[published in X 1 (2022): www.x-n1.com]
[photo by José Castrellón]
You are not on
earth as you believe, but lighting, fleeing its proper place, never sped so
fast as you, going back to yours.
– Dante, Paradiso
To know everything
in a flash takes an eternity in the illusion of time while you gradually die to
yourself.
–
Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing
There’s restless joy in standing
watch and waiting!
–
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The question is where to stand (?)
“Love means that you remain standing close
to your Beloved, when you would be deprived of your attributes.” So said Hallāj, whose
decapitated “trunk remained erect for two hours [after] the head fell between
his two legs, repeating a single phrase ‘Only One! O Only One!’”
To stand is to remain standing, to fall
with whatever falls, fly with whatever flies, to flash with the fastest
stillness of the soul, which is “whole and undivided, at once in the foot, in
the eyes and in every member,” especially when your head
falls to your feet. To stand is to hang out with the question where it answers
itself, to hold the line or horizon where “severing is also a joining and a
relating.”
The modern question mark derives from the
medieval punctus interrogativus, which indicates the rising intonation
of the question with a line resembling a flash of lighting suspended above a
point. A/the question seizes with
the continuity of a thunder strike, a stroke connecting being and doing, head
and feet, heaven and earth, cause and effect. Feel the heavy metal shock of
being struck by the question of oneself as another pointing back: “What is this
that stands before me / Figure in black which points at me?” Of being seen by the other
of one’s own vision, “you in whose eyes I have become a question to myself.” Who withstands standing in
the infinite current of their own event? Are you (not) someone “who is struck
by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below . . . who is
perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning[?]”
The form in question reflects the infinity
of individuation’s depth charge, a force hidden within the absolutely
asymmetrical crack connecting oneself to everything. Is one or is one not
intrinsically one with Reality? Is one’s will other than that which is
creating, preserving, and destroying the universe – yes or no!? What fact can
the fact that one is oneself – summit of impossibility – not make to tremble?
As Meher Baba explains, the cause of this whole multifarious cosmic mess
without and within oneself – not the universe or a universe but this
one, today – is the unaccountable whim of the eternal or divine
Reality to know itself, which operates as the universal dialectic from ‘Who am
I?’ to ‘I am God’, generating en route, in the spiral of evolution and
involution, all temporary beings as provisional answers: ‘I am stone’, ‘I am
plant’, ‘I am human’, and so on.
“Beyond the sphere that circles widest /
passes the sigh that issues from my heart” (Dante, Vita Nuova). “Beyond
the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Be silent” (Hafiz, Divan).
To speak without speaking, just breathing the word(s), in passing. To inhabit
language, the so-called “house of being,” like a passerby or prison escape
artist, just standing there.
“We became enamoured of travel,
intoxicated / with the sensation of movement . . . We must go somewhere where
we will not find ourselves . . . More time to consider the lily in another's
heart? / to watch the leaf-bud and flower putting-forth of our own?” Fleeing what? And what the
hell had to happen for a three-staked instrument of torture (trepalium)
used to punish runaway serfs/slaves to become our name for going somewhere (travel),
not to mention labor or useful/productive activity (trabajo)? On the one
hand, “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of
power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their
own needs animates much of early statecraft.” On the other hand, “Travelling
is a fool’s paradise . . . I affect to be intoxicated with sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” Between fleeing and being
forced to stay there is standing, only way out. “Escape,” says Levinas, “is the
need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably
binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même].” Only the lonely. Good
luck to you. O way of being the way!
Flames of sun fall to earth. Earth melts
matter into fire. Fire burns heart into light. Light flashes mind to ash. Ash
condenses into star. Star . . . Love loves you (so do I) without any care
whatsoever about whoever you are. “That the singularities form a community
without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable
condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition [cogito
ER/GO sum]) – that is what the State cannot in any way stand [tollerare].”
Why do you want them to answer your
question???
Rogare, to ask, derives from rog-,
to stretch out the hand (cf. reach), a variant of the root reg-,
to move in a straight line. This is also the root of ergo, therefore, in
consequence of. ER/GO: To stand in the reach of the question which points to
everything as its answer. To touch everywhere by not reaching anywhere, holding
on to the hem, reaching into the roots of oneself with closed hands, asking
nothing. To play the one game, every game, the infinite game of question and
answer, by standing, taking the only possible, the infinitesimal
shortcut (from here to Here), precisely where there is none: “With the infinite
question, there arises also the infinite answer. The infinite question is
infinite unconsciousness; the infinite answer is infinite consciousness. But
the infinite question and the infinite answer do not simply annul each other
and relapse into the original unity of the Beyond. The two aspects have now
descended into the primal duality which can resolve itself only by fulfilling
the entire game of duality and not by any shortcut.”
See how the world, this society we co-create,
wants you to keep moving, shifting, likes you unfirm, choosing, without a proper
place to stand, always towards the next thing, the hopefully yet never quite?[15]
Ergo they cannot stop offering new opportunities to repeat ourselves, to do the
same thing in novel guises, educating us in the opposite of being where one is.
Stop and look, but keep moving. Stand – in line. Browse (a word that
means to graze on young shoots and buds, cf. breast). Whatever you do,
don’t stay. Instead, stay distracted, not where your body is, like January
shopping his mind for May in The Merchant’s Tale: “Many fair shap and
many a fair visage / Ther passeth thurgh his herte night by night; / As whoso
tooke a mirour polisshed bryght, / And sette it in a commune market-place, /
Thanne sholde he see ful many a figure pace / By his mirour.” At least as it passes . .
. you may skip ad in . . . I can “try to take seriously how advertising
never tires of repeating itself.”
Not milk but its mother’s milk is what a baby
needs, food of the one whose mouth puts me wherever she wants, makes me walk on
air. My intellect is a straying
kitten, a babbling infant whose life feeds and grows strong in becoming more
and more centered, stilled in satisfying desire – Et erit tamquam lignum quod
plantatum est secus decursus aquarium (Psalms 1:3) – not in being
promiscuously passed around, but in nursing (from sna-, to swim),
swimming the ocean-flow of love via the sucking, sapient depth of all-consuming
interest: “Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and
multiplying superficial contacts. It requires the preparedness of mind which
can centre its capacities upon selected experiences and free itself from its
limiting features . . . Such whole-hearted concentration and real interest is
necessarily precluded when the mind becomes a slave to the habit of running at
a tangent and wandering between many possible objects of similar experience.” Ergo, the real problem of
distraction as inevitable imperative to remain (become more and more) distracted
by something that all distractions distract from, to distract distraction
itself. To think from one’s feet.
“The feet, which are physically the lowest
part of the body, are spiritually the highest. Physically, the feet go through
everything — good and bad, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty — yet they are
above everything. Spiritually, the feet of a Perfect Master are above
everything in the universe, which is like dust to him.”
What is their stance, they (whoever) for
whom market is mother, touchpad their mouth, browser the breast? In what sky do
their thoughts swim, what horizon their hearts rest? Where the earth in which
their body or soul nests? “Unless a man takes his stand against the
world of a dying civilization, / unless he stops discriminating the patterns of
shadow / and turns his face to the Sun . . .” Ergo: ground yourself by
touching the blessed feet of a cherubic breast-fed metalhead, charged with standing
in the light of that which never has to be brought from anywhere, which fills
the world by staying where it is.
It seems not so much that one stands
somewhere, as that standing is the place where place happens. Here and there,
inner and outer, silence and language, spin around the axis of standing, this ground
zero of the horizon that, pointing to itself, makes all other indications
possible. But who wants to think about that? Why bother guarding the stance
which guards thinking? “Pointing can only be done from a standing location. My
standing location matters because I am in the midst of things, in media res
. . . We are in a place where we can point at the hand and at the mountain; we
are among them. We can therefore think about what is around us.”
Back off (stay proximate), all you posers
who want position (not stance), who crave identity (not birth/death), who like
to take pictures with your eyes (not X). Ergo, what is the photograph, as
materialization of an image of an instant, but a projection of the standing
question, the question of standing, an indexical capturing of the what-is-this-that-stands-before-me
(figure-in-black-which-points-at-me)?
Photography as science devoid of – before/after
– project. The photographed, gaze-species of something invisible, as an objective
not-seeing of someone-who-stands, i.e. the in-stans itself, a gesture of time’s
likeness to eternity or imaginal place in which being becomes. Ergo,
photographer as reflector of the standing that the photograph abstracts into
concrete image.
“[P]erhaps it is from the most obscure and
the most irreflexive depth of the body that the photographic act departs . . .
from a stance rather than a position . . . ‘Stance’ – this word means: to be
rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence, to be at one’s
station rather than in a position relative to the ‘motif’.”
Verbless language. Silent speech.
Motionless gesture. Each thing simply a pointing to everything through itself. Speak
now – after there is something to say: “God made sense turn outward:
therefore / man looks out. Now and again a daring man / looks back and finds
himself. Now and again / after becoming God he speaks.”
Better to point (by not pointing) than
burp a word. “The universe is deictic or indexical, and therefore
demonstratives are better equipped than substantives to deal with it, and
ultimately to provide some sort of account of it.” Dixit insipiens in
corde suo: Non est Deus (Psalms 13:1). The fool hath blabbed to himself,
hath spoken as a substantivist. What are you talking about?
Better that one “s’ascose nel foco che li
affina” (Purgatorio 26.148), put oneself away (abs-con-dere) in flame, staying
in the fire which life never stops being a birth-like leap from and into: “To
be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world.” Better to stand on the
threshold between prepositions, wearing the sandals of the sacred, and there remain
more and more a white hot black metal head. For it is precisely and
paradoxically the iron’s passive power or strongest weakness to resist
omnipotence, the all-powerful impotence of its inability to be consumed by fire,
in other words, the metal’s remaining itself or intensive standing in
the midst of all that strips it of whatever it appears to be, which is the groundless
ground of becoming all fire or liquifying in the love of . . . .
Standing says: I am that I am. Man
walks upon earth, but she stands in universe.
To stay means to remain where you are by
being in your being, to stand by withstanding the heaviest-lightest weight of things.
Not to be someplace but to insist on the in-stance of existence, which “has no
purpose by virtue of its being real, infinite and eternal.” To stand is to
dwell in staying without purpose, to step into what, “being everything and
everywhere, cannot have any direction,” to insist on not taking the first step
of creating a false goal, for the “Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at
purposelessness, which is the state of Reality.”
Stand up and say what you truly think. Do
what you really want. Stay. Stop being mobilized, for life, against death,
vice-versa, always on this side or that, never out of position, never without
project, lost between ends and means, in line. Everything has already happened,
and it will never happen again, because nothing ever happens. Except this. Says
Rosenzweig, “The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to
what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear
and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark . . . Man should not
cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should –
stay. He should stay. He should therefore do nothing other than what he already
wants: to stay.”
But my God what the hell on earth is the
human waiting for?
“Damned I also call those who must always wait
– they offend my taste . . . Indeed, I too learned to wait, and thoroughly
– but only to wait for myself. And above all I learned to stand and walk
and run and leap and climb and dance. But this is my teaching; whoever wants to
fly someday must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance –
one cannot fly one’s way to flight!”
ER/GO: To stay as to wait without waiting,
to stand as waiting to wait. Here is a kind and degree of waiting that
starts by escaping the boring/excited egoism of waiting (waiting as my
waiting), an order of waiting that offers at once the best and the worst way to
wait, as per the three-fold meaning of waiting to wait, which bears 1)
the flat sense of superadded waiting, waiting only to wait more, where to refers
infinitively to the activity one is waiting for; 2) the intensive sense of
waiting as means of its own end, where to signifies the
instrumentality of action (in order to, so as to); 3) the paradoxical sense of
waiting that does not wait at all precisely by deferring or postponing it, that
waits to wait, waiting, yes, yet not yet. Waiting to wait in this triple way is
graspable as a form of eternal waiting, keeping in mind the
word’s double reference to the timeless and the sempiternal, now and forever.
Tying together, like head and tail of the ouroboros, a waiting that never ends
and a waiting that never begins, eternal waiting unites the opposite senses
of waiting to wait around the middle sense of the present
moment of waiting per se. As the anagogic sense of medieval
exegesis proverbially gives a ‘foretaste [praegustus] of
paradise’, finding in the suspended moment of reading the palpable presence of
a truth or reality that is non-futurally to come, so is waiting to wait,
far from being anything that need ever arrive from anywhere else, simply the
immediate elevation of simple waiting, a flight of the ground where waiting
waits.
Neither thinking (cogito) nor being
(sum), but the flash of what links them (ergo) and not even that
because it is that itself. I.e. a standing in the current of what joins
by severing the link between thinking and being.
To
stand or wait eternally, waitlessly, for all that is here and now (nunc
stans). Therefore . . .
