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?

tao te ching 78

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water.  Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.  This is because there is nothing that can take its place.

That the weak overcomes the strong

And the submissive overcomes the hard

Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into practice.

Therefore the sage says,

One who takes on himself the humiliation of the state

Is called a ruler worthy of offering sacrifices to the gods of earth and millet.

One who takes on himself the calamity of the state

Is called a king worthy of dominion over the entire empire.

Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

  

Submission, weakness, humiliation, calamity.  Like desolation, solitude and haplessness, who would want them?  The sage takes these on, not as woeful weights but as rightful fashions to navigate the way she must walk; they are the unfashionable fashions of the way, fashions the sage refashions in her navigations.

What is this knowledge that our reputedly powerful species contains but cannot enact?  Is it the suppressed knowledge of feebleness’ hidden powers?  How do we transform our incapacity into impossible practice?  It has already been thought and written and, having been thought and written, done:  through returning.

To speak truly is to reunite the contradictions of silence in words; to speak falsely is to verbally resolve—that is, to fragment—the inherent contradictions of our existence.

Dao sides with water over stone and in so siding offers sacrifices to the earth, the visible sphere of the empire.