Indeed, the closer we look at ‘things’, the more compelling it is to see why ancient mystical traditions or ‘civilizations’ thought of the erotic as the deepest, most sacred articulation of aliveness.
We are learning, slowly, that what we rudely call life or reality is, at heart, unbridled ecstasy – a numbing intoxication that really resists articulation, words or coherence – and transcends the politics of belief or our fixations with logic. We are realizing that we cannot situate agency and vibrancy in human awareness, and that ‘things’ – the moss-stained stone, the uprising and down-trending of avian limb in elegant flight, the morose conclaves of pregnant clouds midwifed by blue sky and brown earth – have a vibrancy of their own; that the world cannot be thought of as an ‘object’, but as an entanglement, the sacred in-between; that we – the forlorn human species – seem to be possessed of ‘powers’ that disturb our cherished notions of locality, incremental knowing and separation. Perhaps most of our modern discontents owe their poignancy to the fact that we’ve all become sober and reverent – and we live in a culture that harnesses this strange sobriety, this neat distance from mud and decay. This forgotten affinity with the unusual.
From an emerging essay, ‘The Phantom of the Maze’
