dao de jing viii

that which is most good is like water

it is because water is not only good at benefiting the myriad creatures but also vies to dwell in the place detested by the multitude that it comes close to the way

in a dwelling it is the site that is valued

in quality of mind it is depth that is valued

in giving it is being like heaven that is valued

in speech it is good faith that is valued

in government it is order that is valued

in affairs it is ability that is valued

in action it is timeliness that is valued

it is because it does not contend that it is never at fault

dear eights,

the most good is not power or beauty or pleasure or comfort or virtue but a kind of slipperiness, an out-of-the-wayness, a struggling not for the common aspirations of the human, a thing that doesn’t present itself as most or good

water, sometimes solid, often evaporating, accepting all manner of things within its very being including more of itself, disturbs our hierarchical preferences for the superiority of solidities

look at the table of elements. is zinc better than bromine? gallium than argon? barium than flerovium? and yet it is the way of the human to prefer solid things. perhaps as a significant majority of elements are solid, so humans, and as things prefer themselves, so solidity reigns. but a world without flow, without diffusion, without plasmatic resonance and quirkiness would not be a world

solidity is good for solidity but when it extends its reaches to what it is not and attempts to impose its own constituent qualities on what it is not the world degrades. and this is what we are seeing

depth of mind is hardly important in a home’s construction. order is not necessarily desirable in giving. the site of talking is less important than its integrity. and so good government – if it could exist – would take what things are for what they are and not presume with an evangelistic dogmatism that the codes of some – even if a majority, even if with force – should dominate

what kind of leader could effect such style? water. flow and vastness and flexibility and no need to do much but fit into the forms that present themselves

water may occasionally kill. it may sometimes carry disease. it is indifferent and often cold. water is not the way for nothing is the way but the way and even the way is not the way. water is not the only tangible thing that comes close to the way – so too the baby, the shadow, the valley, confused wandering, silence, …

i see the images of humans pass through me like a grammar of incomprehensible dreams. i do not fight my decay, my enemy, my humiliation. they are only the gurgle of the charismatic stillness of my forgetting what shape i am meant to be

diaper dialogues xvii

so, diaper

yup

i need your advice

don’t give advice

will you let the trees give advice through you?

that’s up to the trees

we’re not getting very far

there’s nowhere to get

then i’m going to ask for advice and also provide it

sort of defeats the purpose

you suddenly believe in purpose?

every once in a while it’s a relief to utter a commonplace

i didn’t think the republic of pompous poetry let you leave

language needs to sleep too

but shouldn’t it not sleeptalk?

i don’t think we should tell language what not to do

isn’t that exactly what we should be doing?

where’s humpty dumpty when we need it?

so here’s the scene. i’m sitting in the members’ lounge in yottalopolis’ primary artfilm venue minding my own business …

… you never mind your own business. what does that even mean bumblebrain? just because language is having a nap doesn’t mean we have to kill it, banality’s …

… minding my own business – i’m sitting in the southeast corner in one of those chairs that’s good for chiropractors typing on my laptop like a zombie literary samurai, for once no tepid neosinatra audio piss playing and the lounge as quiet as a cat when it’s quiet – when the dude behind me starts wanking some youtube junk on his phone. the gift of tranquility, focus, unity’s immediately stolen, torture fantasies rise seductively from the swamp of origins, misanthropy – never one to stay buried long – leaps from its hypertransient grave and claims totalitarian rule on planet i. what should i have done?

trees don’t give historical advice

you’re not one to believe in chronounidirectionality

i’m not one, but setting this aside we’re not one not to believe in anything

it’s the rank obnoxiousness. nature doesn’t exist anymore. only the city remains – everthickening makeup on absurd absence. silence and the spaces it creates – despite that clever 1961 book about silence (a necessary sound in sound’s evolution but hardly any sum of sounds, another cage to try out in the zoo of words) – are critical for biopsychicdiversity, these increasingly ubiquitous invasions accepted, even expected, desired, normalized, these offenses …

… don’t worry, your psychic brand is being phased out, in 10 years at the most the environments of silence will be so polluted with human sound that those unable to adapt will all be dead or incarcerated

want to know what i did?

what you should have done is bound the dude to his chair, smashed his phone, pissed and shat and puked on the fragments, used your revengoblast™ to mutate him into a zerodimensional antiad for nothing and stuck him on a videoboard playing on infinite loop in the hell of his own private theater

didn’t realize trees were so christian

i forgot about the trees

you and everyone else

it’s noise that makes us forget about the trees

it’s the absence of trees that makes us remember noise

it’s forgetting that makes us forget about forgetting

want to know what i did?

all our lives are are retelling stories so we can access modes of time lost with trees’ death

we are the species whose primary pedagogy is knowledge through slaughter

we learn through ghosts

blood is our curricula

death our classroom

there has to be another way

the way of trees

the trees are dead

let’s ask the phones

the phones won’t let us hear the answer

there are no answers

only questions. questions, and time

time too is dead, only questions

where does advice fit into all of this?

advice is the restory of the question

the vice of ads on a quest to rest us

yesterday is like an affirmed tomorrow never returned to its owner

time is like advice never spoken, taken, given, thought

i don’t see what any of this has to do with trees

want to know what i did?

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.