daodejing lxxiii

He who is fearless in being bold will meet with his death,

He who is fearless in being timid will stay alive.

Of the two, one leads to good, the other to harm.

Heaven hates what it hates—who knows the reason why!

Therefore even the sage treats some things as difficult.

The way of heaven

Excels in overcoming though it does not contend,

In responding though it does not speak,

In attracting though it does not summon,

In laying plans though it appears slack.

The net of heaven is cast wide.

Though the mesh is not fine, yet nothing ever slips through.

In the city, our now and metal home, our global castle without dimension, our regulated and exclusive club that accepts all and denies all, that squirms in time’s soil and dreams of floods and fire, the rule that rules in our hearts is the rule of humans over humans, seen in the rise of the will, the increase in sales of indulgences of freedom, manuals of success and stories, games of equality and chance.

Dao acknowledges and accepts this rule; it counts it among power’s necessities.  It avoids positing a fantasy to replace it; some duality to overcome it, succumb to it, or eternally struggle with it; a trinity or quaternity or polygopoly to systematize it into ideologies and texts.

But it does not accept this rule as sufficient in the description of the human’s place in the cosmos.  It does not accept the sight and sightlines of the city as the vision with which we are compelled to see, through some straightjacket of history, some oneiric teleology.

It expands power’s scope and nature, neither by negating nor elevating the human but by expanding--by placing the human on a stage so large it counts as one, by means of returning, through the city’s sewers and memories, its sleepy archaeologies, its torn and smelly maps, to the quiet subversions of earth—subversions we might be able to accept in our present screaming ecologies, in the snatches of our destruction, in the omnipresent hide-and-seeking of the grave, its magnificent facades, if we began listening to wind and stones, if we were not so committed to restricting democracy to our selves.

But Dao doesn’t stop at earth, where it could, where we might want it to.  It digs further, past the silence of the worms—not to a christian otherness, not to a no-place of Plato or More or Jobs, some final fantasy, a tweet of such resplendence it would floor the world (at least for 10 seconds), but—to a heaven which might be said to be the silent articulation of the earth, a glimpse of what we might on better nights imagine ourselves to be:  the voices and nurturers of all those without voice, not simply those (as we now tend to be oriented toward, in our metal castle) whose voices have—through some peculiar process—come to be heard as the voices, entitled to devour and drown.  Dao digs to heaven, the sage’s home and eye, and so digs back to itself, the wayless way:  the gift the human is given to see how it might walk.

So who would be bold on such a stage, on which one, in some vast ensemble cast stands and sits and dies alongside butterflies and dinosaurs and Hamlet and time itself?

One is timid not because of an inability to be courageous but through ability.  One is timid because one is one and the numbers never stop.  One is timid because humans rule over humans; earth rules over rulers; heaven, indifferent and compassionate, rules over earth; and Dao, shadowy and indistinct, rules by not-ruling, counts by not-counting, and walks a path without knowing why and without particularly caring about this.  Why?  Because of this.