XXIII
All practice implies breath.
Show by telling.
Increasingly, the digital world is helping us connect with our natural zombie selves.
Meet George Jetsam.
Bitcoin, mon amour.
How can you seize the amaterial?
Vires in numeris.
But what if the numeris are zeroes and ones?
Silk purse. Digital road.
Goldenthal and Hidden Master were exploring a bog they had come upon quite unexpectedly. They made their way from patch to patch of hardened sphagnum moss until they could go no further, then watched countless tadpoles playing in the water. Goldenthal asked: “Hidden Master, what is the nature of intrinsic value?”
Hidden master responded first by sneezing. Then he coughed. Then he laughed. Then he took a step – zoop! – up to his thigh in water.
Return, return, return to ze-ro.
No ifs, only whens.
If language tracked more closely with social structure we would not use the term “middle class.” Instead we would say “incipient poor.”
Twerken Sie, Liebchen, Twerken Sie!
Malicious militias. And Lady Mondo…
A rigid architect type leaves his WSJ on the table at Bergamote. He nearly knocks the precariously stacked sections to the floor in sweeping past to leave. Wall Street… teeters on the marble edge long enough for you to reach out, catch it, and push it back onto solid marble ground. Your hand falls on a headline, which, in a moment reveals itself. “Darden to Shed Red Lobster.” OMG – who knew? Someone call something-one-one!
Somehow, out of a thousand cuts, you evolve a beautiful scar.
The French have a secret that Baldwin and countless others have deciphered. And that is that once you have taken in what Les Deux Magots – or any of a thousand other Parisian cafés freely offer – you are prepared, in some invisible and inescapable way to face: Montgomery. The dogs of Birmingham. Another Country. Yourself.
When the trick becomes fact, turn the trick.
Ah, but will Red Lobster drop Darden once it’s got its claws clampt?
Stare long enough at a red lobster and you’ll find its afterimage swimming before you.
Still embroil’d.
Would MLK have tweeted Bull Connor? Hitler would certainly have tweeted Stalin. What would Jesus tweet? Pilate?
YTS: yang to spare.
These days, nearly every time you ask a young person how she or he is doing, they reply: “Tired.” Exhaustion of the youth: what’s that about?
What separates your anger for yourself from your anger for humanity? Your grief? Your joy?
Rabbis without borders.
Rabbis without Torahs.
You learn that some wag has coined another acronym for the Rhode Island School of Design, where your daughter is a senior. RISD, it has been discovered also means: Reason I’m Sleep-Deprived.
And if we exhaust the youth in their youth, who will take care of us?
Remind me, who is the race to?
We say we teach them and indeed they learn all kinds of things, except, usually, how to breathe properly. How to take in and let go profoundly and smoothly. How to permit the energy of the universe to come into their bodies, flow out and return again, endlessly, or at least for as many cycles as they are disposed to run.
Jimmy’s respiratory cycles ran out at the age of 63, the age you are now. But for him, perhaps, given his circumstances, his vicissitudes and the level of the voltage he carried, that lifespan may have constituted something like a near-immortal longevity. In the introduction to The Amen Corner, he recalls discovering in exile that:
“…no Frenchman or Frenchwoman could meet me with the speed and fire of some black boys and girls whom I remembered and whom I missed; they did not know enough about me to be able to correct me. It is true that they met me with something else – themselves, in fact – and taught me things I did not know (how to take a deep breath, for example) and corrected me in unexpected and rather painful ways.”
Par exemple.
Et une autre fois:
Calvin Tomkins: Since you’ve stopped making art, how do you spend your time?
Marcel Duchamp: Oh I’m a breather, I’m a respirateur, isn’t that enough?
Sez Krapp: Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.
Well bank’d, Krapp, well bank’d.
Emberesment of riches.
WE DENOUNCE the absolute lack of youth of our youth… said Dalí, in his Manifest Groc like, uh, eighty-something years ago. But, uh, Sal, like, uh, the fuk…
I saw the best minds of my generation
Writing apps and
Tweeting Big Bang Theory
When big bang comes to trickle down.
When putsch comes to tschov.
Trakl down theory.
For whoever is lonely there is a tavern…
And echoes of Musik played a century ago im Mirabell:
A fountain sings.
Clouds, white and tender,
Are set in the clear blueness
Engrossed, silent people walk
At evening through the ancient garden.
The ancestral marble has faded gray.
A flight of birds streaks toward the horizon.
A faun with lifeless eyes peers
At shadows gliding into darkness.
Leaves fall red from the old tree
And circle in through the open windows.
A fiery gleam ignites the interior
And conjures up pale shades of fear.
A white stranger steps into the house.
A dog runs wild through ruined passageways.
The maid extinguishes a lamp,
At night, one hears the sound of sonatas.
All this, Georg, before the Eastern Front.
What would Raskolnikov tweet?
Whenever possible, substitute:
The complex for the simple.
The exotic for the domestic.
The concept for the thing.
Check with me in a couple of millennia and we’ll see how things are progressing.
I was a pathetic fallacy for the FBI.
Great is qi! When qi accumulates, it produces essence. When essence accumulates, it completes the spirit. Keep clear, keep still and abide by the Dao. A heavenly man [“true” man or woman, or sage] can do all of these. He has the Dao and is able to follow it. But what am I? It will be sufficient for me just to practice economy of speech.
So wrote Li Dong Yuan, one of his period’s “four great physicians,” in his essay Admonition on Economy in Speech – once upon a time in the Jin-Yuan.
Right to silence. One of the (silent) cornerstones of numerous human rights declarations and accords during the twentieth century.
When the right becomes practice, practice the rite.
Bathos bathos everywhere y ni una gota para beber.
Silence is argument carried on by other means. So said Che of El Comandante’s legendary and terrifying lapses from speech.
XXIV
“How could I hope for, how could I deserve, my liberation, if I became my own jailer and myself turned the key which locked the mighty doors? But my rage was there, it was there, it pretended to sleep but it never slept, the merest touch of a feather was enough to bring it howling, roaring out. It had no sight, no measure, no precision, and no justice: and it was my master still.
“…and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed; until my pain became invested with a coherence which only I, alone, could provide. And this possibility, the possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of life and the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the very tip of my tongue. My pain was the horse that I must learn to ride. I flicked my cigarette out of the window and watched it drop and die. I thought of throwing myself after it. I was no rider and pain was no horse.”
From Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.
How, and through whom and what flows the power of enchantment?
Look carefully and you will see that the city is full of (mostly) invisible sages. Many work as janitors, opening and closing the gates, presiding over the coming and going of all things. If you want to be certain, acknowledge one with our eyes and she or he will smile, revealing their gums and missing teeth. From this skyline, you will learn, again, that the city, like the human journey, is full of necessary gaps. How, otherwise, could we possibly pass through?
Soften the eyes.
Even more.
Système D mon amour, système D.
In Daoist practice, written and visual texts are employed “to aid the meditator, giving him or her an alternative and imagery-rich language, a departure from ordinary language. Through this departure, the everyday mind is bypassed, allowing one to engage with another more subtle mode of perception, which in turn allows one to discern and engage with the almost imperceptible movements and changes taking place within the body.
Like a Zen Buddhist koan, one of the functions of the language of Daoist meditation is to destabilize habitual patterns of thought. To this end, different and multiple images are used to say the same thing in different or even inverse ways. The discourse of Daoist texts and images is repetitive and recursive, coming at the mind and spirit from multiple angles. It is always different, but always new. This endless recursion continuously interweaves images and words so that our conscious, everyday mind is subverted and transformed…
“In Daoism, the concepts of text and image are interwoven. Images are texts… [hence] Numerous Daoist symbols exist in a gray zone between images and texts. An image can be a text not only because it imitates writing, but because Daoists see ‘viewing’ as the faculty essential to decoding a text. From the Daoist perspective of sacred scriptures, moreover, an image is a text: any materialized form reflects the highest form of text – the writing from heaven, or heavenly writings (Tian Shu), condensed from graphic or picture-like patterns of the pure cosmic qui upon world creation.
[Thus] “For the Daoists, text and image are inextricably intertwined like the warp and weave of a tapestry.”
—From Tom Bisio, Decoding the Dao: Nine Lessons in Daoist Meditation, in which he cites [see italics above] Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China. Harvard East Asian Monographs 342. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
As of winter solstice 2013, the first African-American president of the United States has presided over the deportation of nearly two million people mostly of Latin American or Caribbean origin – a considerably higher number than under any previous chief executive. Useless to ask why. More productive to ask what, through him, we are intending?
Beauty.
Beauty of another sort.
Of Cretan women.
Of Mycenaean men.
Steal the artisan from her country. Transplant her skill.
“Fears Multiply,” says a December 22 NY Times headline, “Amid a Surge in Deportation.”
Decode that, Daoist.
Kidnap. Then deport. Then kidnap…
Sage. Brush.
Sagebrush.
Many an aborigine’s mistaken for a tree
till you near him on the motorway
And the tree begin to breathe.
[See the light ram through the gaps in the land.]
…The civilised they keep alive
The territorial war.
[See the light ram through the gaps in the land.]
Erase the race that claim the place
And say we dig for ore,
Or dangle devils in a bottle
And push them from the pull of the bush.
[See the light ram through the gaps in the land.]
You find them in the road.
[See the light bounce off the rocks to the sand.]
In the road…
Wrote-sang Kate Bush oncet.
South Sudan, mon amour.
PRN mon amour. Pro re nata.
Agronomia/Autonomia, mes enfants.
Utt-da-zay sings the tailor…
That’s the way, baby.
Die Ziet appears to be giving up der Geist.
If an act is performed painstakingly, to whom is the pain given?
How much more is thought than can ever be said. How much more is known than can ever be thought. How much more is mystery than can ever be known.
Pushkin Riot.
There is thought, language, and perception. There is also the one still darker than the dark one. Meaning that within heaven there is another heaven, within breath another breath, within mind, another mind.
In breath, there is both fullness and emptiness.
When we allow transformation to unfold, we produce without owning, just as “the pristine breath produces all things without owning them.” [Ho-Shang-Kung’s Commentary on Lao-Tse. Eduard Erkes, trans. and annotations. Switzerland: Journal Artibus Asiae Ascona, 1950; François Jullien, The Silent Transformations. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, trans. London: Seagull Books, 2011.]
No one hear but us mariposas.
…like a ton of bricks.
What a difference an ascender makes.
If you don’t find your body when you’re young, it will find you when you’re older.
And Tevya, transfigured, sings: “Cognition, cognition!”
Whiteness: a means of putting off the confrontation with one’s own skin.
What so?
¿Por qué no?
Pulling a rabbi out of a hat.
What if the drones went on strike?
Remind me, on what map is freedom located?
If you find it – quick! – pin it down.
NEUTRALIZES
EXTREME ODORS
INHIBITS
BACTERIAL ODORS
ELIMINATES
ODORS 24/7
Product hype on a bag of catsand, or social program?
Science, of course, being an illusion. Given that there is no form of knowledge or understanding which is not an art. The distinction lies in ideas about what constitutes precision. And whether there is an end to the infinite.
Infinity’s End
Finity [and finity’s cat]
Fin
Begin, again, finity.
And glue yourself to change.
[But don’t Braque up.]
