to sadoo

in july i began wandering central mumbai like this – 

theory, as kandinsky and others say, follows practice. or rather each follows and leads (dao de jing ii – before and after follow each other). too much theory without practice (the bulk and worst of the academy) irritates as much as too much practice without theory (the bulk and worst of spheres of action).

i was compelled to wander perhaps to ask why i am compelled to wander.

after having sadooed (i verb the practice) almost 20 times – i mostly wander in the area bounded by nana chowk, jeejabai bhosle marg, dalal street, and colaba causeway: my practice so far has been silently walking solo (but responding briefly, quietly, rationally if spoken to non-threateningly) – threads emerge.

one of these is the weave of sanity – those often assumed configurations of reason and unreason,

conformity and non-conformity that imbue education and culture. it’s one thing to sadoo anonymously (responses range from indifference, fear, curiosity, camaraderie, laughter, ridicule, …), it’s another to be faced (befaced?) like this in my housing co-op (frequently with the politics of a small village) where i am somewhat known. a neighbor-friend is asked routinely if i’ve gone crazy. (but surely this

question/judgment has been around for years.) i'm asked directly if i'm ok. i hear someone whispering to a friend as i approach don't say anything.

i call it sanity currency. i experience it as a necessary parallel currency to money. as humans scrimmage for economic currency to survive and accumulate artifacts, prestige, power, so we scrimmage for psychic currency: a decent amount of human language is devoted to explicitly and implicitly sorting out hierarchies of what's 'normal'.

in my co-op it used to anger-annoy me when others – particularly those in leadership positions – would easily label others as insane or sane, when the epistemological bases for their perspectives seemed dubious, as open for critique as their critique of others. such labelling still bothers me but has more grown into curiosity about the assumptions we make about mental health, how not infrequently our working definitions about psychic-emotional-mental wellness serve particular interests of our own rather than broader pluralities or the humans we're judging (or perhaps ostensibly trying to 'help'.) 

(a lot has been written about this of course. i’m more inclined to the thoughtful experienced expressions outside of or on the margins of institutionalized psychology [psychiatry, therapy, wellness, …] than ‘mainstream’ orientations.)

i sadoo, perhaps, in part, to continue to question, in a more embodied way, our cultural biases and hierarchies about how to live well, circumscriptions and possibilities in and around this ‘how’ – to further feel, see, know, doubt what it means for me to explore humanness in a pyretically technological environment that's endemically obsessed with hierarchies.

rerum novarum cupidus

     return (silent)     

sadoo diaper returns to verdancies of silence for atonal recordings of time

can't live the summer without sadoo favvs (fragments, absurdities, voices, visions)? curious to follow any of diaper's cosmological colleagues in sadooity? find them - with assorted names but matching occupation - in blabaablogbogland

until another decline of summer, through deserts of lush pluralities, now in that miasmic peace often found around hallucinogenic transit, having duodenumed across so many mad vistas presence becomes kaleidoscopic abysses of light under overs and over besides of ofs from until with  by    by                                            

death iv

living a life of death can include eremiticism, primary destruction (regardless of the direction of the destruction and degree of laundering), obsessive morbidities, unthinking citizenship, and many other forms of simulation.  these are the traditional and primitive forms and they interest us far less than the living death of the future, which includes moving from life to life within life to such an extent that the moving, never stopping, becomes death, and so one lives more in the moving, death, the between, than any supposed origin or destination – these false atlantises:  too solid dreams.  yet death, being always unknown, escapes us and so living in escape – from solidity of fact, idea, person, work, direction, dream – is to live lives of verdant death.

so cain was exiled to nod, the land of wandering, after the first death, and there built the first city, and all who live in death live in nod.

if one is given to being committed to no path – hardly one who is aimless and given to regret – and given sufficient opportunity to move among paths to discover that this noncommittal commitment is itself a path, this one has emigrated to the death that lives in life and the life that dies in death.  this no-path path distinguishes itself from other paths in that one has lived it and then discovers oneself on it, in death.

one does not die for one is dying all the time; as a corollary, one does not live, as far as life is normally defined, for one is too busy dying.

i write my death as i write my life, my death is written as my life.  autothanatography and autobiography, wholly embedded in one another, as they are written, create my flesh and eyes.

(elsewhere, a colleague in the industry of sadoo has been exploring new forms of autobiography and is soon to direct this energy and innovation toward new forms of autothanatography.  those interested in creatively and diversely writing their deaths – or simply engaged with the idea of this emerging practice – may wish to seek out that sadoo’s experiments in the ether.)

the void is my mother, death my father …

i write my death.  words open to the abyss.  how can i remember the first time death visited me and said i am life and you will write me, i will be your one and faithful lover?  

we make believe, but we also make disbelieve, and the free movement between the two is death.

violence – regardless of the degree to which it’s laundered through diffusion, institutions – frequently named love – and the naming enforced by the launderers, the priests of money and professions – calls forth violence – immediate, direct, dirty, unmediated by communication, education – and the former, the necessary moralists, call their clean violence good and the dirty violence bad, but from the perspective of death each is equal on the indifferent scale of time, and any hierarchy that might be applied collapses under the weight and the pressing of the calling forth.  so a human who might see these mutual violences as equal and wish to bypass them still cannot bypass violence, but must recreate it using the energies of death.  and is this not the function of art, and the love that is less frequently named, and a calling forth that speaks far from language’s endless abyss?

surely one of the great deaths is the embodied knowledge of how incompatible the good of one loved can be with the good of one’s self.

in the age of technology, we reflesh death.  aloof, clean, optional, with options, impossible, remotely omnipresent and omnipresently nowhere, sexy, urban, statistical, whatever, aesthetic, like cancer conquerable, easy, marketable, objectified, soft like soap, it has become unlike any death anyone has known.  so technology specializes in possibility, a kind of bastard poeticism.

the iliad and blood meridian, bookends to western culture, outline myriad ways to die.  but i, in the outline of my life, find myriad ways to die in life.  someone says, … multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity in contrast to male ideologies.  but i am male and have died many times to know male as multiple and shifting and self-contradictory and i have died from these easy binaries and i die each day from the words you speak, that are spoken, from words …

to live without goals is to live in death and so destroy death as any kind of end.

de nerval died with his hat on.  hat is in death.

how many have been killed from hate.  hate is in death.

the billions burned and are burning and will burn.  heat is in death.

hunger, hunger, hunger