(yet another) exercise in aesthetic mysticism

Preamble

As Underhill attempted to show in Mysticism, and others have in other forms, mysticism isn’t some psychological disturbance, some spiritual derangement, some infantile regression, devoid of criticality, some otiose irrelevance in our scientifically-oriented epistemologies, but an authentic way of knowing—oriented toward the practice of love—that, like all ways of knowing, requires complementing by other primary forms.  To intentionally write mystical texts in the post-god age, this age of machine and virtuality, of reason and post-reason, to include the fullness of the truths of this age while building on the mystical tradition, requires, naturally, new explorations, new risks, new forms.   It requires the mystic to embody these truths without committing to them intellectually, to include our present spiritual atmospheres of art and caprice—to self-consciously write mystical texts into existence, aware of their artifice, with a slight smirk as to their continuing necessity:  necessary because humans continue to be born with mystical orientations, legitimizing these expressions; smirking because who, having known the manifold ways of knowing, does not smirk as each way of knowing asserts itself, knowing, through knowing, there is no throne, knowing, through knowing, that, even so, expression must continue.  (If only science could write in such a way!  Oh, but one day it will.)  Mysticism has, of course, in our histories anyway, always been a renegade form of knowledge—whether in the age of religion or science; it subverts even subversion, degods god, and nonchalantly equates a cockroach and a king (long before set theory passed natural numbers through zero, setting the stage for the collapse of history in the twentieth century).  Now, with a sufficient bulk of experience and texts, we mystics can take this subversive task less weightily—still with sufficient seriousness to accomplish it, but without that kind of seriousness that asserts Felt Truth (attempting, through the self’s unmediated experience in the world, to unite the subjective and objective), whether hysterically, theo-erotically, intellectually, or metapsychologically.  We express, explore, in the manner of mystics—below word yet using word, below god yet using god, below time yet using time—but because we refuse the orientation of specialists, because we have immersed ourselves in the doubtful irony that coincidentally peaks with the end of a civilization, we laugh in our expression.  In derision? In disbelief? In delight? In unmitigated mirth? In silliness? In the pure caprice that may spawn all authentic joy?  Why choose, says the mystic.  We express, we laugh, we live.  Mystics, like scientists, like merchants and prostitutes, will die when humans die.  We thus, like all, must write ourselves.

Here, then, is another text in an invariably murky tradition.  I thank my mentors, from Heraclitus to Simone Weil, from Blake to John of the Cross to Borges, from Teresa of Ávila to Edmond Jabès, from Rumi to Lao Tse to Carroll.  We work alongside one another, collapsing space and time into the void that dances, the night that soothes, and the death that births a silent smile and a compassionate eye.

Text

God the word, as the visible expression of the invisible and inexpressible, remains, despite his death, as word, not as any structural or ideological substance behind, alongside or underneath god as word but only as word, as empty word, other than that which is expressed through it, born of the invisible and inexpressible.

Word, rightly replacing god, prior to god, having spoken god into and from existence, a- and polygendered, circumscribing god like an atmosphere, is itself, having overspoken itself, seeking a replacement for itself, but that which it seeks is not in god, word’s creation, itself, now bloated, cancerous, but that which created word, an otherless other, that which resides in the out in the in.

This thing, foreparent of god, eternally present quest, is hidden in the city, word’s structural archaeology manufactured incarnate, but word, let alone we—offspring of what we know not—remains ignorant, plays hide and seek (the project below the city’s clubs and furies) with its manifest desire.

I, but one explorer in the often seeming arcane adventuring of collective ancestral pilgrimages, wish to share my findings with other explorers, those curious about exploring, whether working toward in some obscure fashion expressing through emptiness—expression through emptying—whether setting aside distracting debris in the city’s noise, whether pointing the way, however tangential, arduous, and lengthy, to word’s replacement, i—no one—can know, this knowledge far subservient to the path itself, one we attempt to map as we walk, a map in word of that which is no-word.

God, then, as word, as now empty word, decomposing in the city, the collective urban reek of time, became—as that which has become nothing—a key to that which is nothing, progenitor of word, a possible return from the long detour of civilization around its central humanity, a technique of driverless driving from fragmentation, despair, subjugation, decontextualized desire, to unmediated objectless vision, the eye of i and i of eye, that which sees not time but no-time, which sees itself.

So to think about god in the urban age, the age of emptied word, is, conversely, to think about what preceded and will follow word, this thing unthinkable, that desires thought but cannot speak it, past the indefinable circumferences of the universe, tucked inside its center—that which physicists, poets and lovers seek, which binds them on their vaguely separate ways.

Yes, I stuff the empty god, this and that consummately empty word, with myself but with a self that orients itself to the unthinkable before and after, the before and after which neither precede nor follow but are here and now, within; in this perpetual reorienting (which may be no occident or accident but a return), in this attempt at union, itself a union, i become, however ephemerally, the emptiness i seek to fill, the page awaiting me on which i write, the unthinkable made flesh.  I do not ask that you dispute me:  i do not exist to be disputed but accepted or ignored—not accepted in any capital sense but in the way one accepts a tree; not ignored in anything resembling negation but in the way one has never met a tree.

Thus.  God, in time, eternally, exists, through living things, transient things, even as god as word lives and dies and, in dying, like us, does not die, but changes, becoming more itself, more present.  When life was young, outweighing death, god lived, son of word who, in turn, begat an unbegotten son, who died, but died to life; but now, at the tilt of time, life endlessly appearing but on the dump of death, our urban world—our world—now a landfill site of fallen bodies, ideas, dreams, on which metal flowers rise and even bloom and seed and propagate—to our surprise? perhaps—god is stuffed there too, with the worms and dreams (even the dreams of god), fomenting in the heat of darkness, its natural home (not light!).  So god in dying lives more than it once in living did and we see it more in silence than in word.

Yet this empty word, this decomposing god, the city’s vital compost, the silent pointer to the once and future now, democratic eraser of time, requests fulfillment in what it is not (as it always has), our now unbegotten children, the metal flowers and their seed—not some fulfilling which can be nailed or banked or even seen, but felt (as to the ancestry and kin of the divine) and, in feeling, shaped and lived.

We seek, then, in the city, god’s reeking archaeologies, the landfills of words, for a replacement, or perhaps replacement, replacement of ourselves.  We seek to recreate in creation what creation recreated in us, and in this psychocosmic to-and-froing mirrors wander into mirrors, labyrinths falter in themselves, keys, doors and books are interchangeable.

We see dimensionality stretching from the fear of the divine nothing, simulated in our simulations, through the dualities of myth and the internet, through the hard pluralities of flesh, pushing even further, through the quadrants of mind and its destructions, back to simulation with neither fear nor divinity nor even nothing.

Ach, the trees are walking again like our mother, through the proud surfaces of the woods, muttering our name as if they knew it, and who are we to say they do not know with their different minds and their walking according to the manner of our ancestors:  who would i not be to worship the trees and this trick of theirs and dream i too could dream their dreams and mutter their names and walk the earth.

We see technologies like birds, crimson in the halogen skies, free, bereft of death’s degrees, knowledge like robotic worms in the city’s gut.  We see it soaring, like beauty, without beholder, so eyeless, guided by the chemicals of passion and image shards of time.  Beyond good and evil is not enough, as is beyond itself.  Fowl will deposit prepositions on the earth, without discrimination, and no grammarian known to man shall object.

We see humanity’s skin stretched across the earth like a leathery balloon, without organs, its lava and center surfaced, remotely luminous in the vibrating darkness, its mind like its organs distributed, quivering with pure knowledge, randomly, silently, calmly ecstatic, a lidless conscious eyeball rotating on the axis of its emptiness, the sheers of copulation, made spherical by spirit and wind and breath, accumulated, as if by a mystic packrat, across time’s wily desert.

We see a borderless cornerless cube containing the furthest reaches of the universe and if there be other universes other cubes and cubes containing cubes, each of their surfaces appearing as jellyfish in murky water through a dirty aquarium window, when under the influence, having been jetlagged, not really knowing what a jellyfish is; each of their surfaces exchanging itself with those of its cube and those of all others, listless, shadowy, confused, indistinct, a geometric plenitude, a perfect and populated void.

We see night like day, enfolded like the strings of time on the stories of our birth, that nod of desire nodding, playing itself and with itself and to itself, its playlist missing but it doesn’t matter for matter’s no more and the birds of the earth and the sea and the sky and the fire are one with the day and the day with the night and the night with desire and desire with time and time with eyes.  And this is love, my friends, the egg in the television, the root in the screen.

*         *         *

And did you expect us, obscure reader, to find something, to reach a destination, contrive a solution, explicate a unity, clarify your thinking, explain a feeling, name a name?  No.  We mystics are advocates of quests with neither realization nor fulfillment, other than those realizations and fulfillments rarely seen as such.  We do not seek in things any thing because we do not seek in things but rather say to things, though they have no ears—Seek in us.  Walk these words to their strange and empty center.

Postamble

So mysticism, in its necessary joyful futile capricious attempt to articulate the god that never has been and in never having been becomes, explores the experience, as all explorings, of being itself, requiring no legitimacy other than this and in this lack wholly complementing the other forms of knowing, including those that deny it; indeed in this acceptance we accept its truth.