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.

april licorice

dreams, virtuality – sleep, void
             the repressed part of a rule which ensures that the rule does not work

i, god

             how can anyone be against me when there is no i to be against?

creation, evolution

             the myth of the black rose that will never be black

living, the city, talking, humans

             coddled cosmopolitanism

poetry allsorts

             perception is only a hallucination that is true

fear & apathy

             if fear is a wave and apathy a particle, aren’t they bound in their travels in the black light of time?

conversations at yet another netherbar

          featuring
                i’m going to get a drink
                                and
                what do you do?

some thoughts at the end of the daodejing

                exuberant namelessness, dissolute virtue –
                                a bridge to the caprice, laughter, and vital deconstructioning of Chuang Tzu

returning to returning

                the i i step in is not the i i stand in

council of i intro bios

                throneless identity:  the body as cacophonous conference room for spirits

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

    little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

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

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

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

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

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

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the body is the way that gets in the way

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

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

the body is the way of the body of the way

            heresiarch ramarooroo

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

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

February 10 - Saint Wystan, Poet

Rev. Dr. George Bicknell loved boys.  He’d watch them from his voyeuristic perch in the Worcester Cathedral tower, lips chomping as if young flesh were a fresh invention and not a steady supply from the fathomless pit of lust.  Each Sunday he’d look forward not to the comforting snores of the congregation or the weekly conjugal tedium with his wife at Vespers, but the sight of the choirboys squirming in their confinement while he spewed rote lies about forgiveness into the apathetic air.  One day, he couldn’t take it any more--the hairless salt of sweet boyflesh would be on his tongue by nightfall or he’d end his meaningless failed forgettable life.

There was one … an image of uncooked innocence reading by a gravestone--as if God were complicit in his desperation and had, right now, just for him, created a lamb to be sacrificed on the searing altar of sex.  Laden with the cruel confidence of desire, armed with the subtle words of his profession, he led the boy to a hut by the Severn where he repeatedly stabbed him with passion’s steel tyranny.  Reason, compassion, balance--they were absent … only the dark stench of possession.

When the rampage was over and his blood had fallen to a human temperature, he saw that the boy was dead.  Realizing what he had done, he stumbled to the Cathedral and impaled himself on a cross.  Three days later, on February 21 1907, a passerby looked into the hut and found a newborn baby, whose name was Wystan Hugh Auden, whose words lead to the land of the dead.

Most modern poets have forgotten music.  Their palettes have one or two colors, their kits three or four tools.  They strut their mushy minds, consumed with ejaculating their names into great vats of ears--regardless of the quality of their verse or souls, or the souls of those at the bottom of their narcissistic fountain.  They think the world was created in 1922, that the infinite is a mathematical set and not the impossible wound that bleeds all human song.  Their social conscience is themselves, their moral vision their genitals, their idea of a poetic education an English degree, a few workshops and weekly inebriation at literary readings.  No one can sanely connect their ideas to their behavior.  They’ve lost the knowledge that the world is the poet’s only teacher and they would do better to be friends with prostitutes and gardeners than the literary dilettantes they think are grand.  Perception is analysis, wisdom consensus, progress publication.  Unimaginative, imperceptive, equating eros with coitus, locked in themselves like a garbage barge in a suburban swimming pool, they produce worn photocopies of lukewarm commonplaces in clunky adjective-infested stanzas of stale mediocrity, which they celebrate noisily as divine achievements in their undisciplined cloisters.

St. Wystan was not such a poet.  St. Wystan was not such a man.

He was turned to stone and fashioned into a grotesque on the western side of St. Stephen’s Cathedral on September 28 1973 and elevated by the Council of I to sainthood on April 27 1992.  We honor the saint today because this was the day at the age of 35 that he acknowledged his relationship with Chester Kallman was a failure, making the rest of his life a quiet squeal of pain.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

February 5 - Saint Maria, Angelologist

Angels are terrible.

Everyone knows this who’s met one.

There they are¾crowding out the air

just beyond my window, composing night.

And what am I but an unlit shade to their prerogatives.

They give birth, these helpers who don’t help,

according to the laws of contrapuntal blackness that they sing,

to death, and death, and death, and death, and death, and death.

And sometimes to a life that’s crammed with death.

Maria, St. Maria.  Doll made man and man made death,

conjured by love’s bleak agony to life’s fake stage,

running, squirming, seeing, there, an angel’s

slimy outline, angels’ flickered laughter, intoned into a crater of society

on December 4 1875.  Oh winged arrow, sting the night,

the night, the wing, the man.

What are these apparitions that we describe as light

but are dooms?  Are they what we see in mirrors

when we actually look?  Those round students of darkness

wanting to escape the flat flat glass that shines so

perfectly¾aren’t they us?  Aren’t they every god

that’s ever died?   Blood.  The word of angel wit.

Blood.  The dialogue of doom and light.  Blood.

St. Maria’s curse and poetry.

Angels!  What are they but humans inside out?  I saw one

in a corner of a closet of a nightmare, calling, not for me, calling …

it was made to call.  I thought I was an angel, calling

for myself from the reeking distant depths, but all it was was

wind, and I an eye watching whirling worlds.

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef.

So many names to not call forth.

I suppose that’s what angels are for …

to not call our names.  And we?  We’re here

to listen to the not calling.  When we’re not spoken¾

that’s when we’re most alive.

Absence, silence, muttered ballads in their silent nonexistent ballrooms:

there he was, a prince of night, muttering alongside, muttering

stacked horrors of silence from the horror of himself, the horror of the world, the horror

that they aren’t the same.

Fools!  Flee!  Flee yourselves!  Don’t you see

you’re not anything you’ve thought?  That it’s better to be devoured

by an angel than devour pastries by the Seine?  Let the gods eat you … so what?

Maybe then even you will fall into a mirror of creation and birth with your murderer a

word.

What else can we hope for?

Loving what he was, he became it on

December 29 1926 and was elevated in

1997 in Munich and Visp behind a contradictory rose.

Let us honor the saint today with our flesh and souls.

January 19 - Saint William, Mythmonger, Silliman, Poet

Far, far away, a long time ago, in a hut made of potatoes overlooking the shelly Sligeach, lived a bitter sentimental woman with her 23 children and drunken husband.  The last of the litter, an ethereal runt who survived only because he began eating the walls, was named not by dad, who was long past being able to name anything, nor by mom, who only called him tuilli cac, but by a pleasant gathering of … well …

Sometime before he was named or numbered, when the sky was lightly leaping through a pack of clouds and the sun was chomping on a distant rainbow, Táin Bó Cúailnge felt herself desiring a child.  Lithe as love she was, and just as wily.  She gathered her friends, Old Yellow Lecan and Druimm Snechta, and said, We cannot breed the way humans do, which is good, because who would want a man anyway?  And the three cackled lightly, to the detriment of a few nearby stars and roses.  Which is bad, because it means when we want a shiny cutsie baby to play catch with, or to pitch through an eclipse to see it shatter, we don’t have one.

We have the dindshenchas, said Druimm Snechta.  And Old Yellow Lecan said, Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

It’s true.  But the dindshenchas only assume human form and only pretend to explode.  If they don’t feel like screaming, they don’t, because they’re not really scared of us.  They’re only good in certain moods and times and rhythms and lights and feels and wants and airs.  Plus … and here she paused to allow the darkness to take form and wrap itself around her … we cannot send the dindshenchas back to earth stuffed with the magic to upset and the silliness to confuse.

And so Táin Bó Cúailnge’s true intent became obvious, which delighted her companions.  They ordered a flock of flaming meteors and took off their bright fashions and danced until their little feet sizzled with naughtiness.

And who would have guessed that on their earthbabe hunt they flitted up Sligeach disguised as snails?  And who could have known that they found a babe so undecided between life and death that they almost thought it was their own?

They returned with the wraith-boy to their wimsy kingdom.  Táin Bó Cúailnge stood on Venus and Druimm Snechta on Jupiter and Old Yellow Lecan on Pluto, and they tossed the human faster than light between themselves.  They threw him hard through galactic eclipses and he exploded the way an earthboy should.  I haven’t had so much fun in moonbeans, said Táin Bó Cúailnge.  He’s better than the dindshenchas, he screams, said Druimm Snechta.  Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui, said Old Yellow Lecan.

But when the time came that the boy started growing hair where there was once only smoothness, that his voice started clambering down the ladder of sin, Táin Bó Cúailnge said, He is becoming a man.  And they sang the Ugh Ugh Song and got to work.  They replaced his soul with Lebor Gabála Érenn, his heart with Tir na nOg, his genitals with Lebor na Nuachongbála and his brain with Oidheadh Clainne Lir.  They filled his veins with monkeypiss and gave him three extra toes as a joke.  St. William he was named, and the number 0 he was given, and he was sent back to the rational planet, escorted by Hy Many, Ballymote, and Fermoy, to make sure he didn’t escape.  He landed on June 13 1865 in the home of John and Susan, where he was fed properly and exposed to the blue and mannered order of the world.

Now I would like to ask you something, biped.  I want you to judge between the heavens and the earth.  Who could have done more to form a poet than the faeries?  Wherefore, when I look on earth for swooning sounds, does it bring forth only clunks?  I will tell you what I will do to poets who think rocks make good poems:  I’ll fill them with rocks and send them to neveretherland for pixies to dance on.  I will command the world to praise them for a second and forget them forever.  For the people of earth look for animation, but—only tedium; for inspiration, but—journalism.

St. William’s life was chaotic, his art metered.  His life was messy, his art pure.  His life looked to the future, his art the past.  His life was silly, his art serious.  His body was owned by the earth, his soul by the cackling creatures who named him.  After his mortal death on January 28 1939, a few strange wailers slunk to Sligo, singing,

Earth to earth and dust to dust

The beauty the beauty the beauty of it all.

Birth to birth and lust to lust

The beauty the booty the duty of it all.

Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

After his mortal death, the faeries died and Romance swooned before her lover cold.  Ireland grew weak and Unity divorced Fantasy and Venus was just Venus and Leda was no swan.

After his mortal death, the Council of I deliberated the question of elevation—who could elevate this saint since he never really descended?—and finally concluded on April 27 1953 that, while he couldn’t be elevated, he could be left where he was, bouncing on the soft heather of the milky heights.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.