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?

ULICA LUTK

The gods inhabiting doubt don’t seem to be inclined to show themselves in manners resembling anything we normally would consider divine or any purported demonic opposition, but neither do they feign to assume human garb.  What then are these creatures (though they be not creatures) and how do they inhabit?

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia.  Nothing had gone right that day.  My father called to inform me my mother had cancer and would die within three months.  My ex-wife called and said she wanted to get remarried.  My brother-in-law called from emerg to say my sister was having a breakdown and was being interrogated by psychiatric interns with no direct experience of the mind’s stranger choreographies—only textbook systematizations and rote vocabularies and envied paychecks.  And in the wee hours of the early morning i had resumed a sexual relationship with a woman who was into extispicy, expired air ventilation and quitting smoking.  Naturally when night came i boozed.

I knew the alleys sufficiently.  They turned into each other like deranged marshmallows.  Transactions occurred of a nature so dubious, so outside the law, that any jurisprudence would have to entirely reinvent itself to take them into account.  By daytime, though, the alleys were exuberances of commerce—wallets flashing like pedophiles, scarves and cravats and bootlaces, fractal romanescos and sexy kuritakes and swabs of turducken terrine with dates and plover eggs and seasoned bustards spilling over coloured tables, and everything singing with the excess of itself.  Near nightfall the shoppers would thin and disappear and the merchants would then hastily pack up and fold their stalls and scurry out, as if they were cockroaches and someone had flicked the light on.  A limbo then occurred in which nothing happened but a silent waiting for the night and its tangled cultures.  It was then i would enter, inebriated, desperate for respite from the arrows of routine, from the protocols of opposition.

That week i sought a friend skilled in the arts of such matters.  He lived in a garret off the Ulica Lutk and mumbled the fragments of sages into broken carafes.  His name was lost and i called him Substantive, as a euphemism and term of endearment and joke, though neither of us laughed.  Interrupted by unhinged doors and tomblike corridors through which ghosts lolled like dustbunnies, there were uncountable twisted stairs to his forgotten hovel which he could only afford by doing free curses for the landlord—long horrible affairs, rife with decibels and spittle, that terrified those in arrears to steal or prostitute their daughters or murder, as long as rent was paid.  We had met in the theater at the opening weekend of The Thing, he with fantasies of doing domestic work at the South Pole, me with a ticket i had found while recovering my glasses from behind the toilet at a soggy waffle place near the condemned sanatorium in which Lucia had finally fully lost her mind a few years prior during that spring in which the blossoms danced like hesperides and no one got the flu.

Haven’t suffered enough, he said, after we had settled into Turkish coffees as thick as madness and he had rearranged the taxidermy specimens so that we could squeeze ourselves into rough spaces between once loved or beaten pets on lumpy dolorous couches which seemed to chant in low scratchy voices of springier and firmer days.

What has that got to do with it?

Haven’t suffered enough, don’t see them.

What happens when you’ve suffered enough?

Not there, they’re inside you—hardly suffered, suffered enough.  The in-betweens, they make them appear.

It’s too easy to blame it on the booze.  We all know that at some level alcohol speaks the truth more ripely, with more imaginative precision and imagistic exactitude, than the tinny truisms of sobriety.  That’s why we drink.  Not to open legs or forget the whipped horrors of existence or even dance with more limbs than we thought we had … but to glimpse what is, however shady, veiled and smelly it might be.

Most truth—the common kinds that cause lukewarm heads to nod lukewarmly—is like an uncooked head of cauliflower.  True and not imperfect in its cruciferous and fractal glory.  Yet it is not the truth that drives us humans on.  Something must be done to the cauliflower.  It must be chopped and garlic added, maybe a bit of reggiano and olive oil, a plop of parsley, roasted until hot and golden, eaten to the tunes of Arvo Pärt and arguments over the attributes that distinguish film from literature or whether religion and secularism are the same.  Booze does this.  Booze is a cooked and wondrous cauliflower.  It shows us what is there.

So i step into the Sevillan maze, that medley of alleys, drunk and desperate, eager for truth.  The smell of merchants has begun to dissipate and the air is expectant and stiff.  Brick buildings of indeterminate age, their windows viscous and unopened, sit stolidly on the sidelines, devoid of any signs of life, as the sun does its daily dance into the grave of the heavens.  There was little discussion of the alleys in the polite society of Seville.  People talked of bargains, of having whittled the price of some haberdasher down to something one could boast about.  They talked of under-ripe avocados and fuzzy fungi and the latest lace.  They talked of days.  They talked of sun-sanctioned fiscal-driven business-blessed products, and then they stopped, like clams, and spoke of happy exhibitions in galleries, and maybe the price of theater tickets and the increasing quantity and quality of weddings and, if efficacious, one or two of the deceased.  The alleys i am entering are entered more than spoken of, and those of us who enter aren’t normally invited to the parties of Seville.

I saw him next under the destitution of a full moon in the smoky geometries of an undecided evening by a polluted creek on the outskirts of love.  Jackalopes, squirradgers, wombines, elephaffes, pysons, donmels, vulphins, and raphonamites lurked in the fuliginous night, gnawing on each other.  He was in the crook of a tree, screaming at unseen enemies, in a loincloth, stuffed with vatic wisdoms.  I threw some pinecones, drawing his ire and attention.

le bruit des cabarets la fange des trottoirs! verfremdungseffekt! petite madeleine! anosognosia! inter alia sophrosune sub-iectum! une riche et inutile survivance! wie es auch sie das leben es ist gut! reines bewusstsein! die schwärmerei! ho hum! l’éphémère ébloui vole vers toi chandelle crépite flambe et dit bénissons ce flambeau! ertrinken! versinken! unbewußt! Höchste! Lust!

He howled like a cloven moon, ripped off his loincloth revealing an erection which began spouting into the skies an aurora borealis of semen, greens and reds and blues of holy sperm, and threw trees and vivisected animals onto the earth like a crazed and animate piñata and i ran back to Seville, to my small apartment, and wept.

Upon his first encounter, Augustine had called them lahars of confusion, and returned to them to castrate himself over a pagan font in 392, swollen with repentance, committed to the plank of clarity, spilling the hideous blood of his testes, those thick and questing hydras, in exchange for the aseptic blood of God, returning to Hippo, never to tread again on Seville’s miasmic earth, never to look back at those purple indulgences, that tumescent sin.  In 1244 Aquinas, smitten with his vocation, ripe with holy passion, slit them off with a broken wine bottle and screamed the names of God in Spanish, which he did not know.  In 1119 Abelard, bereft less of Héloïse than of himself, sought the alleys with a butcher knife and did the deed.  Origen, apophatic and pulsing with the cries of Jesus, began the tradition in 209 when, flexible before the Lord and elastic with righteousness, he arced his body and bit them off—oh snake that devours! oh sacred sacrifice of purity! oh love!

In 1858 Baudelaire wandered in without shame or pity and lopped off the sac of a Portuguese sailor while in very congress with a corpulent Sevillan whore who smelled of turmeric and myrrh.  In 1985 Edmond Jabès, little known to history, having trekked across the desert to the mirage of questions and drank his fill, snipped them off with sheep shears and didn’t weep and died within seven years.  These are the records of castrations of the alleys of Seville in the name of the western gods and under the blankness of a blackened sun.

So i enter them, booze in my sex, a member neither of the holy nor unholy orders, neither tepid nor a scholar nor a citizen of anything resembling knowledge.  Did not Margeurite Porete write, “Are they not a miracle of an architectural prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness, an intersecting of myriad relations?”?  Was it not Julian of Norwich who said to a budding anchoress, “Have they not within them less the mirrors we are seeking and more the labyrinths that are lost?”?

Signage is absent, the forks and interstices are wayward and seem to shift with each visit.  Like Habana, without cars or people and of widths only allowing two fattish people to pass while gently melding.  But there are people.  Yet not in any normal sense.  One sets one’s constructed personhood aside as one enters, and becomes a person of the alleys, an unfamiliar, experiencing by not experiencing, feeling the discarded subjectivities that pass as long and loosened hair, like fallen rain.

The nights melt the alleys down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of black is not the most beautiful hour.  It is only the final chord of night, when the vague and temporary citizens of the alleys have forgotten why they entered, in the deepest pangs of twilight, taking every shade to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by the alleys to ring out.  Then one sees, though in an instant, though one forever doubts and though one knows most deeply, what one has come to see.

I finally found him in his laboratory in the forbidden districts of a simulated CERN, wearing only a dirty labcoat and mumbling in languages i did not know.

was scrawled on a whiteboard and he jumped from testtube to marker to vodka to testtube like a bonobo between lovers.  I sat for what may have been hours, half-watching, shifting between dream and what is ostensibly reality, while he bounced around and scrawled and drank and yelped.  I found him next to me, pawing my leg.

There, finished.

Finished? What’s finished?

Suffering formula.

You’ve solved suffering?

Solved itself.

It’s over?

Always does.

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, and we shall end there also.  For i accidentally found myself at a soiree of a Mrs. Bimble B. L. Bomble, of 382 Rue de la Luna in the Celestetta District, not far from Nomz Bar, an absinthe haunt of mine.  Placing myself innocuously in a corner, slurping aquavit like San Pellegrino, i forced myself to listen to the conversations.

You’ve heard that Alyson’s son received the scholarship?

It was not unexpected.

How is Frederik taking the news?

Naturally, he is upset.  He can’t see past what he can’t help but feel as a betrayal.

Of course.  He should take a trip, go to India or something.  Forget about things.

The storm in the Pyrenees … do you know the total damage?

In the billions, now.  Over 3,000 dead.

Horrible.

Dr. Vertenvoken’s recent book—what a masterpiece!

I hate to say it, but I wasn’t that impressed.

Oh really!  Do tell.

While I appreciated the textures of its plot, the typically finely drawn characters, I found its sense of irony overblown, its passions pretentious, its climax unrealistic.  Too much like Flight of Magenta really, a bit of a waste of paper.

Oh Henri, you’re too harsh as usual!

The truth isn’t always pleasant dear.

She’ll die of it.

I think so too.

Soon.  She’ll die of it soon.

All the better.

We’ve had enough.

She’s gone too far.

It’s all anyone can take.

You know what they say … what you reap is …

What you sow.  It’s so true.

His best work is from his final 10 years.

Unusual.

A late bloomer they say.

What matters is the product.  Life follows its own schedule.

Magnug is doing well.

Far better than expected.

Do you think it’s time to sell?

I’d wait a week, see how Bryzon performs.

Ah, you always were a savvy one Vasiliy, a savvy one.  I like the way you think.

It’s served me well, I have to say.

An asset to our kind, you truly are, an asset to our kind.

I think we’ve finally found one!

I’m so happy for you! Who?

Pierre Lemish.  He actually played once at Wimbledon!

Really!

Didn’t place.  And I’m sure he uses the fact to bump his fees up.  But the twins love him.

It’s been such a journey for you.

She heard it from Seeba and then heard from Fransi but didn’t put two and two together and when she found out … !

I pushed my way into the middle of the crowded room, raised my hand and yelled, Friends!  The room hushed.  I am not a stranger to Seville but i am a stranger to these gatherings.  I have been in the corner—that one (i said, pointing)—listening to your … your … communication.  I have heard you talk of awards and death and charts and justice and art and the gamblings of the privileged and tennis teachers for one’s children.  Most curiously, i’ve heard no one mention what is central to Seville, what grounds and circumscribes your lives and talkings—the alleys, their effects and architecture, the society and business that transpires there at night.

The room grew quieter.  The alcohol stood still.  Ginoo Alabos, debonair musician and member of the professional avant garde, a respected professor and member of the guilds, drawing his recent tour of Hungary on Daw Jia’s lovely naked forearm, stopped and frowned.

I am a frequenter of those alleys.  I have sought God in its garbled corridors and madness in its trampled air.  Yes! God! God who is dead and yet never dies! The god who is gods and no-god and no-gods and none and all and neither.  I have sought that which cannot be found and can be known only when it is not known.  I have sought the annihilation of myself in order to find life.  I have sought to see the possibility of repairing the deep injustice of the divorce of the sacred and the profane, that life is still possible for the human.  I wish to share with you the occurrences of my most recent visit, i wish to speak of the blood on which we walk … the grammar of our walking.  I do not know if i am mad.  I do not know if the alleys are real.  I do not know what i have seen, I do not know if i have seen it, i do not know …

… We have heard all this before, Encik Mllad, a Senior Civil Servant in the Carlosian regime, interrupted. The architecture in question, since it has been mentioned, is being sealed.  Each year, fewer enter, even fewer emerge, the portals of ingress diminish, the doors of egress are closed.

There is no escape, said Zonjë Tsis. Things change.

The Councils decree it, said Gospodin Wǣs-Wǣs.  It is the only way to progress democracy.

The Ministers have approved it, said Ssi Sui G.

The remaining Monarchs have blessed it, said Whaea Wei. We must let life take its course.

The International Bodies have confirmed it, said Mevrouw Vilipa. Its time is done.

The astrological charts don’t deny it, said Seeydi Habibubad.

The computers compute it.

The scientists validate it.

The therapists, psychologists, general practitioners, specialists, neurologists, psychiatrists—with the full support of their attendant lawyers and accountants and lovers and children and masseuses and nannies and poodles and customer service representatives—systematize it and erect a program of wellness to achieve it.

The scholars profunditize it.

The artists sacralise it.

The tweeters and bloggers blab it.

The …

They didn’t try to stop me as i left or seem to notice i had gone.  No one followed me as i departed the Celestetta District and no one mentioned my having had appeared.  Daw Jia’s forearm gratefully recovered the soft map of Ginoo Alabos’s Hungary and Vertenvoken’s oeuvre continued to be explored in tones not unreminiscent of reminiscings of reminiscings.  No one found the testicles of an unnamed diplomat.  It wasn’t reported, the police knew nothing.  I went to seek my friend but he was nowhere and so i left Seville and crossed the old-fashioned way, on a ship, to New York, where I got a job as a night waiter at L’express and found a girlfriend and went to movies and made up stories of a former life.

So gods inhabit doubt through suffering, and suffering lives in the inebriated alleys of truth.  This is what i discovered in the nights of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia, with the aid of alcohol and a man whose name is lost.

Energy and the Object: Desire and Suffering

Karolus Cothraige Gonxha Arnulfo Ceuta Isayevich Forgione was a contemporary of Spinoza, but living in self-imposed exile in a Cretan cave.  While little is known of Forgione’s life, we do know that he despised Spinoza (in a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s hate of Hegel), being temperamentally disinclined to systemization and being equally driven to adumbrate the philosophical fragmentation of the twentieth century.  Despite living as a severe hermit, he was known to develop close relationships with various members of some of the natural species which frequented his cave, they finding him to be a warm, receptive, and vaguely entertaining companion.  We use the Papyrus Stuttgart Linear C text, the most commonly accepted most reliable source for this fragment in Forgione studies.

“Desire,” the first part of Energy and the Object, was showcased here in July 2010.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to continue Forgione’s odd—some would say deviant—exploration into matters usually best left unexplored.

2.      Desire and Suffering

2.1.   The Buddha correctly identified desire and suffering, but he incorrectly assumed the equation should and could be broken.

2.1.1.      The equation is life’s; to attempt to break it is to strive for death.

2.1.2.      The one who attempts to break the equation still has desire, but his desire is turned against his body as opposed to being against other bodies.

2.1.2.1.            Against and For are incestuous siblings in the Preposition family.

2.1.2.2.            Who hasn’t loved his body by rejecting it?  And who hasn’t hated others through consummation?  Only he who is an Adjective¾that cloned genetically modified family of qualifiers.  Slip into his extended family’s picnic¾anyone can if he qualifies; slip into the modifying swamp.

2.1.3.      The cessation of suffering has been made a consequence of the cessation of desire, but this is only true for the one who strives to feel desire’s circumference and only true for this one in those moments of feeling.  The world is larger than these feelings and if the world were to shrink to them, it would end.  There is one world which is comprised of infinite worlds¾a feeling of the cessation of desire and suffering is only one of these, a description of this feeling another.

2.1.4.      The nature of desire is to strive for what doesn’t exist.

2.1.4.1.            Suffering is the distance between the one who desires and what is desired.  The more impossible his desire, the greater his suffering.

2.1.4.1.1.      This is why Christ is the ultimate sufferer, for he desires God (perfection)¾the truest impossibility.

2.1.4.1.2.      Christ suffers more than Buddha, for Buddha can achieve his desire through death, but Christ’s desire is frustrated by death¾Christ desires perfection in life.

2.1.4.2.            The common sufferer, the shadow of Christ, does not reduce the distance between himself and what is desired, but places a veil of flesh between them.  It is this veil that makes him common, for the veil is society¾desire’s commodity exchange.

2.1.4.2.1.      The one who knows the veil is a veil and yet maintains it possesses superior spiritual power over the one who believes the veil is the desired.

2.1.4.2.2.      The veil is common, but the relationship one maintains with the veil determines the desirer’s rarity or, in classical terms, beauty.

2.1.4.3.            All that is considered worthy in human history either attempts to remove the veil (what we call the spiritual) or believes in it only as a utility function (the political or sexual).  Buddha and Christ are symbols of the spiritual, Caesar of the political, Don Juan of the sexual.

2.1.4.3.1.      Political and sexual masters place the weight of suffering on others through desire, the spiritual on themselves.  Regardless of where suffering is placed, its weight is equal.

2.1.4.3.2.      The preexistent scales of the world have been formed to give more weight to each unit of spirit than each unit of utility.  This is what is meant, and the only true thing that is meant, by good’s superiority¾all other meanings are sentimental.

2.1.4.3.3.      Spiritual mathematics follow formulae that mock the laws of physical mathematics, even as the latter mock the former and each fears each as each erects a world inimitable to the other, seen by the other only in that ultimate instrument of death, the mirror.

2.1.5.      In desire, non-desire is desired; in non-desire, desire.  But I speak again of centers and circumferences.

2.1.6.      Desire’s suffering has been shown through religion.  But with religion discredited, geriatric or subsidized and subsidiarized by business, where can it be shown now?

2.1.7.      The Buddha then was right and wrong (the more right and wrong, the greater the teacher, for the more he highlights tension, the only truth).

2.1.7.1.            He was wrong in thinking desire and suffering should and could be separated.

2.1.7.2.            He was right, however, in disbelieving in the veil, in that he was one driven to show the texture of a certain brand of disbelief and disbelief is a rare and legitimate relationship with the veil.

2.1.7.2.1.      The veil defines the one who disbelieves in it as much as that-which-is-behind-the-veil defines those who believe only in the veil.

2.1.7.2.2.      That which is not believed in (veil or that-behind) is the soil to the weeds and flowers of belief.

2.1.7.3.            Buddha was right in pointing to that-behind not as any that but as not-that¾the not-that behind the that.  Christ and Plato pointed to a That behind the that¾that greater impossibility.

2.1.7.4.            Shakespeare is great partially because he provided the first comprehensive secular description of the not-that behind the that.

2.2.   True humanity, and thus divinity, is granted only to those who fear neither desire nor suffering, neither do they crave them¾they simply live them.

2.2.1.      The religious founders of East and West were such¾early explorers of desire incarnate; their words may have played on desire’s surfaces advocating different laws, but they inhabited desire and by inhabiting became their habitation.

2.2.2.      Regardless of his words’ content, the great teacher is desire made incarnate in the realm of spirit.

2.2.2.1.            This is technically impossible, for desire should only be incarnationally possible in flesh, where it is expected and at home.

2.2.2.2.            But the realm of spirit doesn’t care for technical laws; it wanders where it wills.

2.2.2.3.            We see, we know, desire in the great teacher, but of a qualitatively different kind than when we desire flesh.  This difference is what makes this teacher great.

2.2.3.      In atmospheres of discourse of desire, where all is spoken and seen desire and the desire for desires of speech and sight, where can one flee to find a place where desire is silent?

2.3.   In the hard ambiguities of the world, justice is distributed through the courts of suffering.  Through desire, acclaimed judge and silent, humans receive not what is their due, but desire’s portion.

2.3.1.      Above religion’s horrible hopes and business’s cold securities, desire randomly determines the world’s oppressions.

2.3.2.      Desire is justice; there is no more unjust judge.

2.4.   Desire breeds desire, suffering breeds suffering.

2.4.1.      Desire in breeding adds texture to the veil, or in other words adds to humanity’s mask collection.  Thus in breeding desire adds mass to the world.

2.4.2.      Suffering in breeding is constant¾it maintains the same mass now as it did at the beginning of time.  Suffering defies mathematics:  it multiplies but never increases.

2.5.   The human project is not to eliminate desire and suffering but to become them.

2.5.1.      We are destined to suffer and desire.

2.5.2.      Only by accepting desire and suffering (discomfort, loss, alienation, incompletion), do we stop fighting them and give ourselves over to their random rule.

2.5.3.      This becoming is the divine project.  If we, individually and collectively, become desire and suffering, we abdicate the need to enact our desire or seek vengeance for our suffering.

2.5.3.1.            Technology and art are the couple who can facilitate the appearance of progress toward completion.

2.5.3.1.1.      But while technology increases desire and suffering through its global and instantaneous mirror production, it equally ensures they remain infinitely distant by placing them within another skin, the skin of the machine.

2.5.3.1.2.      Meanwhile, art only facilitates such an appearance for those for whom art and names belong in the same metaphysical house (which, admittedly, are the physical majority).

2.5.3.2.            This becoming is impossible to complete.

2.5.3.2.1.      If it were completed, it would no longer be a becoming.

2.5.3.2.2.      If it were completed, we would not have become suffering, for we would not be alienated¾that which simply is is not separate from itself.  Yet we are becoming more separate from ourselves or from what we feel is or was ourselves, our very definition being (or becoming) that which is separate.

2.5.3.2.2.1.            This separateness is a kind of holiness, and the only holiness we will be offered.

2.5.3.2.2.1.1.      In the ultimate ironic twist, alienation becomes holy.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.      Against all philosophy, religion and psychology, all systems and yearnings of healing and wholeness, we become truest and best as we cast ourselves in the sea of sin.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.1.            This casting cannot be active, for such is a rebellion against healing and wholeness, and all rebellions participate in the perpetuation of the rule they attempt to break.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.2.            This casting must be passive, a falling, a union with our separation.

2.5.3.2.2.2.            What becomes possibility is never what was possibility.

2.5.3.3.            We cannot become desire and suffering, but only desire to become them.  This desire includes their absolute incarnation in us and their absolute eradication from us.

2.5.3.3.1.      While the religious past focused on their absolute eradication, the techno-aesthetic future focuses on their absolute incarnation.

2.5.3.3.2.      Both will fail, but both must be tried.

2.5.3.3.3.      At the end of both attempts, how will the new be defined?

2.5.4.      To accept may be to negate, to negate may be to accept.  If we were desire and suffering, we might know.

2.6.   True¾desire leads to suffering, but suffering also leads to desire.

2.6.1.      Desire and suffering are like two business partners who have formed an alliance in the world of spirit, but if the alliance is broken, life ends.

2.6.1.1.            Against all nature and science, spirit rules physics.

2.6.1.2.            Nature and spirit are like two parallel kingdoms¾neither of which has heard of the other, neither of which has any knowledge of the other, but both of which utterly control the other’s destiny.

2.6.2.      Equally, the attempt to eliminate suffering or desire leads to suffering and desire.  All paths lead there, so one might as well accept them.

2.6.2.1.            Acceptance is dissimilar to seeking.

2.6.2.2.            Seeking fulfillment or removal is still seeking.

2.6.2.3.            Seeking. Accepting.  Is the difference between these the difference between society and nature?  Isn’t the human that which is both and neither?

2.7.   If one could experience desire as equally suffering and suffering as equally desire, names would become like art in a gallery of nature.

2.7.1.      But this would require the experiencing one to know nature in ways that have become impossible externally.

2.7.2.      The only remaining gallery of nature is the unseen one within.  To cultivate this garden and place art within it¾who can do this?

2.7.3.      This union¾of nature and art, desire and suffering, names and namelessness, striving and sacrifice¾within the garden of oneself is to bring Buddha and Christ, East and West, together.

2.7.4.      Such a union does not eliminate desire and suffering, but brings their dimensions into mirrored life, the death-life we live and are, so we can see and groom them.

2.8.   I desire desire, certainly, but I also and equally desire suffering; isn’t this the truth humanity has hidden in the folds of history and each individual in the closets of his dreams?

2.8.1.      To pursue equally desire and suffering, primarily in oneself, secondarily in others, to pursue equally comfort and discomfort¾surely this is the only spirituality, the one uncoded by the past.

2.8.1.1.            Any spirituality of the future, any sacred text that might appear through the holes in the webbed earth, must then include these tensions.  And not just these—but its own antithesis, its own negation.

2.8.1.2.            Uncoded because there was no language to negate language—or rather, in geometric terms, the surfaces available for the code were insufficiently large to begin appearing as a sphere.

2.8.2.      Primarily in oneself because the self must be the prime laboratory for the experimenter and adventurer of new forms of God.  One must feel directly the joys and agonies of suffering and desire.  Without this directness, one is a charlatan.