LXXVII
Don’t know what a sly drool is for
But I, too, note that olive-yew…
And when you whisper: shu-th’-door…
There must be thrifty ways to love your liver
What are the “ruling” thoughts? The regulating thoughts? The disruptive thoughts?
The unthinkable thoughts?
Fang song and they will come.
The relation among emotions and circumstances. Circumflexions. Circumextensions. Curcumadductions. Circumabductions.
You are what you breathe. And how.
If yang is allowed to expand endlessly without the regressive, inward movement of yin, the cycle ultimately moves out of balance. Uncontrolled, the upward and outward movement of the liver and the downward spreading action of the lung – the action of the dragon flying upward and the tiger pouncing (i.e. undirected creativity and excitement coupled with feeling, emotion and sensation) – spirals outward, depleting the body’s essence and disturbing the harmony of the spirit. In his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, Richard Wilhelm tells us that the normal movement of the Five Powers allows our passions, emotions and interactions with the external world to lead and influence the clarity of our heart-mind and spirit, thereby gradually diminishing our life energies and dimming the clarity of our Spirit [Shen]. This is a kind of death. [Bisio in Decoding The Dao, p. 298-299, citing Wilhelm’s translation ofLü Dongbin, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, with commentary by C.G. Jung. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931 and 1937, pp. 13-17. Lü was a Tang Dynasty poet and “immortal” often depicted as bearing a sword across his back which he used to dispel evil spirits (Xie qi). Lü is also widely considered one of the earliest master-practitioners of neidan (internal alchemy).]
Eidolonistan, one stage of the Great Game.
One in the same those quotidian gods who put Hell in Hellenism and the des before Troy. And laid ‘em out, heroes all, in verse and corpus: bell, book and Ken Doll.
La-tatata-ta-ta-ta
History
Hmmmmm
Biology
Mmmm
Algebra
Don’t know what an eidolon is for…
Wa’ la-tatata-ta-ta-ta-ta
Science book
Hmmmm-mmm
French I took
Yeah…
But I do know one and one is two
And if this one could be with you…
The person we know as the artist is created when the child’s body experiences an event – often externally triggered – that results in a separation of internal and external realities. Who can say what factors conspire to generate this distinction between the artist and her or his contemporaries who experience the same or similar ruptures and process it or them differently? Functionally, however, the distinction between the artist and non-artist is evident in that the kernel of the bodymind of the artist, having thus been formed, organizes their awareness and perceptions around this separation between internal and external and works it ”creatively” for the rest of his or her life.
Further downstream I will put forward some ideas on the triggering mechanism by which Western dualism occurred and the ways in which the artist, responding to this condition, devotes their energy more or less singlemindely to “healing,” or at least attempting to suture, or bridge, this ancient and enduring rift.
The sound of one land g(r)asping.
Step back, one finds one can lead an easy life just by eating this bowl of porridge and wearing this garment. [Bisio, Decoding the Dao, p. 223, citing Liu Zhengkai, The Mystery of Longevity. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1990 and 1996, p. 34]
Build it and they will succumb.
Harmony will not be imposed. But it can be cultivated.
Intelligence inheres in breath itself.
Story is a concretization of breath. And also its eidolon.
Mañana belongs to yo.
Keeping down appearances:
Lacca povera, poor man’s laquer, i.e. painted papier-mâché, ca. 1700.
It is better – that is, truer to nature – for the artist to depict the conventions of type than the peculiarities of an individual. Sez Aristotle.
The iceman also melteth.
All pedagogy, including “play,” is a form of training. What is the intended outcome?
Qi/Breath and mind move reciprocally.
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
Procul Harum (Dog, i.e. not-really Latin)
Whereas Boko Haram: a darker shade of… seems to mean all sorts of things in Hausa including “boko” as a form of bogus, as in bogus Western thinking or Western-style “education” – not necessarily but possibly derived from “book” – still connoting fraud, external coercion and inauthenticity. But it doesn’t stop there, nor, as with the desert, are conditions ripe for its containment. Some things simply can’t be halted, their force is irresistable. They simply overextend what (later) becomes clear was their natural limits. Like language itself. And murder.
Mercy, boko.
And didgeridon’t.
Cause didgerie-won’t.
Play.
Gray, not so much being the new, as passing for, pink.
Don’t know much about Schadenfreude
Don’t know much about Sigmund Droid
Don’t get much Scientology
Don’t really dig mycology…
One merely intones the words: Boko Shazaam! among many other magical incantations. And the ladies, or at any rate the girls, vanish. Just like so many Mexican student teachers. Or Malaysian airplanes.
Never brought back the wrench I took…
Yet, out on the edge of darkness
There rides the peace train
Peace train’s holy rollin’…
Cat Stevens barked once and it still woofs tru.
Dronedragons wild the skies and foam the sea.
Thunderlizards own the land.
Es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente [León Gieco]
Somewhere below, in the damp earth’s depths, beneath even Hades’ realm and invisible to Thanatos, wounded Aphrodite crouches, protecting her core. Regenerating her limbs and corp(u)s.