Tao Te Ching VI

The spirit of the valley never dies.

This is called the mysterious female.

The gateway of the mysterious female

is called the root of heaven and earth.

Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,

yet use will never drain it.

Who lays claim to the eternal, especially these days of transience and time?  Who proclaims the hidden, especially in an age of explicitness and fame?  As the female morphs into the male and the male into the female, as the cumulative noise of monuments and those who would be monuments crowds the air, who would defend anonymity and silence?  When only the visible, the sensuous, the testable are granted credence by the pomp and powers, the texts and tyrannies, who would whisper to the valleys of night that only the invisible never dies?

Who would confound, not clarify?  Who would lose, not find?  Who would seem dim and ungraspable, not bright and held?  Who would nonchalantly refuse the world’s towering laurels, preferring to rest in the obscure shade of some unnamed cave?  Who would walk through doors not to get somewhere but to go through them?

Is this a timeless woman who has no name?  A woman shrouded in the inarticulate arts of subtle negation?  Or is it no woman, but some epicene who refuses definition?

The questions hover on elusive portals, and are gone.

The Tao removes itself, and removes again.  Doubly removed, for it is not just valley but the spirit of the valley; not just female but the mysterious female.  Then again, not just the mysterious female, but the gateway of the mysterious female.  Not just one name, but two.  Secret, yes, but manifestation and secret; desire and root.

If you would know yourself, the world around you, the arching panoply of power, and the origin of all things, you would remain detached from the myriad specific forms of knowledge and desire.  You would not climb, you would fall.  When you found the valley has no bottom and sex no ground, would you not rest in the dim light of this newly discovered land?  Would you not sing?