“Failure comes before everything. We fail to communicate or we never learn to speak.”
…bewilderment circumnavigates, believing them at the center of errant or circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent.
Fanny Howe, Night Philosophy
originally posted to substack — Dec 01, 2021
Mystic communication is inherently failed – anything ineffable evades detection by description b/c description desires, it eats instead of sees [Weil] and maybe what it really takes is the kind of attention that dies in the eye – “something in the eye is changed into what is seen, and therefore something in the eye dies in seeing” [Porete]
I can’t be I can only become, no solid ground from which to speak
Sight into speech functions on a fantasy set up for failure – the dream of distance in which desire is kept failed, as desire is –
Like I thought I could substitute desire for faith
Or is faith this kind of desire and how do I sustain a durable delusion, strategically position my desire so that I to lose consciousness of the object, the “reality-referent,” in order to enact the RAPTURE-DIVERSION of Mohaghegh’s mania in Omnicide:
“…one must invent some ecstatic distraction, a pastime, to remain unthrottled by longevity …never with the dialectical flaw of fantasy that remain conscious of the original reality-referent, never with the helpless economy of delusion in which the madman loses the capacity for creative intervention, but rather as a phantasmic dressing of the impossible core endeavor… with a side-chimera… This peripheral overlaying of the illusion upon illusion, in turn, lightens the experiential load and makes the otherwise dank assignment into an avatar of excitational desire (rapture-diversion).”
A tactic of subsistence that keeps the mystic (or madman) functional, in a sense. Able to communicate? That keeps the dream alive as dream, the burning desire to believe rather than the belief itself, failing… leading to the perfect city of the fecund
Or how does failure make the world
We become what’s wrong
or we never
at all
The seduction of origin is mirrored in every material, affect – a reflection. And Sophia could no longer distinguish above from below – a bewilderment induced by love
What she thought unmediated was instead an echo from below. So she fell into the depth, she was beckoned and deceived. Heaven’s light mined in a boundless sea of glass, the biblical waters of chaos over which the words of genesis moved, drove her out of her mind – desire, trespassing love. The layering of illusion upon illusion through which Sophia gave birth to the objectivation of her own passion. The adamantine error that made the world
Earth from confusion, water from terror, air from grief
Intention can’t just be undone
“Even in error the thought of an Aeon constitutes reality and lives on in its effects.”
(Is error to failure a lapse in the trajectory of intent. Does faith in the mirror create material substance. Triangulation, the rapture-diversion:
the lover, the beloved, and love’s reflection
the lover, the beloved, and the mirror
I can’t love love, I can only love myself loving
never-there and always-here)