CVIII

 

Once in a while, when you’re sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, as you were this morning, waiting for your Ba Gua students to arrive, you’ll stretch back holding your iPhone over your head and shoot blind behind you, upside down. Nor, necessarily, do you look at what you got until later.

“Are you part of the conference?” asks a voice. A man, your age more or less, informally but not shabbily dressed. Trimmed beard, salt and pepper, not unlike your own. He has paused just in front of you on the path leading out of the park.

“Conference?” you ask.

“Yes,” he says, “you look like you’re dressed for the conference, very much like I am.”

“Well,” you say, listening to the fountain, the clack of metal balls and the canticle of birds, “I’m already at this conference, the conference of all things, sentient and otherwise. Which conference did you mean?”

“Psychohistory – the International Psychohistory Association, over there at the Kimmel Center.” He gestures toward one of the ugliest piles of beige brick in Christendom. “You look like you’re about to teach something.”

“Actually, I am. In a few minutes, I’ll be teaching Ba Gua Zhang – it’s a kind of cousin of Tai Chi – right over there near where they’re playing pétanque.”

“Well, I’m a professor of philosophy.”

You nod and begin to form words of inquiry about his specialty.

“Got to go,” he says, reminding you in the moment very much of the White Rabbit (and yourself).

“OK,” you say, “have a good one.”

Two or three minutes pass. The sax player who spends most mornings standing under the statue of Garibaldi, whanging out, among his repertoire of standards, “Favorite Things,” has taken a break and now walks by your bench talking on his cell phone. “Well, yeah,” he says, “find ‘em, fool ‘em, fuck ‘em, fugget ‘em!”

Ah, there’s Mitch waving to you as he crests the rise. Time to walk in circles. In the square.

 

 

The fool has left the hill

 

It may be that when human energy is distributed among so many individuals – seven billion-odd souls – that it simply becomes too diffuse for coherent cultural structures to form or be maintained.

 

You veer out of the bikelane to avoid a parked truck and a white, blue and red van whizzes past, nearly sideswiping you. AMERICOLD REFRIGERATION SERVICES. Yeah, you got that right.

 

I’m not sure I have the wherewolfwithal to continue howling at the moon…

 

To ignore their prophesy is an act of Sybil disobedience…

 

Gliding on the woosh of the cappuccino machine, a song drifts down from the ceiling speakers of Le G:

When I cut your eye

My hat stood still…

 

Things seem not to end, but sometimes they land

 

What is the quality of the internal gaze?

 

Zhuangzi refers to the du channel (which runs up the back and connects with the ren channel descending along the front midline of the body), as the “central meridian,” whose current, flowing unseen, acts as the real controller of life – as distinct from the conscious mind’s pretensions of control. [Bisio, Ba Gua Circle Walking Nei Gong, p. 145, citing Zhuangzi: Essential Writings & Selections From Traditional Commentaries. Brooke Ziporyn, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2009]

 

I was a Flaminian Wayfarer for the FBI

 

So much of what we think of as personally or socially undesirable, wrong, or even evil, results from disharmonies of qi, i.e. imbalances of yin and yang energies.

One cannot depend on external influences or forces, on philosophical or religious systems, institutions of education, medicine, punishment, or “reform,” on the purportedly self-regulating market, and least of all on the state, to restore or maintain our internal balance.

The techniques for regulating it, however, are simple as breath, but they require tremendous patience, suspension of goal-seeking, achievement or force of will, and, at bottom they require courage. They can, theoretically, be apprehended and practiced by anyone, but few find it possible to sustain the work, the gong fu over sufficient time to recognize its efficacy in their bodies.

If Diogenes sought an “honest” man, I am looking for the men, women, and children who have mastered the art of breathing through their heels. [q.v. Zhuangzi]

 

It’s a rainy day in Bushwick

 

The bad news is that cultivating shen takes time and intention.

The good news is that cultivating shen takes time and intention.

 

Are the same things remembered differently the same things?

The crash of a great oak falling at night awakens the slave quarters and the Master’s house alike…

 

What if interpretation turned out to be another bourgeois vanity?

 

No bugle sounds for the global triple crown: ADD, Alzheimer’s and V-fib – wherein the social and “natural” shocks that once, at least temporarily, restored a sinus rhythm to the multiple cultures of the world heart, now merely serve to make the already overtaxed organ beat faster. But the blood can’t move, so the oxygen can’t perfuse. In which sense, I suppose, V-fib ultimately “cures” the other maladies.

 

The “troika” – the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – convinced that the Cradle is full of money, is rocking Greece violently to try and shake out the Euros it just knows are hidden in there. Too bad about the baby. Shoulda stood in the bathwater.

 

 

What strategy to survive being you?

 

What is your narrative about movement? Do you move, or do things move you. Or do things move?

 

Follow the spine toward heaven, toward earth, toward all in between.

Is this what Sly meant by “Stand!”?

 

To stand upright within the self is possible in the face of external collapse

 

What is the difference, in outward and inward effect, between the self-sacrifice model and the internal cultivation mode?

 

I was a ruby begonia for the FBI

 

Movement and regulation. Inextricable, inseparable. The primary relation. The golden ratio. The pot of gold that is the arc that is the rainbow that contains yet moves beyond the container. Is the riverbank a vessel? Is the river not also its bank? However many times you do or do not pluck Moses from it, or bathe in it, or watch it flow? Or like Heraclitus, weep your pints into it?

 

We tend toward upright. What buckles our knees?

 

How to wrap without crushing, or strangling, or letting fall?

 

What’s the word from Johannesburb?

 

The devolution will absolutely be tweetified

 

If you want to witness a miracle, look at your hands

 

In Genesis, God is the first qualifier. Word initiates the beginning.

 

Social life tends evermore toward sharp practice.

 

Further correspondence with F.:

I agree with you that all art to some extent connects what we call the real and the unreal. But I think the novel has had a particular function – in other words that it possesses unique properties as a cultural form.

In my understanding, the novel grew out of an evermore scientifically determinist age, when classifications, and natural and social distinctions were developing alongside economic expansion, colonization and rationalization to finally achieve what we now know as global bourgeois culture.

To some extent, I feel the novel held open a space that could not be foreclosed, or “owned,” or quantified.

And though it may begin, the novel cannot, in fact, really end.

On another level, the novel incites and moves forward (yang), while simultaneously containing and nourishing (yin). It serves both initiator and vessel and reflects the play of these primal energies.

Also, the novel, unlike other art forms, operates through creating a sustained world filled with “ten thousand beings / things,” a generative ampleness – even if the style is minimalist – all expressed through ideas taking form from written language.

Descartes didn’t need it, but could there be a Lacan without the novel?

So the novel is both full and empty. It is empty in order to be full, and full in order to create the void within which movement and life may generate, grow, proliferate and transform.

It is for these reasons that I think the “invention” of the novel signifies the Western hedge against the full hegemony of its self-imposed deterministic order, with its tyranny of categories and insistence on distinctions between “being” and “non-being” above all else.

In short, the novel has served as the privileged place – in a way like psychotherapy for the individual – where Western thought may actually reflect on its nature and extend its possibilities, without danger of collapse. The novel – the good ones anyway – can’t be reduced to an argument. They certainly stake no claim to being True. Yet are they False? In any case, they transform awareness.

 

A man stands at the edge of a bridge for hours, hesitating to make the fatal leap. At last, a homicidal man, bereft of ambivalence, appears invisibly behind him and gives a push…