knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders iv

cross the bridge of sighs in your robes of doubt.  sing to the punters of ends.  expose yourself to time and may it violate you.  ascend to wicker prisons of fire and burn.  burn your histories and your myths.  burn your pathetic tears.  burn your love and love.  burn your stupid jokes.  fire is the answer and is always the answer.  and the question?  isn’t everything the question?

knowledge is ledge construction and maintenance and pricing and profitability and enforcement, the ledgers of ledges, unknowledge is no ledge or ledgers, and the immaterial orders are the battle and unity of both.

i walk along my segments of the infinite corridors of knowledge, limping like ulysses, soap in my pocket like leopold, a little butterfly dreaming of better butters, the clouds are labia marching to an unknown war, the concrete sun-dried scrotums, and all’s well, all’s well, all’s always well.

take my hand or my prick or my hernia or something and take me down the well of yourself and show me the knowledge that isn’t there and slice me to death with your perfections.  oh my impossible love.  i have learned how to walk around inside my head.  it may sound silly to you but it’s very helpful to me.

i would like to be a white-robed candle on a hill, chanting pee-wee quotes, burning dumbly.  i would like to be some little retorts.  somewhere in the yucatan mayhaps.  then i would belong to the cult of the human and know the rituals of knowledge and walk the walls of names.  i would know the wellness of wells.  i would know knowledge like i know myself.  then i would shine with the light of the dead gods and reflect the mirrors hiding in the folds of clouds.  but i am not what i would like to be.  i am not what i would seem.  i am precisely the sum of the negations of this text.    

knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders i

another human says to me after a community arts festival that ends in white-robed humans, in shadow play and the translucent heads of mythic creatures, gliding, chanting, like humanoid and earthbound clouds, among candles, on and at the base of hills, polyglottally, through a lukewarm late summer evening of threatening rain – looked like a cult to me.  i reply, as pee-wee herman said, one person’s cult is another’s party.

that herman to my knowledge never said this and if he did in contexts so far from mine that we could say he never or barely did, if i assume at least temporarily my context as standard.  that i can and do say to my knowledge.  that i never replied as such.  that the other human only approximated my above quotation of it.  that the image(s) in your mind – if there be image(s) – birthed from these words likely bear little resemblance to what i saw, and these words to other words that might have been birthed from the presumed and ostensibly indisputable actual event, hardly proves but equally hardly dispels the spinning, expanding, morphing, collapsing limits and boundlessnesses of what we learn, and how, and what we don’t.

i am interested in the supposedly existing thoughts of chuang tzu, wittgenstein, kant, hume, foucault, artaud, kristeva, the boys, the non-boys, the non-girls, the girls, and as is well known in non-existent circles, the non-humans (which some have argued include the humans).  but no more interested than in the voices at my co-op’s picnic table, the pebbles in the tiny teeny bitty itty zen garden before me in this café, the repetitive semi-articulations of that lover, or the molasses of the morasses of the marsh mists of the appearances of my mind.

in the paragraph above that begins with another human is all knowledge, all knowledge’s deconstruction, the materiality and immateriality of all things.

in the paragraph above is just another pebble in this zen garden stretching before this and that i to the stars, unseen monks raking, unseen monks constellating, unseen monks whispering, of the infinite love of each pebble, of the sum of all infinities becoming nothing in that way nothing is become.

in the paragraph above i see a ghost of a girl tumbling down staircases of burning manure, men of ostensible maturity and power blanching to fear, for they are seeing saint bernards too large to be saint bernards.  and i want to say – some of me wants to say – i am the girl.  but i cannot.  i cannot for reasons too complex and beautiful and stupid to name.  the reasons are too long.  reasons are always too long.

in the paragraph above is the paragraph below and if you don’t see that you’re dumber than a geriatric cat and i strip you of the name human and turn you into a pebble and you are thereby sanctified in the garden of silences.  these are the paths of knowledge and the signs of the immaterial orders of freedom.

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.

madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.

gott gedanken denken iii

to know in one’s body (and is there other knowledge?) that there are great truths, as equally from those we love as those seemingly outside of love, that wholly negate us is to glimpse god and in glimpsing die.  that humans at various times say god cannot be glimpsed as it is outside existence or that we can glimpse god (even if this be but as god is us) and live only reveals that humans say much.

that god lives in the conforming sectors, those that accept the order of existence and mould their lives to this acceptance and call the moulding wisdom or pragmatism or both or other, that these sectors are the only places god can live (according to that order’s visions of life), hardly negates god’s living absence:  rather, all words (and if god is anything it is all words) have these qualities of multiple citizenship, disorientations, and god is a way of exploring these qualities.

god’s official and legal dwelling is in these sectors – what are called religion, temples, shrines, churches, sacraments, sacerdotal embodiments, established sacred texts, notions and acts of piety, vestments and altars, and by many other names – and, while maintaining certain ironies and necessities, these resident in an inexplicably turpitudinous absence of absence, explicitly and complicitly cooperates in the mouldings, a requisite sector, through ancient prescriptions that don the sartorially visible structures of the day.

while only no one can know where god dwells, god’s de facto dwelling is oracular – in pointings and silences and strange visitations, the plays and shadow flickerings of memory on time’s unattended and broken stage.

certain articulations in the folds of the manifestations of god have claimed to discern good and evil; others have seemingly simply asked how great the distance is between them.  in holding these and other measurements and prepositions inside of us – in our thoughts and actions – do we possibly give ourselves opportunities to glimpse god and die.

why die before death?  isn’t the death we name death a drop of rain among the countless drops, and each a death, so dying before death is a portal to a mode of seeing rain?  god is just a way of seeing rain.

that the human remains so committed to turning rain to stone and thinks that if it were to give this turning up it would die are not holdings without truth; but were it to test other turnings, would it not then turn to liquid ways among the elements of evolution?

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.

daodejing 81

Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful.

Good words are not persuasive, persuasive words are not good.

He who knows has no wide learning, he who has wide learning does not know.

The sage does not hoard.

Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more.

Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm.

The way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.

Dao quietly overturns what might be described as the West’s mantra— 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It overturns the mantra millennia before the above lines were written and about the same time the roots of this mantra were being developed.  It overturns by recognizing the polymorphousness of language, its undependability as a ground, long before Wittgenstein.  It overturns by saying that the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is only the ugly; it overturns by returning to the gate where names diverge.

In returning, harm is deconstructed, contention dissolved through a withdrawal from clinging to anything that can be named.  The empty way, which use doesn’t drain, the beginning, the mother of the world, is the watery way we walk.

January 13 - Malfeasance of Children

When is the child born, why does the child die?

Is the child born on its mother’s tears?

Does the child die in her secret smile?

The child rose from its bed of play,

saw the shy world hiding, said, Come here,

I’m a princess and you’re a crocodile.

The world said, Sure, I was bored anyway,

but you be the croc and I’ll be a deer;

let’s rickshaw to China then skate on the Nile.

The two friends wandered that day,

ate rabbit delight and elephant ears,

composed a petunia and put broccoli on trial.

It wasn’t as if their mothers or they

hadn’t heard of textbooks, ethics or years,

but that that diet wasn’t their style.

You possibly haven’t or possibly may

have heard of a place where everything’s weird;

it’s not very far--just none or woo miles.

The world said, Well, it’s time to go away.

I’ve got commitments, I need a beer,

my voicemail’s ringing, which makes me feel virile.

The child lay down on a bed of grey,

saw shadows fighting her electric fears,

dreamt that night of God, gold and guile.

The child is born on the wing of a word.

The child dies when it first denies.