#{inquiry}

Consider the warm sheen of the copper, polished and lacquered to a mirror finish.

when i (emphasis on "i") speak of mysticism, i mean a cultivated mode of perception, a manner of moving through the world with heightened attunement to its symbolic and psychological textures—what jung might call a dialog with the unconscious (and what an artist might call inspiration). mysticism is not a retreat into superstition, but an approach to awareness, a refined receptivity to nuance, ambiguity, and the strange interiority of life. it is the practice of noticing what the rational mind alone cannot hold: the felt presence of pattern, metaphor, and meaning that permeates our experience even in the absence of any divine architect. the divine is a symbol, a poetic construct which names the very ineffability that torments and sustains us. jung understood this and he wrote not of god as deity, but as archetype—a cipher for the self in its full and terrifying splendor; “we do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” mysticism is not ascent—it is descent. a plunge into the mythic strata of the psyche, where language fractures and symbol bleeds. this becomes a psychological endeavor, not a religious one: a movement toward interior coherence, a confrontation with shadow, a reconciliation of inner opposites, a process of becoming, of deepening one’s awareness until perception itself becomes revelatory. and to create anything of substance, one must develop a mystic perceptivity: to sense the invisible threads between memory and myth, dream and structure, language and longing. mysticism is less doctrine than discipline—an exacting, sensory devotion to what cannot be held in logic alone. a way to make contact with what is marvelous in human experience, and to render it, imperfectly, into form. it is not about transcendence in a metaphysical sense, but about entering more fully into humanness—with all its terror (but equal sublimity). it is this particular attunement, this capacity to peer beneath the veneer of the apparent, that sustains me. i do not write or create from resolution, but from the tremors that precede it; not from knowingness, but from the wound’s aperture, the threshold, the dream-fracture. a ritual pulling forth of what festers in silence, what writhes beneath language and demands embodiment. this is the mystic labor: to descend, retrieve, and render something half-revealed, trembling with presence, unfinished and alive.

OK this one is too far actually. You people are sick don’t ever message me again. Go to hell

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Preface", Philosophical Investigations

It's not a "good" drawing, but maybe with a bit more time I'll be able to make decent art on this