness is that they do not tend to threaten to deceive as significantly as their opposites as to the nature of the universe.

Why then does the sadoo say no?  Simply, if any activity, person, thing, or idea demands to be more than what it is and so reduce the sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things—it is evil and must be avoided; if an activity, person, thing, or idea enhances the sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things, it is good and must be embraced.

The sadoo has one god and it is life.  Anyone acquainted with life knows it accepts all manifestations with equanimity and the sadoo’s one goal is to emulate life’s equanimity.  Why?  Because this is better than gathering things and lovers to oneself?  No.  Because it is what the sadoo does and what he is made to do.  The sadoo is committed to one thing—even as all creatures are committed to one thing—to be himself; to deviate from this is to transgress and leads to spiritual death.  But the sadoo must remain fully animate and if this should cost him his physical life, it is a small cost.  For all things, though beautiful and eternal, are transient and small.