1 (a movement)
To be god(s)-forsaken: to sense divinity, to stumble upon its signs (to have at least that one, memorable time, been a sign of divinity), but to have pathways elude you.

The outsider mystics, their painstakingly codified systems of (non-)knowledge found sometimes in both basements and attics, both living rooms and tombs: in all of their splendour and candour, in all their wealth, they are all predicated on a gliding, veil-piercing movement.

To know the movement (is to know that the veils are infinite). To partake in raptures, in instantaneous instants of being-taken, or being-wave-swept. To have mastered the technique of a burning point whose scintillations inaugurate paradox: the pendulous continuum; to live through methods of sense derangement and to lick the funkiest underbellies.

Never, however, to be invited onto the flights of ever-penultimate fancy about the likes of which you read in codices, in grimoires, in encrypted files.

In other words, to suffer through a god(s)-forsaken mode of environing: to be unable – when a glide occurs and a power is seduced into being-experienced – to harness that power, and to be incapable of fuelling with that power a mythopoeic (en)act(ment).

To choke on a ghost.

2 (wastelands)
To question whether they should have harnessed it and put it to work rather than tremble.

To remember that they have all remembered that ecstasy is in the gap, or is the gap – whatever one feels upon inserting one’s carnality into an other orifice – even if they would never admit the accuracy of ambiguity.

Iconophilia: to subvert encryption by loving the cipher; or by destroying the crypt instead of opening the catacombs of the alphabet. To be without a crypt, without a tombstone: to no longer be banished into absence and separated from a(n after)life of disintegration, dispersal, alien nutrition.

A wasteland may be a realm in decay, plagued by the incompetent rule of a limping king. In spite of that, a different wasteland: to squander is to sanctify. To be holy while being trash, intoxicated and meditating atop a pile of corpses. “I’m a poison worm, I thrive on poison.”1

To contemplate is to designate a temple space: a place for contemplation. To contemplate a system is to effect a (hypo)stasis. There are subsystems contained within metasystems which are simultaneously subsystems of other metasystems, but to suppose a system is to vivisect a preselected section of something not larger, but simply faster – to cut off a stem and proclaim it dead even as it sprouts new leaves, to ignore the fact that everything glitches.

To glide is to glitch. To fall off the map, but onto what territory?

Demons have been put inside the body of flesh, of earth, of all the elements. Angels are posited on the outside of these bodies. To move past these hypostases: towards non-spatial motion: towards emotion. To go neither demonward nor angelwards. To go awkward: in the wrong direction.

To collapse onto yourself is to receive the gift of the rift. Into the outer they have carved the inner, so that the inner seems to be inside, or in the middle of the world. Or: the map shows an exterior, an interior, and something in between, a middle realm: skin, membrane, the media realm.

Koanic query: if there is a middle realm and an interior, which one is more in the middle?

To collapse onto yourself is to receive the gift of the rift, the rift being the gap through which viral movements pass, and thus through which perpetuation occurs.

“Haunted by the idea of knowing what the key to the mystery is, a man becomes a reader of detective novels.”2 “Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”3 To write is to send letters from the bone prison of written word.

Quest: to perpetuate the possibility of sainthood in a god(s)-forsaken wasteland.

3 (to follow your sound tracks)
To grieve for reverberation in architecture, to fear its death in lived experience: to track tracks for tracks’ sake is paramount and tantamount to attending to voices in decay. To hear is not to listen, or are you always tricked?

Heteroglossia: those who voice themselves through you are many, but this can still be orthodox, which is to say homogeneous; all hail the spine spire. Heterodoxy: those who voice themselves through you are many, and they bring with them heterogeneity; are you sure there’s only one tooth per socket in those velvet, violet gums of yours? Alternatively, you may trace the curvature of a previously unknown rib.

To, upon speaking, scrape your tongue on the bristled multitudes that populate you. To recognize that you are a medium, a mediating body, a rift elemental. To reverberate is to be made of multiple echoes.

And yet, those (and many other) things: to unfurl like a budding fern, that is to say to reveal nothing but the unfurling, the movement; to trust that you have received a message in (y)our sleep – to challenge your world to warrant such trust.

If to abandon transcendence is to assume it has already been achieved, then to undertake katabasis is to exit existence. Existence: a fortress of hypostatic transcendence, an error which no longer wants to err. The bone prison.

Regardless, to pursue transverberation and attain the state of grace alongside which “the heart receives, it knows not how or whence, a blow as from a fiery dart.”4

To sustain transverberation is to be pierced through (a shiver is sent down the spine spire, a quake shakes the ouroboric ribcage). Subsystems within metasystems within subsystems within metasystems ad nauseam; a hypostatic body of echoes transverberates itself, inserts itself into an other orifice.

Labyrinthine metamorphosis: to glide is to glitch is to be pierced in a veil-piercing movement, which is not to say that it is simply you who are the veil. To say so would be to merely homogenise.

A machine carries on carving insides into outsides, and you cannot leave the machine without remaining inside the opposition of in and out that is now carved inside you. It is of no use to exit into or enter out of; the machine is still in order, powered by the ugliest myth. Gone, went to the other shore, or are you still swimming? Were you ever not swimming? Thus, to abscond (is often to sound like the reverberating decay of a high-pitched chime).

Question?

Note
To have ventured with the following companions:
Georges Bataille2 (a sorcerer’s apprentice),
Bruno Schulz (a mythopoet extraordinaire),
T.S. Eliot3 (a Knight of the Round Table),
Michael Kirkbride (a loremaster),
Ramprasad Sen1 (a goddess’ poet),
Timothy Morton (a dark ecologist),
Jean Baudrillard (a shadow dancer),
R. Murray Schafer (an ear-cleaner),
Hildegard Westerkamp (a soundwalker),
Saint Teresa of Ávila4 (a heart-pierced lover),
Dorothea Tanning (a sleepy alchemist),
Julia Kristeva (an investigator into the nature of milk skin).