returning to returning

The sun, we say, returns to the sky (though it is always in the sky).  The moon, we say, is full tonight (though it is always full).  Can we not say in the same way that we are always there, still and pyretic, in the void, always full – and that we speak of returning and newness as a result of the confusion of bodies, ideas, events, passions, orbiting around us?

       Returning is a word we use for the perception of motion.

One could say, as some sages, that we all return to the desert.  But isn’t this to privilege the desert?  And isn’t it to set aside our immobility, the desert’s crawl and reach? – the desert moves farther, faster than we do; we only excel at the appearance of movement … the desert returns to us.

What feels like the farthest distance from our origin may be the moment when we have returned.

The tourist returns, but has to move to return – the tourist forever visits Returning, is a resident alien in the no-place, Returning; the natural citizen of Returning does not have to move to return, for returning is its home.

       The tourist in fact has to move to re-image rememberings of returnings, to simulate the no-place of returning through an onslaught of physicality and images.  The function of technology, it could be said, is to aid the increasingly vast industry of tourists to Returning.

       Transportation technologies – to move to returnings

       Image and sound technologies – to (re)capture the movement

       Communication technologies – to narrate the movement and the capturing

In these conglomerations, society loudly assures itself that the simulation of home is home, that tourism is citizenry, and that moving is returning.

Isn’t returning less flying home after visiting another continent, more—after having thought about visiting another continent—staying home?

To return before one has to return –

       Is this less of a returning?

I have returned, said the businesswoman to her partner as she entered the condo they shared.

       I see that, her partner said.

I have been on a long journey and discovered myself and lost myself and become nothing and become everything and here i am, back.

       But you just went to the store to get eggs, her partner said.

The two are not mutually exclusive, the businesswoman replied.

       And the two went their separate ways soon after, for they had not journeyed together, nor had the returning been shared.

To return perhaps is to build a bridge of nothing between the void of i and the void of world and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and not move.

       But would we not rather say that the walking to the midpoint is the turning and the not-movings the returnings?

I returned your book, a friend says.

       But, surely, having gone on a journey, the book is new.

If you have been on a journey and have come home early and a friend calls and says, Oh, have you returned?

       And you respond, I’m unsure.

       Your response will be seen as a little joke, a nod to memory and movement and dislocation.

But, truly, it is the only serious response.

We say, We are returning from a trip on the journey back.

       But we do not say on the way there that we are turning toward a trip.

We think of return as a returning to home or ground … but – if there is no home or ground – no return.

If we had to choose a space to return to, or a time, which would we choose?

       A space, for only it could be in the future.

We may think that returning is a mapped act and the act of reaching the point of returning unmapped, but this is only a feeling at the point of returning.  Once we embark on returning we realize there is no map and never has been.  There was a point we sought, the point at which we turned back or felt we turned back, but our returning is less a seeking than a negating of seeking, a negating of returning, a negating of maps.  We might say disturn instead of return, except for return’s necessary euphemistic function.

I picture a return journey as a line with an arrow pointing inward on each end, or a circle, with my point of departure and return at, say, 0°.  Perhaps a serpentine line, a labyrinth.  But the shape of my picture may be less important than the composition or texture of its shape.  If the shape is made of iron, the journey will firmly be a circle or a serpent; if a string, throw it in the air – a new shape (the journey renewed, reshapen, returned).  If strings, many shapes; if water, the journey reforms itself continuously.  If gas, the journey is everywhere, diffused, like a volcanic eruption affecting the weather in another hemisphere generations later.

       Returning is a shape that has no shape.

We say we return to death from death through life (or, in certain spiritual orientations, to life from life through death) but can the i—of which they are comprised, like structures and quarks—once returned to itself, be said to return to death or life?  i returns to i through i.  life and death are just roadside concession stands.

You are lost.

       But you are lost to your lostness.

Who has returned?

Why don’t you return to your homeland? asked her friend.

       Because i am a different i than when i left, and what was home will no longer be home, and the land is always shifting.  There is no return.

Your home is now here?

       I live here, and i say for convenience, This is my home, but if there is no returning there is only exile; exile is my home.

What does it mean to have no-home as home?

       It is the same as having no-place as place and no-time as time and no-god as god and no-love as love.

How can this be?  Only love is love and god is god and time is time.

       This is not what the heresiarchs have said; the heresiarchs in art and thinking and spirit and number and shape all agree.

The heresiarchs make no sense.

       Then no-sense is sense, for my feeling of exile is more real than my feeling of sense or home or place or time or god or love.

This doesn’t sound like living, but dying.

       But this utopia—this no-place—has been humanity’s dream ever since it began the project of the city; if we have been focusing on dystopias recently, hasn’t it been because we sentimentalized no-place, even as we sentimentalize almost everything?  But our dream is a fate and a passion, and all fates and passions involve dying in order to live.  Exile is the human home and, regardless of the names we give it, we seek it with our lives.

I have what i call memories of what i think are returnings.  But to return to these memories – am i now not caught in a travelogue of impossible directions?

What does the football fan seek in the return to his couch and beer, in the return of the season?  Is he not like Odysseus returning to Penelope after unspeakable absences?  Does he not seek, again, tears, again, shock and rage, again, death, again, great joy, again, the end and return of a story?

The increasing misalignment between the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, and the returnings with which we obsess is perhaps a notable factor in the increase in our ennuis and neuroses, our depressions and fragmentations.

       Yet to return to the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, would break us, dependent as we now are on our obsessions.

              Isn’t this unspoken knowledge also a factor in our ecstatic enervation?

We say we return to the earth—ashes to ashes—but why not to the clouds—rain to rain—or to the iPhone—text to text—or the toilet—dump to dump—or the i—eye to eye:  the gaze at the black center of returning?

Life is not love, we can’t help observing, despite their homophonic properties.  Yet can’t we transform all of life to love through a certain trick, a trick that, when performed, seems more legitimate than the observing we first can’t help?  Doesn’t this trick, once performed, require many of the same manoeuvres as returning? Is returning, then, the manual for the worthy simulation of love?

The body returns to the mind

       the mind to the body

The mind returns to the heart

       the heart to the mind

The heart returns to the spirit

       the spirit to the heart

We are complex prefabricated packages of returning.

Returning home with joy, returning home with foreboding

       the same returning?

Returning home with grief, returning home with ambivalence

       the same returning?

Returning to an alien ashram with grief, returning to your ancestral home with grief

       the same returning?

Returning to life, returning to death

       the same returning?

suicide is the most extreme form of returning to life

A grain of sand returns to the beach from the water, returns to a glass studio from the beach, returns to a vase in Manhattan from the studio, returns to a landfill site from being a vase, returns to a gull’s belly from the site, returns to the water from the gull, returns to the beach from the water.

       Which is the true returning?

              And if i move from child to student to priest to husband to father to banker to lover to academic to poet to bum to student to priest to child?

       So am i not the ways i walk, the ways i am led upon?  Don’t i hang names on myself and with each hanging weigh myself down in my walking, my true returning?

When Chuang Tzu says after he dreamt he was a butterfly that he’s unsure whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a human or he was a human dreaming he was a butterfly … is there not contained in this doubt the very vision and unspeakable truth of returning?

       For what seems to us solid sublimates to gas on slender accident, and what gas to solid.

              Did not Heraclitus say this also when he wrote that gods in dying live our lives and we in dying live the gods’?

       So the tunnel from womb to earth and that from earth to grave are equally returnings.  If we call one light, the other darkness, is this more a function of our darkness, less the vision of returning?

To the human on the shore, the wave keeps returning to the beach.

       But to the ocean it is always a new wave.

To the mother giving birth it is always a new baby.

       To the reincarnationist, the soul keeps returning to the world.

So every return is also wholly novel and every novelty is also wholly a return.

We could speak of the relations of money and returning.  But we shall not.

When i am at life’s statistical midpoint, i could say that i am beginning to return.  Although could i not equally say i am ending returning – for couldn’t life’s midpoint be the consummation of the impossibility of returning?

When you remarry it is not as if you are married again.

       It is a different thing, requiring a new word.

We add a ‘re’ from laziness.

       So with return.

Returning may be less to silence than to the silence in every word.

The city, being the alphabet in three dimensions, returns us to an image of god’s original speaking—one that created a species to destroy the Creator and destroy the silence that comprised god’s heart.

Our attempt to return to places in our minds has more solidity than our attempt to return to them in physicality.  For our minds are closer to the heart of perception, having more purity and hallucinatory power.  The cluttered facticity of objects in physicality diminishes the efficacy of our attempts to return there.  So returning is a spiritual discipline and it is no accident that humanity’s great religions have it—though with different spins—at the center of their cosmologies.

       water returns to the earth from the sky

       water returns to the sky from the earth

       woman returns to man

       man returns to woman

       the adult returns to the child

       the child to the adult

       the sun returns to its deep bowl of night

       night returns to overturning its bowl, releasing the sun

I travel india for a year and return to my home.  I walk through a combination of valley paths and urbanscapes to a café and return to my home after five hours’ absence.  Yet the latter can be more of an adventure, a longer journey, than the former.  Fewer prosthetics are required of the i.  We have hardly begun to explore the relationships between time, space, expenditure (fiscal, ecological, physical, emotional) and returning.

       Until we see every act as equally returning (and thus accept a diversity of way), are we not the most wasteful and inefficient of species, doomed to chains we do not call chains because we have the capacity to make them long.

Returning Exam

In order to be shown the exit from the realm of shades after death and enter eternal dissolution, one must pass an exam on returning.  Here might be some of the exam’s questions.  A sample question, with possible answer, is provided to aid in completing.

Sample question, with possible answer

Which two consonantless words are homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, and might be the mantra of returning?

       eye and i

1.  rotate regress advance relay

       Which is the better synonym of return?

2.  If we saw all words beginning with re as related, how would our lives be changed?

       real       rebozo       reckless       redolent       reefer       referee       regolith       rehab       reificatory       rejectamenta       rekindle       reliquary       Rembrandt       renascence       reodorant       reprobate       requiem       reredos       Reservoir       return       retiary       Reuters       revenant       rewind       rex       reyong       rezepte

3.  Which is more of a journey—returning ourselves or watching others return?

4.  Based on the below patterns, fill in the blank at the end of the question.

   return – reword – renew – reshape – renumber – renew – recreate – repent - redevelop

   return – urn – nut – rut – run – net – ten

   turn – tern - - torn

   re-surrect (insurrect/ion)

   upturn – overturn – downturn

   disturn deturn unturn misturn in/out

   turntable – turnkey

   Turin

   re-mind, re-body, re-spirit

If to decreate is not the same as destroy (and dedestroy not the same as create), then dereturn is not the same as ______________________________________.

5.  none of us are what we seem

              and

       all of us are only what we seem

                Is returning a turning into this and?

6.  Return – ret urn – wet urn – the living :

              the dead – dry urn

       Explore.

7.  Are deconstructions and decreations returnings, in their apparent removal of unnecessary debris, or do they accumulate debris through adding to the material one has to negotiate in order to return?

8.  We return our minds to accelerate our bodies on the commodity exchange of spirit.  Are the industries of law, knowledge, religion, technology, health, justice, ecology, and business the tentacled and transactional ghosts we reify to aid us in our desperate barterings?  To what extent, and how?

9.  Why do we go away?  We go away to come back.

       Isn’t all desire a desire to return, all action an attempt?

What we return to is what was hiding inside what we came from.

       The Eiffel tower is a return to the postcard

       Bloch’s novel is a return to the film

       The parent is the return to the lover

       Han Yu is a return to Kafka

       The ocean is a return to the bathtub

       The pinnation of the leaf is a return to the microchip

Following the model of christ, god in dying has become—through its ultimate absence—more potent than when it was alive, strutting through cathedral naves, solid walls in the cloisters of mind.  So are not we, as god’s forebears, learning from god’s play of potency?  As christ used blood and crosses, as god used education and enlightenment, are we not using technology and communication for our ambitious ends?  Are not christ, god and we walking parallel paths of potent return?

To return is to find returning in not returning.

One cannot say one returns to the one for the one in returning has negated the one it seeks – the one seeking, the one sought, the returning itself – are there not always at least three and, by extension, a myriad, in the one?

We now rest on unities as tenuous as thawing ice.  Is this a return to our original solitude, the height of human civilization a frozen pond, on either side a sea?

There is never a point of no return

       the point of no-return is the point of returning

Re-turn :

       but we are always turning and so always returning.

What do we return to? is perhaps less the question than the questions we ask about our questions as we return.

The merchant returns suddenly, as some zen students achieve enlightenment, on his deathbed; the sage devotes her life to returning.  Some advocate the gradual path, some the sudden.  Nevertheless, all return.

It is easy to say we return to nature or death or god or ourselves or silence or love (through technology or life or humanity/the city or love or words or greed) but what if rather than returning to nature we return to technology (or words or greed)?

We speak of return or returning as singular … but …

       only returns and returnings.

Perhaps the most we do is return to returning – we see, as the arcs of the spheres become visible, there was no original turn.  Of course, we could also say all we do is turn and that we never return.

How i love the efficient destruction of the city, this attempt to return to god’s original destruction, not through word but the destruction of word, to the decreation between and beyond our words.

Perhaps we can say we’ve returned when we perceive entering sleep or night no differently than entering waking or day.

We don’t return to anything, any body, any idea; we return to returning.

It is equally easy to argue that we surround ourselves with ourselves (and surround the extensions of ourselves with our extensions) to avoid returning and to consummate it.  Is this equal ease a returning?

The prefix re- assumes an original.  Do we add another re- for each returning?

       But if there is no original—or the original is irrevocably lost, like the name of god—and there is neither a place to return to nor ever a repeating of place (or i), then we are irrevocably lost between the original turn and the desire to return to what never existed.  This irrevocability, this lostness, are perhaps our home, what we return to, our only returning, although because of its no-place (its utopia) we deny it, and construct homes from false places, covering the no-place of our home, as the city covers the earth and the earth the void.

What is the opposite of return?

       Isn’t it return?

Isn’t the knowledge we attribute to returning the human’s ignorance and hubris, seeing return primarily through the arc of an isolated self, culminating in personal death – this delusional elevation of an infinitesimal part of the whole (a human, a species); isn’t our fear the not-knowing of our root inability to attribute—of not being able to see any point of origin or destination, of not being able to see the portion of the shape we inhabit, let alone the shape?

       So isn’t returning a sub-fallacy of teleology (or teleology a sub-fallacy of returning)?

We always return, we never return, we sometimes return, we partially return, we fully return, we never return.

The concept of turning seems easy—

       I say, Turn your body to your left.

       You do it.

       I see it.

       You have turned.

But if i say, Return your body to your left—

       You (re)turn your body to your left.

       I (re)see it.

But have you returned?

If one pictures a journey as a line,

       all returnings are measurable and finite.

If one pictures a journey as a circle,

       all returnings are immeasurable and infinite.

We can have recreate, bound to recreation, but can we have redestroy?  Does return sit between recreate and redestroy, indecisive?

We visit nature but we no longer can know it.  We know the city.  We can only return to nature by recreating it (its void, its desolation, its silence, its unknowing, its unmappedness, its rhythmic infinitude) in ourselves.  (Isn’t technology the visible sign of this most virtual misplacement?)  So this return to nature (in recreation and signage) may be emblematic of all our returnings, misplaced (re-homed) in the void of ourselves.

We turn to what we know we think,

       return to what we think we have known.

In both cases our knowledge, our thinking, is murky –

       both a gloaming … but which one leads to dawn, which to dusk?

I return to a home of my childhood after decades’ absence.  Is it not like visiting a movie set of a dream?  So all returnings are oneiric, any sensuous manifestations props and facades.  So our returnings are films – we may be the audience, but the director surely is unknown.

       Returning in history : film (a returning to literature, a returning to itself); the human in the city (a returning to a pre-alphabetic age).

Return is not retreat, for retreating arises from desperation or strategy whereas returning arises from an interstice of khôra and qualia.

We think of return as moving toward something that existed in the past, but why fix returning so solidly in time?  Time may only be a one-way street to those who rigidly follow history’s laws.

The house, the woman, the job we wish to return to – are they not as elusive as the smell, the experience, the state we wish to return to?  Both are spontaneous configurations of perception.

Your circumscriptions and so your judgements are solid

       return to the breath on the water

Your love is like an ax

       return to the breath on the water

Your words are like a traffic jam

       return to the brook bubbling around the rocks

Your desires are like apocalypses

       return to the mist of the morning

Your way is littered with definitions

       return to the path of hot coals and rain

Your virtue is like medieval armour

       get naked, throw on a sarong and tanktop

Your assets are like an airplane

       hijack it; turn it into a bird sanctuary

Your relations are like tapestries of dustbunnies

       There is a paneled portal behind, hiding a secret passageway to silence.  Return.

It’s close to midnight.  I crave potato chips.  I return to the store i was at a few hours earlier to obtain them.  But first, before my returning, the potato chips returned to me.

       Before i return, i am always returned to.  I am a transit hub of returnings.

We are homo homo returnus.  Whether talented or middling, whether local or global, whether an EU president or a collections agency officer, we each have our few favourite spots to return to:  intellectual, emotional, physical.  We live in our returnings to these spots and are defined less by the spots and the returnings and more by the ways we return—what we create on these ways:  the totality of these creations we might call the i.  We die (why do we die?) … we die … to assist in creating new ways of returnings for other returners, even as others have done so for us.  Our dyings are our greatest collaborations, our greatest creations, our greatest gifts.  That we do not view our dyings as such—that we even view them as our chief tragedies—is a sign of our skewered geometry:  we overfaith the apparent solidity of our cities’ verticality.  But the ways of returnings are many and go down or sideways as often as up, are gaseous as often as solid, doubt as often as know, and flounder as often as stride.

We are wind and stone.  Yet we fear wind, we fear stone.  Isn’t the fart the lightness of our fear of wind, the turd of our fear of stone – the laughter of Balaam’s ass?

       Sublimation (chemical, psychic, aesthetic) as vital living.

              Yet the paths to walk between solidity and gaseousness longer, more circuitous, more obstacled, more unmapped (despite our tsunamis of maps) – and this distance now the mythic journey, riddled with suicides and breakdowns and genocides and addictions and fragmentations and ennuis and despairs.

       Returning has always been at the center of myth.  But with myth now itself having gone on a mythic journey and returned to itself—its self of returning—and so is at home nowhere and everywhere, the distance between wind and stone is not a lifetime or a catastrophe—though it is a lifetime and a catastrophe—but only the distance from i to i.

It isn’t what we came from or return to that present us with the greatest challenges.  It is our returnings.

I return a smile.  I return a lawnmower.  I return a favour.

       Same returning?

Do we return by turning back or going beyond?  Isn’t this the unspeakable question of the universe, of creation and also of physics, of the spirit – the doubt and seed of the human?  Yet isn’t our doubt and seed also their possible indistinguishability?

As i walk, as one foot returns to the earth the other returns to the air, then the one that returned to the air returns to the earth and the one that returned to the earth returns to the air.  Are not all other returnings complications of these returnings?

april licorice

dreams, virtuality – sleep, void
             the repressed part of a rule which ensures that the rule does not work

i, god

             how can anyone be against me when there is no i to be against?

creation, evolution

             the myth of the black rose that will never be black

living, the city, talking, humans

             coddled cosmopolitanism

poetry allsorts

             perception is only a hallucination that is true

fear & apathy

             if fear is a wave and apathy a particle, aren’t they bound in their travels in the black light of time?

conversations at yet another netherbar

          featuring
                i’m going to get a drink
                                and
                what do you do?

some thoughts at the end of the daodejing

                exuberant namelessness, dissolute virtue –
                                a bridge to the caprice, laughter, and vital deconstructioning of Chuang Tzu

returning to returning

                the i i step in is not the i i stand in

council of i intro bios

                throneless identity:  the body as cacophonous conference room for spirits

daodejing 81

Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful.

Good words are not persuasive, persuasive words are not good.

He who knows has no wide learning, he who has wide learning does not know.

The sage does not hoard.

Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more.

Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm.

The way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.

Dao quietly overturns what might be described as the West’s mantra— 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It overturns the mantra millennia before the above lines were written and about the same time the roots of this mantra were being developed.  It overturns by recognizing the polymorphousness of language, its undependability as a ground, long before Wittgenstein.  It overturns by saying that the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is only the ugly; it overturns by returning to the gate where names diverge.

In returning, harm is deconstructed, contention dissolved through a withdrawal from clinging to anything that can be named.  The empty way, which use doesn’t drain, the beginning, the mother of the world, is the watery way we walk.

tao te ching lxxx

Reduce the size and population of the state.  Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.

Even when they have ships and carts they will have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,

Will find relish in their food

And beauty in their clothes,

Will be content in their abode

And happy in the way they live.

Though adjoining states are within sight of one another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that these potencies will not harm the people.  The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a mutual accord.

So, here, we also have forces; instead of spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons, power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions.  So, here, we have a gap, infinite in practice, between the capacity of the force and its use.  Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death, and contentment.

How do we reduce the size and population of the state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs?  Or, in other words, how do we bring about return without catastrophe?  Isn’t this the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?

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.

tao te ching 78

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water.  Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.  This is because there is nothing that can take its place.

That the weak overcomes the strong

And the submissive overcomes the hard

Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into practice.

Therefore the sage says,

One who takes on himself the humiliation of the state

Is called a ruler worthy of offering sacrifices to the gods of earth and millet.

One who takes on himself the calamity of the state

Is called a king worthy of dominion over the entire empire.

Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

  

Submission, weakness, humiliation, calamity.  Like desolation, solitude and haplessness, who would want them?  The sage takes these on, not as woeful weights but as rightful fashions to navigate the way she must walk; they are the unfashionable fashions of the way, fashions the sage refashions in her navigations.

What is this knowledge that our reputedly powerful species contains but cannot enact?  Is it the suppressed knowledge of feebleness’ hidden powers?  How do we transform our incapacity into impossible practice?  It has already been thought and written and, having been thought and written, done:  through returning.

To speak truly is to reunite the contradictions of silence in words; to speak falsely is to verbally resolve—that is, to fragment—the inherent contradictions of our existence.

Dao sides with water over stone and in so siding offers sacrifices to the earth, the visible sphere of the empire.

daodejing 77

Is not the way of heaven like the stretching of a bow?

The high it presses down,

The low it lifts up,

The excessive it takes from,

The deficient it gives to.

It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient.  The way of man is otherwise.  It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough.  Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire?  Only he who has the way.

Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,

Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.

Is this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?

 

The difference between heaven in Daoism and heaven in Christianity is a matter of geometry and possibly genitals—or at least their corresponding spiritual potencies.  In Dao, heaven collapses—through a radical relativizing—the relation between things (the relation between relations), and so any expected moral hierarchy, by drawing a circle around heaven and earth.  In Christ, man sustains the expectation of moral hierarchy by drawing arrows (teleologies, etiologies) between heaven and earth.  Time, death, origins are central monuments, inexorable, in Christ; they are as wispy and nomadic as words, in Dao.

 

Yet we have in both this notion of good, of justice.  In Dao, of goodness apart from its opposition to evil, of justice apart from its opposition to the law (of words apart from their opposition to silence, of things apart from their opposition for their opposition is a part of them).  A goodness without center or end; a goodness that, if it has a means, its means is not particularly known, other than as one knows the memory of a dream.

 

The sage does not offer what she has essentially, only what she has in excess.  Yet if the sage has anything essential is no clear outline.  Regardless, the sage does not offer what she has in excess to the deficient or the low, but to the empire, bypassing the rough dualities of high and low, heaven and earth.

 

This is the only authentic democracy.  The tree is the tree and does not consider itself better than the cockroach.  The human is the human; why should it be better than the slug or a bog?  I am i; why should i be better than you?

 

If i am muscled, beautiful, successful, rich, talented, famous, fortunate, how easy it is for me to take credit for my state, to draw taut lines of causation.  I am powerful because of my will, my drive, my virtue, my persistency, my blood and heritage, my intellect, my kindness, my perspicacity and judgment.

 

But Dao collapses such pleasant conclusions, such self-serving satisfactions.  Was not this person formed this way, in the same way as a particular tree (by genetic formula and context—in the case of the tree­: wind, soil, environment; in the case of the human: culture, home, environment)?  How can he then take credit for what has been formed into him, what he has been formed into, when he is the murky sum of a formula and a context, a tentative addition, a transient conglomerate of murky inputs and tangled roots?

 

Dao dissolves virtue and morality through their absolution.  It places humans in their place—not slightly lower than the angels or made in the image of God or the unacknowledged legislators of the world or a virus to be eradicated or something to tell the oceans how to live their lives … but as a myriad set of somethings among myriad sets of myriad sets of somethings.  And who can be better in such a context?  One only is, on a sea of is-ness.  This is the way.

a thing in itself

Philosophers and similarly-minded people have been asking what things are—in themselves (as if they could be in something else), in relation to other things in themselves, in relation to what they might or should be, in relation to what they were or might have been, in relation to what they are not, not in relation to anything in particular:  in short, they’ve been asking (i.e. the philosophers, not the things) and some of the better ones have even been asking about asking:  what asking is—for as long as asking has asked philosophers to ask, some philosophers have asked.

That’s great.

But they’re always asking about the same things:  time, death, nothingness (as if you could ask about nothingness!), love occasionally (occasionally, since asking and loving seem to negate each other), truth (way too much), god (back in the god ages), and more recently about other things that nobody ever used to ask about (maybe because they [the things, not the askers, though also the askers] never existed or maybe because we finally got tired of truth and god and time, realizing they had no answers [and although they looked like substantive words were just punctuation marks {question marks specifically}, like everything else], needing as we seem to other things to pretend to have answers hidden behind or in them) but now seem urgently important, like communication, gender, sex, and money.

Maybe we just have to cycle through all the words until we realize that answers—like truth, god, time, nothingness, love, communication, sex, gender, money—don’t exist.  Only death exists … but what kind of answer is death?

In the meantime, though, I’d like to help humanity along its little path, its little discovery project, and begin asking what other things are in themselves and in relation to all those other things.

I could begin with tomato—a compelling choice, to be sure—as I’m pretty sure nobody knows what tomato really is, and philosophers seem to have entirely ignored tomato.  It’s not just the old debate about whether tomato is a fruit or vegetable (any real philosopher [but what is a philosopher?] knows this question is a decoy—it doesn’t probe deeply enough into the essence of tomato), it’s that this commonplace confusion points to the essence of tomato:  that is, its essential ambiguity.  Tomato has nothing to do with fruit or vegetable, lycopene, lutein, Vitamins A, C or E, potassium, zeaxanthin, or anything of the sort.  The truth of tomato is a kind of manifoldpointing.  (In order to sufficiently explore the nature of tomato, we are compelled to avoid the common expressions, for it is only through the uncommon that we have the opportunity to open up new understandings and see the original face, so to speak, of tomato.)  This manifoldpointing is no simple polyinterpretativeapparati, but goes far beyond this, into the realm of pointyplurality, an authentic multimurkiness of manifoldpointing beyond polyinterpretativeapparati thrusting us inevitably into polypointymaniplurality.

But we are not speaking of tomato.  We shall leave tomato in its manifoldpointing of pointyplurality.

Instead, we could begin with tree.  But nobody knows particularly what tree is anymore, so let’s not do that.  Or bicycle, which we would find—after much pain and evidence—is the only remaining freedom left humanity, the perfect fusion of nature and technology, the evolutionary apex of civilization, and the only reasonable successor to god.  Or coffee, which we would find after a thousand pages and a billion tears, as that-which-sustains:  the sanguinary-fuel-future-incarnation-of-liquidity-without-which-all-would-be-lost.  We would then have the necessary foundation to juxtapose bicycle and coffee, the simulated modern equivalents of freedom and fate (albeit in their solid and liquid manifestations, respectively) and begin discovering how things really work, not just in themselves but in relation to each other and so in relation to all things.  We would then have knowledge and vision.  We would be gods.

Yet, let’s not be too hasty.  The road to divinity has many limbs and absurdities on its besotted way, as the Greeks and many others have taught us.  Our thing-in-itself project is vast and we can only become gods the painful way—one word at a time.  (And there are so many words! And they [not us] keep making new ones!)  So—yes—let us not forget tomato and tree and bicycle and coffee, let us not even forget god and death and time, let us not forget (for we unfortunately can’t) communication and sex and money, but let us move on to a word that contains and transcends all these, that might very well be the-thing-under-and-in-and-over-and-through-the-thing-in-itself-and-the-things-in-themselves.  It might be the word behind the Word and words; it might be the word that spoke speaking into existence.

I’d like to ask (I’d like asking to ask me to ask) about something more (and even most) essential to modern times—a thing so central to what it means to be human in the third millennium that, to my knowledge, it’s entirely escaped being asked about by anyone who knows how to ask (or who asks or who wants to ask or thinks it has the right to ask or is known as an asker).  And, if our wheezy little species is anything, surely it’s Homo Askius (or Homo Askus—my Latin is rusty, even as everything before now is rusty).  This thing is ubiquitous, relatively novel, coveted, synecdochal (in that it’s emblematic, a portend, of a vast future, in the way that Christ begat and adumbrated a new age), almost (and perhaps becoming) self-generating, the archetypal union of opposites (clean-dirty, noisy-silent, evolved-primitive, seen-unseen), the far-near of Marguerite Porete, the eureka of Archimedesthe, the alaytheia of Heidegger, the kenosis of Paul, the Tao of the Tzus, the book-of-the-month of Oprah, the money shot of porn, the sunyata of Gautama, and the avocado-that’s-not-in-your-fridge-but-you-really-want-at-three-in-the-morning-but-you’re-too-lazy-to-go-to-that-24-hour-supermarket-five-minutes-away-and-get-it.  Most importantly, it’s vertical—and thus reaches for heaven in the way that Christ once did but can’t any longer because just like he was born twice, he’s died twice—once physically, a second time spiritually and symbolically.  Much as we say we love the earth—its horizontality, its inescapable sphericality—we really do love lines, stretching everywhere, stretching up, way way up … to immortality, clouds and eternal darkness.  And isn’t this the test of the human (the genitive plays both ways [and even more!]:  the human test of the universe, the universe’s test of us):  whether lines are historically and ontologically antecedent to circles and so embedded at the foundations of reality, whether circles are, whether somehow (god and gender forbid!) neither is or both are, and/or whether humanity can do anything but any of this other than perhaps pretend that it is and whether this pretending is sufficient (for a time at least), and even whether sufficiency is sufficient.  But we digress (or rather we are—or have been—digressed).

What, then, is a condo?  We must not say condominium, we must say condo, for reasons that will become apparent if they haven’t already.

We must, as good askers (there are no philosophers any more, as there is no longer any philosophy or philosophies; there are only askers and asking [or askings] or being-asked [or being-askeds]), take this thing, condo, place it in our palm as something fragile, new, original, vast, precious, caress it tenderly, peruse it through myriad lenses, drop it, throw it high, hit it with a sledgehammer, cover it, lose it, turn it around, describe it as the blind ones and the elephant (each description tentative, insufficient, passionate), allow it to describe us, destroy and recreate it in its manifold irreducibility, misspell it, play pinball with it ... in short, we must do to it and allow it to do to us what we have done to the world and the world to us ... without this, we will never know what condo is, we will never have had ourselves made known.

Naturally, we don’t have the time or even interest to do all this; thus, reconciling ourselves to the moderately depressing thought that condo will always remain elusive, murky, just-beyond-our-grasp, we nevertheless proceed, in hopeful futility, even as we get ourselves (or are gotten), somehow, out of the bed each morning and somehow trace the sun to its dubious decline and find ourselves back in bed, doing the same thing as the night before, more or less, without, frankly, having learned anything particularly or advancing anywhere other than toward that one thing of which we shall not speak at this moment, as the sun is shining and the trucks are roaring by and someone next to me in the cafe is blaring some stupid YouTube explanation about carbohydrates from her very loud Mac and i can barely think about condo let alone death that-other-thing, but we may speak of at (yes, two consecutive prepositions are ok) some point since it (the doing and the speaking) seems (seem) inevitable and that is that or this and let’s get back to condo.

Condo.

Disturbingly similar to condom.  Not a chance occurrence, we have been led to believe by credible sources in manners that enhance their credibility.  That one only has to add an m (or mmmmmmmmm—that culinary, sure, and peccable sign of embodied delights) to the end of condo to manufacture in language (the only reality, as every sophisticate knows, because the only dream) that modern shield of pleasure might very well begin to point us in the direction of condo’s natural and original face. 

The key, we will begin to understand in our challenging yet rewarding exploration, is modern shield of pleasure.  As is the nature of such constructions, we are initially in doubt as to whether condom—and so condo—protect us from pleasure or protect us from that-which-inhibits-pleasure.  For we first must acknowledge the hope of pleasure that is generated by the extensive fashion of condo:  the manufactured and reified prestige, the anonymous privatized sky-cell (a kind of heavenly incarceration, the self as jailed and jailor), the essential virtualization of home through the privileged divorce from land and history, the intangible yet compelling and pervasive marketing and branding (even to the point of having the developer imprinted on every door), the facticity of the buildings themselves—great conglomerates of urban clubbing and sterility (a kind of bloodless war mediated by coitus and pharmaceutical ecstasy), the vertiginous and expansive feeling of rising up to look down on the world, the metallic comfort of the womb of technology (its murmurings and lights).  These are all indisputable and, collectively, rough negotiators of significant sectors of significance in modernity.

Yet.  These very attributes that promise pleasure are also the ones that frustrate it, distancing as they do the human from its origins, leaving it to traverse greater and greater distances (requiring more sophisticated, novel, and expensive tools—prosthetics) to maintain even the semblance of a relationship with a ground of any sort (whether real or simulated is irrelevant), unless one accepts language itself as a ground, which it may be, but, like any nameable ground (and isn’t language the ultimate nameable ground, being comprised only of names?), is insufficient to ground.

So there is very little difference between standing before a floor layout of a prospective condo and a prophylactic display in a drug store, very little difference between the act of purchase, the imbued hopes, the ambiguity and ambivalence of the entering and exiting—the experience of temporary habitation—and the complex, varied, and dubious narratives that develop after the purchase and the act.

So the condo shields us from pleasure (through stretching our existential circumference further from the earth) and shields us from pleasure’s traditional enemies (death, decay, morality, children—all unavoidable products of the earth).  This dual movement is encapsulated in the removable m (mmmmmmmmm)—its sensuality, brevity, and innate ubiquity.  For there is far less spiritual, emotional, linguistic, and experiential distance between condo and condom than there is between condo and house.  

Condos’s intrinsicity (of stretching through a double-shielding) is seen—showing more ominously or enlightenedly, dependent on factors which we are ill-equipped (in time particularly) to deal with presently but seem to be related to such things as branches of science and art that haven’t yet been exposed or invented (dependent on factors which may be similar to the ill-equipped ones that were just referenced)—through the seeing that is novel to civilization, as it is euphemistically called, and central to the prostheticized heart of condo.  Central, because seen and seeing, eyeing and eyed, mirroring and mirrored, are the molecular building blocks of condo’s spirituality, without which it would crumble in the manner of the Tower of Babel.  Novel, because the Bentham-Foucault panopticon has been most fully actualized in condo (not primarily in prisons, hospitals, universities, courts, businesses, schools, factories, the military), most insidiously actualized in condo, because of its deeply embedded appearance of non-hierarchy, of privilege, of middling and rising money, privacy, and safety.  Condo is, before and above anything else, a complex system of eyes, in which the jailed are so wholly obsessed with the jailedness (politely termed freedom) of others that they come to think (indeed they come to think so long before they see the face of the obstetrician or midwife yawning at them through the vagina’s expulsory maw) of themselves as jailors.  Or they would so come to think if it were not that in their role of jailors watching the jailed, they cannot also help to see (albeit in shadow) the role of the others as jailors watching themselves as the jailed, thus exposing, in a manner, the necessary opposites, without ever uniting them except in the schizophrenia of the modern dweller of condo, yielding a foundation stone for the utterly corpulent and blind psychotherapy industry (or, rather, industries) to produce a simulacrum of union.

So condo’s stretching is also made manifest through the almost infinite separation of panopticonal jailed and jailor, sprinkled liberally through the fleshy diaspora of dwellers in condo.

As is typical in modernity, cinema comically and recently adumbrated the concept of condo, even if the Bentham-Foucault panopticon seriously and distantly adumbrated it in words.  I speak, of course, of Rear Window, which seems to us—in condo—the seed and egg of our modern situation, a homunculus of condo, a bonsai tree of eyed and eying.  That I can see—from a condo cell, without straining—roughly 1,700 other cells (I have counted) and, with binoculars (even Mr. Stewart used these), into these other cells, seeing then the abject incarceration of the jailed who think they are jailors, who think they are free—jailed to their 830h march downtown, jailed to their very large flatscreen TVs, jailed to their genitals, jailed to their laundry, jailed to their exercise regimen, jailed to their consumptive and desperate need to be jailed, clearly demonstrates the end of humanity and the beginning of condo, the human becoming (and in some cases having become) the Kinder Sorpresa, as it were, within the larger, more glamorous and necessary, egg.  For who really pays any attention to the cheap plastic forgettable toy within—it is almost immediately discarded, breaks, or is lost—what truly matters is the experience of egg (or cell), of branding and anticipation.  In short, what matters is condo, not what is inside.  The eyes, the jailed and jailing, simply provide the pretext for condo; condo, if it could act or speak (and its non-acting and non-speaking are its redemption and apotheosis), might rub its little necessity—us—on the head or derriere and say, Ah, how blessed, how eyed, how necessary … how irrelevant.

And here a most striking discovery presents itself—one which not only encapsulates the condo in its existing and future situation as the condom of the city, in its capacity  as shield and pleasure of the human, its protector and joyful spurting, but experiences the condo as the veritable stretching of significance:  both as the radii that evolve the human past its limits (the stolid vertically transcendent massively visible house and the glittering horizontally immanent massively felt home) and as the center (the repository of darkness, insignificance, doubt) and circumference (the edges of light, significance, knowledge) of that circle.  The condo is and has become and is becoming that mystical sphere, incarnate and incarnadine, bold and vulnerable, everywhere and nowhere, full and empty, shadowy and intractable, silent and boisterous, of which the ancient prophets foretold in their visions of the great city of god, of heaven on earth.

But all this is only a little scratching!  We could speak of con do – the con of action (in comic contrast to can do—the past slogan of a large North American bank), signifying the simulation of deed, its ruse, pointing to a returning to the wu wei of the East.  We could speak of con dough or even con doe.  We could speak of con dom – the domination of cons, the new king dom of simulacra.  Indeed, it is not a long bridge then to comedo (through condom and cum do and come do), Latin for glutton (noun) or I consume or squander (verb).  Or condor, a large predator that eats dead animals.  Condos are not far from the coffin-apartments advocated in the nouveau architecture of Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.  It is not difficult to see the condo as an essential evolutionary stepping stone to a new race of short legs (for who needs to walk?) and huge eyes (all the better to see you with, my dear!), precipitating future wars between the horizontal people of the houses and the vertical and eyed race of the condos; like the Neanderthals before Homo Sapiens, the people of the earth will have no chance.  The condo dwellers will win.

We could speak of all this.  But we must return to our task of watching.  And, frankly, the exploration of things-in-themselves is exhausting.  But if the signs and signifiers that condo presents to us seem at times labyrinthine and murky, let that not reduce our attraction to condo’s truth but rather propel us toward it; for is not the truth of a thing not what it initially and superficially presents but the fruit of hard labor acquired only through pilgrimaging through a thing’s thingness, refusing the temptations of ease and escape, the fruit of becoming a thing’s thingness through significant and frequently arduous feats of hard empathy, the fruit of walking around the concrete commonplaces which comprise the marketplace of the thing into (while hardly ignoring these edifices, for they are highly instructive in their negative signs, in their pointing to the antithetical essence of their being) the commodious and healthy air of the thing itself, even as one mounts Everest to finally stand on the pinnacle, practices scales to perform at Lincoln Center, or lives to confront and so surpass death and so live.

***

So we have seen not what condo is or might be, perhaps, but what asking is—its nature, its essence, its face.  So we have seen that the question that is asked is often not the question that we think is being asked, but the question behind the question, the asking behind the asking, the condom behind the condo, the punctuation behind the substantive, the doubt behind the certitude, the awe behind the philosophy.  And this seeing, we see after our asking, is the nature of condo.  But not only of condo but of all things.  And this common nature—this bond—is our humanity:  our bestiality, our divinity.  That it is now encapsulated in 20 square metres in the sky should not surprise us.  We are a species that, surpassing, reach.  Now that our arms—or at least our prosthetics—reach horizontally around the spherical exuberance and despair of the earth, now that we have effectively abandoned the search for a vertical divinity, we can devote our fickle attention to sticking our prosthetic arms (indeed! all our prosthetics!) into the air, into space, beyond our natural reach, looking endlessly into the endless darkness of other eyes, and discovering (if that is the word) what is not there.