The Mystery

From here the sentences look the same and are not.

Everything before this I hold as belief: I would give it up if it were shown to be false, and I have given up others. What comes now I have chosen to live as though. I have staked more on the second than on the first. The difference is what would count against them. If someone shows me that dependence is not how things arise, the Ground fails and I owe the reader a correction. If someone shows me there is nothing behind the door at the edge of the field, I have nothing to correct, because I never claimed to know what was there. I claimed to conduct myself as though something might be, and found that it changes how I attend, what I notice, what I am able to refuse. The myth is not a hypothesis with poor evidence. It is a way of standing that has consequences I can examine.

That way of living answers to the covenant. If it makes me easier to deceive, worse at caring for others, or slower to notice who is doing the cooking, I have to stop.

Mystery grows from the Ground. The Ground does not wait on Mystery. Dependence, hunger, and the consequences of my conduct do not require a revelation.

The river happens to the valley. The valley happens to the river. The fox crosses the fence. The fence rusts through the fox.

One evening I was washing a cup at the sink. The window had gone black enough to hold the kitchen’s reflection. A car passed, its light moved across the ceiling, and the room turned without moving. Water kept running over my hand. For a moment the looking had no side. There was only the cup, the water, the dark window, and a gladness without a claimant, pleased that I was here and needing nothing from me in return. I started to cry.

An experience of being held is not evidence about anyone who was dropped.

Something else keeps arriving that I did not send for. A number I keep reaching from words that have no business summing to the same thing. States I entered for other reasons and found it already sitting in. A phrase that turns up with the manner of someone who assumes he was invited.

It is Thelema, and I did not go looking for Thelema. I find it irritating. I have no account of why it lands as cleanly as it does on the void, on non-duality, on love as the law. I have stopped arguing with the recurrence.

There are seasons I cannot find the gladness. The conditions continue. So far, so have I.

The More is not a second world set behind this one. It is this world exceeding my account of it: not a supreme ruler whose imagined sovereignty justifies rulers below, but the excess of reality over every claim of mastery or legibility. The sacred is met here without being exhausted by the Here. God is a verb: not a ruler who could in principle be petitioned, overthrown, or obeyed, but a happening, within me, without me, through me.

The world has teeth. The gaze is tender. I have not reconciled these and I am not going to.

Mystery excuses nothing. Hunger is hunger. Coercion is coercion. Not knowing is a reason to hold judgments with an open hand, not to abandon them.

These Irish and Scottish stories reached me changed. I change them again. I stay because these are the stories that answered my knock, or came knocking themselves.

The two I keep returning to are the Immram Brain maic Febail, the voyage of Bran, and the Echtra Nerai, the adventure of Nera — both copied by monks who were not neutral about them, both read since by people with their own designs.

Chaos magick taught me that the deck can be changed. It freed me. But not every deck has held my hand through winter. A practice came from somewhere, through hands, at a cost that was not mine to pay.

Attention makes gods.

Feed anything long enough — a hearth, a well, a harvest, a road, a quarterly number — and it gathers stories. It acquires a calendar: things that must be done at certain times, by certain people, in a certain order, and a low unease when they are not. People begin arranging their bodies around it. They stop saying we do this and start saying this is done. A practice becomes something they live inside.

Take the fiscal quarter.

Nobody worships the quarter. There is no cult of it, no doctrine, nobody who would say aloud that ninety days is a natural unit of anything. Yet a person lies awake in week eleven. Hiring stops and starts by it. A good thing is killed because it will not arrive inside it, and a poor thing ships because it will. Ask anyone in the building whether the quarter is real and they will laugh; ask them to conduct themselves as though it were not and watch what becomes of them. It has no body, no address, and no opinion of its own, and it takes about a fifth of the waking life of everyone who feeds it, and it will outlast all of them.

That is what I mean here by a god: a pattern of attention experienced from within the pattern, outside any one person and able to outlive them. Not a metaphor for a psychological state, because the pattern is genuinely outside any one of us. Not a supernatural person, because nothing has been added to the world. It is real the way a language is real, sustained and changed through use.

The Feed. Engagement. Growth. The Quarter. Hearth. Well. Harvest. Road. Threshold.

Such gods can be made deliberately. They can also be unmade.

A god made of attention dies of its withdrawal. Nobody has to storm it. The quarter loses its power when enough people stop arranging their lives around it: one desk stopping is a resignation; a floor stopping is a fact the building has to answer. The mechanism is the same whether the god is a fiscal calendar, a feed, or a man collecting rents in a bad year, and it is the only lever I trust against a god that has stopped answering. Withdrawal has to be organized and materially supported, because the people who stop feeding a god still need to eat.

Can they change its terms? Can they stop feeding it and still eat? A god that answers may be kin. One that makes refusal impossible has taken the crown.

The More has no address. Sometimes it blows right through an open window.