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.
- 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 …
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
*** 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
