absinthe makes the fart grow stronger

if this is time give me blood

if this is blood give me water

if this is water give me air

if this is air give me fire

if this is fire give me plasma

if this is plasma give me god

if this is god give me i

if this is i give me love

if this is love give me art

if this is art give me dreams

if these are dreams give me death

if this is death give me absinthe

if this is absinthe give me more

the curse of the poet is upon us

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the curse of the poet is upon us

we have learned to breathe blood

and nothing is real

intelligence is the process and practice of routinely cancelling itself

the marriage of yotta- and homo sapiens with death officiating

the potentially fatal contradiction in liberal diversity projects   while other populist options are less appealing that the former can only apply itself to evolutionary aspects that perpetuate injustice and conformity through that ruse that shuffles words and pointers and bodies around on the gameboard of technicized nature and applies to this shuffling half the words – the words that nobilize its efforts … this is the problematic shape of human time progressive politics cannot speak

death isnt doing enough

were not getting death working for us

physical death itself isn’t a sufficient evolutionary policy –

(waiting for the old guard the old ideas the repressive regimes the stodgy generation to die)

(to trust natality!

remains a common tactic and hope but evidence for its efficacy seems lacking)

when we speak of the efficacy of what is commonly called mental illness what do we mean?

                  the genius of mutancy

                  a wildcard of experimentation and nonconformity

                  the hard brilliance of sacrifice

                  new geometries of darkness

                  necessary composting shadows of the loud feasts of hierarchies

                  questions

                  the inefficacy of what is called mental health

                 

become excited if you wish by esotericism its visions and romps  they arent untrue  they have their sustenances and seductions  it rests though on the arts of margins and margins to be margins live on names edges and you lover of esotericism of places outside whose home is the outerclass whose role in spiritualsocial linguistics is voicelessness will lose your excitement and fulfill your fates with neither abuse nor affirmation

                  inner hidden reenchanting rejected withins of withins

and while were blabbing of class where is the blab about all those other prepositions?

not just outerclass but para- syn- meta- pata- through- by- alongside- …?

油炸圈餅

deep fried circle bun

donut

                  lessons in etymology

and you over there … sadoo! … sadoo in the dirty white clothing

                  uirwq

why are you so delusional

                  delusion is for me the only path

but this is insane

                  not just delusion but delusion piled on delusion on delusion

you need help

what i mean by this is going to the bottom of play

thats not what delusion means

                  my delusion does because i place myself in its bottom

youre ludicrous

                  and youre a venereal gwagwa con

im outta here

                  you never came in

in the end (though there is no end) all ive been

is another animal gasping for god

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.

mysticism iii

to say all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well – neither as a joke nor a commonplace, a comfort nor a privilege, a ruse nor an experiment, but as an acceptance of the all one cannot know … what is this other than a calm absurdity, a replete and resplendent reason?

it is easy to see existence as a jewel, naked in the night and possibly eternal, civilization as a process of time covering up the jewel with fabrics, analyzing the covering, the fabrics, enchanted with the growing bulk, enamored by the changes, the colour and texture of the fabrics replacing the colour and texture of the jewel.  if art’s trick is to show the jewel using the materials covering it, mysticism's might be to remove the materials and know the jewel cannot be shown and that the jewel itself is this inability, the removal a rough simulation of the jewel.

so mysticism is associated with what has been called the negative way.  and all this is is or may be a removing and simulating and not showing.

society – which we could say is also devoted to removing and simulating and not showing – is the positive way, for it removes and simulates and doesn’t show what mysticism doesn’t reveal.

mysticism is perhaps the one unique element of humanity, the core of consciousness, allowing as it does humanity to imaginatively step outside itself – whether through nature, god, art, technology – and doubt reality’s weighty structures and so create spaces – however transient – of grace and, if grace is capable of entering reality’s structures, possibility of form.

if mysticism is oriented to language in silence, community in solitude, light in darkness, inhumanity in humanity, is it not an experiment to find a way through or around the problems that pervade us, seeing no evidence that social-political struggle – regardless of the ostensible goodness to any of its claims – effects at best anything more than a displacement of problem to problem.

everything constructive i have learned i have learned from the mystics in their immense deconstructions, which make scholarly deconstructions seem like décor alterations in a room in versailles and the knowledge of the learned and experienced like dusty wall hangings.  all these other paths, rife with cleverness or utility though they might sometimes be, all seem the same in their unmitigated support for or rebellion against the given world.  but the mystic path, being not a path but a placement in a flow and flows, provides alternatives to the given world and its endless injustices and so – through awe, passion, doubt, plurality, play – subverts it.

one mystic says, i am the universe – what do i have to fear?  another – hide your boat in the universe, then the thief cannot steal it.  the only safety of the soul is this:  the i - which appears at first and for long and chaotic periods as the ultimate non-safety - is recognized as a ruse, doubles, balloons to margins slightly larger than the entire universe, bursts, and disappears in itself.

mysticism is creedless, has no tribe, no fads, hardly a history or purpose, no hierarchies, no alliances, no wars.  mysticism does not contend or claim.

it is not as if mysticism would eradicate flesh, but that it would renew it through greedless gazing.

if mysticism can be said to be oriented to death, is this not less because it sets too little or too much store by life and more because, in an age which does, it sees no use for life?

there is a place for laughter in mysticism, a place where mysticism itself disappears.  and in this disappearance mysticism may be most truly itself.

voices speak in the night of the question, this night that, once entered, encompasses the day.  what is mysticism but a clearing of debris for entering, a clearing of noise for listening, a clearing of thought for translating?

all these other modes of knowledge to which humanity is addicted and for which vast resources are required are modes of building and willing and desiring and endless separations and unions.  but mysticism sidesteps, like a flower on the edge of battlefields, a vision on the edge of screams.

to self-identify as a mystic has a certain discrediting quality to it.  to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet is to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet.  but to be a mystic is not to be – and this is what a mystic is.  so we see mystics hiding, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in thought, sometimes in children, sometimes in shape or flowers or death or a smile.

mysticism ii

various systematizations ascribed to mysticism – whether kabbalah, astrology, magic, theosophy, all manner of occult and divination, arts and crafts and cards – like all things have their place.  but whether their place is in anything called mysticism?  the question more pointedly is to what extent the practice of darkness, of not-knowing, can attempt to systematize without unbecoming its practice?  and even whether unbecoming, considering its not-knowing, might be part of its practice?

mysticism, while using language, has typically been skeptical of language’s claims.  so poetry and mysticism share a common glance, though the former may work with its material initially from love, relentlessly the latter from necessity, later only the former from necessity.

relations between the child, mysticism, and knowledge are set aside by those who congratulate themselves for being adults.  but mysticism questions the assumptions of such congratulatory flourishes:  from mysticism’s arc, humans are all children – the gap between what one can know and what presents itself to be known is nearly infinite – and so what is called adulthood is often the worst of childhood retained and reified – society’s role not infrequently being the defense of such reification.

mysticism and anarchism might be linked through an empty subterranean tunnel apart from the hierarchies of the world, the former emphasizing the tunnel’s spiritual qualities, the latter its political and social.  historically, various individuals who could be called individual anarchists could also be called mystics:  chuang tzu, thoreau, blake.

mysticism is a mode of human being that precludes finality – whether the finality of religious or secular teleology, the finality of existential choice or commitment, the finality of technodeterminism, the finality of freedom.  in such preclusion, it flirts with certain vital pathologies of life as well as various pathological vitalities of death. for what is death other than the perception of a finality of finalities.  and what is life for most other than building bulwarks of hoped finalities against that perception of a finality of finalities?  mysticism attempts to slip aside from these perceptions and buildings; its means for slippage often include the murkiness of identity, the non-pursuit of money, the question in all statements, and a pervasive homelessness.

to say mysticism is existence’s reflection says more

the objectlessness of mysticism is intrinsic.  whether emily bronte or teresa of avila, bruce conner, marguerite burnat-provins, or meister eckhart, each was lost and found in spaces of disobjectification and so dissubjectification, spaces of geometric mobility and nomadism, of the absence of the thing in a thing.

so mystics can never form a club, society, school, movement, manifesto, party, religion, revolution, institution – and barely a discernible idea.  mysticism is ungraspable for its nature is air and fog, and it begins to feel false to itself should it begin doing anything but attempting to shape the shapeless into fluid words.

the car is the bird.  that god is this woman.  your dream is my life.  this i is this they.  these and their infinite variations – crepuscular thoughts in the mystic’s eternal gloaming – are easy to mock, discredit.  a laboratory, a dropped knife, a syllogism, a joke – each is sufficient.  but the irritant that persists in the side of truth, the mystic thorn in the brain of realism and facticity is this:  that knowledge is based on relation, that knowledge’s growth is based on the similarity of seeming dissimilarities, insights frequently obtained through analogy, dream, disintegration, error, irrationality, subversion.  and mysticism is the science and the art of this irritant.

mysticism places itself in the wound between the human feeling of its significance and the human knowledge of its insignificance.  it places itself there, and remains.

mysticism places itself in the manifold and contradictory narratives of any situation, seeing equally the legitimacy and insufficiency of each, the impossible comprehension of the whole, and remains.

mysticism places itself in the distance between the confines of any singularity and the sum of all singularities, and remains.

mysticism places itself in the sight of indifference, chance, volition, freedom, carnage, goodness’ incarceration and the laundered joys and comforts of evil, and remains.

the emptiness of mysticism might be said to be due to the cancellations inherent in such seeings, its fullness to the existent and residual pluralities, their union to the placings and remainings.

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.