mystical landscapes

visiting toronto from mumbai recently, i treated myself to the mystical landscapes exhibit at the art gallery of ontario. aside from any specific surprises, disappointments or expected delights, some more general impressions:

canada’s troupe (including carr and the group of seven) plunge into god as well or better than most of the rest of that presented world

the extra-thick crowds around van gogh, while not unjustified (the represented starry night is powerful) and not as wholesale an absurdity as the gaggling routine camera competition around the louvre’s mona lisa, remind of something mostly to be forgotten

humans (and other animals) – while thick as art voyeurs on the exhibit floor – are almost entirely absent from the art. yes, we can say this emerges partially from the period – mostly a century ago, the selection process, in which a certain strain of artists struggled with the increasing potency and pervasiveness of a technocapitalistic society by withdrawing from its human and industrial faces. but it is not just this (and related factors)

the divine vision – almost however we define it, palpably elusive in definition though it must be – places the human alongside the myriad creatures, without ascendancy … and how then can it appear in greater proportion than the entirety of creation – almost [but not quite] nothing, an aspect among teeming aspects of the creator, oneness, the universe, thingness, irreducible and vast complexity, love (call it what you want)

starry night has, for example, some humans, blurred individuals, hardly individuals, forms of sorts really, in the foreground, but small, more like re-shaped stars … and those other stars (the original ones, our likely destiny), those popping out like thoughts in god’s universal mind are the backdrop and centerpiece of the drama, the settlements and affairs of earth like icharus rippling into the sea in auden’s poem or bruegel’s painting … a reality to be sure, but one like a shutter being closed or opened on some lane in a village beside drying laundry in dusty-sunny air, clouds working nonchalantly as they do on their important projects

and now? a century later? 6 billion more humans, the urbanized percentage having risen from 13 to 58%,12 cities with more than 1,000,000 humans leaping to over 400, technology our skin and consciousness, god in an unmarked grave, capitalism like nero in an rpg of rpgs, art a useless caboose, a used tampon, a credit limit of vision, a dream journal, a cosmic rosary, a desert song … now … where are the mystic landscapes and those who paint them? with the soul made of garbage rather than numinous emptiness, how shall we ascend descend migrate to the forbidden light?

around the time nietzsche went mad, georges-albert aurier wrote – and this quote is prominent in the ago’s exhibit –

we must become mystics again. mysticism is what we need today; only mysticism can save our society from brutalization, sensualism and utilitarianism. the noblest faculties of our soul are atrophying … we must react.

is this sentiment even translatable in 2016?

(the journalistic reports on the exhibit in the dailies suggest in their expected prose thudding lightly across pragmatic landscapes that mysticism isn’t for everyone – a little out of place really – but that they’re glad at least the results exist even if the origins seem somewhat off to the orthodox)

does the more contemporary reel-unreel short shot in kabul (on the ago’s 5^th floor presently) hold hints?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IuEM4w7Gbc

do the films on https://vimeo.com/videovectors ?

the paintings in http://bernardlegay.fr/ ?

the sounds on https://thenidus.bandcamp.com/ ?

the dancing dead, holding hands across the waking world?

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.

forgetting i

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

darkness iv

long have i stood at the doors of darkness, waiting for light to give me permission to enter, or even to push me through.  then one day i found myself – though i hadn’t moved – in darkness.  and i knew then that darkness roams, seeking, and if one wishes darkness all one has to do is wait.

darkness levels, equalizes, democratizes.  and so it is little wonder of the rarity of equality, the paucity of democracy, when darkness is equated with death.

darkness is doubt, and should doubt feel like death in this epoch of knowledge, isn’t this related in part to the ferocity and confidence of truth in its new linguistic clothes?

who hasn’t uttered upon noticing the preponderance of white on a page of text and yet it is the blackness that we read?

love, dissettled bird, sentimental sword, is of darkness and hides in light, and anyone who would love would first travel on this path of possessing and masking.

we have images of fire at the onset and demise of consciousness – at least that instilled to its present degree in humanity – as barriers of light between the darknesses of eternity and the darknesses of seeing, films of beginnings and endings hardly screened in the pitch of the universe’s vast and empty theatre.

i am a curious son of darkness, it has been said.  and – a curious son of light?  no.  a curious child is always of the seed of darkness.

i am necessarily indifferent to the sufferings of the world, unless they be prosthetics of my flesh.  should i confront this necessity with the only force capable of encountering it – hardly light – the prosthetics fall away and i become darkness, and my death is as indifferent as the world’s.

how beautiful is the nudity of darkness.  light clothes everything.

so darkness is the edenic dream, and light the fall into society’s bottomless analytic well.

darkness, rather than copulating with light, maintains a wardrobe of light’s fashions.  darkness copulates with nothing and light only with itself.

if darkness was once denial of flesh and is now flesh’s fulfillment, what is light’s trajectory?

everything interesting happens at night; day exists only as a place to tell night’s stories.

what is sex other than night seeking night through day, and failing.

there is always a darkness below (in, above, around) the opposition between light and darkness that is the same as light; the path to it though is a path of darkness.

when the nightmares of day are accomplished and i am permitted to return to my natural habitat of horizontality and darkness, i breathe with the breath of eternity, my true life of dreams commences, and the substances of hallucination are intravenously fed into the conglomerates of my flesh-soul.  time then is the joke it was meant to be, the ponderous politics of the human some rapidly dispelling flatulence, and money an annoying fly i just smacked on my face.

a human who inhabits darkness detaches itself from modes of production and there, away, becomes perpetually open to being created – form of formlessness and nothing manifesting but the open.

darkness is a human oriented with more or less equal measure to the languages that seem to emerge from within it and those that seem to confront it from without.  darkness could be said to be the confusion that results from a persistent uncertainty  about the source of the myriad languages.  does this darkness change, in some psychic alchemical sense perhaps, to light as one becomes comfortable with the confusion?  but if i become comfortable, am i listening, or has comfort become a dominant voice?  i remain in the doubt of myself – a doubt some might say is a dominance – and this is darkness.

darkness is the voices of form, its drought and flood.

i am in love with darkness.  the passages and shapes of light – its assertions – are to me dark’s rough categories, beckonings toward night.

darkness is the space that can be entered after use does not lose its use but rather takes its place in the domains of uselessness.

in darkness i work with whatever materials are at hand – weakness, wealth, poverty, power, betrayal, fragmentation, loyalty, unity – and darkness teaches me to be equally adept with all materials and tools, for the universe in its reaches knows no hierarchies – or rather, knows all hierarchies and knows that within this knowledge each subverts the other and is true to itself.  through the vastness of these truths, weakness and strength are equally powerful, impecuniousness and riches equally abundant.  darkness is democracy.

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.

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.

andre the giant and the strawberry

andre the giant and the strawberry

(the coloured version)

Andre the Giant punted down the Clem, Ms. Katonic in tow, trafficlight green chemise unruly, Winners’ briefs unsoiled, fluffy socks from mocked aunt in Devonshire, quite deceased.  

The Clem, since it was circular, and thus knew no destination, was a favourite spot for lovers who, loving love, knew no destination too.

Boys were known, being boys despite the second sex, to hide in bushes round the bend of the Nodens, and display penises through the prickles, to their own bemusement and lovers’ shame.

The sun that day seemed beyond itself, as if it had read the most esteemed literary and scientific descriptions of itself, and attained a new consciousness, affecting its reflections.

The mocked aunt was not from Devonshire but Bocking and was infamous in certain basement ecclesiastical circles for her fluffiness and how she somehow transmigrated it to her socks.

A renowned incident occurred some years prior, and was reported, involving a Lucia Haddlewich and a Milton Brubblewich and a sandwich and an ostrich and a pickle and a punt.

General Paint (a nickname) was the lead boy and had become accustomed to vulgarities, some say, due to a father who had used zucchinis for what God, if there were one, had not intended.

Continuing the speculation of a solar literatus, the sun’s favourite lines from our terrestrial ball about itself all had to deal with anthropomorphisms; it had to laugh, if it could, which it couldn’t.

Ms. Katonic hailed from Catatonia; her father was a sociopath, her mother a homeopath, she herself a taxi driver who’d met Andre through a poet in a backseat, rather squished.

Being round and flowing into itself, but not a moat, the Clem was a minor curiosity for fluviologists, who flocked to punt and wonder, though General Paint and his penises made many flee.

Sometimes though the boys would put out pickles to sub for penises, dressing them with alfalfa sprouts and little hats of cocktail umbrellas, and give them names, then eat them.

Beyond itself yet notwithstanding the sum of itself, the sun performed its duties without any lone or clump or crowd of clouds, meaning punters and penis boys were sunned and, being summer, warm.

They had not got it on much, the Giant and Ms. Katonic, in the backseat, initially, squished, due less to any chemical incompatibilities and more to a sort of caesura that came between them.

Haddlewich and Brubblewich spent a night in jail, the ostrich in a morgue, the sandwich in General Paint’s anus, the pickle in a punt in a bobby station, a bobby at the bottom of the Clem.

General Paint procured his penises from Margrit and Margrit got them from her cousin who got them from a Presbyterian who got them from an Oxford don.  He got his pickles from the store.

The sun that day rose higher than it usually did and saw with eyes more perspicaciously the randomness of humankind and stretched its fingers so it almost lit the bobby at the bottom still.

The other punters thought Ms. Katonic might be playing a game, the way we do, like water skiers but horizontal, like funalicious in the Clem, and Andre the Giant her gracious host and driver.

Circular rivers, wrote Dr. Slev D. William Blot-Hrag, in Fluviology Today for Fluvies (Fluviologists being taken), I propose are deltic aberrations of rhithronal stridulations. Little more.

Paint’s favourite had been the one who when she saw the penis (the extra large kind) pushed her man from the punt and punted frantically away, crashing on a little isle, impaling herself on rocks.

Consciousness, being preferred by humans as a human attribute (though defined by them in terms favouring such a preference), may not be solely or predominantly such a thing, thought the sun.

The sock mocked Bocking aunt was the mother’s sister and Ms. Katonic had met her only once, in Braintree, with spray paint on her hands, at a rave.  The socks started coming then.

There was a way (counterclockwise) to go round the Clem but those in the know would do the other way so that General Paint and his boys would focus on the others, drawing ire from the others.

The boys in the bushes with their penises and pickles weren’t against love, technically, in its romantic guise, but more for love, realistically, as a rupture in the flow of things.

What if I, the sun continued, did the same to them, and solarpomorphized the human, and said the human lacks my consciousness, which it does?

So was the perfect venue not that river, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience, for their exploits, love and boys and punters, a distributed collective quest under the rosy rolling sun?

Ms. Katonic and the Bocking sockist hadn’t hit it off in Braintree, but with the drugs and the blood and the Catatonia connection, who would?  The socks came anyway.

You’d think, of course, that the penis- and the pickle-flashers through the bushes would be nabbed by the bobbies and settled down, the way society’s supposed to do.

You’d think they’d get families and put penises in homes they’re made for and let the fucking lovers on the Clem do the googlies and the sippies and the touchies and round and round once more!

The socks came, though Ms. Katonic didn’t often, and she’d put them in a box or give them to Goodwill or feed them to her dog … but here, towed in the Clem, she wore them.

The Clem had a reputation naturally.  All things do.  General Paint was underplayed to newbies.  Locals went the other way.  Bobbies got paid off.  All things worked together the way they do.

Andre the Giant, despite his size, was gentle, while Ms. Katonic, despite her size, was not.  When they found each other on the channel ferry and shared a moment, she promised him some socks.

But what’s happening up there? With the sun?  Let’s ask it.  Well. The usual. Not much. Been reading a western. Doing a bit of thinking. The usual. Some anger management issues. Going down.

The aunt, after all, was not known for sizing, but fluffiness, so the socks for Ms. Katonic, in abstract surprisingly, fit Andre’s feet quite well, and Ms. Katonic got rid of socks, and Andre gained some.

We have one only, but there are many, and some have wondered whether they all think the same or, like us, if a certain inscrutability exists from star to star.

Science says, of course, that stars don’t think but science does, rocks don’t think but people do—thoughts worthy maybe of consideration.

The sun that day shone lightly on the punters who, except for Andre who required a special punt and was the talk, being large, interrupting more than the boys the quiet quests of love, only wanted love.

When the Bocking socker heard of her niece’s demise she didn’t weep (she was British) or think of travelling to the Clem to see the body but made more socks than ever, sending them to Andre.

The Clem was a circle as we’ve said, but the boys were stationed in the bushes round the bend of the Nodens, as that was most fortuitous for shocks and fleeing and various exchanges.

More rivers should be circular, argued Dr. Blot-Hrag, and engineers should get right on it:  dams and projects, federal funding, work and progress, now’s the future, begin it yesterday.

The Oxford don wasn’t always careful or consistent, nor was the Presbyterian nor the cousin nor Margrit nor the boys nor Ms. Katonic; who is?

The Clem rose slightly with Andre’s tears, for they were large and many, and he had never loved before, but now he had and she was dead and he was weeping and she was towed and she was dead.

The sun glanced at its continual descent—that slide of spherical proportions that slides eternally away from science—and said, It’s been a day. With me, it’s always been a day. Always is a day.

The boys were known, led by General Paint (that bastard), to drop the used penises in the letterboxes of the punters whom they considered, after voting, were most likely to succeed in love.

The Clem, since it is circular, and thus knows no destination, is a favourite spot for lovers who, loving love, know no destination too.

Andre the Giant is punting down the Clem, Ms. Katonic in tow, trafficlight green chemise unruly, Winners’ briefs unsoiled, fluffy socks from mocked aunt in Devonshire, quite deceased.

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

    little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

isn’t god the image of ourselves that we shatter upon, becoming not whole or healed but uncountable pieces of glass under an electric sun?

            we gather ourselves into transient unities through wisps of language, ineffable reflections of our fragmentation.

god is a word i use to describe the chasm in words, the chasm between desire and desire.

death stabs us.  This stabbing while we continue living i call god.

it isn’t so much god we miss in a secular age but the shadows truth once cast, protecting us from perpetual light.

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

            wouldn’t god, though, be a sanctuary for those with wings in a flat and gravity-bound world?

i once thought that god, grounded as it seemed to be in darkness, would spell the sacred word at the end of time.  But i saw in a dream that time, unlike humanity, is eternal and we are the sacred word which cannot spell itself.

little, said god one day under the bonsai tree it favoured, is born from tears and blood, even as little is born from their absence.

            and the bonsai tree withered upon god’s speaking these words and god was silent.

if god must pitch its tent in a poet for poetry to exist and god is dead, do we not write from a residence of death and a throne of dust?

            but hasn’t language always been dust’s tongue and poetry its bloody pen?

the golden irides of god are dimly visible in the smog of our souls, through the gutted monsters of our wounds.

            as we spot them (staring at what? surely not us! staring at staring itself?), a certain death is inevitable (who does not seek this death in the act of gutting? in slaying the hungry heads of those wounds?):  we cannot help but become the blurred reflection of those thousand eyes.
                        the endless deaths in life:  with each one added, life and death begin to resemble each other, like a dog and its human.  (but which is which?)  (with each addition of death, divisions are subtracted …)
                                    heresiarch ramarooroo said, from death’s perspective, all of life is a failure.  And i said, yes.  But isn’t it equally true that from death’s perspective, all of life is a success? (and doesn’t, ^now, ^{the golden flappy now}, ^{tolle’s cheap toll}, chuang tzu’s butterfly poke its pesky head over language’s cliffs, laughing like a banshee munching avocados on a teetertotter on a raft in the Pacific?)
                                                (and from life’s perspective [from those perspectives] what is life? might it be language precariously stuffed into human form? and when humanity ends there still may be life but …)

might god be the amorphousness in the eye of each word, making the hebrew scribes right:  the holy name cannot be written?  It would be english’s crassness—our requirement to express subtlety in syntactic convolutions, the directness we claim in our grammar, the mask of honesty we demand in our art and our love—to plunk the shapeless shape in a clunky one-syllable word, with a hint of its essence in the vowel at its hollow center.

              
isn’t my melancholy that art, like god or time, has no end, no goal, no definition, no f ^ac ^e … only a fluidity polluted (flowered?) with past ends?

one must speak of god (if one must speak of god) in ways that barely resemble ways that resemble.  (and who would be so mad to speak of god unless one must?)

although there are other claimants, we prefer the gods who crouch at the edges of thoroughfares, drooling a bit perhaps, though not infrequently from caprice, day-old french fries in a paper bag, sartorial holes worn comfortably, quarreling with death as if the quarrel were a lover, dreaming of a night of love to down the horny world, seeing themselves not as saviors or losers or members of the virtuous merchant class or artists (those usurpers!), not particularly seeing themselves, humming off-tune tunes, not having had a martini in seven weeks or bermuda … these gods of smells and dirty fingernails, those claimants no more true than others, yet more true through our preferring.

i use god in the way you use waffle or project or agent or fuck me—not in any final sense or sense existing outside of what presently is inside, but in the sense of picnics and candy floss and rhino poop.  God is simply the empty set of words that impossibly claims to hold the infinity of other empty sets.

the endless compelling compulsive exhausting irrevocable exuberant leaping need for the tongue to move in the mouth, celebrating sound, feeling itself wiggle, wiggling, wiggled, in that cavity buttressed by carnivorous teeth and salacious lips, madly, softly, sweetly, bleeding, reaching through the void for the clanging stars … this need … isn’t it god?
 
which is greater—language or god? heresiarch wollenmatova asked one woolly bedtime as gramma tucked her in to hums of bygone nights.  Language, gramma spontaneously answered.  No, god, she corrected herself.  No no, that’s incorrect, it’s surely language.  No, forgive me, it’s god.  Language—i remember, i got the answer wrong, it was #98—is it, i know now.  But … i can’t forget that moment in the backseat of the chevy … without a doubt, god is right.  And so it went until heresiarch wollenmatova fell asleep and gramma died from the exhaustion of indecision, sucked into the gyres of memory.
            and love? you (& paul & aldous) ask, from a perch of posited perennialism.  Love, said heresiarch munchawuffle, i have heard it said that love is but one of the trillion children spawned by language and god, wee hindu-ish divinities wobbling it out in the living dictionary of life.
                        love! said will burr-brrrrrr and his wiffles.  Love is a meme stuck on the forehead of my self-proclaimed integration and enlightenment, a plank in the eye of my transpersonal taxonomies.
                                    love, said the kamut flakes, is an emo orgy on a bed of blooming almond milk, the jets we fly to paradise.
                                                love, said sappho and sade, that salad of limbs and eyes …
                                                            love, said aristophabooble, that cloven sphere …
                                                                   love, said Love, as it may have always had, which makes it maybe just like us,—…:  dunno what i am.

god is every word in every past, present and future language.  Not just every word, but every object and concept that that word points to, every textual and oral discourse (thought and feeling) about that word, the object(s) and concept(s) it points to.  Not just these, but the end-to-end experiences of that word.  For example, god includes the word ‘potato,’ the object potato (in all its varieties and states), all words and concepts (ontological, scientific, theological etc.), thoughts and feelings about potatoes, and the actual lived experience of modifying, growing, marketing, selling, preparing, cooking, using, wasting potatoes in all possible circumstances, with all possible methods, in all possible states.  Until the human has entered into each word in all languages this way, entered until each word has collapsed under its own weight and become the night below all words, it does not know god.  This radical limit to knowing we might call the humility we resist in order to sidestep reality’s confinement, the humility we must resist in order to speak at all.

 
if god was absence before it died, does it not become after its death not amortized absence but the absence of absence, which is not presence (which would immediately destroy us) but something more problematic—the lack of lack, the silence of silence?
            god becomes the copy of itself—itself by definition itself copying (god bless you please, mr. benjamin)
                        in dying, god expands its infinity, takes on more of eternity.  God always gains through death.  We always lose.  But in god’s dyings (which are endless), we become more distant from our center, requiring more substances (things, noises, images, movements, orgasms, money) to bridge ourselves, attempting to compensate for god’s expanding infinities through prosthetic innovation, to which society must increasingly devote itself; this activity inevitably becoming the sacred (the task of compensating for the absence of absence:  the perpetual sacred).  [the three sacreds:  the above task of compensation, the task of detouring around the above task, the task of bridging compensating and detouring]
                                    it is humanity’s inefficient energy to transform the divine losses we are granted into processes we are compelled to call gains.
                                                isn’t this compulsion the cooperative task between heaven and earth, that old alliance (to refer to heraclitus) between delight and mud?
                                                            (daodejing xlii:  thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to …)

the body is the way that gets in the way

the body is the way and the body gets in the way

the body is the way that gets in the way of the body, in the body of the way

the body is the way of the body of the way

            heresiarch ramarooroo

 

god i take to be the inexplicable incommunicable infinite resource i draw from to attempt to describe the quantumly human (what feels at times like a siege of twinkies).

 
grey is the god of the city, who slips on its vomit in the back of taxis, who leaps before trains from a pedestal of pills, who rides elevators, prime past prime, until light itself snaps and the god forgets its names.
            grey is the god of the city, who has forgotten the energy of unconsummated desire, the fomenting pit of silence, who races up the steps of the future without faltering or looking back at the pillar of love.
                        grey is the god of the city, grey and pricked and sated and beautiful and doomed.
 
it has long been known that god is a failed alchemist and we its confused apprentices.

the urban streets are god’s neurons, its intersections its synapses.  We inhabit the divine cranium to explore our resilience in new environments, to explore new explorings, to trace circumferences on night’s unblinking canvas (the arctic, everest, the congo were nothing next to this critically acclaimed [and popular!!!] choreography of the unseen and seen!).  The visions of the Apocalypse are fulfilled, and we stumble along heaven’s alleys and boulevards (where the sun is no longer necessary! finally!), not (of course) according to anyone’s expectations, as is the nature of visions, wily to the squiggles in their vast and microscopic core.
            this mind incarnate we inhabit:

• our collective flesh turned inside out and hammered into shapes of certain dreams?
• the essence of a substance of a shadow ^{(dream’s definition?)} shoved through time’s leathery funnel, splatting architectures on the shaved and antiseptic earth?
• our lusty tongues, strung out on themselves, drooling patterns we barely understand, the woven spit of history?
• the imago of a race neither won nor lost and maybe hardly run?

 
doesn’t god wait for me in darkness, less like a lover, somewhat like a corpse, more like a word dropped into a bottomless desert well?
 
what drives us to god?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy and small-mindedness and the arrogance that pretends it’s not, the cruelty and aggressiveness at the heart of the good, the greed that disguises itself as cooperation and the cooperation that disguises itself as greed, …  what drives us away?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy …
            and of these other things:  tenderness, understanding, friendship, care, forgiveness … do they not drive us to the human … or, rather, do they not drive?
                        those who would call the driving evil or ignorant or otiose or tired but gladly accept its effects (planes, trains, automobiles, yoga, to name just a few) … what do we call them? might we call them unjust?
 
texting is a bridge from god to nothingness, from the nothingness of god to the nothingness of god … god, simply, was insufficient as a bridge (at least it learns on its śūnyatā designer couch!); we need aids:  two thousand years ago it gave us Christ the Word, now it gives us texting—the ultimate instant communion, oh bouncy host!
 
one doesn’t oppose society and god (other than in that particular way, the scrubless plain on which things legitimately confront one another in the joy and desolations of themselves), one doesn’t unite them either (other than in that other particular way, on the supersonic planes of the air show of ourselves).  But one can perhaps, in some geometric spinozean vertiginous calm, listen faintly to a dialogue between them, not without meaning not dissimilar to the feeling of glimpsing a silent mob under a night clear rural sky. 

haiku on the trans-siberian at three a.m.

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

like virginia, with her waves and rocks, i refuse to watch art kneel before psychology, vision before analysis, enthusiasm before pragmatism, spirit before money.  This refusal i could call god.
           (you call my divisions false, my refusal puerile, my methods dubious?  Do i not also?  [But what shall we call the calling?]  I appeal, in part, in the broken pitch, from the whispers of stone, to the uncarved block of the dao, lay my oily fingers on its surfaces, cling to muddled images of murkiness and turning back and vacancy and the ancestors of beginnings—the project of the unnaming of names, beyond death’s caress, life’s claws.)