unspeaking the unspeakable

diary … diarrhea … diarrhy-ha …

everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics

but ... everything begins in politics and ends in mysticism

drama shifts from visible stages of society to invisible stages of body, electrical surges in flesh (what technocapitalism calls neurological issues) – a consequence of withdrawing from electrical surges of production : loci of energy transplacing, rooting in soils of human molecular vermicology

evolution of mysticism –

… from purity’s skirmishes to purity’s dream (here, an overlap with art)

… from a distant or estranged relationship with institutional religion to institutional religion's irrelevance

… from emphases on lines (progression from darkness through darkness to light) to circles (geometric orientations toward centers and circumferences)

… from religious mysticism to aesthetic mysticism

do we not seek a union – at least a constructive dialogue – between mysticism and politics (rather than a crocodilian estrangement)?

we all are food. this that democracy

technocapitalism is a caste system. that there’s some mobility between castes – as equally down as up (though the edges are further protected ... and almost everyone wants [tediously] to go up) – changes little. verticality is still respected and dominates society (those up are envied, talked about, desired; those down are despised, invisible, shunned, pitied); each caste tends to be an enclave to itself with its own assistance networks, jokes, moralities, vulgarities, hypocrisies …

the privilege of traveling among castes (living among them – not visiting and analyzing) relativizes, instilling doubts (remember montaigne and his cannibals?) about the received wisdoms and mores of any specific tribe/caste or the systems in which they individually and collectively operate

a privilege not normally counted among privileges

a question naturally arises – the human seems (in the ubiquity and enforcement of the caste system) inextricable from the caste system – of the nature of the human. when i question this – its totality, enforcements, methods – question not from the authorized pedestal of questioning (the academy) but independently (for the academy speaks complicitly within the system regardless of any sympathies of any of its contents) i am shunned or dismissed as pathological, misanthropic, insane, bitter, romantic (whimsical, utopian) ... not just from one tribe, but all of them, their codes of dismissal differing according to the respective tribe's grammar. yet each secretly corroborates with the others in their unspoken shared geometric assumptions

we severely limit our knowledge and experience to get on

with our lives. we label that which is outside our knowledge and experience (annoying, detrimental to us! gets in our way of getting on!) with exclusionary pejorative labels. as a species we limit what is most distinctive about us (vision, empathy), emphasizing instead common elements (domination, avarice), using our distinctions primarily to further subjugate, to become the hyperapex predators of the commons

daodejing 77

Is not the way of heaven like the stretching of a bow?

The high it presses down,

The low it lifts up,

The excessive it takes from,

The deficient it gives to.

It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient.  The way of man is otherwise.  It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough.  Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire?  Only he who has the way.

Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,

Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.

Is this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?

 

The difference between heaven in Daoism and heaven in Christianity is a matter of geometry and possibly genitals—or at least their corresponding spiritual potencies.  In Dao, heaven collapses—through a radical relativizing—the relation between things (the relation between relations), and so any expected moral hierarchy, by drawing a circle around heaven and earth.  In Christ, man sustains the expectation of moral hierarchy by drawing arrows (teleologies, etiologies) between heaven and earth.  Time, death, origins are central monuments, inexorable, in Christ; they are as wispy and nomadic as words, in Dao.

 

Yet we have in both this notion of good, of justice.  In Dao, of goodness apart from its opposition to evil, of justice apart from its opposition to the law (of words apart from their opposition to silence, of things apart from their opposition for their opposition is a part of them).  A goodness without center or end; a goodness that, if it has a means, its means is not particularly known, other than as one knows the memory of a dream.

 

The sage does not offer what she has essentially, only what she has in excess.  Yet if the sage has anything essential is no clear outline.  Regardless, the sage does not offer what she has in excess to the deficient or the low, but to the empire, bypassing the rough dualities of high and low, heaven and earth.

 

This is the only authentic democracy.  The tree is the tree and does not consider itself better than the cockroach.  The human is the human; why should it be better than the slug or a bog?  I am i; why should i be better than you?

 

If i am muscled, beautiful, successful, rich, talented, famous, fortunate, how easy it is for me to take credit for my state, to draw taut lines of causation.  I am powerful because of my will, my drive, my virtue, my persistency, my blood and heritage, my intellect, my kindness, my perspicacity and judgment.

 

But Dao collapses such pleasant conclusions, such self-serving satisfactions.  Was not this person formed this way, in the same way as a particular tree (by genetic formula and context—in the case of the tree­: wind, soil, environment; in the case of the human: culture, home, environment)?  How can he then take credit for what has been formed into him, what he has been formed into, when he is the murky sum of a formula and a context, a tentative addition, a transient conglomerate of murky inputs and tangled roots?

 

Dao dissolves virtue and morality through their absolution.  It places humans in their place—not slightly lower than the angels or made in the image of God or the unacknowledged legislators of the world or a virus to be eradicated or something to tell the oceans how to live their lives … but as a myriad set of somethings among myriad sets of myriad sets of somethings.  And who can be better in such a context?  One only is, on a sea of is-ness.  This is the way.