Of Merdia 26 - 29

Ms. Denum continues, scatoblabbing--

26.        When I sit on my throne and the small urban sea admires the vanity between my cheeks, I am king of all creation¾Merdia's sweet gift in a brief and brutal life.

27.        Thoughts float upward as Merdia's laughter gurgles down.  This dual movement is my goddess' contrapuntal glory.  How many times have I sat in decision, scepter cast aside, weights of the universe hanging hot and light over the anticipative sea.  My mind surges to the rhythms of my bowels; in peculiar synchronicity, they heave as one.  That which has been withheld in darkness sees the tunnel's end; the blessing drops, and precisely at the moment of the first delicious splash, the tight sphincter of my mind opens wide and a solution to a great bafflement soars to Heaven and splashes in a cloud.  At such moments I often offer a little prayer to Merdia, for her double goodness.

28.        As human consciousness began with Merdia's first movement, so it will end with her last.  She will raise her ripened buttocks high above the mediocre earth and extend her cheeks to the corners of the cosmos.  Her perfect rump, full of adumbrations, will open as wide as Sheol and the four winds of the apocalypse will race down to scatter the sons of men.  Merde upon merde will descend from her holy sphincter, covering cow and ass and city, and the dying gasps of millions will be, Merdia, Merdia, why hast thou forsaken us?

29.        What light do we see at the dusk of time?

What song is the sum of all we've heard?

What is the source and abolition of man's crimes?

These and more are contained in our daily merde.

I sit on my throne and know my transience

While the waters hover calmly below my rump.

I rejoice in the heaving of my noble dalliance¾

a smooth, ripe, miraculous, perfect dump.

Who climbs to Heaven, falls to Hell, with equal ease?

Who causes a billion global glorias?

Who hints at herself in a gentle breeze?

Our redemption and creation, our love, our Merdia.

Of Merdia 21 - 25

Ms. Denum continues ...

21.        Rarely, I approach the seat of high humility and awaiting me is the sweet creation of another member of our race.  I often don't know whose, and this ignorance is the source of many hours of imaginative pleasure.  Unlike many others, whose practice it is to rapidly render the foreign creation absent, I revel in this uncommon democratic opportunity, of two strange children mingling, and retain the old creation to receive the new.  I do not see the other’s delight as anything particularly odd¾no more than mine, which is new and wondrous with each passing¾but familiar; cousins in the arms of Merdia.  This rare event¾a family reunion in Merdia’s diverse and royal kingdom.  Merdia, great goddess of democracy.

22.        My love for Merdia enables me to love all things, whereas my love for other members of the pantheon enable me to love one thing.

23.        Merdia gently brings me to reject the world¾for I must daily reject the world's foundation¾and accept it, for I am brought to accept this rejection as a portion of the world's foundation.  Merdia brings forth, her bringing forth disappears.  I bring forth from her bringing forth, my bringing forth disappears.  For this space of rejection and acceptance she gently leads me to, this space known by the sages as the height of spirituality, I am most grateful.

24.        Merdia, soft brown goddess of the little seas, proud, ever naked, full of gentle curves.  If I were so formed, so flexible and ripe, would I not be the proudest of men?  But I am not … this is why I need her.

25.        Merdia brings dignity to our vicious race.  She brings grace and hope.  Because of this, she is the greatest of goddesses.  I imagine her at the end of time, when all human achievements are ripe with desinence and have lost their smell.  She will be vigorous, waiting for another better race to replace us and bestow her verdant blessings.  Then the world will know its pantheon was inverted, due not to Her deficiencies but ours.  Our cowardice.  Our mediocrity.  Our indolence.

Of Merdia 16 - 20

Cloa Denum, of Of Merdia fame, was sighted recently by a hysterical Catholic near the rear buttresses of Notre Dame.  Paris City Council and The Vatican are deep in session, discussing the possibility of erecting a shrine in honor of the sighting.

16.         The future, as everyone knows, is in waste management.  Only those who love Merdia will enter the future singing.

17.        The collegial attributes of our race are most fortuitously shown when two members are placed by fate beside each other to sing Merdia’s praise in chorus.  Whether barriers mute the singing or the voices are free to blend in the thankful air, a spontaneous duet erupts from Merdia's generous lungs.  In such circumstances, it is not unusual to hear the participating humans trying to imitate the melody with their lesser, upper mouths, gently envying the purer sound of the symphony below.  Nevertheless, despite their humbling, the two orchestrants arise in gratitude for their small part in Merdia's eternal magic and it is my hope that one day soon it will be common practice for the two, upon exiting their joint impromptu bliss, to embrace and thus physically consummate what was begun by Merdia in spirit and in song.

18.        Some among us have been given the rare gift of reading scats.  We are not rewarded by society, which degrades such divination, but by Merdia, whom we love because she first loved us.  This gift, so common among the ancients, so common there were competing schools, has declined in these constipated times.  Yet some remain who read Merdia's jewels.  They are skilled in the arts of selection, drying, penetration and discernment.  They generally do not share their knowledge.  They are prized in private.  But there will come a day when these scatomancers will be raised so high they will glimpse though darkly Merdia's resplendent buttocks on Heaven’s shining throne.

19.        Particularly ennobling is the dump's pinnacle, when a significant mass sustains it and it rises triumphantly out of the water like Neptune's hair above a gratified Pacific.  Then I know anything is possible and the heights achieved by man thus far will be superseded by even greater heights, that the umbilical waters will continue to be hovered over by the divine forces that run through man long after I and my little graces have been flushed into Sheol.

20.         In a contest involving Hera, Aphrodite, Athena and Merdia, my goddess would win “most beautiful.”  She turns nothing to something and something to nothing; she fertilizes everything and is never far from our thoughts.  All lovely things are built on her magnificent rump; the more beautiful, the more her urgent passions form the beauty's blueprint.  She is fine, my love, the glory of goddesses, the Hole of Ages, omnipresent and fertile.

Of Merdia 12 - 15

Cloa Denum continues with her scatomystical obsessions.

12.         Jesus, Aeneas, Blake, Lear--they descended into Hell, that brilliant sewer of creation.  These men, whom our society now so easily adores, knew they had to drink the most putrid waste of our kind to know how to transcend our kind.  They fell in love with God¾or his equivalent¾only through God's waste.  I'm more efficient:  I fall in love with the God of waste.  I make everything my toilet, I therefore never have to leave my love.

13.         As I age, the act of voiding does not become less novel.  (And I am not one to void infrequently, I am blessed among women.)  If anything, the experience heightens.  Each new act contains not just itself but every previous void--the unique discoveries, the manifold personalities.  I wish I had a gallery containing a photograph of each dump I’ve ever bequeathed to the world.  But this would be inadequate; so much of the joy is not captured in a cold image:  the sensuous ambience, the communion with nature and creation, the deeply visceral pushing, the sound and the blurring, the distinctive focus in which all of one's faculties are brought to bear on this singular act of grand and primal expulsion.  Such historical weight makes me tremble with anticipation as I contemplate even my third dump of the day, and this before lunch.  Past and present fuse, the future trembles with me.  All is light and glory.  All creation sings.  I am brought face to face with my responsibilities to transcend my mother¾these daily, hourly, reminders of who I am and what I can still become.  I climb the stairs to the only throne in the universe, my fingers fumbling at my fly like a teenager’s attending her first sexual experience, dropping my pants and undergarment to the floor with the vast knowledge of what is about to take place.  Memory and hope join, become incarnate, take wing and soar like eagles far above the thoughts of men.  They will fly and not be weary, they soar and do not faint.

14.         I am made new with each passing dump.  The busy factory of my body is cleansed through Merdia's magic.  Not only do I see the handwriting of the gods below my reeking heaving ass, but I myself leave this room of wonder and decisions lighter than the dump I left behind.  It is as if all the weight I have carried within me since the last transfiguration has been borne by my creation.  This is cause for dancing, for believing in the gods.

15.         Merdia, goddess of cleansing and purification, goddess of strength and overcoming, goddess of holiness and creation, goddess of light and pushing, of withholding and revealing, of anticipation and sweetness, the transcendence of Hell, time's redemption, history's urgency, God's envy; goddess of binding and releasing, goddess of pleasure’s emptiness and fullness, goddess of mystics and saints, of legions and visions, of profits and prophets, of shame and innocence; goddess of singing, art, religion and love, bless us today and for evermore.  Amen.

Of Merdia 7 - 11

Sadoo Diaper continues with Cloa Denum's

gripping scatomystical saga and liturgy, Of Merdia.

7.            I begin by testing my ability to control and soil.  I refuse the controls of my body and my mother, who emerge in my toddling mind as horrible allies, in secret league, with their own private language they share in silence and refuse to teach me, less from cruelty and more from their hard knowledge, gained through millennia of observation, that I am incapable of learning it.  Merdia's language is mine to learn, the language of angels and excrement.

8.            Through the beneficence of Merdia, I build small graceful statues instead of napping.  I line them on the parapets of my crib.  They harden in the heat and wreak their defiance at my mother's turgid assault.  The statues are destroyed, the war seems lost; but I have gained knowledge that is worth a thousand losses … I have learned how to rouse my mother's passion.

9.            I join the watery gangs of global children, floating efficient brown boats on our waves of freedom.  Though the Yellow Duck that Squeaks may initially appear to dominate the seas, it soon is clear that the small brigade of rafts, canoes and flotsam are clever: they surround the Fowl, their crafty tactics bring that duckie down.  It is wrought by standards in gross and metal tombs; we unthanked gangs create our toys from our natural exuberance.  This is why the Plastic Monster cannot win.

10.         I never lose the thrill of taking a dump.  It is an act of worship, a cry of triumph.  It unites savagery and inspiration.  It precedes God, civilization, art.  It precedes and predicts them, it’s their necessary womb.

11.         When I have the good fortune of using an outhouse, particularly the crude kind where the pit is shallow, open to the air and light and thus my eyes, I peer through the dark triangle formed by the rugged seat and my naked thighs and watch my creation piling, forming, steaming, rising¾live and virile and lovely.  I see the immediate gratitude of bugs, many of whom seem designed solely for this, who fight gloriously for a small patch on which to pitch the hungry tent of their body.  I see gods and masterpieces in the fresh sweet reek; these are the nutrients the bugs and I desire.  I rise from my proud production and know my goddess lives.

The New Mysticism

Mysticism, as everything, gets tiresome after a while.  Sadoo Diaper has thus decided to leave the Tao Te Ching behind for a time and introduce its readership to a number of new voices in the literary gaggle. It begins with Cloa Denum's 1777 Of Merdia, recently discovered at the bottom of a Parisian toilet, smuggled to the New World in a Somalian pirate ship, and introduced here, in The Secular Sadoo, for the first time to a human audience. Specifically, today, the Sadoo publishes Cloa's bio and Of Merdia's opening vignettes.

Of Merdia

Cloa Denum wrote Of Merdia in 1777 in The Bastille; legend has it that she wrote it on the first roll of toilet paper, which she invented for this purpose.  A mystic by training, she angered the French aristocracy when she, vaguely anticipating Marx, claimed that the peasants had insufficient access to the porcines of production.  For this she was incarcerated and, according to official prison records, went mad shortly thereafter, frequently giving lectures to her dumps, with the length of the lectures not incommensurate with the length of the dumps; comparing the taxonomies of clouds and dumps; sculpting with the available material and presenting said sculptures as gifts to her favorite guards; and so on.  The roll was preserved by her cellmate and lover, Gloria Gaither, who was released in 1789 during the storming, subsequently applying the roll to the purposes we are intimate with today—a notable exception being, of course, the majority of the Indian subcontinent and a few other scattered freaks—making later interpretation of the text challenging.  What happened to Ms. Denum is not known.  There is a growing consensus among recent feminist scholars that Denum is the authentic founder of Scatomysticism, some going as far as positing that she retains the same role in Scatomystic Semiotics, although this is hotly contested.  Psychology has only just begun to explore the significant implications of Cloa Denum’s insights for itself and humanity.  The significant number of shockingly precise technological and commercial prophecies was the prime cause enabling her to be fast-tracked by the Vatican to sainthood in 1801, an effort nobly spearheaded by Pius VII himself despite the obvious heresies in the document.

1.            I am deeply in love with Merdia, goddess of first creations.  She shows me my true destiny; she, more than any of the millions in the teeming pantheon, smells of truth.  She, not my mother, was my first love.  My mother I cannot help but resent; I am her creation, not she mine.  We both know this, and this is her eternal power over me.  How do I transcend this knowledge?  To whom do I turn to draw power to combat my mother's supernatural strength?  Merdia, she is the goddess of my first creation and the power of my once and future combats.

2.            In the low is the high, in excrement are mansions.  Every artist and homosexual knows this.  Art swirls in the toilet.  Sewers give birth to visions.  Should I ignore Merdia, my life will be a suburb, smelling only of Mr. Clean and Lysol.  Merdia is my fire for another world, a world I create to set against the power of my mother.

3.            I cannot create from the power of myself, for what am I but the extension of my mother?  Yet when I look at the perfect brown spirals curled happily in the tranquil waters awaiting their fate with dignity and silence, I know I too am capable of extensions as holy as my mother’s.

4.            I develop mythologies for myself--potent complex narratives processed in the infinite intestines of my soul.  These are Merdia's gifts to me, celebrations of my separateness.  Mythologies are our first defense against the world.  We realize after deconstructing the illusion of maturity they are our only defense.

5.            Merdia enables me to invert the natural order of existence, for in my mythologies I imagine myself as more powerful than my mother and this imagining suffices for its actuality.  The wonder I feel before my ability to create and overcome gives birth to powers in me that didn't exist before.  Merdia, not Christ, makes all things new.  These powers are such that my mother's fade in comparison; even her creation is nothing next to this feeling, which is so virile all other births seem small.  How this inversion occurs is the greatest mystery, greater than all natural births.

6.            At first, my creation is beyond me.  It controls and soils me, like my mother, who controls my existence and soils me with her superiority.  But gradually, I sense an unnatural force, pressing deeply against the membranes of my spirit.  It is vatic, guttural, urgent, hot.  It steams like a thousand stallions of Hell crossing Antarctica through pitch.  It hisses through its nostrils that this creation which surrounds and sullies me is not beyond, but within.  And anything within is mine to bring without, but more than this, far more than this, is solely mine.

Tao Te Ching LXII

The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.

It is that by which the good man protects

and that by which the bad is protected.

Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return,

beautiful deeds can raise a man above others.

Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?

Hence when the emperor is set up and the three ducal ministers are appointed, he who makes a present of the way without stirring from his seat is preferable to one who offers presents of jade disks followed by a team of four horses.  Why was this way valued of old?  Was it not said that by means of it one got what one wanted and escaped the consequences when one transgressed?

Therefore it is valued by the empire.

One of the astonishing aspects of the Tao to a traditional Westerner is how little it cares about whether a person is good or bad.  The Tao acknowledges the distinctions:  some people are oriented to behavior we typically call good, others to behavior we typically call bad; whether these interpretations and naming are socially constructed, whether genetically defined, whether rooted in some objective reality is largely beside the point:  the roots of the causes of our naming, as is typically with the Tao, aren’t particularly relevant.

Unlike the Christian god, who supposedly rewards good and punishes evil—though we see little evidence of this on earth—the Tao (perhaps because it tends to being the this-worldly spirit of nature rather than the other-worldly spirit of spirits) neither rewards nor punishes, but quietly accepts.  So the sage quietly accepts, but does not do so stupidly—as the naïve and inexperienced might—but as one who has sojourned through the cold-hot expanses of the human soul and says without despair or exuberance, Well, this is it, this is existence … oh well.

But this subversion of the traditional western polarities—good and evil, of course, only being one—is not done to be subversive, not performed from some theoretical tour de force, not arrived at through nihilism or amorality … but is maintained as the best possible way to survive.  If you stroke the good for being good, they begin to behave well to be rewarded (then, naturally, they are no longer good); if you punish the bad for being bad, they naturally feel alienated and vengeful and one way or another, from time to time at least, the punishment will return to confront the punisher.  So the sage doesn’t flash and bribe, doesn’t scorn and destroy, but walks alongside the seemingly eternal struggles of society and accepts them the way she accepts water.

Tao Te Ching LXI

A large state is the lower reaches of a river—

the place where all the streams of the world unite.

In the union of the world,

the female always gets the better of the male by stillness;

being still, she takes the lower position.

Hence the large state, by taking the lower position, annexes the small state.

The small state, by taking the lower position, affiliates itself to the large state.

Thus the one, by taking the lower position, annexes;

the other, by taking the lower position, is annexed.

All that the large state wants is to take the other under its wing;

all that the small state wants is to have its services accepted by the other.

If each of the two wants to find its proper place

it is meet that the large should take the lower position.

When one falls into the boggy depths of consciousness, one finds mud.  There are those who say that, upon emerging (should one emerge), one wears the cloak of light—spun from detachment and freedom from desire.  Hippies, New Agers, the Buddha, and an eclectic mix of charlatans and earnest well-intentioned fools.  Others, far more rare, such as the Judge in Blood Meridian, emerge in puissant darkness.

But in mud there is neither light nor darkness, morality nor immorality, male nor female, life nor death.  So the sage, having visited the muddy way and never really feeling inclined to leave, promotes nothing in particular—not war, not peace, not good, not evil.  The sage knows the enlightened one is bound to the unenlightened, the redeemer to the unredeemed.  The sage, though, being bound only to mud and its murkiness, sidesteps allegiances and the common opposites of the human spirit.

So the Tao recognizes that in the world there are pieces—large and small, annexing and annexed—which need each other.  Without the small, the large is excessive, imbalanced; without the large, the small is insecure, imbalanced:  finding each other, they temporarily unite that which is irreconcilable in the world and so find balance for a time.  Of course, the rule of the world is such that they rarely find each other, the one too obsessed with its excess, the other too insecure to act.  So the sage, finding the irreconcilable reconciled in mud, stays in mud and lets the world do what it is inclined to do.

Tao Te Ching LX

Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.

When the empire is ruled in accordance with the way, the spirits lose their potencies.

Or rather, it is not that they lose their potencies but that, though they have their potencies, they do not harm the people.

It is not only they who, having their potencies, do not harm the people.  The sage also does not harm the people.

As neither does any harm, each attributes the merit to the other.

The soul is a many-headed many-faced many-tongued beast.  Each head is a god, each face a spirit, each tongue a demon.  The processes of education and enculturation typically are processes of numbing—of building internal and external barriers between individuals and their souls, between selves and the divine; this numbing is for good reason:  the soul easily devours the faint-hearted, the serious, the glib, the naïve, and the coddled.  The primary function of society—its processes and structures—is to offer this protection.

Yet those who do not wish to be numbed, to be protected, against the soul’s vastness, its dark empty spaces, its potencies and surprises, must themselves develop strategies to avoid destruction, for the soul is always larger than anything that inhabits it.  We have a sufficient number of great explorers of the soul—from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil—to know how it treats those who neither numb themselves nor appeal to the method as large as the soul—the way that accepts and walks but does itself become any aspect it sees.  Thus the soul’s potent spirits—whether they’re named Apollo or lust, Yahweh or pride, Aphrodite or despair—are not ossified, succumbed to, worshipped, or ignored … but simply acknowledged.  The sage knows the words and methods of each spirit, each god, each demon; she knows them but does not feel inclined to identify with them.  She walks, and in walking she passes from voice to voice, spirit to spirit, potency to potency … and in passing does not harm.

Tao Te Ching LIX

In ruling the people and in serving heaven it is best for a ruler to be sparing.

It is because he is sparing that he may be said to follow the way from the start.

Following the way from the start he may be said to accumulate an abundance of virtue.

Accumulating an abundance of virtue there is nothing he cannot overcome.

When there is nothing he cannot overcome no one knows his limit.

When no knows his limit he can possess a state.

When he possesses the mother of a state he can then endure.

This is called the way of deep roots and firm stems by which one lives to see many days.

Western causation—scientific, measurable, reproducible, abstract—differs from the way’s causation, which is mysterious, elusive, and embodied.  The Tao begins in restraint and ends in life, passing through an overcoming which is no transcendence but an immanence, no acquisitiveness but an abundance, no leadership but a following.

Physical survival at the writing of the Tao Te Ching was far more dubious than it is now for those living behind the increasingly precarious fortress of the First World.  Yet look at what many of the world’s privileged are focused on—extending life, maintaining and increasing health.  But this is presently done not by being sparing but by being excessive, not through virtue but through extravagance, not through serving but through arrogance.  Individual physical survival may no longer seem like an issue for the world’s entitled, but our species’ survival is—and so each individual is bound.  Thus in ruling ourselves and in serving the earth, it is best for us to be sparing; we might then endure and live to see many days.  But, first, we have to know that it is not better to be a human than a butterfly, to be a ruler than a bum.

Tao Te Ching LVIII

When the government is muddled the people are simple,

when the government is alert the people are cunning.

It is on disaster that good fortune perches,

it is beneath good fortune that disaster crouches.

Who knows the limit?  Does not the straightforward exist?  The straightforward changes again into the crafty, and the good changes again into the monstrous.  Indeed it is long since the people were perplexed.

Therefore the sage is square-edged but does not scrape,

has corners but does not jab,

extends himself but not at the expense of others,

shines but does not dazzle.

Clarity, truth, honesty, precision … aren’t these the values of the evolved and noble?  Murkiness, confusion, slipperiness … aren’t language and love—aren’t society, technology, and culture—designed to eliminate these undesirable traits?  But the Tao in its very roots and eyes uses language but trusts it no more than anything else, including itself; accepts the world’s cornucopia but does not give it more credence than death.

The sage is not particularly surprised when an enemy becomes a friend, when his highest love betrays him.  The soul is a hydra and humans, should they ever be able to achieve emptiness, might then realize that emptiness is what is said about it and no conclusions, proofs, or assurances live there, but only the very experience of emptiness itself.  The sage knows that love is often draped over a thousand fences and that which society celebrates is often born in that which society despises, that time is just a function of geometry, and science a symbolization of what we already know in our vision.  But the light of our vision is not enough and so we try to stuff the light into our minds and there it becomes imprisoned and dies.

And if it was long since the people were perplexed, it may be even longer now, in an age when doubt—not as intellectual inquiry but as the ground of experience—is derided and one’s volition has become the one true indicator that one exists.

The sage possesses the necessary tools to damage others and things but rarely uses these tools and if she does so does so sadly.  She knows that emptiness leads in itself to the monstrous as easily as to the good and that the causes we tell ourselves, whether moral or otherwise, often simply serve ourselves.

Why does the sage, then, not use the tools at her disposal, when it seems patently obvious that such equipment exists to further herself and that the normal path is, as one advances in years, to ensure one is protected and to transfer the naïve exuberance of youth into systems of control and oppression for all and comfort for oneself?   Why does she not?  If you were to find a sage and ask her, she would not give you any clear answer, for no clear answer exists; rather, she might smile and offer you an orange.

Tao Te Ching LVII

Govern the state by being straightforward; wage war by being crafty; but win the empire by not being meddlesome.  How do I know that it is like that?  By means of this.

The more taboos there are in the empire the poorer the people.

The more sharpened tools the people have the more benighted the state.

The more skills the people have the further novelties multiply.

The better known the laws and edicts the more thieves and robbers there are.

Hence the sage says,

I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves.

I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves.

I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves.

I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block.

There are the techniques of the specialties in the world—techniques of being this way or that way, of being taciturn or assertive, of being restrained or abandoned, of being an academic, rock star, lawyer or bum.  These are all prescribed and to deviate from the respective prescriptions is to diminish or remove one’s impact in one’s specialty.  But there is the non-technique of the whole, of seeing rather than action.  This is the sage’s means and she moves in murky ways.

The Tao, while hardly being anarchist, is neither inclined to regulation.  So the sage knows that in attempting to regulate herself, she lessens herself; in condemning and praising, she subverts herself; in willfully expanding her skills and knowledge, she warps herself.  The sage is constantly doubtful about more and better, about almost all morality and causation.

The management techniques of the sage are similar to and different from the management techniques of Machiavelli.  Both are ruthless, distant, and devoted wholly to their path without regard for consequence.  But the prince is ruthless for her own ends, distant to enhance the fear of the people and the perception of her superiority, devoted to carving his name on stone; the sage is perceived as ruthless because she doesn’t pamper the people, distant because that is what she is for that is what is, devoted to turning names into air—which involves no effort, for that is what names are.  So the prince constantly strives and struggles and the sage does not; they may look at each other as somewhat foolish across the odd void between them, which is natural—the people may or may not view them similarly and the prince and sage, if they are truly princes and sages, have looked into the darkness that forms all things and not flinched; but after having looked the prince returns to the world and must dominate it, the sage may return to the world but must do no particular thing.

Tao Te Ching LVI

One who knows does not speak, one who speaks does not know.

Block the openings.

Shut the doors.

Blunt the sharpness.

Untangle the knots.

Soften the glare.

Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

This is known as mysterious sameness.

Hence you cannot get close to it nor can you keep it at arm’s length; you cannot bestow benefit on it nor can you do it harm; you cannot ennoble it nor can you debase it.  Therefore it is valued by the empire.

The Tao uses words but isn’t particularly impressed with them; knowledge may exist somewhere but if language is its tool, it’s only one of them.  So the Tao has slippery causation and dubious antecedents.  Its therefores, hences, and thuses defy the firm relationships modern thought demands and in their place places bridges with spans of water at both ends.  Its its seem to point but the object of their pointing seems to be far below the water’s surface, if at all.  With the Tao, there are no ends, guarantees, or origins; there is movement.

As it is with the Tao, so it is with love, art, self, god.  Those who attempt to get too close or keep too distant, to benefit or harm, to ennoble or debase are unacquainted with the soul; those who do not attempt have been too close, too distant; received benefit and done harm; been ennobled and debased; been to every aspect of the soul and no longer have any need to fulfill any particular aspect again but only the soul in its glorious horrible indifferent entirety.

Tao Te Ching LV

One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a newborn babe.

Poisonous insects will not sting it.

Ferocious animals will not pounce on it.

Predatory birds will not swoop down on it.

Its bones are weak and its sinews supple yet its hold is firm.

It does not know of the union of male and female yet its male member will stir.

This is because its virility is at its height.

It howls all day yet does not become hoarse.

This is because its harmony is at its height.

To know harmony is called the constant.

To know the constant is called discernment.

To try to add to one’s vitality is called ill-omened.

For the mind to egg on the breath is called violent.

A creature in its prime doing harm to the old is known as going against the way.

That which goes against the way will come to an early end.

Virtue is not a mental concept, but a physical orientation; not a code but a state; not a judgment but a celebration; not an institution but a laugh; not morality but mysterious caprice; not stone but water.  To attempt otherwise is to stand existence on its head.  Yet such inversion is now the order of existence; ill omens and violence are the norm and while talk of harmony abounds what is meant by it is often adding and egging:  truth is something which can be obtained through communication and goodness isn’t goodness unless it’s named, photographed, copied, and broadly disseminated.

The virtuous are flexible—emotionally, intellectually, practically, structurally, ontologically, fiscally, geographically, culturally, aesthetically, erotically—not because they believe in flexibility as a goal or idea but because their bodies are rooted in the way.  The falsely virtuous know and thus prescribe, the virtuous do not know and thus exist.

The soul—that possibly threatened murky repository of the human:  contradictory, shifting, impossibly one, desirous and still—is not dissimilar to the Tao in its once and future proclivities.  Nor is it dissimilar to the historic Yahweh—calm, like a high wind that never ceases.  East and West poles staked early in the ground of time.

With the poles now magnetized and fibre optics strung between them, with Yahweh in a test tube and the Tao a freeway, the soul—like almost everything—has become subject to the clinicians’ incessant analysis:  the forced stuffing of that-which-cannot-be-stuffed into mind’s metallic ordering—an ordering that overturns existence’s dark vibrancy for those who don’t walk increasingly large and rocky detours around it.

This analysis and ordering include diagnoses like bipolar, manic-depressive, mentally unstable, schizophrenic.  If these false laboratory priests’ labeling, induced by fear, is listened to, those listening will view themselves as something to be fixed, take pills and therapies—and so seal themselves more thickly from the source of life.

The Tao is a turning back, a stripping away.  It does not add names, prosthetics, and theories, but subtracts them.  In subtracting it finds not mental illness, but murky life.  It does not damn the river or deny it, but becomes it.  So the sage is diseased according to those who would name the way.  So she is unconscious, fulminating, and silent in Yahweh’s masculine bush.  But in the Tao the river flows and every thought and feeling passes through her and they are not her but the world, so she is not disturbed.  As the world is not there to be healed but to exist.

Tao Te Ching LIV

What is firmly rooted cannot be pulled out,

what is tightly held in the arms will not slip loose.

Through this the offering of sacrifice by descendants will never come to an end.

Cultivate it in your person and its virtue will be genuine.

Cultivate it in the family and its virtue will be more than sufficient.

Cultivate it in the hamlet and its virtue will endure.

Cultivate it in the state and its virtue will abound.

Cultivate it in the empire and its virtue will be pervasive.

Hence look at the person through the person, look at the family through the family, look at the hamlet through the hamlet, look at the state through the state, look at the empire through the empire.

How do I know that the empire is like that? By means of this.

The incessant alteration of fashion, the subtle perpetual morphing of language, the orgy of novelty, the sags and slings of our outrageous bodies—these lead the common mind to the conclusions that life is in constant flux, that the only constant is change, and that the wise or at least pragmatic person (and these too, to such a one, seem as one) thus accepts change as good.  And these conclusions are not wrong.

But the sage passes on the embodied elusive knowledge of that which is deeply rooted—not by negating flux but by seeing it as the other face of that which does not change.  For despite our attempts to control, despite our narratives of freedom, despite our fear that we may have already articulated the essential and be largely unable to incarnate it, we remain humans and the soul remains the soul.  It is this knowledge—held silently and deep within the sage, even as it is within rocks and words—that makes the sage the sage.  So everything reveals itself as itself and it is this revealing that will never come to an end.

Tao Te Ching LIII

The court is corrupt,

the fields are overgrown with weeds,

the granaries are empty.

Yet there are those dressed in fineries

with swords at their sides,

filled with food and drink

and possessed of too much wealth.

This is known as taking the lead in robbery.

Far indeed is this from the way.

The broad way is decried in the West, celebrated in the East; the narrow way celebrated in the West, decried in the East.  The multitude walk the broad way in the West, the narrow ways in the East.  The ease of the broad way is what makes it anathema in the West and appealing in the East.  How confusing!  Is the truth one or the other?  Is it in some mysterious sense both?  Or is all this, as the academics would have it, a matter of semantics?  What might the Tao say if it could speak?  Might it uphold the broad way, as in this odd vignette?  Or might it uphold the mysterious union of secret and manifestation, as it seems to in other odd vignettes?  The Tao is slippery; who knows?

The Tao hesitates to say that wealth, pleasure, and society are wrong—only that too much of these are wrong.  Is the Tao thus communist?  If it is, it is a communism which grows from the soul rather than government, that naturally emerges from within rather than something that is imposed from without.

If the empire was once the actual systems which are now known as the government, it is no longer but is rather the soul and the sage dares not tamper not with the government—though she frequently cares little for this—but with her soul.  For she knows her soul is stronger than she; her soul is like water and the one thing that must be submitted to.  Her soul mirrors the way.

Tao Te Ching LII

The world had a beginning

and this beginning could be the mother of the world.

When you know the mother

go on to know the child.

After you have known the child

go back to holding fast to the mother

and to the end of your days you will not meet with danger.

Block the openings,

shut the doors,

and all your life you will not run dry.

Unblock the openings,

add to your troubles,

and to the end of your days you will be beyond salvation.

To see the small is called discernment.

To hold fast to the submissive is called strength.

Use the light

but give up the discernment.

Bring not misfortune upon yourself.

This is known as following the constant.

The Taoist sage can seem surprisingly and perhaps disturbingly like a bourgeoisie:  doing all to avoid misfortune, never excessive or exuberant, balanced, boring, vacantly content.  If this is so, the key difference between the sage and the bourgeoisie can be seen by randomly changing their circumstances.  Rip away the savings, house, car, career, and spouse—the bourgeoisie breaks down and possibly jumps from a window, the sage sings a little tune and moseys on.

The difference, then, is not be in outward circumstances, but inward ground.  The bourgeoisie’s ground, in fact, is not within him, but in his prosthetics; thus when his prosthetics disappear, he falls.  The sage’s ground, however, is the way, and should her prosthetics disappear (if indeed she has any, for she doesn’t particularly care), she does not fall for there is nowhere to fall.

The bourgeoisie knew the mother—the void of creation—as an infant, then moved on to know the child of society and culture.  But he gets stuck there and thus returns to acting like an infant when his things are taken away from him.  The sage, however, after knowing the child, returns to the mother—not as a grasping infant, but as an adult whose mother is the world.  This is why she blocks and shuts, sees and holds fast, uses but gives up, believes in light but not distinction—she has no need to build worlds around her; she has the world.

However, in modern times, with so much data and so many artifacts having been erected between the individual mother of our physical infantility and the collective mother of spiritual maturity, who can claw her way through and back?  Who can negotiate the mass seduction of sensual and intellectual knowledge in such a way as to say no, instead following a distant way?

Tao Te Ching LI

The way gives them life.

Virtue rears them.

Things give them shape.

Circumstances bring them to maturity.

Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honor virtue.  Yet the way is revered and virtue honored not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Thus the way gives them life and rears them,

brings them up and nurses them,

brings them to fruition and maturity,

feeds and shelters them.

It gives them life yet claims no possession;

it benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;

it is the steward yet exercises no authority.

Such is called the mysterious virtue.

Has the old man gone mad?  After convincing us that the people have separated themselves from the way and scorn virtue, clinging instead to rituals as a sorry substitute for what is natural and institutionalized paths as concrete encasements for dancing air, he now claims that everyone reveres the way!  And that they do this naturally!

Listen to what the people love!—  They love to possess no one or thing.  They expect no gratitude when they help others.  They take care of the earth, things, and people without establishing themselves as superior to the earth, things, and people.  This is what the people love!

Yet the people are not natural.  Scared of nature’s perpetual indifference, peculiar order, and ecstatic randomness, they surround themselves with artifice then become artifice themselves by absorbing what they have surrounded themselves with; they become their fear and, having become it, do not see it.

Yet surely the old man is mad; he dreams of that mythical golden age in which the people are perfectly aligned with an idealized nature; consciousness is not a breach but an integration; the illusions, catastrophes, petty victories, and follies of ambition are seen by all and laughed aside.  He lies in a field of poppies, outrageously fantasizing about a world far removed from the one we know.

Yet the people are awed by the way and honor virtue—though often posthumously, distantly, and incomprehensibly.  The way and virtue, these forces beyond the people’s gods and grasping, are aloof, mysterious, numinous, and strange.

The sage, naturally, knows that the way encompasses all things yet still is only the way and virtue’s just virtue and so continues bumbling along her path, avoiding arrogance and humility, reverence and shame, honor and disgrace.  Everything that can be named is beautiful, transient, and forgettable; nothing that can be named is honored or revered.

Tao Te Ching L

When going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades of life, three in ten will be comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also number three in ten.  Why is this so?  Because they set too much store by life.

I have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding his own life does not meet with rhinoceros or tiger when travelling on land nor is he touched by weapons when charging into an army.  There is nowhere for the rhinoceros to pitch its horn; there is nowhere for the tiger to place its claws; there is nowhere for the weapon to lodge its blade.  Why is this so?  Because for him there is no realm of death.

Life is just life and not something more than life.  While human life includes fantasies about how life might be—and occasionally a few of these fantasies are partially enacted—fantasy is ultimately subject to life’s necessities, thus ensuring it is always actualized according to life’s proclivities, not fantasy’s.  As life both feeds and devours, those who cling to it will not live; they will die in any of the realms in which it is possible to die.

Modernity is a culture given to setting too much store by life; modernity devours and prolongs; hence our apocalyptic obsessions which arise from our collective intuitive sense that while talking life, we’re living death.  That, too desperate for life, we try too hard to shove death aside, fatally ignoring the inescapable reality that death is eternally the wind and we eternally leaves.

He has heard it said but never observed it as there is no one who solely excels in safeguarding her life.  Life is always stronger than any safeguard, than any individual excelling.  The one who is above accident, chance, harm, fate, the wiles of freedom, is a fantastical creation, not a product of life.  Nevertheless, one who gives herself over to life and not the way she wishes life to be—a process we might call love—can be said to live apart from death … for there is only one death that can and will affect her and this will not affect her until it does; until then, it plays no more role in her life than a flower.  So she is never harmed.