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.

hanaϡelah and the chair

when hanaϡelah was invited to meet with the chair, it wasn’t as though she were trepidatious, through callowness or cowardice, but more probably, as some would have it, as if she were not indifferent exactly, but something that resembled indifference, not entirely dissimilar to when the world considers a woman to be one of its ten most beautiful, when this is only the case because she is rich and famous and the star of a recent blockbuster movie and the daughter of the senate majority whip and the lover of the winner of this year’s triple crown and a citizen of the earth’s sole superpower and a reputed descendant of the aztec pipiltin.  It is, most assuredly, not as if she resembles a squashed wombat, but, even so, naked, upon waking, random in a nameless bed, hundreds of thousands of others would be equally aphrodisiacal.

she spoke about it with her brother.  The reason or reasons for the request to meet, while not unfathomable, she said, remain opaque.

to you or to others? he inquired.

even that’s not wholly clear.

to you?

well.  To those who consider such things.

of course.

she stretched her limbs, not unlike an athlete preparing for a sport not yet invented, thinking to herself of the bitter tree she used to exist for in her youth, but without wishing to bring this into articulation due to associations she thought best not left unburied.  The chair isn’t known to be of the type that is unacquainted with the matters that we are.

i’ve heard roughly the same, though with some qualification as to the nature of the lack of unacquaintance.

yes.  This, frankly, is what disturbs me.  Not simply this orientation—or lack of it … it’s hard to tell … — but the basic fact of its existence.

i understand.  More than might be realized.

hanaϡelah paused in her thinking, and considered her approaching thoughts from another sphere.  Nevertheless, i’ll attend.

when are you called for?

three days hence, at fourteen-thirty hours.  I must begin preparing.

certainly.  Since you have decided to not absent yourself, an absence of diligence isn’t an option.  On that, at least, we’re in agreement.

hanaϡelah picked herself up, followed the departure protocols, and left toward the preparatory tasks which were, as can be imagined by the imaginative, substantial. 

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intermezzo 

⅟       the sky is incipiently turbid, almost macabre in its dissipatings

⅟       rooks the size of american footballs raucously mate in the air, broken infinities fall from the highest firmaments

⅟       a coach pulled by nine performs night’s pulchritudinous transport

⅟       do we not, announcing to no one, don the foreordained fashions, taken by that coach through tributaries of tribulation til deposited under destiny’s door?

⅟       “phhszzt, no! nothing! not lady szetto under the tumescent tree!”

⅟       i have heard it said that you said that i said that franz, the scornful bastard, whom i loved like dangling lemons under an atavistic sun

⅟       your interpretations are as paracetamol plunked into the pacific

⅟       being welcomed, being mannered, being been, having being

⅟       lairs are liars and words are truthful and minnie hummed a little song through the history of her sweetling crack 

end of intermezzo

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 now, said the chair, settling into itself, it is seen that you have not been absented.  Beyond the question of why this might be—or, rather, setting such questions aside, placing them, as it were, in time’s stinky incarnadine compost, along with newtonian geometry, garburators and catholicism—or even be might this why (as my ancestors would ponderously intone whenever fat-bottomed guests were guested), beyond the question of the beyond, beyond even questions, beyond beyonds, not questioning questions, why are you here?

hanaϡelah had not been unprepared for this approach.  She watched the chair, its cornucopia of vicissitudes, its stolidity, questioning her next move.

regardless, said the chair, have you not been told of the riddle of the multitudinous legs and the albatross, how they flopped their way to glory in porto alegre just moments before being undone.  The last time i told it, not disundone myself, of rancid disposition, shellac’d most miserably, i almost wept if i had not been past weeping and weeping passed me.

as the family of hanaϡelah had adumbrated on its vatic verandah, 7 of its 117 two-bys faulty, none of them unflawed, a descendant, gross in fame, would eat her way to glory, without a stitch in time.

ponderously.  We can’t escape it.  Said the chair.  Some have spoken, speaking of the dreams of the ancients, of dreams, the itch of seeming.  We would not.  Your ancestors, for example {and here, how could not hanaϡelah twitch, remembering the simulacra.  Nought was not, she thought, but then corrected herself, knowing better}, living in the wood near dover, never would have.  Why would you?

hanaϡelah pondered her options.  She could neither assent to nor pursue the why.  This was certain from her preparations.  Yet, disturbingly, as she had glimpsed, neither could she avoid it.  This was not some simple either-or, some dialectic in a stream, a frosty maiden.  Something else.  Like a minisery, or a bapterasmima.  Or a thong.  She dug deeper.  Time still timed.

when you and i—if you and i—had been of the sort to sort, would we have sorted sordid swords in sardinia, would we have tangled two—or more?—tangentos in tartufo?  You know we wouldn’t.  Instead, we would have remained as we always are, in the limbo of our in-betweenness, in grace and reverence, in a rhyme …

there.  The chair had failed.  Hanaϡelah saw it clearly now.  The work had paid.  She reached out her tongue beyond its usual extensions and performed the diligence required of her by the codes.  When she returned to her brother, later, offerings in the wake, the clouds hung far below the sky, their ground and benefactor, songs were not unheard.