Vivienne’s Diary – 8.12.20

from ‘Little Gidding’ – Ts Eliot

Eliot begins: we shall not cease from exploration. 

Tao means Way – ‘My Way!’ A way to go, involving choice. In Proust, ‘Swan’s Way’ the family evening walk passed Swan’s house, leading back 2 home; or they chose the Germant’s way. Swan & the family Germant each stood for something different.

The Way of Tao eschews ambition because it leads U away from yr true potential. Tao adheres 2 ‘nothings own doing’: let life come 2 U & respond 2 circumstance according 2 yr character; this way U live in harmony with yr true potential.

I believe in my ‘best self’ which is yr c’hi; follow yr c’hi, it’s always right 4 U. This is what we mean by Queen of Hearts: culture is ‘the pursuit of our perfection’. Tom, my yoga teacher, always says, “‘Don’t give yrself a hard time, U R doing yr best, U R perfect now.”

Forget yrself -> Follow yr deep interest -> ‘U get out what U put in’ -> Become who U R.

This is what Eliot means by:

‘A condition of complete simplicity.
 Costing no less than everything.’

It has no price: give everything U have got.

Tao says: the ‘10,000 things’ that exist call it Presence, when they don’t exist call it Absence, no-one knows where life comes from, it is ‘occurrence appearing of itself, self-ablaze’. Science has not yet equaled this accurate statement.

The gateway of Tao leads 2 mystery – ‘dark female enigma’, where absence & presence give birth 2 one another in the generative tissue of the Cosmos.

‘Through the forgotten unremembered gate’ 

U never pass thru’ the gateway, U just arrive. The Chinese poets refer 2 the experience as ‘the Way here lost’, or ‘no return’. Way is Revelation: call it intuition (or insight -> same word), when U suddenly know something: ‘U get it’! U try 2 pin it down with words but it is beyond reason & U can never fully explain it but U know it’s true. Read the Joker of Hearts, I think you’ll find it easy 2 absorb the concept of Homo Loquax.

Science tells us that energy & structure are one + same. I imagine (energy) a stream of atoms, only too small 2 exist, travelling at fast frequency, & crystals (structure) travelling more slowly  at a different  frequency like building blocks,  Fusion: rose = structure/body; fire = energy/spirit. 

‘When the tongues of flame are in-folded
 Into the crowned knot of fire
 And the fire and the rose are one’

I’ve always been a Taoist but I didn’t know it until I discovered Chinese painting: the job of the painter is to catch the rhythm & so I figured out that everything is rhythm. Another great event in my life was when my friend Feargus gave me a copy of ‘An Anthology of Chinese Poetry’ – translation by David Hinton. Chinese poetry is the longest tradition in the history of literature, lasting for more than 2 1/2 thousand years. For me, today’s leading figure in literature is translator + philosopher, David Hinton, he should get the Nobel Prize.

The anthology includes a selection from the Tao. The Tao is a collection of 80 poems written by sage philosophers. It’s a way of life & has probably had more influence on philosophy than any other.

Eliot is a christian but also a Taoist. In 1922, The ‘Waste Land’, broke the tradition of western poetry. Indeed the poem is a smashed mirror of the world made up of broken pieces.  Renaissance man represented all knowledge – available at the time. The modern age is the age of the specialist who’s often quoted as someone who knows more and more about less and less.

The great scholar Ezra Pound, had translated Chinese poetry & Japanese poetry & the drama of the No Theatre. The modern art movement was dependent upon the arrival of Chinese art + poetry. He worked with Eliot on the poem – a collage which mirrors the Chinese poetic oeuvre in that it is put together like a collection of different short poems.

I’ve finally completed the Manifesto but we’re considering whether we can link with AOC and the Magic Money Tree (see image below) as a way of speeding up the process to X.
I hope that I have more time to include culture; the suite of hearts stands for culture. So here I am talking about the Tao.

My Friday Speeches have been a series of 9 programs: torture. Which is best: immediate violence or is it the slow torture of solitary confinement until death as suffered by Julian Assange?  Formula: text on black background, followed by dressing up to recite a poem. This Friday it’s me reciting Eliot’s poem. The last one will be Sara Stockbridge & ‘The Self-Laudatory Hymn of  Inanna and her Omnipotence’, a 4,500 years old Sumerian poem. Then back as usual.