Tao Te Ching VIII

Highest good is like water.  Because water excels at benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.

In a home it is the site that matters.

In quality of mind it is depth that matters.

In an ally it is benevolence that matters.

In speech it is good faith that matters.

In government it is order that matters.

In affairs it is ability that matters.

In action it is timeliness that matters.

It is because it does not contend that it is never at fault.

Water is not a specialist.  Construction, scholarship, alliances, oratory, politics, business, and war—dentistry, golf, web design, advertising, prostitution, poetry, trafficking, and bishopry—are.  In each specialty, there are specific attributes and forms of knowledge that are required to excel in that trade; there are, as much in the so-called anti-social trades as in the so-called proper ones, social protocols that comprise entering and remaining in that trade.  It is true—water has attributes and so in that sense can be considered a specialist, in the way that everything named is in some sense a specialist, so fulfilling its name.  But water, unlike the standard specialists, has no objective, no ambition, no resentment; it is full of life, creates primarily but does destroy, and is acquainted with worms and mud.

The one who is close to the way is also acquainted with worms and mud.  So, like worms, she is not unacquainted with the arts of enriching, aerating, decomposing, circulating, and transforming the putrid decay most avoid into the blabby light most desire.  So, like mud, she is not unacquainted with providing habitats, sustenance, and hiding places.

She is close to the water and not unacquainted with its methods.  She spurts and froths, calms and eddies, quenches and nurtures, and on occasion destroys—often for good reason, sometimes for none.

Water’s goodness is unlike the common good—the good that trades in perks and prestige, comforts of all kinds, and evil.  For the common good has evil as one of its trading interests, but the highest good—though including its lower forms—does not keep evil at a distance, across its borders, but knows it well, even settling on its muddy wormy bed, close to the way, hidden from fault.  The highest good does not need to trade, as elements and creatures naturally embed themselves in it and trade emerges from deficiency.

Water goes anywhere and is found everywhere.  So the sage.  She does not distinguish between hotspots and cold, between renowned banks and anonymous ones, between wide and narrow, shallow and deep, torrential and still, turbid and clear, populated and empty, nutritious and unpalatable, complicated and sparse.  All of life is fascinating and good—and who is she to say that one aspect is better than another, that she is destined to only exist in one milieu?  Is she so small?  If she is, she is not a sage, but a specialist and she has a name and she contends to maintain it.

Tao Te Ching VII

Heaven and earth are enduring.  The reason why they can be enduring is that they do not give themselves life.  Hence, they are able to be long-lived.

Therefore the sage puts her person last and it comes first,

treats it as extraneous to herself and it is preserved.

Is it not because she is without thought of self that she is able to accomplish her private ends?

The cosmos, while not eternal, in comparison to us is eternal.  Certainly the cosmos is indifferent and unconscious.  How then can that which is passionate, conscious, and very transient emulate that which is cold and long-lasting?  Why should it?

The sage does not become heaven and earth, even as she does not become the Tao.  Nothing becomes the Tao; the Tao becomes.  The sage loses herself in heaven and earth to become herself.  This loss is no Christian kenosis, though it is not entirely antithetical.  It is no subjection of the individual will to some larger will; there is no larger will, there are simply many wills.  The sage still has her private ends; she still comes first; she is preserved.  How can this be if she is hidden in the infinite folds of the universe?  It is because she is hidden in the infinite folds of the universe.

The sage does not lack a will; she simply directs her will to the becoming of the Tao, which is to say the becoming of all creatures.  As this is her becoming, why should she not accomplish her ends?

The universe is the only thing that truly and endlessly affirms; it affirms by not speaking and that which speaks—no matter how large, how historic, how numinous, how affective—is always only an aspect of the Tao.  The universe affirms, but it is no cuddly affirmation; it is an affirming that provides brief space for your existence and that is all.

Western dualism posits egoism against selflessness, good against evil, male against female, transience against permanence.  But the Tao, while nodding toward the existence of these categories and affirming them, at least in speech, is not inclined toward separating them.  If you love your daughter and she dies, her death is a negative act.  But if you also love the Tao—or perhaps more aptly are inclined toward it—you know that her loss is the gain of something else.  That the earth—flowers, beetles, squash—benefits from her decay and so, in turn, all creatures on the earth benefit.  Death always includes love and gain.  And who is the sage to say she is the only one that matters, the one that matters more?  It is not that she does not mourn her daughter, but that she does not equate her own place and feelings with the universe.  Everything is in its rightful place.  She mourns but like Chuang Tzu she may very well be singing, drumming, and dancing within days.  Society might be shocked—propriety is broken—but society is not the sage’s master.  Society continually strives to give itself life, maintain and increase it.  Whereas the sage turns her will toward that which looks at life and death, smiles, shrugs, and walks along.

The Sadoo, Walking

the sadoo walks. it walks and walks, walking through walls of talk (what a magician!), wearing out its socks (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 sadoo'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

Tao Te Ching VI

The spirit of the valley never dies.

This is called the mysterious female.

The gateway of the mysterious female

is called the root of heaven and earth.

Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,

yet use will never drain it.

Who lays claim to the eternal, especially these days of transience and time?  Who proclaims the hidden, especially in an age of explicitness and fame?  As the female morphs into the male and the male into the female, as the cumulative noise of monuments and those who would be monuments crowds the air, who would defend anonymity and silence?  When only the visible, the sensuous, the testable are granted credence by the pomp and powers, the texts and tyrannies, who would whisper to the valleys of night that only the invisible never dies?

Who would confound, not clarify?  Who would lose, not find?  Who would seem dim and ungraspable, not bright and held?  Who would nonchalantly refuse the world’s towering laurels, preferring to rest in the obscure shade of some unnamed cave?  Who would walk through doors not to get somewhere but to go through them?

Is this a timeless woman who has no name?  A woman shrouded in the inarticulate arts of subtle negation?  Or is it no woman, but some epicene who refuses definition?

The questions hover on elusive portals, and are gone.

The Tao removes itself, and removes again.  Doubly removed, for it is not just valley but the spirit of the valley; not just female but the mysterious female.  Then again, not just the mysterious female, but the gateway of the mysterious female.  Not just one name, but two.  Secret, yes, but manifestation and secret; desire and root.

If you would know yourself, the world around you, the arching panoply of power, and the origin of all things, you would remain detached from the myriad specific forms of knowledge and desire.  You would not climb, you would fall.  When you found the valley has no bottom and sex no ground, would you not rest in the dim light of this newly discovered land?  Would you not sing?

THE SADOO 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.

TAO TE CHING V

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and 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.

Much speech leads inevitably to silence.

Better to hold fast to the void.

Nature, leadership, wisdom.  These are all sentimentalized—which is to say falsified—by those who live far from these things.  Who lives in nature (not a cottage in nature) and thinks nature is benevolent?  Who binds human masses to some common goal and thinks leadership is sweet aphorisms on a desk calendar, speeches on a bedside table?  Who has gained the knowledge of rocks and time and, looking at humanity, thinks, What a lovely species!  How beautiful and virtuous!  Calm indifference to all particular things—which is to say, everything—is the hallmark of this detached trinity.

The sage is ruthless not because she struts across the city leaving heads and hearts lolling on the streets but because she doesn’t cater to the people’s infantile fantasies about themselves and the world.  For this refusal, she is considered ruthless.  If one understands heaven and earth—the vast coldness of heaven, the insignificant passions of earth—one also understands one’s self:  a microcosm of this coldness, these passions. 

The sage may laugh at the misfortunes of the world because she laughs at her own.  And only she who laughs at her own may also laugh at the world’s.  For this detachment and humor, she is considered ruthless.  The straw dogs want coddling.  When they have been used for what they are good for and find they are not coddled but cast out, they complain and accuse those who used them, though they were frequently complicit in their being used.  The dog complains, but the sage walks away whistling, setting out to do the next appointed task, even if this be banging pots by a shack until she dies.

The sage is a sage because she mirrors heaven and earth, not the rebellion against them.  The dogs are dogs because they rebel against this primary mirroring, eking out existence in the spiritual garbage heaps of the world.  There, there is another ruthlessness which the dogs call virtue and wisdom and leadership and nature and love.  But the sage is ruthless and her names are nothing but her breath—here, there, and gone.

THE SADOO MAT

In a world of acceleration, the sadoo slows down; even stops.  In a world of specialization and consequent ideology, the sadoo skims across the ocean of knowledge in his scatoo and the only thing he knows is the waves.  In a world scared of darkness and silence, the sadoo avoids neither light nor noise but they seem to him simply different faces of night.  The busy heap is busy buzzing, being anxious.  About money, security, reputation, love, health, and--behind it all--that great diffused monolith, death.  The bedsheets of memory, the duvets of hope, are happy escapes.

What does the sadoo do?  He laughs and dances and eats and breaks his celibacy vows when necessary.  When money happens, it happens; when it doesn't, it doesn't.  So with love and death.  Does he notice a difference in quality between having and lacking?  How could he?  The world is always full and verdant and he is in the world.  Every day is much the same, every day is entirely new.

This particular sadoo--Sadoo Diaper--has taken recently to sleeping on a foam mat on the floor and performs a twice-daily pilgrimage to store and retrieve his mat and bedding.  He views this as a comic ritual.  Ritual--and thus serious--in that it occurs regularly and reminds him of old unspeakable things--as a dog might piss at a space where a church wall once stood.  Comic in that the gap between the modesty of his sadoo-mat and the glory of the mighty mattresses he has had seems like no gap (he sleeps just as well, dreams as pleasantly) and he chuckles at the non-difference.  He chortles at the thought that the only difference is that he makes a daily silly pilgrimage, which he ponders and enjoys.

The only hero left is the non-hero.  So as bumbling Bloom is to Odysseus, the farting sadoo is to Buddha, we all--absurd, passionate, and mortal--are to the swirling forces of life (once named the gods) that cast us up, swirl us around, and soon enough feed us to monsters and flowers.

The sadoo is free not by exercising his will, expanding the artifacts and prosthetics around him, or attempting to nail his name to the sky ... but by watching the clouds blot out the moon and hearing a cat's bell tinkle in the distance.

TAO TE CHING IV

The way is empty, yet use will not drain it.

Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures.

Blunt the sharpness;

Untangle the knots;

Soften the glare;

Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

Darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there.

I know not whose son it is.

It images the forefather of God.

Does the Tao exist or does it not?  Is it the deluded creation of someone detached from the brute exigencies of reality or the elusive center and circumference of existence?  These are the questions of someone not walking the Tao.  In this sense, the Tao is like any way.  For those who walk the way of money, the way of money is real; for those of Christ, Christ is real; of family values, the same holds true.  And the list of ways is manifold, though the list of ways many claim is not long.  These ways, in theory or practice, explicitly or subtly—sometimes both, sometimes all—war against each other, each proclaiming the supremacy of its way.  But the Tao does not proclaim; it neither negates nor affirms each proclaiming way, though it can negate and affirm each way.  The Tao includes all ways, all myriad creatures, ideas, institutions, values, dreams; this is why it does not need to proclaim:  each specific way, each specific creature, each specific institution does the proclaiming and negating for it.  The sum of all proclamations and negations is the Tao.

We say the Tao is like … it seems … it’s the image of … for we can never see the whole, we can only intuit it.  Just as we can never see our entire body at the same time, so we can never think all thoughts, believe all values, and walk all ways simultaneously.  But we know the world—in all its teeming contradictoriness—is the one true thing.  So we walk the way of the world, which is the way of all ways, which is the Tao.

To reach the Tao, one walks the way of dismantling the ways that proclaim.  The light shines too clearly; all is not clear.  The truth pokes too incessantly, tradition stridently tangles, novelty creams its sticky honey.  The one who aligns herself with the Tao acknowledges the shining, the poking, the tangling, the creaming, but one is not blinded, stabbed, entrapped, or stuck.  For such a one walks in the empty darkness that, without speaking, says yes to all.

The Tao exists prior to the myriad specific ways, which are our great projections, veils on our fear, mutes on our trumpeting desires.  The one who follows the Tao neither veils her fear nor mutes her desires but by becoming the original fear and desire allows the Tao to enact fear and desire for her.  This does not mean she neither flees nor acts; it does not mean she does nothing … but she feels she does nothing for she does nothing but follow the Tao.  And the Tao is the force that gives birth to the gods and goes wherever it goes to whatever end.

It’s been said that life’s a dream; likewise it’s been said that unfortunately or not, it’s not—it’s the only reality.  Yet both these feelings are true:  life seems real, life seems a dream; life is real, life is a dream.  So with the Tao, for the Tao and life are like cousins in some obscure mythology.

The more life is categorized, technicized, visualized, analyzed, and verbalized, the more these methods of knowledge are trusted—that which is sensually objective—and the less the oneiric functions are, instead being viewed as the ignorant pastime of dilettantes and flakes—as they indeed often are.  But those categorizing, technicizing, visualizing, analyzing, and verbalizing are no less ignorant; it is simply that their ignorance is the accepted ignorance, the ignorance that masquerades as knowledge.  The Tao mysteriously unites the two modes and the one who follows the Tao walks the tightrope of strange unity, avoiding the silliness of excessive cognition and excessive fantasy.

So the Tao sometimes is glimpsed on a hazy night down a long corridor in a mirror, as the clouds wisp across the moon and a cool specter drifts though some window, effortlessly reaching for the glass, filling it with dim memories.

Of Merdia III

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.