CLIII

 

I was an illusory precipice for the FBI

 

An arrondoucement is a slow, quiet, gentle neighborhood…

 

What if one were to compare qi rising from diantian-mingmen toward the heart, propelled by anger, alarm, or joy with the myth of Pandora lifting the lid on the box that lets loose into the world every kind of evil?

Now that I’ve set it down, I can see that the analogy does and doesn’t work and is, at best, a potentially misleading cultural trans[p]la[nta]tion.

Indeed, one goal of internal practice is to return reckless and upward-flaring qi to the kidneys and dantian. So fortunately, via breath and mind-intention, that which escapes its proper place and therefore may cause harm can be, not so much recaptured and isolated, as reintegrated into a harmonious flow of energy within the body.

One idea-image from internal practice is that the heart be “well housed.” When mingmen fire rushes upward and engulfs the heart, mind-intention must flee and disperse until the fire is brought under control and returns to the kidneys. There can be great cost in psychic pain and anxiety, and a corresponding toll on the organs themselves. But it is possible, with suitable techniques, to restore kidney fire to its natural home.

It is also said, both in Chinese medicine and internal practice, that the heart “hates heat.”

 

What is the relation between phenomena and process?

 

Water keeps leaking through my process-sieve

 

She/he/you/I have a mind like a steel sieve

 

Getting there is all the fun

 

When something emerges from the known or unknown into thought, once it is grasped, it may profitably be permitted to melt back into the undifferentiated, so that it may retain its generative potential and allow other thoughts to arise and shine.

 

Over-differentiation eventually dissolves all structures

 

Surf the people!

 

Ah, the marginal magical

 

Governor Liu, cast adrift alone,

By fortune found Nanyang’s Sleeping Dragon.

He sought to know the shape of things to be;

Smiling, the master mapped his strategy.

[Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Vol. 2, p. 681]

 

It is a mistake to assume that all creatures with human form are people

 

Golden theory practice

 

The bull sculpture at Bowling Green, though cast in bronze, is actually bull shit – in the sense that the creature the bull represents has moved on to greener pastures, leaving behind and excrescence as evidence as evidence that it once fed there.

 

A milliner may make a hat, but only G*d can make a cat

 

Allegory kills

 

Steatopygia mon amour

 

I was a jeune Tarentine for the FBI

 

The Grand Old Tendency Waltz

 

Beneath the realm of visible drama, phenomena and events works a subtle web of engagements and disengagements…

 

Madness on the corner

 

Ni tierra, ni fuego

 

Aleppo, mon amour

 

Tyrannosaurus Rexit

 

Elastic Lad ♥ Rubbermaid

 

Find Reincarnation in Another’s Corpse, as strategy – one of the classic 36 Stratagems – that has several manifestations, among them finding something that conveys legitimacy in one’s right to assume power. This can mean resurrecting a lineage that ties one to a previous popular leader. It can also mean appropriating an institution, technology or method that has been forgotten or discarded and employing it toward one’s own purposes.

Another use of the stratagem is illustrated in the famous “resurrection” of Zhuge Liang on the battlefield after his reported death. Sima Yi, leader of the opposing Wei army pursued the Riverland army as it retreated, believing that their retreat confirmed reports of Zhuge Liang’s death. Just as Sima Yi was about to attack, he saw Zhuge Liang in his carriage with his banners raised, surrounded by his commanders. Sima Yi panicked and retreated, thinking he had fallen into a trap, only to learn later that Zhuge Liang was indeed dead and what he had seen was a statue dressed in the great strategist’s clothing. It is said that Zhuge Liang planned this deception on his deathbed. [Adapted from Tom Bisio’s Beyond the Battleground, op. cit., p. 269]

 

Reindeer keep falling on my head…

 

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“Captains of industry and lawyers are not dying left, right and center like this in the West,” sez William Browder, an American financier who campaigned Congress for a law punishing Russian officials who have committed rights abuses. [NYT, 8/21/16. 3:4]

The Times, raises, as ever, a host of interesting questions, among them whether a law itself can constitute punishment, or whether a law is a means of regulating punishment.

 

Posh Lives Matter

 

What about decay is not reductive?

 

Dramatic reforms would be predicated on a reform of the dramatic

 

While in New York City, two naked women attempt suicide on the same day, one by defenestrating in Marble Hill (she landed on an air conditioner the floor below), the other by jumping into the water off Williamsburg. Both are rescued, though the latter dove in again twice after being pulled into a Fire Department launch.

 

Just published: The Perfect Horse, by one Elizabeth Letts, a chronicle (according to the Post) of the “little-known U.S. military operation toward the end of WWII [that] rescued Hitler’s secret stash of 300 of the world’s most valuable horses.” The book “details the daring rescue by a small band of battle-weary American soldiers” of the Lipizzaners (purportedly captured as war booty) as the “Russian Army was rapidly advancing on the stud farm… Joseph Stalin had marked Czechoslovakia as his territory. Had the Russians made first claim, the royal Lipizzaners would have been stripped of their flesh and served charred at the first of many victory banquets. The 2nd Cavalry had learned of…”

Sherryl Connelly, author of the review does not elaborate on which parts of the Lipizzaners Ivan & Co. would have served, charred or otherwise in addition to their stripped flesh – entrecôte de cheval, as it were. Given that animals are generally skinned and gutted and their flesh, as well as selected organ meat, is what one consumes… Did she mean “skins”? Who can say in such a moment as this?

Ah, Bart and OJ Simpson, and Bartleby Scrivener, shackled to a common oar and rowing for dear life – slaves in a leaking galley tempest-tost upon the pluperfect storms of language and pure meaning… “They had charred them nicely when we hungry troops arrived (at the stud farm).”

And indeed, The Perfect Horse would make a fine title for a cookbook…

 

 

I sense that you are my sister-brother. Do you, brother-sister, sense that I am your brother-sister?

How might we recognize and acknowledge our sister-brotherhood?

First by sense, and then by sign.

For what is sign but embodied and enacted sense?

But without a common sense, what will be the nature of our signs?

 

What is the relation between the Ludlow (1914) and Attica (1971) massacres?

Well, for openers, Rockefellers.

And their favorite of the 36 Stratagems:

Use another’s knife to kill

 

White wines matter.

Tell that to les pinots noir.

 

Cotton Mathers

Or does he?

Pure-of-tan

Pansies

 

Sense of selfie

Stuck

         Plus-que-parfait, mon amour

 

Tropaia (from which we derive “trophy”): constructions of weapons and armor taken from an enemy and amassed in a Greek Temple as a votive offering.

 

The Hydrant Next Time

 

Sigmund Schadenfreude à votre service…

 

Museum of Apotropaic Art

 

Who smashed all that sculpture?

 

In some impossible future, will folk looking back on us ask: What was this “identity” they were so hung up on?

 

In the late 18th century, the notions of studying after Nature (d’après la nature) and after the Antique (d’après l’antique) were in a sense two sides of the same coin. In striving for a true imitation of Nature, the perfect form was not contained in an individual object, person, animal or plant, but in the idealized and faultless concept of it. [Roger Diederin, Telling Tales I: Classical Images from the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2001. P. 9]

And lo, the Grand Tour gaze pivoted “east.”

Orientalism, mon amour.

 

The burkini girl disturbeth – troubles the water – in multiple ways: as language appropriation and disruption of our gaze expectation.She’s an implicit and literal counter, and therefore an attack upon, the image of Aphrodite-Bardot. She also radically Islamicizes the beach, a realm of sand and sun which, ironically, we Greco-Judeo-Christos imagined we had total claim to – ah Bartleby, Ah (So)Mersault – in the name of a kind of meta-cultural Pagan-Christian meeting ground of land and sea, Apollonian, Dionysian, Edenic, Sun-Principled, Austere in Sense, Luxuriant in Sensuality…

Burr-kini sounds a chill – it’s catchy, like a cold – but reconjures not merely the terrorist’s bomb but our bomb, the mushroom one.

Neither itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny or yellow polka-dotted, the burkini poses the master argument to any property right to our bare-all-to-the-light-transparency and liberation of the body from its confining materiality and transcension to the plane of pure spirit.

Woman presented as anti-nude means we cannot “fix” her. The burkini girl not-from-Ipanema remains unknowable, undefined and unidealizable. There is no “dialogue” with her. We are flummoxed, outraged, shut down and yes, impotent before her.

Thus burkini gurrrl, frolicking in the waves, casts a giant shadow over our monopoly of light. She is the endarkening anti-goddess, the suppressed, hence monstrously distorted and engulfing yin at the end of our too-bright tunnel. By renouncing, even repudiating nudity, she becomes a claim to unimaginable purity. She disrupts, at one fatal stroke, the overarching ideal in which the west has wrapped all its conceptual rods of meaning, bound up as if in a fasces: The Beautiful. Here is the event horizon of our supernova’d ontology – no longer expansive and “abbreviated two-piece,” but unified, compressed, and infinitely dark. Burkini girl is the ka’aba we cannot circumambulate, nor will we encounter in her any angelic guide: lovely, divine and unearthly wise. A flashing knife A glint of sun? Shoot. And shoot again.

Bikini-Fatso, the body-shaming nation state

 

When [Wang] Xizhi left his position as the Prefect of Kuaiji, he resided at the foot of Mount Ji. One day an old woman was going to market with ten-odd hexagonal fans. Wang asked her the price and she answered that each cost twenty coins, whereupon Wang took a brush and wrote five characters on each fan.

The old woman sorrowfully said that her whole family’s livelihood depended on those fans and asked Wang why he wrote on them and ruined their value. Wang told her to tell her customers that the calligraphy was by Wang and to ask for a hundred coins each. The old woman went to market and a crowd gathered and bought them all. She then bought ten more blank fans and asked Wang to write on them. He only smiled and did not reply. [Uncredited exhibit card translation of Anecdote 2 from a handscroll of Zhao Mengfu, Four Anecdotes from the life of Wang Xizhi]