September 24, 2024 - A post with a repost from a post posted last year, 2023, reviewing/recommending Jean-Luc Nancy's "scriptural text" - Adoration, The Deconstruction of Christianity II. You can read this post further down below THIS, today's posted fresh text re-introducing Adoration (hey, not a bad idea, right - I prescribe Adoration - take two and call me in the morning):
"Our time is the time of a dispropriation."
Just in case, had to look it up to make sure I knew,
Dispropriate - to deprive of ownership
Jeez. Only that?
BUT ain't is so?
A few passages from Jean-Luc Nancy's Adoration, The Deconstruction Of Christianity II. Exquisite writing, inductive meditative reasoning -or as mystic monk Thomas Merton would say, and did, "thoughts out of season" - Nancy's masterful devoted pursuit of an often elusive labyrinthine quality of mind/consciousness articulations and parsings, wrong turns perhaps leading into the "other space" - resonant enclosure - which actually dis-incloses not only thought by following such into intuitive "off the obvious map" destinations of knowing as Dostoevsky's Alyosha prescribes going "with one's inside, with one's stomach", a fuller, more enriching embodied sense that is indeed, as the etymology of the word "religion/religious" indicates, a verb, a re-connecting, a linking back, a deep breach of ordinary "profane" and orthodox "sacred" (dogma, doctrine, this is the only right way) into timeless reach (a breaking, a breach) arrival into PRIMAL GROUND
It is indeed "meta" aka "beyond" "apart" yet all is a part of IT (if IT implies/indicates a WHOLE or at least a more With IT Solid HOLD) (which is not a noun but, what, a Verb dependent upon AD-verb, modifications, but still more Verb - perhaps Hindus have it right-write with their approximations of such aka MAYA, THAT dance, as poet Ted Roethke writes, ..."slowing in the mind of man That made him think the universe could hum?" Or is it OM? OM HUM wha cha call it jiggly hoky pokery - must let Herman Melville chitter here from the Mobius Dick Schtick Juke Boxery:
"Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The scud all a flyin',
That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!"
Ahoy OY and Alive Alive oh
So hum n fling us! cue Charlie Mingus! many ways to sound, dance, and trance is key to, at least, understanding all us we, and still we call it "awakening" (I most often call it FAT CHANCE for who indeed can actually live THERE in THAT, consciously so? Rare's the bird what knows itself as air):
Mingus "Moanin'" <— click here to hear
So take a dare. Try some Nancy, Jean-Luc. Yes, you'll break but results are worth the synapsistic ic ic challenges hard stares but to utter the now trite but still correct and righting Gertrude Stein, me changing one word from the trivialized snoot -
There is A there there.
But it ain't what you think. Or is but can't be easily scribbled.
We nibble at the edges of what is there, or nibble from within the enclosure, the old and reified meanings and structures of meaning in order to be, as Nancy says in Vol 1 of Deconstructing Christianity, disenclosed, un enclosed, freed into new possibilities and discoveries of what, this old saw and hard brick, "means"—
"I wanna ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I use my senses"
Roy Rogers, that cowboy romance, that fantasy still in American psyche, mythic, deranging beyond know arrangements and wranglements, sings our innate longing, our plea for disenclosure though "we have come to love our chains" of paradigms past their prime (good ol' Marx):.
Don't Fence Me In <— click here to hear
....perchance tah gaze at th' moon till ah looz mah senses....
HA! Only that!
AND. BUT. SO.
Take the effortful plunge and just go with Nancy though one may, no, WILL reread again and again and "break one's mind" on the snail's epheme-real liine-trace that Nancy seems to so easily "track" on our way intellectually and more back to where we already are, unknown support of what appears to be infinite, immeasurable and sustaining whether known consciously or not.
But this suchness can be more "gnown" as in gnossis which is knowing derived from the gut, one's own experience via more than one or two senses but even these do the job of expanding what we call, so limited is the word, "thought" or, best -
ENCOUNTER.
Ready to fall or sly, or both, into inductivities, awaken mystic (not bliss niinny) proclivities innate in hairless apes such as ourselves so full of our own mawkish prance about, hack Jack Horner's all, inflated, jaded, one-eyed gapers at our own dyspeptic banquet of Christmas pie deluded that we ourselves created the not only the pie, the plum, the thumb itself, but the entire Cosmos. This is why we are undergoing despite our massive resistances a necessary and fated (consciousness IS fate) dispropriation - a deprivation of ownership. Or, as T. S. Elitot sings in his Four Quartets, "we must go by a way of dispossession." All our musings and muster and mustard are undergoing massive withdrawal of what was understood for millennia as "meaning", as telos (purpose), as "what matters".
Nancy's efforts assist in the "disenclosure" that humans are globally (glub glub) undergoing we have gotten so way ahead of ourselves and our capacities to pace and digest the tyrant unleashed, the powers that humans as we are now, our still very primitive ID consciousness, can control in safe enough and mindful, circumspect ways. It, the Beast, is disenclosed now, released unleashed into the masses, the mostly heedless and unconscious collective herd minded cybernauts/nuts ensnared/enmeshed in the maya web, weave, of pure and utter "distraction fits" (Eliot, again) caught, addicted, dependent upon the most odious and loathsome of postmodern malaise and second by second bedazzlement (and addled-ment) - TRENDING and BREAKING NEWS (spews). Enough. I here prattle doggie paddling in the glyph-stream of a species dependent now upon Moloch Machine coding we hope, pray, depend upon to make our days and selves meaningful. I heave to differ. Here below is some Jean-Luc (I feel for him such affection as he sweetens my and our disaffection with cyber confection - see screen grabs selections from Nancy's Adoration further below or just scroll ahead and down to read them then return to this section immediately following).
"We don't need more humanism or democracy; we need to begin by question anew the entire thought of "man", returning it to the workshop." - Jean-Luc Nancy
September 23, 2023
My review from a few years ago when I first read-tread-Nancy's "threads" - his weave - warp woof - of what, that What that IS yet easily eludes our barely adequate senses (including "reason") to, perfect word here - GRASP (GROCK) the Invisible that gnocks or not yet seems, as poet Rilke says, to spin him a bit, "strangely seems to require us, the human, creation" for its own needs, it requires us to give it FACE(s).
Enough - this from last year which was/is a reprise from some years before last:
Yom Kippur. Two days of rain, darkened skies, and the surprise reminder of grace, of psychologically emptying one's pockets of the everyday and also of each and every fuzzball of lint, dust, the crusts accumulated by hands that do our human will's, our egos' bidding, all this is dumped, released, shaken out, handed over and into literal and/or symbolic cleansing river or body of water as an alchemical process of atonement both poetic AND noetic.
A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts. —Willard Van Orman Quine
A few words from C. G. Jung about "beside the water" moments - this passage from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung's autobiography, last chapter titled "Retrospect":
"When people say I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that amount to? I am not that stream . . . . There is a fine old·story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowadays no one can stoop so low."
One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream."
Now's a good time to read, reread, slow down, read a passage over yet again, wait for understanding of Jean-Luc Nancy's remarkable book, Adoration, The Deconstruction of Christianity II. One must (well, I must and have) develop an ongoing relationship with the book in order to reel in (impossible, I know) the Big Fish, or at least grasp a minnow or two from the massive cloud/school of fish that circles and obscures the Big Fish, think Melville and Moby, think swimming in "the Drink" of think and intuition, even a zen dropping/falling through into __________. It is possible. But conveying the experience is a challenge.
Anyhow, yada yada....o for capacities such as Nancy's to butterfly net, even fish net, the Nyet and yet the ineffable but alphabeti-ful.
"The form of the spirit as it awakens is adoration."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted by Nancy at the book's beginning.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Adoration/6JGUDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
1. The Dance
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.
For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,—
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!—
This animal remembering to be gay.
I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood lept with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
2. The Partner
Between such animal and human heat
I find myself perplexed. What is desire?—
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
We played a measure with commingled feet:
The lively dead had taught us to be fond.
Who can embrace the body of his fate?
Light altered light along the living ground.
She kissed me close, and then did something else.
My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse.
I'd say it to my horse: we live beyond
Our outer skin. Who's whistling up my sleeve?
I see a heron prancing in his pond;
I know a dance the elephants believe.
The living all assemble! What's the cue?—
Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost?
This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares?
I gave her kisses back, and woke a ghost.
O what lewd music crept into our ears!
The body and the soul know how to play
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
3. The Wraith
Incomprehensible gaiety and dread
Attended what we did. Behind, before,
Lay all the lonely pastures of the dead;
The spirit and the flesh cried out for more.
We two, together, on a darkening day
Took arms against our own obscurity.
Did each become the other in that play?
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
When glory failed, we danced upon a pin.
The valleys rocked beneath the granite hill;
Our souls looked forth, and the great day stood still.
There was a body, and it cast a spell,—
God pity those but wanton to the knees,—
The flesh can make the spirit visible;
We woke to find the moonlight on our toes.
In the rich weather of a dappled wood
We played with dark and light as children should.
What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?—
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.
4. The Vigil
Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,—
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
Though everything's astonishment at last,
Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?
The links were soft between us; still, we kissed;
We undid chaos to a curious sound:
The waves broke easy, cried to me in white;
Her look was morning in the dying light.
The visible obscures. But who knows when?
Things have their thought: they are the shards of me;
I thought that once, and thought comes round again;
Rapt, we leaned forth with what we could not see.
We danced to shining; mocked before the black
And shapeless night that made no answer back.
The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when wind was in my way;
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
ALL PHOTOS ARE BY WARREN FALCONDo not use without asking permission 
All photos were taken in the DIA Beacon Museumlocated in Beason, NY.
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