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.

madnesses i

while in capitalism money and its obvious prosthetics, ancillaries, and symbols are the regime’s official currency, any regime must – by the laws that govern laws – have a shadow currency that (through its capacity to out-flexibilize officiality, through its dimensional surprises, through its greater orientation toward energy) circumscribes the official – in this case money – and confronts humanity most deeply with the sacred struggle of its age.  in capitalism, this greater currency is sanity.

only the sane are permitted access to the corridors that manipulate, circulate, and define money; in such a way building and maintaining assets of sanity precedes physical acquiring and accumulating.

sanity is a matter of defending certain geometrical configurations over others.  thus ‘marginalization’ – a term not infrequently used by those claiming to be nearer the center or middle of something humanity values (and yet the meaning of this something is uncertain, contradictory:  take knowledge, justice, power, goodness) – is typically and covertly a plea for certain orbitings.

yet in some worlds of the mad, a ground is no fixed orbiting – there are no margins, for margins are everywhere.  humanity itself is no center – despite various religious, philosophical and populist attempts to wish-claim otherwise – but yet another orbiting:  elliptical, thoroughly transient, even the star it once claimed gone, and that star, in the presumed memory of its presence or the palpable appearance of its absence, still hardly humanity.

money and sanity are related as the biological sexes are related:  each can express various genders but the binary relation remains required to perpetuate the species.

many paths exist to be deemed mad by the sane; a rare but occasionally fruitful path is to conform as wholly as possible (or attempt to conform) to one or more of the sane’s ideals.

since we know we know how to assemble spaceships, to cook falafels, to theorize and write texts, to manipulate ourselves, other members of the species, and objects throughout the planet, to play horseshoes with competence, but know we hardly know what wisdom is and even whether it exists – and without this knowledge and its practice what are we other than another shooting scream – sanity’s definitions, their institutionalizations and enforcements, are melancholic in their brutalities and injustices, faintly comic in their strewn caprice.

that sanity requires madness for itself and to be itself is obvious.  and so too is sanity’s need – without which it would be lost – to manufacture madness, to forge and reproduce it from whatever materials are at hand.  for a human to observe this process and choose to be such material-at-hand for further observation – what discipline might we call this?  and would it be a discipline of the mad or sane?  an interdisciplinary venture, a new alliance?

while we might be tempted to distinguish between pathological and productive madnesses – even as we might distinguish between pathological and productive sanities – this temptation, while not necessarily misguided, assumes pathology is unproductive, productivity superior and good.  a question inhabits this, as all, temptations – whether pathological madnesses and sanities are in fact a different configuration of mad and productive madnesses and sanities of sanity, or the reverse?  and another inhabiting question – whether these questions of sanity are nested endlessly, whether the moats that surround it are mirage-moats, its fortresses of sand?

i ask questions of the oracles hidden in the fallen temples of the luminescent city, see them point to darkness, write in hallucinatory nights tangled, alabaster visions.  for this i am deemed mad.  and the one who pays its taxes and owns a home and has a career in the official taxonomies and carries out the necessary appearances of love is deemed sane.  yet is there not a conflict of interest in the naming – are there not governance issues in the management of the world and the structures and processes of names?  is not an audit lacking of humanity?  or rather has it not been made, and filed far away, and down?

gott gedanken denken i

i speak of god, though god be dead.  i speak of god for in its death we eat of the divine corpse through the earth and in eating know it in the knowledge that is not the knowledge of articulation but of flesh before it speaks.

so these words are nothing unless the reader has gotten on its knees and put its face in the earth and eaten of that corpse.  even then, they are nothing, but of a different kind.

in this knowledge – of divine flesh in animal flesh – we see – see with that vision not of words – that god was not god, and that not-god had to die.

i speak of god in its living death, for in our eating god reanimates and death becomes again the molecules of life.

i have so much to say of god and all of it is untrue.  i have so much to say of god and i will say it in its untruth.  for it is only through untruth that we walk the way of truth.

i would rather speak of god than humanity.  and if you say being human all i can speak is the human, i would say, on what grounds even can we speak the human?  on these grounds then i speak god.

the pronouns i use are false.  i say i.  i say it.  i say you.  i could call i they and it we and you she and he.  in god pronouns trade clothes like actors.  and glyphs and phonemes are clothes on what we cannot say.  not just pronouns, but prepositions, adjectives, nouns, verbs – the entire anatomy of speech, naked in its speechless glory, constantly robing and undressing.  words are robbers, aren’t they?  like god.

god is most adept at stealing from itself.  it has stolen so many clothes from itself it forgets what it owns.  and this forgetting is intrinsic to god, this slipping of ownership away.

that god doesn’t exist, that science can’t find it, that psychology doesn’t want it, that religion bypasses it, that philosophy murdered it, that art decreates it, that the crowds as always assiduously ignore it – all this proves nothing, for god disproves.

if god has been sufficiently crafty and bold to take nine billion names, to sacrifice its child, to morph itself through the evolutions of the divine, to twist ladders into running wheels, to lay claim to no merit, it can also stage its death.  non-existence permits such flexibility.

to say that if i speak of god i simply speak of a projection of my own image is to miss that i may not have an image and if even i speak of a projection of an image that hardly falsifies less other speakings and that if i do not speak of god – who will?

the most compelling – often the only compelling – aspects of the human are the inexplicable, aesthetically generative, expansive and boundless, visionary, detached, holographic … what we think of when we think of the compelling aspects of god.

god is just another word, like cabbage, and one is surely not wrong to say god is as in a cabbage as cabbage is in a god.  we grow both, we eat both, we worship both, we kill both.  cabbages evolve as gods do, and both may well outlive humanity.

when it is said – mysticism is truer than i can tell you – we speak of god.  we speak of it in the inability to speak, in the eternal inarticulation of truth.  and we speak of it with a word that is commonly and uncommonly mocked among and not among those of the knowledge classes.  mysticism is not a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy or science; it is a differently rigorous mode:  one can argue a centrally rigorous mode as it uses the central artifacts of life – flesh, breath, and as extension words – as tools.  it relies primarily on the spiritus of the technoanimal that gives itself over to the relation between and among spirit and flesh.

tao te ching lxxx

Reduce the size and population of the state.  Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.

Even when they have ships and carts they will have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,

Will find relish in their food

And beauty in their clothes,

Will be content in their abode

And happy in the way they live.

Though adjoining states are within sight of one another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that these potencies will not harm the people.  The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a mutual accord.

So, here, we also have forces; instead of spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons, power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions.  So, here, we have a gap, infinite in practice, between the capacity of the force and its use.  Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death, and contentment.

How do we reduce the size and population of the state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs?  Or, in other words, how do we bring about return without catastrophe?  Isn’t this the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?