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.
