not to honour humans of excellence will keep the people from contention
not to value goods that are hard to
come by will keep the people from theft
not to display what is desirable will
keep the people from being unsettled
hence in its rule the sage empties
their minds but fills their bellies
weakens their purpose but strengthens
their bones
it constantly keeps the people
innocent of knowledge and free from desire
and causes the clever not to dare
it simply takes no action and
everything is in order
dear threes,
in this age of
action, will, desire, coveted goods, displayings, knowledge, cleverness,
purpose, strength, guilt, daring, prizes … how could we ever respond to such a
piece of trivial comedy?
in a world that
calls for increasingly accelerated action, that fears and seeks disorder, that
could be said to inhabit – and require for its shaky presentations of sanity – a
constantly expanding ever-full so-busy amusement park of mind … what are we to
conjure from this text other than laughter and a quick return to facebook?
the people. contentious.
stealing. unsettled. ignorantly purposive. banally knowledgeable.
conventionally clever. orgasmically active
the sage. emptying,
filling. weakening, strengthening. keeping, freeing, causing. all not for all
but for not
three nots begin. not
to honour. not to value. not to display. not as commandments. these are not do nots. rather these are apophatic infinitives
and the dao de jing
belongs in a tradition of extreme erotic animation, of unbounded limitless
vitality, not of any of these cheap pejorative unthinking labels of
sublimation, denial, repression, puritanism, prudery spawning from an
inquisitional technochristian psychology … but through immersions in life flows
that will not be dammed, ossified, monetized, monumentalized. its negations and
seeming absurdities – which are truly absurdities seen from within the crammed
and camera’d tourist lookout of monuments – arise from a natural aversion to
the apparent positivity of construction and objective … as things that have
forgotten their not-thingness
here is a not-self.
look at the selves in it. here is a not-word. see the words
not a discipline or
even a practice but maybe an experience, sensation, attraction, response
and the rule? what
do we say about this? do we posit an esotaticized empire in which its people
are the myriad voices of a collective psychic history pulsing through the vast
empty spaces of modern interiority? do we messianically or otherwise dream of a
singularity or set of singularities that might slip through the heaping
clutters of meddling sectarian politics to impossibly model dao in a world of
technology – that knowledge made overwhelming and necessitous environment?
what are these
questions but the mind that has neither emptied nor overflowed, set in its
irrigation canals for the mawed input pipes of gorged epistemological factories?
dao is a form of
radical freedom, of an orientation toward and placement in desire such that all
possible objects of desire are already present and fulfilled, presenting and
fulfilling, to be presented and fulfilled, tenses and modes of wandering … of
identities relentlessly morphing and morphed into one another, of mutation not
being a precipitator and product of fear but these very seconds of air we
breathe
so humans. take your
hierarchies of people and things and don’t invert them – inverted hierarchies,
twisted hierarchies, flattened hierarchies, transmuted and transformed
hierarchies are still hierarchies. just simply not and no and an order
that slips through the ordering ordered orders may manifest
