Sunday September 23, 2018

Bang! I’ve got enlightenment. Time to use it and change the world. Augment storytelling capacity. Change consciousness. Otherwise it’ll be 40 years into what was once just Reagan’s “New Lame America,” but is now, at certain moments in our seeing, a 24/7 corporate-fascist, logistics-driven, policed and self-policed carceral state. Live differently, motherfuckers! At which point I remind myself, “Breathe. Let go of the anger. Release it. Forgive. Return to the Dhammapada. ‘Go far into the Void,’ as the Tao Te Ching counsels, ‘and there rest in quietness.'” Thus enabling us to act gratefully and compassionately toward others, as we “Flight of the Bumblebee” around town. In return, we get to learn about the meaning of “Mu,” a concept from Zen Buddhism. Moten teaches us to think of such concepts as props or toys. “If you pick them up,” he explains in his interview with Stevphen Shukaitis, “you can move into a new set of relations, a new way of being together, thinking together. In the end, it’s the new way of being together and thinking together that’s important, and not the tool, not the prop” (The Undercommons, p. 106). What matters now is what we do with concepts, how we use them in our relations with others. Intellectual exchange can be practiced, here and now. Come on, folks — let’s do this. Let us use these words and participate in study.