kingtycoon | What It Is Like

This is how I became a Taoist. I can tell you this thing, this one thing that is simple, but that means a lot and makes everything what it is. I’m standing at the busstop this morning and watching. I stand next to the broken shelter where a car has hit the barriers around the fireplug. The sidewalks are cracked and there are grass and weeds growing through. Behind me there are three vacant storefronts. Mayfield is recently resurfaced, it is cleaner than the sidewalks and there are people driving very expensive cars up and down. I think to myself, first, about ideation, about how I can or have imagined a better world and then compare it to the current. Then I consider the man in a Porsche who must also have his own ideas about a perfect world and the owner of the vacant storefront and the people still at home and the students just starting school. They’re like me, we’re all of the same piece, we have ideas of how we’d like things to be.

I think of my own great plans, my deity fantasies, my wishes – this is desire. I think that I’m not alone in this, we’re all creatures in the crumble-down world no? With thoughts and dreams, all capable of imagining more and better. We are, we all are. So why is nothing the culmination of the wishes of others? I think it over, getting on the bus, it’s late, I’m late, it’s not going to be a perfect day. For me. Here it is, here it’s figured out. For me, the day is my experience of it as it deviates from a central ideal, the sublime, let us refer back and say, Platonic Ideal of what the day should be, and can be. This best, most perfect, it suits me and who else? It’s my own dream from my own self – who else does it serve?

I look at the broken sidewalk again, the second late bus of the day, I’m thinking about how this interaction is the result, not of anyone’s best intentions or any grand dreams of anyone, rather everything in a day, the whole experience of life is a series of negotiations between the varied and conflicting desires of everyone. Everyone in the world. It’s not done by one or two of us, but all and every one, agreeing to some give and to some take, allowing some trespasses, anticipating that our trespasses be forgiven. We have created the world, all of us together, by consent and by collusion and by force and will. All of it is to feed the desires of individuals. Desire is the root of dreaming, the platonic ideals are formed from a desire, and desire is the consequence of consciousness. These are the conclusions I arrive at while I’m arriving at work. Thinking and knowing that it’s all the wishes of everyone around me that make the company something, subsumed to the larger ambitions of others, we indulge our own goals and serve the goals of others to suit ourselves. Negotiations, always, transactions. I can’t help but wonder what transactions would occur if desire were eliminated, if we could with certainty accept that the world is not an edifice built by one in service to all, but the work of many mindless hands, invisible or not, all stacking and building without a sense of the final production. I can see Smith’s fascination, the strange thread of consent that combines all our efforts into something that the fewest of us can love but the most of us can tolerate.

I think of what it must be to try and scrabble to the heights, to inflect the world’s construction, inform it with my own wishes. Wishes are vanity though, no? Ambition is this, to make a mark in the consensus – but is it better altogether to be unmarked in the first place? To stand away and out of the fray and watch it unfold, the road the Tao is the Way, the Road, the Path – Road, literally – I stand on the road and look at the road, the road is a perfect representation of human wishes, it is so hopeful – the road assumes that there is someplace other than here, a place to go, that must be connected. There is somewhere to go, something else over the horizon. This, to me, is like a wish or like vanity. It says there is a place and that by desire a path can be made to it, without any sense that it is the road that is the place and what it joins.

It is not that life offers no savor, it’s that life is not what is presented, it is something else altogether, not desires but the connecting routes between the manifestations of everyone else’s desires.

I go walking with Agatha, I go to see her and she runs down the sidewalk to meet me, I am glad, I did not dream or wish for this, I only act and am gratified that this is the result of my action. I take her to dinner and ask: “What do you want?” She doesn’t know, or won’t say, admitting only in the end that she wants her regular order from the regular place, after I speak up in favor of all the pan-asian places, all the sportsbars and the pizza stands. It is never in doubt, and my desire is not greater than hers, I agree and we go to Tommy’s. We talk and eat and have our time, we have conversations that are growing more and more like a continuation of a conversation that began years ago when she first had words. We try to determine which road we want to walk to go home, we go home and I say: “What do you want to do?” She doesn’t know, or won’t say, admitting only by her actions that she wants to watch her show and make sprites and code on her computer. She does and I accept, because my desire is not greater than hers, she does what she wants and I have no objection. It gets late. I have to work in the morning, I have to sleep. My desire is to sleep, I have to take her back to her mother’s. We walk, and she doesn’t want to go but I have a desire to be able provide for us which is why I go to work and I have a desire for her not to be left alone at our house while I’m at work and these are strong desires that trump her wish to stay with me. We talk about who is the one who makes the determinations in our lives, we realize it is her mother and we both realize that we have a greater desire not to be in confrontation with her than we do to have anything else. We both have a desire to ignore her and not engage her and so we let these matters slide. Because we can see that there is a will to possess and keep and own that is alive in people – like a darkness, and that this afflicts all of their actions and so we accept and enjoy what we have and refuse desire and walk down our roads.
All things spring up, and there is not one which declines to show
itself; they grow, and there is no claim made for their ownership;
they go through their processes, and there is no expectation.
The work is accomplished, and there is no
resting in it.