mysticism iv

the innocence of mysticism is what rouses scorn.  yet is it not in this very innocence that the question of humanity is raised, and the new brought to bear?  and is it not before this very innocence that the arrogance of knowledge falters, swoons?

the relation of mysticism and truth totters, like all relations, at an unspoken fulcrum in night’s ill-visited playground.  and yet, outside of that playground, away from the oscillations of darkness, we might say in certain moods that this relation is bound in a manner not dissimilar to the bindings of the womb.

since mysticism is the discipline that cannot be taught, the practice that cannot be shown, the learning that is an unlearning, the play that is never staged, of what use is it?  but that is the question it doesn’t care to ask.

mysticism does not destroy time and space – for what could destroy them? – but rearranges them according to principles hardly cognitive.  this hardly cognitive is something that is set before the world’s beginnings, questioned at the center of the world’s spinnings, and loosed past the world’s endings.

the distance between mysticism and nothing might, in a mathematics not yet invented, in a geometry still imprisoned in dream, be precisely the distance between good and evil, between yes and no.

when i speak, this i made more an i by being less, language is less a function or spawn of meaning, more a film on a window during rain.

the doubt of whether, when dreaming of being a butterfly, i am a human dreaming of being a butterfly, or, when appearing as a human, i’m a butterfly dreaming of being a human, if discredited by science or common skepticism, does not negate the spaces the doubt is trying to reach – spaces that may be alongside or even in the spaces that discredit, for these spaces themselves are spaces of negation and strewn through them holes to playful empathies, perhaps a necessary condition of constructive evolution.

if all this is only sophistry, language games, an avoidance of anything that’s truly life, i, who have known the conditions of those who know such things, would simply hold conditional reflection before them, this glass of nature, this laboratory of time and the human but some broken vials in it.

mysticism might be a way of sensing time not from the present but all presents, history melted butter, the human earth just another sphere.

mysticism, as a particular brand of hallucinatory existence, might be considered the formless form of the physics of hallucination.

mysticism is a means of interrogating nature, while having forgotten words and will.

we have said before that mysticism is the ratio 2:0, where 2 is the experience of the sensuous world, 0 the experience of emptiness, and : the experience of the relation between.

how does the continuously emerging technological global complex affect mysticism?  as an invasive species might affect a fog.

that what is sometimes called nihilism can be viewed as a negative form of mysticism (a negative form of a negative way) opens portals of the relations of time and myth, but barely.  the explorer of relations might use contortionist means to squeeze through narrow passages of language, entering what might be called a funhouse of negation, glimpsing flows of politics, psychology, and art as through an instrument made for alternative analyses.

the classic formula of mysticism – this is that – an equation at the root of art and knowledge, contains within it this is not that, this is this, that is that, that is not that, and this is not this.  without these inclusions, the formula is wholly empty.

if there is curriculum for the mystic, it might be to travel through these inclusions to the formula and through these travels know the formula not as formula but flesh.

i read the distant scrimmages of humans, i scan the daily blood.  the advances in knowledge and speed appear like cats.  the screaming significance of the living is muted by the eyes of the dead.  and the human seems to me less a newspaper than a cloud, more a river than a god.

i am led through the city by threads of energy spun from the grave’s slow looms.  the living blow around me like dust, their voices like bones clanking in the wind.  i am led, and there is no destination but to be a weaver too, to lead some who speak in analytic tongues, briefly, through the dust.  all is energy and dust and a strange weaving.