absinthe makes the fart grow stronger

if this is time give me blood

if this is blood give me water

if this is water give me air

if this is air give me fire

if this is fire give me plasma

if this is plasma give me god

if this is god give me i

if this is i give me love

if this is love give me art

if this is art give me dreams

if these are dreams give me death

if this is death give me absinthe

if this is absinthe give me more

a lesson in jurisprudence iii

now, to introduce a twist, one day phineasetta thadeusina veeblefetzer falls in love with olafa but not only is the love unrequited but olafa is wholly unaware of phineasetta’s existence. phineasetta sets out to correct this obersicht. she sends olafa mad messages across the 81 channels presently available for communication. she likes & loves & laughs at everything. she is unmitigatedly hysterical and persistent. but olafa is unfazed. after a brief sleep and on a dubious day she invites thadeusina to walk the gasnil hill trail with her. ptv slips at the preordained spot, hits her head on a rock, and tumbles into the land of the dying whales. olafa has to put up with a week or two of unpleasantness as she correctly responds to the queries of officials but all in all a job well done and she has returned to her solitary knowledgeable walks, clinically improper sleeps, nameless reveries, and veeblefetzer-free existence

our lesson in jurisprudence is done

dear readerless readers

you bare-assters & lovers of bare-assters

return to your barriers and your absolutelies

you olafas to your nameless madnesses

you veeblefetzers to the sea

dao de jing 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

fientive honorificabilitudinitatibi

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