death v

when i died first i don’t remember …

once one detects monism and begins dismantling it one experiences it everywhere (this splintered monism, this new secular religion:  the yahweh-christ in disguise – multipally:  as cyborg, victim, scholar, social media junkie, justice ngo guru, feminist, techno, eco-spiritualist, healer …), and cannot stop dismantling.  this process is death.  and then a one does not appear and this is not the one but one.

the root of the human is the inhuman and the process of entering this root to become human is what we call death.

to encounter the human by matching nature with nature – this is a death of which we speak.

just as there is no closure in love (regardless of its state and direction), so there is no closure in death.

death is only a simulation of emptiness.

death is the gap between desire and no-desire, these infinite gradations in which we live.

one of death is given to and rather than or, an and that includes many or’s, even as one authentically given to yes is one given to a yes of infinite no’s.

soft death, like art or bread, you do not forgive our clumsy love, our confused aloofness, our fated cruelty, you do not forgive.  you do not forget, for memory is hard and apportioned to life.

my life is established as a chair from which to watch my death unfold.  i do not waste it on side ventures, on frivolous things, on the pursuit of accumulations or to be watched.  i watch.

death, my true name which cannot be named

for, like death, it hides, in my brain

what i call consciousness, game

of chance and light – inane

but pointed, the same

as love’s blood’s stain?

all the same

the pain

…

the historic objects of mysticism – those perceptions that facilitated justification of death:  whatever linguistic-spiritual concatenation of god, holiness or purification, charity might have been involved – having now, along with objects (through their spectacular proliferation) died, place mysticism with no possibilities of human or self improvement, no sainthood of anything recognizable, no allegiances or alliances, no institutional affiliations however strained.  it arrives, empty, at time’s dirty threshold, still housed in horny flesh, still yearning, still hardly of this world, its not-knowing and suffering odd antidotes or absurdities to the edifices of knowledge and wellness, questioning, empty, objectless and aimless, subjectless, godless, dirty, looking, still looking, but with perception shattered, bereft even of bereftness, lacking any justification, perhaps in all this absence with opportunities to become more itself.

methods of exile and death in the technological age for those disinclined to participate in the dominant and present forms of life (liberally pervasive now across all sectors, from business to art to politics to humanitarianism to ecology to spirituality and psychology to education to law and justice to science and technology) include not only withdrawal from progress, monism, societal devouring, but also humanism and anthropocentrism.   the primary tenets of today’s religion, craftily having rebranded itself secular, are as monolithically and inquisitorially voracious, ruthless, intolerant, dogmatic, and enforced as the primary tenets of past religions, and so one who is non-conformist will likely experience death, but according to the forms of this religion, which finds blood distasteful and death impossible and martyrdom repugnant, and so exile and death and martyrdom are simulated, offset, emigrated from physicality to emotionality, from visibility to virtuality, and the one so disinclined (who refuses to climb) likewise uses simulated means to withdraw, to die.

geometrically, simulations of death can be negotiated as moving forward by turning back, mathematically as adding by subtracting, communicationally as speaking by using no words, politically as acting by not-acting, emotionally as loving by not-loving, existentially as living by dying.

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.

darkness iii

in the absence of visible darkness yet with its desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought the unseen light of god.  so the human disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our absent selves.

in the age of knowledge, with the human more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream, disintegration the hope.

only flesh in its darkest knowledge can rise to look light in the eye.

to love darkness is to avoid in its entirety the statement – let there be light (and consequently let there be …, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on voids, exhorting nothing.  this is no statement of fate, any more than let there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance.  this indivisibility is darkness.

to exist on the margins – but rather, no:  to exist in places those with money and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than language), and this outside given to a deeper darkness:  that of not knowing whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.

to see, it is said, requires light.  and yet can we not say that the blind-from-birth see, yet through language.  words are dark eyes.  language has the capacity to bypass light and see.  this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the world and the screams and resentments they plod on.

and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in relation to word.  so technology permits new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of creating.

i take the lights of society and weave them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of my flesh’s black thread.  how do i know this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead?  i take my lessons in the night, i read the texts of void.  madness becomes my lover and emptiness my friend.

mysticism, as its more visible sibling, society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is the present greater energy.

i am oriented to those without names in the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named – but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed.  i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.  we are the nomads of darkness.  should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.

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.

gott gedanken denken ii

mysticism is the process of attempting to enter the process of that of god which survives the deaths of gods, doing so by avoiding names.   it has no throne:  whether reason, passion, self, will, nothing.

i speak of god as god is the most impossible thing and if i should lose the ability to speak of impossible things i will lose the i and the ability to speak, which are one.

i and god are one in the way cabbage and god are one.  in this way i speak of god.

the negation of reality is humanity’s only positive and distinctive attribute and it achieves this to the extent it enters spaces of zero dimension:  god and art are two common names for this entering.  that the former was dominant in past time and the latter in present and future time registers in reality but not in its negation; in its negation god and art are the same.

certain existentialists and others who thought they were brave derided god as an escape, mysticism as weakness, sacrifice and passivity as shadows of authenticity; promoted the will, projects, societal struggle as the valid human enterprises.  and who could not say this sitting at certain angles?  but stretching the triangles and squares out to be spheres, who could not see escape as escape from convention, weakness as water, shadows as something to be praised.

that god is obviously unreal hardly prevents us from believing more (not more firmly, for that is an adverb of the real, but more spatially) – and yet with another belief – that god is not only the most real thing but the only real thing.  this possibility is hardly possible in the marketplace, the marketplaces of money and ideas, the unfirm that pretends not to be.

not suffering leads us to god, for suffering can equally lead us away, or anywhere; suffering is random in origin and direction – god leads us to god, and if money is said to be a wall between the seeker of god and god it is hardly because money is more a wall than society or art or love or even a wall or non-wall but as it is something and there must be nothing – not even suffering or non-walls – between.

the demons have left me and i am empty

while they inhabited this i they covered my disease

with their words, their carousings

now there is nothing

i am an empty monastery waiting for gods

to leave their lives and inhabit these

hapless infinite cells

i am average – the sum and average of all averages.  i cast rough planks on the mud of life to cross to the outhouses of god.  the planks are made of booze, sex, books, dreams – anything i can find that prevents me from sinking in the mud.  but i know god is the mud and i’ll never reach the outhouses, only finally sinking when no longer can i find.

to say that god is death is not untrue.  yet even if it were true, would we not now need god more than ever in time, death being now what it is – a nothing that is refused?

god cannot enter time but through shadow.  so the lover of god lives in shadow and the light of the city is a constant burden.  that god cannot is no reason to refuse our need.  that god cannot, that the city is a burden, are no reasons to assume our divinity, or anything resembling knowledge, to avoid the city or time.

we hardly ate of the tree of knowledge; this is history’s ruse.  our innocence is maintained.  and only the story we tell ourselves of our eating deceives us in disbelieving our innocence.

visions of god are not negated from asceticism but affirmed – god enters vision through unions of flesh and flesh’s absence.

it has always been the book that has saved me.  but saved me from what? and to what? that these questions are unanswerable in the i and yet i knows it has been saved - is this not dissimilar to god being dead and in its being dead made more alive?

god is not an escape from reality but a confrontation and subversion of it.  for there are those born into the human who test existence and rather than have the capability or desire to conform to it object to its order.  god is a name given to this objection and those who conform live in the creatings of that givenness.  weakness is a name given by the conformers to the non-conformers.  but weakness is everywhere, even as strength; it is rather that they are variously configured - and how are these varieties of configurating seen, but through god?

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.

April 22 - Saint Johann-Simone, Mystic and Martyr

In the black heart of God one finds no light.  The pious think otherwise, but the pious are acquainted with their wishes, not with God.  In the black heart of God, snakes abound; they feed on the excrement of human suffering and bury their knowledge away from mortal grasping.  The devout think otherwise, but the devout strive for fidelity, not God.  In the black heart of God, silence slaughters every truth that sprouts on earth.  The righteous think otherwise, but the righteous have never been to God.

Every century or so, God rips Himself¾on a sharp edge of history perhaps, or maybe on a rusty nail left over from the crucifixion.  When he does, one drop of black blood leaks out and falls to earth, and humans have a rare chance to see what God’s like.  Do they take it?  Of course not.  Humans excel at botching divinity, then running to join the ape kingdom as if that’s the only option left.

These leaks sometime take human form, though we’d never know it because we’re too busy hammering our reputations to the air, and if we have any remaining energy we use it to make fun of these freaks from outer space, then return to our lifelong pursuits with a beer in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

These forms don’t speak the languages we’re familiar with¾those from earth and Hell¾so we think they’re nuts, and if we don’t kill them, there’s no need to worry¾no one really pays them attention anyway.  Their words are like signals we think we see in the sky some night we’ve been drinking¾maybe they’re there, but who knows? who cares?

In their alien hunger they drown identity.  In their bleak souls names dissolve.  In their hideous autonomy they collapse gender.  In their passion for God a hole is dug for time and it’s thrown in, without even a stone to mark its passing.  Life and death are the same, as indifferent to them as an exploding star in a remote galaxy, noticed by no one.

Is God worried by all this?  Does he notice the scars that have formed across his body from all those rips?  Does he track these saints in a spreadsheet, on colorful graphs from three perspectives?  Is His blood gradually being depleted?  Maybe.  We’ll never know.

2:0 - Biography and Opening

Biography

Svoo—born John Smith—was an English aristocrat and Lord Spiritual who went mad when his wife died and wandered for seven years on the moors, munching on heather and mumbling to himself.  At the end of the seven years, he dictated 2:0 to Dominica, a golden plover, who transmitted the text to the Secular Sadoo.  We thank Svoo, Dominica, and the moors for their cooperation.

In a simple—some might say simplistic—and occasionally disarming way, Svoo examines the world of duality (2), nothingness (0), relation (:), and unity (1).  Written in brief, loosely connected vignettes, we’ll post sections on available improper days.

2:0

There is no definition of God.  There is only an experience of God.

Experience should not be understood as an experience from within me or an experience of something “out there.”  While the experience of God contains both, it is beyond both.

Experience should not be understood as feeling or using.  Feeling and using separate subject and object.  I feel love towards this person.  I use this person to gain information or pleasure, to reduce my loneliness.  The experience of God may include these things, but it is far more than these things.

We could also say knowledge instead of experience.  But it is not knowledge about something.  I do not know God if I can make a list of divine characteristics.  I do not know God if I have uncommunicable visions of God’s essence.  I do not know God if I have religious training or follow certain rituals.  All this, while it may be part of knowing God, is not knowing God.  If this is all that one knows about God, one only knows God as an object.

The New Shamanism

Not some network, some organization, principles formed of committee, a light and fluffy healing, as if we were running a marshmallow spa, not some ISO spirituality or social-scientific temperament quiz or hallucinogenic or pleasurable tent, but those pioneers of the modern techno-spirit, who disdain society to love it, have unalterably eternal and tumultuous and sometimes deadly affairs with art and whatever, who throw everything away with regularity and hard sorrow, who sleep on bleak beds, who believe madness is health and health is madness, who know everything is alive (subways, falafels, notebooks, dishwashing detergent, ideas) and dialogue with everything alive and know the voices of subways, who see the burning darkness at the center of things as you see your dentist, who don’t particularly distinguish between them and you, who care for money as you might care for a bedbug, who are genetically incapable of working in any manner you might normally call work and yet are equally genetically incapable of indolence in any manner you might normally call indolence, who are their own gods and yet know no gods yet know all gods, who fear nothing but mediocrity, who eat fear like chocolate chip cookies, who howl at anything if the mood is right and the mood is not unoften right, who drink whatever they must drink, who have strobes for hearts and hearts for eyes and eyes for strobes, who know there are two kinds of laws, two kinds of education, and two kinds of love and in the second myriad kinds and in the first only one, and there is a law the masses and their masters build around them like a suburb and one the others use to traverse the wasteland of themselves, who might be anything, who conjure curses as you might make fast food appear and think both more and less of it than you, who must obey silence, those of legion and maybe spinach, of that horrible and only true certitude at the center of doubt, of ice and zen, dice and then, shapes in dark skies, vision in sewers, desire in death, sweetness in betrayal, of the this is that before the this is that, who does not know the difference between a cat and a court, who eructates on demand… no no no no no no:  not some new nude new age lickspittle nor some unctuous psychobabbler with a Fulsome Scholarship nor some mummified academic nor some lobotomized lobotomizer nor some one-track vegan anarchist but those …

Is it progress, really, that we have eradicated the one who sits in its situation—temporally atemporal, gnostically agnostic, sanely insane, in a mudhut or mudpenthouse, to whom the schlock and wealthy go with their whatevers, and—put in its place possibly—tweets and genomes?  I—or my god, apparently—am hardly one to throw out genomes, but we both—we’re one on this, it seems—think, like Freddy Mercury[1], why can’t we have it all:  tweets and shamans?  Why must we be so tiny as to think darkness is ever dead, that we’ve slain it with something as wimpy as electricity? Where did electricity come from, Chimps?  Darkness.  And its infinite eyes of fire streaming from the hydrants.

The New Shamanism is not some institution, some professional association, some list of accreditations, some piety or anything growing from a natural tradition (herbs and wails and totems), but a twisted metal hybrid, a construction dump, still perhaps without a name, manufactured—not begotten—in the data center of the urban present (the best name may not be shamanism but some other bastard name—something capricious, bold, obnoxious, heretical, necessary … something ecstatic, sad and true and new too, too new …), … and its practitioners …

… whose eyes verb and never noun, whose bodies roam the grave and who never leave the grave, who build bridges from the pain of themselves between madness and society, who spell dervish any way they want, who are snakes to snakes and lemmings to lemmings and ducks to ducks and for this divine flexibility they are sometimes shammed!, for the new shaman is a new Noah’s Ark bouncing on the flood of the global psyche—Noah! his wife! his drunken daughters! the sinful memories! all the crazy animals mating like there’s no yesterday! the boat itself! the rain! the stupid hope! rainbows! that bossy god! the whole fucking hopeless soggy mess—, who has forgotten the taste for land, this voyage out, through the unknown, the sky and sea black as your mortgage, our hearts drowning in the abyss, drinking poison as if it were mango juice from deliquescent tits, some oracle to oracles yet always somehow oracled, who really don’t see the difference between a mushroom and a caterpillar, made half of maggots, half of pomegranate dreams, and half of other things:

we are the new shamans and yes we’re stealing because that’s what good ideas are for and we’re stealing everything we like from everybody and everything but it’s not ours just like it wasn’t theirs just like it’s not yours because the earth’s the earth and factories are factories and these are what we’re made of and, like them, a shaman is whatever I want it to be:  warped, garbled, incompetent, corrupt, possessed, ennui’d, pure, curious, rigorous, amoral, contradictory, impossible, a little screw in a dirty cubicle, virtuous, productive, ecstatic as the stars, rarely clear, a liar in a lair some say, a miasma of melancholy, whimsical, indolent, a little granola with your tea? a schlump, an imposter, a thorny horny corny whiny porny wornout sage, a barometer of nothing and a stroll down Madison what is it? yeah yeah you’re one too and so am I and so’s my god amen.

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[1] ([{Who are some modern shamans?  You want names, you who love to acquire names, who stack them like money, thinking this will give good account of your souls?  I’ll give you names.  Artaud, Weil, Nietzsche, Whitman, Bozulich, Baudelaire, a poet or inmate here and there (no shaman will call itself a shaman), all nameless naming ones, of the cry in the dishwasher, of titillating night}])

The Nature of My God

My god is virtual.  As virtual as a website, digital time, playlists and participles, nightmares, Blairism, gamma rays, memories, smog, desire, sublimation, and you.  My god is virtual not because it cannot deposition but because it will not; it is my god for its refusal to condense and freeze, instead allowing solids to be solids, infusing them with itself under conditions that still remain—despite our reputed advances—largely inexplicable.  If my god were a solid—or even all solids in sum—it would not be a god but simply a dump of solids.  And my god is no dump but a fart.

My god is a fart and lives no longer than a fart.  It smells like a fart, is as unpredictable as a fart, dissipates and eternally recurs like a fart, and is as joyous and iconoclastic as a fart.  My god rhymes with heart and art but does not rhyme with news or business or money or marriage or time.

If it offends you that my god is a fart—maybe even the sum of all farts—we (my god and I) might very well politely suggest that you leave the room and visit your local museum, perhaps renting those special guided-audio-tour headphones and muttering, in that particular way, hmm-hmmm from time to time.

Being the sum of all farts, my god everywhere always exists—in potentia, in formaldia, in speedia, in purposia—and this is what theologians mean when they refer to the omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternal nature of God.  But my god is slipperier than the theologians’ cheap and easy god.  I dare the tome-laden smirkless god (or no-god) of Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Tillich and Van Buren to meet my god (or no-god) on Mount Caramel in a cow-lighting competition.  Oh … my giggly farty god would win.

You might say, if you wish to use the old language, that my god is spirit, but any competent philologist knows that spirit is booze and spirit is wind and spirit has 33 entries in the OED.  The Internet is spirit and the Internet grew from spirit and spawns spirit, but spirit­—in the corporation of words—is a major global subsidiary reporting to the Fart Division.  That my corporation has no CEO, that its divisions have no stable leaders, that my god is but one element of one division in it … shouldn’t surprise you.  Farts are tricky.  This, at least, you know.

But we don’t wish to use the old language, do we?  My god doesn’t want to use it, I don’t want to use it, and you don’t want to use it unless you’re a schmockity-schmuck.  We all—all three of us:  I, my god, and you (which covers all the bases, truly)—can use it if we want to, but we don’t often want to, do we, being, as we are, members of the nouveau flatia of language, leaving the ossuariacical functions to the zombies who comprise society?

My god is a servant of language and language is a servant of flatulence and flatulence is a servant of my god and if you accuse me of circularity, I say to you—my god is a circle or maybe my god is an egg or a cloud or a game, who, being in the form of farts, doesn’t think it’s unjustified to become a fart which, seeming to be of no reputation, no name, little duration, being found in the fashion of the mammal, exalts itself, and puffs itself up like a puffin, and gives itself an aim which is above every aim, that at the aim of itself, presidents should bow and starlets should swoon and every lung confess that my god is my god, until the last star melts and the last bear pirouettes.

To speak of the nature of fart may seem to some to be unnatural.  To break wind with my god, to divine with my wind, may seem to some to break faith with faith.  To shift the paradigm from lip to sphincter, from word to turd, from art to fart, from ego to eggo, from Jeez to cheese, from God to bod, may seem to some a transmogrification not worthy of somber traditional theological pursuits.  To take the faux pas and elevate it to the true dance may seem to some gauche.  To transform the transgression, the mutation, the offense, into sacrament, aesthetics, relief, may seem to some uncalled for.  But a call is a call and one who misses the call an ox and a moron but one who catches it an oxymoron and a pleonasm and a retronym.  My god doesn’t care and this is why it is my god.

My god rises above the petty concerns of pants and skirts, de-naturing nature, de-divining the divine, de-deing de-.

Discussing nature in an age (in an egg?) when nature no longer exists is to align ourselves with the nature (with the fowl?) of our god, which exists in an egg when chickens no longer exist.  This is why my god is born in and lives in and dies in air—the media of pantheons and progress and nothing.

Have you not smelled?  Have you not heard?  How you dream of the hard human harrowing, that underwear descent, sweet sonatas of the golden ass, the nanogod?  How you dream, when you dream, of all society isn’t, all your life and life has not become? 

The only ground is dream, my god my only dream.  My god turns farts to dreams and dreams to farts and this is why it is my god.

That the one who loves my god doesn’t distinguish between the breaking of bread and the breaking of reality is an argument for, for the discerning, my god.  The flatulogical argument.  (Ontology, like God, is dead.)

Does my god have a nature if its only nature is gas, vague electrons streaming from the universe’s silent bulgy buttocks?  What nature is this that has been denaturized?  What god is this that has been degodded?  It is my god and I see it as plainly as I see the night.

Pronouns

Those of us accustomed to the troubled and interminably lengthy history of pronouns (and what a dysfunctional family it is!) are frequently inclined to say, Well, you know, Aunt You, she bakes a mean banana-pecan-chocolate chip muffin but I wouldn’t trust her with a loonie or Yeah, my sister, Me, we got along great when we were in grade school but now that we’re grown up, there’s not really much to talk about or Their, my pa, he’s a fucking bastard.  The point is, whether human or divine, sentient or insentient, subjective or objective or suprajective, they’re slippery.  Maybe not as slippery as prepositions, but maybe more so, for pronouns proposition and it may be this propositioning that makes them incestuous magicians and slimy doppelgangers.

Now the theological or semiotic pedant (and are not all pedants semioticians these days?) plays kindergarten games, ignorantly, without panache, calling them instead scholarship or progress.  They say things like, It is wrong that God was male; she shall be female or male or female or male and female or some new third or greater sex or gender—(an aubergine, perhaps)—or none at all—and this is that and all is good except what isn’t … or … the male (sniffles please) is nothing other than one which, maling, maled, males … or … I am Dr. Ubergrrrrr and I rhetoricize that That which once was called “Pronoun” I resemioticize “Laynoun and Unternoun and Unterlay (applause).”

But I say they are not wrong but neither are they sufficient and god is god and every pronoun and none at all and not just pronouns but every part of speech and every part of part and something outside of grammar and that and that and you.

I have been using it to refer to my god.  Those who eat unsweetened almond butter will have noticed this.  They will have noticed this and this’s relationship to which and even other things, depending on the jam they use.  And what cogitations has this wrung from those sensitive among you—you who are sensitive about your jams?  What must I have meant by it?  Is my god impersonal?  Is it a machine?  Is the it a necessary consequence of my god being technological?  Is it a rebellion against the or a he or (or and) she?

You cogitate too much.  So do I but my god doesn’t and I try to stuff my I into my god since my god is in my eye, like a beam, and your god is in your brain, like a safety deposit box or a pacemaker or dental floss or the envy of some other god or another god’s I or a papal bullfight or disposable batteries or a Rottweiler Mercedes Benz S&M movie or a Paris Hilton tweet or a goodenough marriage or a hotel gangbang frat party or a bout of doubt trout gout or a list that can’t stop itself or a swoon

I call it my god, but is it my god?  Use any pronoun, if you will; use yonder or such or themselves.  Use any god sub also; use Glompf or Carrot or Ooof.  Call them yonder Glompf.  I call it such Carrot.  Themselves gadget Ooof.  I’m not picky.  Nor’s my god.  If it were, it wouldn’t be my god.

You’re welcome to ossify your pronouns; but pronouns themselves, like my god yourselves, are gas.

My god, who turns preposition and frat to Fart and Fart, that old old legal firm of unfirm reputation.

My god, in fact, last time I asked it, loved being an it.  My god, I said, blowing smoke into its non-existent face, will you munch and molt if I continue calling you an it?

I, it said, It is the new I.

Which makes the story difficult to continue.

My god graduated from Pronoun School millennia ago.  It’s you who haven’t even applied yet, still thinking pronouns are solid things, like toast.  Whatever works, says It.  You’re flexible, I—or It—replies.

So maybe my god’s yours, yours is mine, theirs ours, his hers, one another nobody’s, everyone’s why’s, and some’s anysuch’s.

I don’t know.  I just have to talk about my god and the language less important than the talking and the talking less important than the experience and the experience less important than my god.

(One little side benefit of my god is that you don’t have to worry about the distinction between whoever and whomever anymore:  my god’s at both ends:  a little pushmi-pullyu case.)

We could of course do what I overheard an American at Versailles once say to his wife about languages—Honey (they were dressed in that standard American tourist way, as if they had fashion, pining after Floridian cafeteria chains), I don’t know why the government doesn’t just get on it and get there to be just one language —… and just get there just to be just one just pronoun.  My god would be amused, particularly if we made it the same as its name (ooof Ooof e.g.); we all know it would be the humans who would object.  (Humans get very attached to their pronouns; but my god is very attached to me.)

My god loves being called it.  My god loves repeating itself.  My god is not IamIam, like some Attic poetry or confused sweet potato, but, if anything, itit.  Or itititititititititit, but around in a circle, with the letters in apocalyptic white, the center in virgin black—my god’s shape and logo.

If my god is a pronoun, what is its antecedent?  Nothing? Itself? Me? Somebody?  I don’t know … go ask your god.  Is my the pronoun of my god?  Is it it?  The pronoun of my god is god.

And if this or my or my god’s meditation on pronouns and its or their pronouns is fragmented, there’s a point to it, which may be it is I or may be not, which we believe to be more of a point than the point those pedants make because our point points whereas theirs just clunks and pointing, as they knew, is what gods are all about

A Recreation of God

Gretchenetta von de Hatten is an inmate in the House for Psychotic Mystics, founded in the 11^th century by a Spanish cardinal after being excommunicated by Pope Sylvester III and presently believed to be located in a Los Angeles suburb.  The Secular Sadoo thanks Gretchenetta for releasing the introduction and first nine vignettes of her new collection, A Recreation of God; she intends to release future vignettes, also in blocks of nine, according to proclivities not entirely understood by anyone.  Ms. von de Hatten’s distinctive post-theological and post-psychological approach may very well be a first step toward discussing a blueprint for possibly building a tentative bridge between theology and psychology.  Or, in other terms, to articulate brahman-atman from within the traditions and languages of the West.  She anticipates having 81 vignettes and 81 introductions; numerologists will also find it significant that each of von de Hatten’s vignettes contains, according to Word, 1027 words.

Introduction

Roughly, in 1883 or so, God died.  The basic obituarial facts are well known and have been painstakingly analyzed:  He had to die, He was a He, He was capitalized, and we killed Him.  (Whether the twentieth century was us putting ourselves on trial for his death is still, some might say, open to interpretation.)

Or, at least, in 1883 God had died to such an extent that a lonely man in Turin could say that God had died.  Which is to say, in other words, that the word God had died and, seemingly conversely and perhaps to an equal extent, that the god Word had died.

I wish to recreate god.  Since it is my desire that wills this—or, as certain dreams and visions seem to suggest, some inchoate embryo that seeds my desire—I experience this not only as a new creation of god (thus cyclically furthering the divine) but, as the name suggests, a caprice.  God is play and I who creates god creates in play.

The stridency and blood and ecstasy of death are tired.  The fulminations and lies of copulation are done.  Technology permits a birth that, while hardly painless, is, by historical comparison, quite straightforward and risk-free.  The pain is understood, rehearsed, and incorporated; it is not something alien and surprising, but accounted for and even not unpleasantly anticipated, not through some autonomous masochism but rather through a radical, dark-light acceptance of the corpulence and reaches of life.  If this is a primary function of technology—to allow new gods to be born without the Sturm und Drang, the medieval barbarisms, typically associated with the divine—we should accept and explore this function, even as we accept and explore urls and iPads.  (That our understanding of the spiritual functions of technology is still in its infancy should not particularly surprise us; technology’s physical functions have been sufficiently manifold, rapid, and ubiquitous so as to bury us in their whirring glories.  Who would see and hear through their loud excitements to the barely articulate voices wormed through the roots of all things?)

I do not wish to resurrect some dead god.  The Elohim or Krishna wandering along Fifth Avenue, reeking seaweed dangling from their nostrils, rusty poisoned barbs jutting shamelessly from their aching cocks … how macabre! how gauche!  Likewise, I hardly am so inexperienced in the wiles of the divine as to expect that I can create something utterly unlike that which has preceded me.  Humans are humans and if we evolve we do so slowly.  So with maple trees and jurisprudence and etiquette and spinach.  So also with the forms and circumference of the divine.

Where this divine resides is relevant only to pedants.  That I use the word divine in an age of immanence and horizontality is offensive only to the unimaginative and inexperienced.  If you are so incarcerated that you associate divine with daddy or superego or something the Russians couldn’t find … well … that’s your regression.

It is not a new Adam I seek, but a new Yahweh, a new Buddha, a new Brahman, a new Tao, a new Allah, a new Christ.  One that is as unlike the originals—if originals they in fact are—as I am to whatever wandered in Eden at consciousness’ cusp.  I name this new thing god from convenience, from convention, from caprice.

From convenience, for any new word (what should it be … Glompf? Histamana? Ooof?) or borrowed existing one (Carrot? Jezebel? Garburator?) would inevitably be ridiculous; from convention, to acknowledge the beauty of the past and the strange continuities of all things, continuities that surpass death; from caprice, to equally acknowledge my necessary love of destroying that beauty, not from a love of destruction itself—which is tedious and infantile—but from an immersion in existence and its consequent demands.  This new god is transsexed, living (though perpetually being born), lower-cased, and mine:  the farting wide-eyed child of now, who eats religion for breakfast, scats yoga, and has no need to distinguish between building towers and destroying them, for towers are words and words are gas and gas is what this god’s about.  This smelly greasy glabrous god.  My god.

My god is not a god of nature—as the old gods were—but a god of technology.  As, in the true and verdant days of the old religions, spirit, tree, bark, leaf, and canoe were inseparable, so my god is indivisible from sidewalks, twisted dumpheap wires, deduplication DASD, and brain pacemakers.  I listen for its voice in subways, I wait for revelation in abandoned gas stations.  My gadget god.

I have no more desire to convince you of the reality of the god I am recreating than I do of the reality that I had a bath last night.  Who cares if you believe I had a bath last night?  Does my telling you about my baby god change anything?  I simply write down what I’m doing—the experience of what I’m doing, the experience of recreating god—in the manner of a child blowing bubbles.  Anyone who wishes may attempt to nail those bubbles on a wall, throw them at the heads of others or their own, stack them to form some edifice, sell them online or in Greenwich, eat them daily as a bedtime snack, or leave them to their fragile fates.  Whatever.  I wish to recreate god and I shall do it according to the murky proclivities that seem to circumscribe my life because it’s my god and this is what I’m born to do.  Psychology, irony, be damned.

Notes on Method

I don’t have a method.  Method is for dead gods and scholars and programmers and people who don’t have very many interesting things to do.  Methods may arise in the process of recreation, as it is difficult and not necessarily even desirable to entirely suppress them; however, if they do, I shall do my best to kill them or turn them into toads.

Notes on Principles, Definitions, Axioms, Lemmas, Propositions, Proofs, and Corollaries

I acknowledge their existence, as I acknowledge the existence of bathtubs, beer, and masturbation.