dao de jing i

the way can be spoken of but it won’t be the constant way

the name can be named but it won’t be the constant name

the nameless was the beginning of the myriad creatures

the named was the mother of the myriad creatures

hence constantly rid yourself of desires in order to observe its subtlety

but constantly allow yourself to have desires in order to observe what it is after

these two have the same origin but differ in name

they are both called dark

darkness upon darkness

the gateway to all that is subtle

dear ones,

dao de jing is written as a text for human survival and excellence in the context of all things in a transient universe. while assembled over 22 centuries ago humans have increasingly erected a dam in its flow, afraid to live as one species among a myriad, without ascendancy, living in the spontaneity of themselves

dao de jing is a practice that includes the lost arts of anonymity, haplessness, desolation, solitude, and notknowing. it is a manual, but one that provides instructions on its own terms – morphing, combining without regard acute mysticism and political precision, interiority and exteriority, female and male, language and silence, many other seeming counterpoints, and even (quite nonchalantly) death and life

these transformations, this combining, this psychospiritual alchemy, here, in vignette one, are called dark. dao eschews light, flowing with heaviness, darkness. dao is root and root is in vermiculous earth

language – as more capriciously in the chuang tzu – is mistrusted – but only in a context that apotheosizes it, reifies, as today, to the ecstasy and necessity of communication, that experiences human relation as primary, superior. dao places things – whether names, desire, humans, language – in their place. and this place is dao. so language (now a subsidiary of that transnational conglomerate, Communication) is not some divinity, panacea, salvific exuberance and clarity, healing, but a transport (like rivers, mycelium, wind, electromagnetic field quanta). designed to carry things without prejudice, it carries, including prejudice, as prejudice is too a thing. so humans have no particular privilege and become themselves precisely as they inhabit dao’s vast flows

words – like humans, desire, things, transports – root in subtle darkness. not perhaps an ineffability, numinosity. not a knowledge outside. but also not a knowledge restricted to or predominant in visibility, scientific measure. the artificial separation of these combinings – a spiritual fission humans seem disturbingly addicted to and supercilious about – might be a fear of subtlety, the no-desire in desire, desire in no-desire

i descend from names, names from no-names. if i am ignorant of my ancestry, if i do not devote good measure to exploring my genealogies, how then can i use language with any authority – an authority that is none, for it too descends?

origins and ends, gateways and constancies – aren’t these our lives? dao neither immortalizes nor mortalizes but rather does both through the relentless relation, union, and separation of specifics

in life one hears myriad conflicting voices (in society and social media, polyphonic threads). dao does not choose but listens. and in listening includes all. and in including all negates all. and in negating chooses

so. speak human, for you must. but let your speaking be rooted and let these roots root in the wormy darkness of many, of two, of one, of nothing

dao de punk

dao is way

de is virtue

punk is rotten wood dust used as tinder

dao of poo

dao of physics

dao of punk

punk is darkness

punk is the incense of dust & shit & ashes

punk is the valley of dirty virtue

de subverts subverts itself subverts subversion

de turns back

de does not de

darkness iii

in the absence of visible darkness yet with its desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought the unseen light of god.  so the human disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our absent selves.

in the age of knowledge, with the human more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream, disintegration the hope.

only flesh in its darkest knowledge can rise to look light in the eye.

to love darkness is to avoid in its entirety the statement – let there be light (and consequently let there be …, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on voids, exhorting nothing.  this is no statement of fate, any more than let there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance.  this indivisibility is darkness.

to exist on the margins – but rather, no:  to exist in places those with money and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than language), and this outside given to a deeper darkness:  that of not knowing whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.

to see, it is said, requires light.  and yet can we not say that the blind-from-birth see, yet through language.  words are dark eyes.  language has the capacity to bypass light and see.  this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the world and the screams and resentments they plod on.

and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in relation to word.  so technology permits new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of creating.

i take the lights of society and weave them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of my flesh’s black thread.  how do i know this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead?  i take my lessons in the night, i read the texts of void.  madness becomes my lover and emptiness my friend.

mysticism, as its more visible sibling, society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is the present greater energy.

i am oriented to those without names in the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named – but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed.  i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.  we are the nomads of darkness.  should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.

darkness

darkness and homelessness are siblings in time’s dysfunctional family.  in a present odd reunion – a poorly attended affair that’s rented my flesh for its drugged party – i find solace in darkness, i sleep in the cardboard box of my blood; familial lineages glide before me in runny colours and difficult flatulences.

the realms of visible politics – identity, sex, gender, ethnicity – are the shibuya of the human psyche … but the realms of invisible politics – sanity, eloquence, blood, beauty, virtue – are the pissed slums of neglected urbanscapes.  the latter are my home; daily i uncoil my diseased prick and whiz on the future.  melancholic jötunn suck me off with their gums and we collapse into night’s putrescent kingdoms.

i wake up daily in a bed of death

i say to the shadow called day –

i will crawl into you

i will make you my companion

we will play together as if we were friends.

but i long for the prayers of dreams

i lust though for the shadow of sleep

death is my lover, the grave my mentor

day – night’s useful mask, void’s awkward other

evening waits like a warm and dirty bath

how beautiful when darkness draws us into her

that dread of this ever-present waking

darkness is not an absence of light, but is polar to and interacting with light; light is the simplest most undivided, homogenous being we know … confronting it is darkness:  infinitely plural, divisive … and so infinitely creative.  colours – shadow and the children of shade – are light itself.  colour is born of and feeds on darkness.

darkness evolves environmentally:  as humans migrate into contexts of perpetual light, so darkness – our deepest need – is constructed and accessed in novel and fabricated ways by these emerging creatures of light.  the materials, maps, hazards, portals, labyrinths, signage, risk management practices and false exits of these fresh routes – the comparison of these to those of the worn ones – all this giving new life to darkness … or rather to humans in their cravings for infinite relations.

at light’s highest point on its ladder, the darkness of things presents itself to me as the simmering surfaces of light.  but at the apex of darkness on itself, how do i see light?  as the animation of darkness?  a misspelling?  as the remnant that questions, dark’s tongue?  a hope that subverts even hope?

any authentic notion of divinity – or at least that of the human unhinged from its overwhelming greeds and incarcerating self-reflections, and so the human not itself – must include that which is oriented to seeing in darkness, regardless of whether it can speak.  divinity is independent of language, and any future notion of the writer, of the book, might place vision – not word – at the center of its dark art.

do i wait for day or do i wait for night?  my orientation to this question determines my comfort with society.

knowledge, while it may be acquainted with day – most certainly an esteemed and professional colleague at times, on occasion a spouse – is night’s lover.

if we were to compare the conversations of night with the conversations of day, with humans being novel to us, would we not conclude we were dealing with two separate species?  so darkness is a language, and who would give themselves to its mastery? and how can it be taught but in unaccredited and disavowed classrooms?

are not the translation arts between the languages of light and the languages of darkness more of darkness, for they are rooted in obscure soils and hardly seed or flower?

to say we are born of darkness and return to darkness neglects that we never leave – we are simply given briefly eyes to see it.

mysticism iii

to say all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well – neither as a joke nor a commonplace, a comfort nor a privilege, a ruse nor an experiment, but as an acceptance of the all one cannot know … what is this other than a calm absurdity, a replete and resplendent reason?

it is easy to see existence as a jewel, naked in the night and possibly eternal, civilization as a process of time covering up the jewel with fabrics, analyzing the covering, the fabrics, enchanted with the growing bulk, enamored by the changes, the colour and texture of the fabrics replacing the colour and texture of the jewel.  if art’s trick is to show the jewel using the materials covering it, mysticism's might be to remove the materials and know the jewel cannot be shown and that the jewel itself is this inability, the removal a rough simulation of the jewel.

so mysticism is associated with what has been called the negative way.  and all this is is or may be a removing and simulating and not showing.

society – which we could say is also devoted to removing and simulating and not showing – is the positive way, for it removes and simulates and doesn’t show what mysticism doesn’t reveal.

mysticism is perhaps the one unique element of humanity, the core of consciousness, allowing as it does humanity to imaginatively step outside itself – whether through nature, god, art, technology – and doubt reality’s weighty structures and so create spaces – however transient – of grace and, if grace is capable of entering reality’s structures, possibility of form.

if mysticism is oriented to language in silence, community in solitude, light in darkness, inhumanity in humanity, is it not an experiment to find a way through or around the problems that pervade us, seeing no evidence that social-political struggle – regardless of the ostensible goodness to any of its claims – effects at best anything more than a displacement of problem to problem.

everything constructive i have learned i have learned from the mystics in their immense deconstructions, which make scholarly deconstructions seem like décor alterations in a room in versailles and the knowledge of the learned and experienced like dusty wall hangings.  all these other paths, rife with cleverness or utility though they might sometimes be, all seem the same in their unmitigated support for or rebellion against the given world.  but the mystic path, being not a path but a placement in a flow and flows, provides alternatives to the given world and its endless injustices and so – through awe, passion, doubt, plurality, play – subverts it.

one mystic says, i am the universe – what do i have to fear?  another – hide your boat in the universe, then the thief cannot steal it.  the only safety of the soul is this:  the i - which appears at first and for long and chaotic periods as the ultimate non-safety - is recognized as a ruse, doubles, balloons to margins slightly larger than the entire universe, bursts, and disappears in itself.

mysticism is creedless, has no tribe, no fads, hardly a history or purpose, no hierarchies, no alliances, no wars.  mysticism does not contend or claim.

it is not as if mysticism would eradicate flesh, but that it would renew it through greedless gazing.

if mysticism can be said to be oriented to death, is this not less because it sets too little or too much store by life and more because, in an age which does, it sees no use for life?

there is a place for laughter in mysticism, a place where mysticism itself disappears.  and in this disappearance mysticism may be most truly itself.

voices speak in the night of the question, this night that, once entered, encompasses the day.  what is mysticism but a clearing of debris for entering, a clearing of noise for listening, a clearing of thought for translating?

all these other modes of knowledge to which humanity is addicted and for which vast resources are required are modes of building and willing and desiring and endless separations and unions.  but mysticism sidesteps, like a flower on the edge of battlefields, a vision on the edge of screams.

to self-identify as a mystic has a certain discrediting quality to it.  to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet is to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet.  but to be a mystic is not to be – and this is what a mystic is.  so we see mystics hiding, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in thought, sometimes in children, sometimes in shape or flowers or death or a smile.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Its black flame is more potent, its reach further, its hope more boundless.  Light is the child of darkness and those who fear darkness the children of light.  These grandchildren, happy in forgetting their grandparent, presumed lost at sea, to dance on the shoals of knowledge.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The sheets of darkness are pulled across your nudity, across your eyes, at night, and night again, and you forget its flames in the pills and disasters of the technological morning or you present them, wrapped in strings of words, to analysts, who turn them into light for cash or sex or children or something else or all of the above, or you use art or its shadow, entertainment, this heat, this tongue, to enter a lighter sleep, cool-warm, the make-believe womb of power, art’s frequent effect.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Do not flee the brighter light, even though it sucks you down.  Without this danger, darkness is not darkness and you can never burn.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  What is darkness?  Darkness is waiting and watching, stillness and nothing, the wordless equality that crawls from the embodied knowledge that every thing is a god.  It is the chaos we crave and fear and work toward in our cosmopolitan denial.  For darkness must be the center of all acts and words and thoughts and things, and that is why all things are gods.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Its fuel is a composite of doubt and death, the egg and seed of life.  Darkness is no friend or savior, but neither is light.  Light pretends to befriend, but darkness does not.  Light pretends and its pretense is not unreal.  Darkness does not pretend and its lack of pretense is not a matter of trust or nobility or anything particular, but the feeling evoked in its presence.  Light is the absence of darkness and darkness the fullness of light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Every gram of new consciousness, each euphoric and progressive comma, everything making your life comfortable and pleasurable, each truth that dams the night, leaks from darkness’ masked expanse.  Yet humans, who seem to crave little more than comfortable pleasures, would hide and try to slay their source, as if they were babes of spirit and cowards of the soul.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The birds of darkness, screeching silently through centuries, broke through my bedroom window one lost November, pecking out my eyes, filling the cavities with fire.  I walked into the streets and the people of the bright urban night, upon seeing me, fled to drink and flesh and the caresses of electricity.  I walked on.  Was I to thank the birds of darkness?  Was I to curse them?  I only knew they do what they must do when they must, ripping aside the lighted veil to show the still translucent veil of darkness.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  This darkness is not some esoteric, cultic, theosophist, ecstatic or depressive, exclusivist, occult, or material knowledge, other than the material knowledge that is not usually called knowledge, for it simply exists, without need to explain or describe.  This darkness is calm, unruffled, without impulse, below and in and through every word.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness eats light and desires it.  Producing gargantuan quantities of light from our secret love of darkness and knowledge of its need, we feed darkness rather than resting in it, but in doing so cloister and abuse its capacities while remaining encapsulated in our burden of light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness is more passionate, more intelligent, witty, more courageous, innovative, and more fun than light.  It dances harder, lighter, longer; it makes the dance and is the memory of the dance.  Darkness stretches the circle to its ecstatic limits of futility and in stretching breaks what it contains, and its methods of breaking are myriad; the impossibilities and the breaking drive the people to light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The creatures of darkness, knowing their namelessness, know darkness is a moniker, its nickname often confused by those buried in names with light’s enemy, as if light—if it is truly light—could have an enemy.  But light, being born of darkness and not something other than it, knows no enemies until it forgets its ancestry and falsely claims autonomy on god’s infinite palette.  What structures are there which enable such forgetting and what is their appeal?  The creatures of darkness, having been compelled to burrow through them, might be able to say, but seem to choose silence, and this silencing may say more about what enables than the saying.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  It is made of flame and fuel and charcoal formed of the bodies of gods long dead and forgotten.  They who would burn, not with electric light, that cool copy and shadow and regulation, but with the inferno of origins and the death of origins, which is no hell unless heaven be hell, become flame and fuel and charcoal and in becoming must live in death according to the means granted them, though this death, like this darkness, has no opposition.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness washes sin and erases alienation.  It looks at telephone poles and presidents and through its eyeless vision sees no difference.  Would all humans have these eyes, how would the trees and rivers appear?  How might we talk about this representation?  Would we see it as a gift and is this gift the gift, the one we cannot give ourselves?

Darkness burns.  Burns brighter.  Light burns.  Far brighter.  Far.  Light brighter, darkness far.  Burns.  Burns far.  Burns far brighter.  Darkness light.  Light light far burns.  Brighter darkness brighter light.  Far, far the darkness, far the light, burns far brighter, light than far and far than light, far than burns, burns than bright, far than far, light than light darkness brighter light than light far far

darkness burns far brighter than light