heaven and earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs
the sage is
ruthless; she treats the people as straw dogs
is not the space
between heaven and earth like a bellows?
it is empty without
being exhausted
the more it works
the more comes out
to hear much will
lead only to a dead end
better to hold fast
to what is within
dear fives,
in contrast to reward
and punishment mythologies, moralities of good and evil … in contrast to any
sentimental gods or god who assume goodness, compassion, love – offsetting cruelty,
hate, malice to other forces … in contrast to the childish capricious powers of many – forceful infants of the heavens …
shrugging at ideas of benevolence and ritualistic conformity (whether
the rites are prescribed institutionally or in the heave of society), dao
doesn’t even posit a god (or at least a god more than a common tansy or brinjal
masala). here are heaven and earth – the way of dark virtue and the way of
simian prescribed rites – the people, the sage
the sage, who is
later dismissed as unworthy and risible. the people, who are routinely
presented as a pulsing conglomerate of necessary followers. the impossible way
of heaven. the pervasively enforced expectations of earth
here heaven, earth,
and sages form a strange alliance, of which the people are not a part,
contractually bound by ancient models to a dna of indifference. the people
though get excited or discouraged by constructions of amorality, immorality,
blood and barbarism, difference, the vestments and scripts of hierarchical
power and status, their passions expressed in moral systems, tedious schadenfreude
and its organized siblings (government and war), integrity and transgression
and what is this
indifference – detachment or fate or enlightenment or geometry or discernment or silence or
intelligence or something else or puerility? – a
magnificent disdain for the mores of a species which has consistently demonstrated
through its nightmare, history, that it cannot act except through severings, genocides, rapaciousness, and an alert purposiveness?
love is mentioned
few times in these 81 vignettes and when it is always in a way that subverts
our common orientations. dao doesn’t say love
but ruthlessness. not a ruthlessness
apart from love as it is not apart from anything. dao does not do apart. (to not take this word or text or any and raise it to an all)
not that ruthlessness
of presidents and entrepreneurs that is called expediency and pragmatism, not
that squabbling fortress of mothers and fathers and lovers and spouses that is called
love, not that ruthlessness of a member of the myriad creatures as it goes
about its entertained scrimmage of a life, a ruthlessness called whatever it is
called, but some other kind that is not defined by the images in your mind but
by dao, undefined, in its inexplicabilities
love, that drippy
word, may be destroying us. for the way we practice it is not large. it does
not reach beyond our little interests of self and species, around the earth and
out to heaven, past the breathing of the infinite spaces between, and further
still, something at hand, a vital emptiness
dao acknowledges the paths – of reading all the books, collecting all the lovers, helping all the
poor, responding to all the messages, listening to all the podcasts and videos,
amassing all the wealth, assuming all the power, knowing all the references and magic tricks, displaying all the beauty …
and of holding assiduously to that vitality
and where are the
measures and graphs and peer-reviewed articles to show the how and what and why
of this? how do i tell that one holds fast to that?
by means of dark
virtue, by means of old paths, by means of confused turnings, by means of
muddledness and listlessness, by means of this
