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.

TAO TE CHING III

Not to honor men of worth will keep the people from contention; not to value goods which are hard to come by will keep them from theft; not to display what is desirable will keep them from being unsettled of mind.

Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones.  He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

The root of reality is the body, thus the body is at the center of the Tao.  To know the body is to know the world.  When one is scared of the body, when one is scared of the world, one reverts to violence—against oneself, against others; by means of the body, by means of the mind.  The body is truly the one and only thing to be afraid of; even death is included in the body.  But the body includes so much more than death:  contradiction, vulnerability, beauty, unpredictability, hunger, amorality.  To counter the body, many build fortresses against it:  homes and wars, morals and systems, ideologies and philosophies, institutions and analysis.

The one who follows the Tao does not build a fortress against the body, but deals with her fear of the body by entering into the body’s center and using that center as her strength.  That center is the Tao.

If the people have as much food and sex as they want, if their needs for comfort and pleasure are easily gratified, if they are not given the opportunity to dream of impossible structures and otherworldly schemes, then why would they rebel?  Such easy gratification is, of course, difficult for some and impossible for a few.  But for many, this is all they require … and, in human society, the many is the boat, the leader the rudder, the Tao the sailor, and nature the elements.

The evolution of a life, a culture, or a species seems to follow a line.  And in some ways it does—stretching forward in time, reaching for dreams and ideas, extending to attach words and objects to itself.  Monument and temple; masterpiece and system; script, plan, and story.  As the line thickens and lengthens—ossifying, cracking, swirling, yet continuing—it whips the minds of individuals and cultures, scourging them with incessant urgent calls to decisively unambiguously add to the line’s thickening and lengthening.

The line is mind and will; flesh is a circle.  The Tao doesn’t dismiss the line but if it were given tokens to lie on the nearest shape, the circle would mostly be nearer.

Existence is a fearful jewel.  To deal with our insignificance alongside this jewel, we cover it with dirty rags, build strident taunting structures that mirror splinters of the jewel, boast of our supremacy, and proclaim ourselves—directly, indirectly, subtly, surreptitiously— knowledgeable and powerful.  But the greatest of our structures are neither strident nor taunting but rather calm attempts to straightforwardly remove the rags and polish the jewel, revealing it for what it is.  So existence is a small circle and our greatest efforts large ones and the Tao the breath that expands and contracts and does nothing.

Of Merdia II

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

TAO TE CHING II

The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad.

            Thus Something and Nothing produce each other;

            The difficult and the easy complement each other;

            The long and the short offset each other;

            The high and the low incline towards each other;

            Note and sound harmonize with each other;

            Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.

            The myriad creatures rise from it yet it claims no authority;

            It gives them life yet claims no possession;

            It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;

            It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit.

It is because it lays claim to no merit

            That its merit never deserts it.

If desire is the orthodox energy—our grid and outlets—beauty is the orthodox appliance.  We plug beauty into desire and feel a strange utility.  We purchase beauty in sleek packaging, according to the prerogatives of marketing and merchandising, from and for desire.  If one lives in a forest of iPods and food processors, a new gadget may be beautiful; but if one lives in a forest of sequoias and brooks, that same gadget may be ugly.

The Tao doesn’t care much for interpretations that grow from the soil of only one forest.  The Tao’s soil is the world—its myriad forests, its diverse ecologies.  What’s beautiful in one environment is ugly in another; what thrives in one system dies in another.  The one given to the Tao sees that all things lead to their opposites, and all opposites are bound to what they aren’t.  How then does such a one affirm anything?  It’s quite simple.  Such a one affirms any thing because it affirms everything.

But whereas most people affirm things and draw the strength of those affirmations from the things they negate—thus depending as much if not more on their hidden negations than their overt affirmations—the one given to the Tao draws her affirmation from the fact of the thing’s existence in the context of all other things.  The former affirmation feels total to the one affirming, for the one affirming stakes his existence and subsequent claims—the very justification of his being—on the rightness of his affirmations over his negations.  But the latter affirmation is never total; the only totality is the sum total of all affirmations—neither an affirmation nor a negation, neither both, but something else.  This is the Tao and the one who lives in such diffused and contradictory ambiguity one given to the Tao.

Opposites do not simply produce each other, they are each other.  They are not each other identically or analogously, but contain each other within themselves as lovers contain each other.  The separation of values—beautiful from ugly, good from evil—is a mental exercise designed to make the intellectual gymnast (though he is often fat) increase his comfort in the face of life’s overwhelming discomforts.  And—let’s face it—the miracle is that the exercise often works.  Who would not then perform it in the armchair of his mind?  The one given to the Tao.  Why?  Because neither comfort nor miracles, beauty nor ugliness, good nor evil, particularly depress or enchant him.  He sees them as children on opposing seats of a seesaw, in endless play and vacillation.

The sage is not the sage because she wishes to be a sage … or, more likely, wishes to be perceived as a sage.  The sage is a sage because she’s a sage.  She was born on the non-action side of the seesaw, looking across the fulcrum of nothingness to the bulging seat of action.  How does one who is born from action and gives birth to it—but is non-action herself—cause her end of the seesaw to rise then?  Ah!  That is the mystery.

The sage describes the great stage of action because that is what she sees before her.  But does she see yet refrain from describing the backstage of non-action because that is what she is?  Ah!  That is a question.

The sage does not become better than others because of her sagacity; she does not become better than others at all; she simply becomes a sage because she is not inclined to act—a lack of inclination not from indolence or fear, but from vision and inclination.  This inclination hardly precludes action but places it in spaces of sensation that affirm and in this affirming multiply action into all things. Others, then, from envy or lack of understanding, equate sagacity and superiority, but if the sage is truly a sage, she denies this equation.  Indeed, she tends to deny or at least sidestep all equations.