tokamak symplegma

always having suspected that i was one of those of the missing and having found myself solidly halfway through life and still not missing and not wanting to miss my fate – at least not absolutely – i began migrating down a path of simulating being one of the missing and i would like to write about this migration but haven’t yet found the right language and so all the writing i’ve done is a kind of attempt to write about wanting to write about it

we decreate our way to ungreatness – to paraphrase a fortune 100 executive who paraphrased a management guru who no doubt paraphrased someone else. in my case this means learning the obscure arts of babbling, acedia, hallucination, and a calm franticness (which is not as much a contradiction as you might think) … not as anything to fear or scorn but as a lifestyle as legitimate as the rich and famous, the common bourgeois, or the common activist

the discipline of this learning is i admit a peculiar study and practice. to learn to experience these typically shunned arts as normal, good, desirable, even progressive requires a complex rewiring of the brain that no therapeutic advocacy or pharmaceutical aid could accomplish, as these aids and advocacies are most frequently designed to happyize (how else do we describe our novel culture of Smile except to conjure a verb from an almost enforced obsession?) active willing participation in the production of names … which is the religious orthodoxy of the day : the requirement to be seen. that is, to not be missing

a side benefit of this discipline is that it introduces (or reintroduces for those who believe in some sort of original face, core identity or soul – the language is less important than the orientation) us to some externally-contextually unreachable timespace of our i (our plurality or pluralities of i) … those languages and mores our interiority would find naturally compelling were they to exist in externality … where we would find our true place, that spiritual-physical home of dream and desire where, as some greek philosopher prayed, the inner and outer would be one

unfortunately these sorts of practices can’t be taught – even speaking about them in the way i’m doing lends itself to interdisciplinary quackery. every instance we see of these principles and movements being systemized and communicated for emulation (regardless of how sophisticated or earnest any student or teacher might be) the enterprise quickly turns into a parody of itself and the rationalists are right to shamelessly mock. for the time being and perhaps always we strange pupils resort to actualizing only in aspects of desolation, incommunicability … those spaces between the interior and exterior realms that reach for both but never touch either

mystilogue

travelling is from one perspective a cheap mysticism - a way to insignificize self, one's birth culture and hence the assumptions and notions separating i and world from void, to equalize at least the human world and possibly the myriad worlds within world. cheap because it uses money to achieve its mysticism and an apparently authentic mysticism uses flesh (but what else?). but travelling - and this only works if one travels cheaply (economy class, lowcost accommodation ...) - disintegrates time, despaces space, caresses death, places one in that vast irrelevance of god

mysticism is our only available known mechanism - though it is as much a dearchitecting (deverbing, deminding) as anything biologically molecular - for subverting (mocking, bypassing, ignoring - we detour around words like combating, destroying, even protesting, evolving) the brutalisms of human sociopolitical structures and processes. mysticism exists outside, in part by virtue of its inveterate insideness : its status (though this diction must be ironic) as the consummate inside. it finds the trap door of in (mysticism if full of anything is full of traps) - or perhaps rather just the trap (there is no door, only void) and so not opens it but falls in (from in to in) - and there (through this through) finds out. as human sociopolitical processes and structures are devoted to entirely incompatible methods (and consequently lifestyles, languages) of achieving out (and in fact mysticism doesn't achieve out [or seek it], it finds itself accidentally, inexplicably out in a thoroughly different way than any ambition, quest), it remains a question to what extent these outs aren't the same out - as (perhaps to a large extent) how we get to a place fundamentally, qualitatively alters place

so we cultivate mysticism - these ins and fallings - as a hard hope, the only alternative we see (which we see through not seeing). cultivate? yes. no. we fall. farmers of fallings, pilgrims of traps, pariahs of voids. we labour in uninvented calendars. we do nothing, our ins our outs, those traps our homes, other outs unworthy deaths

so travelling's another mechanism in the workshop of the impure mystic (the only form remaining in a cluttered universe?) to rein outs, reout ins, to fall and fall