daodejing lxiv

It is easy to maintain a situation while it is still secure.

It is easy to deal with a situation before symptoms develop.

It is easy to break a thing when it is yet brittle.

It is easy to dissolve a thing when it is yet minute.

Deal with a thing while it is still nothing.

Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.

A tree that can fill the span of a man’s arms grows from a downy tip.

A terrace nine storeys high rises from hodfuls of earth.

A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one’s feet.

Whoever does anything to it will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it.

Therefore the sage, because he does nothing, never ruins anything and, because he does not lay hold of anything, loses nothing.

In their enterprises the people always ruin them when on the verge of success.

Be as careful at the end as at the beginning and there will be no ruined enterprises.

Therefore the sage desires not to desire

And does not value goods which are hard to come by.

Learns to be without learning

And makes good the mistakes of the multitude

In order to help the myriad creatures to be natural and to refrain from daring to act.

Always in the Dao a fish, deeply set, sensed, known, perhaps even loved, by the sage.  Below, some membrane separating words and things.  Is it feral?  Whose desire is it for it to be set free, to be loosed into the human circus:  another flood, another olympian drama?  Can anything be done to it? Can it be ruined?  Is it possible even to stretch one’s hand through the membrane and touch it?  What are the methods for its description?  Is this stretching, this setting free, the reason for humanity, its being and becoming, the arc of history, time’s timeless blood?

We exist on a murky equilibrium, an unseen fulcrum.  The sage knows the feel of the pivot as life whirls around and she is somehow not undone.   For to deal with a thing while it is still nothing, you must know nothing.  You must know how it feels to attempt to get the fish to leave, to grasp its scales, to know ruin, to have attempted to have become the slippery spirit of desire, suck on its piscine heart, been spat back to land, unloved, unnamed, unbecome.

But, in that Daoist twist, the scales—those energies of all seduction—are not known by grasping or doing but by grasping not-grasping and doing not-doing.  The sage does not lay hold, but lies on the membrane, watching the fish, watching the grasping, watching the watching watching the fish.  The sage does not seduce or is not seduced in the usual ways, but through the eyes on the membrane on the fish on the deep.  So things get done, though no one really knows how.  So ways are walked, and the walking is not a method, a program, a measure, but a step, and another, and another, and that is all:  this the vision and the eyes and the learning and the care.

In the Dao a fish and in a fish the Dao.  Untouched, bound, and in its binding free.