Buddhist mysticism, the joining of seemingly contradictory notions, is relevant insofar as mysticism is rendered with respect to the Buddhist transcendent state of nibbāna. If mysticism is conceived as an asocial positionality in which one retreats from the social in conjunction with entering into the transcendent Oneness of all things, then Buddhism is irrelevant. For the Buddha himself wanders around every street, into each and every corner and teaches nibbāna, the cooled state, the having let the burning passions simmer to room temperature rotted houses tea. But one that God the Christian Father would nevertheless slush around in his mouth, and soon spits out, loose leaves of those tea bag bodies of believers.
But mysticism as a transcendent ontology, and the transcendent ontology as the deathing of “oneself of the illusion of the empirical self”, is appropriate to the Buddhist and life in the Sangha.
Then the dissolving memory that follows the rolling empirical self as with rainfall over the valleys of a face. No longer memory as “having happened to me”; memory as, this night, these persons, this person before these eyes, these birds and this moon. And a body prostrate, falling down as with a gradual weight into the dark cracking wooden floor, to memory as, ⟷⟷⧬*, as *flow in all
ways through an emptying cardboard carton with a number a brand a, such and such contributed this to it to make it be, while it is being in its sogginess in its shredding itself in its strips of leaves drying up sinking down into the non-identity of the field of grass.
But the hostility of the Christian icon.
Hostility defined as, aggressively barring the viewer, the lock made of gold, the scene itself and its saints and persecutors and the landscape itself in expression as houses and trees and wildernesses and mountain peaks=holy, in its theological conception
(separated from [ ] ), the viewer:
I take their large eyes,
the thin nose
small mouth
tiny hands
twig fingers
All elements of the figure all spiritual, for eyes of mine smaller for lack of spiritual meditation, for wider nose of mine wider for inhaling each chain link of smell in the world, for a large mouth for large hands for sausage roll fingers for masturbation of the orange fleshly phallus in the world on others on myself on the complete rejection of the world yet to arrive in me—for this I am not projected onto the egg tempera. I must stare. I must allow it to crawl into my iris. I must forfeit the expectation of entering into it. I the feminine. I the lesbian with myself as soon as I’ve stepped away from the icon and toward a mirror: I in love with rubbing myself with myself as I receive these things of the world and not the world to come which I shall have rejected which I shall not from love for myself.
Isolated in itself, the hypocritical mysticism God grants. Sometimes he licks his teeth and finds my remains. He rejects me from his cooled throat. In his saliva one descends forever heated knowing one is condemned, that one is and only through him one is, that one must be one, that one remembers forever that one is one, one-condemned-me remembering one as me one as one as one trajectory flowing from the displeased soured lips of our Christian Lord.
Yet, despite the abrasiveness of God the Father (and all his plenteous forms), what might be salvaged from the condemnation rests precisely in that feminine identification and lesbian proclivity. Insofar as both are generative, in that, I derive an encompassing view of myself entwined with a love for myself, when partnered with a misreading of Buddhist mysticism shall proceed is a widened eye whose object is endlessly expanding and transmuting the object into a partial, fluctuating subject.
It is, therefore, an expansion paralleling the cessation of the empirical ego. However, what is maintained, by means of the lesbian proclivity, in the incomplete melting of the memory of an “I” is the unfolding of myself across a myriad of plains of abundant material existence. What I withhold from myself is the total withholding of myself; resisting the identification of a non-identification. Despite this, I allow myself to reach the point of boil—to begin a liquefaction while simultaneously remaining somewhat gaseous (or, a self in adjustment, whose gait still spreads across impersonal idiosyncratic paths; e.g., these nights, even those an “I” has not occupied, these nights across these histories, though an “I” had not occupied them).
For despite the illustrious nature of Buddhist mysticism, what I prevent from myself is the cessation of all participation in affect. Rejecting the suppression of the passions to the extent that I still maintain the partial dissolvement of self. Here is the struggle: that I wish to maintain my place as recipient and lover of my recipient nature, which I glean from the intimidation of the Christian icon, while also participating in the reduction of the empirical self. However, the objective imposed onto the latter is that I wish to allow myself to graft onto all things, not denying an event or memory because it offends a part of me.
To let go of offense, to deny the empirical self, yes, but maintaining the fear and trembling that exalts, and thereby reinforces, my being enamored with myself as recipient of such expansive all-memory-and-me. Keeping the icon in pocket to keep myself a lesbian. The honorable end that consummates such a contradiction is of an infinite nature. It is indefinite relative to the spread and production of my body and faculties. It reaches into the dirt and softens my tissue to be received and reinterpreted, woven into new systems of life-affirmation—until the sun has enjoyed its final meal of earth.
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