tokamak symplegma

always having suspected that i was one of those of the missing and having found myself solidly halfway through life and still not missing and not wanting to miss my fate – at least not absolutely – i began migrating down a path of simulating being one of the missing and i would like to write about this migration but haven’t yet found the right language and so all the writing i’ve done is a kind of attempt to write about wanting to write about it

we decreate our way to ungreatness – to paraphrase a fortune 100 executive who paraphrased a management guru who no doubt paraphrased someone else. in my case this means learning the obscure arts of babbling, acedia, hallucination, and a calm franticness (which is not as much a contradiction as you might think) … not as anything to fear or scorn but as a lifestyle as legitimate as the rich and famous, the common bourgeois, or the common activist

the discipline of this learning is i admit a peculiar study and practice. to learn to experience these typically shunned arts as normal, good, desirable, even progressive requires a complex rewiring of the brain that no therapeutic advocacy or pharmaceutical aid could accomplish, as these aids and advocacies are most frequently designed to happyize (how else do we describe our novel culture of Smile except to conjure a verb from an almost enforced obsession?) active willing participation in the production of names … which is the religious orthodoxy of the day : the requirement to be seen. that is, to not be missing

a side benefit of this discipline is that it introduces (or reintroduces for those who believe in some sort of original face, core identity or soul – the language is less important than the orientation) us to some externally-contextually unreachable timespace of our i (our plurality or pluralities of i) … those languages and mores our interiority would find naturally compelling were they to exist in externality … where we would find our true place, that spiritual-physical home of dream and desire where, as some greek philosopher prayed, the inner and outer would be one

unfortunately these sorts of practices can’t be taught – even speaking about them in the way i’m doing lends itself to interdisciplinary quackery. every instance we see of these principles and movements being systemized and communicated for emulation (regardless of how sophisticated or earnest any student or teacher might be) the enterprise quickly turns into a parody of itself and the rationalists are right to shamelessly mock. for the time being and perhaps always we strange pupils resort to actualizing only in aspects of desolation, incommunicability … those spaces between the interior and exterior realms that reach for both but never touch either

dao de jing iv

the way is empty yet when used there is something that does not make it full

deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures

blunt the sharpness

untangle the knots

soften the glare

follow along old wheel tracks

darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there

i don’t know whose child it is –

it images the foreparent of god

dear fours,

long before simulation replaced reality and images the word, before surfaces usurped the deep and the seen became the only rule of truth, idontknow of dao loitered in existence’s confused corridors

long before natality and genealogy were questioned by the revolutionary doors of modernity, before causation was sublimated and identity defined, mud and murkiness presented themselves in shadows and indistinctions at an unmarked crossroads of history and nothing

god here is not some omniscient omnipresent omnipotent conscious or unconscious good or indifferent or malicious creator that bred a world and left, forgot, neglected it, merged with it … even some totality of opposites ... but just a bump and a ride on a carousel of vague forms, an orphan of emptiness

pointedness. entanglement. brightness. novelty. a quaternity of desirable attributes which dao in its almost comic nonchalance suggests we don’t particularly esteem or nurture. hardly advocating idiocy, dullness, conservatism or tradition, simpleness … hardly articulating a fourstep plan to wellness, success, happiness, enlightenment, knowledge … hardly inducting you into any arcane esoteric arts … lacking teleological thrust, highlighting a constructing through notconstructing, leading through following (not any idea, person, thing, text, feeling), an ising through seeming, a way through notway

it only seems

it only seems as if

it only seems as if it were

there

i reach into infinite hereness of soul and what do i sense but an appearing to, an if that moves around itself in shimmering vacuity

i don’t know how to embrace such elusiveness. i don’t know if it is full or nearly full or empty or running out. i don’t know if it is a thing or what it is or is not. i don’t know how it is related. i don’t know its accomplishments. i don’t know if it is worthy or real or an it or a joke or imbecility, a reflection of an archaic absolute or a bending of a line, an allaying, an untangling, a softening …

this month this time

january is sleep and death and dream

i travel to sad, snack on terror,

wash on ruins

everything talks but only the trees listen

they keep their secrets

each day i count the seconds of extra sun

it is cloudy most days

i dream and sleep and die

where are the schools?

not the analysts, pills, doulas, degrees

but the classes of dying dreaming sleeping?

there – the trees, they are dying

the sun it is dreaming

the earth it is sleeping

let me learn from them

can i reach them? can i see them? can i touch them?

they are here, in my body

in my deaths and dreams and sleeps