knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders iii

the sun sets on man.  how many times do we need to be told this?  genocide has more meaning.  the sun rises on another day and the day jumps around and barks the way days do and licks my balls in just that special way, and the sun rises, and it rises it also rises, and hemingway is orlando and orlando is walt and walt is in your wallet and your wallet’s blood has spilt and it is empty.  this is what i see on the set of the sun, its pretty bombed hemoglobin stage.  oh monks.  oh monks of my lecherous mind.  build me stages of pebbles, construct theaters of suffering.  take me by the prick into fields of fading labia.  autumn.  today is the first full day of autumn and winter looms like aphrodite in her drunkenness.

hooters is across from me.  condos parade their compassionate faces before our forsaken redemptive world.  coffee loves me.  the hare in my ass is lively and angry and stuck.  it’s going to be a good day.

you haven’t heard it said that the limits of knowledge is the onset of spiritual menstruation.  you haven’t heard it said that to explore the limitless with the limited is the most dumbest  thing and the most central human act making the human the most dumbest thing.  you haven’t heard.  you haven’t read.  you haven’t lived.  you haven’t had.  you.  you.  you you ma.  you you ma ma.

nothing solves tummy aches like tum tums.  tum tums and death.  and death does it better.  death tums.  tum tum de tum tum

rilke taught me something once.  taught me something on his ladder of torture.  but i forget.

nothing solves tummy aches like nothing.  or a rabid rabbit up your butt.

i think of all the teachers i’ve had.  professors, prostitutes, priests, pedants, philosophers, pedophiles, poets, pipers, piped.  and i have to say.  the rabbit competes.

who is more glorious?  alice coltrane, alice in wonderland, alice the girl next door, or alice the closet inside?  i asked this of the oracle and you know what i think i saw her pointing to in the pyretic tundra of words?  alice.

fucker.

i stand on knowledge’s skinny windowsill, pretending i’m cleaning glass.  the dead birds raining don’t help much.  the rabbit helps.  the rabbit and the oracle.  the rabbit and the oracle and the pebble and pee wee and the memory of the dentist and dead mister disney.  everything helps.

woe to you who take the sheets of knowledge and cut them into itty pieces and gouge out eyes and stuff them in your deep pockets and call yourself well.

this is knowledge.  to sit on the toilet some fucked up morning and sing the praises of flighty fate.  to lie below a once-loved corpse and love it even more.  to walk through the sewers on superbowl sunday and compose unfunny jokes and laugh.  to talk as if talking were something other than talking but know it isn’t.  to go to galleries and piss on the heads of oneself.  to collect sheep, placing them one by one in mason jars, labeling each carefully according to burton and archimedes and allen and john, and show them to your girlfriends or boyfriends or whatevers or just yourself and you are the sheep.  you are the sheep and the rabbit and the dentist and the dead.  when google tolls, it tolls for thee.

knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders ii

the esoteric and the homodox, the arcane and familiar, the oneiric and substantial, the purchased and the given, the robed and the naked, the entitled and the violated, the tribal and the hard wind of the commons, that which is caressed and that which is set aside, abnegation and striving, enfeebling and potencies … here, without diminishment, is the knowing that does not know in the currents of quarks.

that yellow is a light which has been dampened by darkness, blue is a darkness weakened by light is no less true today than it was or will be, that every statement is from the non-existent platform of truth true and so to state is to be of the state and in state and people of knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders are less of state than mood and mood a form of homelessness … that this, that this is, is something we might imbue into the imbibings of our formal education systems if it were not for the comedies they so freely grant.  praise be states in their beneficence of tangential wit.  praise be schools in their oblique walllessness.  praise be enculturations in the smiles they hide.  for knowledge is that ancient game we play on time’s broken board.  and we all have the rules.  and i read yours the way i read butter.  and mine in the manner of cheese.

i tell you the truth.  you shall melt like milk in the abattoirs of the law.  and people shall laugh at you like the violence of rabbits.  you shall climb into the bed of your tears like happiness.  and then you shall know.  then we shall know.  then and when knowledge shall rear its rear like cloudy eclipses and the moon shall be full and we shall be blind.

oh little pebbles.  i eat you out like alice.  i grow and shrink like nightmares.  i am no phallus or pink and shiny thing, that jewel in clams in cans.  i am neither satisfaction nor monks.  i may be heat but if i am i am of the kind of popsicles.  the irrevocable fire of the frozen shall be sucked by the eternally starving.  and this is the knowledge you begin losing after kindergarten.

i suck knowledge like an alabaster cock stuck in the forehead of maggots.  i am blood and eyes and both are sucking maws.

you are knowledge.  i take you on my tongue like a too sweet cough candy.  i choke on you.  you are a pebble.  you are a desiccated rabbit.  you are the perfect lie of the cult.  i need you like blood.  eyes eat blood and blood eats eyes and so the world is made perfect again and again.  it is only our knowledge that prevents us seeing this, seeing eyes.

the mirror of eyes is set to the mirror of eyes and what is exchanged between them?  the gods are decomposing.  democracy is a dead bird.  love is mechanical coffee.  music is semen on your face.  and still i love you.  still i love.

knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders i

another human says to me after a community arts festival that ends in white-robed humans, in shadow play and the translucent heads of mythic creatures, gliding, chanting, like humanoid and earthbound clouds, among candles, on and at the base of hills, polyglottally, through a lukewarm late summer evening of threatening rain – looked like a cult to me.  i reply, as pee-wee herman said, one person’s cult is another’s party.

that herman to my knowledge never said this and if he did in contexts so far from mine that we could say he never or barely did, if i assume at least temporarily my context as standard.  that i can and do say to my knowledge.  that i never replied as such.  that the other human only approximated my above quotation of it.  that the image(s) in your mind – if there be image(s) – birthed from these words likely bear little resemblance to what i saw, and these words to other words that might have been birthed from the presumed and ostensibly indisputable actual event, hardly proves but equally hardly dispels the spinning, expanding, morphing, collapsing limits and boundlessnesses of what we learn, and how, and what we don’t.

i am interested in the supposedly existing thoughts of chuang tzu, wittgenstein, kant, hume, foucault, artaud, kristeva, the boys, the non-boys, the non-girls, the girls, and as is well known in non-existent circles, the non-humans (which some have argued include the humans).  but no more interested than in the voices at my co-op’s picnic table, the pebbles in the tiny teeny bitty itty zen garden before me in this café, the repetitive semi-articulations of that lover, or the molasses of the morasses of the marsh mists of the appearances of my mind.

in the paragraph above that begins with another human is all knowledge, all knowledge’s deconstruction, the materiality and immateriality of all things.

in the paragraph above is just another pebble in this zen garden stretching before this and that i to the stars, unseen monks raking, unseen monks constellating, unseen monks whispering, of the infinite love of each pebble, of the sum of all infinities becoming nothing in that way nothing is become.

in the paragraph above i see a ghost of a girl tumbling down staircases of burning manure, men of ostensible maturity and power blanching to fear, for they are seeing saint bernards too large to be saint bernards.  and i want to say – some of me wants to say – i am the girl.  but i cannot.  i cannot for reasons too complex and beautiful and stupid to name.  the reasons are too long.  reasons are always too long.

in the paragraph above is the paragraph below and if you don’t see that you’re dumber than a geriatric cat and i strip you of the name human and turn you into a pebble and you are thereby sanctified in the garden of silences.  these are the paths of knowledge and the signs of the immaterial orders of freedom.

mysticism iv

the innocence of mysticism is what rouses scorn.  yet is it not in this very innocence that the question of humanity is raised, and the new brought to bear?  and is it not before this very innocence that the arrogance of knowledge falters, swoons?

the relation of mysticism and truth totters, like all relations, at an unspoken fulcrum in night’s ill-visited playground.  and yet, outside of that playground, away from the oscillations of darkness, we might say in certain moods that this relation is bound in a manner not dissimilar to the bindings of the womb.

since mysticism is the discipline that cannot be taught, the practice that cannot be shown, the learning that is an unlearning, the play that is never staged, of what use is it?  but that is the question it doesn’t care to ask.

mysticism does not destroy time and space – for what could destroy them? – but rearranges them according to principles hardly cognitive.  this hardly cognitive is something that is set before the world’s beginnings, questioned at the center of the world’s spinnings, and loosed past the world’s endings.

the distance between mysticism and nothing might, in a mathematics not yet invented, in a geometry still imprisoned in dream, be precisely the distance between good and evil, between yes and no.

when i speak, this i made more an i by being less, language is less a function or spawn of meaning, more a film on a window during rain.

the doubt of whether, when dreaming of being a butterfly, i am a human dreaming of being a butterfly, or, when appearing as a human, i’m a butterfly dreaming of being a human, if discredited by science or common skepticism, does not negate the spaces the doubt is trying to reach – spaces that may be alongside or even in the spaces that discredit, for these spaces themselves are spaces of negation and strewn through them holes to playful empathies, perhaps a necessary condition of constructive evolution.

if all this is only sophistry, language games, an avoidance of anything that’s truly life, i, who have known the conditions of those who know such things, would simply hold conditional reflection before them, this glass of nature, this laboratory of time and the human but some broken vials in it.

mysticism might be a way of sensing time not from the present but all presents, history melted butter, the human earth just another sphere.

mysticism, as a particular brand of hallucinatory existence, might be considered the formless form of the physics of hallucination.

mysticism is a means of interrogating nature, while having forgotten words and will.

we have said before that mysticism is the ratio 2:0, where 2 is the experience of the sensuous world, 0 the experience of emptiness, and : the experience of the relation between.

how does the continuously emerging technological global complex affect mysticism?  as an invasive species might affect a fog.

that what is sometimes called nihilism can be viewed as a negative form of mysticism (a negative form of a negative way) opens portals of the relations of time and myth, but barely.  the explorer of relations might use contortionist means to squeeze through narrow passages of language, entering what might be called a funhouse of negation, glimpsing flows of politics, psychology, and art as through an instrument made for alternative analyses.

the classic formula of mysticism – this is that – an equation at the root of art and knowledge, contains within it this is not that, this is this, that is that, that is not that, and this is not this.  without these inclusions, the formula is wholly empty.

if there is curriculum for the mystic, it might be to travel through these inclusions to the formula and through these travels know the formula not as formula but flesh.

i read the distant scrimmages of humans, i scan the daily blood.  the advances in knowledge and speed appear like cats.  the screaming significance of the living is muted by the eyes of the dead.  and the human seems to me less a newspaper than a cloud, more a river than a god.

i am led through the city by threads of energy spun from the grave’s slow looms.  the living blow around me like dust, their voices like bones clanking in the wind.  i am led, and there is no destination but to be a weaver too, to lead some who speak in analytic tongues, briefly, through the dust.  all is energy and dust and a strange weaving.

mysticism iii

to say all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well – neither as a joke nor a commonplace, a comfort nor a privilege, a ruse nor an experiment, but as an acceptance of the all one cannot know … what is this other than a calm absurdity, a replete and resplendent reason?

it is easy to see existence as a jewel, naked in the night and possibly eternal, civilization as a process of time covering up the jewel with fabrics, analyzing the covering, the fabrics, enchanted with the growing bulk, enamored by the changes, the colour and texture of the fabrics replacing the colour and texture of the jewel.  if art’s trick is to show the jewel using the materials covering it, mysticism's might be to remove the materials and know the jewel cannot be shown and that the jewel itself is this inability, the removal a rough simulation of the jewel.

so mysticism is associated with what has been called the negative way.  and all this is is or may be a removing and simulating and not showing.

society – which we could say is also devoted to removing and simulating and not showing – is the positive way, for it removes and simulates and doesn’t show what mysticism doesn’t reveal.

mysticism is perhaps the one unique element of humanity, the core of consciousness, allowing as it does humanity to imaginatively step outside itself – whether through nature, god, art, technology – and doubt reality’s weighty structures and so create spaces – however transient – of grace and, if grace is capable of entering reality’s structures, possibility of form.

if mysticism is oriented to language in silence, community in solitude, light in darkness, inhumanity in humanity, is it not an experiment to find a way through or around the problems that pervade us, seeing no evidence that social-political struggle – regardless of the ostensible goodness to any of its claims – effects at best anything more than a displacement of problem to problem.

everything constructive i have learned i have learned from the mystics in their immense deconstructions, which make scholarly deconstructions seem like décor alterations in a room in versailles and the knowledge of the learned and experienced like dusty wall hangings.  all these other paths, rife with cleverness or utility though they might sometimes be, all seem the same in their unmitigated support for or rebellion against the given world.  but the mystic path, being not a path but a placement in a flow and flows, provides alternatives to the given world and its endless injustices and so – through awe, passion, doubt, plurality, play – subverts it.

one mystic says, i am the universe – what do i have to fear?  another – hide your boat in the universe, then the thief cannot steal it.  the only safety of the soul is this:  the i - which appears at first and for long and chaotic periods as the ultimate non-safety - is recognized as a ruse, doubles, balloons to margins slightly larger than the entire universe, bursts, and disappears in itself.

mysticism is creedless, has no tribe, no fads, hardly a history or purpose, no hierarchies, no alliances, no wars.  mysticism does not contend or claim.

it is not as if mysticism would eradicate flesh, but that it would renew it through greedless gazing.

if mysticism can be said to be oriented to death, is this not less because it sets too little or too much store by life and more because, in an age which does, it sees no use for life?

there is a place for laughter in mysticism, a place where mysticism itself disappears.  and in this disappearance mysticism may be most truly itself.

voices speak in the night of the question, this night that, once entered, encompasses the day.  what is mysticism but a clearing of debris for entering, a clearing of noise for listening, a clearing of thought for translating?

all these other modes of knowledge to which humanity is addicted and for which vast resources are required are modes of building and willing and desiring and endless separations and unions.  but mysticism sidesteps, like a flower on the edge of battlefields, a vision on the edge of screams.

to self-identify as a mystic has a certain discrediting quality to it.  to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet is to be a truck driver or banker or scholar or cleaner or even a poet.  but to be a mystic is not to be – and this is what a mystic is.  so we see mystics hiding, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in thought, sometimes in children, sometimes in shape or flowers or death or a smile.

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.