madnesses i

while in capitalism money and its obvious prosthetics, ancillaries, and symbols are the regime’s official currency, any regime must – by the laws that govern laws – have a shadow currency that (through its capacity to out-flexibilize officiality, through its dimensional surprises, through its greater orientation toward energy) circumscribes the official – in this case money – and confronts humanity most deeply with the sacred struggle of its age.  in capitalism, this greater currency is sanity.

only the sane are permitted access to the corridors that manipulate, circulate, and define money; in such a way building and maintaining assets of sanity precedes physical acquiring and accumulating.

sanity is a matter of defending certain geometrical configurations over others.  thus ‘marginalization’ – a term not infrequently used by those claiming to be nearer the center or middle of something humanity values (and yet the meaning of this something is uncertain, contradictory:  take knowledge, justice, power, goodness) – is typically and covertly a plea for certain orbitings.

yet in some worlds of the mad, a ground is no fixed orbiting – there are no margins, for margins are everywhere.  humanity itself is no center – despite various religious, philosophical and populist attempts to wish-claim otherwise – but yet another orbiting:  elliptical, thoroughly transient, even the star it once claimed gone, and that star, in the presumed memory of its presence or the palpable appearance of its absence, still hardly humanity.

money and sanity are related as the biological sexes are related:  each can express various genders but the binary relation remains required to perpetuate the species.

many paths exist to be deemed mad by the sane; a rare but occasionally fruitful path is to conform as wholly as possible (or attempt to conform) to one or more of the sane’s ideals.

since we know we know how to assemble spaceships, to cook falafels, to theorize and write texts, to manipulate ourselves, other members of the species, and objects throughout the planet, to play horseshoes with competence, but know we hardly know what wisdom is and even whether it exists – and without this knowledge and its practice what are we other than another shooting scream – sanity’s definitions, their institutionalizations and enforcements, are melancholic in their brutalities and injustices, faintly comic in their strewn caprice.

that sanity requires madness for itself and to be itself is obvious.  and so too is sanity’s need – without which it would be lost – to manufacture madness, to forge and reproduce it from whatever materials are at hand.  for a human to observe this process and choose to be such material-at-hand for further observation – what discipline might we call this?  and would it be a discipline of the mad or sane?  an interdisciplinary venture, a new alliance?

while we might be tempted to distinguish between pathological and productive madnesses – even as we might distinguish between pathological and productive sanities – this temptation, while not necessarily misguided, assumes pathology is unproductive, productivity superior and good.  a question inhabits this, as all, temptations – whether pathological madnesses and sanities are in fact a different configuration of mad and productive madnesses and sanities of sanity, or the reverse?  and another inhabiting question – whether these questions of sanity are nested endlessly, whether the moats that surround it are mirage-moats, its fortresses of sand?

i ask questions of the oracles hidden in the fallen temples of the luminescent city, see them point to darkness, write in hallucinatory nights tangled, alabaster visions.  for this i am deemed mad.  and the one who pays its taxes and owns a home and has a career in the official taxonomies and carries out the necessary appearances of love is deemed sane.  yet is there not a conflict of interest in the naming – are there not governance issues in the management of the world and the structures and processes of names?  is not an audit lacking of humanity?  or rather has it not been made, and filed far away, and down?

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?