Zhenevere Sophia Dao

                                                

 

On Living

an Introduction to Neo-Romanticism
                                                       

                                                                                                                        words for my child              
  

 

Zhenevere Sophia Dao

 

2025


 

 

In an age that distrusts passion, when the heart's affections are watered down by petty fear, passivity is a spiritually fashionable distraction from the work of power or pain. But passivity breeds illness of body, heart, and mind. Passivity unbelongs us from the heart of being. Therefore, when difficulties come your way, face them directly, as in a mirror bravely. Hardship endured without denial always becomes some form of trust in yourself. You become a more resonant sound. As if, by the hearth, on a long winter's night, you are your own quiet guest, parallel to the meditative fire. Passivity has no calm; it arrives at no hearth. Neither is passivity neutral. It is a nerveless scar, but without the alchemy of injury. The vital spirits that wanted you to transform rove away; they visit less and less. 

Attend to the difficult and the uncomfortable, then, as you would to mystery. Every difficulty is an envelope of becoming. Call this capacity for life “Negative Capability.” Not John Keats’s definition of the phrase, as sublime as that is. But I mean something different, a Neo-Romantic definition of Negative Capability. Namely, a kind of chthonic force of disposition in certain people who belong to the earth, in whom immensities of thought and feeling are as forces of nature, and who can be in states of spiritual pain, discomfort, or disorientation without denying them with trifling distractions or desperately searching for their dissipation. Rather, they feel in the visceral sensations of the transformation of the soul—in the very verb of soul-making—a familiar substantiation of power and belonging, and, by a thrilling inversion, change the aversion to spiritual rigor into the constant pressure of poetry, the mystical apprehension, and the alchemy of transformation, as what life is. A Neo-Romantic view of life would put this understanding of Negative Capability at the center of the affirmation of life, including an attitude toward pain that transcends stoicism. For stoicism endures life. A Neo-Romantic subject would want to become equal to life, in order to become life. Disorientation, when you feel impotent; grief, when what you love is shattered; longing, when you cry out to be filled; anger, when it is precise, because your soul has been molested; awful inferiority, in the face of incalculable beauty and power; sacrifice, when you empty yourself for no known yield; dissolution, when your identity dissolves, and all that remains is prayer—these are Negative Capabilities. They are spiritual entities of affirmative discomfort, the holy ghosts of belonging, and the secret ground of joy. For joy is not overbrimming cheerfulness, or calculable pleasure, as happiness is. Joy is the visceral sensation of the fact of consciousness having already been expanded. Joy is the occasion, the flooding of the moment, the gift—aesthetic, emotional, sensual, intellectual—when the world is more sacredly perceived, because of the mysteriously accomplished alchemy of the soul, through Negative Capability. 

Go into hardship, then, like a mountaineer with strong legs, not to scale the air, but to descend down into the dark and wild heart of the world. Expect nothing meaningful to be easy. But know also that human freedom consists of making choices that, if brave and true, mysteriously align your single life with the unseen forces of Providence. Daunting impasses and terrible difficulties may shiver and release, like bars of sediment in a running stream. Grace may flow down from everywhere, like mountain water. But the timing of these will not be yours. Let your ego grow smaller, and your wonder more immense, the longer you live on the earth. You are in love with Being, and, like love, you must forsake control; you must relinquish the need for evidence; you must transcend cause and effect; you must be what the earth makes of you unceasingly, through intensest and most guileless revolutions.

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​Be wary of snideness entering your heart. Some styles of irony spiritually refine and mediate pain, and may temporarily relieve despair. Irony can be a pure source of hilarity because it exposes the stultifying ways of the world, and hints at something finer. It can be a chivalric protection of beauty. But the line between the sweeter sarcasm of a dry humor and an acrid view of life is fine and slippery. For crassness and bitter sarcasm are often the clever tantrums of sick and frustrated passions, masks of strategies to avoid essential grief. Reduce nothing prodigious. Avoid rancor, greed, and vengeance. Trust your transformations, for they are the soul's resolve to not waste your life. Sincerity is not saccharine, naive, or effete. Sincerity is power, because it wastes nothing, being only itself. Sincerity does not alter itself strenuously to please; it does not beg for approval; it does not want false communions. Nothing advantages sincerity but sincerity itself. In this way, sincerity is infinite. At its stillest center, it is nearly godlike; it has no armor; it has no substance but truth.

Strive to become as the animals and the plants in the way you move and perceive. But when you speak as a human being, use words that dignify the world. If you must defend yourself with words, because of some injustice or offense to your soul, use words carefully and knowingly, like the sharpest, most precise sword. But do not glory in victories. What is glorious is not the infliction of pain, however necessary, but the more necessary honesty; the courageous self-preservation. Not the victory, but the attempt at healing; the empathy; the fierce resolve to sound out truth, to lay oneself bare in the need for communion, endlessly.

Don’t live tamely. Take risks, or rather, make risk, by marrying an almost unthinkable dream to its brave determination. Risk is beauty; it is the agony of a soul to emerge. When life is rote; when your habit or your prowess has become your composure; when you are “respectable”; when Providence dries up and the rarer callings of your soul have vanished—this is not the zenith of success, but rather the onset of your death. Risk as one who hears in the slapping of the rain the footsteps of mourners at her own funeral, and who breaks the coffin in order to begin everything again—how to talk, how to move, how to eat a piece of bread. Make strange clay of regret because you cannot sleep—for it is good not to sleep if you have not lived your life. Risk as one who bends down to his childhood and asks, “How have I failed you?” and says, “I will amend.” And again: “I swear, I will amend.” To risk for yourself is beautiful; it is a refund to birth itself. But to risk for someone else, to risk for someone else's becoming—this is indescribably beautiful. 

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When you are injured in your body or your mind, see yourself not as a victim, but rather joined in the historical procession of profundity. Focus on the nature of the wound, and ask of it what it needs in order to shape you into yourself. Don’t complain; complaining consumes the life force and blinds you to every opportunity that is as near to hand as your own breath. On the other hand, allow yourself to grieve when life and faith are shattered. Cry out to the heavens, or to the bowels of the earth in your grief. Be inconsolable at times, because you are inconsolable at times. Grief is a valuation beyond human intention, and therefore touched by the divine. And grief is a force of nature, a form of earthly thunder, conferring great resolution and change. Grief cannot lie. When we grieve, the skin slides off the soul; the organs disintegrate; we soak speechless into ultimate matters. We cannot restore ourselves, and so the earth shapes us into plain testaments of why we live—of why anyone lives. For grief is as universal as ground and sky. But neither is grief a steady state. Grief has no prescription; no design; no advice. You cannot anticipate grief's yield. Grieve, and attune to mystery. It may become very quiet. A motionless flower petal; a bone. Hearken to sense and sound. For grief is a religious power, beyond hope and fear.

 

Avoid facile, acquisitive ambition. Grow more rather than less responsible. Never think you are free because you are indifferent or do not care. Freedom is always some pasture that is revealed after devotion, or sacrifice, or terrible responsibility. If you are insulted or demeaned by someone, do not respond in kind. Rather, rearrange your inmost disposition so that nothing in their slander can sever you from yourself. Avoid people who thrive on attacking other people. But if you are attacked, speak clearly in your knowledge of yourself, so that your own soul bears witness to the truth of your nature. And if you are attacked in your body, defend yourself as powerfully as you can. Walk away from foolishly violent people, but if you cannot avoid it, fight back fiercely, and let your fierceness speak for the precious gift of your life. 

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Stay human, woundable, transformable, and devoutly sentient. If you live and animate obsessively on technological media platforms, you will diminish your subtlety, discernment, and your sensitivity. You’ll unconsciously imitate the personas of personas and lose the sacred connection to your instincts. Technological media and mean-spiritedness are tragic bedfellows. The detachment inherent to a means of communication is proportionate to its tendency to foster cruelty, numbness, and defamation, even in your own heart. Just so, a species diminishes. The essence of human being is dependent on its way. If you communicate by robotic means of sound bites and ill-considered opinions, the breadth of you will shrink to the dead dimensions of your language. Your own mystery, even to yourself, will become improbable. If you depend on Artificial Intelligence to replace the rigor of your thought, you may no longer be stirred by thought. You may forget the awe of mental thunder. You may doubt the truth of wisdom. Thought and inspiration are wings that visit. They are annunciations, not data accumulations. Dulled, engineered, algorithmical, you may become less attractive to ghosts in the unquantifiable air. Spirit may not alight on your data-crammed branches.

 

If you employ Artificial Intelligence for your companionship and your coping, you may lose faith in yourself, even as you lose faith in other people. Eros shies away from calculation and self-reflexivity. We cannot forgo human intimacy and remain faithful to ourselves. We make a friend by believing in friendship; the work discovers us miraculously to ourselves. Enslaved to the drug of scrolling, corpsified and left wanting by instant gratification, you may become more excited by slander and cruelty, and less moved by quiet things; by harmonic life and dignity; and by powerful, reserved people. You may imagine intelligence is manipulative, because it is serious and careful, and that wounded blame and herd-like hatred are authentic, because they seem raw and immediate. You may lose the capacity for love, for love considers others so deeply you become indivisible from their fragility, and naturally bound to their courage. We become the modes that soothe us: distraction, blame, or communion. In the final analysis, empathy is intelligence, because we possess no world other than that which we make with understanding.

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Remain strange; locate yourself in your inimitability. Your unlikeness is your harbor and your calm, if you have the power to believe in your soul. Even so, unique lives incur pain. You may feel like a tree falling forever through the common shout of civilization. Probably, you will bleed. Difference invites abuse. There will always be people who use hate to veil their own stagnation. But there will also be people who need your difference, like a secret seal, in order to become themselves. Stand your inmost ground. Observe courage wherever it can be found. See eccentricity, your own and others', as mystery, not as fodder for scorn. The soul is an explorer, or it is not a soul.    

 

Do not curse your fate. Fate is a pliable master. Fate reflects upon ourselves what we think of fate, and our own substance grows or corrodes accordingly. But do not imagine that “character” means a stoical lack of emotion. That misunderstanding is the ruin of the world. Feel everything that happens to you, and to others, as if your own nervous system is the map of an inalienable religion. Sacrifice for others, unreasonably, and take care of yourself, unreasonably. In love, remember that passion, if it is passion, is always specific. You cannot desire innumerable people at the same time—not if your desire is the singular code of your nature. Passion and sexuality are always realizations of focus, or else they are merely the itch of insecurity. Be reverent with yourself, and you cannot but be reverent with others. Reserve yourself in love for those who want to know why you live. Touch others because you want to know why they live. 

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​A person is found by what they feel. This is also true of sexuality. If you would be sexual, stay findable to persons. Need to be touched by persons. Need to touch persons, as if you were new, and would learn about the world. Reserve your senses for secrets; stories; tears; confessions; catharsis. Lovers make each other, through emotion and ecstasy, because emotion and ecstasy arouse each other, are each other. Ecstasy is at once the transformation of emotion into physical sensation and the transformation of physical sensation into emotion. Deep sexuality is a rite of catharsis, if we mean the ache of longing discharging in the shuddering of union. There has been a tragic civilizational mistake regarding desire. Desire is not a brute, uncontrollable "drive." Rather, desire is the sanest madness to become life itself, through contact. 

Pornography is not sexuality; it is the sexualized exhibition, for money, of a desexualized physical intensity. Pornography longs for longing, the way obscene wealth longs for simplicity. There is a tragic pathos in the ethos of pornography that is enervating to the spirit. There is a sadness in the self-conscious athleticism; even the vigor is bored. The filmic perfection of the bodies and acts defeats some original wonder. It seems there are no spirits in the room, on the set. It's as if, forlorn, they have left the pornographic scene to roam the world in search of lovers.

Your sexuality is an intense angel—strangely obscure; natural in her transgression; carnal and spiritual in her need. Protect her, who is yourself, from sad, easy diminutions. Pornography is everywhere, like microplastic in the ocean of us. Let it insult your tempests and your calms, your fathoms, as it should. Then turn forever, like a rare, untamed creature, back into your dark and dappled forest. Sexuality is freedom, but only if it binds your loneliness to your hope. Only if it braves the risk of heartbreak for the chance of unspeakable joy. For the consummation of lovers ultimately has no language other than the utmost, inmost gasps and whispers. The body gives out of its isolated shell; it holds and bestows, breathes and spills. Sexual, the body translates the soul’s honesty. Nothing could be farther from commodity. 

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Know some kind of dexterous trade or craft. If you would belong to life, the animals, plants, and the elements must know you and trust you by the way you attend to material and sentient things. Touch carefully and deftly the more-than-human world. There are distances in animals without which we are bereft. Plants go down deeply, and turn toward the sun. Clay is our hands. Red-hot iron, folding under blows, makes mystery. Strive to be natural, not colonized by money and digitalization and screens. But be wary of turning nature into a product or a screen. Gear and equipment may be accoutrements to action, but the essence of nature remains untouched by all things. All you have is the instrument of your organism. You feel and perceive only the measure of your sensibility. You cannot buy nature any more than you can buy love. Neither imagine that nature is something to be conquered. Rather, learn ways of human being that blend with nature, as if you were hardly there. Speak like streams, on occasion like lightning; be silent like snow; listen like a lake; ponder like a field; imagine like a wing; shiver like a pelt when you are moved.

 

Awe is wonder that has become personal. Become natural, and your passions—body and soul, word and deed—cannot help but align your will with the preservation of the wild—the wild that abides within you, and the wild that remains on the egregiously abused earth. Humility is soil in the biome of the human. We may yet disdain ourselves for the maltreatment of the earth. We may finish where we began: sparse, primal, with an unspeakable reverence for solidity, darkness and fire; for air; for water; for wind and salt; for fur and blood; for the pounding of hooves; and for microscopic cosmoses of infinite complexity we surmise but cannot see. Live this reckoning now, for the sake of the ice and the bees, for the vegetation and the creatures. Not only because they sustain us, which they do, but because care is a supreme human purpose. Care is the stitch in the cloth of interdependency. Care cannot condescend, because care finds itself in that which it nourishes. You are most mysteriously yourself when you are filled with the exigency of others, all kinds of others. Ultimately, there is no "other" on the face of the earth.

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Do not court power, for true power cannot be courted. Power is as the ocean is; it moves according to eternal forces. Power is not leverage; rather, power is belonging to life. The confusion between these two is perhaps the severest blight on the legacy of human being. For the desire for power as leverage already spells the death of belonging to life. Power is consummation of being; union with irreducible forces. It is wisdom become instinct in body and soul, stripped of sophistication, expressed in thought and action. Power is sudden; strange; power cannot be calibrated to circumstance or society, for its strangeness is spiritual and incalculable. Power is plain profundity; wondrous ideation; undiminished sensation. In this way, power is almost too simple for the world. Not possessing this mystery, people rely on leverage for a surrogate sensation: influencing; commanding; inflicting; exacting change upon things, land, and people, often against their nature or their will. But this is not power. This is agency in the absence of mystery—even if it describes nearly all the world.

If you would be powerful, transcend the shrillness of superficial ambition. Let every moment of life be a moment of inner life—even as your surface shimmers in true vital arts and signs. The body cannot lie; the face cannot lie. We paint ourselves until we die, or we become the true subtle landscapes of our interior. Be an instrument played by the irreducible. Imagine, as a tuning fork feels the waning of sound, that the vital forces—the gods, if you will—have become bereft among human beings, for we have all but abandoned them. That we are less and less their reciprocating atmosphere. That they are roving, searching, repelled by our distraction, our petty machination, and all the exhausting strategies of leverage. Power is vital force recognizing itself in you; it is the gods insufflating you where they themselves are breathing. The most perfect human continuity is the marriage of modesty and passion. Each is renewed by the other; each calls to the other indefatigably; each is half of eternity. To be powerful is to be but a drop of water, but made of the colossal stuff of the ocean. There is no "will to power." The phrase, however etched in philosophy, is essentially a contradiction. We are no more or less than our substance. We subsume into immensity, or, bereft of mystery, we scrounge on leverage. 

Some people may distrust you, even fear you, because union with life is too rare and too strange. They may feel groundless in your presence, and grow confused, angry, afraid, or dismayed, vacillating between adulation and disdain. They may even lie about you, because sullying you with slander momentarily anesthetizes their own pain. For you will speak another language: the language of belonging to being. To belong to being as a tree, or a lake, or a storm belongs; as wound, movement, thought and emotion belong; to overflow plainly with the faith of feeling—this skinless vibrancy often offends the jaded world. But every worthy thing on earth will feel you capable of consonance. You will know universal sympathy; and generosity; and superabundance of being, all of which are power. Like all immensity, power lies underneath itself. It wells inside, like the sublime pressure in a seed. 

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Of politics, know that politics is not only a subject of social science, but the political is ultimately the spiritual; there is no separation. We disgrace this truth every moment—we have not told this truth for a comprehensive second on the earth. Nevertheless, the human race is an aspen grove, an infinite mycelial sensorium. Everyone is the limb and nerve of everyone. There is distance, but there are no walls; not in time or space. A child cries next door, wherever you are, and somewhere a bomb drops on a school or a hospital. This interdependence is endless, and more than human. Every thing is the limb and nerve of every thing. You exhale, and a tree turns your carbon dioxide into sugar, and gives oxygen back into the air you breathe. All the world is mutuality. Life is an extreme co-sentience, a constant, myriad mutual salvation. Politics would be the noble instrumentation of this interdependency.     

And yet injustice and evil dominate the world. The inhales and exhales of human consciousness are maimed, shattered, poisoned, weaponized. The human being is a potentially beautiful, tragic, horrific autoimmune disease on the earth. Refuse this tragedy with your single life. Like a holy fool, a savant of fiery heart, live each moment as if every sentient thing was your charge. Be responsible. Thirst for responsibility, as if, with the little grain of your life, you could offset the pain of human indifference. Be brave, especially when you feel wounded. Ask the wound to reveal your nature. Be accountable to your soul. Don't scapegoat with blame. In this, be ruthless with yourself. Then you will be one with your birth, and powerful enough to be good.

 

Do not merely hate the tyrants, but try to mend the lives they've broken. But be careful of identifying absolutely with causes. Be careful of becoming no more than a sign. For whatever work you do for justice, you must work twice as hard—thrice as hard—on your own soul. You must continually become a living answer to the question, “What was the human for?” If your own sensibility does not rise above the summit of your anger, you will become part of the world’s impotent rage. Simple harmonies; myriad studies in close love and care; privacy and passions and gratitudes of being; tremulous brushes with nature—these small mirrors of immensity will forgo you, if you are only rage. For the question of how to live—this, too is your life; this, too, is your cause.

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Also this: alongside the never-ending fight for justice, your mind is delicate; your heart is breakable. As maddening as it is to say it, there are forces—insidious, overwhelmingly dominant forces—designed to damage your mental health and to make you doubt everything true, even the capacity to trust yourself. In this techno-surveillance-capitalistic society, you are targeted. You are targeted to be stripped of the Neo-Romantic intensity of yourself. Even your most just causes can become your diseases, if you allow yourself to be engineered against your mental and emotional health. Your hopeful mind, the wilderness of your senses—these are the new “savages,” the unspoiled continents the destroyers are colonizing. But the enemy, this time, is faceless. For the enemy has become your own habits. Thus goes the engineering. When your habits replace your instincts, you have been subjugated. You can be steered toward any kind of merchandise or entertainment, and you will buy it with the passion of discovery. You can be told when to shout out for joy, and when to cry, and when to sigh, and you will shout out for joy, and cry and sigh, like the darling of the algorithm. You can be told who to hate, because, knowing yourself less and less, you will need an emotion that feels like passion in order to fill the void. Refuse this by learning what you love. What stimulates you is not necessarily what you love. Passion is a complex of intensity, an emanation of the incalculable soul. What you love is what you want to sacrifice for. Sound out what you love. You can become immune to almost any coercion, but only if you know what you love. Therefore, hold your own heart and mind like a mother holds her child, and shun every dehumanizing temptation, as if you were responsible for the birth of the soul.

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​Worship the gift of life itself as the utmost sacrament. Every moment is a shivering little disc, a platelet of immensity, a tremor condescended from eternity—or it is the stuporous blink of nothing. Put your life carefully under your pillow each night, and, in the morning, take up your life carefully in your two cupped hands. Sing the sun, even a thimbleful of sun. Soak the nourishing darkness, like a  constant soul. The brushed rim of the world; holy, honest whispers. Become pure in spirit, not anesthetized by convention or dogmatic morality, not dulled by culture and expectation, but pure because you are undisguised to yourself; pure because you are filled with birth and death unceasingly. Take your naked soul bravely out into the world, where you will be loved or hated, or both, by turns. Expect disapproval and sympathy equally, for in a wounded and often diseased world there is no other way to be a true and powerful person. You will disturb coming in, and soothe going out, like the tide. Ask life to be intense, not easy. But let laughter sometimes overtake you like a rushing stream. Let a divine madness quake your very bones, not in derision, but when gravitas becomes comedy, through the mercy of the absurd. The world is filled impossibly with sham and cruelty. But the world is also filled impossibly with essential goodness, with sudden shoots of innocence that nod like beams of dew in the almost implausible grass. Be rare in beauty and in your considerations, but be too consumed by world and love and care to even recognize that you are rare. Then you will be a maker of humanity on the earth, and of the earth.

 

And when the earth shuffles us off, as it will, perhaps some tissue of your residency will remain, that you did less, rather than more harm on earth. Perhaps something of the way you thought and moved and touched will subsist in wild and true things, and in the dust of the inseparable stars.

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My editor, Willa Roberts, is so rigorously present in every sentence of this work,

that it is hard to imagine ON LIVING as anything but a co-creation.

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