MYSTICISM

I find that on Sundays I swear a lot. And that in spite of my being quite ‘religious’ on such days. Today I was trying to find some live organ concerts in the Copenhagen area, but all I could stumble upon on the internet were either ones that have been, or some future ones that feature French composers, whom I dislike. I’m a Bach kind of person. So I went swearing, all day and in all sorts of languages for variation sake. While also thinking of Mario Andretti's - the Formula One guy - words: "If everything is under control, you are going too slow." I've managed to keep a sense of mysticism up, however, judging by the various comments left by friends in connection with my latest updates on facebook. So, it was nice of the community out there to let itself be allured into the world of sentences, which for most people don’t make much sense. But my friends like to read signs. Especially on Sundays. And today they’ve raised me to the rank of high priestess or oracle. I liked that. Generally speaking, we like to believe that some of us possess powers that the majority doesn’t. For my part, such beliefs are good when we are in need of spicing up our lives. Having just attended a theater performance in Lyngby the other day, about some trivial little plot written by a famous Romanian playwright, Ion Luca Caragiale, and afterwards having spent some time around 11.30 pm at the central station in Copenhagen waiting for my train towards Roskilde, I swore that, yes, I was ready to go for all the mystery in the world, all cosmological synchronicities, and other mystical symmetries, rather than live the lives of the some 100 drunkards that passed by me. The only mysticism that preoccupies me these days is that stemming from my bewilderment at most people’s lack of interest in thought itself, not to mention imagination. Now, this type of generalization – I actually asked myself, what makes you think that you know anything about anybody’s life? – is bound to upset the politically correct, the rational, and the moralists, as indeed it’s a bad idea, but on Sundays and coming from the mouth of Pythia, I insist on my prerogative to pass judgment: yes, the lot I’ve seen at 11.30 pm on Friday, was a sad lot. So, if I were to give some advice – now I’ll enact another role than that of the oracle, as Sunday is about to be over, I’ll say this to people who feel that their lives aren’t exciting enough: read something, go with the process not the end result, and stop being afraid. Just say yes to what the mind loves in the unknown, and Pythia will follow. Alea jacta est. Now, that was rather well done, heuristically speaking, wasn’t it?

--- Walter Benjamin would agree. He already has, walking down the narrow path, the exclusive one-way street, figuring out what time the clock struck:

“To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments. “Genius is application.”

("Standard Clock", from One Way-Street, Selected Writings: Vol. 1, 1913-1926, p. 446)