dao de jing ix

rather than fill it to the brim by keeping it upright better to have stopped in time

hammer it to a point and the sharpness cannot be preserved always

there may be gold and jade filling the chamber but there is none who can keep them safe

to be overbearing when one has position and wealth is to bring calamity upon oneself

to retire when the task is accomplished is the way of heaven

dear nines,

an odd vision for a pervasively rapacious species

while some humans advocate for reason, justice, equality, balance, almost all are impressed with excess – the reaches of human strength, power, goodness, domination, fame, wealth – resulting in scenarios we now face: of seeking to establish ourselves on other planets even though we have demonstrated little capacity to live well on this one

dao shrugs, inclined to being impressed with individuals and species oriented to more mature processes than striving for increase and clinging to positions of superiority. while the dao de jing is a text articulated by human minds it seeks to express, in an inevitably limited way, the complex and nuanced fleshy principles of nature that all things and creatures in the universe are bound to, regardless of any hubris or talent or constructs

dao’s task is typically antithetical to what we are taught and rewarded for – of limiting ourselves individually and collectively in the context of all that exists. the human – regardless of its rhetoric – does otherwise. so we see those travelling the globe preaching ecology, those amassing goods preaching spirituality and wellness, those complicit in myriad abuses through wilful blindness while preaching justice and peace. and the many – practical, happy perhaps, productive – who go about their hopefully expanding businesses and portfolios with few ideals

and all these primitive horrors of inequalities and hypocrisies, of hierarchies within our species and our species over others, of endless paternalisms and barbaric enforcements ... how are we to live let alone find a way?

dao says stop when you should stop. how do i know when to stop? by means of this

stopping is a practice, not some glamorous announcement

how will the nations and the corporations and the artists and the people do such a thing when any model for such a thing only seems as if it were there? by developing practices of intimacy with unseen things? less the unseen things of my emotions, memories, desires, abuses – these archaeologies of therapy – and more the unseen things of the myriad creatures returning to their roots in a nameless way?

and why are we not taught of these practices in our homes and schools and businesses and entertainments, instead encouraged to practice increase and excess and volitional solidity? is the human a voice that has become so overbearing in its massive clamourings that calamity has become inevitable as a corollary?

what if humanity retired from its rapacity – not through weakness but strength, not through force but discernment, not through setting too much store by life or treating death lightly but some other relation of vitalities? how would we ever in this morass of ourselves find a way out of our obese greed and satisfied fullness? who or what outside or inside would teach us? and who among us would put language and law in their place, and learn? and how do we grow beyond our infantility and adolescence, rechannelling our prodigious energies into not-hoarding, not-promoting, not-desiring, not-severing, not as acts of masochism or self-abnegation but as movements of dark energy on time’s synthesized tracks? will technology and policy do this for us? will law or religion? will money or love?

a genealogy of the immanent comedy

(or human history for the time-starved)
...

mama
   dada
          pata
                      data
                        mada
                                    nada
                                                 mama

                                                           ...

today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.