Vimalakirti
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At every moment, you’re with power, or against it. Or you’re with power, and against it, at every moment.
Or you’re with power on some days, and against it on others.
Or you’re with power day after day, but wish you weren’t.
Or day after day you’re against power, but wish you had some.
Or power lights & dims up and down the chakras of your spine like a string of Christmas lights.
You sprinkle power like a spice, or snort it like a drug.
You wallow in power like a pig in s**t, or you pinch it off like a turd-tabulating puritan.
You wonder: is there anything but power? You wonder: is power anything?
You speak against power, using a rhetoric of power.
Or your power is so different, so rarified & pure in quality that really it’s not power at all. Your power has the winsome, bulbous head of a newborn, while the power of others is like the power of biker gangs, politburos, brown shirts & war lords – it just reeks. Your power smells like lilacs. In all honesty, your power is adorable, while the power of others is like the farts of others – noxious.
And without your exercise of power, which is good, wholesome, sanctioned, why would you wake in the morning, scratch your balls, and start the day, with nothing to wield and nowhere to wield it? Say you woke in a picture-book world of virtue, where every fly, dog, whale, robin, dragon, bridge, prairie & kitchen is perfectly secure & whole in the expression of its own peculiar being. What would you have to do? Wouldn’t you fall into inertia, lassitude, boredom, decline & extinction? Your sword would dangle at your side like joke store prop. What would you have to do? You can’t imagine. You have to see.
Yet at every moment, you must be with power or against it, however subtly you speak or hedge the question, how diffidently you walk.
You must be with power, no matter how ragged & violent its methods; against power, no matter how benign & placid its face.
Power doesn’t mind. It coils & uncoils as if it were a natural thing. Rivers of biography and solemn documentaries spout from its jaws. Far from its fields of action, it monologues you to sleep with catalogues, genealogies & recitations. You nod off to dreamy voice-overs, in pleasant slumber, knowing that all is well, wondering why anyone would be so out of season as to object.
Still, something mild & terrible wants to know – in the room with you, on the road with you, in your head. It’s a hopeless question, a stupid question, you say, an infantile question. The question doesn’t mind. The question will keep posing & composing itself like a ham actor, like a child at make-believe, like all the saints, idiots & martyrs who ever lived, like rishis balancing by the river on spiral toenails, like Catholic girls passionately in love with their lord, like anyone and no one just awakening from a sleep.
Or you’re with power on some days, and against it on others.
Or you’re with power day after day, but wish you weren’t.
Or day after day you’re against power, but wish you had some.
Or power lights & dims up and down the chakras of your spine like a string of Christmas lights.
You sprinkle power like a spice, or snort it like a drug.
You wallow in power like a pig in s**t, or you pinch it off like a turd-tabulating puritan.
You wonder: is there anything but power? You wonder: is power anything?
You speak against power, using a rhetoric of power.
Or your power is so different, so rarified & pure in quality that really it’s not power at all. Your power has the winsome, bulbous head of a newborn, while the power of others is like the power of biker gangs, politburos, brown shirts & war lords – it just reeks. Your power smells like lilacs. In all honesty, your power is adorable, while the power of others is like the farts of others – noxious.
And without your exercise of power, which is good, wholesome, sanctioned, why would you wake in the morning, scratch your balls, and start the day, with nothing to wield and nowhere to wield it? Say you woke in a picture-book world of virtue, where every fly, dog, whale, robin, dragon, bridge, prairie & kitchen is perfectly secure & whole in the expression of its own peculiar being. What would you have to do? Wouldn’t you fall into inertia, lassitude, boredom, decline & extinction? Your sword would dangle at your side like joke store prop. What would you have to do? You can’t imagine. You have to see.
Yet at every moment, you must be with power or against it, however subtly you speak or hedge the question, how diffidently you walk.
You must be with power, no matter how ragged & violent its methods; against power, no matter how benign & placid its face.
Power doesn’t mind. It coils & uncoils as if it were a natural thing. Rivers of biography and solemn documentaries spout from its jaws. Far from its fields of action, it monologues you to sleep with catalogues, genealogies & recitations. You nod off to dreamy voice-overs, in pleasant slumber, knowing that all is well, wondering why anyone would be so out of season as to object.
Still, something mild & terrible wants to know – in the room with you, on the road with you, in your head. It’s a hopeless question, a stupid question, you say, an infantile question. The question doesn’t mind. The question will keep posing & composing itself like a ham actor, like a child at make-believe, like all the saints, idiots & martyrs who ever lived, like rishis balancing by the river on spiral toenails, like Catholic girls passionately in love with their lord, like anyone and no one just awakening from a sleep.
