of merdia 1 - 6

the new mysticism

Mysticism, as everything, gets tiresome after a while.  Sadoo Diaper has thus decided to leave the Tao Te Ching behind for a time and introduce its readership to a number of new voices in the literary gaggle. It begins with Cloa Denum's 1777 Of Merdia, recently discovered at the bottom of a Parisian toilet, smuggled to the New World in a Somalian pirate ship, and introduced here, in The Secular Sadoo, for the first time to a human audience. Specifically, today, the Sadoo publishes Cloa's bio and Of Merdia's opening vignettes.

Of Merdia

Cloa Denum wrote Of Merdia in 1777 in The Bastille; legend has it that she wrote it on the first roll of toilet paper, which she invented for this purpose.  A mystic by training, she angered the French aristocracy when she, vaguely anticipating Marx, claimed that the peasants had insufficient access to the porcines of production.  For this she was incarcerated and, according to official prison records, went mad shortly thereafter, frequently giving lectures to her dumps, with the length of the lectures not incommensurate with the length of the dumps; comparing the taxonomies of clouds and dumps; sculpting with the available material and presenting said sculptures as gifts to her favorite guards; and so on.  The roll was preserved by her cellmate and lover, Gloria Gaither, who was released in 1789 during the storming, subsequently applying the roll to the purposes we are intimate with today - a notable exception being, of course, the majority of the Indian subcontinent and a few other scattered freaks - making later interpretation of the text challenging.  What happened to Ms. Denum is not known.  There is a growing consensus among recent feminist scholars that Denum is the authentic founder of Scatomysticism, some going as far as positing that she retains the same role in Scatomystic Semiotics, although this is hotly contested.  Psychology has only just begun to explore the significant implications of Cloa Denum’s insights for itself and humanity.  The significant number of shockingly precise technological and commercial prophecies was the prime cause enabling her to be fast-tracked by the Vatican to sainthood in 1801, an effort nobly spearheaded by Pius VII himself despite the obvious heresies in the document.

1.            I am deeply in love with Merdia, goddess of first creations.  She shows me my true destiny; she, more than any of the millions in the teeming pantheon, smells of truth.  She, not my mother, was my first love.  My mother I cannot help but resent; I am her creation, not she mine.  We both know this, and this is her eternal power over me.  How do I transcend this knowledge?  To whom do I turn to draw power to combat my mother's supernatural strength?  Merdia, she is the goddess of my first creation and the power of my once and future combats.

2.            In the low is the high, in excrement are mansions.  Every artist and homosexual knows this.  Art swirls in the toilet.  Sewers give birth to visions.  Should I ignore Merdia, my life will be a suburb, smelling only of Mr. Clean and Lysol.  Merdia is my fire for another world, a world I create to set against the power of my mother.

3.            I cannot create from the power of myself, for what am I but the extension of my mother?  Yet when I look at the perfect brown spirals curled happily in the tranquil waters awaiting their fate with dignity and silence, I know I too am capable of extensions as holy as my mother’s.

4.            I develop mythologies for myself - potent complex narratives processed in the infinite intestines of my soul.  These are Merdia's gifts to me, celebrations of my separateness.  Mythologies are our first defense against the world.  We realize after deconstructing the illusion of maturity they are our only defense.

5.            Merdia enables me to invert the natural order of existence, for in my mythologies I imagine myself as more powerful than my mother and this imagining suffices for its actuality.  The wonder I feel before my ability to create and overcome gives birth to powers in me that didn't exist before.  Merdia, not Christ, makes all things new.  These powers are such that my mother's fade in comparison; even her creation is nothing next to this feeling, which is so virile all other births seem small.  How this inversion occurs is the greatest mystery, greater than all natural births.

6.            At first, my creation is beyond me.  It controls and soils me, like my mother, who controls my existence and soils me with her superiority.  But gradually, I sense an unnatural force, pressing deeply against the membranes of my spirit.  It is vatic, guttural, urgent, hot.  It steams like a thousand stallions of Hell crossing Antarctica through pitch.  It hisses through its nostrils that this creation which surrounds and sullies me is not beyond, but within.  And anything within is mine to bring without, but more than this, far more than this, is solely mine.

thoughts on memorization on the ides of may

for commentaries on daodejing see this

At the end of posting Book I (Vignette XXXVII) of DC Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching and my meditations on it, I would like to comment briefly on my experience of memorization - before writing each meditation I memorize each vignette and am working toward having the full text memorized, hopefully finishing sometime this year.  Historically, it’s not a big feat - there are only 81 fairly short passages and many mnemonic devices throughout.  Nevertheless, while in some sense we are very much a memorizing culture (I listen to my sons quote entire Simpsons episodes to each other), we do not typically memorize texts much anymore.

I had read the Tao Te Ching well over a hundred times and over many years before I decided to memorize it.  Growing up as a Christian and formally studying the Bible for many years, the Tao attracted me as a living concept and as a text … it seemed to me to articulate the human experience in spiritual terms from an almost completely different orientation than the bulk of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Its core concepts - including its relationship to the earth; its attitude toward humanity’s place in the cosmos; its weighing of elitism, equality, and humility; its indistinction between politics and spirituality - seemed foreign, enticing, and somehow, despite various antiquated curiosities, true.

Yet having a text outside of you and having it inside of you are two different things.  If you eat Big Macs all the time, the cells in your body will - metaphorically at least - be made of Big Macs; you will, in a weird yet true sense, become a Big Mac.  So as the text of the Tao Te Ching migrates and stays inside me, I, in a weird yet true sense, become the Tao … or at least the principles intimated in the Tao become more natural to me and the principles I’ve associated with the West, with Christianity, and with myself - of assertiveness, volition, firm distinctions, rationality, causation, striving, knowing - begin to dissipate.

A text inside - especially one like the Tao, which is murky, meditative, slow, and calm - modifies not just one’s mind and heart but one’s body.  A text moves in the blood and feels like the blood.  It feels like the eyes … or the eyes behind the eyes.  It wraps other words in itself and slowly digests them.  Things inside become liquid, gaseous, and so nothing to be clung to, but simply part of the transient flow and vapor of existence.  This particular text becomes the nature that is lost in the city - the nature that affirms one in one’s insignificance and in this affirmation diffuses restlessness and weaves a murky thread throughout the self and the world.  It strips me down to darkness, a darkness that doesn’t seem like the fearful night of the child but a darkness that lies quietly at the center of light, a darkness that is light.

None of this is really possible when a text is outside.  Outside, it’s still something of an object, a commodity, an it.  Inside, it talks at odd times and fornicates with other inside things.  Inside, it begins to grow and gradually replace dying cells of words, cognition, attitudes, and behaviors.  Inside, it blurs distinctions and so becomes love.  Not necessarily a love of laughter and hope, but a love of drowsy acceptance and muddy days.

doo, walking

doo walks. it walks and walks, walking through walls of talk (what a magician!), wearing out sox (where will it get new ones?), listening to its cock (what a blabby flabby thing!), death's clock tick-tock knock (how calm! how turbulent!). why does it walk, this doo-doo dao face? just to listen and wear out and wonder? if it were just these things, wouldn't that be fine?  but the sadoo is not as evolved as it sometimes wants itself to be - being human and mortal and not much more - so it also walks for other things.  it walks to dissipate its desolation, to laugh at its haplessness, to place its solitude on the wings of the sun and watch it burn. walking transplants the false roots in the Sadie's controlling mind, in its greedy heart, in its hungry ticky-cock, into the movement of its feet, the stillness of its eyes. what grows in such transplanted soil? walking, wearing out, listening, walking

doo as flaneur

A serious question that must be addressed in the future discipline of Sadoo Studies is the extent to which the sadoo is a flâneur.  A number of significant obstacles are immediately raised.

The flâneur is most ecstatically, horribly, and originally linked to Saint Charles Baudelaire and the museum of Paris.  Saint Baudelaire wandered that museum - before it became a museum - during The Great Age of the Birth of The Modern City, when pedestrians were pedestrians not the extensions of cars; when cities were livable and scalable and walkable; when Paris was a living beauty and not a postcard of itself.

It would take many days to walk across Delhi today - most of it tedious, sterile, feet-unfriendly, eye-unfriendly.  So in the 143 years since St. Baudelaire died, the psychic and artifactual mass one has to negotiate to see God - the only objective of any authentic sadoo or flâneur - has exponentially and continues to exponentially increase.  The distance between the genitals and purity, beast and divinity, ignorance and knowledge, the sacred and the profane, commerce and creation, is now so great as to break the feet of all but the greatest stroller.  The human soul itself is being stretched from creation’s dim dawn to apocalypse’s eager maw and what tends to fill its corpulent diameters are money, mirrors, and noisy wills.

Since the ugly tepid demise of St. Charles, the term flâneur has been usurped by the academy and its pedants.  This began with Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life) and Walter Benjamin (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), both likable enough, and from them into the rhetorical discursive polemical psychosociocultural analytical critical mediocre gobbledyfoofoo that passes for knowledge among those who dispense degrees from within the pomo vending machine which in the common tongue is called the university.

But the flâneur is no idea, but first a leaf in bodily form, second the eye that God lacks, and third a continuous visceral-emotional shock that the world in its corrupt incompetent horror and beauty is the way it is.

Whether the flâneur was moneyed or impecunious, he was invariably indolent - at least according to any standard definition of industry.  Yet St. Charles flâneured in the pre-nanosecond world when art, God, and nature still were legitimate republics in their own right and had not yet capitulated to money’s false monistic claim.  So leisure, anonymity, and caprice have been increasingly desecrated and, with these, the flâneur.  Even artists these days - with their workshops and websites, careers and conformance - have lost not just the ability to walk, but their right to walk.

The rise and dominance of virtualization means that a flâneur is now a simulacrum of the flâneur:  one can walk the world without walking; one can stroll Parisian streets through two-dimensions from a St. Louis suburb; one can receive mock-shocks and e-bustles from a virtual crowd in a potato-chip-chomping bedroom.

Three or four or more questions arise from these meandering musings and thick conceptual walls.

1.  Is the flâneur dead?

2.  If not, why?  If not, how is it and/or can it - it being flâneurism - be transformed?

3.  How is the sadoo a flâneur?

An attempt at answers.

St. Baudelaire’s flâneur is dead - or at least seriously maimed - but the flâneur lives on, minimally in the imagination and quite possibly in that most archaic of possibilities - the body.

The flâneur may continue to live because

-  the crowd - as offensive, cloacal, faceless, goalful, merging, as the nineteenth century - continues to exist and grow and throb in its active urban malaise.  As long as the urban crowd exists and bulges, so must the flâneur.

- money - modernity’s cheap divinity - is no longer transcended through art, God, or nature but only through that which money now utterly depends on … movement - continuous meaningless movement - the flâneur’s chief love.

- one subverts the dominance of technomoney (and all money is now technology) by returning to the body in its schizoid simplicity.  Certainly the urban throb-mob tries to return through sex, Baudelaire capturing this in his observation - sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.  More modernly and popularly, TV shows such as Sex and The City express Baudelaire’s thought mythically and specifically.  But the flâneur goes deeper than sex - which reeks too much of self-interest, groupgrasp, and false promises - into the body’s rank core:  the combination of futile bestial wandering with the raw deep eye of God.  It is a truism to say that nature no longer exists except as metaphor.  There is one exception, though.  And that is the body in the city - nature’s last stronghold.  The flâneur does not primarily give his body over to other individual bodies (the sexual frenzy which dominates urban despair and ecstasy), but to the body of the city in its entirety and so attempts to recover the ancient trees and texts as they were once alive.  Attempts to recover them on the shimmering sweat of his flesh.

This particular sadoo has extensively and precisely imagined the modern city as the sarcophagus of God - that we are secretly sustained by decaying divinity, affording the ecstasy our species requires.  The human has always thrived on death - we kill (physically, emotionally) to risk extending ourselves - and the city affords great feasting.  Faith in the city - the only faith remaining - necessitates believing God is dead; this is no textbook belief, no parched cognitive truth, but one as living and sinewy as water.  This faith in the city is an aspect of the sadoo’s faith and an aspect of what drives him to walk.

So, then, the sadoo as flâneur sojourns aimlessly through God’s decaying body to observe and document the great convulsing human mass which has dubiously taken the burden of god upon itself; he sojourns, observes, and documents before the eye that circumscribes divinity, humanity, and bestiality disappears into itself, the city collapses to two dimensions, and the resultant mirror reflects nothing.

other early doo adventures can be found here

dao de jing commentaries

 

dao de jing commentaries have moved here

group names g - p

geeks	usurpation
geriatrics	complaint, olfactory, swallow
glass blowers	cunnilingus
gravediggers	descent, jukebox
guests	confusion, misunderstanding
heterosexuals	domination, constipation, despondency
husbands	cornucopia, temerity
impaired drivers	incarceration, spiritus, secretion, fumbling
janitors	doubt
journalists	despair, vomit, gall
kibitzers	deal, gratuity
lawyers	pomposity, jargon, bile
lepers	testament
lesbians	domesticity, lapidary
magicians	trace
mausoleum attendants	drawer, immobility, dearth
mayors	erection
mediums	acephalous
menstruators	funhouse, lochia, embryo
middle managers	mush, tenement
midwives	caesura
mistresses and gigalos	codification, excess, levy, competition
mothers	album, query, blindness, sentimentality
mystics	eternity, negation
narcissists	reflection, kaleidoscope, pond
neighbours	voyeurism, comparison, envy
newlyweds	shutter, charm
nuns	beatitude, regress, murmur, hymen
nurses	fantasy, formaldehyde
nursing mothers	bouquet, areolae, murmur
ovulators	follicle, oocyte,
perjurers	deception
philosophers	asomatous, labyrinth, consolation
piano tuners	intuition
piccoloists	fellatio
pimps	meanness
poets	preponderance, neglect, tedium
politicians	irrelevance
post-menopausals	historicity
preachers	deception, incinerator
presidents	repetition, cliché, forgettability
priests	consolation, pederasty
principals	grumpy
professionals	sorrow, pride, indistinction
professors	pretence, verbosity, abstruseness, tenure
programmers	carbonation, simulacrum, acronym
prostitutes	detachment, junction, diffusion, taboo
protestors	indignation, perturbation

group names a - f

We're all animals and if animals deserve anything, they deserve names. I've got a name - Sadoo.  You've got a name - Thanatos, Mooty-Socks, Wee Willie Wilbur, Alice Nd Çurap Mazlum ... whatever moved your mother in the weird reaches of the night.  But when you see a pack of chefs sauntering down the street, you don't (or shouldn't) say, "Hey, look at that pack of chefs."  You say (or should say), "Hey,  look at that arrogance of chefs."  And just as a pack of cats can be called a clowder, clutter, pounce, dout, nuisance, glorying, or glare (but not a pack) and kittens can be called a kindle, litter, or intrigue and cats wearing glasses can be called a geek, surprise, or impossibility and wild cats are simply a destruction, so those chefs can be many-named.

We'll do this in segments (beginning with A-F), interspersed with thoughts about pants, no-pants, underpants, uberpants, and - of course - farting.  Add your own names, your own groups.  Disagree with me.  Share the names with your friends and enemies.  Start using them in public.  Let's get them in the dictionary before we die.

adulterers	transgress, alibi, caprice, milan
accountants	deceit, morgue, receipt, conceit
agents	veiling, unveiling
anarchists	constitution, vacancy, nonexistence
architects	erection, fenestration
baptismal candidates	cowardice, wetness, confession
bastards	stew, confusion
believers	lobotomy, earnestness, syllogism
bums	query, emancipation
cashiers	catastrophe, mausoleum, flirtation
chefs	competition, arrogance, suicide
children	amorality, excess
consultants	semiotics, jealousy
couriers	illegality
cowards	comfort, tradition, omnipresence
crossword addicts	cabal, interstice
cuckolds	camaraderie, barnyard, greenhouse, serenity, cove
dancers	anorexia, diet
doctors	obfuscation
donut-lovers	cancer, exegesis
dropouts	icharus
engineers	balustrade, catapult, kingdom, input, euphemism (sanitation)
entrepreneurs	resurrection, hummer
epileptics	unpredictability
executives	clone, treason
farmers	reduction, irrelevance
fashion students	aggression
fathers	memory, poverty, absence
fornicators	ingress, confession, condom, std
freshmen	syphilis

a pejorative of taxonomists

It was 20 years ago today not that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play but that I received a vision.  Like any normal sadoo, I’ve had visions of everything from braless angels descending countless ladders in fluttery bliss from heaven onto my priapic bed … to vermiculous apocalypses so horrific the very retelling of them would kill you.  But on January 25 1990, shortly before my final son was born, three de-wombed children sweetly farting in their sleep, in the happy desolate hours of the night, after an evening of far too many Brussels sprouts, I received a vision that united time, myth, nature, technology, humanity, art, and god; in the morning, over a breakfast of vast toddler demands and oatmeal, I determined that the vision was conceptually sound and imaginatively potent.

It was, I confess, a taxonomic vision.  Which sounds less healthy than it should.

The sadoo - a human type I do not advocate but only describe in a shadowy attempt to name what I seem to be - is, among other things, a competent taxonomist.  There are those, naturally, who despise taxonomists.  Back in the days I mingled with the named, I met with Eric McLuhan - one of Marshall’s many Catholic-spawned children.  More ignorant than I should have been about the politics of such a statement, I referred to Northrop Frye in a vaguely positive way; this provoked a terse dismissive response, of which academics seem to be particularly fond.

Frye, McLuhan said with religious and contemptuous finality, was a taxonomist.

What a vile tribe I belong to! I thought, pained and bleeding.  How despised and rejected of people, humans of sorrows and acquainted with grief, are we taxonomists!  I went home and built Lego fairies with my children to escape the horror of the new knowledge of what I was.

Even now, recalling that trauma, I find myself slightly weepy and realize I may not have the strength today to share my taxonomic vision with you.  Please believe me:  I so want to tell you what makes a beautiful taxonomy - one so magnificent politicians become poets and the Fortune 500 forget how to count.  I so very very much want to tell you … when I’m ready for it, when you’re ready for it, when the world’s ready for it … what my perfect taxonomic vision is.  But I must wait, Dearly Beloved, until the proper time.

It’s all about waiting.  It’s all about the proper time.

In the meantime … to wet your pants … here’s what’s coming next … something you need, something you’ve been waiting for - a desperate lacuna in the very miasmic fabric of language:  group names for groups that don’t have names.  That is:  if a bunch of crows is called a murder and a bunch of waterfowl is called a knob, what should a bunch of lawyers be called? A bunch of administrative assistants? Pimps? Desperados?  Should they all be called a bunch?  No.  Oh no no no.

I have been given the names for such bunches, people.  In another vision.  And I shall share these names with you.  I shall share them with you soon.  And your lives shall be changed.