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.

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.

madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.

madnesses iii

the official migration from nomenclatures of madness to nomenclatures of mental illness, like that from personnel to human resources, like that from word to language, indicates typically less the truth being stated, more questions of the distance between dark and light.

as published values and laws provide quotidian dreams and nightmares to navigate the expressed emotionality of society and the unwritten, value and law permeating the published, provides the actualized sacred, so money and sanity.

the sacred that refuses actualization but in transient form is madness.

the varied circumscriptions of madness are surely differently delineated than the varied circumscriptions of sanity.  but by what? and by whom? and this what and this whom on what authority outside these particular circumscriptions?

if the will to power is already and equally a past twig in the rapids of history as madness, personnel, god, word, nature, what might it now be?  the will or non-will to energy? a reproduction?  a misnomer, misboner?  and how might this be related to the will to sanity?

sanity is collective, madness is individual.  sanity is individual, madness is collective.  what is the despoken word that holds supplely this appearing contradiction?

madness might only be the air that surrounds and infiltrates solidity, the necessary elemental counterpoint to monumental sanity.

madness might be another name for sanity if it were not for sanity’s necessitated need for definitional existence.

i have walked, with purpose and without and often not knowing which was which, the alleys of words and shifted through their garbage.  i have seen the worn walls of meaning and not gone mad. or wholly mad.  i have known in my blood that all the sane have said and all the mad have said balance on the scales that hold the universe.  and to some of the sane and some of the mad this knowledge is the greatest sanity; and to some of the mad and some of the sane it is the greatest madness.

it is not as if i would have the mad rule the present world.  but some other world?  (and, even so, i would hardly have the sane rule this one.)

if the present world is the best of all possible worlds and the worst and neither – which it all surely is – i would not (being not given to be able to choose between sanity and madness) present myself to the present (and so to those who rule it) but attempt to develop the arts of depresenting and through these avoid it.

we might speak of sanity as the void that bespeaks itself in the falseness that wears truth, and of madness as the void that bespeaks itself in the truth that wears falsehood.  two dancers on an infinite empty stage in perfect night, the only audience themselves.

sanity is less a reason that, founded on sensuous evidence, founds a more proximate relation with truth than other modes, founded on other evidence in other ways, and more a way that wears the name of reason, as a stretch of road might bear the name ‘Alphonsi’ but instead bears ‘Fifth.’  This ability to hold onto a particular name and have a particular value ascribed to that particular name, when wholesale evidence is lacking, being as we are minutely in time and hardly even in eternity, is perhaps sanity’s greatest attribute.  madness might be less committed to founding and holding and ascribing, and for this it is called mad.

as sanity manufactures madness to further its purposes, can we also – and if so in what similar and different ways – speak of madness manufacturing sanity?

for are not the mad the ones who see death in the lineaments of life, hope in the lineaments of despair, and leaves on the lineaments of words?  for seeing what is not and yet what is in what is, are they not mad?

that the sane see cannot be denied except at a certain cost.  the legitimacies and illegitimacies of this seeing, this denying of denying, this cannot, may be the seeing of the mad.

madnesses ii

certainly the currency of money can entitle its holder to safely play with society’s constructed lines between sanity and madness.  as we see, various sectors of fiscal wealth reveal on lit and comfortable stages the eternal intermarriage of sanity and madness, providing tents of release for the many who carry the burden of maintaining separations and the appearance of madness as an external thing.

language’s role as the currency exchange of sanity is indisputable.  what remains disputable is the table of contents for the exchange’s manual.

whether madness is inclined toward fragmentation or unity is a question the self-designated sane tend to avoid in any extended musing, being themselves inclined to both.

the relations of madness with possibility and dream are a hardly nascent science.  all we can say in our bare infancy is that god, at least as creator, was mad and that the subtle and fashioned schizophrenias of sanity depend on the madness of god, the incoherence of dream, and the possibility of impossibility for the entirety of their comforts and breath.  little will advance here until the essences of religion (the psychology of the inhuman) and science (the geometries and mathematics of the senses) sufficiently converge in yet articulate dialogues.

the recent rise on history’s plane of wellness, of mental health, of the psychotherapeutic professions, conglomerates, vast merchandising and retail franchises – and so of madness as a core industry – indicates nothing like progress in any sense, other than as a further accumulation of cultural artifacts, and rather may point to an increasing insecurity and insularity of the species that requires such industries for its vast protections.

if time is money, it is also madness.  the three are united in a manner not dissimilar to the muses.

as what is routinely called civilization continues to migrate farther from its dark origins into habitats of eternal and artificial light, it may be that sanity takes on, culturally, a function analogous to the alphabet, technologically.  whether earlier warnings about the correlative increasing prostheticization of the human soul, in relation to the alphabet, are relevant to sanity is a question perhaps worthy of further practical and theoretical explorations.

madness is a language family, within it as many languages as sanity.  who would trace these trees and relations, these syntaxes?  who would translate among the many speaking things?  who would know the wind’s dark mind?

do not say – oh, that barely babbling thing with booze for blood, that savage indifferent to its killings, that lump locked in the lacunae of itself are mad, while this executive vice-president of cards, this towering name of music, this lovely altruistic nun are not.  or say it.  but do not say it lightly.

so little along the pathways of evolutionary diversity has humanity crawled on its hapless and blooded knees.  even colour and genitalia, the names or not of one’s gods, are hardly plural in any bulk and spread, or have simply transferred old tyrannies to new.  we have not even reached infancy in these organics.  but geometries of mind, heart, soul, language, thought, form – our approach here is of the non-existent.  of the non-existent, or mad.  and the two are not wholly distinguishable.

for those babbling in the gutters manifest the coated nonsense of the sane; the sane wear them as an ocean its waves.  and the tongues of the eloquent are covered with blisters of denial and usurpation, and woe to those who hear their words and do not see their tongues.

for would not the one capable of hearing the speakings of the sane and the mad equally, applying neither privilege nor objective, be also the one hardly capable of speaking?  so language, sanity’s exchange, does not trade when madness’ stocks have equal value.

based on what i’ve heard the articulate and inarticulate, the loquacious and taciturn, say, i am far from convinced of what is articulate, its source, of any truth in words.

rather than pretending to be mad, i pretend to be sane?  what does this make me?  and if the former is malingering, the latter is …

     for isn’t there always a pretense, and a purchase of that pretense, and often a forgetting of the pretense and its purchase, for the sake of utility and ease?

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 iii

to know in one’s body (and is there other knowledge?) that there are great truths, as equally from those we love as those seemingly outside of love, that wholly negate us is to glimpse god and in glimpsing die.  that humans at various times say god cannot be glimpsed as it is outside existence or that we can glimpse god (even if this be but as god is us) and live only reveals that humans say much.

that god lives in the conforming sectors, those that accept the order of existence and mould their lives to this acceptance and call the moulding wisdom or pragmatism or both or other, that these sectors are the only places god can live (according to that order’s visions of life), hardly negates god’s living absence:  rather, all words (and if god is anything it is all words) have these qualities of multiple citizenship, disorientations, and god is a way of exploring these qualities.

god’s official and legal dwelling is in these sectors – what are called religion, temples, shrines, churches, sacraments, sacerdotal embodiments, established sacred texts, notions and acts of piety, vestments and altars, and by many other names – and, while maintaining certain ironies and necessities, these resident in an inexplicably turpitudinous absence of absence, explicitly and complicitly cooperates in the mouldings, a requisite sector, through ancient prescriptions that don the sartorially visible structures of the day.

while only no one can know where god dwells, god’s de facto dwelling is oracular – in pointings and silences and strange visitations, the plays and shadow flickerings of memory on time’s unattended and broken stage.

certain articulations in the folds of the manifestations of god have claimed to discern good and evil; others have seemingly simply asked how great the distance is between them.  in holding these and other measurements and prepositions inside of us – in our thoughts and actions – do we possibly give ourselves opportunities to glimpse god and die.

why die before death?  isn’t the death we name death a drop of rain among the countless drops, and each a death, so dying before death is a portal to a mode of seeing rain?  god is just a way of seeing rain.

that the human remains so committed to turning rain to stone and thinks that if it were to give this turning up it would die are not holdings without truth; but were it to test other turnings, would it not then turn to liquid ways among the elements of evolution?

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?

gott gedanken denken i

i speak of god, though god be dead.  i speak of god for in its death we eat of the divine corpse through the earth and in eating know it in the knowledge that is not the knowledge of articulation but of flesh before it speaks.

so these words are nothing unless the reader has gotten on its knees and put its face in the earth and eaten of that corpse.  even then, they are nothing, but of a different kind.

in this knowledge – of divine flesh in animal flesh – we see – see with that vision not of words – that god was not god, and that not-god had to die.

i speak of god in its living death, for in our eating god reanimates and death becomes again the molecules of life.

i have so much to say of god and all of it is untrue.  i have so much to say of god and i will say it in its untruth.  for it is only through untruth that we walk the way of truth.

i would rather speak of god than humanity.  and if you say being human all i can speak is the human, i would say, on what grounds even can we speak the human?  on these grounds then i speak god.

the pronouns i use are false.  i say i.  i say it.  i say you.  i could call i they and it we and you she and he.  in god pronouns trade clothes like actors.  and glyphs and phonemes are clothes on what we cannot say.  not just pronouns, but prepositions, adjectives, nouns, verbs – the entire anatomy of speech, naked in its speechless glory, constantly robing and undressing.  words are robbers, aren’t they?  like god.

god is most adept at stealing from itself.  it has stolen so many clothes from itself it forgets what it owns.  and this forgetting is intrinsic to god, this slipping of ownership away.

that god doesn’t exist, that science can’t find it, that psychology doesn’t want it, that religion bypasses it, that philosophy murdered it, that art decreates it, that the crowds as always assiduously ignore it – all this proves nothing, for god disproves.

if god has been sufficiently crafty and bold to take nine billion names, to sacrifice its child, to morph itself through the evolutions of the divine, to twist ladders into running wheels, to lay claim to no merit, it can also stage its death.  non-existence permits such flexibility.

to say that if i speak of god i simply speak of a projection of my own image is to miss that i may not have an image and if even i speak of a projection of an image that hardly falsifies less other speakings and that if i do not speak of god – who will?

the most compelling – often the only compelling – aspects of the human are the inexplicable, aesthetically generative, expansive and boundless, visionary, detached, holographic … what we think of when we think of the compelling aspects of god.

god is just another word, like cabbage, and one is surely not wrong to say god is as in a cabbage as cabbage is in a god.  we grow both, we eat both, we worship both, we kill both.  cabbages evolve as gods do, and both may well outlive humanity.

when it is said – mysticism is truer than i can tell you – we speak of god.  we speak of it in the inability to speak, in the eternal inarticulation of truth.  and we speak of it with a word that is commonly and uncommonly mocked among and not among those of the knowledge classes.  mysticism is not a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy or science; it is a differently rigorous mode:  one can argue a centrally rigorous mode as it uses the central artifacts of life – flesh, breath, and as extension words – as tools.  it relies primarily on the spiritus of the technoanimal that gives itself over to the relation between and among spirit and flesh.