LXIII
“Not quitting, not sticking.”
“Not keeping oneself in check, not letting oneself go.”
Bu ji bu li.
Meth, myth, math, sweet and sour mashup.
For all his meticulous planning, he had forgotten one small detail: The Bourgeoisie.
My freedom keeps getting in the way of your towers.
Ex-spleen-nation, por favor.
Six robots set out to wash the windows of the Freedom Tower. This is their story.
My dog, my gastroenterologist.
A doctor with a flea problem.
Nine cyborgs and a dwarf set out to paint the George Washington Bride (pink)…
Ah, the infamous, treacherous, south face of the…
Six sherpas, a chocolate lab and five dwarves set out to raft the Futaleufu…
Harmony grits.
By means of the mind you store the mind:
Within the mind there is another mind.
That mind within the mind: it is an awareness that precedes words.
From Nei-yeh, Harold D. Roth, trans.
Can one freely choose to enslave?
Terraced pavilions – mountain forests:
It was never necessary to distinguish between them!
Wrote Su Dongpo.
You have the right to reality, nada más.
To experience the world and walk among men,
To see oneself resting on cloudy peaks.
Again, Su.
I was a “discourse” for the FBI.
Ah, the young and their wondrously dexterous thumbs!
Grub Street and its discontents.
Same desperation, different day.
What sorts of tyrannies do we impose on ourselves?
On the cover of the New York Post: a photo of Bill Cosby, “beloved” comedian, now accused of multiple rapes. What are the possible fates that may befall a “black” man? The caption reads: “Stunning Fall of America’s Dad.”
For a moment, and only a moment, you think of George Washington. And what does and doesn’t pass across that bridge. And how the troop of boy scouts marching across has to, legendarily, break step so that the wave forms of structural steel, stretched across state lines and suspended by cable, don’t turn catastrophic.
Spiraltual.
Does one need a koan to recognize the existence of the sign that cannot be analyzed?
The daughter also arises.
Therefore this vital energy is:
Bright! – as if ascending the heavens;
Dark! – as if entering an abyss;
Vast! – as if dwelling in an ocean;
Lofty! – as if dwelling on a mountain peak.
This from Inward Training (Nei-yeh) II, in Roth, Original Tao. Roth comments: “Lines 1-5 employ the identical rhetorical structure of a vivid adjective followed by an ‘as if’ clause.”
The verse continues:
Therefore this vital energy
Cannot be halted by force,
Yet it can be secured by inner power.
Cannot be summoned by speech,
Yet can be welcomed by the awareness…
As if I had a hammer,
I’d wring it in the morning.
As if I were Fannie Lou Hamer…
Vital! – as if.
America!
Dad!
Comrade Americano!
As if
Private property,
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing
As if
Was made for you and me
As if departing, as if arriving.
Treating painting in terms of formal resemblance:
That view is close to childishness;
Just as, when someone composes a poem, if it has to be this poem
Surely you know he is not a poet.
Wrote Su Dongpo.
Can one view the building of the World Trade Center as indicative of a stage of Western dualism?
Any world that you invent will make it harder to live in this one. Simply because of the diversion of energy to another place, “outside.”
Therefore, Sister painter, Brother writer: refrain from creating. To transmit suffices.
Silent! none can hear its sound.
Suddenly stopping! it abides within the mind.
Obscure! we do not see its form.
Surging forth! it arises with us.
We do not see its form,
We do not hear its sound,
Yet we perceive an order to its accomplishments.
We call it the “Way.”
From Inward Training (Nei-yeh) IV, in Roth, Original Tao.
Journey, man. Toute la journée.
Empty as the all-animating hub.
By allowing transformations to unfold in our writing, one “produces without owning,” just as the pristine breath produces all things without owning them. [Laozi, as quoted by Bisio in Decoding the Dao]
This harmonizes our work with the Way, (variously alluded to as the beginning, mother, ancestor, father of heaven and earth) which gives birth to, nourishes, matures, completes, gives rest to, rears, supports and protects the myriad things which “entrust their lives to it. Yet it does not act as their master.” [Laozi, as quoted in Roth in Nei-yeh]
Hence the words and images we evoke – rather than concretizing into objects and losing their potentiating force – become legible or intelligible by joining with that which underlies and sustains all things and is therefore inaccessible to much everyday thought, language and perception. The art we make thus affects the reader like successive blows arising spontaneously and from unexpected directions, pushing and pulling him or her to a place somewhere in the middle: a numinous zone where we ourselves also seek to dwell, and whose spirit permeates us even as it circulates through the myriad things.
Here I have extended the non-objectivizing principles of daoism into the realm of writing and imagemaking, and also into the sphere of what capitalists and their adversaries call property. While neither the Laozi, the Zhuangzi nor any other foundational texts I am aware of, advocate anarchism or socialism – for how, categorically, could they? – one does not need the linguistic discernment of a Lacan to sense in which direction the wind (or more literally, the pristine breath [that] produces all things without owning them) tends to blow. Or, more accurately, to circulate within and among all things, yet “without acting as their master.”
Elsewhere in the Laozi, one finds Te or De (inner “virtue,” i.e. power, capacity, potentiation) described thusly:
It generates and nourishes.
It acts and does not possess.
It causes growth and does not rule.
Yes, and a poet once writ:
East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat…
While in the former precinct, upstream of certain Kiplings, the Laozi asks, (albeit shorn of rhyme and rhythm and otherwise compromised in translation):
Amid the daily activity of the psyche, can you embrace the One and not depart from it?
When concentrating your vital breath until it is at its softest, can you be like a child?
Can you sweep clean your Profound Mirror so you are able to have no flaws in it?
And the latter exhorts:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…
[Kipling, “IF—“]
Can you concentrate? Can you unite with them?
Can you not resort to divining by tortoise or milfoil
Yet know bad and good fortune?
Can you stop? Can you cease?
Can you not seek it in others,
Yet attain it within yourself?
[Nei-yeh]
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat these two imposters just the same…
[Kipling, ibid.]
In loving the people and governing the state, can you do it without using knowledge?
When the Gates of Heaven open and close, can you become feminine?
In clarifying all within the Four Directions, can you do it without using knowledge?
[Laozi, ibid.]
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you;ll be a Man, my son!
[Kipling, ibid.]
You must align your body
Unify your vision,
And the heavenly harmony will arrive.
Gather in your knowledge,
Unify your attention,
And the numinous will enter its lodging place,*
The inner power will beautify you,
And the Way will reside in you.
You will see things with the eyes of a newborn calf
And will not seek out their precedents.
[Zhuangzi]
*via the inner cultivation practices of breathing meditation
And that little pearl in the lower abdomen just keeps rolling along.
Just as when, in 1895, more or less, Kipling wrote “IF—“ and Cézanne, once again, de-picted Mont Sainte-Victoire:
