solids liquids gases

One of the challenges of being sadoo is that, if sadoo is true sadoo, she doesn’t particularly believe his own words, states, and emotions.  Rather, they believe them, but not as solid states; instead, he believes them as running water or wind.  So sadoo who knows herself as sadoo refrains from making grand or final statements about himself - she may be presently in a state of exuberance or hermitic withdrawal, polygamy or chastity, wealth or poverty, social favour or disgrace … but these are not her definition, their unalterable future.  They are simply what she is now.

So sadoo differs from the sadhu and the Christian by making no final choice as to her life and orientation other than to align himself with the wind and wander where they must.  This is what confuses people about sadoo - the people want to feel safe, they want life wrapped in pleasing understandable packages which quantities of people, regardless of their merit, affirm.  

The people of course wander where they must also - the only real difference between the people and sadoo is that he knows she is air - they and his words, thoughts, feelings, and circumstances - whereas the people hide the fact of their being air with words and things, which they attempt to affix to their souls with whatever tools of attachment are available to them.  Thus their souls become heavy over time, weighed down with fear of life’s transience and fullness.

If sadoo flits around, it is not because she runs away (what is there to run from?) but because he desires only to give themself over to the wind and go where it carries her.  

sadoo corp

 

It should appear obvious to even a casual onlooker that the sadoo is a corporation.  While this particular sadoo cannot necessarily speak on behalf of other sadoos, he is vaguely aware that his own corporation - like all - has various executive branches with various responsibilities; these are outlined below.

Sadoo Corporation Division	Title of Head	Function	Analogy in Capitalism
Word	Senior Executive Vice-president (SEVP)	To be constantly receptive to new configurations of words which subvert the commonplace and animate.	Corporate Communications
Vision	SEVP	To experience God and to see God in all that is encountered	Strategic Planning
Flaneur	SEVP	To move his body around the city of the world - avoiding no sight, sound, smell, taste, or feel - tracing his body’s movement on consciousness.	Transportation
Waste Management	SEVP	To transform all solidity, resentment, cliché, seriousness, possession, and death into dance.	Waste Management
Excess and Rebound (formerly the Paint-by-Number Division)	Executive Vice-president	To fully explore all aspects of the contradictory problematic capricious infinite soul.	Risk Management
Input-Output	EVP	To put things in his body and take them out.	Human Resources
Whatever	VP	To oversee the obligations to time, space, and their extensions.	Operations and Technology
Survival	Custodial Engineer	To maintain and increase money, sex, fame, security, reputation, and comfort.	Custodial Operations

Notes

• The Custodial Engineer, Survival reports to the Vice-President, Whatever, who in turn reports to the Executive Vice-president, Input-Output.
• All seven executives (the four SEVPs, the two EVPS, and the one VP) and the one custodial engineer all sit on The Sadoo Corporation’s (TSC) Management Board.

Two distinctions between The Sadoo Corporation and the capitalistic corporation immediately become obvious.

1. The paramount values of the capitalistic corporation (and in this we include for-profits, non-profits, governments, NGOs, and most individuals) - money, sex, fame, security, reputation, comfort - are, in The Sadoo Corporation, made subservient to word, vision, movement, and transformation.  This inversion presents Sadoo with most of her problems, not only in terms of living their own life but in mingling in normal society, as he finds it difficult to grasp how most view the custodial engineer’s objectives as interesting, worthy, exclusive, and supreme, devoting their lives and conversations to putting everything noble and transcendent (art, imagination, God, nature, beauty) in the service of dust and the custodial engineer.
2. No president, chairman, or CEO exists to oversee and have ultimate responsibility for The Sadoo Corporation; neither do any of the management team have such control.  Rather, the members of the management team routinely disagree with each other and have little comprehension of the others’ objectives.  Board meetings are thus rarely productive but are often stimulating; sometimes the custodial engineer is the only one who says much, despite the fact that he’s the most boring.  If any unifying factor exists, it is the Sadoo’s body, a possibility that the EVP of Input-Output and the SEVP of Flaneur do not hesitate to attempt to exploit - to no effect, however, as the other executives - particularly the SEVPs of Word, Vision and Waste Management - don’t give a damn about Sadoo’s body.  In fact, the Input-Output and Flaneur executives don’t really either; they just say they do because it makes them feel more important than they are.

And so The Sadoo Corporation - like all corporations - has its distinctions, routine operations, strengths, flaws, and finitude.  

For readers further interested in sadoo management

and administration, we kindly refer them to —

      here      

— where Fukky Risotto graciously

hosts posts from sadoos around the world

sadoo society of upper canada

 

In the past when people asked me what I did, communication was easy.  Consultant, director, project manager, professor, teacher.  Nods and smiles and where do you work and mortgages and marriages and aren’t the olive gruyere pistachio artichoke empanaditas wonderful and children and minivans and everything as normal as America.

Then I became a manager of an outdoor organic fruit&veggie market and told people I was a peach salesman.  Tenure-crazed academics would buy peaches from me and say they wished they were peach merchants but everyone listening knew the scholars were too tethered to their tiny offices to ever leave the circus of knowledge and the prestige of firing degrees into the stratosphere of global commerce.  Following my peach adventures, I became a househusband, creating giggles, curiosity, vague incomprehension, and occasional disdain.

Now, after many years of trying to fit into the world’s standard and non-standard occupations - of trying to please bosses and wives and chairs and executives and girlfriends and gods and entrepreneurs and pleasing none of them at all - I came to the edge of the earth and there found a syllogism

I have searched the world for the right job and there is nothing that is right.

I shall joyfully destroy my body before I destroy my soul.

I have to create a new job.

Fine, but there were still three paths I had to duly consider and reject.

1.      The traditional religious paths of renunciation (sadhu, monk) I rejected because I didn’t want to renounce anything.  The modern aesthetic paths I rejected because I find artist circles to be as greedy, petty, mediocre, and fame-obsessed as the very groups they are supposed to transcend.  While I don’t particularly care for conventional society—finding it to be rather like sleeping wombats in an overcrowded cage in a zoo - the art industry has simply erected its own conventionality which tends to have the same underlying values as business.  More importantly, any writing of note does not emerge from writing-as-career but as a by-product of something else - writing as spiritual vocation.

3.      
I very much wanted to call myself a flâneur and join The Historical Society of Flâneurs.  But this is so historically Parisian and, via Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, has become so abducted by totalitarian academic rhetoric that one can’t use the word without being buried in an avalanche of psychosocial gobbledygook.

So I became sadoo - a person committed to continually nurturing his passion, wit, perspicacity, caprice, and intellect and never allowing the common pursuits - money, security, reputation, possessions, and fame - to get in the way of this nurturing.  Also to generously share what he has nurtured with whomever wants that sharing and to happily walk away from those who don’t.

Is sadooing really a job though?  Isn’t it more of a delusion? a hobby? a pretention? a madness?  

No.  It’s a job.

Term	Standard Definition	Sadoo Diaper’s Interpretation
Job	A regular activity performed in exchange for payment.	Sadooing is a job.  All I do is sadoo and I get paid exceedingly well for it.
Payment	The transfer of wealth from one party to another.	As a divorce lawyer once wisely said to me, there are many forms of currency; money is only one and hardly the most important.  Naturally, the payment I receive is entirely in non-monetary currencies, which seems appropriate.
Party	A person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law.	As there are many forms of currency, so there is more than one law:  the law of cops and judges - always imperfect, often unjust - but there are also laws of aesthetics, caprice, nobility, madness, observation, and purity (all also imperfect, often unjust).  The courts of torts and estoppels may not recognize sadooing in its somber ossified halls, but this particular sadoo says that all beautiful things have been born outside of standard definitions and hallways.

So - perhaps because initiating a new occupation is often lonely - I have strange desires.  Not least among these is to begin The Upper Canada Sadoo Society (UCSS):  an odd assembly of sadoos, would-be-sadoos, playful sadoo-critics, charlatan sadoos, and SITs (sadoos-in-training), who would not erect any solid laws and schools and robes and rhetoric and prisons (as do those physical societies and courts that tend to be used by those who have no justice of their own) but would misspell and bend the laws; send them through a prism - swallowing the refractions; continually creating, recreating, and demolishing societies and gods; contriving obscure sadooic passion plays and closet dramas; avoiding and mocking the serious and mean-spirited; never flagging, always dancing; not belonging to anyone or anything but the very air that gives him breath.

sadoo and temptation

 

Sadoo, naturally, has many temptations, some of which she should definitely succumb to, some of which he is unsure about, and some of which he should definitely avoid.  These are not classic temptations - sadoo can be permitted drunkenness, debauchery, indolence, neglect, insolence, arrogance, superciliousness, and disregard for the law in all its ossified, liquid, and gaseous forms - but rather focus on whether the activity in question unduly misaligns the sadoo with his essential vocation, whether it makes him feel smaller than the universe he seeks to mirror.

The great heaving masses devote their lives to the usual disciplines:  amusement and all its circus tricks, money and all its verdant relatives, mirrors and all their little validations, political power and all its random surges of bliss and Schadenfreude, sex and all its petty cosmic dramas, movement and all its pretensions of progress, possessions and all their simulations of security.  The difference between sadoo and the heaving masses is not that he avoids these activities, but that he does not seek them … if they happen, they happen.  Whether she’s rich, homeless, celibate, polygamous, admired, despised, active, still, amused, bored - it’s all really the same to him, for all states are just different forms of energy and sadoo excels at transforming whatever is given to him into useful forms of bouncing joy.  The only potential advantage of boredom, poverty, obscurity, powerlessness, and stillness is that they do not tend to threaten to deceive as significantly as their opposites as to the nature of the universe.

Why then does sadoo say no?  Simply, if any activity, person, thing, or idea demands to be more than what it is and so reduce sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things - it is evil and must be avoided; if an activity, person, thing, or idea enhances sadoo’s ability to be receptive to all things, it is good and must be embraced.

Sadoo has one god and it is life.  Anyone acquainted with life knows it accepts all manifestations with equanimity and the sadoo’s one goal is to emulate life’s equanimity.  Why?  Because this is better than gathering things and lovers to oneself?  No.  Because it is what the sadoo does and what he is made to do.  The sadoo is committed to one thing - even as all creatures are committed to one thing - to be herself; to deviate from this is to transgress and leads to spiritual death.  But sadoo must remain fully animate and if this should cost her their physical life, it is a small cost.  For all things, though beautiful and eternal, are transient and small.

definitions of god

God is surely dead, according to any traditional notions.  But god continues to live as a word; consequently, it is up to those of us dedicated to capricious semantics to usurp the word for our own delight and future transformations.  So, below, sadoo diaper offers some new definitions of God, in his attempt to re-create divinity in his own image.

1. God is that which most fully can not and never be described; that which most fully has not, does not, and can never exist.

2. God is desire, the waiting for that which may never come.  That which we desire, but do not obtain - the ever-present unknown - is God.

3. Each moment judges the other and finds it wanting; the collection of all these moments is the judgment of God.  Stories are formed from the two gaps that define the human:  the gap between the least a person is able to achieve and the most, and the gap between what a person achieves and what that person longs for.  The first gap is a subset of the second gap.  The second gap is God.

4. In our nightmares, we live our fears of losing what we have.  In our daydreams, we live our hopes of gaining what we do not have.  The union of our nightmares and daydreams, of what we possess and lack, is God.  We stand between, forever in the same position, at the midpoint of fear and desire - the opposite of God.

5. God, from a psychoanalytical perspective, is nothing other than the male fear of female sexuality organized into a deity.  But psychoanalysis is only one lens in the fly-eye of God, even as each definition is only one lens in an eye of infinite lenses.

6. Everything can kill us - restraint, abandon, prudence, whimsy, intelligence, stupidity, solitude, society, justice, injustice, religion, atheism, thought, emptiness.  We tell stories about what has killed or might kill, but these are attempts to order the chaos at the guts of life and death.  God is this everything.

7. The artist’s call is to directly experience beauty and pain and to transform this dual experience into a unified work.  This experience is the experience of God.

8. One can only be in relation to two things:  zero and infinity.  The first is the mystic, the second the philanderer.  Meister Eckhart and Don Juan.  Everyone else - the majority - deny the fact of the choice of these two relations and thus exist continually in no relation:  ones in relation to ones.  Here is the hope, the messianic hope, the hope of both physics and poetry:  the one who would be in equal relation to both zero and infinity continuously.  In short, God.

9. God is cabbage soup on a cold day.

10. The nameless wants to be named, for the nameless perceives that to be named is an increase in power; but the nameless moves at its peak power the closer to namelessness it remains; energy is most concentrated in the nameless.  The more something is named, the more it repeats itself in its addiction to remain named.  God is that which is not tempted to become named.

11. God is what is created from the sight of the gap between our attitude toward the universe and the universe’s lack of an attitude toward us.

12. God is that which muddles yes and no.  As that which is perpetually creation and apocalypse - never that thing in-between:  time - God scatters and melds the categories, without intent.  Humanity is the intent.

13. God is that which overcomes passion by means of passion, offering justifications for this overcoming.  We call these justifications myth.  We are now myth’s partially conscious co-creators; hence, our present potency and malaise.

14. In music and sound, there are pitches below and above human capability of hearing; so in painting and colour, there are portions of the spectrum invisible to the human eye.  God is that which, in literature and language, falls outside of human thought.

the sadoo mat

 

In a world of acceleration, the sadoo slows down; even stops.  In a world of specialization and consequent ideology, the sadoo skims across the ocean of knowledge in his scatoo and the only thing he knows is the waves.  In a world scared of darkness and silence, the sadoo avoids neither light nor noise but they seem to him simply different faces of night.  The busy heap is busy buzzing, being anxious.  About money, security, reputation, love, health, and - behind it all - that great diffused monolith, death.  The bedsheets of memory, the duvets of hope, are happy escapes.

What does the sadoo do?  He laughs and dances and eats and breaks his celibacy vows when necessary.  When money happens, it happens; when it doesn't, it doesn't.  So with love and death.  Does he notice a difference in quality between having and lacking?  How could he?  The world is always full and verdant and he is in the world.  Every day is much the same, every day is entirely new.

This particular sadoo - Sadoo Diaper - has taken recently to sleeping on a foam mat on the floor and performs a twice-daily pilgrimage to store and retrieve his mat and bedding.  He views this as a comic ritual.  Ritual - and thus serious - in that it occurs regularly and reminds him of old unspeakable things - as a dog might piss at a space where a church wall once stood.  Comic in that the gap between the modesty of his sadoo-mat and the glory of the mighty mattresses he has had seems like no gap (he sleeps just as well, dreams as pleasantly) and he chuckles at the non-difference.  He chortles at the thought that the only difference is that he makes a daily silly pilgrimage, which he ponders and enjoys.

The only hero left is the non-hero.  So as bumbling Bloom is to Odysseus, the farting sadoo is to Buddha, we all - absurd, passionate, and mortal - are to the swirling forces of life (once named the gods) that cast us up, swirl us around, and soon enough feed us to monsters and flowers.

The sadoo is free not by exercising his will, expanding the artifacts and prosthetics around him, or attempting to nail his name to the sky ... but by watching the clouds blot out the moon and hearing a cat's bell tinkle in the distance.

the bowl and the quilt

 

The Sadoo wishes in their blog to weave a strange quilt.  Not - it should be obvious - one that records having omelets for breakfast and little thoughts about the NFL.  She does not wish to post pictures of the pricks of Supermodels or discuss the relationship between the Udder Pata Ash psyche and its suburban literature.  No, they has other little threads to weave.  He wishes to keep you suspended over the ultimate design of her comfy canopy.  What is the Vision it dreamt 20 years ago?  How shall it integrate or not with his Group Names and those additions of Others?  Will her Group Names ever be complete or are they, like desire, infinite?

Now that my method is clear (or methodology, as the academics prefer), allow them to foreshadow two of the imminent threads.

One is a meditation on the Tao Te Ching, a book which has fascinated The Sadoo with its natural polarity to the bulk of Christian texts and its this-worldly orientation.  Sadoo has taken to memorizing the DC Lau translation and, after each vignette is racing comfortably around with ou blood, they allows it to speak itself through him.

Two is a more comic (or is it?) meditation on one of The Sadoo’s most excellent activities—scatting.  Sadoo has long noticed a distinct lack of adequate homage to the Noble Scat in literature.  Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare exploited the fart and Bloom's lingering Pprrpffrrppffff in Ulysses does modern justice.  And a not incorrect interpretation of art in its entirety is that it's humanity's flatulence directed toward the heavens.  We wish for a voice to be heard, "Whoa ... my beloved species ... my Divine Nose! ... in whom I am ... phew! ... well pleased" ... it won't happen, of course, but we're genetically predisposed to keep trying.  Ze has also noticed that the traditional divine pantheons lack an adequate Holy Member to receive our praise and distress for what happens in The Bowl.

Being not just a taxonomist, but a scatologist, The Sadoo conjured with ve hapless sadooic colleagues and, in a terribly joyous and volcanic moment, encountered Merdia - goddess of ribald smells and steaming coils.  All beauty is born in the toilet, all art crawls from mud and—as Yeats taught us—love itself has pitched yo mansion in the place of excrement.  The Sadoo lives, as tey must, in the source and origin of things, laughing at how others despise that source and yet depend on it for life and culture.  The Scat is where all things begin. Merdia must receive her due.

Weaving patterns in ways the loom directs, with a nidus of mothers and Tao and merde, the quilt begins.  I wish it to cover the earth with sleepy exuberant tones and the down of gods.

the secular sadoo

sadoo - an early manifestation of doo 

I am a sadoo - not a sadhu - and this blog is the imaginative wandering of this particular sadoo.  Let me explain.

I am not a sadhu because:

• I was born a Jesus-thumping Christian near the epicenter of the West, not a Hindu in poop-mad India
• I don't believe in liberation, renunciation, or asceticism
• I experience yoga’s practitioners as gummi worms thrashing in a sea of processed sugar

I am a sadhu because:

• I am a mystic
• I am a wandering monk - attached to no cause but wandering - which in the language of the West might be called a flâneur
• I am adept at curses

This condition I-am-not-I-am I name sadoo - vile, sensuous, amoral and apolitical, cosmopolitan, aesthetic, religious, skeptical, gleefully intelligent, verbal, and witty, detached, happily and acutely judgmental, raunchy.  I name this combination of attributes holy, for it sets sadoo apart both from the common fawning hordes overtly or covertly seeking money, fame, power, reputation, security, admiration, and pleasure and the sadhus - and their spiritual relatives across the religious world - who strive (or pretend to strive) to transcend (or pretend to transcend) the bloody, schizophrenic, bound condition of flesh.

As sadoo, I don't believe in striving, for there's nothing to strive for.  The world is perfect in its imperfection and this thought - that there is no other world - is the one thought that is anathema to civilized humanity.

So I wander in the world, watching its possible demise through the human clambering for progress, and blow bubbles of words in the greater bubble of blog.

january 13 - malfeasance of children

 

When is the child born, why does the child die?

Is the child born on its mother’s tears?

Does the child die in her secret smile?

The child rose from its bed of play,

saw the shy world hiding, said, Come here,

I’m a princess and you’re a crocodile.

The world said, Sure, I was bored anyway,

but you be the croc and I’ll be a deer;

let’s rickshaw to China then skate on the Nile.

The two friends wandered that day,

ate rabbit delight and elephant ears,

composed a petunia and put broccoli on trial.

It wasn’t as if their mothers or they

hadn’t heard of textbooks, ethics or years,

but that that diet wasn’t their style.

You possibly haven’t or possibly may

have heard of a place where everything’s weird;

it’s not very far--just none or woo miles.

The world said, Well, it’s time to go away.

I’ve got commitments, I need a beer,

my voicemail’s ringing, which makes me feel virile.

The child lay down on a bed of grey,

saw shadows fighting her electric fears,

dreamt that night of God, gold and guile.

The child is born on the wing of a word.

The child dies when it first denies.