…until thought resembles experience
I have utilized the fantasies of the visionary: bored, infantile, insane, fanatical, aggressively ignorant, hyper-critical.
– Paul Laffoley
originally posted to substack — Dec 30, 2021
The above loosely quoted from Laffoley’s painting I, Robur Master of the World, which is from Jules Verne whom I’ve never read, in reference to some fantastical/technological schematic I have little interest in, not wanting to be extended past extinction by any tech except for maybe the tech of extinction itself as a puzzle about gxd – the sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere
But it sticks, “aggressive ignorance,” I want to think about it. Trying to understand ignorance like trying to touch a ghost. The internal alliteration is lyrical, sexy I guess – slightly guttural then sibilant. Maybe like death metal, the aggressive ignorance of repetition and technical mastery. Or a bodybuilder working to failure, up to and beyond capacity. Speech fails on both accounts – the death growl, the grunt. In my aggressive ignorance I’m past language and into asemia, into Bataille’s non-knowledge where symbols fail as means to “evoke an experience that exceeds the faculty of the intellect”
– another deeply nested reference,
it compares non-knowledge to Novalis’ idea of nescience “according to which all true knowledge is only the ephemeral residue of an ‘ignorance,’ where the insatiable quest undertaken by the mind to push beyond its limits will necessarily take any knowledge.”
And in this autodidactic, incessant feed (how the internet reads me) of commentary on commentary on commentary… what could be a mild, adulterated ignorance is more like a translation that supersedes its origin, pulling as far from the initial source as possible until it snaps back violently like a rubber band – too much until it’s not enough
(Is ignorance closer to or farther away from the source?)
There’s a polar tension that increases intensity. Paradox is aggressive in that its wild oscillations shove thought back and forth between extremes until it breaks itself
(That’s what writing this feels like)
One must waste the mind, work it to failure, move through reason into noise (density of all frequencies) b/c ignorance can also be soft but this is not the type of ignorance that resists expression
(And is reason not aggressive? Intending to dominate and master…)
Moving through the kataphatic <–> apophatic scale (everything/nothing) of gxd (g±d), through every order of angel – Pseudo-Dionysian style – until the sheer polyphony of communication drowns out the self (receiver)
– standing too close to the PA until you go deaf, at which point words are pure vibe
I’m finally able to understand, without knowing anything, absent the distraction of myself
– pure verb
“In other words, what had started out as thought, as the end-point of a particularly rigorous way of thinking, came over time to resemble an experience.”
Which is mystical experience > which is the final understanding of all experience > which is the endpoint of an experimental practice of belief that strives to sever all attachment to belief