The Mystical Journey

 

Provocative readings recently have featured a half dozen or so works that circle about “visionary recitals,” hoping for exposure to the numinous, moving like Rilke’s orbits around the ancient tower, perhaps to gain personal guidance on this journey, probing the beyond. Rilke’s imagery suggests the way:

“I live my life in growing orbits

which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.”

   Translation by Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, pp. 12-13. 

     [see also, Going in Circles]

     The “tower” centers a life by providing the gravity that holds against the centrifugal force. The orbits drawn by guidance are building the character needed to prevent the accumulated life experience from dissipating into nothingness. This guidance protects from being drawn into false idols of power-mad cults as well as from the seductions of narcissism. Finding and refining the “tower” directs the journey to heaven. The theme of “visionary recitals” offers such a tower. 

     A visionary recital that carries particular magnetism for me comes in Attar’s [d. 1229] Conference of the Birds. Yearning for the Divine, as Rilke tells, distinguishes this tower with its orbital power, and my connection with Attar’s masterpiece has been engaged for at least a decade or so … “if one sigh rises from the inmost soul…” 

Eleven minutes after the previous photo

     This magnetism of Attar’s work prompted an orbit into Avicenna [d. 1037] to explore source material drawn upon by Attar. The significance of this exploration receives fascinating elaboration by Henry Corbin who summarizes the importance: “With Attar’s poem, the end of the celestial ascent finally marks full mystical consciousness of encountering, attaining to, the Self to which one says ‘Thou’” (p. 169, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital). Corbin’s study led to consideration of Salaman and Absal as well as Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (translation and commentary by Lenn Evan Goodman). The trace soon focused on Ian Richard Netton’s Islam, Christianity and the Mystic Journey which includes particular reference to Qushayriya’s Sufi Book of Spiritual Ascent. The spin also led into Austin O’Malley’s The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Persian Sufi Didacticism.

Netton synthesizes the central theme on page one: 

“like the great Persian mystical poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi (AD 1207-73), before her, [Professor Annemarie] Schimmel expresses the essence of Sufism best in her poetry [referencing p. 42 from Nightingales Under the Snow “… I wait for the silent night/ when the archangel’s purple wing/ will cover the eyes of my heart/ and there will be nothing but You.”]. The verse captures one of the most commonplace, and yet deepest, of all sufi themes, the yearning of the terrestrial-bound soul for communion, intimacy and ultimate union (whatever that might mean!) with the Divine ‘Object’ and focus of sufi love, God Himself.”

     Manna for going along life’s way comes in the imagery of orbiting around the tower and/or of traveling with a guide (as Attar’s sojourners or Dante’s descent or so many stories tell). Corbin suggests:

The idea of the journey into the Orient—that is, of the soul’s return to its “home” under the conduct of its Guide, its celestial Self—implies an “angelic pedagogy” that makes the being of the particular soul and the notion of soul in general concurrent with an angelology. This concurrence is particularly clear in the Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, in which the Avicennan angelology propounds its triple hierarchy: there are the Archangels or pure Intelligences, the Kerubim (Cherubs). There are the Angels who emanate from them and who are the moving Souls of the celestial spheres. There are the human souls, or ‘terrestrial angels,’ who move and govern earthly human bodies (p. 46) …

This recital is an initiation into the Orient: the meaning of the Orient is announced to the adept by a messenger from that Orient itself, who shows him its direction, describes the difficult stages of the journey thither, sets forth the conditions for undertaking it, and finally concludes with the invitation: “If thou wilt, follow me.” (p. 123, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital)

Sunset, August 27, 2026

Of Love, Beauty, and Sadness

      And, of Love, what can we say or know or live? Moving daily further along, does it only swirl more mysterious, inner and outer? 

Reading from Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital:

“But what the Soul tenderly desires is precisely to assimilate itself with the Intelligence by becoming like it, as the disciple makes himself like his master, or the lover like the beloved. To do this, the Soul must ‘grasp the beauty of the object that it loves; the image of that beauty increases the ardor of its love, this ardor makes the soul look upward, and thence arises a motion by which it can apply itself to the object with which it desires to assimilate itself. Thus imagination of beauty causes ardor of love, love causes desire (inquisitio), and desire causes motion.’”

 

    Corbin continues into the next page commenting on Suhrawardi’s The Familiar of the Mystical Lovers with a discussion of “three beings who proceed from the threefold self-intellection of the Intelligence [who] bear three names that, despite appearances, are less abstractions than typifications, since they have correspondences in three names from Biblico-Koranic hagiography (Joseph, Zulaykha, Jacob). The three figures that proceed from the meditation of the First Archangel reflecting upon his being are named Beauty, Love, Sadness. Of these three dramatis personae, Sadness corresponds to the heaven whose subtle matter ‘materializes’ the thought of a nonbeing; it measures the zone of shadow, the distance that always intrudes between Love and the Beauty to which it aspires—that is, between the celestial Angel and the Angel-Cherub. But at the same time this heaven, this Sadness, is the instrument that allows the Soul, by the roundabout way of a long pilgrimage, to approach that Beauty, to attain the goal of its desire, just as, by moving its heaven, the Soul tends toward the Angel from which it emanates. Thus the same nostalgia that is close to the secret of the mystic’s heart is likewise the secret of celestial physics.” pp. 74-75

 

    So good to have guidance on the way that gives place and relationship among Sadness, Beauty, and Love; and all this encouragement for finding oneself on the pilgrimage of life with such fine companions.

The Ecstatic Blur

 

Sunset yesterday

     Sometimes a partial is all that’s given. Whisp of a dream… the unavailable you and the might-be beloved speak “You…” The words in the dream have slipped back across the veil. Right enough. Dreams and other ecstatic whiffs are just enough to draw the next step, into the blur…A-slant. 
Ex-stasis. Outside self. Not literal. 

Literal. Letter?  Word. Representation. Re-Present is not same as present (in its multiple meanings slip-sliding to push the edge of sense). This chain of associations brings to mind Epaminondas: the tragedy of literalism and fundamentalism; the risks yet critical necessity of imagery running into troubles of idolatry and idealism…
     All this points toward realization of “other.” The standing outside of one’s self. The Ecstatic. The Not. Nothingness. Not knowing as beginning of wisdom. Nishitani on going beyond emptiness. 

“It is only in breaking through to the field of ecstatic transcendence (or trans-descendence), then, that the awareness of birth-and-death as ’transmigration’ comes about. This ecstatic trans-descendence appears in the endlessness of finite life and in the totality of the horizon that embraces the mode of being of man along with that of the other species. Nihility opens up only in this transcendence.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 174-5). 

Transcendence?  At least going outside. Ecstatic. “Non-knowledge communicates ecstasy,”  Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience.
     Rosemarie Waldrop opens Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes:

“Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arises, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God.” (p. 1)

A Woodland Valentine

7:19AM February 14, 2026

“Where else but in nature do we learn to overcome nature and thereby become our humanity—our finite, open-ended transcendence?” Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, p. 231.

     The heart songs offered in forests and woodlands come freely every day. Their blessings enter the window above my desk as well as all windows around our home and perhaps even better when walking amid the oaks and maples. Harrison’s book enriches these experiences with his elaboration on the words and representations articulated by historians, story tellers, poets, and visual artists who have ventured into forests across many lands and ages. One, of course, is Henry David Thoreau. Harrison notes: “The woods do not contain the knowledge that Thoreau seeks by going there; they do, however, uncover the habitual hiding places of the self, leaving it exposed to the facts of life,” p. 222.

February 14 2026

Exploring woodlands through the lens of John Constable’s paintings, particularly Study of a Trunk of an Elm Tree, Harrison furthers an understanding of logos:

… the trunk of the elm tree…stands there as the embodiment of something that has come to appearance, that has emerged from the earth that somehow gives itself over to representation. The tree and its encircling forest, the patch of open sky and its sphere of illumination on the floor of the clearing, appear in Constable’s study in what one might call their pregivenness. The phenomenon is always pregiven, the human presence is that to which it is given. Expressed otherwise, the phenomenon takes its stand within a fundamental relation, or correlation, that binds together the human essence and the self-disclosure of the phenomenon. This relation is logos. Logos is the ‘word’ that keeps silent in the artwork by disappearing into the presence of the phenomenon.

We must go further and say that this fundamental correlation underlies the correspondence between soul and landscape which Constable’s paintings strive to evoke. Constable’s devotion to the light, tone, and atmosphere that pervade a landscape and imbue it with a mood that is like a fusion between human feeling and nature’s appearance—this devotion to the emotional modalities of the chiaroscuro indicate the extent to which, for Constable, human presence in the world belongs most intimately to nature’s manner of being. ‘Painting is but another word for feeling,’ he declared, and feeling is but another word for the relational bond—the logos—through which nature comes to presence in the phenomenon. (p. 208)

This commentary contributes to my sense of the possibilities of photography involving these woods.

     Harrison also meditates on the abundant giving from the woodlands through several poets, especially A.R. Ammons, John Clare, and Andrea Zanzotto. Poignant are the revelations from seasonal expressions shown by forests in relation to longing and loss. Profound are the gifts that flow from fallen leaves covered in snow.

Disfiguring

 

Jan 5, 2026, 9:03PM

Ah-Ha! Just when I think I’ve figured it out…Not.

 

                                   yesterday's sunrise, taken with the camera’s “default” setting

Maybe moving into my 80th year I’m finally learning to look through, maybe to revalue the quick take or the disappointment, perhaps to imagine a conception possibly drawn from the other world. The “figured-out” more likely marks the activity of presumption and delusion, but rather than throwing it out, consider it as an opportunity to “disfigure.” The really important things like beauty, truth, love and the other 96 Names for God all surpass human containment. Claiming to grasp them descends into all manner of trouble; yet when problems are recognized and this brings a humbling recognition of human limitation--then  comes the chance of surrender to the beyond. And, by Grace, the Divine just might allow a whiff of the ecstatic.

same image edited to remember and imagine possibility of spring, etc

This venture beyond the bounds of cognition invites the play of imagination, and opens a free space where interpretations guess and dance with uncertainty. The figures that have ruled as unquestioned reality, as absolute right, get unmasked in  “disfiguring.” This term finds provocative elaboration in Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Taylor explores and richly illustrates with contemporary artists, also connecting with philosophy and theology, as he develops the process of finding sacred ground by breaking idols that block access to creativity and compassion. How can we engage the modern condition without sinking into despair and alienation?

same image edited for black and white setting

“Modernism’s perfection is always a ‘violated perfection’; its purity is impure from the beginning, indeed, before the beginning. Modernity is infected by an other it both refuses and cannot refuse.

One of the figures of this irrefutable other is figuration. Modernism’s disfiguring is not only an aesthetic strategy; it is, as we have seen, a moral crusade. The struggle between figuring and disfiguring is the strife between madness and civilization. Inasmuch as it re-presents sensuousness and irrationality, figuration represents the primitive, infantile, feminine, and mad that modern civilization is constructed to refuse. The refused, however, never goes away. Constituting itself in and through acts of refusal, modernity needs what it nonetheless cannot bear. The refused eternally returns to disrupt and dislocate the structures constructed to control it. 

At its height, modernism’s search for purity is violated by the eruption of surrealism. . . 

The goal of surrealism is to reclaim the rights of the imagination by releasing the strange forces that inhabit the mind. These uncanny powers constitute madness in the midst of civilization and folly at the heart of reason. By soliciting the return of the refused, surrealism attempts to subvert modernism’s repressive puritan ethic. . .

Against modernism’s preoccupation with purity, order, rules, reason, clarity, and function, surrealists set impurity, disorder, transgression, irrationality, and uselessness. Such concerns are hardly reasonable; indeed they are folly—‘les folies les plus vives.’ Forever incomprehensible in any system—be it philosophical, religious, or economic—the folly of surrealism is the ‘non-knowledge’ that Bataille associates with the ecstasy of ‘inner experience.’ If the proposition (non-knowledge lays bare) possesses a sense—appearing, then disappearing immediately thereafter—this is because it has the meaning NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY.’ 

(pp. 232-233, 235 in Taylor, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52; emphasis in original).

Perhaps reading Taylor has encouraged my play with photo editing and its application to other stuck places in views of life past, present, and future. The snapshot offers a limited perspective dependent on the camera’s default setting and the photographer’s point of view, focus, zoom…so much like the mind’s view that has its own default settings, often unexamined, that control and limit understanding, action, and love for others as well as for self. So let's figure, dis-figure, re-fuse, play on...

Telling the Truth

December 9, 2025

A secret special passage mediates between me and the message that wants to get through. One mess (or not) involved with access to and movement within this passage involves the collection of books that somehow shuffle around desk, floor, shelves, boxes… to say nothing about drop-ins from used book stores, goodwill, on-line sources, and recommendations... Just yesterday (or maybe the day before) I was browsing about the basement library hoping that something would light up. Although Taylor’s Disfiguring was the right book to be reading, the copy I had was just too cluttered with a previous owner’s ink underlinings and marginal notes. Connecting Taylor’s terrific commentary on Modernism/Post-modernism, art, transcendence/immanence and integrating this with personal experience was demanding enough. Trying to block out the distraction of someone else’s grappling/frustration with the text was too much. So I gave in to the need to order a replacement and to find another good read while waiting for it to arrive. 

     A gift really, because when looking about the possibilities, my eyes fixed on a slender volume with Truth in the title, by an author I’d not read before, Frederick Buechner. The first glance wasn’t compelling enough so I kept browsing, but maybe that golden thread that Blake says leads the way must have been tugging me back. So I returned and took down Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. 

     A day or so later I’m very grateful because not only is this book terrific but I’ve now found two other books by Buechner that were lost in the other side of the basement library thus promising prospects for wonderful hours guided by his imagination, the opening of truth, the Word in the rich dimensions of depths of each human’s life expressed through tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. 

“The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be pointed to by the language of poetry—of metaphor, image, symbol—as it is used by the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it—meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful—but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery.” p. 25

December 9, 2024

Framing Presence and Absence

October 18, Good Morning

Midway in Mark C. Taylor’s The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, the dialectical wonder around presence and absence lightens shadows and complicates the clear. Might we draw closer to God, the Great Unknowable, as these phenomena happen? Again, the ever-present longing: Love, beauty, freedom, justice, truth. Perhaps we only have dissolving frames, another way of imaging. Taylor explores the artistic erasure of the picture: Is God more present in the admission of absence?

Before I press the shutter, I’m less moved to erase frames. To wonder and wander into depths of “reality,” perhaps the telephone pole belongs (possible reminder of a cross), the bumper of my 15-year-old car belongs in the edging of today’s glorious sunrise, including the glass and screen in the window allows the reflection of my partner in the pre-dawn display of autumn leaves. 

We’ve contemplated long on the life task of containing opposites. The yes and no. Life and death. Light and dark. Presence and absence.

God forbids making images, idols… Yet we’re said to be made in God’s image…and advised to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. There might also be comfort in considering God’s anger at idol-makers and in dealing with our feelings concerning the violence and craziness in living today…

“ A jealous God authorizes no delegates and sanctions neither representatives nor representations. ‘The uniqueness and unicity of God,’ as Peggy Kamuf observes, ‘must forever prevent His appearance through any kind of substitute, any doubling of the eternal One and the Same. God, who is unique and uniquely the one who is, cannot tolerate a double, a replacement, a representative.’ Always beyond reason as well as the imagination, the jealous God cannot be figured.” [p. 71 in Taylor; quoting Kamuf from A Derrida Reader, xxiii.]

Thus humbled and leaning thru sight and blindness…

Picture-taking & the Ecstatic

    Winnowing reflections on this first day of September, wondering what’s wanting to be drawn from the seine, like the folks fishing watch as water flows from their nets…Why not stand beside them, wondering if Jesus has spoken? And the term “Ekstasis” flits up in the mind with an uncertain recollection of where I was reading about it.  The book was probably giving the root of the term “ecstasy,” thus suggesting it has to do with positioned beside or outside oneself.  I’m not finding the place where I was reading but it probably came from one of these:

     Anyway, the point is that this magnetic attraction toward the ecstatic inclines us, sometimes with a more emphatic shove, toward realizing the divine alongside the everyday. Perhaps some of us need it, certainly I want the push toward increased awareness. How easy and how unfortunate it is to miss the sacred as it disappears due to unholy distraction. How often the visitation gone. The missing not even noticed.

     The picture shown above came through the default editing of the camera shutter this way:

Re-editing the image

happens partly because I walk outside most morning, predawn, and imagine how the darkish horizon might be imagined if I just attend further into the shadows, 

venturing through the invitation of foggy places, hoping with the early sunlight that bends over while mostly unseen, as if asking one to see through the veils. How might we move closer to the Presence? 

Messages from the mystics often feature “attending,” “interpretation,” entering the dark and/or silence. To stand beside, to experience the ecstatic, especially in the more subtle vibrations, might require “slow art.” The opportunity is to extend looking, to intensify attention, to open imagination, to go further than the default experience given by “normal” “default” time and space.

The framing and focus on my horizon has been re-set-ing through readings as well as in picture-taking and editing. Arden Reed in Slow Art (pp 120-121) quotes historian Jonathan Crary (Suspensions of Perception) who quotes William James (Principles of Psychology): 

In fact, Crary argues, attention and distraction came to define the modern self. For the psychologist William James (1842-1910) experience itself was not given but formed through acts of attention. He explained in painterly language: ‘Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses in ways which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to … Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground…Without it…consciousness…would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.’

For more of this excerpt from William James, Chapter XI, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, please see: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm 

      From the closing pages of Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams asserts: “Nature photographers particularly need to widen their subject matter if they are to help us find again the affection for life that is the only sure motive for continuing the struggle toward a decent environment” (p. 103). I’m also being moved by reading Denise Levertov. 

      In addition to picture-taking and editing, my response led to this draft:

The point obscure.

   Like ecstasy, likely obsessive. 

Direction? Where the center,

   illumination? 

Maybe the draw

   not to beauty nor truth. 

Separate no one

   from the ninety nine. 

Just attend with a sixth 

   or further 

sense toward the unknown,

   the Unknowable. 

Focus for the whispered 

   hint, the inaudible 

“Good enough”—