Showing posts with label loci?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loci?. Show all posts

27.7.18

dao de jing vii


heaven and earth are enduring
the reason why heaven and earth can be enduring is that they do not give themselves life
hence they are able to be long lived
hence the sage puts her person back and it comes to the fore
treats its person as extraneous and it is preserved
is it not because she is without thought of self that she is able to accomplish her private ends?

dear sevens,

my book. my name. my will. my reputation. my things. my children. my home. my partner. my job. my ideas. my assets. my lover. my art. my feelings. my video. my dreams. my power. my story. my friend. my land. my body. my brand. my style. my self

hence here flows from the daoical orientation toward humanity as just another species: unprivileged, ungraced, ungoded, unsmarted … while skilled in a number of sectors, not overall superior or inferior to others. and so death is not something to be sought or spurned, hastened or avoided. and so too life. and so too all

what is a human doing as it clings and promotes and subjugates and kills and asserts and knows? what are its assumptions and fears? what has changed among us since one who thought weeping wrote the fairest universe is but a heap of sweepings poured out aimlessly?

dao is the most subversive intelligent witty thing i know

extraneous, external, strange, outside, unknown, alien, curious, without, distant, separated, foreign, surprising, other.

the average person is insulted when you criticize his ideas, his tastes, feelings, body. he identifies his self with his identity, thoughts, worth, life. he finds himself in resentments and seeks retreat or revenge. but the sage is uncertain of identity, this worth – not in those cheap psychological ways of worthlessness that are simply the same notions of worth positioned differently … the loci of the emotional and cognitive flows that many say occur within the self seem difficult to place, the self that many say should be valued, protected, loved, known, even defined, is instead more of a gift of a plaything, highlighting humanity’s greatest and most abused attribute – what we could call consciousness or a shapeless image

some 2500 years ago as humans navigated certain early spasms of language, a nascent potential to dominate this planet, seductions of instrumental reason, dao might be a dark blueprint of an intuition of how to deal with these notable challenges in creative, contextual, intelligent ways that would assert humanity not through assertion, that would show humanity not through conspicuousness, that would distinguish humanity not through distinction, that would empower humanity not through instrumental reason and domination, that would dissolve disputes not through disputation

but instead we have become rabidly assertive, grossly conspicuous, pathetically distinct, hyper-rational and forcefully dominant, argumentative to no effect. and through these gargantuanly clever and comprehensively stupid

dao is nothing, a point, circular, spherical, hyperspherical …
before and after follow each other
the way that leads forward seems to lead backward
what is put in the back comes to the fore

but not a fore in that sense of a midden of twitter followers. these are different fores, backs, ends, different selves. and how do we find them if not in the classroom, the pecuniary therapist's chair, the youtube, the research grant (yet they are there too)?

would we not in our hard selves desire to learn of the intelligences of the many things? for has not the human already been tried by time’s ruthless court and not been found worthy of the earth and the gifts it finds on it and in itself? does not even the regretful colonizer conform in new ways to its presumptuous ancestral patterns? and where the manual to move in these twitchy days? and what the aims and why the shadows?