The wet gray ropes of the mop-head loosely swerve back and forth, folding its wetness back as if to untie and tie the dust and grime of the pine kitchen floor, this mopping seems to pick up and absorb the golden light then paint it back, more gleaming now in the frame of the film into the screen of the hand-held video camera, or gleaming now in its projection onto the wall, the wall is mopped now in digital affect in an otherwise dark room. It’s night but it is day in the film. The mop inscribes mopping the floor onto the wall, while the feet of the mopper stand aside visible and bare, stepping now quietly in the frame, leading this erratic waltz, dipping its partner in and out of the periphery, hands we see now on the long neck of the mop, leveraging its weight and moment. The mop hand-held, the hand-held camera. This choreography wants to innovate a loosely methodical technique of looking. Look at this mopping, beautiful, light coming in through some unseen window. I’m filming this mopping now, now I’m writing this mop film and it is in these relationships, in this necessary field of our activity, that the image comes into play, attention, only to outrun perception on every side.
Poach or Go Feral
There are two choices for the Domestic Mystic in contemporary society: Poach or Go Feral
“Domestic” 1. She is a ________. 2. The realm of the home, as in sweeping it, keeping it. 3. The dome of atmosphere around the earth. 4. The sky is domed by our presence in it, by our phenomenological view, that is to say our being within the physiological boundedness of our senses. Looking up at a space which is both a depth and a surface encloses us gently: the sky. We see into a distance at the limits of our own perception, so we reach out into a field of vision roundly, and our vision becomes like gravity, drawing space toward us, toward the location and depth of our bodies. 5. As opposed to foreign, as in “policy.”
“Mysticism” 1. In cultivating the techniques of the body, i.e.. weeping, praying, sweeping, whirling, sitting, walking, breathing, prostrating, incubating dreams, refraining from speech, enduring illness, one has “experiences.” 2. Mystique of ________ (dreams, high heels, the red fox running into the woods, etc.) 3. Transcendent, transcending the body, not the body, the body alight. 4. The “core” of religion, at the “source” of its prophesy, as in God speaking to the prophet. 5. If Religion is: “THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN IN THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES TO STAND IN RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER THE DIVINE” then Mysticism is the direct relationship, the union Ineffible, Noetic, Transient, Passive. (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 27 & 206-207.) 6. Visible & Present, Agnostic & Open, Circular & Repeating, Agential. 7. Authority of ___________________ is what I want to poach. Alterity of _________ is how I poach it.
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Domestic Mysticism Ritual Remake
“O a pure pure tedium. With and without ideas. A lovely pure tedium.” -Robert Duncan
The violence of writing a sentence is that it carves away everything else possible to be said.
I must have read this somewhere; someone else must have said it, so the violence too comes from the fact that the idea is carved in me and it’s carving is my belief that it is true.
But I love writing a sentence because I know it can be revised, rearranged, added to, erased. So it has freedom in it. And even if it is brutal in its inception, elbowing other nascent ideas out of the way, it then has a delicate, ephemeral nature; it is itself subject to the violence of continual change. Writing has a vulnerability which is not my own vulnerability, but which displays a likeness to my own contingency, to my own body’s spatial exposure to the elements, to its temporality which is its continual slipping out of the world of time. Language as its being written and this breathing bodily existence seem to me now to share this perpetual perceptual undertow.
I hadn’t the intention to write about writing. I am tired of meta-moves in the game of language; nonetheless it is the ground I sweep before I find I can say a thing. I had intended to write about film. I’m making a film. Actually, I’m remaking a film, revising it with entirely new footage. The film is about ritual. The making of the film is a ritual in my perpetual remaking of it. The film is a documentary, or it is a document. It is, or I want it to be, a silent, visual sentence in which the syntax of subject-object formation repeats itself into a kind of oblivion. Ha.
You do not see the entire body; you never see the face. You see the repetitive actions, hands under a running faucet. You see feet leading the dance with the broom across the wood floor. Dust piles, square-headed nails nestled deep in the pine. You see the gas burner burst into its ring of flame. You see it light again. You see a hand arc a rag across the surface of a sprayed mirror; light in the mirror, no face. Scrubbing a spot of splashed wine off the wall. Folding a towel into eighths. Like a sentence, all this takes place in black and white…
Occured in Lincoln, MA: Five Definitions
Domestic Mysticism:
A small frog in the sink
interrupts my grandmother’s chard-rinsing
while outside, rain falls in a cement birdbath.
I am there, here, but where.
Domestic Mysticism:
We go by
second or third names,
nicknames, name games,
and no one can know
to speak our first
which is a face
not a sound.
Domestic Mysticism:
I cannot agree on anything
abstract. But reeds at the edge
of an estuary, the saltwater filtered into standing
up to wind, to day
in a painting of Cape Cod, I imagined I could enter,
drown beneath.
Domestic Mysticism:
Fade of burgundy print
patterns a soft sheet.
Everything seems
and seems to belong,
as a color belongs to its fabric,
silver to a spoon,
or, I have been here.
Also, the limit to description,
definition, inscribes itself
in a pattern which can only describe
its repetition, petition
for asymmetry, repletion.
Domestic Mysticism:
Silk button in a drawer, silk flower
sewn onto some mistake
righted.
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DOMESTIC MYSTICISM / URBAN POST-CONFESSIONALISM
Stray iridescence, vagabond jewel in cement, I have absorbed you
through my foot bones, pain prayers, wandering out here
in the urban gardens, (I’m not tough–)
Only resting now inside a bus, well lit and filling up,
home and homelessness cycles as breath, a string strung through a shared sense.
A string around my wrist broke long ago,
and this was how I became a consumer
of gels, foams, glitter, with nothing to hold onto but a vision:
gold nugget replica in the museum, a cigar box painted black as a piano,
purple feather and netting of a felt hat in a window, ordinary, extraordinary
nimble things without presumed significance, between ownership
(blue-finned fishes teething on my limbs)
and my perception an object
too, a carbonate bubble lined in layers and layers of ether,
everything, everything, and isn’t it how.
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I was always out west
Dear chokecherries,
Bright down low. Dear ponderosas and smokey chipmunks harvesting pine cones in a fall morning. Last night,
the creek was so clear and cold–
–two bull trouts flashed by, away, even the blooming olives could do nothing to lure them–we waded through the braiding stream and over driftwoods turning to mulch, casting nymphs, stripping back streamers through pools which, as the atmosphere darkened, grew no less clear, and we caught nothing–we were “fish, naked inside the wind.”
Something in me likens a letter I will never send, dear chokecherries, at the base of the ponderosa which reminds me of home, in which someone has hacked a terrible cave–for firewood? or just to be cruel? I touch the tree and look up, it branches less fully on the hacked side, but still, the tree stands higher than the rest. The top of it young as new growth on the ground, the lower branches darkened with moss, and this looking pauses itself in an inability. A lack of communication between life forms. My pity and awe, my blindspots, my inability to imagine being, the bark breaking–I want to throw all my ideas away, but they keep coming back to me–
Like nature.
Dear father, we are learning how to fish.
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Another argument for the ordinary
Once, recently, I tried to explain Domestic Mysticism to a glass artist. The whole articulation made me wonder, again, about the nature of the idea in particular, and also about the nature of ideas in general. How much fluidity can an idea bear to run with? An idea is not a vessel for something real and contained/containable, but it is a vessel in that it is a thing made (and which can be, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, unmade.) The glass artist said, I too make vessels. We are in a world of vessels, I said.
And then what I said was this, or something like it: Mysticism in traditional terms privileges, and tries to open the individual up through specific ritual practices to, the experience of the divine. To experience the divine, in these terms, is set apart from ordinary experience–so, one must practice asceticism, take hallucinogens, chant, spin, sit for hours, and then, and thus, enter an abnormal state: ecstasy, realization, transcendence, purification.
But these states, exoticised and idealized, presume that ordinary experience is static, not real, and impure in some way. The mystic feels an intense need to transcend the world, the ordinary, the domestic, the mundane, the self. The mystic feels an intense separation from the divine, and a need to dissolve the boundary between self and the source of light and otherness. This longing is emblematic of the escapist tendency in humans which, at its most interesting, causes mysticism and art, and at its most dogmatic and vile, causes orthodoxy and fundamentalism. I do not intend, as a domestic mystic, to rail against mystic tendencies, certainly not against all art; even religion has its place sociologically.
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