Monologue in B flat
[filed under poetics/red_path]
“It takes qi to win, it takes qi to lose, and most importantly it takes qi to adapt to change. Do not waste qi celebrating success or complaining about failure - demonstrate your qi through adaptation and then return to the quiet within.”
Liu Ming - pg. 149 of Changing - Zhouyi: The Heart of the Yijing - except from hexagram 61: Zhongfu - Holding the Center
“I could blame the disease. I could blame my Ancestors. I could blame society and a thousand thousand systemic conditions. I could blame myself. None of it would matter.
I had a very direct and honest talk with a friend, a mentor, a teacher yesterday. They are also in extremely dire circumstances. There is no end to pain. Everywhere you look, you see the uneven and unfair tendrils of fate, the stains of karma, the hideous face of reality. And there are flowers too. But who cares?
I’m not trying to be funny, it’s just that the humor is dark, like a swarm of ants smothering a piece of meat.
I’m writing because i suffer from a baseline of constant anxiety, but i don’t think writing will save me. I’m writing because it tricks me into feeling useful, productive. It is an outlet for the pain, the fear, the ghosts and demons. I can’t trust it, but i can’t trust much of anything anyway.
What does one do when all trust is hollowed away by something that might be wisdom? When hope and faith and belief are all burned away by the heat of time?
Another character, another roll of the dice would have a totally different outlook on this. Someone with a safety net, a family, money, etc. They say truth is relative, but there is something behind even all of those glittering fantasies too. Something that binds them all, a gravity no icarus can escape.
There are things i think i know:
My parents should not have had a child. I don’t blame them, i understand them. I have chewed and swallowed them until i became sick, in order to understand why. Why do people make the decisions they make? Even when it appears so obvious that every choice leads to worse choices, more pain, more resentment, more destruction…
I made those kinds of choices too. I too was led around by the nose, pulled and yanked by desire, by hope, by “love”. I regret everything. This regret is like a cold breeze at the end of a long journey. The regret has changed me, stripped me, cut the last of me. These are things i think i know.
All the many corpses under us. So many used and discarded. Unremembered, unpraised, uncared for. This is us too. What we have wrought on them is wrought on us. It appears differently at different times, at different angles. They say that sick people each have their own sickness, while healthy people are all the same. I say, there are no healthy people. Just the appearance of them, which creates the situation by which sickness can be categorized and sick people can be used as examples. And one by one, we all join the pile, and one by one, we are paved over.
Every loser is someone who could have given the world beauty but was prevented from doing so and blamed for it.
This is the path we take, as a whole. Unsustainable of course, but humanity will exhaust itself eventually and then the winnowing. Nature will rebound and humans will become something else. These are things i think i know.
Don’t cry for me, don’t blame me, and don’t remember me. Don’t use the idea of me to further yourself in any way. Keep my name out of your mouth. When this body is gone, there is no need to waste qi on it. Regret won’t even help you. It will just hollow you out until all you can see is the face of nature.
Perhaps this is the gift. The unwanted gift. But a gift, nonetheless. All the keepers of this story have been relegated to the prisons and the pits. There is no room for them in our life raft of a society, except to grease the gears with their flesh. They are fuel, and we are going somewhere. Somewhere very very important.
These are things i think i know.
So i don’t blame my parents, but i don’t like them either. Certainly, there is nothing like the kind of love people define love as. No, there is a kind of bitter respect for their actions and consequences. There is a pity, and a wish for some version of peace. Children having children and scattering, scattering. Clawing at the doors of heaven but finding only silence there.
Wisdom, ripped from all the gilded artifice, is empty. A sheer cliff, an open sky, a forever desert. Time, history, memory is that too. Every thought exhausted; every face blurred, scorched black and leathered. All names forgotten, as if never existing.
Humans turn to gods in times like this, and gods do not answer. What does answer is not god, but we may say it is so anyway. We crave the beauty of a thing that cannot die and so we conjure it from our pain and need. The wind howls and that is a lover singing to us, the sun burns and that is someone finally touching us again, the belly empties and begins to devour the body, the skin begins to itch as the parasites infest us and at least it feels like we are wanted. Finally, all semblance of self is extinguished. All memory, all past and all future, seen to be what it always was, a darkened stage, a quiet place. The actors turn and walk away.
These are things i think i know."
Housekeeping
Donating is Liberating & Sharing is Caring
venmo @dare-sohei or paypal.me/daresohei
The Gu syndrome page is updated again, this is becoming a project all unto itself.
Two series of long posts are cooking, until they are ready there will be shorter posts, fiction/poetry/essay like the one above.
This braided “series” will be looking at my body of work from two angles: deathpractice and artmaking. It is a more complete/revised and perhaps distilled version of everything i’ve been saying for the past 5+ years. It is my attempt at a “first draft” of some kind of manual. We’ll see how far it transforms. It’s my attempt at leaving something behind when i die. I’ve been saying that since the beginning and it bears repeating, i think. My fate is very uneven, very hard. I know about some things not through conjecture or hypothesis. You can do with that notion what you will, but what i intend is that i show you what it’s like to live in a non-hypocritical way, even when that creates “negative” situations. I’m trying to leave something useful behind. Something that is beyond dualistic morality.
The “thrust” here for me creatively is that if i can “burn off” some of my cursed anxiety in the effort of writing all this, this might leave some room for more purely artistic projects. For now though, writing is the fastest way for me to feel like i’m doing something useful with what i’ve been saddled with.
There are still a lot of culture wars type issues though, even here at substack. Many people show the data that readers don’t read the posts. Most skim/scan, sometimes even liking or commenting but not reading or comprehending. Apparently, most people don’t read more than 400 words, and only some read to a max of 800-1,000 words. (there’s data on this but i’m always suspicious of data because it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. prophecies of a cultureless culture.) I have a library of books, many of which i haven’t read, but they are there in all their long-form substance.
People’s lives, their time, their craft, shouldn’t be boiled down to short form content for extremely stressed and time-poor people. This is an us-problem, a you-problem. I hated what instagram and facebook was doing to people, people who think they can and should understand complex things in less than a minute. Imagine visiting a doctor or a mechanic who only learns via short form…. what an unmitigated disaster. A culture-less cult, bent on categorizing reality into fragments which they then claim knowledge and authority over. That’s what individualism is, that’s what branding is, that’s what shortform is when it doesn’t exist within an ecosystem of wisdom. Memes & short form content have a place, that place is not on the dais.
May you be finding your way through the nastiness of this culture and age in a way that is unpredictable to the empire’s demands.
Thank you!
"Somewhere very very important..." Thank you. This is somewhere I think we are.