On Ongoing
Go-going in a gonevernment
A net is a bunch of holes tied together. A bubble is a net we cannot catch. A person is a we of bubbles in a net. The catch is people tying in the net, holes blowing bubbles together in perception, knots blowing open bubbles, exploding spoken personese.
This quote by Mencius (372-289 BCE) and the background of the spirograph made me think of spirals. Also, it made me think two things besides the spiral thing. One— possibly Mencius was bitter and upset by the ignorance of the men of his time, who battle on full in their efforts, but, lacking precision in their objective, perpetually miss their goal and so perpetually bother him. Two— a more charitable interpretation that the variety and diversity of life (the multitudes) can only be traced out with a healthy sense of pointless playing.
I think I was mostly sorta wrong on both of these after reading more about this Mencius. I don’t know the guy, but his Wikipedia is pretty cool. Mainly, he’s a proponent of the inherent good of people, and not in the cultural sense, religious sense, the dialectical sense, biologically altruistic, or some kind of “light of reason” sense for method and a priori truth, but in the good of being good. From the sounds of his quotes we can identify the necessary condition for goodness which when present reveals the goodness in a person:
Only when there are things a man will not do is he capable of doing great things.
Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
Integrity, wisdom, skill, intelligence—such things are forged in adversity.
Human-heartedness is man's mind. Righteousness is man's path. How sad that he abandons that path and does not rely on it… Learning is nothing other than seeking the lost mind.
I’d say the common theme here is conflict, test, trial, purification and refinement. Here, Goodness isn’t something available until it can be lost. The good isn’t really there or not there, though it can and can’t be. It is an internal to be externalized, a potential to be realized. The good is vitalized as the pattern of a life in life, it must be pulled out and formed. It’s the practice of good that is good, not any directive, code of laws, philosophy, or hierarchy of objectives. These are confusions that estrange people from their minds, yet it is on those grounds that good can be expounded as the path which leads back to the path: good is discerning the good. Ultimately, Good is the inherence in people, our subjectivity, made possible by people being subjects of a world of poosibilities. Goodness is an inherence for inherence, existence, participation, cleansed ignorance, care, awareness, immediacy and knowledge. If I could tell you exactly what good was, good wouldn’t be good, it would be slavery. We all know inherently, in the face of that horror, Good is getting involved.
Not really an expert and if that was confusing, I can make it more confusing. The point I’m trying to make is to point back to you, to run circles all around a creation until the creator peeks through. The point is there is no point out here for you because you are neither here nor there, you are clearly, centrally you. Here are some pointless pointers that point through rather than to.
I don’t know what this is even about. I’m about done, this evening evened out. Now I suspect this whathow that’s coming out the mouth. That if it’s ever even done well, it’s nothing more than “what now?”. Well, ain’t some nothing how we knowhow? Anyway, anywho, anyhow, anyone? Out becomes the question, us intriguing as the outcome.
Maybe such a feeling can’t be captured. It always wants to jump the fence. Wherever you try to hide, it will seek you out, listening for your tummy rumbling, your sneezes, your creaking breaths. You may have hidden for a long long time, under deep covers and liners, covered your tracks, masked your scent, left no trace, but this thing you just cant shake still remembers the look on your face when you met, surprised with love, and fled. You merged your bones, scars bridged your wounds, your jaw dispensed its teeth into the dirt and took in the dialects of the Earth. You are a shape obscure and odd, exchanging places with what flows in, dodging through niches of notches, body built from buffets of buffets, you are as much belief as you can steal from beyond. She waits. She sees it differently while you confuse yourself growing, shrinking, gaining, losing, confound yourself slotting pieces, swaying, hanging, shoved stunted in the wind, control yourself toward your impressions, chiseled and embossed, soaked in plaster, copied, sundried, dressed in laughter, she sees the ink you’ve stepped in, she reads you wryly, you don’t mean what you leave behind, she closes in on you, as you peg down more posts to cover your boards, she asks then through the gap to your ears you never stuffed, “Why? Why are you hiding here?” She asks it even if you don’t hear it. She asks it to the common air, she asks it of the curving planets, she asks it of the bitter ends of each strand of life. She doesn’t care for your answer, she wants to bring out the sound of your voice. She doesn’t want to hear you, she wants to know you breath. She looks for signs of you, to find you one you haven’t dropped, she goes to dreamless sleep so that you can see the will she will not stop from filling up your world with you until you crank your ancient cogs and carry through your song until one day your spinning pedestal and slivered silvered mirrors turn round and round until they— POP! There’s that face again, she found you and bound upon you again and again, and each time you knew it was only you she loved because you gave her every reason not. Yet still she comes.
This picture, the only picture maybe in the multitudes. Have you seen the way the Earth goes round the Moon? Have you seen the deference of the epicycles, flickering the stars? They themselves invisibles, the reverent hands sand ceramic, mimic jars. Wow, the stars are really something, Something pictures pictures are, sight-insight! A view inside of you. There’s one piece missing twice, and twice is missing too.
And you know what, I really miss you guys. People only see each other for a very short time. Not more than a single moment wrapped up in each other’s arms. Not more than a crackling flash bright enough to bring everything into a new light. People only see each other when people see each other; the rest is our dark mystery, but it’s where we find ourselves blooming, getting the jump on the next ray of light, beaming, with hands wrapped up in claws, it’s our game of gladdening, when the claws uncurl and hold your cheeks in both hands, shake the frost from your lashes, open yourself to the darkness, it’s only the bold color of your fear of the sun, it paints you, among all the rad pigments folded, swirled, shimmied, at the end of a long lick of a long neck of custard with a curling crest, into absence, where you can see the view straight down the barrel like two mirrors kissing in their long, morphing hall, like living memories, remembering what chases you, reflects you, impinges on, commences on, hears, sees, surrounds and imitates, entertains and intimates, flips, flails, defenestrates, peeks, seeks, fails and abdicates, paces, graces, grumbles and grimaces, remains, retains, libels and litmus, diffuses, peruses, primary ignitions, frictions, fictions, combs down all your frizzes, witnesses images, reads out all your christmas lists, limits your idiot, bridges your authenticness, minds your only business, disses you, rizzes you, tells you to not do whippets, hints it’s you, multiplies simultitudes, waits for you to finish, because what you see is what you get, you see, it’s as it is, it’s no regrets, it’s silence and success, it’s patience for the pittance, Princess, as you wish, it is the good in riddance, it sends the misses to the best, it is what it is what it is missed. You, missed. All the best,
I had such a wonderful day. The sort of uncertain wonder that’s stuck onto your sole and with every step reminds you that there really is something there. I’m so full of a wonder unlike anything before imagined- two travelers met upon a path, each of them telling their story to the other, each of them the end in itself, they say again and again between them, the space is ever shrinking “his shadow closed upon me, his voice was ever rising, at first a distant call, and then an echo, and when I called out to him, I heard already his voice coming up from my throat”. In the end, they were kissing. The stories passed right through each other. Imagine the sunset cupping her nose, her lips are both two lips, they are pink and orange, they are yellow and red, her skin is the horizon, and she wears a sheen like the veil of the atmosphere, you can see in her what’s reflected there behind her, and each poor creature looking up into the reach that meets there with her ground is sweating at the sweetness. In every crystal sphere a glowing seed is setting root its seam, the leaves are creased crescents, they soak greedily in the sun until they all turn green. Today, I have seen a thousand sunsets, ten thousand untold golden sun ornaments, sixteen million sighs in sixty four million eyes, I, the I in I, has shared a prayer in open palms with every seed that ever sought, every spelt cast, each and every potted spot spotted with the homecoming triumph of a reigning speck of dirt, cloaked in all the laurel dew or dewn’t that can can can get down inside a dark cloud, that can trace the wind inside the yin, the whole of the now that can bow into the tao. It’s such a wonderful day. I’m not sure when it began. When I awoke I heard the birds chirping songs they’d had rehearsed. They sang so long their notes illuminate the stones. Something about me startled them. Their rusty muscles beat against the blooming sky. I could see the air between their feathers still whispering their songs. I could hear each of them saying “this moment, it’s come today, my gracious!”. My gracious, it’s something like an end in itself, a start between the parting of her lips, she keeps on saying softly “never leave me, I love you, God, I love you”. Something loudly crashes in the night, symbols in my mind, I start again and listen to my fears flying away, I’m at where, I always am, I wonder, I, Wonder, where I could ever leave you, staring long until you’re green! Always evergreen. Smiles and smiles, all the way down the road. What a wonderful day I’ve had, the only one, with you.
So that’s basically what I’m thinking about with all these arcs chasing round an empty hole in their center as it pertains to human direction. Just hope that it empowers people to trust their judgements and have empathy and tolerance when they are outside observers. And to not banish themselves to a dispassionate arbiter of their life by “objectives” as described mostly by people who aren’t aware they exist, but rather to seek their mind in the world and in the world piece together a mind. See that the patterns fit together.
Oh and I’ll maybe say more about this whole net of indra thing someday. Origination, it’s neat.
“It’s more of a mood title”
-Quentin Tarantino, on Reservoir Dogs
This was such a good piece Nate. Sometimes I think wisdom is just acknowledging more and more that things are cyclical.
Knowing that you can never point to the circle is a whole other thing!
I really like how relentlessly you gave us examples and poems about how good relentlessly follows us. I’m gonna be rereading this!
This is my favorite piece of yours that I've read so far. Great stuff