LIX

 

…The vital essence: it is the essence of the vital energy.

When the vital energy is guided, it [the vital essence] is generated,

But when it is generated, there is thought,

When there is thought, there is knowledge,

But when there is knowledge, then you must stop.

Whenever the forms of the mind have excessive knowledge,

You lose your vitality.

From Inward Training (Nei-yeh) VIII [in Roth, Original Tao]

 

Giraffes: spotted swans of the savannah.

 

Sick as a tick.

 

Emergent, sí.

Submergent, sí también.

 

How the mother half lives.

 

Dotting the t’s and crossing the i’s

on the New Jersey Turnpike…

 

Strayed, no chaster.

 

Abject expressionism.

And the masters of disfiguration. Viz.: an exhibition on T.H. Benton’s America Today, his ten panel mural for the boardroom of the New School for So-called Research painted 1930-31. Extraordinary the range and activity of his moderns – they hang off girders and subway straps, pilot trucks, drive aeroplanes. All laboring at whatever task with a kind of blank affect, as though moved and frozen by some unrelenting force. Yet however overlapped in implied collectivity, the figures stand, or rather contort, in isolation. But what is weirdest is the anatomy – for their bodies are not just elongated, their bodies and members, man and woman alike, seem to have been subject to a variety of closed, yet dislocating fractures that distort their alignment in a way that signals a latent, yet categorically impossible (for him) cubism – cubism being radical disarticulation toward rearticulation of perception itself – the compound rupture of classical perspective. Rather Benton wraps cubism’s insuperable, blasphemous refraction of the figure over with a bandage of flesh that, in attempting to disguise it, only draws attention, and a kind of ecstatic horror to the disjunction.

What external blows and torques have broken these bodies, so that not one shoulder remains undislocated, and no arm hangs easily off its shoulder? Or is it possible that, as in advanced tetanus, the force of muscular contraction has shattered Benton’s fantastically, desperately, animated Americans from within?

 

Dry leaves blown down the street make a scraping sound.

Do your ears deceive you?

Are these the footfalls of your ghostly friends?

Yes, the are coming toward you.

Sudden silence.

Ah, now they depart.

 

We so fear sinking down that we put a disproportionate amount of energy into rising up. It is easy to see that this creates an imbalance that works against a full deployment and perfusion of energy throughout the body. Acts of will further overextend us upward and forward. The most simple and efficacious way to equalize the flows of energy and rhythms of the body is practice regulating the breath.

 

You must coil, you must contract,

You must uncoil, you must expand…

This couplet from the Nei-yeh is not meant metaphorically. It, and similar passages like it in the Laozi and other texts, refer to a meditation practice that involve regulation of the breath. Such texts, and a few earlier fragmentary inscriptions, give evidence of what had been a previously oral mode of practical instruction making its way into written record. It is customary in the West to read these texts as philosophical works, and to compare them with works by Plato and Aristotle dating from the same period.

I am certainly not going to argue against this avenue of reception. What I will do, however, is suggest that these texts, when stripped of metaphysical impositions, permit one, as Jullien puts it, to turn away “from a Greek logic of perception [and] explore, in China, a logic of respiration.”

And at a less cogitative level even than a “logic” of respiration, such texts facilitate access to the synchrony of our individual breathing with that of the One – for the single most recurrent and foundational idea within the streams of thought from which these written words emanate, is that what we call sagacity, wisdom, and possibly “immortality,” inhere in and our nourished by the practice of breathing.

That’s it. Situated as we are between yang-heaven, and yin-earth, the simple reciprocity of our inhalation and exhalation links us with the world-breath, and allows us, amidst the “ten thousand things” (the myriad forms that continually proliferate from the animating polarity), to harmonize with deep and all-pervasive coherence of the phenomenon of life.

 

Is a thief a steal worker?

 

Were Cézanne and the Cubists trying to represent the idea that all planes, however perceptually separated and particularized, are ultimately One?

 

I do not know whose son he is,

he resembles the ancestor of god(s).

Says Laozi, [Jullien’s translation via Jane Marie Todd] who locates this unknown son upstream, upstream genealogically from “the (Platonic) Good, dominating the world of Ideas by means of its transcendence and symbolized by the sun (the sun, ‘son’ of the Good by virtue of resemblance within the sensible and yet hanging over the sensible).”

Jullien distinguishes Western and Chinese realms of invisibility and suggests an alternative order of the “invisible foundational,” one which “does not stem from a different state of reality, from the supersensible real. Rather, at the far end of the sensible, it is that which, having resorbed all differentiation, is no longer concretely apprehensible and therefore proves to be evanescent.”

 

The book falls open. Apocalypse. In which it is revealed that God is an argument. The Master Argument.

 

Yet the game’s still a foot, and the draping is a green dragon: even unto the stone carvings of Medieval Germania. Where, as now, scores, even hundreds of years, like time and space, avail not:

 

 

The fundamental tool of differentiation is the gaze.

Therefore attend to the quality of the gaze.

A hard gaze wounds the self.

A vacant gaze shows depletion.

 

ABC = anything but coherence.

 

Rome wasn’t resolved in a day.

 

ingot  wheat  rust

 

Post-modernity: well sure, why not? A lot invested in that term, though one hears it less frequently these days, and when one does, it feels evermore drained of oracular power. Should one wish to depart from language that emphasizes the linear, the locational, the chronologic, the essential, one could just as well say Ghost Modernity, and this move toward the allusive would be pretty easily grasped, I think.

 

In drawing, one attempts to de-pict, much the same as in writing one aims to de-termin(e)(ate), thus allowing meaning to remain open.

 

(De)term(inism) limits.

 

Meaning always fights its way out of determination. But at what cost?

 

What thoughts precede these words? And what knowing turns the wheel upstream of these thoughts?

 

The Lesbians, according to Aristotle, possessed a ruler made of lead, hence so flexible it could measure the exact contours of stone, and all manner of irregular shapes.

 

Some curves being longer than others.

Some curves being as if straight.

 

I was a Shabbos Goy for the FBI.

 

You build what you think.

 

Possible but not probable.

Likely but not certain.

 

When Gumby goes Zombie beafraidveryafraid.

 

Nei-yeh, XXIV, trans. Roth:

When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,

When you relax your vital breath and expand it,

When your body is calm and unmoving:

And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances,

You will see profit and not be enticed by it,

You will see harm and not be frightened by it.

Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,

In solitude you delight in your own person.

This is called “revolving the vital breath”:

Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.

 

Property may be private, but strategy, like air, and love, is free.

 

Outside, two Gumbies dressed in police uniforms are wrestling a naked Gumby to the ground.

 

What is the work of the work?

What does the work have to let go of to work?

To fully constitute itself, must the work give up its identity as work?

Must it learn omission?

 

Jullien in Great Image: That suspicion about the work – about the work of the work – could easily be taken as symptomatic of an anxiety we call “modern” and of the insidious and provocative way that anxiety plays up the negative. But it is in the nature of the symptom to guide us toward the power of the repressed. I am astonished to see how [the] recognition of the sketch’s superior value [to the finished painting] has been constantly on the prowl throughout the history of Western painting, even at times making histories and theories come unhinged. But of course, that recognition, having no strong argument in which to take root, unable to flourish in the light of day, intervenes only as an aside, a remark, a secret. As Malraux noted, for the last several centuries, painters have chosen to keep their rough drafts and sketches in their possession – as if they were setting aside the most precious things for themselves – while sending their finished canvasses to the Salon, destined for the bored admiration of museums.

 

Art must always be something less than craft. That is how we know it.