SPIRITUO-MATERIALITY

It’s difficult to countenance the divide between atheism and theism as a real one any longer, given the degree to which things have sunk into opinion on these matters, and when those preparing the next stages in thought are already working on both sides.
The question would have to be: what operational difference is there across this divide? How do different beliefs shape different worlds and, are these worlds actually different?

When a ‘case’ can be made for both sides, what’s wrong with ‘both’ being the case?
A case, grammatically, is just a tense of a verb, which can ‘fall’ into many cases. It just depends on situational pragmatics, to decide what to say. That’s a lot easier than choosing, in some fantastical moment of conversion, ‘once and for all’, how to talk henceforth, which ‘side’ to belong to.

That doesn’t mean that, ‘innerly’, there isn’t an intuition, conviction, choice, or guiding/grounding orientation. There can be hidden convictions and responsibilities, what the soul receives. Only that, whatever that may be, it has nothing to do with the surface talk and its supposed necessities of logical opposition, operation, and predicative combinatorics.
Listen first, then decide what to say, in a strategic manner, getting at the unclosed truth of things. Otherwise there just the nasty ‘handling’ of the other like an overlord: leading questions that drive them to a side, into mental and linguistic prison.
The other’s language comes ‘first’ in any equation of saying. It gets in us ‘innerly’, too, and ‘shudders’ our hidden convocation, so that at no time is there cessation to the need of novel language.

There is normally a fruitless obsession with pre-dicted ‘grooves’ in the logos, so that thought is funneled down given lanes, to regions known and mapped. Thus ‘debates’ become brain-dumbingly dull and predictable.
One pretends its a different liquid in the various grooves and that there can be no contamination across them; but in fact it doesn’t matter, the liquid is the same – obligatorily conceptualizing and metaphoring language.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but once ‘soaked’ in it, the notion of sides and options becomes comical, given the range that opens up.

Wisdom wants to resolve the madness of poetry, but poetry sticks to the contingency of things, dreams, words, ideas, situations, durations, persons (don’t stop there).
That’s why a generic, unallied practice of thought-words 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡 signification follows the age of religion and ideology-production. The trouble is, as a practice, it doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t ‘recall’ anything, exactly, because it can’t. Its movement is anti-referential, free to use any reference. Nothing covers its range.
The ideal is to match mind and matter exactly–almost as if language would then disappear from language. Such would be the revelation of mystery as mystery.

If there’s spiritual considerations, these can and must be dealt with materially, not as ideology or belief, not even as ‘vision’.
But the minute I concoct a term like spirituo-materiality, I both open a field of potential semantic exploration, and show the folly of running through it with my head chopped off.
I would like to do that, and why not? Who could stop it?
But the term is irrelevant and needn’t ever be said again. It will never be of any help, on its own, to guide any sense of anything whatsoever.
All that would matter in this ‘case’, is running.

Ironically, words are no longer obvious and must never be obvious anymore. They no longer communicate anything to anyone–except of course in exchanges of information, as in debates over beliefs. Words with clear reference are, obviously, still useful for pragmatic situations. But, for ‘truth’ in the momentous sense, ‘words’ are helpless and help only by indirection, by refusing obviousness.
There is nothing to ‘tell’ anyone at the spirituo-material level.
It’s a case of ‘put up or shut up’ in raw description of thought-matter that lacks outcome, accumulation, even memory. None of that’s needed anymore–not intentionally; and in not being needed, the whole play of thought and imagination is liberated away from conceptual and imagistic capture, into the contingency of experimental gestures complete in themselves and forever unfinished.

The secret boils down to: give no information about God. But also, there’s no information to give: there is no secret held by anyone. “God is love.”
This is how one might successfully ‘exhibit’ how it might be that ‘everything is out in the open’.

Of photographs, only the ‘click’ remains. This does not mean we stop taking, looking at, and cherishing photographs. After all, we’re only human.

—April 16, 2019