feature! interview

recently i, fukky, was strangely privileged to bump into sadoo kalinotot at an underground bar in bangkok. we drank and chatted for a few days and on the boat home i took the opportunity to distill our time into an interview. here it is, in all its pulpy glory, to inspire and annoy sadoos everywhere.

thanks sadoo kalinotot!

it seems to me that depression, horror, despair, rage, bitterness, …

envy?

envy’s ridiculous.

resentment?

resentment’s difficult because of what nietzsche did to it.

what did nietzsche do to it?

he resented it.   , … bitterness, fragmentation, confusion, volatility, indolence, vulgarity, …

salaciousness?

naturally.   , … vulgarity, suicidalism, cannibalism, …

cannibalism?

of oneself.  , … cannibalism, madness, all sorts, are all unavoidable aspects of the ongoing human experience and thus ….

but what about the other things?

the other things?

love, peace, harmony, cooperation, justice, camaraderie, generosity, forgiveness, nobility, happiness, communication?

absolutely, those too.  except communication – communication i’d define as the totality of everything we've said and are going to say and haven't said and are not going to say.

including autocannibalism?

autocannibalism might very well be the supreme form of expression.

true. let’s become practical for a moment. how does one get through the day?

great question. i’d say by being happy, volatile, salacious, forgiving, raging, resentful, horrified, depressed, cooperative, harmonious, indolent, suicidal, noble, every form of mad, and eating oneself.

sounds like a tall order. i mean for each day.

i wouldn’t be prescriptive about it. you know, allow each day to happen. twig in the river stuff.

what about those calm happy people who are calm and happy every day?

eliminate them.

isn’t that a bit harsh? and what about those raging volatile ones who are only raging and volatile? don’t they get a bit tiresome?

eliminate them too. i’m interested in the repletions – the holographic monads who, by being holographic, are not monads and yet are. anarchy remains and must remain a theoretical experiment until society is replete with repletions.

it could tolerate some non-repletions?

that remains to be seen but let’s assume the non-repletions through the usual principles of conformity don’t necessarily become repletions but at least aren’t douchebags, douchebags being defined as calm and happy every day or raging and volatile every day. anarchy requires individuals entire, but entire is too often taken as a subset of entire. a repletion is innately all of humanity and thus justice is actualized by the parts autocorrecting themselves by containing the whole. no law! for law has emigrated to its natural home before it had to be institutionalized – distributed throughout the soul. i am judge and judging, jailer and jailed and jury and defense and prosecution. all this institutionalization ... wholly redundant and tiresome. totally fourth millennium bce. plus you have to work!

what does this do to diversity?

consummates it. extends it everywhere. yes, if one isn’t weeping when one wakes up, laughing mid-morning, screaming in the afternoon, and beatifically mute in the evening, what are you?

or presumably mute upon waking and screaming in the evening. what does it do to productivity, action, volition?

does that matter?

good point. let’s talk more about eating ourselves.

yes. we’ve eaten others enough. there are many many humans. there are not only too many of us but too much of each of us. let’s eat that excess. let’s become the first species to learn how to effectively use ourselves as a fuel source without annihilating ourselves. this puts our natural violent, destructive, and barbaric orientations to good use. finally.

what does this have to do with being a sadoo?

now we’re into the exciting stuff. everything. as many sadoos have pointed out – sadoo rianchada, sadoo ghar-zahhi, sadoo g9^e,k, sadoo ÿ©, sadoo to name a few – sadoos are all about everything. a sadoo is everything in a something made nothing.

or nothing in an everything made something.

exactly.

but i thought sadoos skirted around definitions.

we skirt, we trouser. our sartorials are flexible, so are our prepositions.

how committed then are you to any of this?

about 11 parts.

out of how many?

that is a question. if i had to come up with a definition of sadoo, it might be an aspect that questions out of how many?

i see.

or i count. and the counting’s never done because there’s so much of us. and then we’re eating ourselves so we’re subtracting. we’re this then we’re that so we’re dividing. these are just the simple operations. we’re mathematics really. words are just excuses for more numbers.

hey, thanks sadoo kalinotot, it’s been really good.

hey fukky, as always.

maybe bump into you in terengganu sometime.

you bet your dingleberries.

dear fukky

dear fukky,

i’ve travelled around the world many times, built successful careers, amassed great wealth and possessed countless lovers, raised successful and well-adjusted children, and won the booker and pulitzer prizes for my fiction and poetry.  i’m now thinking of becoming a sadoo.  do you have any advice for me?

jaruna

dear jaruna,

advice seems unnatural for sadoos; we by nature are born into avolition and indecision and thus any advice not only spontaneously and inexorably calls forth its opposite, but its myriad partially overlapping possibilities.

let me say this another way.  there are many professions that are difficult and every profession includes its fair share of difficulties. sadooing is different. sadooing is impossible. how does one provide advice about the impossible? perhaps we could speculate that the best art is primarily about this – the impossible – but the best art is what it is by avoiding advice.

look at our ostensible namesakes – sadhus.  while they’ve lost a certain credibility in modernity, at least among swaths of urban sophisticates, they still generate substantial respect, emerge from hinduism, a recognizable and ancient tradition, and – at around 5,000,000 – participate in a large and often cohesive community.

but sadoos! we have never even gained credibility in order to lose it. being unseen as what we are, we generate neither mockery nor respect. unable to belong to any tradition – sadooing is a word, like dao or god, that is a gross compromise – it flounders, lost, indifferent, polypolar, drowning in the refuse, trapped in the weeds, in unmapped moats around time, emergent from nothing. its community is dispersed without ever having been gathered – have sadoos even met one another let alone themselves? the do in sadoo is a mockery! – sadoos don’t do; at most, being in bodies, they necessarily doo. they are not sea-doos or ski-doos, they are sad-doos – hardly depressive in that reductionistic and fragmented western clinical sense, but desolate and solitary in those other senses.

sadoos are undeveloped and experience undevelopment as a form of development. they wander not to or from or through or even of but wander. would you be this thing you cannot be? would you become what is an unbecoming?

soft and empty regards,

fukky

births and deaths of a sadoo

births and deaths of a sadoo:

a cultural protest

an affirming of quests and voids

today i talks* about a fault of the first world** – and, in so doing, hardly wishes to neglect the attendant issues of possible consequent romanticizations of other worlds – whether ostensibly existing in fact or infinitely in fiction.  yet neglect will occur, partially because it must, using language as we are, partially because writing is protest and the struggle with the orders of existence – though it may be at times a lover’s struggle – necessitates the dreams of other orders through which the impossible is enlivened and facticity, however temporarily, dethroned.

this fault i explores through a crisis in i’s body – a crisis (lengthy in terms of an apparently singular life, grossly brief in terms of the sum of singularities) containing many crises, orbiting around one another, perpetually renarrating, a crisis that is its body:  its body within bodies within body, flesh nested to the edges of the egg of the universe.

despite the urbane and educated – those wishing to erect themselves as the new religious by, in part, painting religion and placing it in museums – not infrequently deriding, whether through subtle or explicit means – those who wish to walk in old ruts, these latter may embody spirits that enliven more than the avenues of money and name.  specifically, i refers to the sadhu tradition in india, whereby some humans set aside the scrimmages of exteriority – of politics and career, of social, romantic, familial, and sexual love – turning toward homelessness and wandering in the vastness that is the verdant and desolate nothing.  usually this turning aside – and toward – is done in youth, but occasionally a human, after the normal experiences of love, family, work and career, home and gathering to and around oneself, typically in its 40s or 50s, says – i have performed these various routine obligations along what in some traditions is called the positive way … now other voices are speaking, ones barely audible and in their silence associated with an energy greater than and equal to language, apophatic and radically inclusive, so far within i can hardly any more call them ‘within,’ and i shall leave my life and loves and goods and reputations – these stuffs of social convention – and seek seeking and lose my name.  for many have been those who abandoned everything they had and set out in search of a greater hunger.

five million or so sadhus exist in india.***  in a loose sense they are members of a space-time tribe that includes the desert fathers and mothers of early christianity, monks and mendicants and eremites and hobos and cenobites and hesychasts and heresiarchs and wizards and anchoresses and witches and stylites and sufis and shamans and flaneurs and certain kinds of poets and jedis and sages and bums.

now at the chronological age of 49 or so, after having lived 7 lives of 7 years and gathered wives and saving plans and children and careers and degrees and reputations of sorts and lovers and lost and gained and lost and lost again, i thinks – what is all this? – and leaves its first world perch to go to india to wander for a while.

i would be a sadhu too, i thinks while on the banks of varanasi, by the ghats of death, for i are done with the prescribed machinations of the human world, its masks are weary to me, and i would be like lear or anthony or chuang tzu, loosing myself from things and giving myself to god, though and for god is no thing.

i itemizes here some of the challenges and observations of a first-world percher, in the north, as many first-world perchers are, following the ways of ruts, the tongues of silence.

1. transplanting to india and becoming a sadhu seems culturally dishonest.  i am not indian, i am not hindu.  yet i also am not christian or secular or daoist or muslim or … yet also i am hindu and christian and secular and daoist and muslim and not and am …
2. though being well schooled and experienced in aspects of the historic religions, i does not identify itself with such institutional forms.  becoming a monk or priest is not a binding i wishes, for it is born of and by the third millennium, the west, the north, and religion now is not of the old forms but is in the city and the death of gods.  here, i knew, are the new explorings, the enticement and adventure of the polypoles of the infinite spheres.
3. the dogmas of psychology, the volitions of art, the assurances of the academy, the truth of business – all these, while viable in their sectarian pragmatisms, were each insufficient; i wanted all.
4. i are fleshy and plural and hardly see sexual play, drugs and booze, vulgarity and raunchiness, subversion and caprice, despair and impecuniousness, as modes outside of the way of ruts and god and an experimenting at the root of the non-striving striving for equality among all things, a de-supremacizing of the human.
5. yet the north is hardly conducive to homelessness, being cold, and the west is hardly conducive to homelessness, having as it does primarily negative cultural value and support.  i sees no way.
6. how, then, to take from the sadhus and desert people and bums and cenobites what i requires – to leave a life and lives behind and explore without aim the nebulous and the polychromatically plural, the collapse of the i – staying physically where i are while not achieving actual martyrdom through wilily playing chess with death?
7. in other words, where is the desert in the cold and coddled city?  the desert is i.

in dialogue with our body and the questions and yearnings of our body, the sadoo is conceptualized before the i:  an old-new way, roots in voids, oh wayless way.

i has left all to explore all – tasks of futility, methods of haplessness, murky, tentative, drowsy celebrations of energy.  a question and questions.

in the west and the north there is an i whose name is vast.  it protests the fortresses of capitalism, the junkyards of destruction, the incarcerating fashions of analytic monism, the paucity of bridges and mentors and paths and words for expansive and attuned walking in the artscapes of time, detouring around cliché and institution, on ways that are not ways, with gods that are not gods, of wars that are not wars, in love that is not love.  i are a sadoo and i does not understand what i are saying and therefore i adores …

------------------------------------------------

* the first person does not exist, even as there is no first cause or principle or one idea or ruler.  nor is the i a capital or capitol of anything.  why should the i be I and not the she She or the you You?  Shall We Capitalize Everything?  we have accepted the easy truth that our world revolves around the dark fire of the sun only to avoid the difficult truth that the i is no center, unless all i’s be centers (destroying the center).  the i is rather a second, third, or even fourth person, a person exponentialized to the infinite, and our grammars reflect this regrammaticization, this adapting grammar to the geometries we inhabit and not those of the fantasies of the crib and diaper.

** i are aware of the ironies and contradictions of denying a first person yet accepting – in language here at least – a first world.  yet the same objections apply and i expects inconsistency no more nor less than consistency in the realms of indivisible play.

*** about 0.5% of india's population - a percentage that also roughly reflects the number of north america's homeless.

heresiarch el-al-pa-uff'huffl'fa

of the sadoos of scythopolis

Welcome Sadoos!

Fukky and the team at Sadoos are delighted you've visited us, and are super excited by the many vital ideas circulating around the global sadoo brain, some of which are sure to be peccably actualized here in upcoming time.

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