LXIV

 

Verse III of Nei-yeh “implies that the mind has a natural tendency to revert to equanimity.” [Roth]

 

If you can feed your head when all about you

Are starving theirs and blaming it on you…

 

Assymetry, mon amour: a one eyed cat, peepin’ in the seafood store.

And then, the cat who ate the cannery.

 

Mainz, 1434, mon amour.

While in Paris 400 years later, pure light shatters the mirror, refracting the visible world into an infinity of grays.

Leaving the illusion of resemblance to ray-o-fy in a world beyond. Such as the subway.

 

 

So Up–up-Upton and away.

 

 

Yes, she’s a goddess – and who are we to disagree? Swimsuit beauty Kate Upton dons Grecian gown and armor Saturday in South Korea as she shills for new app “Game of War: Fire Age.” The 22-year-old stunner is a featured character in the iPhone game.

 

But in New York:

 

 

 

Nothing to see, nothing to see.

Yet, according to the Times, “one of the country’s great dynastic families is downsizing.” By which they mean that the Rockefeller family is leaving the “56th floor aerie [in 30 Rockefeller Plaza] they have occupied since 1933” moving into “somewhat less rarefied headquarters across 49th Street” [in One Rockefeller Plaza, the building that briefly housed Diego Rivera’s fresco with its “problematic,” segun el Times, portrait of Lenin].

“’The family office used to mean everything, the whole shebang,’ said David Jr., 73, a member of the fourth generation.” But though the total family forture is estimated at $10 billion, and “they are by no means pleading poverty,” David notes that “’what’s different is that there are nearly 300 of us now.’” Thus will this tribe of “public-spirited philanthropists,” one which has “endured pretty much intact longer than most American oligarchies” descend to an office in the 34-story building that faces the skating rink.

“Some people think higher is better,” says David, Jr. “I like the human connection.”

And who could fault him for such a yearning? After all – according to a venerable New Yorker article – the old family office in 30 Rock, Room 5600, was so lofty that those prelapsarian Rockefellers, because of the Earth’s rotation, had to travel “more than a mile farther each day than the man in the street.”

Still, David, Jr. seems to be bucking the trend. At least the trend spread across two pages of the New York Post:

 

 

Yet, as they say, heaven round, earth square.

 

 

Moon transits sun.

An eclipse also rises.

 

He Shang Gong, an ancient commentator on the Laozi, interprets one passage as “both generating and nourishing, the dao bequeaths, but does not control.”

For this, and the discussion of “property,” “production,” “ownership,” and “governance,” or “mastery” above and below, this work is indebted to Tom Bisio, François Jullien and Harold Roth, and the numerous scholars they cite.

 

Cormac McCarthy’s play, The Stonemason, (1994) contains a passage in which the character Pawpaw, a centegenarian, African-American, discusses the fruits of the craft’s ownership with his adult grandson Ben, also a stonemason. The era is the early 1970s and together are rebuilding the family’s old stone house. Ben brings up an incident many years past in which some of Pawpaw’s co-workers destroyed a stone house they had built, but not been paid for, enacting quite literally, a crowbar lien.

BEN: So who owns the stonework that’s not paid for?

PAWPAW: Well, under the law you can get a lien on the work. You can claim it, but you caint take possession of it. The man you built it for, he can take possession of it, but he caint claim it. The law dont have no answer. Where men dont have right intentions the law caint supply em. You just at a dead end.

BEN: Then no one owns the work?

PAWPAW: The man’s labor that did the work is in the work. You caint make it go away. Even if it’s paid for it’s still there… it dont make no difference whose name is on the paper.

 

q.v. and c.f. JK Rowings’ final volume in the Harry Potter series, and the pivotal question which bears on the survival of the “magical” world and that of the all-unwitting Muggles alike: Who owns the Sword of Gryffindor?

And, by extension: What must we renounce “possession” of in order to sustain life?

 

Provenance: chain of custody. From provenir: to come forth, to arise.

 

It is also to be noted that Pawpaw refers to his craft as “the trade.”

 

Also called the work.