mysticism i

mysticism is a pervasive and routine awareness that each existent thing – whether animal, idea, flora, element, dead, living or yet-to-be, oneself and one’s constituents no different – is a member of the universe, with its own voice and no clear criteria existing to distinguish legitimacy among the voices.

mysticism is less an indifference to the opposites, or any union of them, and more a continuous translation among them, translating, for example, life into death and finding it a sufficient, even worthy, equivalence.

the translation arts of mysticism are less related to what we call the many languages within and possibly emerging from and returning to language, and finding uncommon common spaces among the many apparently divergent words – and more to language within itself:  arts necessarily without available schooling, or at least any schooling of the sort we normally call such.

mysticism has nothing to do with god unless it has the same to do with god as science or art.  mysticism is god behind gods, science behind sciences, art behind arts.  mysticism is always behind.  but not just behind.  it is ahead and in and under and through and over and of.  one could almost say mysticism is the class we presently call prepositions, but they incarnate.  blood-prepositions.  the of of eyes.

mysticism is less the lines or the destruction of the lines between things and more a recreation of lines to nomadically move around things.

that the human is more oriented to not-knowing than knowing tends to be a knowing of mysticism, but a knowing that feels so deeply in flesh that its knowing is always striving and never achieving articulation – and for this always and never it remains a question if it is a knowledge and, if so, what kind.   for its existence, its vocation, being inside and outside language but never of (unless of expresses direction), it falters in language’s vast networks of utility, and for this faltering tries to imagine how not-knowing might speak.

the human’s orientation to migrate what it might call not-knowing into what it calls knowing presents certain challenges to the mystic, for whom these orientations are not wholly unknown but for whom they are secondary.

all the not-seeing to see, all the seeing to not-see.  this might be a motto of the mystics if that peculiar tribe were given to mottos.

the mystic is hung from a non-existent thread spanning a chasm between the non-existent cliffs of vision and vision:  the vision of seeing and the vision of not-seeing.  so the oracular blind are pathways and metaphors to maintain this state of hungness.

it is not as if this state is – as one is always tempted – superior to other states.  we are all the living hung, all given to our states, these states of our givenness.  that the mystic knows the impossibility of superiority is a component of the suffering and joy of its not-knowing.

mysticism in the age of god’s (or gods') death (or deaths) cannot help but alter from itself in the age of god's (or gods') life (or lives).  for mysticism exists in flesh and flesh’s migrating orientations toward the ineffable and undefined.  but these alterations tend to be a matter of a sartorial waistline modification due to a change in poundage (the exploration of whether an increase or decrease or, strangely, both, being a particular discipline within mysticism) and not anything in what we might call spiritual dna.

within that sartorial world, then, the world of tailors, presses, needles, we could pick up its nomenclatures and say mysticism now is of art rather than religion, of debauchery rather than asceticism.  and we would not be wrong.  but, outside, in the corridors of wind, the tapestries of night, art and religion are just different ways to pronounce an unspeakable word, debauchery and asceticism varied moods of eternally silent flesh.

any individuality, identity, attributable to this i hardly interest me other than as abdications to the unknown.

mysticism is frequently heretical as society – whether it names itself or is named religious, secular, democratic, feudal, progressive, conservative – remains itself by maintaining (despite the shiftiness of the things and the placements, a shifting that can generate great excitement and anxiety among the masses) commonplace boundaries between things while mysticism remains itself by orienting itself toward the bound-shifting and boundless.

while there are many practices of boundlessness, mysticism, it could be said, is the only one that avoids madness and death, doing so by incorporating them into its practice.

gott gedanken denken ii

mysticism is the process of attempting to enter the process of that of god which survives the deaths of gods, doing so by avoiding names.   it has no throne:  whether reason, passion, self, will, nothing.

i speak of god as god is the most impossible thing and if i should lose the ability to speak of impossible things i will lose the i and the ability to speak, which are one.

i and god are one in the way cabbage and god are one.  in this way i speak of god.

the negation of reality is humanity’s only positive and distinctive attribute and it achieves this to the extent it enters spaces of zero dimension:  god and art are two common names for this entering.  that the former was dominant in past time and the latter in present and future time registers in reality but not in its negation; in its negation god and art are the same.

certain existentialists and others who thought they were brave derided god as an escape, mysticism as weakness, sacrifice and passivity as shadows of authenticity; promoted the will, projects, societal struggle as the valid human enterprises.  and who could not say this sitting at certain angles?  but stretching the triangles and squares out to be spheres, who could not see escape as escape from convention, weakness as water, shadows as something to be praised.

that god is obviously unreal hardly prevents us from believing more (not more firmly, for that is an adverb of the real, but more spatially) – and yet with another belief – that god is not only the most real thing but the only real thing.  this possibility is hardly possible in the marketplace, the marketplaces of money and ideas, the unfirm that pretends not to be.

not suffering leads us to god, for suffering can equally lead us away, or anywhere; suffering is random in origin and direction – god leads us to god, and if money is said to be a wall between the seeker of god and god it is hardly because money is more a wall than society or art or love or even a wall or non-wall but as it is something and there must be nothing – not even suffering or non-walls – between.

the demons have left me and i am empty

while they inhabited this i they covered my disease

with their words, their carousings

now there is nothing

i am an empty monastery waiting for gods

to leave their lives and inhabit these

hapless infinite cells

i am average – the sum and average of all averages.  i cast rough planks on the mud of life to cross to the outhouses of god.  the planks are made of booze, sex, books, dreams – anything i can find that prevents me from sinking in the mud.  but i know god is the mud and i’ll never reach the outhouses, only finally sinking when no longer can i find.

to say that god is death is not untrue.  yet even if it were true, would we not now need god more than ever in time, death being now what it is – a nothing that is refused?

god cannot enter time but through shadow.  so the lover of god lives in shadow and the light of the city is a constant burden.  that god cannot is no reason to refuse our need.  that god cannot, that the city is a burden, are no reasons to assume our divinity, or anything resembling knowledge, to avoid the city or time.

we hardly ate of the tree of knowledge; this is history’s ruse.  our innocence is maintained.  and only the story we tell ourselves of our eating deceives us in disbelieving our innocence.

visions of god are not negated from asceticism but affirmed – god enters vision through unions of flesh and flesh’s absence.

it has always been the book that has saved me.  but saved me from what? and to what? that these questions are unanswerable in the i and yet i knows it has been saved - is this not dissimilar to god being dead and in its being dead made more alive?

god is not an escape from reality but a confrontation and subversion of it.  for there are those born into the human who test existence and rather than have the capability or desire to conform to it object to its order.  god is a name given to this objection and those who conform live in the creatings of that givenness.  weakness is a name given by the conformers to the non-conformers.  but weakness is everywhere, even as strength; it is rather that they are variously configured - and how are these varieties of configurating seen, but through god?