darkness ii

to pass over in a plane a city at night – is this not a vision less of the indication of civilized constructs of a species and more of the stirred dreams in the human looking down?  and when the plane moves from its island of light to oceans of darkness, what then the dreams?

we may be better thinking less of darkness as anything visual and more as sound.  not silence, for only the space between darkness and light would be silent, but atonal moods at the margins of noise.

we know that darkness – like eternity, justice, love, light, goodness – doesn’t exist in any raw or pure form. thus what we call darkness is always an admixture with light and so its ratios – the amount of light in it – are always shifting.  darkness is variegated and impurified light.

darkness is less darkness and more our giving ourselves over to it.  darkness is the gift of ourselves, a yielding without object.

night is simply day made visible, for isn't crepuscularity the onset of the unknown?

enlightenment if it is anything is endarkenment.

isn’t darkness life that has not been turned into an event and so the overwhelming bulk of life?

aren’t there literatures of light and literatures of darkness?  in the former, tristram shandy, shakespeare’s comedies, orlando, aristophanes, groups and atolls of others; in the latter almost everything.  between but on darkness’ side a range from hamlet to the master and margarita.  this may make it seem as if light laughs, darkness weeps or is mute.  and this is not untrue.  but rather, to be literature, both laugh and weep and are mute.  it is more that the former enter existence through social ritual, the latter through the grave.  both are insufficient comedies, different genres of wit.

that the mystics experience light when through their circles of ordeals, that the dying see tunnels of light, that the supposed achievement of the guru and the goal of the spiritually seeking is enlightenment … all this points only to darkness containing within it its opposite, a concentration of everything, at its center, a sphere with almost no diameter, and this almost-not-thereness only increasing its potency and apparency in the overwhelming black.

what is the distance between you and i, i and i, between memory and forgetting, the unseen and the seen?  aren’t these distances darkness?

this wiring that connects light to life and goodness and truth, darkness to death and evil and falsity – only a particular standard in the linguistic-energy configurations of the universe.  what would rewire us to new standards of possibilities and impossibilities?  where might be the vision to become wireless in ourselves, all connecting to all and from all, the playful and free democracies of consciousness?

necessity perhaps is related to darkness as freedom is, in some collective-oneiric genealogy.  and light?  is light the manufactured apparati that permit screenings of the familial relationships?  the dubious, searing, and unmitigated beams of civilization and culture turned on our irrevocable and lost origins?

if i must speak your language to understand it, is darkness all the speakings i have not spoken, that have not summoned me to enter them?  if so, don’t i live and speak in darkness and my little languages, these candle flickerings, which so often seem to the i as stars larger than the universe, primarily indicators of what i do not know?

so ignorance and darkness and doubt may be the only and vague harbingers of truth, and what we call knowledge an edifice of falsities.  the human in its bulk places its bets on the latter, but the odds of time are set in obscure places, and hardly read.

in the light of knowledge, darkness is no longer possible.  i simulate it in the laboratories of the absent.  i package it in capsules of varied legalities, shoot it in the wretched alleys of god.  i visit the prostitute of art.  i am laid down in the soils of the damned.  these are my rites and sex, my semiotics of love.

darkness

darkness and homelessness are siblings in time’s dysfunctional family.  in a present odd reunion – a poorly attended affair that’s rented my flesh for its drugged party – i find solace in darkness, i sleep in the cardboard box of my blood; familial lineages glide before me in runny colours and difficult flatulences.

the realms of visible politics – identity, sex, gender, ethnicity – are the shibuya of the human psyche … but the realms of invisible politics – sanity, eloquence, blood, beauty, virtue – are the pissed slums of neglected urbanscapes.  the latter are my home; daily i uncoil my diseased prick and whiz on the future.  melancholic jötunn suck me off with their gums and we collapse into night’s putrescent kingdoms.

i wake up daily in a bed of death

i say to the shadow called day –

i will crawl into you

i will make you my companion

we will play together as if we were friends.

but i long for the prayers of dreams

i lust though for the shadow of sleep

death is my lover, the grave my mentor

day – night’s useful mask, void’s awkward other

evening waits like a warm and dirty bath

how beautiful when darkness draws us into her

that dread of this ever-present waking

darkness is not an absence of light, but is polar to and interacting with light; light is the simplest most undivided, homogenous being we know … confronting it is darkness:  infinitely plural, divisive … and so infinitely creative.  colours – shadow and the children of shade – are light itself.  colour is born of and feeds on darkness.

darkness evolves environmentally:  as humans migrate into contexts of perpetual light, so darkness – our deepest need – is constructed and accessed in novel and fabricated ways by these emerging creatures of light.  the materials, maps, hazards, portals, labyrinths, signage, risk management practices and false exits of these fresh routes – the comparison of these to those of the worn ones – all this giving new life to darkness … or rather to humans in their cravings for infinite relations.

at light’s highest point on its ladder, the darkness of things presents itself to me as the simmering surfaces of light.  but at the apex of darkness on itself, how do i see light?  as the animation of darkness?  a misspelling?  as the remnant that questions, dark’s tongue?  a hope that subverts even hope?

any authentic notion of divinity – or at least that of the human unhinged from its overwhelming greeds and incarcerating self-reflections, and so the human not itself – must include that which is oriented to seeing in darkness, regardless of whether it can speak.  divinity is independent of language, and any future notion of the writer, of the book, might place vision – not word – at the center of its dark art.

do i wait for day or do i wait for night?  my orientation to this question determines my comfort with society.

knowledge, while it may be acquainted with day – most certainly an esteemed and professional colleague at times, on occasion a spouse – is night’s lover.

if we were to compare the conversations of night with the conversations of day, with humans being novel to us, would we not conclude we were dealing with two separate species?  so darkness is a language, and who would give themselves to its mastery? and how can it be taught but in unaccredited and disavowed classrooms?

are not the translation arts between the languages of light and the languages of darkness more of darkness, for they are rooted in obscure soils and hardly seed or flower?

to say we are born of darkness and return to darkness neglects that we never leave – we are simply given briefly eyes to see it.

knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders iv

cross the bridge of sighs in your robes of doubt.  sing to the punters of ends.  expose yourself to time and may it violate you.  ascend to wicker prisons of fire and burn.  burn your histories and your myths.  burn your pathetic tears.  burn your love and love.  burn your stupid jokes.  fire is the answer and is always the answer.  and the question?  isn’t everything the question?

knowledge is ledge construction and maintenance and pricing and profitability and enforcement, the ledgers of ledges, unknowledge is no ledge or ledgers, and the immaterial orders are the battle and unity of both.

i walk along my segments of the infinite corridors of knowledge, limping like ulysses, soap in my pocket like leopold, a little butterfly dreaming of better butters, the clouds are labia marching to an unknown war, the concrete sun-dried scrotums, and all’s well, all’s well, all’s always well.

take my hand or my prick or my hernia or something and take me down the well of yourself and show me the knowledge that isn’t there and slice me to death with your perfections.  oh my impossible love.  i have learned how to walk around inside my head.  it may sound silly to you but it’s very helpful to me.

i would like to be a white-robed candle on a hill, chanting pee-wee quotes, burning dumbly.  i would like to be some little retorts.  somewhere in the yucatan mayhaps.  then i would belong to the cult of the human and know the rituals of knowledge and walk the walls of names.  i would know the wellness of wells.  i would know knowledge like i know myself.  then i would shine with the light of the dead gods and reflect the mirrors hiding in the folds of clouds.  but i am not what i would like to be.  i am not what i would seem.  i am precisely the sum of the negations of this text.    

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.