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.

daodejing 77

Is not the way of heaven like the stretching of a bow?

The high it presses down,

The low it lifts up,

The excessive it takes from,

The deficient it gives to.

It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient.  The way of man is otherwise.  It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough.  Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire?  Only he who has the way.

Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,

Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.

Is this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?

 

The difference between heaven in Daoism and heaven in Christianity is a matter of geometry and possibly genitals—or at least their corresponding spiritual potencies.  In Dao, heaven collapses—through a radical relativizing—the relation between things (the relation between relations), and so any expected moral hierarchy, by drawing a circle around heaven and earth.  In Christ, man sustains the expectation of moral hierarchy by drawing arrows (teleologies, etiologies) between heaven and earth.  Time, death, origins are central monuments, inexorable, in Christ; they are as wispy and nomadic as words, in Dao.

 

Yet we have in both this notion of good, of justice.  In Dao, of goodness apart from its opposition to evil, of justice apart from its opposition to the law (of words apart from their opposition to silence, of things apart from their opposition for their opposition is a part of them).  A goodness without center or end; a goodness that, if it has a means, its means is not particularly known, other than as one knows the memory of a dream.

 

The sage does not offer what she has essentially, only what she has in excess.  Yet if the sage has anything essential is no clear outline.  Regardless, the sage does not offer what she has in excess to the deficient or the low, but to the empire, bypassing the rough dualities of high and low, heaven and earth.

 

This is the only authentic democracy.  The tree is the tree and does not consider itself better than the cockroach.  The human is the human; why should it be better than the slug or a bog?  I am i; why should i be better than you?

 

If i am muscled, beautiful, successful, rich, talented, famous, fortunate, how easy it is for me to take credit for my state, to draw taut lines of causation.  I am powerful because of my will, my drive, my virtue, my persistency, my blood and heritage, my intellect, my kindness, my perspicacity and judgment.

 

But Dao collapses such pleasant conclusions, such self-serving satisfactions.  Was not this person formed this way, in the same way as a particular tree (by genetic formula and context—in the case of the tree­: wind, soil, environment; in the case of the human: culture, home, environment)?  How can he then take credit for what has been formed into him, what he has been formed into, when he is the murky sum of a formula and a context, a tentative addition, a transient conglomerate of murky inputs and tangled roots?

 

Dao dissolves virtue and morality through their absolution.  It places humans in their place—not slightly lower than the angels or made in the image of God or the unacknowledged legislators of the world or a virus to be eradicated or something to tell the oceans how to live their lives … but as a myriad set of somethings among myriad sets of myriad sets of somethings.  And who can be better in such a context?  One only is, on a sea of is-ness.  This is the way.