dao de jing iii

not to honour humans of excellence will keep the people from contention

not to value goods that are hard to come by will keep the people from theft

not to display what is desirable will keep the people from being unsettled

hence in its rule the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies

weakens their purpose but strengthens their bones

it constantly keeps the people innocent of knowledge and free from desire

and causes the clever not to dare

it simply takes no action and everything is in order

dear threes,

in this age of action, will, desire, coveted goods, displayings, knowledge, cleverness, purpose, strength, guilt, daring, prizes … how could we ever respond to such a piece of trivial comedy?

in a world that calls for increasingly accelerated action, that fears and seeks disorder, that could be said to inhabit – and require for its shaky presentations of sanity – a constantly expanding ever-full so-busy amusement park of mind … what are we to conjure from this text other than laughter and a quick return to facebook?

the people. contentious. stealing. unsettled. ignorantly purposive. banally knowledgeable. conventionally clever. orgasmically active

the sage. emptying, filling. weakening, strengthening. keeping, freeing, causing. all not for all but for not

three nots begin. not to honour. not to value. not to display. not as commandments. these are not do nots. rather these are apophatic infinitives

and the dao de jing belongs in a tradition of extreme erotic animation, of unbounded limitless vitality, not of any of these cheap pejorative unthinking labels of sublimation, denial, repression, puritanism, prudery spawning from an inquisitional technochristian psychology … but through immersions in life flows that will not be dammed, ossified, monetized, monumentalized. its negations and seeming absurdities – which are truly absurdities seen from within the crammed and camera’d tourist lookout of monuments – arise from a natural aversion to the apparent positivity of construction and objective … as things that have forgotten their not-thingness

here is a not-self. look at the selves in it. here is a not-word. see the words

not a discipline or even a practice but maybe an experience, sensation, attraction, response

and the rule? what do we say about this? do we posit an esotaticized empire in which its people are the myriad voices of a collective psychic history pulsing through the vast empty spaces of modern interiority? do we messianically or otherwise dream of a singularity or set of singularities that might slip through the heaping clutters of meddling sectarian politics to impossibly model dao in a world of technology – that knowledge made overwhelming and necessitous environment?

what are these questions but the mind that has neither emptied nor overflowed, set in its irrigation canals for the mawed input pipes of gorged epistemological factories?

dao is a form of radical freedom, of an orientation toward and placement in desire such that all possible objects of desire are already present and fulfilled, presenting and fulfilling, to be presented and fulfilled, tenses and modes of wandering … of identities relentlessly morphing and morphed into one another, of mutation not being a precipitator and product of fear but these very seconds of air we breathe

so humans. take your hierarchies of people and things and don’t invert them – inverted hierarchies, twisted hierarchies, flattened hierarchies, transmuted and transformed hierarchies are still hierarchies. just simply not and no and an order that slips through the ordering ordered orders may manifest