revising

I will say I find it a strange wording to talk about how mysticism is metabolized on the page.  A wording I would never have dreamed of and I'm not even sure I like it or like how it sounds.  Does it sound pretentious and vague to talk about an experience being metabolized on the page.  And then to say it maps loosely with other ways of talking about experience.  When we talk about inwardness similar troubles with language arise.  Different spiritual postures. Here the use of "tides" and "erasure" does seem interesting to describe the kind of prayer Fosse describes implicitly---withdrawing the self, dissolving the voice into surrender into repetition and silence.  This sense of erasure could well be exactly why reading his book Melancholy spooked me so, made me recall my times in Eugenia memorial mental hospital.  Short as they were, yet intense as they were.  Also the experience of blackout when Va was still in her coma state and I drove down to New Bedford for an overnight escape and woke up not knowing where I was or how I had managed to checkout of the motel without having been conscious of doing so.  I had to call David and ask him to help me remember where I was.   The blackout, the panic attack, would be the kneeling in a dark chapel that you suggest.  But in the goalie's anxiety you dwell inside your perception and wait for the game itself, the field you are in, to speak and meaning arrives when you feel yourself dwelling inside your perception of being alive.  Your attention waits, alert, receptive.  I always, usually, resonate with  how things feel right now.  Intuitive awareness of feeling my way toward meaning, as meaning unfolds.  I would not use that phrase "language as a private ethical act."  Sounds too borrowed from some abstract text without any meaning at this point at all.  Does it mean I name what goes on for myself, apart from how anyone outside, contextual, would name what happens?  If feeling is paramount that would seem to mean that my subjective perception, my felt sense of things, is how I experience everything and how this keeps ambiguity alive.  I guess that is how ethical judgments are kept off stage, out of view, of no interest to me.  Here my delight in reading Handke is that old feeling that I accompany a companion friend rather than an arbiter outside my experience.  Now then you do offer an interesting description of how Fosse reads, he immerses us, his "characters" and his readers, in the rhythm of silent music, a transcendence through negation.  The revelations of "travel mystics" assumes we participate in inquiry, we inhabit comfortably even while experiencing the mysticizing of experience.  Fosse dematerializes experience.

Rather than ultimate unity, I prefer the lived texture of radiance, to use a term Handke likes.  He likes the word "shimmer" too, a term you use for Virginia Woolf's work.  

Now to distil further your language, your terminologies--

Architectonic vision overwhelms.  Staying in the Order, in the Church, is not possible, not life affirming. Life becomes dematerialized, your sense of self breaks down, disappears, you crawl on the floor of the refectory during dinner in search of your absent sense of self.  Looking for the lost bead.  

Immanence roots you in walking, weather, time, sensation, wandering observations.  In these ways you feel yourself being faithful to inner life not escaping it.  I am not waiting for Godot, I am being here whether he comes or not.  Not waiting but drowning.  Not waving but standing on the bottom in shallow water.  

Fosse's work enacts the very thing I fear losing---my fragile, anxious, morally charged and ambivalent, inner voice.  In Handke I sense a fellow soul who pushes his inner sense, inner voice, to the limits but preserves it in spite of those pushes, in the face of the attacks from without and within.  

You place great emphasis on putting your observations into spectrums.  Why I'm not sure.  Is that a given of AI operative perception itself?  Writers who walk beside you: immanent attention, the self stays intact, meaning emerges through perception.  

Ok, I give in and give up my attempt to re-write all of this so the professor would never dream that I had

plagarized my paper from chatgpt or AI in any way.  If I were the professor would I make all written assignments be done in the classroom by hand?  Or would a better assignment be to play with your AI companion all you want and report back whatever you want from all of that.  Would you drive each other nuts and still get a decent grade or contribute something of your own somehow?  Here close reading and play with the text of the writer companion would be much better than the chat programs.  Unless we

assume that they are somehow authorial entities in their own right?  

Peter Handke (anchor here)

– Mysticism of seeing, naming, walking
– Ethical attention to the world as it is
– The “I” remains fragile but present

Marcel Proust
– Memory as revelation
– Time recovered within consciousness
– Almost sacramental attention to sensation

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
– Nature as text
– Awe without surrendering agency
– The watcher matters as much as the watched

Robert Walser
– Smallness as spiritual posture
– Humility, play, inner freedom
– Mysticism of the marginal

Virginia Woolf (The Waves, late essays)
– Moments of being
– The self thins, but does not vanish
– Consciousness as shimmer, not doctrine

If you love this zone, you likely want mystery without annihilation.

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🟡 MIDDLE: Liminal / Ritualized / Unstable

(The self flickers—sometimes guide, sometimes obstacle.)

These writers test your footing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
– The self as vessel
– Angels, terror, beauty
– Oscillates between inward lyricism and metaphysical command

W.G. Sebald
– Memory, ruin, ghostliness
– The narrator is present but haunted
– Mysticism via history and melancholy

Clarice Lispector
– Radical interiority
– Consciousness cracking itself open
– Sometimes intimate, sometimes alien

Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf)
– Spiritual seeking dramatized
– The self must fracture to learn
– Explicit metaphysical arc

This is often the INFP–INFJ overlap zone.

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🔵 RIGHT: Transcendent / Apophatic / Self-Erasing

(The self is to be surrendered; language becomes rite.)

These writers ask you to kneel.

Jon Fosse (anchor here)
– Repetition as prayer
– Silence as meaning
– God, death, negation

Samuel Beckett (late prose)
– Voice without owner
– Consciousness stripped to residue
– Anti-self as revelation

Georges Bataille
– Ecstasy through excess and rupture
– Transgression as spiritual method
– The self is broken open

Simone Weil
– Attention as self-emptying
– Grace arrives only when “I” disappears
– Severe, radiant, merciless

This zone can feel sublime—or emotionally uninhabitable—depending on your temperament.

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A quick diagnostic (for you)

Notice which sentence feels truer:

1. “Meaning appears when I pay exquisite attention to my inner life.”

2. “Meaning appears when I dissolve into something larger than myself.”

If you hesitate on #2, you’re probably left-leaning on this spectrum—and that explains Handke.

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One subtle but important distinction

Some writers protect the reader’s interiority.
Others override it.

• Handke, Woolf, Walser → protect

• Fosse, Beckett, Weil → override

Neither is better.
But only one feels like home.

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If you want, next we could:

• Place your own writing on this map

• Compare two writers you’re conflicted about

• Or identify the bridge writers who might ease you toward Fosse without losing yourself

I’ve got time.