More off Critchley’s Mysticism

by Mark Phillips on December 1, 2024

FICTION EXCAVATION AND RESPONSA

Beatrice was sure she loved Kellerman. But for Keg Keggerman, that was another story. He would no more have it that the material world needed divinity to be anything but nihilism than he would want the world to be burned. It was all family, you see. And not a distant relative. All one in the same. All from the same father and mother, everyone getting along with each other, loving each other, enjoying spending time together with each other family. No anger or distance or separation. Everyone was doing there own thing, yes. Everyone was independent or could be, though they could also act collectively and everyone looked great in pictures together. (Can you imagine a glorious sunset without seeing it?) But no one needed to be burned or consumed to make Keg feel any closer to them. He’d hate that. It’d be oblivion unrelaxing unfulfilling. It’d be manipulative and pain causing. Why batter around reality, creating divisions? Yes, Beatrice longed. Keg longed too. Though all this longing for experience without will was also something he couldn’t stand with. It’d be like deciding not to take his cholesterol medicine or driving without a seatbelt or being willfully negligent with a handgun or punching people for no reason. Or quitting his job to the detriment of his family. There’s a bank that holds a mortgage that requires payment every month. Can feel separate. Can act careless and callous. Can pick a side and create division in pursuit of its responsibilities to its people and machines delussian involved. But. Declining isn’t involvement by another name. Not for Keg. May be a path to literal enlightening for the person made lighter. But leaves the world more easily defeatable. People more easily stomped on. Materiality more easily manipulated. Promise more easily subverted. Someone thinking making everything more expensive is a good idea. That supply chains can rebuild overnight. That instrumentalist science is bunk. That ideology and loyalty are a path to something more global noble than individual gain. Something somepeople paint as a concept called redemption. From what or from why it’s needed? “Ask the hucksters selling it,” Beatrice’s mother always said. She loved that quote from Teddy Roosevelt about being in the arena. “Or follow the money,” from the EIB network. History makes stranger bedfellows than one’d like to admit if one’s only looking in the rear view mirror to justify a land grab.

Keg did stand with mystical experience. It’s a closeness that doesn’t come from prior separation or distance being shortened. It’s not a forgetting. (Or is it? He sometimes wasn’t sure). But he’s open to it. Has had things he couldn’t explain and still can’t. He’s good with that.

CATALYST