Daodejing lxxvi

A man is supple and weak when living but hard and stiff when dead.  Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living but dried and shriveled when dead.  Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death, the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.

Therefore a weapon that is strong will not vanquish,

A tree that is strong will suffer the axe.

The hard and big take the lower position,

The supple and weak take the higher position.

Writing, like any vocation, if one sticks with it long enough to get past its ecstatic and lingering novelties, becomes supple and weak, an expression of the fragile project of humanity.  Yet, in order to eat and because we are indelibly social apes, we are compelled by elusive forces of no fixed address to move out from our caves and eyries, our burrows and wires, into the scrimmage of crowds and ladders, where, in comparison to a vocation’s dark freedoms, the lit courts and laws are hard and stiff.  So much of humanity, the city’s scream, the car’s orgasm, feels like the embodiment of death.  Is this the left and the right of Vignette xxxi?  The ruthlessness of Vignette v against the shadowy play of xv?

Perhaps.

But whatever the external environment may be, appear to be, or feel like, the sage, because she is not committed to any particular order of things, can slip into and out from any order, which may appear to others as disorder but to her is the only order—that of living.  Why assume she is equal to or greater than life, a graspable part equal to or greater than the ungraspable whole?  Only death could possibly make this claim (though it restrains itself).  So she refrains from definitive conclusions, causations, judgements, sustainable definitions, and adapts herself to the constantly shifting environments of life which greet her, escaping the myriad shriveled and dried fates of the dead.  She will be dried and hard some sunny day, and that is enough.

The sage, naturally, is severely limited in many areas, even as all things are limited.  A tree may be the most beautiful tree in the world but it cannot compose Mass in D Minor.  Which is greater—the tree or the composer?  Those who erect hierarchies do so for their aggrandizement, but their erections grow flaccid in the spherical Dao, in which everything is a waterdop that falls from heaven and merges with the sea.

So, like anyone, the sage can do many things or few things; what makes her a sage is not this doing or not-doing but her relationship to her doing and not-doing.  Whereas the people see a difference between doing and not-doing, the sage doesn’t.  Whereas the people say I am these doings and not-doings but not those doings and not-doings, the sage does not say but sees the Dao in everything.

Certainly one might look at the sage and say—She does not care about success, she is a child, she is useless and improper, she laughs when she should cry and cries when she should laugh, she is a hobo, no one understands her.  If she is not a sage, she will be bothered and modify her behavior and thinking; but if she is, the words will be like a tree rustling in the wind.