sadood

we feature today a rare interview with sadoo diaper who we under

stand recently has been dressing up and roaming city streets alone. sadoo! – we know you’re strange but isn’t this a bit much?

most days it isn’t but sometimes i get home and think i should have done a k less or so.

i mean socially.

socially?

society, while in this case moderately and superficially tolerant, has, like everything, its limits, and it’s given to excise any excessively aberrant aspect to guarantee its own survival.

shouldn’t it then be excising itself? look. it’s possible various specimens among the masses don’t like my makeup or sartorial expression but that’s neither illegal nor even particularly aberrant. at worst some might consider it to be unfashionable, incomprehensible, distasteful, irrelevant, inappropriate or obnoxious.

but why are you doing this?

i gave up on why many years ago. and giving up on why led to giving up on you and i and he and she and it and they. this led me to give up on doing. the copulative followed. so you see your question is more or less an empty set of emptiness. if anything, i’m doing this to not do.

what do you mean sadoo? or should it be sanotdoo?

snotdoo might
doodoo. i mean (if i mean, which i doubt, often finding meaning too mean) that i may be dooing but i’m dooing without purpose (dooing with purpose we could call doing) and this without is linked somehow to this biochemical technical conglomerate (what we could call the inhabited body that maintains an appearance of speaking in the republic of the present) being attuned to different frequencies than those emitted by the worlds of doing – those worlds we could for

convenience call capitalism and which we humans are all now born into, regardless of any attunement with it, rousing all manner of defects and strategies among the misattuned for survival – a survival that isn’t simply an animal protection of their singularities but an aspect of attempting to nurture (rather than destroy) biodiversity, which surely exists not only in the forests and oceans of the world but also our cities and souls, these new and critical habitats.

i’m not sure i follow.

no need to follow.

could you try to be less difficult and restate in language that more of our audience might be able to follow?

capitalistic structures and processes work great for some of the human population (but hardly outside the human). it’s hard to quantify this as most humans are automatically enculturated into capitalism and never question it. if i’m protesting i might be protesting (most generally) humanity's strategic imbecility (and tactical implementations of this imbecility) – that as a species we're investing most of our time, money, and energy into our hyperapex predator attributes (slaughtering more and better than anything else) and little into what for me is our most distinctive talent – a kind of empathic consciousness that allows us to contextualize ourselves (individually and collectively) as part of vast and intelligent ecosystems and adapt our lives to this broader knowledge. more specifically, objecting to anthropocentrism (speciesism), its concomitant ecological degradation – and the political-lifestyle machineries we in our mob conformity are enculturated into.

how will people get that – you look like the offspring of a

jovian clown and the dropped insides of a second generation laptop?

i was told today i look like goku. but your question’s misplaced – it assumes there’s something to get, that my presentation – whether through image or text – is a tradable commodity on the image-text exchange. to put it another way, judeochristiancapitalistic society wears reason on its body of unreason. i wear unreason on my body of reason.

what?

next – sadood ii

to sadoo

in july i began wandering central mumbai like this – 

theory, as kandinsky and others say, follows practice. or rather each follows and leads (dao de jing ii – before and after follow each other). too much theory without practice (the bulk and worst of the academy) irritates as much as too much practice without theory (the bulk and worst of spheres of action).

i was compelled to wander perhaps to ask why i am compelled to wander.

after having sadooed (i verb the practice) almost 20 times – i mostly wander in the area bounded by nana chowk, jeejabai bhosle marg, dalal street, and colaba causeway: my practice so far has been silently walking solo (but responding briefly, quietly, rationally if spoken to non-threateningly) – threads emerge.

one of these is the weave of sanity – those often assumed configurations of reason and unreason,

conformity and non-conformity that imbue education and culture. it’s one thing to sadoo anonymously (responses range from indifference, fear, curiosity, camaraderie, laughter, ridicule, …), it’s another to be faced (befaced?) like this in my housing co-op (frequently with the politics of a small village) where i am somewhat known. a neighbor-friend is asked routinely if i’ve gone crazy. (but surely this

question/judgment has been around for years.) i'm asked directly if i'm ok. i hear someone whispering to a friend as i approach don't say anything.

i call it sanity currency. i experience it as a necessary parallel currency to money. as humans scrimmage for economic currency to survive and accumulate artifacts, prestige, power, so we scrimmage for psychic currency: a decent amount of human language is devoted to explicitly and implicitly sorting out hierarchies of what's 'normal'.

in my co-op it used to anger-annoy me when others – particularly those in leadership positions – would easily label others as insane or sane, when the epistemological bases for their perspectives seemed dubious, as open for critique as their critique of others. such labelling still bothers me but has more grown into curiosity about the assumptions we make about mental health, how not infrequently our working definitions about psychic-emotional-mental wellness serve particular interests of our own rather than broader pluralities or the humans we're judging (or perhaps ostensibly trying to 'help'.) 

(a lot has been written about this of course. i’m more inclined to the thoughtful experienced expressions outside of or on the margins of institutionalized psychology [psychiatry, therapy, wellness, …] than ‘mainstream’ orientations.)

i sadoo, perhaps, in part, to continue to question, in a more embodied way, our cultural biases and hierarchies about how to live well, circumscriptions and possibilities in and around this ‘how’ – to further feel, see, know, doubt what it means for me to explore humanness in a pyretically technological environment that's endemically obsessed with hierarchies.