mysticism i

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.

Man Meets Himself

The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban man is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular.  Man’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; he lives in his dream.  But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as he had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when he lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently).  Considering that he has invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s got worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than man thought—he resorts to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among him cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.

The problem is that man has become the god he’s always wanted to be.  The creator.  The arbiter of good and evil.  The writer of the text of knowledge, the one who eats that text and is not ashamed.  The confounder of language.  The fashioner and remover of fig leaves.

Except to the one who has become a machine—driven by its dictates of productivity and repeatability—all these grand accomplishments seem rather unsatisfying.  To this one who refuses the heady drugs of romanticism, no satisfaction is available to him.  The Stones’ famous song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they likely imagined.  Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and man has something to do that society considers useful.

But the futility of our projects is intuited in man’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition he blocks by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as he can afford into that growing vortex.  The gushing new is absolutely, tyrannically necessary … it’s the force that keeps society intact.  Although the consumer frenzy may destroy us, giving it up would also destroy us, a paradox that is—if possible—more horrifying than the futility of our efforts.

And what does the one of no-satisfaction do?  He does not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and he left that playground some time ago.  He neither protests nor hides nor preaches.  He accepts what comes and bows outwardly to the rabid building around him.  He bows because not to bow is to draw attention to himself … and that is not worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.

In effect, he becomes an eye.  He becomes what God became.  What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became.  Still, silent, desolate.  A black unspeakable center.

The discerning reader may well ask—what then, to the visible eye, is the difference between the one who conforms to the machine and the one who bows but whose bowing is an act?  This is the irony—in the realm of flesh, there is no difference, and as only the realm of flesh, of quantity and things, matters to machine’s children, life can go merrily along and only those who have swung from hope to despair and can’t get back have to be punished.  That other realm—the realm of spirit—only matters to those who are acting, for they require its strange energy to build and sustain their masks.

Peering and Peering

My god peers through human eyes, hiding as it does in vision’s absence.  It peers through this human—this human that something sometimes calls my I—at other humans, seeking what blocks it from seeing other gods.

Is it trying to remove the blockages?  For what purpose, if any?  Does it think in terms of ends or is my god—are all gods—being, it seems, in strange relation to time, resident outside of ends?  Does it have means?  Are these means technological, biological, aesthetic, or according to some other mechanism that might be intuited, then forgotten, in sleepless nights?  Is flesh the blockage? Society? Convention? Ego? Language? Sex? Is it, perhaps most horribly, the gods themselves?  What is it in me (but prepositions and pronouns quickly fail) that even senses and names that something peers?

My god peers through human eyes, and maybe other eyes, and maybe all the eyes that ever are (but this would be quite a feat), and eyes seem in relation to my god as chance to fate or fate to freedom or freedom to chance.

It peers, and seems to pass at times emotions, often violent, into this thing something sometimes calls the I, then this I falls to flesh and fury in whatever form has overcome it.  Does my god enjoy this?  Does it flinch?  Is it the one that calmly seems to say the passing and what’s passed are not important in proportion to my sense of my experience?

My god watches human greed, lust, stupidity, incompetence, corruption, Schadenfreude, pettiness, fear, injustice, indolence, and the common acts of affection that gently stab our veils of misery, and what does it do?  It peers through my peering, and whether the words, feelings­—and consequent thoughts and action—that arise from these concentric circles of eyes are something that are passed between the circles, whether they are passed unidirectionally, bidirectionally, according to different principles according to which direction, not at all, or in rough conjunction with some geometry yet undiscovered, who might claim to know?  And if someone should have the audacity, ignorance, and/or blessed-cursed gift to somewhat say, what criteria would the rest of us have to separate their words (if words they [or their gods] choose [or are compelled] to use) from that noise we not infrequently call communication, if separation is indeed the act most efficacious for a process that we barely seem to comprehend, if it exists at all?

Nevertheless, my god peers and all this peering is not tumult.  On occasion, an occasion brought about (if we can even speak of causation here) by exhaustion or serendipity or what certain humans might call failure, eye through eye passes onto other eyes and all that seems to happen is this passing.  Silent, bright-dark, calm, seemingly impossible in the molecular chaos that circumscribes us.  Are such occasions­—pure peering—what we might want to call enlightenment?  Can we, as certain gurus proclaim, sometimes loudly, never leave this state?  Or, as certain poets indicate, sometimes softly, do we truly enter it only in death?  But there must be other ors, which maybe stretch as far as language into the night we cannot grasp, snapping back at times to nothing.

If all gods peer—if the very nature of the divine is peering and all that we might have ascribed to divinity simply our own conflicted responses to peering projected, often desperately, onto the eyed peering itself—but peer differently, through diverse modes, hindered in various degrees by the humans they inhabit, then what might be the sum of these peerings, if indeed we can even place this problem (if it is a problem) in the crisp sphere of mathematics?

My god’s peering feels to me as if some other eyes have abducted a space behind my eyes—some hermitage or forge hacked from old rock and fossil, a stranger pitching residence, an occupation my mind may deny, resent, attack, or describe.  I prefer to describe and in describing feel my eyes staring in a mirror at eyes that might not be mine, this feeling an encounter I might call a womb of art.

Is my god, then, a voyeur, a kind of transcendent peeping tom, one who peers itself but resists all standard human methods of being peered at?  Oh vision of vision!—which seems even not to require human eyes for its murky work but only itself, housed in living flesh, some senses active, requiring not even output for its satisfaction (output being a human manufacture, perhaps to attempt to counteract [or mimic] the foreign force behind), but only peering.  A vision that often has no vision, a dependent vision, a concatenation of prosthetics and little else, source and defiance of science and art, a usurper of space, a tramp and sneak, a rogue, a thief, a chameleon, opportunist, liar, a human-eating dog … what god is this?

My god peers, and Peering might be its name if it were given to names.  But I am given names and given to being given and given to peering at that which peers through me.  And what—the question lurks, anxiously—is the effect on me as I begin to peer at peering?  Do my god and I become peering peers?  Do I usurp space (non-space?) in it behind its non-existent eyes?  Does my god become unsettled as it realizes two can play its unsettling game?  And then what happens?  More eyes?  Eyes manifold and multiplying, crawling into beckoning space on language’s weary crumbling track, eating words into the wordless night?

If some thing bumps into earth some billion years from now, might it discover only a sphere of eyes—this our tribute to existence, a footnote to the fact that vision has existed?  Or, still, the same old war and garbage?  Maybe this thing that bumps eats eyes or vision, and is grateful, for it is hungry after many light years of traveling; it eats our tribute and our gods, belches, and returns, spawning stories of a planet of eyes and more hunger.

My god and I, competitors and collaborators on the ancient stage of eyes.