Blank words and the fourth dimension of language
the story of Zen founder Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu. The emperor was a benevolent Buddhist who built many temples and monasteries throughout China. When the great teacher Bodhidharma came to visit, Emperor Wu asked “What merit is there in all my good works?” Bodhidharma replied, “None whatsoever.” Puzzled, the Emperor asked, “What then is the primal meaning of reality?” “Emptiness,” the teacher answered. “But if it is emptiness, who then am I talking to?” cried Emperor Wu. Bodhidharma shrugged and answered “I do not know,” and seeing that the Emperor was speechless, walked away (McRae). Here we see the dissolution of the subject himself through the self-referential nature of language. “Each ‘thing’ opens itself up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self” (Deleuze 174). The myriad forms fold in upon each other, stripped of meaning.
The fourth dimension of the proposition is sense. “The Stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, in an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.” The Stoics were masters of paradox, especially Zeno. They even had their own esoteric vocabulary. Sextus Empiricus tells us that the Stoic had a word completely stripped of meaning, “Blituri,” which was employed with its correlate “Skindapsos.” Strictly speaking, skindapsos was the word for a four-stringed lyre. While, blituri is an oenomanopea for the strumming of the strings. But, in the Stoic use, it is applied as a blanket term for any combination of series (or strings) and the corresponding event produced by this combination. “The blank word is designated by esoteric words in general. The function of the blank word, or of the esoteric words of the first order, is to correlate the two heterogeneous series( Deleuze 67).
Zen also has a blank word, Mu (Wu in Chinese). Roughly translated it can mean “no”, “none”, or “without”. It can be used as a response when the question itself is wrong and thus cannot have a definitive answer. The Rinzai school of Zen uses the following koan as their initiation. A monk asked Joshu: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu answered “Mu”. Early Buddhist thinkers conjectured extensively on whether animals had Buddha-nature, so if Joshu answered “no”, then he would be denying their wisdom, while if he answered “yes” he would seem to obey their dogma. Joshu’s answer signifies that the question, which demands that one take a position on a rather arbitrary matter, is itself a delusion (Mamon). More recently, Discordians, a quasi-parodic modern religious movement, sometimes labeled “Zen for roundeyes”, used Mu as the appropriate response for the loaded question “Have you stopped beating your wife?”
These blank words also extend into portmanteau combinations. Take for example the notion of We-wei, typically translated as “action without action”. This is not to say wu-wei is idleness. Instead, it’s a sort of preconceptualized, primordial action that comes directly from the will, without being turned around in the intellect. There is also the notion of Mu-shin, or No-mind. Again, this is not a purely negative indication a somnambulant, crazy or zombie-like awareness. Instead, it is a free and fluid mind, that it not preoccupied by thought and emotion. It is not relaxed or sleepy, but working very fast, as it has less mental preoccupations. It is the mental state hightly trained martial artists are said to enter right before battle. “Esoteric words, in turn, may also be designated by portmanteau words, of the second order, whose function is to ramify the series (Deleuze 67). The contradictions often stem from the misunderstanding of the negation of negation to mean the same as the original affirmative statement. But this is of the same class of mistake as taking an undead zombie to be a regular living human being.
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
John McRae, The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chense Ch’an Budhism
Mumon, The Gateless Gate
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, celebrated satirist and science-fiction writer, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and over a dozen other novels, many of them best-sellers, died on Wednesday, April 11. Unlike the false death report in January 11, 2000, when Vonnegut fell asleep with a lit cigarette, setting his bed and house on fire, this time, the author really ‘destroyed the universe’, to paraphrase ‘The Book of Bokonon’ from his Cat’s Cradle. His passing was caused by irreversible brain injuries, which he suffered from a fall a few wees ago, tho the details of the fall remain obscure. A counterculture hero, Vonnegut was a humanist, and even served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, replacing Isaac Asimov, in what he called a "totally functionless capacity". He did not support the current American president, in his last novel, A Man Without a Country, writing that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." Nor did he think anything would change in the 2004 election: "Both candidates were and still are members of the exclusive secret society at Yale, called ‘Skull and Bones.’ That means that, no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones." Of course, we know better than to suggest any kind of conspiracy surrounding the writer’s death. So it goes.
Robert Anton Wilson - author, philosopher, prophet - left his body at 4:50am yesterday morning, on the binary date 1/11. He will be missed. The following was one of his last post.