XCVII

 

It must be a year since I wrote anything. Except for dribs and drabs about living in Vermont and working for Doubleday.

An awful lot has gone down since then. Politics and revolution have grown enormously and there have been some massive changes. Womens Liberation and Freak Nationalism have grown; sometimes overlapping but mostly running afoul of eachother. No cohesive “movement” really seems to be emerging, probably because repression is not equal all around and also because there is too much hostility between all kinds of revolutionaries yet to be overcome. A lot of heavy head changes really have to be made before we all have a communal identity. [Journal note, June 6, 1970, Berkeley, CA]

 

Every time I hear “online,” I think “hooked.”

 

What is the cure for spiritual greed?

 

Be a Buddhist. Or just look like one.

Here at the Dharma Modeling Institute, we’ll train you for a high-paying, glamorous career in spiritual posing…

 

I was an expedient means for the FBI

 

Middle gaze

 

You can spend a lifetime running early or late. But when you die, you’ll be right on time.

 

The plague: man and pest destiny

 

Going to meet the hoplites

 

Athens tells Sparta?

 

Leveaning happens

Leveling happens

 

Anxiety and desire: another way to think of yin and yang

And the consumption, production – and possible regulation – of extremes

 

We’re looking for a few good Melians

 

Tax the deaf!

 

I am a subject!

No, you’re an object…

Rebeated ten thousand billion times this is the primal strophe-counterstrophe, the great Western fugue passing for a dialogue that unfailingly produces catastrophe

 

The pen is mightier than the sword

What a difference a # bet annen & andani makes

 

 

Anxiety and desire: one may, if one chooses, safely secede from this war between the states. For the antagonists constitute the disunion itself. There is no Mason-Dixon line, no Fort Sumpter, no Battle of the Ironclads, no Antietam, no Pickett’s Charge, no March to the Sea, no Appomattox – only a diaphragm that moves in relation to the intake and outflow of air, tugging subtly on the body’s organs and structures, orchestrating a new harmony with every breath.

What is it like to breathe through your heels?

 

Ah, you have such a detoxicating personality!

 

Disconnecticut, the convolution state

 

The Eight Extraordinary Channels are sometimes referred to by Daoists as the Eight Psychic Channels. Of the Du Mai channel, Bisio writes:

Du Mai commands and regulates the yang of the body. Yang is related to movement, our intrinsic movement through life. Yang gives vertical strength to the body. As children we learn to stand upright, walk and move. Jeffrey Yuen says [in Channel Systems of Chinese Medicine: The Eight Extraordinary Vessels, lecture, 2003] Mingmen is what throws and lifts the head up, and gets you into an upright posture. If the moving qi of the kidneys is held back, yang movement is hampered, preventing movement and stimulation.

The Du channel’s association with the spine allows this upright and upward movement. Zhuang Zi, in talking about nourishing life, tells us to take the Du as the regulating principle in order to preserve the body, nourish vitality and complete one’s destiny. The spontaneous fluctuations of behavior tend to normalize around the central current. [see Bisio for source].

The Due is hidden and unseen. Unlike the Ren [Channel], which lies in front, the Du is behind us and is thus invisible. Hence it is opposed to the “knowing mind” and is the real controller, as opposed to the knowing mind’s pretentions to control and direct life. Daoist priest Kristopher Schipper adds that concentrating and regulating our own energies (qi) enables us to stand upright in ourselves, instead of having to lean against trees or on the crutches of systems and religious doctrines concocted by men. Only by remaining independent, by following the natural action of the spinal column, can we be a free human being, standing upright within our own vital space. [Tom Bisio, Ba Gua Circle Walking Nei Gong: The Meridian Opening Palms of Ba Gua Zhang. Outskirts Press, 2012, p. 171]

 

Now and then I hear about some Prometheus

wearing his fire helmet,

enjoying his grandkids.

While writing these lines

I wonder

what in them will come to sound

ridiculous and when.

[From Wisŧawa Szymborska, “Written in a Hotel,” Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998]

 

The collier has a daughter,

She’s black but O, she’s bonnie;

A laird he was that loved her,

Rich both in lands and money.

I’m ower young to wed the laird

and over black to be a lady,

But I will hae a collier lad

The color o’ my daddie.

 

The collier has a daughter,

I vow she’s wondrous pretty;

The collier has a daughter,

She’s black but, O, she’s witty!

He shawed her gowd in gowpins*

But she answered him fu’ ready:

The lad I love works underground

The color o’ my daddie.

*handfulls

[“The Collier’s Bonnie Lassie,” The Shuttle and Cage: Industrial Folk Ballads. Ewan MacColl, ed. London: Workers’ Music Association, 1954. p. 24]

 

c.f.-q.v. Fleetwood Mac’s pop chestnut “Dreams,” in which it is asserted that:

Thunder only happens when it’s raining

Players only love you when they’re playing…

The first proposition is patently untrue.

As is the second, since “players,” constitutionally, cannot love.

 

Aye, very utopitarian.

 

Yang, beyond its incitatory quality tends to expand go upward and outward. Left to its own devices, any such excess becomes unstable, since it signifies an often invisible lack elsewhere. This is a long way round to saying that if yin is insufficient to control its expansive force, yang will (perversely) “invent” something to constrain itself, something like Private Property – which is supposed to stabilize things – but patently works toward further instability, asymmetry and, ultimately, chaos.

We have long moralized about the evils of wealth, particularly extreme wealth, and the evils “caused” by poverty. But wealth and poverty are, no more, no less, than symptoms of imbalance and disequilibrium operating within social life. If one had, say, a tremendously “rich” heart and an equally “poor” set of kidneys, one wouldn’t feel very good. One’s body wouldn’t work very well, since all the organs need to work harmoniously in the generation, circulation and storage of energy. It is always risky to bring physiology to bear in analysing society, but truly, can we really say, clinically, that the institutions we’ve evolved, the Nation State, Private Property, and the whole organization of social life around their protection and preservation, has worked to stabilize, regulate and conserve the health of people or their orbish home?

The counter-arguments are easily anticipated. We just have to get it right, i.e. the State or Property, just have to tweak things, reform them, and/or become better, more moral people, whereupon the rich will become kindly and generous, and the poor, conversely at least into grateful, wherefore less dangerous. The problem is that there is always some unenlightened, bad, or even evil They who won’t sign on and seizes the opportunity to claim what isn’t rightly theirs. So we fall back on the notion that our institutions are perfect, it’s just that humans, at least some of us, are too ignorant or innately nasty to go along the righteous path.

Yours truly proposes that we can’t afford to be moral any more. We never could. But now it’s time to walk away from the real or imagined debt we owe to the idea of perfecting ourselves and our institutions. Abstract concepts can, and often do, die off without anyone being the least bit harmed by their passing. We just have to let them go. Smile and wave bye-bye. Concepts are, inherently, like clouds. We turn them into rocks.

Better to breathe and live and work at making useful, needful things, and not worry about who owns that particular mountain, valley or drone. Or whether the drone crashed on my side of the border or on your’n.

 

 

A man on a cellphone, his voice inflected by what you figure to be years of booze and cigarettes: Just because you hang up on me doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say.

 

Is it possible that we have used our telecommunication devices as telemutation devices, i.e. to leverage ourselves out of the electromagnetic field of human collective experience and intentionality – by which I mean shared experience, however inconsistent, partial, or lopsided – and into a dead zone of massively distributed hyper-individual micro-experiences that can never cohere as genuinely interpersonal and embracing? Experiences born as ghosts. Experiences that cannot cohere a structure.

Is it possible that we, the seven billion, have we become a massively disassociated, categorically uncollectivizable Cloud, the sort of vapor which lacks the potential to gather, condense and generate beneficent rain. The sort of cloud that appears, only to disperse in the next breath? Like a pfft of an icon off a dock.

For all our “media,” is humanity now post-social?

 

Gin a madness meet a madness comin’ through the why?

 

Ought or naught: that is a question

 

The EXIT is through the fourth wall

 

Holes in the ozone there may be, but the moronospere carries on robust as ever

 

Who can survive the great freedom?