dao de jing xiv

what cannot be seen is called evanescent
what cannot be heard is called rarefied
what cannot be touched is called minute

these three cannot be fathomed
and so they are confused and looked upon as one

its upper part is not dazzling
its lower part is not obscure
dimly visible it cannot be named
and returns to that which is without substance
this is called the shape that has no shape
the image that is without substance
this is called indistinct and shadowy
go up to it and you will not see its head
follow behind it and you will not see its rear

hold fast to the way of antiquity
in order to keep in control the realm of today
the ability to know the beginning of antiquity
is called the thread running through the way

dear fourteens

a geometry of apophatic aesthetics. a mathematics of negative spirituality. pervasively repeatedly softly emphatically indiscernibly. a mandorla of invitations. a lightness so bright only darkness can represent it

depending on how you count – and counting is less a sequence than a listening (to which numbers might be in relation) – 15 or less or 19 or more negations are present. cannots nos  nots & withouts  confusions & shadows

and after 8 lines of cannoting, it says … this

this what?

this … cannot?

this way of cannoting?

the referent – unless the referent is cannot – is missing. but no panic from this critical void. no surprise. no argument. no construction. no reference

and if the referent is cannot, what then? the cannot cannot? cannots cannoting? we fall into nested oblivions so practically inaccessible our present handles offer nothing? (& an offering of nothing may be the only gift an altar of cannot can accept)

absent referents are our present referents

a way of ability (positivity visibility solidity capacity) alongside a way of cannoting (negating murkiness flow haplessness)

in the myriad creatures’ cannotness, confusion & bewilderment. in their fearing of unfathomability does a monism arises, a definable one? destruction of monism created through a way …

is technodigital culture a dao reconstituted for today – a thread rewoven, rethreaded … a way rewayed reweighed wuwei’d?

the thread is not the beginning of antiquity but the ability to know the beginning ... how do we know a way we can’t see, a beginning we can’t access?

textual criticism suggests within the dao de jing are commentaries on commentaries on texts on text, itself a commentary. but textual criticism itself is a commentary on a commentary on a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. so we are less interested in any truth of another nest than the layers of shapeless times on nothing

for after all this cannoting an imperative and ability present themselves. flimsy threads, moving running, pervasive throughing, waying ways, with counts so dense and nothing who could sleep?

… we have ability noted mutedly admiringly in the penultimate line … no ability of any corporate measure, any lust or competition …

… the humans no longer know how to distinguish spirits. they’ve crawled into technology but don’t even know its mind, the mind of their nascent body, spirits of the new machines, having lost ability to empathize with much outside (living so on outsides there seems no outside left)

                  our time has no outside

we name but don’t know names. we create but have become incapable of intimacy with creation, its voided edges, eyes. what cannot be fathomed is knowable but not according to the modes which dominate our present definitions of knowing and so confused the aspects of the unfathomable according to our incompetencies, misnaming them sophistications

what is this this around and in an it, this it? this it eluding poles of dazzles and obscurities? detours around namings and substances, slips among shapes and shadows? having head and rear but you'll not see them and in your not seeing not know and in your not knowing not distinguish and in your not distinguishing unlive?

technology attempts in its growths and dressings, limbs and tumours to see touch hear but all these reachings bring us no closer to the inexplicable. a core gift technology presents is the pretense of humans thinking they can safely see themselves from distances, these satellite eyes of truth and nurture showing some of the some, a sum we think in the erasable mandala of ourselves is one and all

its body, this body of wires and viscera, coiled buzzings and alphaplasmatic algorithms, blind knowings, tight pants, demgelologies, seeming threads, we cannot sense for it’s too close in its distances, too there in its hereness

but might it not be these evanescences, those rarefieds, these miniscules that in their unknowability present a knowing of our fear, an energy patient in the walls of our illusions?

a holding fast not that we could call any more conservative than liberal, oldfashioned than avantgarde, stodgy than bold, antiquated than visionary, controlling than chaotic : thread of vermiculous dreams we’ve lost in the banally overwhelming noise of us … oh most confused manifestation of dao, this timethingplop called human, sidestepping its unfathomable gifts for the measurable

what is the one other than the all that's the many? what is seeing other than the moving that is notmoving, a knowing that's notknowing, a confusion that doesn’t?

we wait in whistling megavisceras for abilities of other ways

writing vii

language wants to escape itself, even as we want to escape ourselves. language’s means is silence, ours technology. but silence and technology are bound similarly to language and the human.

even as i cannot consider the human an expert commentator on itself – but only one voice among many, hardly privileged because it tends to be perceived to be located on some inside and the inside perceived to possess in some sense superior perception – so i cannot consider myself an expert commentator on myself. yet we – and i – cannot help comment. the gap between this cannot consider and cannot help is a charter of writing. yet most writing comes from the cannot help.

when we say the external world doesn’t exist – or that it exists solely or primarily as a function of imagination – we point to maps of spaces of writing. for writing re-enters voids not to create worlds about which it is debated whether they are illusory or real but to create spaces that might point to maps, so making any discussion of existence and non-existence, their locus or non-locus, moot.

we don’t have to create another world, through politics or technology. that other world is here, already, in language – all we have to do is enter it, although the policies and procedures for immigration are never explicit and always morphing.

do i write in privacy and loneliness? i enter privacy and loneliness – or at least the porches of the cottages of their names. then writing happens. writing is the odd breath of souls loosened in the unsegmented world.

writing! a dialogue with mirrors’ mute flat infinity.

to trek through writing’s dense empty forests, the only respites deserts and carnivals, is to become so used to nomadic minimalism and survivalist ingenuities that i confuse life and those techniques required to navigate writing’s environment.

writing is violence, but a violence so processed by violence violence destroys itself and only writing remains.

nothing here, he says, after having purchased an excursion package to writing. but writing is a selective mute.

writing? an empty boat on a river, unmoored, drifting, unseen, in which time may have ridden once, its traces smelly, like a deep navel never cleaned?

writing subverts itself. so that in the end – though there is no end – it gives up itself. what is left? a useless acquiescent subversion? questions of the methodologies of giving up? atonal memories? convalescence? palliation? a wellness that refuses its name? these are questions of death, of the root of the religious quest, where neither spirit’s presence nor absence can claim ascendancy and its mutability presents itself in objectifications, its mockery in reifications, its incommunicability in subjectifications. am i not seduced by writing as its voids are passable simulations of death and so hold the eternally lost key to life?