LXXXVII
Sweat a different sweat
Outside, the first serious ice melt day.
Inside, you walk the circle and practice first and second palm changes as if you were an old pine tree, limbs weighed down by snow.
The Nude as body absolutely (literally apocalyptically) revealed functions as eidolon of God or spirit: the awesome embodiment of the Ideal, the infinite surging through material form and penetrating, overwhelming our senses from without.
In this metaphysical encounter, our own bodies, and the sensible world entire turn to nothing more than bad copies of an endlessly perfected Out There (ektos kosmou, “outside the world”).
“All is heavenly,” says Plotinus in Enneads, 5.9, “in the skies of that other world there.”
Whereas, for Jullien: Heaven [in China], never deviating from its course, embodies Regulation, which is why it ultimately corresponds to what we understand by nature. I offer as proof of this the fact that when their language had to be opened up to Western notions, the Chinese could only translate “ideal” as “thought of the li” (li-xiang). Li is the “internal coherence” inseparable from the energy-breath it organizes, which causes a bamboo to grow into a bamboo or a rock to become a rock, and by virtue of which this rock, whatever form it may have, does indeed present the consistency and configuration characteristic of a rock. Expressed in this way, the notion becomes that of an inner principle which is both dynamic and structuring and from which the process of things derives. It no longer contains anything of the intelligible or the divine Outside that parallels our own world, of the essence and the archetype which the Ideal suggests to us and toward which the mind strives.
…There are echoes of Plotinus in Baudelaire: “I am beautiful, oh mortals, as a dream of stone.” And there is still no end to the secularization of “God” under the cover of the ideal (as expressed in statues glorifying the ideals of Beauty, Liberty, and so on). [Jullien, …Nude, p. 90]
The trouble with archetypes being: they are a species of Ideal.
We’ve had an ice age. D’ya think we’ll have a nice age?
1) “Should,” as in he should have been a better father. 2) “You would think,” as in you would think a doctor would know enough to wash his hands. 3) “I would never,” as in I would never treat someone like that. All three should be used with utmost circumspection.
1000 histories
∞ mysteries
The new barista’s a Johnny-come-latte
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I don’t seek refuge for eternity.
I’m not unhappy.
I’m not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe.”
“You shall not enter,” says the stone.
“You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.”
[From Wisŧawa Szymborska, “Conversation With a Stone,” Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998.]
Ireland, the south of the north
Then things got surprising
Gravity’s Gringo
Departing from our mother’s vagina, sensing the air, sometimes with a little prompt, we begin breathing on our own. Is it not eminently reasonable that, in the time between this re-initiation into the world, post-heaven, and the final exhale, the ceding of yang to yin, we may turn our intention toward regulating the breath?
You’ve seen one too many Liveraged buyout
Is not the polar icemelt, snowcap shrinking, glacial retreat, the rising sea, an ascendency of yin? Our mother’s attempted irrigation, balm and tonification of the Heat/Excess, the great drying out, the Liver Fire Blazing Upward to possess our heads, split them with migraines, red face and vampire eyes, dry mouth, deafness and sudden ringing where a panoply of sound ought to be? Irritability, frequent anger, insomnia. If not, what is it then?
When we can see only red, the afterimage will be green. Or blue.
Anabasis: generally: a going up, an ascent.
More particularly: denoting a march from a coast into the interior, as that of the younger Cyrus into Asia in 401 BC, as narrated by Xenophon in the seven books of his eponymous work.
So, can a sister on the rise be called, en français, an ascensœur?
And then, there’s katabasis, as in a journey from interior to coast, or downward, even unto Hades.
Landscrape
Here comes the stun
Day by day, breath by breath, you perfect your own personal ghost dance
Alive is the new dead
If we’d thought a bit, of the Drang of it
When we started Sturming the town…
I will astonish Paris with an app
The Longitude of the Long-distance Swimmer
There’s some difference between un bain-marie and Marie dans le bain.
Putsch comes to shovel
Pervefect, just pervefect
La viande rose
Oy-la-la!
Be f–king Zen!
Sleep and the world sleeps with you.
Wake and you wake alone.
Beaux-arts as it may seem
Once upon a time in and out of the West
Ah, the marsh on Washington.
Surely you mean the March on Washington?
No, the marsh: the one that was there before L’Enfant’s city and its favelas, the marsh that will eventually swallow the White House, Congress, The Justice Department, the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument, Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, Union Station with its statue of A. Philip Randolph, Columbia Heights and U. Street, The Museum of the American Indian, The National Gallery, the soi-disant Cato Institute, Rock Creek Park, its waterfalls, and the Ghost of Chandra Levy, yes, and the Cherry Trees along the Potomac…
Time marshes on
Across the bridge over Majors Creek, from Sell-mor to Montgomery
Ah, the psycho-spiritual damaged done by not living in reality
Why Johnny can’t breathe
Breed
Bleed
Ran out of pluck. But, whew! not luck
Here comes the stun
Brother chicken’s out of cluck
Life she is like this, oui? Comme le tricotage: you knit, you knit, you pearl, you knot
Square in the circle: day ja vous all over again
Finnigan
Guantánamo Girls wontcha come out tonight
and dance by the slivery moon?
Enough apps and you become an appsenteee
lord of no land
much less your body
The Chelsea laddies come and go
Talking of Mike, and Angelo
And the rain takes care of the soot-black snow
“Pheidias made his Zeus [of Artemision],” Plotinus concludes, “without reference to any model perceived by the senses but taking Zeus as he would be if he were to consent to become visible to us” (Enneads, 5.8). This is the source of its essence: a Nude is not empirical.
Bone is not cartilage. Cartilage is not tendon. Or ligament. Or muscle. Or fascia. But can one, in life, meaningfully separate them?
What passes for sage in the West
What goes out is also coming on
Place yourself, therefore, in the midst of the world as if you were alone.
Said Thom Traherne oncet
The canon [Polycletus] of the nude is first and foremost established by the numbers manifest in its proportions. The tradition goes back beyond Plato himself to Pythagoreanism, which holds that the beauty of the nude lives in a numerically defined body structure, inspired by musical harmony. [Jullien, …Nude, p. 91]
Sprinkling: an inkling of spring
And the whirled keeps whirlding
To draw the nude, become nude
“Being a developer is kind of like being a character in Star Trek. Sometimes you can bend the laws of physics, and sometimes you can’t.” Said Jason Huber of Warburg Realty in Catherine Clark’s article “Wiggle Room at the Top: Asking prices for superdeluxe penthouses tumble,” New York Daily News, 3/13/15, Real Estate Guide insert, p. 1.
Partnership and departnership
Seven-eleven. Nine-eleven, not to be confused with.
King Philip’s War, aka the First Indian War, Metacom’s War, Metacomet’s War, or Metacom’s Rebellion. First serious native pushback against the waves of “colonists,” whatever that means, and leading, inexorably, to the establishment of European-style property wrongs on the American continent, whatever that means.
Give me analog, or give me debt
There are things to realize
When you talk about archetypes, it makes me feel Jung again
When I hear the words “business plan,” I reach for my kultur
Distinction between school reform and reform school
Je suis colporteur, mais je ne suis pas Cole Porter. Ni un porteur du charbon.
The Kardashophone, a kind of instrument…
What appears to be incoherent yet has a structure that can be more felt than perceived
When [the string]* is high, bring it down
When it is low, raise it
When it is excessive, reduce it
When it is insufficient, supplement it**
Dao De Jing, Ch. 77 as quoted by Kaptchuk in The Web…, p. 254
* as of the bow, which is the Dao
** caveat lector: the translations of this passage vary widely and wildly
