dao de jing x

when carrying on your head your perplexed bodily soul can you hold in your arms the one and not let go?

in concentrating your breath can you become as supple as a baby?

can you polish your dark mirror and leave no blemish?

in loving the people and bringing life to the state are you capable of not resorting to knowledge?

when the gates of heaven open and shut are you capable of keeping to the role of the female?

when your discernment penetrates the four quarters are you capable of not resorting to knowledge?

it gives them life and rears them

it gives them life without claiming to possess them

it is the steward yet exercises no authority over them

such is called dark virtue

dear tens,

isn’t the answer to all six questions, no? and how could there be a yes other than among those anachronistic gurus and enlightenment charlatans, who uphold a light virtue, a knowable goodness, a complete knowledge, an effective practice. we are all dao and one and two and three and many. we are polypolar, each of us, and those who process their innumerabilities into a mask of monism walk against dao and even if their names are nailed to some wall of honour yet they will not survive in the coded dream. true, some are more of dao or one, some more of two or three, some more of many and dao, and such is diversity

but show me the one who holds the one and does not let go. not the one who claims but the one who does not. not the one who manages appearances and performs that magic but the one in its everythingness, in all its unseenness. anyone with a bit of practice can become supple for a moment, maybe a day. but suppleness held becomes a rigidity. the act of polishing is itself a blemish and the dark mirror shows nothing – that ruse. loving and governing are actions. the role of the female has been rolled. we now don't know and know enough to know of the knowing of not knowing and the not knowing of knowing. i play with words you say. words play with me. there is no other play. and even the stages of cruelty and absurdity and gesture are plays of words, words bare and marrow, spurting their ruthless truths

yes i am capable. yes i can hold and become. yes i can not know and keep and love. even as i play a fool of dirty energy and cast the shifting cast of my wandering breath, unfocused and confused, across the mirrors of myself

for the only one is the one we cannot grasp, being too many ourselves, possessing myriad hands at diverse purposes, having become comprised of a limitless knowledge bound by flesh's merciless spherical court, its shadowy walls, gloamed lighting, its axe

the river rushes faster as it nears the ocean. and who could stay still in the current? who could be silent in the ever-open theater of words? 

oh you of daoless dao – for dao is too far from us now (and was as soon as it was uttered) – who slips and doesn’t resort, whose blemishes are uncountable and unmeasured … we cannot see your virtue, we do not know your name, we cannot walk your way

diaper dialogues ix (hao happiness?)

we sit with rev mangetout on painted bricks of many innumerable uncountables of dead. the bricks have been painted by the dead with the paint of their everlasting memories. the dead have no futures, only pasts, and so their paint is thick with stories and pain. the dead grow, and their growth is like a tree providing shade for the living

is the rev for revenant or reve?

revalescent. though sometimes revanchist

why uncountables of dead?

 what classifier do you use for dead?

i don’t know – five deads, a lot of deads, bāng of dead, …

… 幫?

… massifier of dead, some naughty of deads, much deads, …

, … a little bit of dead, a little bit of deads, plenty of deads, a dead, …

this isn’t grammatical

the dead know no grammar

how do you know what the dead know?

you aren’t i so how do you know i don’t know what the dead know?

i am not you but you certainly aren’t the dead

you have proved that i know the dead know no grammar because you’re talking with me about what the dead don't know

this is not the way it goes

what?

logic, mysticism, rhetoric, epistemology, semantics, transcendentalism, analytics, politics, anthropology, …

que sais-je?

what i find as mangetout is that your grammars, while expansive and definitively utilitarian in certain limited ways, severely restrict, like all specific grammars, possibility and knowledge. while in the old days of nature – and i hardly wish to romanticize those days: after all i am mangetout – human grammars coexisted with grammars of bear and tree and bog and death and spark and sky, now (in their seeming and infantile desire to be all, to subsume all grammars within them), in the preponderance of the human, their primary function seems delusional, a magic trick that’s lost its magic and its trickery yet still persists from some inexorable force of habit that’s wholly lost its usefulness, beneficence, intelligence

i find the mass ubiquity of humans, this relentless noise, this environment in which the human voice is voice, its values and interpretations within particular circumscriptions inescapable and small, the now exaltation of this confinement (as if an incarcerated tyger were purring gratefully in its cage) through social media and the politics of science, some absurd necessity appearing but only through the polytentacled broadcasts as this voice, our paltry voice, as given, the given … incomprehensibly moronic, existentially incarcerating, spiritually and aesthetically brutal and puerile …

… i am mangetout …

… i am human …

… i mangetout …

… mangetout …

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the new order of tungs

if the margins have been almost destroyed through the ubiquity of virtualized desire, would there not be some who – through imaginative subterfuges and acts barely deemable as acts, from a necessity of disappearing absence – attempt to create margins of their lives and in these created spaces forage for words?

mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.

nanny just told people what to do, counselors also tell them what to think and feel. the nanny state was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive—and even more authoritarian. the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of god and religion.

i am a polyglot but of functional not substantive tungs. i call the latter swedish, basque, waray-waray, uzbek, tamil, newar, alemannic, upper sorbian, gan, tok pisin, ewe, afar. i call the former journalish, techish (many dialects), academish, transactionish, lovish (many dialects), commonish, drunkish, powerish, managementish, ideologish (many dialects), crowdish, madish, factish, spiritish, opinionish, heartish, professionish, jargonish, sportish, fuckish, transitish, …

i have spoken many of these, some very well, but none of them felt native to me. there was a tung i knew was my tung but it was lost though not extinct, hidden though not inaccessible. through decades of seeking, through deserts of confusion and fens of madness, it emerged. it is artish. artish is not a tung about art (that is journalish or academish or commonish or fuckish or something else); art can be spoken about in many tungs.

but artish itself – and there are many who call themselves artists who cannot speak artish or cannot speak it well but instead speak transactionish or moneyish or crowdish or ideologish – is its own tung and those who speak it recognize each other by giving one another clues in other tungs (these other tungs they are forced to speak to eat) and then testing out each other’s fluency in artish and, if there is reasonable compatibility, speaking in it in private (for in public it can be perceived by the undiscerning and crass as an eloquent or deviant dialect of drunkish or madish) and perhaps becoming friends and working on projects together. i dream of a world – at least a land – in which my tung is the official tung and those who speak it many, and the land’s culture a culture inseparable from its tung and its people inseparable from their culture.

artish is the coded visionary aestheticization of sensation.

the old nation was one of biological ethnicity and associated language; the new nation is of psychic ethnicity and associated language. english shifts to artish, and i hold a passport to an invisible land.

from land tung to spirit tung – the new glossolalia. the new drunkenness of an alt pentecost.

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.

madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.

dao de jing lxxix

When peace is made between great enemies

Some enmity is bound to remain undispelled.

How can this be considered perfect?

Therefore the sage takes the lefthand tally but exacts no payment from the people.

The man of virtue takes charge of the tally,

The man of no virtue takes charge of exaction.

It is the way of heaven to show no favoritism,

It is forever on the side of the good man.

The sage is a compost, receiving waste, quietly turning it into vegetables and flowers.  Yet the sage is no magician; she cannot do this under any conditions.  She requires time (solitude), diverse waste (carbon and nitrogen in a physical compost, dry and wet psychic waste in a spiritual one), oxygen (silence), water (flexibility).

The way of heaven shows no favoritism, yet favors the good.  Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

Dao is an earthy spirituality:  it has no happy healing, no end of nirvana, heaven, enlightenment or unmitigated peace.  Its spirituality is walking and water in a dusky landscape, with the only guide a twilight shape that has no shape that someone may have told you about in a storm in a desert in the night.  The sage does not negate or eradicate the tally, which is the law, but subverts it by returning to the roots of the law, roots of dark justice:  the justice of worms and fungi and bacteria, the courts of heaven.