dao de jing i

the way can be spoken of but it won’t be the constant way

the name can be named but it won’t be the constant name

the nameless was the beginning of the myriad creatures

the named was the mother of the myriad creatures

hence constantly rid yourself of desires in order to observe its subtlety

but constantly allow yourself to have desires in order to observe what it is after

these two have the same origin but differ in name

they are both called dark

darkness upon darkness

the gateway to all that is subtle

dear ones,

dao de jing is written as a text for human survival and excellence in the context of all things in a transient universe. while assembled over 22 centuries ago humans have increasingly erected a dam in its flow, afraid to live as one species among a myriad, without ascendancy, living in the spontaneity of themselves

dao de jing is a practice that includes the lost arts of anonymity, haplessness, desolation, solitude, and notknowing. it is a manual, but one that provides instructions on its own terms – morphing, combining without regard acute mysticism and political precision, interiority and exteriority, female and male, language and silence, many other seeming counterpoints, and even (quite nonchalantly) death and life

these transformations, this combining, this psychospiritual alchemy, here, in vignette one, are called dark. dao eschews light, flowing with heaviness, darkness. dao is root and root is in vermiculous earth

language – as more capriciously in the chuang tzu – is mistrusted – but only in a context that apotheosizes it, reifies, as today, to the ecstasy and necessity of communication, that experiences human relation as primary, superior. dao places things – whether names, desire, humans, language – in their place. and this place is dao. so language (now a subsidiary of that transnational conglomerate, Communication) is not some divinity, panacea, salvific exuberance and clarity, healing, but a transport (like rivers, mycelium, wind, electromagnetic field quanta). designed to carry things without prejudice, it carries, including prejudice, as prejudice is too a thing. so humans have no particular privilege and become themselves precisely as they inhabit dao’s vast flows

words – like humans, desire, things, transports – root in subtle darkness. not perhaps an ineffability, numinosity. not a knowledge outside. but also not a knowledge restricted to or predominant in visibility, scientific measure. the artificial separation of these combinings – a spiritual fission humans seem disturbingly addicted to and supercilious about – might be a fear of subtlety, the no-desire in desire, desire in no-desire

i descend from names, names from no-names. if i am ignorant of my ancestry, if i do not devote good measure to exploring my genealogies, how then can i use language with any authority – an authority that is none, for it too descends?

origins and ends, gateways and constancies – aren’t these our lives? dao neither immortalizes nor mortalizes but rather does both through the relentless relation, union, and separation of specifics

in life one hears myriad conflicting voices (in society and social media, polyphonic threads). dao does not choose but listens. and in listening includes all. and in including all negates all. and in negating chooses

so. speak human, for you must. but let your speaking be rooted and let these roots root in the wormy darkness of many, of two, of one, of nothing

the new order of tungs

if the margins have been almost destroyed through the ubiquity of virtualized desire, would there not be some who – through imaginative subterfuges and acts barely deemable as acts, from a necessity of disappearing absence – attempt to create margins of their lives and in these created spaces forage for words?

mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.

nanny just told people what to do, counselors also tell them what to think and feel. the nanny state was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive—and even more authoritarian. the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of god and religion.

i am a polyglot but of functional not substantive tungs. i call the latter swedish, basque, waray-waray, uzbek, tamil, newar, alemannic, upper sorbian, gan, tok pisin, ewe, afar. i call the former journalish, techish (many dialects), academish, transactionish, lovish (many dialects), commonish, drunkish, powerish, managementish, ideologish (many dialects), crowdish, madish, factish, spiritish, opinionish, heartish, professionish, jargonish, sportish, fuckish, transitish, …

i have spoken many of these, some very well, but none of them felt native to me. there was a tung i knew was my tung but it was lost though not extinct, hidden though not inaccessible. through decades of seeking, through deserts of confusion and fens of madness, it emerged. it is artish. artish is not a tung about art (that is journalish or academish or commonish or fuckish or something else); art can be spoken about in many tungs.

but artish itself – and there are many who call themselves artists who cannot speak artish or cannot speak it well but instead speak transactionish or moneyish or crowdish or ideologish – is its own tung and those who speak it recognize each other by giving one another clues in other tungs (these other tungs they are forced to speak to eat) and then testing out each other’s fluency in artish and, if there is reasonable compatibility, speaking in it in private (for in public it can be perceived by the undiscerning and crass as an eloquent or deviant dialect of drunkish or madish) and perhaps becoming friends and working on projects together. i dream of a world – at least a land – in which my tung is the official tung and those who speak it many, and the land’s culture a culture inseparable from its tung and its people inseparable from their culture.

artish is the coded visionary aestheticization of sensation.

the old nation was one of biological ethnicity and associated language; the new nation is of psychic ethnicity and associated language. english shifts to artish, and i hold a passport to an invisible land.

from land tung to spirit tung – the new glossolalia. the new drunkenness of an alt pentecost.

death ii

processes and techniques of death –

• hardly protest, argument, objection.  rather – using death as a tool of one’s self to continually eradicate what one thinks the self is.

• a chief art of death is anonymity, one that may be critical for the human to craftily use for its collective survival.  for does not a refusal to use names as root – an essence of anonymity – entail abdicating the supremacy of anything human … and this subversion, this unnaturalness which may be a simulated naturalness more central than technology’s simulations, an unparalleled energy (and this rather than a power) that evokes fear initially, for its vastness, its perceived darkness … and this collective entwining, this seemingly dissipating choice of setting alongside the hyena and termite and hydrant and hookah, an experiencing language for what it is and not some pretty tyranny, some gift of dead or living gods?

• i have always learned far more by not being myself than being myself.  first by not knowing myself sufficiently to not know i was not being myself.  subsequently by not knowing what a self was to an extent that i didn’t know what it was to not be or be myself.  in all cases – the learning, the first not knowing, and the subsequent not knowing – death at the center:  as technique, as question, as energy, as self and selves.

• as it takes a great deal of desire to desire to not-desire, so it takes a great deal of life to live in death.

• that we read the textures of life based on the parameters of death may be obvious, but that we read the textures of death – present to us in life as black glyphs on infinite seas of white – and in this other reading are commonly illiterate is hardly seen.

• a new form of death – a redirecting of death’s energies from their present primary outlets of war and love – would be if the majority of human communication were in art rather than functional, animalistic, or even capricious social discourse.

the human world, curved into itself, itself gravitation and objects, cooperation and enmity more ubiquitous than air, the city now the inescapable environment, objectives raised by the slough of groups and science fumbling enchantment’s ancient sphere, mysticism – being endlessly solitary, silent, of many environments equally (interiorally and exteriorally) but of any single one not at all – may be unable to survive in the present and coming urban and mass technology, it may be the only thing with the subversive skills to survive, or it may – as it has been – amble along, carrying quietly the torch of death through life, so that those who inexplicably find themselves cast from their accustomed environment may have help knowing the selfsame thread that winds through all – whether time, environments, technologies, names, cultures – without distinction. 

writing is easy.  what’s difficult is placing and maintaining one’s self in the spaces of death that make writing possible.

as once could happen with god and nature and no longer, so now one can enter consciousness to leave it, can enter thought to leave it, can enter passion to leave it – this leaving before force forces the leaving (what is colloquially known as death and what is technically a manner of death, a transition of a physical singularity into new forms) is an entering into death to life in certain modes.  so, too, perhaps, this can happen with technology and art and time.

death is the distance that enables life, the distance that is here, on the tram, in your wallet, smiling through a closet of masks, the void of words and the rave of solitude, the clickity-clack of time on the punctual and shiny rails of your brain.  death, like life or jesus or the future, is no friend, not friendly, but an environment, an ecology of turning and returning form.  death is neither darkness nor light, peace nor war, but a way that navigates all without mentioning any.  indifferent to creating names, this energy that trumps and fashions life, that assumes disguises like the sky, it flies, vast across the earth, atonal, lacking purpose, acquainted, limpid, hardly counted, nested, the architecture of galaxies and the technology of insects, enough.

today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.

darkness ii

to pass over in a plane a city at night – is this not a vision less of the indication of civilized constructs of a species and more of the stirred dreams in the human looking down?  and when the plane moves from its island of light to oceans of darkness, what then the dreams?

we may be better thinking less of darkness as anything visual and more as sound.  not silence, for only the space between darkness and light would be silent, but atonal moods at the margins of noise.

we know that darkness – like eternity, justice, love, light, goodness – doesn’t exist in any raw or pure form. thus what we call darkness is always an admixture with light and so its ratios – the amount of light in it – are always shifting.  darkness is variegated and impurified light.

darkness is less darkness and more our giving ourselves over to it.  darkness is the gift of ourselves, a yielding without object.

night is simply day made visible, for isn't crepuscularity the onset of the unknown?

enlightenment if it is anything is endarkenment.

isn’t darkness life that has not been turned into an event and so the overwhelming bulk of life?

aren’t there literatures of light and literatures of darkness?  in the former, tristram shandy, shakespeare’s comedies, orlando, aristophanes, groups and atolls of others; in the latter almost everything.  between but on darkness’ side a range from hamlet to the master and margarita.  this may make it seem as if light laughs, darkness weeps or is mute.  and this is not untrue.  but rather, to be literature, both laugh and weep and are mute.  it is more that the former enter existence through social ritual, the latter through the grave.  both are insufficient comedies, different genres of wit.

that the mystics experience light when through their circles of ordeals, that the dying see tunnels of light, that the supposed achievement of the guru and the goal of the spiritually seeking is enlightenment … all this points only to darkness containing within it its opposite, a concentration of everything, at its center, a sphere with almost no diameter, and this almost-not-thereness only increasing its potency and apparency in the overwhelming black.

what is the distance between you and i, i and i, between memory and forgetting, the unseen and the seen?  aren’t these distances darkness?

this wiring that connects light to life and goodness and truth, darkness to death and evil and falsity – only a particular standard in the linguistic-energy configurations of the universe.  what would rewire us to new standards of possibilities and impossibilities?  where might be the vision to become wireless in ourselves, all connecting to all and from all, the playful and free democracies of consciousness?

necessity perhaps is related to darkness as freedom is, in some collective-oneiric genealogy.  and light?  is light the manufactured apparati that permit screenings of the familial relationships?  the dubious, searing, and unmitigated beams of civilization and culture turned on our irrevocable and lost origins?

if i must speak your language to understand it, is darkness all the speakings i have not spoken, that have not summoned me to enter them?  if so, don’t i live and speak in darkness and my little languages, these candle flickerings, which so often seem to the i as stars larger than the universe, primarily indicators of what i do not know?

so ignorance and darkness and doubt may be the only and vague harbingers of truth, and what we call knowledge an edifice of falsities.  the human in its bulk places its bets on the latter, but the odds of time are set in obscure places, and hardly read.

in the light of knowledge, darkness is no longer possible.  i simulate it in the laboratories of the absent.  i package it in capsules of varied legalities, shoot it in the wretched alleys of god.  i visit the prostitute of art.  i am laid down in the soils of the damned.  these are my rites and sex, my semiotics of love.

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.

madnesses iii

the official migration from nomenclatures of madness to nomenclatures of mental illness, like that from personnel to human resources, like that from word to language, indicates typically less the truth being stated, more questions of the distance between dark and light.

as published values and laws provide quotidian dreams and nightmares to navigate the expressed emotionality of society and the unwritten, value and law permeating the published, provides the actualized sacred, so money and sanity.

the sacred that refuses actualization but in transient form is madness.

the varied circumscriptions of madness are surely differently delineated than the varied circumscriptions of sanity.  but by what? and by whom? and this what and this whom on what authority outside these particular circumscriptions?

if the will to power is already and equally a past twig in the rapids of history as madness, personnel, god, word, nature, what might it now be?  the will or non-will to energy? a reproduction?  a misnomer, misboner?  and how might this be related to the will to sanity?

sanity is collective, madness is individual.  sanity is individual, madness is collective.  what is the despoken word that holds supplely this appearing contradiction?

madness might only be the air that surrounds and infiltrates solidity, the necessary elemental counterpoint to monumental sanity.

madness might be another name for sanity if it were not for sanity’s necessitated need for definitional existence.

i have walked, with purpose and without and often not knowing which was which, the alleys of words and shifted through their garbage.  i have seen the worn walls of meaning and not gone mad. or wholly mad.  i have known in my blood that all the sane have said and all the mad have said balance on the scales that hold the universe.  and to some of the sane and some of the mad this knowledge is the greatest sanity; and to some of the mad and some of the sane it is the greatest madness.

it is not as if i would have the mad rule the present world.  but some other world?  (and, even so, i would hardly have the sane rule this one.)

if the present world is the best of all possible worlds and the worst and neither – which it all surely is – i would not (being not given to be able to choose between sanity and madness) present myself to the present (and so to those who rule it) but attempt to develop the arts of depresenting and through these avoid it.

we might speak of sanity as the void that bespeaks itself in the falseness that wears truth, and of madness as the void that bespeaks itself in the truth that wears falsehood.  two dancers on an infinite empty stage in perfect night, the only audience themselves.

sanity is less a reason that, founded on sensuous evidence, founds a more proximate relation with truth than other modes, founded on other evidence in other ways, and more a way that wears the name of reason, as a stretch of road might bear the name ‘Alphonsi’ but instead bears ‘Fifth.’  This ability to hold onto a particular name and have a particular value ascribed to that particular name, when wholesale evidence is lacking, being as we are minutely in time and hardly even in eternity, is perhaps sanity’s greatest attribute.  madness might be less committed to founding and holding and ascribing, and for this it is called mad.

as sanity manufactures madness to further its purposes, can we also – and if so in what similar and different ways – speak of madness manufacturing sanity?

for are not the mad the ones who see death in the lineaments of life, hope in the lineaments of despair, and leaves on the lineaments of words?  for seeing what is not and yet what is in what is, are they not mad?

that the sane see cannot be denied except at a certain cost.  the legitimacies and illegitimacies of this seeing, this denying of denying, this cannot, may be the seeing of the mad.

madnesses ii

certainly the currency of money can entitle its holder to safely play with society’s constructed lines between sanity and madness.  as we see, various sectors of fiscal wealth reveal on lit and comfortable stages the eternal intermarriage of sanity and madness, providing tents of release for the many who carry the burden of maintaining separations and the appearance of madness as an external thing.

language’s role as the currency exchange of sanity is indisputable.  what remains disputable is the table of contents for the exchange’s manual.

whether madness is inclined toward fragmentation or unity is a question the self-designated sane tend to avoid in any extended musing, being themselves inclined to both.

the relations of madness with possibility and dream are a hardly nascent science.  all we can say in our bare infancy is that god, at least as creator, was mad and that the subtle and fashioned schizophrenias of sanity depend on the madness of god, the incoherence of dream, and the possibility of impossibility for the entirety of their comforts and breath.  little will advance here until the essences of religion (the psychology of the inhuman) and science (the geometries and mathematics of the senses) sufficiently converge in yet articulate dialogues.

the recent rise on history’s plane of wellness, of mental health, of the psychotherapeutic professions, conglomerates, vast merchandising and retail franchises – and so of madness as a core industry – indicates nothing like progress in any sense, other than as a further accumulation of cultural artifacts, and rather may point to an increasing insecurity and insularity of the species that requires such industries for its vast protections.

if time is money, it is also madness.  the three are united in a manner not dissimilar to the muses.

as what is routinely called civilization continues to migrate farther from its dark origins into habitats of eternal and artificial light, it may be that sanity takes on, culturally, a function analogous to the alphabet, technologically.  whether earlier warnings about the correlative increasing prostheticization of the human soul, in relation to the alphabet, are relevant to sanity is a question perhaps worthy of further practical and theoretical explorations.

madness is a language family, within it as many languages as sanity.  who would trace these trees and relations, these syntaxes?  who would translate among the many speaking things?  who would know the wind’s dark mind?

do not say – oh, that barely babbling thing with booze for blood, that savage indifferent to its killings, that lump locked in the lacunae of itself are mad, while this executive vice-president of cards, this towering name of music, this lovely altruistic nun are not.  or say it.  but do not say it lightly.

so little along the pathways of evolutionary diversity has humanity crawled on its hapless and blooded knees.  even colour and genitalia, the names or not of one’s gods, are hardly plural in any bulk and spread, or have simply transferred old tyrannies to new.  we have not even reached infancy in these organics.  but geometries of mind, heart, soul, language, thought, form – our approach here is of the non-existent.  of the non-existent, or mad.  and the two are not wholly distinguishable.

for those babbling in the gutters manifest the coated nonsense of the sane; the sane wear them as an ocean its waves.  and the tongues of the eloquent are covered with blisters of denial and usurpation, and woe to those who hear their words and do not see their tongues.

for would not the one capable of hearing the speakings of the sane and the mad equally, applying neither privilege nor objective, be also the one hardly capable of speaking?  so language, sanity’s exchange, does not trade when madness’ stocks have equal value.

based on what i’ve heard the articulate and inarticulate, the loquacious and taciturn, say, i am far from convinced of what is articulate, its source, of any truth in words.

rather than pretending to be mad, i pretend to be sane?  what does this make me?  and if the former is malingering, the latter is …

     for isn’t there always a pretense, and a purchase of that pretense, and often a forgetting of the pretense and its purchase, for the sake of utility and ease?

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.

sadoos live

while the voices on the secular sadoo have recently and apparently been silent, while this blog itself may seem to have entered the spaces of the hidden, the global sadoo community is growing. seek evidence on the ether of language and silence.

in the meantime, make your vocation sadoo.

do not neglect inhumanism.

the plurality of mixters shall speak.