dao de jing iv

the way is empty yet when used there is something that does not make it full

deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures

blunt the sharpness

untangle the knots

soften the glare

follow along old wheel tracks

darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there

i don’t know whose child it is –

it images the foreparent of god

dear fours,

long before simulation replaced reality and images the word, before surfaces usurped the deep and the seen became the only rule of truth, idontknow of dao loitered in existence’s confused corridors

long before natality and genealogy were questioned by the revolutionary doors of modernity, before causation was sublimated and identity defined, mud and murkiness presented themselves in shadows and indistinctions at an unmarked crossroads of history and nothing

god here is not some omniscient omnipresent omnipotent conscious or unconscious good or indifferent or malicious creator that bred a world and left, forgot, neglected it, merged with it … even some totality of opposites ... but just a bump and a ride on a carousel of vague forms, an orphan of emptiness

pointedness. entanglement. brightness. novelty. a quaternity of desirable attributes which dao in its almost comic nonchalance suggests we don’t particularly esteem or nurture. hardly advocating idiocy, dullness, conservatism or tradition, simpleness … hardly articulating a fourstep plan to wellness, success, happiness, enlightenment, knowledge … hardly inducting you into any arcane esoteric arts … lacking teleological thrust, highlighting a constructing through notconstructing, leading through following (not any idea, person, thing, text, feeling), an ising through seeming, a way through notway

it only seems

it only seems as if

it only seems as if it were

there

i reach into infinite hereness of soul and what do i sense but an appearing to, an if that moves around itself in shimmering vacuity

i don’t know how to embrace such elusiveness. i don’t know if it is full or nearly full or empty or running out. i don’t know if it is a thing or what it is or is not. i don’t know how it is related. i don’t know its accomplishments. i don’t know if it is worthy or real or an it or a joke or imbecility, a reflection of an archaic absolute or a bending of a line, an allaying, an untangling, a softening …