dao de punk

dao is way

de is virtue

punk is rotten wood dust used as tinder

dao of poo

dao of physics

dao of punk

punk is darkness

punk is the incense of dust & shit & ashes

punk is the valley of dirty virtue

de subverts subverts itself subverts subversion

de turns back

de does not de

death ii

processes and techniques of death –

• hardly protest, argument, objection.  rather – using death as a tool of one’s self to continually eradicate what one thinks the self is.

• a chief art of death is anonymity, one that may be critical for the human to craftily use for its collective survival.  for does not a refusal to use names as root – an essence of anonymity – entail abdicating the supremacy of anything human … and this subversion, this unnaturalness which may be a simulated naturalness more central than technology’s simulations, an unparalleled energy (and this rather than a power) that evokes fear initially, for its vastness, its perceived darkness … and this collective entwining, this seemingly dissipating choice of setting alongside the hyena and termite and hydrant and hookah, an experiencing language for what it is and not some pretty tyranny, some gift of dead or living gods?

• i have always learned far more by not being myself than being myself.  first by not knowing myself sufficiently to not know i was not being myself.  subsequently by not knowing what a self was to an extent that i didn’t know what it was to not be or be myself.  in all cases – the learning, the first not knowing, and the subsequent not knowing – death at the center:  as technique, as question, as energy, as self and selves.

• as it takes a great deal of desire to desire to not-desire, so it takes a great deal of life to live in death.

• that we read the textures of life based on the parameters of death may be obvious, but that we read the textures of death – present to us in life as black glyphs on infinite seas of white – and in this other reading are commonly illiterate is hardly seen.

• a new form of death – a redirecting of death’s energies from their present primary outlets of war and love – would be if the majority of human communication were in art rather than functional, animalistic, or even capricious social discourse.

the human world, curved into itself, itself gravitation and objects, cooperation and enmity more ubiquitous than air, the city now the inescapable environment, objectives raised by the slough of groups and science fumbling enchantment’s ancient sphere, mysticism – being endlessly solitary, silent, of many environments equally (interiorally and exteriorally) but of any single one not at all – may be unable to survive in the present and coming urban and mass technology, it may be the only thing with the subversive skills to survive, or it may – as it has been – amble along, carrying quietly the torch of death through life, so that those who inexplicably find themselves cast from their accustomed environment may have help knowing the selfsame thread that winds through all – whether time, environments, technologies, names, cultures – without distinction. 

writing is easy.  what’s difficult is placing and maintaining one’s self in the spaces of death that make writing possible.

as once could happen with god and nature and no longer, so now one can enter consciousness to leave it, can enter thought to leave it, can enter passion to leave it – this leaving before force forces the leaving (what is colloquially known as death and what is technically a manner of death, a transition of a physical singularity into new forms) is an entering into death to life in certain modes.  so, too, perhaps, this can happen with technology and art and time.

death is the distance that enables life, the distance that is here, on the tram, in your wallet, smiling through a closet of masks, the void of words and the rave of solitude, the clickity-clack of time on the punctual and shiny rails of your brain.  death, like life or jesus or the future, is no friend, not friendly, but an environment, an ecology of turning and returning form.  death is neither darkness nor light, peace nor war, but a way that navigates all without mentioning any.  indifferent to creating names, this energy that trumps and fashions life, that assumes disguises like the sky, it flies, vast across the earth, atonal, lacking purpose, acquainted, limpid, hardly counted, nested, the architecture of galaxies and the technology of insects, enough.

mysticism iii

to say all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well – neither as a joke nor a commonplace, a comfort nor a privilege, a ruse nor an experiment, but as an acceptance of the all one cannot know … what is this other than a calm absurdity, a replete and resplendent reason?

it is easy to see existence as a jewel, naked in the night and possibly eternal, civilization as a process of time covering up the jewel with fabrics, analyzing the covering, the fabrics, enchanted with the growing bulk, enamored by the changes, the colour and texture of the fabrics replacing the colour and texture of the jewel.  if art’s trick is to show the jewel using the materials covering it, mysticism's might be to remove the materials and know the jewel cannot be shown and that the jewel itself is this inability, the removal a rough simulation of the jewel.

so mysticism is associated with what has been called the negative way.  and all this is is or may be a removing and simulating and not showing.

society – which we could say is also devoted to removing and simulating and not showing – is the positive way, for it removes and simulates and doesn’t show what mysticism doesn’t reveal.

mysticism is perhaps the one unique element of humanity, the core of consciousness, allowing as it does humanity to imaginatively step outside itself – whether through nature, god, art, technology – and doubt reality’s weighty structures and so create spaces – however transient – of grace and, if grace is capable of entering reality’s structures, possibility of form.

if mysticism is oriented to language in silence, community in solitude, light in darkness, inhumanity in humanity, is it not an experiment to find a way through or around the problems that pervade us, seeing no evidence that social-political struggle – regardless of the ostensible goodness to any of its claims – effects at best anything more than a displacement of problem to problem.

everything constructive i have learned i have learned from the mystics in their immense deconstructions, which make scholarly deconstructions seem like décor alterations in a room in versailles and the knowledge of the learned and experienced like dusty wall hangings.  all these other paths, rife with cleverness or utility though they might sometimes be, all seem the same in their unmitigated support for or rebellion against the given world.  but the mystic path, being not a path but a placement in a flow and flows, provides alternatives to the given world and its endless injustices and so – through awe, passion, doubt, plurality, play – subverts it.

one mystic says, i am the universe – what do i have to fear?  another – hide your boat in the universe, then the thief cannot steal it.  the only safety of the soul is this:  the i - which appears at first and for long and chaotic periods as the ultimate non-safety - is recognized as a ruse, doubles, balloons to margins slightly larger than the entire universe, bursts, and disappears in itself.

mysticism is creedless, has no tribe, no fads, hardly a history or purpose, no hierarchies, no alliances, no wars.  mysticism does not contend or claim.

it is not as if mysticism would eradicate flesh, but that it would renew it through greedless gazing.

if mysticism can be said to be oriented to death, is this not less because it sets too little or too much store by life and more because, in an age which does, it sees no use for life?

there is a place for laughter in mysticism, a place where mysticism itself disappears.  and in this disappearance mysticism may be most truly itself.

voices speak in the night of the question, this night that, once entered, encompasses the day.  what is mysticism but a clearing of debris for entering, a clearing of noise for listening, a clearing of thought for translating?

all these other modes of knowledge to which humanity is addicted and for which vast resources are required are modes of building and willing and desiring and endless separations and unions.  but mysticism sidesteps, like a flower on the edge of battlefields, a vision on the edge of screams.

to self-identify as a mystic has a certain discrediting quality to it.  to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet is to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet.  but to be a mystic is not to be – and this is what a mystic is.  so we see mystics hiding, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in thought, sometimes in children, sometimes in shape or flowers or death or a smile.