CVI

 

What’s the difference between a habit, and a story?

 

It was the operative assumption, certainly one that lent urgency to the negotiations for a peaceful settlement to the Attica revolt, that a violent retaking of the prison would trigger widespread rioting in inner cities throughout the country.

But apart from a retaliatory bombing by the Weatherman, reaction was muted and the suppression of the rebellion did not trigger any major incidents, much less a wave, of civil unrest. How important a part, though, did the initial saturation media reports of hostages having their throats slashed by inmates, or being castrated and/or disemboweled, play in undermining public outrage over the state’s hard line?

It is impossible to say with any certainty what would have gone down in the presence of a different story. But the lack of a general and sustained uprising in response to the state’s naked show of power, compounded by its assertion of total control over the mass-mediated story, may have been a crucial factor in the rapid draining of energy out of the “revolution.” On a less speculative level, one thing I can say for sure is that after Attica, without any great intention to do so, I found beginning the slow walk away from the Movement – in the same manner I imagine, one sees among people who’ve survived a train wreck.

 

Sometimes you sit on the elephant. Sometimes the elephant sits on you.

 

The good Buddhist skeleton knows how to free its muscles from bony attachments.

 

Another way of thought may enter through the body. In the case of language the first organs of reception are the ears and mouth. The organ by which I have embraced daoism is the entire body, beginning with my lungs, which had been so compromised by a pathogen that their dysfunction affected every aspect of my life.

I speak specifically of the trigger that initiated my practice of qi gong, Ba Gua Zhang, and breath-meditation – a practice which, carried out over more than a decade, began to knit me into the integral whole I always imagined was possible but for which I had no “grammar,” or letters, since in such a practice there is only image, sense and syntax.

Thus the “entry wound” may become the incitatory moment of an ongoing healing, which, in the end, finds no “exit wound,” but rather a release of one’s qi freely into the universe, with its innumerable denser and more diffuse concentrations of the same spirit-matter-energy.

 

 

Sturm and drangy weather.

 

Ah, go feng shui yourself!

 

Then I can drown an eye, unused to flow

And Flo, she don’t know,

‘cause the boy she loves is a Romeo

 

A Bolshevik, 3 Mensheviks and Trader Vic walk into a bar…

 

If I had a wingnut

I’d wing it in the morning…

 

Five qilins and a dragon walk into a bar…

Wait a minute – do dragons walk?

 

Connection is available to the Plath trains…

 

Is your figure less than Greek?

 

Flat white: a coffee “style.”

Not a description of the world.

 

A choir boy

Acquire boy

 

Upon what basis does authority rest? The beggar’s authority lies in his poverty. The policeman’s authority rests upon the gun which is licensed to him by the state. As distinct from the stick-up man whose authority rests on his freelance desperation. Hence he is a desperado. Authority, it will be readily seen, ultimately rests on the liminal space inhabited by our idea of authority and the signs that constitute it. And who, therefore, are the authors of authority? Why we are – collectively! So can we call the construction of authority a socialist enterprise? Does it answer to that name?

 

Ah, there’s a pot of gold at the end of Eire’s gay marriage rainbow.

 

Welcome to the Hotel Diogenes.

 

In Western thought, what we call doubt is predicated upon a priori certainties: not the least of which being that non-Western thought really doesn’t constitute thought. And maybe it doesn’t in the sense that the West “thinks.”

 

We can become as vast as we need to become by allowing thought to permeate our bodies, like and as breath.

 

God guard me from the thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone…

Writ Yeats oncet in “The King of the Great Clock Tower.”

 

 

Eventually, a schemata becomes a schmata

 

Intelligence being the continuous scroll we paint of intelligibility

 

Clouds potentiate rocks potentiate human beings potentiate pine trees. And on. Anon. Anonymous.

 

Dictatorship of the vanities

 

What color is your paranoia?

 

A deer, caught in its own headlights

 

We are in the midst of a great dispersion – a diaspora – of consciousness, hence social energy. We are casting ourselves out, atomized, not from Eden, but from the very idea of habitation – of our bodies, of the earth, of the countless places in which it is possible to exist. We have grown allergic to our own concreteness and want to be beautiful, well-muscled clouds with a strong “core.”

But before we made the planet nowhere, we first had to makes ourselves nomad, nowoman, noman.

The Mall of America, or that other one in Dubai, what makes them different from the gigantic rubbish heaps at the inskirts of Harrare or some other spot? Only that the Mall is subject to tighter price controls.

And, of course, deep down we know that at some point known only to itself, all extremes collapse back on themselves and that today’s dispersion is the next instant’s singularity and that the bright blessed day is inextricably one with the dark sacred night.

And I believe I can feel the turning without as within, and I think to myself, what a wonderful whirl.

 

I was a dark, sacred night for the FBI

 

Thinking beside the box

Man-o-Manicheanism

 

The bailout or the bullet

 

The image comes of you on your bike, seen from high above – se faufiler – on your bike, call graphing and recalligraphing the scroll of the city in an improvisatory poem that goes on for as long as it goes on. Between the lines.

 

Philosophy begets real estate. It insists on debate, i.e. argument as the core of reason, and reason as a priori of thought. Hence land – the sustaining earth and sea – turn into debate, into confrontation, into a rationality to be rationalized. When truly, can one say the earth is debatable? Hunger is not a concept. In that sense, though it is very personal, however widespread the famine, it is not Property.

 

Society (as the sum of all its institutions) = socialized fear

 

 

Just how agog is my ped?

 

I am curious, George. Who is the Man With the Yellow Hat? Why is he so fascinated with the essence of your gonads? You can tell me, George, is he “cut hunter”? It’s OK, George, you can spill your secrets. What does the Man With the Yellow Hat have to do with Babar? Does Yellow Hat take his orders from Babar? Or is Celeste the brains behind the operation? Come on, George, don’t make it rough on yourself.

It’s like this, George, if you’re a good boy, you don’t spend even a day behind bars. We can protect you, George, make you look like a Bonobo – our cosmetics guys work miracles, even with a mug like yours. You’ll be safe and have all the chicks you want – bananas too. But don’t play with us, George. If you do, your bad quarter hour hasn’t even started.

OK, George, let’s take it from the top: Yellow Hat who does he report to? Tshombe? Mobutu? The Company? MI6?

 

A culture incapable of self-reflection is going nowhere no matter how fast its wheels turn, no matter how much dust it kicks up. It ends up swallowing its own tail.

 

From H. to E.D. via email, May 30, 2015:

Ah, dragons, indeed!…Yes, I think much of Dave [a deceased mutual friend and comrade] these days. I have no doubt that Dave would have found deep satisfaction in taking part in the race reconciliation work I am involved in here in Haywood Co. [NC] now. We are, in fact, currently investigating local law enforcement, with their active participation…

Yes, Dr. Wu was the real thing, too, when it came to Tai Chi, and Taoism. Oddly, in a phone conversation I had with him some years ago he admitted that all of his students had basically turned out to be a wash. He said they all grew up to be whiny and dependent, and many of them were still hanging around him expecting him to still lead them.

So, we must press on with the salvation of this earth we have inherited, and its peoples. We know so little, and are mistaken about so much!

Blessings,

 

From E.D. to H. in response:

Dear H. – I’m sorry but not surprised that Dr. Wu found it so difficult to transmit his teachings.

I imagine this may be one of the reasons my teacher emphasizes the martial aspects of Ba Gua Zhang and largely leaves it to his students to discover the consciousness transforming aspects on their own. Many of the students are Chinese medicine practitioners, and one begins to pick up, over time, a working knowledge of how the qi gongs affects that meridian system, organs and connective tissue; so that gives it a third dimension.

My sense, though, is that, aside from the commitment of a lot of time for what seems like a questionable result, that it is very hard, cognitively as well as psycho-spiritually to enter into a daoist practice for even the most “progressive” Western minds.

It’s been my personal experience that daoism leads one way out of one’s comfort zone into what is, essentially, non-existent territory for the three major monotheistic religions as well and Hinduism. Daoism is even missing the “transcendent” element of Buddhism. There is no sustaining narrative, only constant movement, change and transformation.

What I find, though, is that daoist practice dovetails well with my organic anarchism, and BGZ seems a fruitful path.

Onward, indeed.

Hugs abounding,

Eric