dao de jing vi

the spirit of the valley never dies

this is called the dark female

the entry into the dark female

is called the root of heaven and earth

tenuous it seems as if it were there

yet use will never exhaust it

dear sixes,

dao is not a descent and ascent or ascent and descent or ascent or descent, a season in hell, a mountaintop experience, a retreat, a place or system or status or argument, a destination or map, an i can help you or take you there, a self-denial, even a here or there, an escape or virtue, a process particularly, certainly not a product or tribe or people or religion or movement or a thing (though it too is a thing, though indistinct, a substance in crepuscular dimness). it might be a moving and a moving and movings

it acknowledges all and sides with all and simultaneously and mostly prefers valleys, darkness, roots, heaven (no christian or otherworldly heaven), not meddling, certain constructions of muliebrity, suppleness, nonharm, stillness

one of the legends of the birth of laozi relates how an old woman becomes pregnant after drinking a drop of sweet dew. she carries the baby for 80 years but only during the daytime … at night baby leaves the womb to study dao. when he is finally fully born (through his mother’s armpit some say) he already has a long white beard and is able to walk. seeing this strange old child (laozi means old master but homophonically & metaphorically suggests old child) the mother takes fright and dies. thus in this genesis of laozi – from gender neutral divine being to woman to child, there is no father

dao is not very comforting. it puts everything at risk. we pile others and things and words around ourselves and forget the world is much more threatening than we want to admit. everything is always at risk and one of dao stays still in this everything. we could say this staying still in this everything is entry into the dark female

again, so soon … it seems as if it were there. and watch for these repetitions of phrases, words, themes as they move and morph through the 81 poems, appearing and disappearing in varied contexts, even as do our varied selves and shapes in lives

she is not this or that. heaven in its compassion or earth in its barbarisms. both are present but they do not battle. in not the valley but the valley’s spirit. in not a woman but the darkness of an entry

so the sage dies, not from exhaustion. a loved body is over. an ambivalent life ends. a sage dies, as all, and the spirit of the dark valley, root and unusable, continues as it is, seeming

dao de jing v

heaven and earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs

the sage is ruthless; she 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

to hear much will lead only to a dead end

better to hold fast to what is within

dear fives,

in contrast to reward and punishment mythologies, moralities of good and evil … in contrast to any sentimental gods or god who assume goodness, compassion, love – offsetting cruelty, hate, malice to other forces … in contrast to the childish capricious powers of many – forceful infants of the heavens …  shrugging at ideas of benevolence and ritualistic conformity (whether the rites are prescribed institutionally or in the heave of society), dao doesn’t even posit a god (or at least a god more than a common tansy or brinjal masala). here are heaven and earth – the way of dark virtue and the way of simian prescribed rites – the people, the sage

the sage, who is later dismissed as unworthy and risible. the people, who are routinely presented as a pulsing conglomerate of necessary followers. the impossible way of heaven. the pervasively enforced expectations of earth

here heaven, earth, and sages form a strange alliance, of which the people are not a part, contractually bound by ancient models to a dna of indifference. the people though get excited or discouraged by constructions of amorality, immorality, blood and barbarism, difference, the vestments and scripts of hierarchical power and status, their passions expressed in moral systems, tedious schadenfreude and its organized siblings (government and war), integrity and transgression

and what is this indifference  – detachment or fate or enlightenment or geometry or discernment or silence or intelligence or something else or puerility?  – a magnificent disdain for the mores of a species which has consistently demonstrated through its nightmare, history, that it cannot act except through severings, genocides, rapaciousness, and an alert purposiveness?

love is mentioned few times in these 81 vignettes and when it is always in a way that subverts our common orientations. dao doesn’t say love but ruthlessness. not a ruthlessness apart from love as it is not apart from anything. dao does not do apart. (to not take this word or text or any and raise it to an all)

not that ruthlessness of presidents and entrepreneurs that is called expediency and pragmatism, not that squabbling fortress of mothers and fathers and lovers and spouses that is called love, not that ruthlessness of a member of the myriad creatures as it goes about its entertained scrimmage of a life, a ruthlessness called whatever it is called, but some other kind that is not defined by the images in your mind but by dao, undefined, in its inexplicabilities

love, that drippy word, may be destroying us. for the way we practice it is not large. it does not reach beyond our little interests of self and species, around the earth and out to heaven, past the breathing of the infinite spaces between, and further still, something at hand, a vital emptiness

dao acknowledges the paths – of reading all the books, collecting all the lovers, helping all the poor, responding to all the messages, listening to all the podcasts and videos, amassing all the wealth, assuming all the power, knowing all the references and magic tricks, displaying all the beauty … and of holding assiduously to that vitality

and where are the measures and graphs and peer-reviewed articles to show the how and what and why of this? how do i tell that one holds fast to that?

by means of dark virtue, by means of old paths, by means of confused turnings, by means of muddledness and listlessness, by means of this

dao de jing iv

the way is empty yet when used there is something that does not make it full

deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures

blunt the sharpness

untangle the knots

soften the glare

follow along old wheel tracks

darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there

i don’t know whose child it is –

it images the foreparent of god

dear fours,

long before simulation replaced reality and images the word, before surfaces usurped the deep and the seen became the only rule of truth, idontknow of dao loitered in existence’s confused corridors

long before natality and genealogy were questioned by the revolutionary doors of modernity, before causation was sublimated and identity defined, mud and murkiness presented themselves in shadows and indistinctions at an unmarked crossroads of history and nothing

god here is not some omniscient omnipresent omnipotent conscious or unconscious good or indifferent or malicious creator that bred a world and left, forgot, neglected it, merged with it … even some totality of opposites ... but just a bump and a ride on a carousel of vague forms, an orphan of emptiness

pointedness. entanglement. brightness. novelty. a quaternity of desirable attributes which dao in its almost comic nonchalance suggests we don’t particularly esteem or nurture. hardly advocating idiocy, dullness, conservatism or tradition, simpleness … hardly articulating a fourstep plan to wellness, success, happiness, enlightenment, knowledge … hardly inducting you into any arcane esoteric arts … lacking teleological thrust, highlighting a constructing through notconstructing, leading through following (not any idea, person, thing, text, feeling), an ising through seeming, a way through notway

it only seems

it only seems as if

it only seems as if it were

there

i reach into infinite hereness of soul and what do i sense but an appearing to, an if that moves around itself in shimmering vacuity

i don’t know how to embrace such elusiveness. i don’t know if it is full or nearly full or empty or running out. i don’t know if it is a thing or what it is or is not. i don’t know how it is related. i don’t know its accomplishments. i don’t know if it is worthy or real or an it or a joke or imbecility, a reflection of an archaic absolute or a bending of a line, an allaying, an untangling, a softening …

dao de jing iii

not to honour humans of excellence will keep the people from contention

not to value goods that are hard to come by will keep the people from theft

not to display what is desirable will keep the people from being unsettled

hence in its rule the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies

weakens their purpose but strengthens their bones

it constantly keeps the people innocent of knowledge and free from desire

and causes the clever not to dare

it simply takes no action and everything is in order

dear threes,

in this age of action, will, desire, coveted goods, displayings, knowledge, cleverness, purpose, strength, guilt, daring, prizes … how could we ever respond to such a piece of trivial comedy?

in a world that calls for increasingly accelerated action, that fears and seeks disorder, that could be said to inhabit – and require for its shaky presentations of sanity – a constantly expanding ever-full so-busy amusement park of mind … what are we to conjure from this text other than laughter and a quick return to facebook?

the people. contentious. stealing. unsettled. ignorantly purposive. banally knowledgeable. conventionally clever. orgasmically active

the sage. emptying, filling. weakening, strengthening. keeping, freeing, causing. all not for all but for not

three nots begin. not to honour. not to value. not to display. not as commandments. these are not do nots. rather these are apophatic infinitives

and the dao de jing belongs in a tradition of extreme erotic animation, of unbounded limitless vitality, not of any of these cheap pejorative unthinking labels of sublimation, denial, repression, puritanism, prudery spawning from an inquisitional technochristian psychology … but through immersions in life flows that will not be dammed, ossified, monetized, monumentalized. its negations and seeming absurdities – which are truly absurdities seen from within the crammed and camera’d tourist lookout of monuments – arise from a natural aversion to the apparent positivity of construction and objective … as things that have forgotten their not-thingness

here is a not-self. look at the selves in it. here is a not-word. see the words

not a discipline or even a practice but maybe an experience, sensation, attraction, response

and the rule? what do we say about this? do we posit an esotaticized empire in which its people are the myriad voices of a collective psychic history pulsing through the vast empty spaces of modern interiority? do we messianically or otherwise dream of a singularity or set of singularities that might slip through the heaping clutters of meddling sectarian politics to impossibly model dao in a world of technology – that knowledge made overwhelming and necessitous environment?

what are these questions but the mind that has neither emptied nor overflowed, set in its irrigation canals for the mawed input pipes of gorged epistemological factories?

dao is a form of radical freedom, of an orientation toward and placement in desire such that all possible objects of desire are already present and fulfilled, presenting and fulfilling, to be presented and fulfilled, tenses and modes of wandering … of identities relentlessly morphing and morphed into one another, of mutation not being a precipitator and product of fear but these very seconds of air we breathe

so humans. take your hierarchies of people and things and don’t invert them – inverted hierarchies, twisted hierarchies, flattened hierarchies, transmuted and transformed hierarchies are still hierarchies. just simply not and no and an order that slips through the ordering ordered orders may manifest