XII
On inhalation, yang waxes and yin wanes. On exhalation, yin waxes and yang wanes. Similarly Quian-Heaven and Kun-Earth wax and wane as day alternates with night.
In Quian there is an opening of the gates for Qi/Breath to flow and change and for transformation to occur. In Kun there is reception, closing and consolidation.
“And what is respiration but a continued incitation not to dwell in either of two opposite positions – inhalation or exhalation?” Asks François Jullien in Vital Nourishment: Departing From Happiness (trans. Arthur Goldhammer).
America is the Indes; the rest is hallucination.
The fountain that sounds like applause.
Aldous Huxley remarks somewhere that we moderns have invented only one new vice: speed.
In Jullien’s formulation, exquisite perception, a distinctly non-obsessive mode of concentration, brings with it the ability to guide the qi/breath in one’s physical being and in one’s life so it is neither thwarted nor dispersed, but continues to flow.
“Of all the things everyone does,” asks De Certeau, “how much gets written down?”
Exquisite corpse of perception. Corps. Corpus. Corp.
The Europeans who came to these shores surely did not “settle” here, for here, nothing is settled. But they invented, of necessity, something extraordinary and world-blinding: the idea of white people.
Well I’ll be a Lybian Sybil!
Le pendable = a hanging matter or offence; the smoking gun.
Don’t put all your aches in one basket.
The value of our labor may fluctuate more rapidly, or, in a different rhythm, than the winds or tides of capital may transport us physically, or be prepared to house us. And this greatly problematizes the material nature of our bodies.
At what point does symbiosis shade into parasitism?
The Shadow Knows.
Yes, but compared to what?
When government fails, there’s always governance.
Every liar wants to change the world.
Amidst a sea of bright Chelsea smiles, the missing teeth in the mouths of the elders are as a hole in the heart.
“Living has no meaning,” says Jullien, “(except by way of projection or fabulation), nor is it absurd (despite the spiteful reaction of disbelief); it is beyond meaning.”
Hence, and I borrow this for the practice of writing, “what this journey affords is, once again, an opportunity to verify that the thought of the other remains inaccessible unless one is willing to rework one’s own.
“In this reworking, one’s ‘own’ thought ceases to exist…”
Absorbing the essences of both, one attempts to stand, somehow, with one foot in Greece and the other in China.
Zoographos, zoographos mon amour.
John’s brown body – hey wait a minute!
The name is and is not the thing.
His Truth goes something on…
Who can calculate the high cost of cheap praise?
Is it necessary to point out that in act of “French” kissing, la langue is both engagée and impliquée?
An ancient game: knock down the figure.
An ancient practice: ascribe a value.
Systems of accounting: they predate numbers by millennia. And we who are selected to retell the stories, what do we do but cook the books?
When in doubt add zeroes.
Keep your eye on the radix point.
Moving root.
Show us the real books!
A number is a thing. And a ratio?
There are those who believe the radix point to be the god dot.
Gary Zaragovitch. Olives, Fish and S.B. Oil on wood. 60” x 36”. 2007.
POZZO: His hat!
Vladimir seizes Lucky’s hat. Silence of Lucky. He falls. Silence. Panting of the victors.
Watch the dot.
XIII
“Modern science has discovered that saliva has many important properties. Studies in Japan have shown that saliva contains various enzymes and hormones that help to aid digestion, maintain health and prevent disease. The digestive enzyme Ptyalin begins the process of breaking down carbohydrates. Other substances in saliva detoxify and protect against toxic substances in foods… Parotin, a hormone found in saliva, has been found to strengthen the activities of the muscles, maintain the blood elasticity of the vessels, maintain the elasticity of the skin and strengthen the connective tissue, cartilage, bones and teeth.” This from Tom Bisio, Decoding The Dao: Nine Lessons in Daoist Meditation.
Bisio retells a story of Lino Stanchich, a nutritionist, whose father was taken prisoner in Greece during WWII and sent to a work camp in Germany. Starved and hypothermic, the prisoners received only a slice of bread and what passed for coffee for breakfast. Stanchich’s father discovered that chewing his food, and even fluids, many times, increased his energy. He imparted this information to two other prisoners. They also felt warmer and more energetic after chewing as much as a hundred and fifty times before swallowing. Given the harsh conditions in the camp, the death rate among prisoners was extremely high. The elder Stanchich and his friends were among the very few who survived.
Swallowing one’s saliva and imagining that it turns to vapor when it reaches the dantian – as if it were water striking a hot rock – is a key element of the Daoist meditation practices that Bisio describes. In one method the accumulated saliva is swallowed in thirds. Once the first part reaches the dantian and becomes vapor, the practitioner swallows the second part, which in turn vaporizes, then swallows the final portion. One name for this is “stringing pearls.”
“In spite of a persistent fiction,” says De Certeau, “we never write on a blank page, but always on one that has already been written on.”
Die Jungfrau vas recommended to konzult mit Herr Doktor Freud because she vas exhibiting klimptoms of hysteria.
Who are they? We sense their presence, find evidence of them.
Entasis: application of a convex curve to a form as in a Doric column. From Greek enteino: to stretch or strain tight.
Tales of survival in parlous times. A refugee family took shelter in a cave and were sealed in by an avalanche, the only other inhabitant being a tortoise that subsisted on only the occasional drops of water that fell from the ceiling. The people began to imitate the movements of the tortoise, extending and contracting their necks.
Years later, when the cave was rediscovered and the boulders from the landslide rolled away, the family emerged in excellent health – if a trifle shell-shocked. Ba-doom.
In Chinese cosmology, the tortoise is one of four celestial creatures and is associated with the north, water, and, in human bodies, with the kidneys. One legend allows that there are only female tortoises and the species reproduces by mating with snakes, hence the many (ancient) depictions of snakes entwining tortoises.
Medicinally, the shell of tortoises is believed to regulate the yin “extraordinary channel” Ren Mo.
I’ve adapted the above from Bisio’s Decoding the Dao.
The immemorial girls’ rope-skipping rhyme, last heard in Brooklyn in the ‘50s.
I should worry, I should care;
I should marry a millionaire.
He should die, I should cry,
I should marry another guy.
It is worth noting the multiple values of should, of which the chanters, though perhaps not grammarians, were fully aware. In the first line should implies something close to the opposite of its literal meaning and demonstrates a (rhetorical) lack of concern. In the last three lines, “should” expresses various shadings of intention, desire and prognostication.
Jumping into this game requires one to translate flat definitions into a more replete form – something as ductile as a whipping rope.
To be intelligible today, the rhyme does not require us to leap between archaic and contemporary female roles. The task is merely an economic one: the second line “should” be augmented by three zeroes. Yes, even in down home BK!
The good, the bad and the rhetorical.
Ah, the Dutch they are so double…
And the Greeks so magnetic. They believed, the ancient ones at any rate, that a race of people, the Khalubes, dwelling on the slopes of Mount Ida in Asia Minor, had invented metalworking. From which we get Chalybeate Waters, mineral springs containing a healthy dose of iron salts.
In the early 17th Century, the discovery of such waters – associated with the curative properties of ye vitryol, aka sulfuric acid – in the West Country town of Tunbridge Wells – prompted a local physician to proclaim them a cure for “the colic, the melancholy, and the vapours; it made the lean fat, the fat lean; it killed flat worms in the belly, loosened the clammy humours of the body, and dried the over-moist brain.”
No less an eminence than Thomas Sydenham prescribed these waters for hysteria.
In Vicenza, Italy, the chalybeate springs are associated with Anthony of Padua, a healer venerated far and wide as “the miracle saint” – even unto Tamil Nadu where he cured a shipload of Portuguese suffering from cholera.
L’chaim!
A Vintner’s Tale
The Merchant of Venus
Tourist (noun). Pronounced tsuris.
A Child’s Garden of False Comparisons.
Send in the moon… jellyfish.
The whole world is sloshing.
Something happening to the male in the early 17th century, the invention of the (now extinct?) Don Juan. He is born in Spain, 1630, midwiff’d by Tirso de Molina: The Trickster of Seville and the Guest of Stone. “Why, for her love I’m almost dying / I’ll have her now, then scamper flying.” Or words to that effect.
Generally assumed: Don Juan’s near diabolic power of seduction correspond, hand in glove, to the insubstantial will of even the most virtuous of women.
The renderings of Don Juan by Goldoni, as well as Da Ponte and Mozart, on which most of us base our sense of the character and situation, are pretty nearly contemporaneous with – jump cut northward to a Protestant nation – Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady was published. Clarissa is a very long book, around a million words, and it appeared, as was common at the time, in a series of installments between 1747 and 1748. Presented over a year’s timespan, Clarissa’s broad readership had ample opportunity to implicate itself in the drama of a rock solid (female) virtue that constituted very much its own reward. When the final volume appeared, and the living text confirmed rumors of the heroine’s death, many purchasers of previous installments rebelled and refused to buy it, preferring to invent their own “happy outcome.” Despite mounting reader outrage, Richardson remained adamant in his assertion that Miss Harlowe’s earthly departure was essential to the moral imperative behind his work. It is difficult to imagine how strongly interwoven morality, sentiment and narrative were in an Anglo culture not so long past, nor so different from our own in its teleological romance. Suffice it for evidence that, as news of Clarissa’s death rippled out from London, church bells pealed in a thousand towns and villages. England having lost a daughter, now rang her into heaven’s home.
Curiouser and curiouser in the widening gyre. Comes word via email blast that a book forthcoming from Viking and co-edited by a much-published poet has been “tentatively” entitled 100 Poems Your Teachers Don’t Want You to Read.
A host of questions spring up with daggers in their teeth. Just who be this “you,” and who am those “teachers” what got sich motives? And why only one hundred poems?
It will be remembered (well maybe) that Plato, ur-teacher to the Western World, was all for banning poetry – Mnemosyne’s most idle and seductive child – outright from his ideal state.
Teachers: the time has come to woman and man the barricades! We’re two thousand-odd years late, and the Sirens are sounding again.
XIV
In Decoding the Dao Tom Bisio writes that in the early years of his study of Xing Yi Quan, an internal martial art, much of what his teachers told him seemed abstract and contradictory. “The body should move, but spontaneously, without thought and intention. Concurrently, our training involved specific exercises that utilized breath and [deliberate] movement to facilitate this spontaneous movement. It seemed impossible to perform exercises that employed very specific, controlled movements in order to generate spontaneous movement. When I mentioned this dilemma, the answer was an exasperated, ‘Keep practicing.’ I did keep practicing and in time watched spontaneous movements occur in my own body as though I were an outside observer.”
Rationalism was, for millennia, the West’s rocket fuel and crazy glue. What now?
After ’63: what then?
The quiescent state, said Wang Chuan Shen, back in the Ming, is actually quiescent movement.
De as in Dao De Jing is usually translated as virtue or ethics. But an earlier meaning and usage conveyed the idea of potential or power. Bisio cites Arthur Waley’s interpretation of De as “bound up with the idea of potentiality. Fields planted with corn represent potential riches; the appearance of a rainbow, potential disaster; the falling of ‘sweet dew’ potential peace and prosperity. Hence De means a latent power, a virtue inherent in something.” Bisio goes beyond this to suggest that De is also the exercise of our natural inherent ability which, in effect, “makes us who or what we are,” and therefore fulfills us as human beings.
Originally, the character De combined the characters for “footstep” and “straight.” “Heart” was added later.
Dao is derived from “head” and “go.”
Jing in this context means a canon or scripture, but it originally meant the warp in a loom.
In my youth, I was a roller coaster. In my old age, I’m a water wheel.
As bad as things get, they can always beget verse. Pace, Theo W.
Games of enchantment.
The Chinese translate “hamburger” as “thousand aspect cow.”
Seven billion states of exception.
Let them eat jellyfish.
Boots and faces blackened. iPhones and hearts unlocked.
The minstrel sitting on the crate by the turnstiles on the uptown #1 platform at 23rd starts strumming. I know what’s coming, you think, and start as-iffing the lyrics in your own head.
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crecen las palmas…
Ah yes, but then he starts singing and it wasn’t what you pre-heard coming. Which goes to say that the opening chords for Fernández Diaz and Garcia Wilson’s Guantanamera are, surprise surprise, the same as for Caviliere-Brigati’s Groovin’.
And then you’re sing something else. And here’s that lovely Lady Mondegreen:
Life will be ecstasy
You and me and Leslie
Groovin’…
We ain’t got no ma or or pa, cause we is au-tom-a-ta.
Quipt Lem oncet, back in the Futurological.
I am way past tense.
A bibliography:
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, originally published as Penny Whistles in 1885. Recommended edition is the Big Golden Book with illustrations by Alice and Martin Provensen, S&S, 1951.
Paddle to the Sea written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
Two Little Trains by Margaret Wise Brown. Illustrated by Jean Charlot. New York: William R. Scott, Inc., 1949.
Soldier at 13.
And of ’63
And at 63.
The year of your non-Bar Mitzvah:
June 11: † Thich Quang Duc
June 12: † Medgar Evers
July 22: Liston-Patterson rematch in Las Vegas
August 28: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
September 5: 16th Street Baptist Church, Bombington, AL
† Addie Mae Collins
† Denise McNair
† Carole Robertson
† Cynthia Wesley
November 2: † Ngo Dinh Diem
November 22: † John F.
November 24: † Lee H.
Spectacular gunning-down of the previous year: Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Which film, it is said, Sergio Leone loved for its pessimism.
Pessimism, Sergio, or something else?
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
XV
Système D, mon amour.
Word comes of the death of Maxine Powell, née Blair, aged 98, the Miss Manners of Motown. “I teach class,” she said of her role there, “and class will turn the heads of kings and queens.”
Margalite Fox’s obituary in the Times notes that when Motown singers came through Detroit, “they were required to take instruction from Mrs. Powell for two hours a day… Her curriculum covered deportment onstage and off: how to speak impeccably and stand erect, how to glide instead of merely walking, how to sit in a limousine with the ankles crossed just so.”
She also weaned the label’s artists of what she considered unhelpful habits.
Diana Ross, for instance, “favored exorbitantly long false eyelashes. That did not sit well with Mrs. Powell, who installed shorter ones. Marvin Gaye liked to sing with his eyes closed. That did not sit well with Mrs. Powell either, and she insisted he keep them open.”
When she saw the manner in which the Supremes were practicing The Shake, it “emphatically did not sit well with Mrs. Powell, as she recalled in a 1986 interview with People magazine: ‘You are protruding the buttocks,’ she admonished them. ‘Whenever you do a naughty step like the shake, add some class to it. Instead of shaking and acting tough, you should roll your buttocks under and keep smiling all the time.’ Then I showed them. They were shocked that I could do it and at how much better it looked my way.’”
In the same interview, she recalled teaching her students how to sit on stools. “We don’t go to bars,” The Supremes protested, “why should we sit on stools?”
“A lady with class can sit on a garbage pail and look good,” Mrs. Powell replied.
When, a few weeks later, The Supremes appeared on “The Mike Douglas Show,” they walked onto a stage set consisting of three stools.
According to Mrs. Powell, The Supremes sat, and sat well.
I was a teenage psychopomp.
I was a psychopomp for the FBI
I was a Lybian sybil for the FBI.
Wait ‘till the sun shines, Nellie…
Did Hermes style his hair in a psychopompadour? Ifsowhyso, ifnotwhynot?
Hearts blackened. Tongues lashed.
I’ll see your dead and I’ll raise your dead.
Watertight. Airtight. But truthtight? Over time, as it purifies and refines itself, truth tends to seep out between the pores of any would-be container.
The demonic other: a projection racket.
The mall. Them all.
What are you asking of the animal?
A grisaille painting circa 1620 by Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, Al te bot! (Altogether too stupid!) in which a peasant woman has her wits sharpened on a knife-grinder’s whetstone while her assembled compatriots marvel at and begin to spread word of the miracle cure. Known primarily for his allegorical paintings, Van de Venne also wrote a lengthy poem, Tableau of the Laughable World. However did he manage to find a closing line?