Tao Te Ching XI

Thirty spokes share one hub.

Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand and you will have the use of the cart.

Knead clay in order to make a vessel.

Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand and you will have the use of the vessel.

Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room.

Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand and you will have the use of the room.

Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.

Scholars, firefighters, the wise, astrologists, businesspeople and priests, prostitutes, bathroom repair technicians, and judges all share one assumption:  that something will lead to something; that a specific act, idea, or attitude—or some conglomeration of acts, ideas, or attitudes—will, more likely than not, lead to another specific act, idea, or attitude.  The Tao does not deny etiology but places empty spaces as the cause of function and movement.  Whether these be the empty spaces of the physical world or the empty spaces of the mind and soul.

The sage is the sage because for her causes transform from solids to liquids to gases … and dissipate.  Uncertainty, agnosticism, doubt are her playthings.  Morality is the weapon of those afraid of the gaseous dissipative world--the world that has shadowy guidelines but no rules, that sees justice, truth, and love as moments rather than monuments.  (But if fear leads to morality, does not this show the sage to be a hypocrite, as even she believes in causation?)

There are empty spaces, there are the ways we respond to them, and there is the stab of emotion between.

The sage does not stay in nothing, but migrates easily to something.  But all do this.  The sage is the sage because she is disinclined to attribute solid names in the ancestries of all specific things.

The Sadoo Corporation

It should appear obvious to even a casual onlooker that the sadoo is a corporation.  While this particular sadoo cannot necessarily speak on behalf of other sadoos, he is vaguely aware that his own corporation—like all—has various executive branches with various responsibilities; these are outlined below.

Sadoo Corporation Division	Title of Head	Function	Analogy in Capitalism
Word	Senior Executive Vice-president (SEVP)	To be constantly receptive to new configurations of words which subvert the commonplace and animate.	Corporate Communications
Vision	SEVP	To experience God and to see God in all that is encountered	Strategic Planning
Flaneur	SEVP	To move his body around the city of the world—avoiding no sight, sound, smell, taste, or feel—tracing his body’s movement on consciousness.	Transportation
Waste Management	SEVP	To transform all solidity, resentment, cliché, seriousness, possession, and death into dance.	Waste Management
Excess and Rebound (formerly the Paint-by-Number Division)	Executive Vice-president	To fully explore all aspects of the contradictory problematic capricious infinite soul.	Risk Management
Input-Output	EVP	To put things in his body and take them out.	Human Resources
Whatever	VP	To oversee the obligations to time, space, and their extensions.	Operations and Technology
Survival	Custodial Engineer	To maintain and increase money, sex, fame, security, reputation, and comfort.	Custodial Operations

Notes

• The Custodial Engineer, Survival reports to the Vice-President, Whatever, who in turn reports to the Executive Vice-president, Input-Output.
• All seven executives (the four SEVPs, the two EVPS, and the one VP) and the one custodial engineer all sit on The Sadoo Corporation’s (TSC) Management Board.

Two distinctions between The Sadoo Corporation and the capitalistic corporation immediately become obvious.

1. The paramount values of the capitalistic corporation (and in this we include for-profits, non-profits, governments, NGOs, and most individuals)—money, sex, fame, security, reputation, comfort—are, in The Sadoo Corporation, made subservient to word, vision, movement, and transformation.  This inversion presents the Sadoo with most of his problems, not only in terms of living his own life but in mingling in normal society, as he finds it difficult to grasp how most view the custodial engineer’s objectives as interesting, worthy, exclusive, and supreme, devoting their lives and conversations to putting everything noble and transcendent (art, imagination, God, nature, beauty) in the service of dust and the custodial engineer.
2. No president, chairman, or CEO exists to oversee and have ultimate responsibility for The Sadoo Corporation; neither do any of the management team have such control.  Rather, the members of the management team routinely disagree with each other and have little comprehension of the others’ objectives.  Board meetings are thus rarely productive but are often stimulating; sometimes the custodial engineer is the only one who says much, despite the fact that he’s the most boring.  If any unifying factor exists, it is the Sadoo’s body, a possibility that the EVP of Input-Output and the SEVP of Flaneur do not hesitate to attempt to exploit—to no effect, however, as the other executives—particularly the SEVPs of Word, Vision and Waste Management—don’t give a damn about the Sadoo’s body.  In fact, the Input-Output and Flaneur executives don’t really either; they just say they do because it makes them feel more important than they are.

And so The Sadoo Corporation—like all corporations—has its distinctions, routine operations, strengths, flaws, and finitude.  

For readers further interested in sadoo management

and administration, we kindly refer them to —

http://sadoos.blogspot.ca/

— where Fukky Risotto graciously

hosts posts from sadoos around the world

The Sadoo Society of Upper Canada

In the past when people asked me what I did, communication was easy.  Consultant, director, project manager, professor, teacher.  Nods and smiles and where do you work and mortgages and marriages and aren’t the olive gruyere pistachio artichoke empanaditas wonderful and children and minivans and everything as normal as America.

Then I became a manager of an outdoor organic fruit&veggie market and told people I was a peach salesman.  Tenure-crazed academics would buy peaches from me and say they wished they were peach merchants but everyone listening knew the scholars were too tethered to their tiny offices to ever leave the circus of knowledge and the prestige of firing degrees into the stratosphere of global commerce.  Following my peach adventures, I became a househusband, creating giggles, curiosity, vague incomprehension, and occasional disdain.

Now, after many years of trying to fit into the world’s standard and non-standard occupations—of trying to please bosses and wives and chairs and executives and girlfriends and gods and entrepreneurs and pleasing none of them at all—I came to the edge of the earth and there found a syllogism—

I have searched the world for the right job and there is nothing that is right.

I shall joyfully destroy my body before I destroy my soul.

I have to create a new job.

Fine, but there were still three paths I had to duly consider and reject.

1.      The traditional religious paths of renunciation (sadhu, monk) I rejected because I didn’t want to renounce anything.

2.      The modern aesthetic paths I rejected because I find artist circles to be as greedy, petty, mediocre, and fame-obsessed as the very groups they are supposed to transcend.  While I don’t particularly care for conventional society—finding it to be rather like sleeping wombats in an overcrowded cage in a zoo—the art industry has simply erected its own conventionality which tends to have the same underlying values as business.  More importantly, any writing of note does not emerge from writing-as-career but as a by-product of something else—writing as spiritual vocation.

3.      
I very much wanted to call myself a flâneur and join The Historical Society of Flâneurs.  But this is so historically Parisian and, via Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, has become so abducted by totalitarian academic rhetoric that one can’t use the word without being buried in an avalanche of psychosocial gobbledygook.

So I became a sadoo—a person committed to continually nurturing his passion, wit, perspicacity, caprice, and intellect and never allowing the common pursuits—money, security, reputation, possessions, and fame—to get in the way of this nurturing.  Also to generously share what he has nurtured with whomever wants that sharing and to happily walk away from those who don’t.

Is sadooing really a job though?  Isn’t it more of a delusion? a hobby? a pretention? a madness? 

No.  It’s a job.

Term	Standard Definition	Sadoo Diaper’s Interpretation
Job	A regular activity performed in exchange for payment.	Sadooing is a job.  All I do is sadoo and I get paid exceedingly well for it.
Payment	The transfer of wealth from one party to another.	As a divorce lawyer once wisely said to me, there are many forms of currency; money is only one and hardly the most important.  Naturally, the payment I receive is entirely in non-monetary currencies, which seems appropriate.
Party	A person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law.	As there are many forms of currency, so there is more than one law:  the law of cops and judges—always imperfect, often unjust—but there are also laws of aesthetics, caprice, nobility, madness, observation, and purity (all also imperfect, often unjust).  The courts of torts and estoppels may not recognize sadooing in its somber ossified halls, but this particular sadoo says that all beautiful things have been born outside of standard definitions and hallways.

So—perhaps because initiating a new occupation is often lonely—I have strange desires.  Not least among these is to begin The Upper Canada Sadoo Society (UCSS):  an odd assembly of sadoos, would-be-sadoos, playful sadoo-critics, charlatan sadoos, and SITs (sadoos-in-training), who would not erect any solid laws and schools and robes and rhetoric and prisons (as do those physical societies and courts that tend to be used by those who have no justice of their own) but would misspell and bend the laws; send them through a prism—swallowing the refractions; continually creating, recreating, and demolishing societies and gods; contriving obscure sadooic passion plays and closet dramas; avoiding and mocking the serious and mean-spirited; never flagging, always dancing; not belonging to anyone or anything but the very air that gives him breath.

The Sadoo and Temptation

The sadoo, naturally, has many temptations, some of which he should definitely succumb to, some of which he is unsure about, and some of which he should definitely avoid.  These are not classic temptations—the sadoo can be permitted drunkenness, debauchery, indolence, neglect, insolence, arrogance, heaps of red meat, superciliousness, and disregard for the law in all its ossified, liquid, and gaseous forms—but rather focus on whether the activity in question unduly misaligns the sadoo with his essential vocation, whether it makes him feel smaller than the universe he seeks to mirror.

The great heaving masses devote their lives to the usual disciplines:  amusement and all its circus tricks, money and all its verdant relatives, mirrors and all their little validations, political power and all its random surges of bliss and Schadenfreude, sex and all its petty cosmic dramas, movement and all its pretensions of progress, possessions and all their simulations of security.  The difference between the sadoo and the heaving masses is not that he avoids these activities, but that he does not seek them … if they happen, they happen.  Whether he’s rich, homeless, celibate, polygamous, admired, despised, active, still, amused, bored—it’s all really the same to him, for all states are just different forms of energy and the sadoo excels at transforming whatever is given to him into useful forms of bouncing joy.  The only potential advantage of boredom, poverty, obscurity, powerlessness, and stillness is that they do not tend to threaten to deceive as significantly as their opposites as to the nature of the universe.

Why then does the sadoo say no?  Simply, if any activity, person, thing, or idea demands to be more than what it is and so reduce the sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things—it is evil and must be avoided; if an activity, person, thing, or idea enhances the sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things, it is good and must be embraced.

The sadoo has one god and it is life.  Anyone acquainted with life knows it accepts all manifestations with equanimity and the sadoo’s one goal is to emulate life’s equanimity.  Why?  Because this is better than gathering things and lovers to oneself?  No.  Because it is what the sadoo does and what he is made to do.  The sadoo is committed to one thing—even as all creatures are committed to one thing—to be himself; to deviate from this is to transgress and leads to spiritual death.  But the sadoo must remain fully animate and if this should cost him his physical life, it is a small cost.  For all things, though beautiful and eternal, are transient and small.

Energy and the Object: Desire

Energy and the Object, in post-Spinozean form, explores the relationship between energy and the object in six sections:  Desire, Desire and Suffering, Energy, Objects and Subjects, Energy and the Object, A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy.  This is the first section.

1.      Desire

1.1.   Desire is at the center of God, nature, technology and art¾the four dimensions that comprise the human.

1.1.1.      Desire is at the center and circumference of these dimensions; the further one draws toward the middle¾corruption of desire in the forms of repression, moderation and stagnation.

1.1.2.      No human reaches the center or circumference, although occasionally some feel as if they have; the fullest descriptions or enactments of this feeling are what humans chiefly celebrate.

1.1.3.      The center and circumference are both desire’s purity, but the former is desire for desire and the latter desire for non-desire.  Both, however, are equally desire, and this equation unites what has classically been called the sinner and the saint.

1.1.3.1.            The sinner, who strives to live at desire’s center, is typically associated with life, although death is his shadow; the saint, who strives to live at desire’s circumference, is typically associated with death, and life is his shadow.

1.1.3.2.            Death and life are embedded in each other like a fruit and its seed; so desire’s two pure forms know each other like transgression and the law.

1.2.   Desire is amoral and without identity; these characteristics are both what draw humans toward it and away.

1.2.1.      While the draw toward and away are equal, and most are given to primarily moving away, with occasional and decreasing spurts toward the center and circumference, those whom we most celebrate are those drawn to desire’s amorality and namelessness.

1.2.2.      All are born amoral and nameless, ripe with raw desire; some are simply unable to move far from birth though they themselves may want to; desire itself holds them back.  This holding back is what humans celebrate, for it seems to them mysterious, though it is no more mysterious than what is called maturation; it is simply less common.

1.2.2.1.            Naturally, those who are withheld are those forced to encounter creation.

1.2.2.2.            These ones are often called creators, although all they do is describe their relationship to the birth they can’t escape.

1.2.3.      The artifacts that seduce away from desire offer the shadow of seduction for those who are disinclined to the stark light and darkness of its purer forms; these artifacts include alcohol, money, acquisitions, reputation and institutions.  These products are the children of the fear of desire; desire breaks them as easily as a hurricane does a tree.

1.2.4.      Desire’s attributes are the attributes of origins and apocalypses¾whirling masses of black light whose gravity pulls the universe in, and spits it out.

1.2.5.      Those who seek names are never those of the greatest desire, for to desire desire or its negation is to enter on a quest where names are worms; those of desire seek something else and this something else eternally sets names aside.

1.3.   The greatest desire is the greatest tension between the greatest impossibilities.

1.3.1.      If I could desire equally both absolute light and absolute darkness, both desire’s center and circumference, I would become desire.  But this is impossible and this impossibility is the substance of all our fantasies.  He who dwells equally in these fantasies and their impossibility is the one who dwells closest to absolute desire; but even this indwelling is nearly impossible and is, if achieved, just the shadow of divinity on earth.  As if God Himself were passing over like a cloud and the indwelling one born into the transient discoloration of its passing.

1.3.2.      To reduce tension is to reduce the dimensions that comprise the human which is to reduce the human.  God, technology, nature and art are all reduced by the promulgation of moderation and peace.  Each of these requires diversity and blood, the antitheses of peace.

1.3.2.1.            The greatest subjects of desire are not those who displace desire’s tension onto groups through war or institutions, but those who carry the tension in themselves and funnel it into the dimension they are called to.  They internalize war, live on its inner battlefield and reform the hidden vain sound and fury into human forms.

1.3.2.2.            Desire’s subjects create new forms of God, technology, nature and art; each new form requires a thousand or a million objects to maintain it, balancing the scales of flesh in time’s peculiar courtroom.

1.3.2.3.            Some would say that the human lives far from edges and centers; they would rename the human¾animal.  But isn’t everything defined by its distinctiveness and human distinctiveness by eros (tension) and thanatos (tension’s snapping).

1.4.   Desire is the God behind God, the form behind forms, the darkness preceding the division of night and day, the good below good and evil, the breath that sparks and the wind that kills.  Desire is the force that terminates God and stuffs nature into a monitor.  It does not care what it does or what it makes, as long as it is constantly doing and making.  Its products are relevant to humans, but irrelevant to desire; desire is constant movement, the process from which forms are born and to which they return.

1.4.1.      Humans tend to cling to products, but desire will wrench their fingers from the objects of their clinging, throw them in the sea and leave the humans spun and desperate.

1.4.2.      As the world is made of products¾an ever increasing number¾often humans can flop from one to one and mistake their flopping for desire.  It’s the laughter of desire, but desire is the sea.  Humans are pale images of desire’s totality and contradiction.

1.5.   Desire!  What is it but the chasm between time and sensation?

1.5.1.      The chasm

1.5.1.1.            Some would call this chasm Hell and avoid it at any price or fall forever in its teeth.

1.5.1.2.            Some would invert it and call it Heaven¾the heaven of humanity.

1.5.1.3.            To desire, these names and movements are the same; let humans invent and move.

1.5.2.      Time

1.5.2.1.            Desire once worked through God and nature in their presence and art and technology in their absence.

1.5.2.2.            As desire has stretched from its clockless origins, it has begun working through God and nature in their absence and art and technology in their presence.

1.5.2.3.            For time to function, both the workings of absence and presence are necessary; what each is attached to is irrelevant, as long as the attachments balance.

1.5.3.      Sensation

1.5.3.1.            Human orientation to desire has been evolving from its circumference to its center.  This is analogous to desire crossing the chasm from time to sensation and with this crossing, human perspective changing, for what is human perspective other than our relationship to desire?

1.5.3.2.            As desire crosses, time becomes something not natal and living but geriatric and prosthetic.

1.5.3.3.            Sensation becomes primary because all that is absent, all that is at desire’s circumference, is held solely in one place¾the surface of human flesh¾and the burden of this holding has become the burden of desire.  So the world is oriented to its burden and time fades to an autumn flower.

1.5.3.3.1.      The tool to deal with the human burden is technology, and technology’s spirit that sustains and destroys it is art.

1.5.3.3.2.      Humans peer through the thick lens of desire at sensation’s shore and think they see salvation.  Why not?  But when desire meets sensation, God and nature will have become a point so dense with absence that technology and art will have been forced to become almost all to compensate.

1.5.4.      Falling

1.5.4.1.            Desire is like the surface of the ocean, but without substance at its surface or below.  Desire is an ocean of nothingness.

1.5.4.2.            If humans give up on desire, they fall between the shores of time and sensation and present themselves to the chimera of forgetting.

1.6.   Desire does not change; only humans change in relation to desire.

1.6.1.      Desire’s manifestations ceaselessly change; this is why desire never changes.

1.6.2.      Humans could be said to be nothing other than manifestations of desire.

1.6.3.      Because desire is wrapped in humans like death in tombs, the only way for them to gain perspective on their fashion is to fall and see desire from below or, by a severe act of the imagination, use desire to see themselves on either shore¾time or sensation¾looking at desire from its origin or end.

1.6.4.      Using a substance (even a substanceless substance) to look at the same substance when the looker is comprised only of this substance is problematic.  This disorientation is at the root of confusion; we could call this root alienation or, more classically, sin.

1.6.4.1.            Only a human who becomes easeful with this root can be said to be most human, for this root is the human.

1.6.4.2.            Such ease does not remove the disorientation, confusion or alienation; it is simply ease with them, ease being the acknowledgement that they are necessary aspects of the human condition.  A human who claims to remove any of these dissatisfactions is false to humanity and itself, what in classical language was called a false prophet.

1.7.   We can think of desire not simply as the center and circumference of all human constituents, but as the constituent material of existence.

1.7.1.      This existence is not simply what is scientifically, misanthropically, shockingly or pleasantly called life (birth, comforts, survival, growth), but equally all that which is attached to life (disease, decay, termination, brutality, accident).  Desire, though it end life or make life look anathema to life, is for all and in all.

1.7.2.      The human soul is simply desire for everything and the greatest individual souls are closest to this impossibly contradictory plurality, though existence itself, ironically, indifferently and silently, forces even them, through its tools¾the finely meshed sieve of time, fate’s indestructible hammer¾to a single pathway, though this singularity is paved for them with more diverse materials than those who accept it early, blindly, naturally.