LXVIII

 

Pure and severe, the air suddenly turns harsh;

Across a thousand cliffs, pines appear like shadows through the snow.

I clean my inkstone not just to paint,

But to reveal the images in my mind.

—Dai Benxiao

 

I got a brother named Lee

Look just like me

He gotta lotta enemies

Got a brother named Lee

Look just like me

Both sides of the Mississippi

Both sides, both sides

Both sides of the Mississippi…

Citizen Cope, “Brother Lee”

 

Hidden Master, Hidden Master, what will you do now?

 

 

By concentrating on your vital breath as if numinous,

The myriad things will all be contained within you.

From Roth, Original Tao: Nei-yeh (Inward Training) XIX

 

#icantbreathe

 

As if

Numinous

 

The Diagram of Inner Circulation [of Qi/Breath] (Nei Jing Tu), referred to in Courants past, depicts a person seated in meditation. In this “landscape” of the body, the cartilaginous rings of the throat are represented by a twelve-tiered pagoda. It is through this passageway that the “golden fluid,” saliva refined by the process of “internal alchemy,” is said to descend via the ren vessel to the dantien, thereby nourishing our vital breath.

 

“I don’t think that anyone who watches that video is undisturbed,” said NYC Police Commissioner William Bratton, of the clip taken by a bystander on which the late Eric Garner is heard to utter the words I can’t breathe eleven times.

“It always looks awful,” he continued, “but we have an expression: ‘lawful but awful.’ We are going to have to see if the actions were a violation of our policies and procedures.”

 

Eventually, when policies and procedures have had their say, and their day, it all comes down to respiration. Or the lack thereof.

 

Where are the streams and mountains within you, Hidden Master? The valleys and springs? Where do you wander?

Do you roam, as the sages are said to: beyond the guidelines? Have you learned how to forget other men and women? Have you cultivated the numinous ability – the talent for forgetting yourself?

 

To evoke the vital breath that courses through the landscape, as it does through your body, find a marvelous hand that “makes it rise up in profusion.” Advises Guo Xi.

 

What’s the cure for a racial tic?

 

Pardon me, boy, is this the Schadenfreude choo-choo?

 

The ruins of the country club. And they were sufficient.

Railroad ties heaped in the snow (like cordwood). And they were sufficient.

 

My ancestors came over on the Aprilshower.

 

The sketch may also be called the working drawing.

 

And the dark, sacred night.

 

And what happens when Google meets Gogol.

 

Orchid, Orchard, Orca

 

Department of meteor studies

 

I was a cabinet of curiosities for the FBI

 

Jump-outs, mon amour, jumpouts.

Or, how many deadly earnest clowns can you fit in an unmarked copcar?

Unbebreathable.

 

Sharpshooter or sniper. It’s all a matter of some ante-kill distinctions.

And which of these would the pre-Han Terminologists have argued for?

 

LRAD, mon amour, LRAD.

 

J’entraîne ma division comme une compagnie, je grimpe sur les chars en marche, j’engueule Pierre et Paul, je dis merde aux obus et ça avance. Je ne serai jamais un vrai général. Mais ma division est une vraie division!

Said Diego Charles Joseph Brosset, born Buenos Aires, October 1891, died (au champ d’honneur) in Champagne, Haute-Saône, November, 1944. General, Compagnon de l’Ordre de la Libération, Officer de la Legion d’honneur (posthumous). Father of the late French sinologist and daoist scholar Isabelle Robinet.

[I train my division to be like a company. I climb on the tanks as they roll and yell at Peter and Paul: shit to the shells – advance! I’ll never be a real general. But my division is a real division.]

 

The real. The real. As if nothing else existed!

 

“Nothing less was needed,” says Jullien in The Great Image…, “than all that the Greeks invented: the establishment of a moral distinction between lying and telling the truth (painting ‘deceives’ by misleading – exapatān – says Plato); the ontological separation between nonbeing and being (by virtue of its mimetic status, the image belongs to appearances)…

In short, there is the possibility of illusion in art only [but not only in art: E.D.] if you proceed openly to a duplication of planes (the ‘real,’ whatever its status, and the image of the real) and posit a world of essences that the image can simulate(eidos becomes eidolon).

 

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense

To glean eidolons.

 

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts put in,

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidolons.

 

Ever the dim beginning,

Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,

Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)

Eidolons! Eidolons!

 

Ever the mutable,

Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,

Ever the ateliers, the factoris divine,

Issuing eidolons.

 

Lo, I or you,

Or woman, man or state, known or unknown,

We seem solid wealth, strength, beauty build,

But really built eidolons…

So chanted Whitman, somewhere between the fall of Troy and the rise of the Freedom Tower.