knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders i

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mysticism iv

the innocence of mysticism is what rouses scorn.  yet is it not in this very innocence that the question of humanity is raised, and the new brought to bear?  and is it not before this very innocence that the arrogance of knowledge falters, swoons?

the relation of mysticism and truth totters, like all relations, at an unspoken fulcrum in night’s ill-visited playground.  and yet, outside of that playground, away from the oscillations of darkness, we might say in certain moods that this relation is bound in a manner not dissimilar to the bindings of the womb.

since mysticism is the discipline that cannot be taught, the practice that cannot be shown, the learning that is an unlearning, the play that is never staged, of what use is it?  but that is the question it doesn’t care to ask.

mysticism does not destroy time and space – for what could destroy them? – but rearranges them according to principles hardly cognitive.  this hardly cognitive is something that is set before the world’s beginnings, questioned at the center of the world’s spinnings, and loosed past the world’s endings.

the distance between mysticism and nothing might, in a mathematics not yet invented, in a geometry still imprisoned in dream, be precisely the distance between good and evil, between yes and no.

when i speak, this i made more an i by being less, language is less a function or spawn of meaning, more a film on a window during rain.

the doubt of whether, when dreaming of being a butterfly, i am a human dreaming of being a butterfly, or, when appearing as a human, i’m a butterfly dreaming of being a human, if discredited by science or common skepticism, does not negate the spaces the doubt is trying to reach – spaces that may be alongside or even in the spaces that discredit, for these spaces themselves are spaces of negation and strewn through them holes to playful empathies, perhaps a necessary condition of constructive evolution.

if all this is only sophistry, language games, an avoidance of anything that’s truly life, i, who have known the conditions of those who know such things, would simply hold conditional reflection before them, this glass of nature, this laboratory of time and the human but some broken vials in it.

mysticism might be a way of sensing time not from the present but all presents, history melted butter, the human earth just another sphere.

mysticism, as a particular brand of hallucinatory existence, might be considered the formless form of the physics of hallucination.

mysticism is a means of interrogating nature, while having forgotten words and will.

we have said before that mysticism is the ratio 2:0, where 2 is the experience of the sensuous world, 0 the experience of emptiness, and : the experience of the relation between.

how does the continuously emerging technological global complex affect mysticism?  as an invasive species might affect a fog.

that what is sometimes called nihilism can be viewed as a negative form of mysticism (a negative form of a negative way) opens portals of the relations of time and myth, but barely.  the explorer of relations might use contortionist means to squeeze through narrow passages of language, entering what might be called a funhouse of negation, glimpsing flows of politics, psychology, and art as through an instrument made for alternative analyses.

the classic formula of mysticism – this is that – an equation at the root of art and knowledge, contains within it this is not that, this is this, that is that, that is not that, and this is not this.  without these inclusions, the formula is wholly empty.

if there is curriculum for the mystic, it might be to travel through these inclusions to the formula and through these travels know the formula not as formula but flesh.

i read the distant scrimmages of humans, i scan the daily blood.  the advances in knowledge and speed appear like cats.  the screaming significance of the living is muted by the eyes of the dead.  and the human seems to me less a newspaper than a cloud, more a river than a god.

i am led through the city by threads of energy spun from the grave’s slow looms.  the living blow around me like dust, their voices like bones clanking in the wind.  i am led, and there is no destination but to be a weaver too, to lead some who speak in analytic tongues, briefly, through the dust.  all is energy and dust and a strange weaving.

returning to returning

The sun, we say, returns to the sky (though it is always in the sky).  The moon, we say, is full tonight (though it is always full).  Can we not say in the same way that we are always there, still and pyretic, in the void, always full – and that we speak of returning and newness as a result of the confusion of bodies, ideas, events, passions, orbiting around us?

       Returning is a word we use for the perception of motion.

One could say, as some sages, that we all return to the desert.  But isn’t this to privilege the desert?  And isn’t it to set aside our immobility, the desert’s crawl and reach? – the desert moves farther, faster than we do; we only excel at the appearance of movement … the desert returns to us.

What feels like the farthest distance from our origin may be the moment when we have returned.

The tourist returns, but has to move to return – the tourist forever visits Returning, is a resident alien in the no-place, Returning; the natural citizen of Returning does not have to move to return, for returning is its home.

       The tourist in fact has to move to re-image rememberings of returnings, to simulate the no-place of returning through an onslaught of physicality and images.  The function of technology, it could be said, is to aid the increasingly vast industry of tourists to Returning.

       Transportation technologies – to move to returnings

       Image and sound technologies – to (re)capture the movement

       Communication technologies – to narrate the movement and the capturing

In these conglomerations, society loudly assures itself that the simulation of home is home, that tourism is citizenry, and that moving is returning.

Isn’t returning less flying home after visiting another continent, more—after having thought about visiting another continent—staying home?

To return before one has to return –

       Is this less of a returning?

I have returned, said the businesswoman to her partner as she entered the condo they shared.

       I see that, her partner said.

I have been on a long journey and discovered myself and lost myself and become nothing and become everything and here i am, back.

       But you just went to the store to get eggs, her partner said.

The two are not mutually exclusive, the businesswoman replied.

       And the two went their separate ways soon after, for they had not journeyed together, nor had the returning been shared.

To return perhaps is to build a bridge of nothing between the void of i and the void of world and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and not move.

       But would we not rather say that the walking to the midpoint is the turning and the not-movings the returnings?

I returned your book, a friend says.

       But, surely, having gone on a journey, the book is new.

If you have been on a journey and have come home early and a friend calls and says, Oh, have you returned?

       And you respond, I’m unsure.

       Your response will be seen as a little joke, a nod to memory and movement and dislocation.

But, truly, it is the only serious response.

We say, We are returning from a trip on the journey back.

       But we do not say on the way there that we are turning toward a trip.

We think of return as a returning to home or ground … but – if there is no home or ground – no return.

If we had to choose a space to return to, or a time, which would we choose?

       A space, for only it could be in the future.

We may think that returning is a mapped act and the act of reaching the point of returning unmapped, but this is only a feeling at the point of returning.  Once we embark on returning we realize there is no map and never has been.  There was a point we sought, the point at which we turned back or felt we turned back, but our returning is less a seeking than a negating of seeking, a negating of returning, a negating of maps.  We might say disturn instead of return, except for return’s necessary euphemistic function.

I picture a return journey as a line with an arrow pointing inward on each end, or a circle, with my point of departure and return at, say, 0°.  Perhaps a serpentine line, a labyrinth.  But the shape of my picture may be less important than the composition or texture of its shape.  If the shape is made of iron, the journey will firmly be a circle or a serpent; if a string, throw it in the air – a new shape (the journey renewed, reshapen, returned).  If strings, many shapes; if water, the journey reforms itself continuously.  If gas, the journey is everywhere, diffused, like a volcanic eruption affecting the weather in another hemisphere generations later.

       Returning is a shape that has no shape.

We say we return to death from death through life (or, in certain spiritual orientations, to life from life through death) but can the i—of which they are comprised, like structures and quarks—once returned to itself, be said to return to death or life?  i returns to i through i.  life and death are just roadside concession stands.

You are lost.

       But you are lost to your lostness.

Who has returned?

Why don’t you return to your homeland? asked her friend.

       Because i am a different i than when i left, and what was home will no longer be home, and the land is always shifting.  There is no return.

Your home is now here?

       I live here, and i say for convenience, This is my home, but if there is no returning there is only exile; exile is my home.

What does it mean to have no-home as home?

       It is the same as having no-place as place and no-time as time and no-god as god and no-love as love.

How can this be?  Only love is love and god is god and time is time.

       This is not what the heresiarchs have said; the heresiarchs in art and thinking and spirit and number and shape all agree.

The heresiarchs make no sense.

       Then no-sense is sense, for my feeling of exile is more real than my feeling of sense or home or place or time or god or love.

This doesn’t sound like living, but dying.

       But this utopia—this no-place—has been humanity’s dream ever since it began the project of the city; if we have been focusing on dystopias recently, hasn’t it been because we sentimentalized no-place, even as we sentimentalize almost everything?  But our dream is a fate and a passion, and all fates and passions involve dying in order to live.  Exile is the human home and, regardless of the names we give it, we seek it with our lives.

I have what i call memories of what i think are returnings.  But to return to these memories – am i now not caught in a travelogue of impossible directions?

What does the football fan seek in the return to his couch and beer, in the return of the season?  Is he not like Odysseus returning to Penelope after unspeakable absences?  Does he not seek, again, tears, again, shock and rage, again, death, again, great joy, again, the end and return of a story?

The increasing misalignment between the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, and the returnings with which we obsess is perhaps a notable factor in the increase in our ennuis and neuroses, our depressions and fragmentations.

       Yet to return to the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, would break us, dependent as we now are on our obsessions.

              Isn’t this unspoken knowledge also a factor in our ecstatic enervation?

We say we return to the earth—ashes to ashes—but why not to the clouds—rain to rain—or to the iPhone—text to text—or the toilet—dump to dump—or the i—eye to eye:  the gaze at the black center of returning?

Life is not love, we can’t help observing, despite their homophonic properties.  Yet can’t we transform all of life to love through a certain trick, a trick that, when performed, seems more legitimate than the observing we first can’t help?  Doesn’t this trick, once performed, require many of the same manoeuvres as returning? Is returning, then, the manual for the worthy simulation of love?

The body returns to the mind

       the mind to the body

The mind returns to the heart

       the heart to the mind

The heart returns to the spirit

       the spirit to the heart

We are complex prefabricated packages of returning.

Returning home with joy, returning home with foreboding

       the same returning?

Returning home with grief, returning home with ambivalence

       the same returning?

Returning to an alien ashram with grief, returning to your ancestral home with grief

       the same returning?

Returning to life, returning to death

       the same returning?

suicide is the most extreme form of returning to life

A grain of sand returns to the beach from the water, returns to a glass studio from the beach, returns to a vase in Manhattan from the studio, returns to a landfill site from being a vase, returns to a gull’s belly from the site, returns to the water from the gull, returns to the beach from the water.

       Which is the true returning?

              And if i move from child to student to priest to husband to father to banker to lover to academic to poet to bum to student to priest to child?

       So am i not the ways i walk, the ways i am led upon?  Don’t i hang names on myself and with each hanging weigh myself down in my walking, my true returning?

When Chuang Tzu says after he dreamt he was a butterfly that he’s unsure whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a human or he was a human dreaming he was a butterfly … is there not contained in this doubt the very vision and unspeakable truth of returning?

       For what seems to us solid sublimates to gas on slender accident, and what gas to solid.

              Did not Heraclitus say this also when he wrote that gods in dying live our lives and we in dying live the gods’?

       So the tunnel from womb to earth and that from earth to grave are equally returnings.  If we call one light, the other darkness, is this more a function of our darkness, less the vision of returning?

To the human on the shore, the wave keeps returning to the beach.

       But to the ocean it is always a new wave.

To the mother giving birth it is always a new baby.

       To the reincarnationist, the soul keeps returning to the world.

So every return is also wholly novel and every novelty is also wholly a return.

We could speak of the relations of money and returning.  But we shall not.

When i am at life’s statistical midpoint, i could say that i am beginning to return.  Although could i not equally say i am ending returning – for couldn’t life’s midpoint be the consummation of the impossibility of returning?

When you remarry it is not as if you are married again.

       It is a different thing, requiring a new word.

We add a ‘re’ from laziness.

       So with return.

Returning may be less to silence than to the silence in every word.

The city, being the alphabet in three dimensions, returns us to an image of god’s original speaking—one that created a species to destroy the Creator and destroy the silence that comprised god’s heart.

Our attempt to return to places in our minds has more solidity than our attempt to return to them in physicality.  For our minds are closer to the heart of perception, having more purity and hallucinatory power.  The cluttered facticity of objects in physicality diminishes the efficacy of our attempts to return there.  So returning is a spiritual discipline and it is no accident that humanity’s great religions have it—though with different spins—at the center of their cosmologies.

       water returns to the earth from the sky

       water returns to the sky from the earth

       woman returns to man

       man returns to woman

       the adult returns to the child

       the child to the adult

       the sun returns to its deep bowl of night

       night returns to overturning its bowl, releasing the sun

I travel india for a year and return to my home.  I walk through a combination of valley paths and urbanscapes to a café and return to my home after five hours’ absence.  Yet the latter can be more of an adventure, a longer journey, than the former.  Fewer prosthetics are required of the i.  We have hardly begun to explore the relationships between time, space, expenditure (fiscal, ecological, physical, emotional) and returning.

       Until we see every act as equally returning (and thus accept a diversity of way), are we not the most wasteful and inefficient of species, doomed to chains we do not call chains because we have the capacity to make them long.

Returning Exam

In order to be shown the exit from the realm of shades after death and enter eternal dissolution, one must pass an exam on returning.  Here might be some of the exam’s questions.  A sample question, with possible answer, is provided to aid in completing.

Sample question, with possible answer

Which two consonantless words are homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, and might be the mantra of returning?

       eye and i

1.  rotate regress advance relay

       Which is the better synonym of return?

2.  If we saw all words beginning with re as related, how would our lives be changed?

       real       rebozo       reckless       redolent       reefer       referee       regolith       rehab       reificatory       rejectamenta       rekindle       reliquary       Rembrandt       renascence       reodorant       reprobate       requiem       reredos       Reservoir       return       retiary       Reuters       revenant       rewind       rex       reyong       rezepte

3.  Which is more of a journey—returning ourselves or watching others return?

4.  Based on the below patterns, fill in the blank at the end of the question.

   return – reword – renew – reshape – renumber – renew – recreate – repent - redevelop

   return – urn – nut – rut – run – net – ten

   turn – tern - - torn

   re-surrect (insurrect/ion)

   upturn – overturn – downturn

   disturn deturn unturn misturn in/out

   turntable – turnkey

   Turin

   re-mind, re-body, re-spirit

If to decreate is not the same as destroy (and dedestroy not the same as create), then dereturn is not the same as ______________________________________.

5.  none of us are what we seem

              and

       all of us are only what we seem

                Is returning a turning into this and?

6.  Return – ret urn – wet urn – the living :

              the dead – dry urn

       Explore.

7.  Are deconstructions and decreations returnings, in their apparent removal of unnecessary debris, or do they accumulate debris through adding to the material one has to negotiate in order to return?

8.  We return our minds to accelerate our bodies on the commodity exchange of spirit.  Are the industries of law, knowledge, religion, technology, health, justice, ecology, and business the tentacled and transactional ghosts we reify to aid us in our desperate barterings?  To what extent, and how?

9.  Why do we go away?  We go away to come back.

       Isn’t all desire a desire to return, all action an attempt?

What we return to is what was hiding inside what we came from.

       The Eiffel tower is a return to the postcard

       Bloch’s novel is a return to the film

       The parent is the return to the lover

       Han Yu is a return to Kafka

       The ocean is a return to the bathtub

       The pinnation of the leaf is a return to the microchip

Following the model of christ, god in dying has become—through its ultimate absence—more potent than when it was alive, strutting through cathedral naves, solid walls in the cloisters of mind.  So are not we, as god’s forebears, learning from god’s play of potency?  As christ used blood and crosses, as god used education and enlightenment, are we not using technology and communication for our ambitious ends?  Are not christ, god and we walking parallel paths of potent return?

To return is to find returning in not returning.

One cannot say one returns to the one for the one in returning has negated the one it seeks – the one seeking, the one sought, the returning itself – are there not always at least three and, by extension, a myriad, in the one?

We now rest on unities as tenuous as thawing ice.  Is this a return to our original solitude, the height of human civilization a frozen pond, on either side a sea?

There is never a point of no return

       the point of no-return is the point of returning

Re-turn :

       but we are always turning and so always returning.

What do we return to? is perhaps less the question than the questions we ask about our questions as we return.

The merchant returns suddenly, as some zen students achieve enlightenment, on his deathbed; the sage devotes her life to returning.  Some advocate the gradual path, some the sudden.  Nevertheless, all return.

It is easy to say we return to nature or death or god or ourselves or silence or love (through technology or life or humanity/the city or love or words or greed) but what if rather than returning to nature we return to technology (or words or greed)?

We speak of return or returning as singular … but …

       only returns and returnings.

Perhaps the most we do is return to returning – we see, as the arcs of the spheres become visible, there was no original turn.  Of course, we could also say all we do is turn and that we never return.

How i love the efficient destruction of the city, this attempt to return to god’s original destruction, not through word but the destruction of word, to the decreation between and beyond our words.

Perhaps we can say we’ve returned when we perceive entering sleep or night no differently than entering waking or day.

We don’t return to anything, any body, any idea; we return to returning.

It is equally easy to argue that we surround ourselves with ourselves (and surround the extensions of ourselves with our extensions) to avoid returning and to consummate it.  Is this equal ease a returning?

The prefix re- assumes an original.  Do we add another re- for each returning?

       But if there is no original—or the original is irrevocably lost, like the name of god—and there is neither a place to return to nor ever a repeating of place (or i), then we are irrevocably lost between the original turn and the desire to return to what never existed.  This irrevocability, this lostness, are perhaps our home, what we return to, our only returning, although because of its no-place (its utopia) we deny it, and construct homes from false places, covering the no-place of our home, as the city covers the earth and the earth the void.

What is the opposite of return?

       Isn’t it return?

Isn’t the knowledge we attribute to returning the human’s ignorance and hubris, seeing return primarily through the arc of an isolated self, culminating in personal death – this delusional elevation of an infinitesimal part of the whole (a human, a species); isn’t our fear the not-knowing of our root inability to attribute—of not being able to see any point of origin or destination, of not being able to see the portion of the shape we inhabit, let alone the shape?

       So isn’t returning a sub-fallacy of teleology (or teleology a sub-fallacy of returning)?

We always return, we never return, we sometimes return, we partially return, we fully return, we never return.

The concept of turning seems easy—

       I say, Turn your body to your left.

       You do it.

       I see it.

       You have turned.

But if i say, Return your body to your left—

       You (re)turn your body to your left.

       I (re)see it.

But have you returned?

If one pictures a journey as a line,

       all returnings are measurable and finite.

If one pictures a journey as a circle,

       all returnings are immeasurable and infinite.

We can have recreate, bound to recreation, but can we have redestroy?  Does return sit between recreate and redestroy, indecisive?

We visit nature but we no longer can know it.  We know the city.  We can only return to nature by recreating it (its void, its desolation, its silence, its unknowing, its unmappedness, its rhythmic infinitude) in ourselves.  (Isn’t technology the visible sign of this most virtual misplacement?)  So this return to nature (in recreation and signage) may be emblematic of all our returnings, misplaced (re-homed) in the void of ourselves.

We turn to what we know we think,

       return to what we think we have known.

In both cases our knowledge, our thinking, is murky –

       both a gloaming … but which one leads to dawn, which to dusk?

I return to a home of my childhood after decades’ absence.  Is it not like visiting a movie set of a dream?  So all returnings are oneiric, any sensuous manifestations props and facades.  So our returnings are films – we may be the audience, but the director surely is unknown.

       Returning in history : film (a returning to literature, a returning to itself); the human in the city (a returning to a pre-alphabetic age).

Return is not retreat, for retreating arises from desperation or strategy whereas returning arises from an interstice of khôra and qualia.

We think of return as moving toward something that existed in the past, but why fix returning so solidly in time?  Time may only be a one-way street to those who rigidly follow history’s laws.

The house, the woman, the job we wish to return to – are they not as elusive as the smell, the experience, the state we wish to return to?  Both are spontaneous configurations of perception.

Your circumscriptions and so your judgements are solid

       return to the breath on the water

Your love is like an ax

       return to the breath on the water

Your words are like a traffic jam

       return to the brook bubbling around the rocks

Your desires are like apocalypses

       return to the mist of the morning

Your way is littered with definitions

       return to the path of hot coals and rain

Your virtue is like medieval armour

       get naked, throw on a sarong and tanktop

Your assets are like an airplane

       hijack it; turn it into a bird sanctuary

Your relations are like tapestries of dustbunnies

       There is a paneled portal behind, hiding a secret passageway to silence.  Return.

It’s close to midnight.  I crave potato chips.  I return to the store i was at a few hours earlier to obtain them.  But first, before my returning, the potato chips returned to me.

       Before i return, i am always returned to.  I am a transit hub of returnings.

We are homo homo returnus.  Whether talented or middling, whether local or global, whether an EU president or a collections agency officer, we each have our few favourite spots to return to:  intellectual, emotional, physical.  We live in our returnings to these spots and are defined less by the spots and the returnings and more by the ways we return—what we create on these ways:  the totality of these creations we might call the i.  We die (why do we die?) … we die … to assist in creating new ways of returnings for other returners, even as others have done so for us.  Our dyings are our greatest collaborations, our greatest creations, our greatest gifts.  That we do not view our dyings as such—that we even view them as our chief tragedies—is a sign of our skewered geometry:  we overfaith the apparent solidity of our cities’ verticality.  But the ways of returnings are many and go down or sideways as often as up, are gaseous as often as solid, doubt as often as know, and flounder as often as stride.

We are wind and stone.  Yet we fear wind, we fear stone.  Isn’t the fart the lightness of our fear of wind, the turd of our fear of stone – the laughter of Balaam’s ass?

       Sublimation (chemical, psychic, aesthetic) as vital living.

              Yet the paths to walk between solidity and gaseousness longer, more circuitous, more obstacled, more unmapped (despite our tsunamis of maps) – and this distance now the mythic journey, riddled with suicides and breakdowns and genocides and addictions and fragmentations and ennuis and despairs.

       Returning has always been at the center of myth.  But with myth now itself having gone on a mythic journey and returned to itself—its self of returning—and so is at home nowhere and everywhere, the distance between wind and stone is not a lifetime or a catastrophe—though it is a lifetime and a catastrophe—but only the distance from i to i.

It isn’t what we came from or return to that present us with the greatest challenges.  It is our returnings.

I return a smile.  I return a lawnmower.  I return a favour.

       Same returning?

Do we return by turning back or going beyond?  Isn’t this the unspeakable question of the universe, of creation and also of physics, of the spirit – the doubt and seed of the human?  Yet isn’t our doubt and seed also their possible indistinguishability?

As i walk, as one foot returns to the earth the other returns to the air, then the one that returned to the air returns to the earth and the one that returned to the earth returns to the air.  Are not all other returnings complications of these returnings?

Proper of Saints - Preamble

Religion has been weary for centuries.  Sainthood has been misnamed.  Religion, once lusty for the world, virile and verdant, has gradually become one of the gray divisions of culture, with all the attendant privileges, smells and limps.  Saints, still chosen by Roman pomp and its damp English shadow, are drawn from too specialized a section of society, from a narrow sticky strip of the soul.  Sainthood has not been modified for 2000 years; it still flops in the mud of asomatous bifurcation.  The criteria for sainthood have not been discussed in any meaningful way by those who name the saints; neither have criteria evolved to coincide with the evolution of God.

Sainthood is not a hermitic solitude, a selfless suffering, a sexless martyrdom; it's where the action is¾the deepest action.  And this is the problem:  this space, so deep it defies us¾we, who are its substance¾is not restricted to those of ecclesiastical bent, especially since those of such bent are not aligned with the world's present arc¾art¾but wear a particular belt of righteousness:  branded, blessed, by papal paps.  What is this deep space of purity, where saints of all descriptions dream and sometimes live¾saints so heterogeneous they make the Devil look united?

No saint is pure.  The difference between the saint and the sinner is not that the latter sins and the former doesn't, even that the one sins less, but that the former dreams of purity and the sinner doesn't particularly care.  The sinner is a pragmatist, bound solely to the world of sense.

But what is purity if it is not sinlessness, and only a dream?  What does one dream of and how does it feel to dream it?  If one cannot be pure, if one cannot even dream purity since it doesn't exist, if no one knows what purity is, least of all the saints, what then does the saint inhabit?  what does she breathe?  While the saint is neither pure nor knows what purity is, this lack of knowledge is the backbone of her dream life and she envisions her waking life as a path toward this dream of dreams.  I call this path purification and the one who walks it a saint.

I accept without question that purification's element is fire and the paths of fire, while they have many starting points, all descend to the same land, the home of fire, what saints and sinners alike call Hell.  It matters little to me how literal this land is, whether it's external, physical, whether it exists in circumstances, imagination or society's cruel children.  It matters little to me whether you call the land of fire Hell, hell, something descriptive¾that space in which saints are produced through fire's purification¾or something faintly lexical¾the name given to eternal perdition by the righteous.   What does matter is whether you believe in this space; if you do and desire to live in it more than anything else, you may be a saint.

You have heard that saintliness is renunciation, the loftiest human attitude, human creation of beauty, or turning pain to good account.  Yes, sainthood is all of these.  And who does these more than the artist?  Who renounces more than the artist, for who accepts more, and only she who is capable of great acceptance is also capable of great renunciation?  What attitude rises above all others so high it cannot help degrade them, for does not art degrade even compassion by including it, its opposite, and all other possible attitudes and values?  Who, from the bondage of the human spirit, creates more beauty than the artist in her home of the nothing of herself?  Who is so acquainted with suffering that suffering itself becomes the fuel that both threatens to engulf and effects transformation to the unimaginable goodness of the artist's longing?

The saint as defined by those purple birds, that servant of servants¾isn't he in his worthiness just one color on the palette of the artist's holiness?  Isn't he just one ingredient in the artist's dreamy stew of purity?  Isn't he just one of many inputs into the artist’s global factory, an input she must understand and not just understand as an outsider but in herself … whereas she's irrelevant to the saint's mission and demise?  What I am saying is that the artist includes the saint, but the saint excludes the artist.

Yes, I’m saying to you that the artist is the saint raised by the power of desire to be not purity, but purity's incarnation¾which the laws of flesh forbid to be pure.  That God today demands fleshy saints, bloody, reeking of imperfections, acquainted with his nemesis¾the Devil¾possessing résumés rife with amputations, and so longing for purity that their lives are nothing next to this longing.

Fire and purity can only be separated by artificial means, after which fire is comfortable, purity’s achievable.  This is the domain of those metaphysical scientists, so abundant today, who actually believe that ease and goodness are compatible.  They have succumbed to the putrid artificiality of plastic; they think it is beautiful, they would take it as their lover.

The world was created by fire and fire will end it.  We long for these two equal moments, when time and eternity mate, so much so that the priestly class of scientists sacrifice thousands of their scrawny members each year in the futile effort to claw back to the first spasm of time in their attempt to expose the universe's raw industries.  But there is only one way to travel to creation, to experience firsthand the fire that destroys and enlivens, to realize the knowledge that this fire can equally create nothing, something or anything, and that the observer of this knowledge, this strange time traveler, is but a venal puppet in fire's overwhelming purity.  The one so situated, who observes and knows she is nothing but a speck of ash in the great primal heat of creation, is the saint … the saint who is the artist.

A more prosaic comparison exists.  In the Middle Ages, when priests were more common than trees and indulgence was the intercourse of spires and squires, the saint in his thousand and one disguises was the aspiration of the commoner.  Almost everybody, if not a saint, was at least a monk or nun or had a relative who was one.  So today, when artists are more common than telephone poles and indulgence is intercourse, the artist in her thousand and one disguises is the commoner's inspiration.  Almost everyone's an artist or wants to be, but like the saints of old, where few were of any worth, few artists today are worthy of the name they claim.  An artist must be a saint before she is an artist.  She must long for purity and this longing must be prior to her art, the material from which her art is made.  Art emerges from the wound that opens between the dream of purity and the consciousness of its impossibility—the greater the wound, the greater the potential for art; this is why purity must be retained¾without it, art diminishes.  Artists are the guardians of this dream and the explorers and tongues of this wound.

How can a classical saint be saintly?  He cheats.  He lives off the suffering of others; he doesn't travel to Hell himself, but lives vicariously from the travels of sinners.  He attends their travelogues and murmurs exorcisms.  He is a piranha, a leech, a bloodsucker, in love with demonry but unable to consummate his love.  But the artist lives in Hell herself; she descends daily, daily lifting herself out; this continuous descent and ascent is her purification¾ authentic, potent, a totality of opposites and so a mirror of the terrible holiness of God.

The new saint fulfills God by futilely attempting to become Him.  This is the saint’s worship and rebellion, her challenge, her stake in the spiritual heart of the cosmos, which is nothing other than her own dark and reeking heart.

I, thus, to evolve with God and please Him, to please the dead, who are the arteries of God, to inform the yet-to-be, who require instruction in the ways of fire, to maintain the dialogue among the spirits of Hell, to uphold purity as the only object of desire, I revise, and by my revision transform, the record of the saints placed into time's incarceration, what has been in the record of the Church known as the Proper of Saints.

I recommend that interested readers continue to refer to that older document for historical and archaeological purposes, but that they refer to mine for the present and the future.

An issue of nomenclature arises.  Is it proper, considering the evolutionary movement I have described, to retain the ecclesiastical name in full, or is it more appropriate to revise it along with the content and call it the Proper of Artists?  This has the merit of retaining the traditional liturgical meaning in the first noun and updating sainthood according to our necessity in the second.  But then, would it not be better to make the revision full, acknowledge the impropriety of our aesthetic rebellion, this rebellion that is more conformance than rejection, and call our calendar the Improper of Artists?  This turns the original title on its head, accentuates our new position, one required by the progress of humanity, and boldly cuts the tie with anachronistic Roman circumstance.  Yet, as we push this further through the intestines of thought, the question arises whether it would be most apt to entitle our noble arrogance the Improper of Saints, thus clearly upholding the artist as the new saint while recognizing the efficient novelty of our action.  However, almost as soon as this new title surges through our brain, a new one arises, one that is not new but old, yet is made new by imbuing the old words with new meaning.  Yes¾new wine in old wineskins, which I fill and leave to age … and age … into the new age of artists, this age of saints.

Therefore, I title my calendar the Proper of Saints.  I recommend it to all who would be edified by the accounts of those who have taken the path of purity into the deepest regions of Hell, who have survived the Devil’s deadly lechery, who have renounced all by accepting all, who love the world by despising it and despise it by loving it, who create beauty for our redemption, who do not shy from suffering but turn it to good account, these men and women who lead us forward into the dark spaces of righteousness … these artists, these saints.

  

Note on Selection

The saints in this Proper have been chosen by the Council of I.  The workings of the Council have been explored elsewhere and its process of selection outlined in the Bavarian Code.  The saints from literature significantly outnumber the saints from music, the visual arts, dance, film and architecture.  Literature extends over 2500 years to Homer, as a named individual phenomenon, whereas the other categories (except for film, which is still in its infancy) can claim only about 20% of literature's time.  It may be true that literature is giving way to film on purity's path, but the millennia-old jewel still retains its supreme qualities and precedence.  Sainthood began with the word, and writers have labored longest in Hell’s darkest pits to mine flecks of holiness from deep within God's guts.  Thus we honor them not more than others, but we do honor more of them.

All this aside, the Council's standards, while necessarily shadowy, are high, arbitrary and final.