You Will Move Into My Depths

Note: I put this text together in a single night on June 22nd, 2024 while staying at my humble and eclectic guest room (think woodcraft-course crucifix meets giant Andy Warhol closet) in the Dominican monastery of Düsseldorf. Initially meant as an intro text to the residency I’m hosting at ImpulsTanz festival, I decided to get over my anxiety and publish it online as-is. Knowing myself I’m bound to come back to make some edits and will make sure to keep a log of any changes.

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[Love speaks to the Soul]
Beloved, what do you wish from me?
I contain all things which were,
And are, and shall be,
I am filled with all things.
Take from me all which pleases you:
If you desire from me all things, I will not deny.
Say, beloved, what do you wish from me?
I am Love, filled with the goodness of of all things:
What you will, we will.
Beloved, tell us plainly your will.
from The Mirror Simple Souls (ca.1300)
by Marguerite Porete¹

In preparation for the residency I’m hosting at this year’s ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna, I’ve been trying to collect some of the questions that I keep coming back to in my work at the intersection of participatory art and spiritual practice. One question this: 

What’s at stake in accepting that you are nothing, but a relationship?

I hope to move together this question through a clumsy dialogue with Christian mystical concepts of annihilation and ecstasy. Very big words both, I hope to make them somewhat smaller and in their smallness find a greater bigness. I can’t claim to be an expert on mysticism by any measure but its concepts, language of sensitivity and manifestation in lived faith have been challenging my own little ideas about participatory art and somatics. This will be central to the work I hope to unpack with our little Vienna group. For this text, I brought in the heretic Marguerite Porete, Annie Dillard, Fred Moten and a bunch of faceless Swedish strawmen.

Towards the end, I hoped to zoom out by imagining mysticism as a form of study in how intimacy challenges individual selfhood and sovereignty, how our relationships might know something of us we never will, and how sensitivity often eludes the senses.

1. You, the Choir

When talking about mysticism, there is a lot to be said about the concept of annihilation and every time I try doing it, I find myself sounding very silly. Often taken as a final death of the mystic's creaturely self, or soul - annihilation is seen as the end goal or the completion stage in a journey towards divine union. This is not an inaccurate reading, but it often results in the belief that to achieve said annihilation the mystic needs to be - for lack of better words - clinically dead. Some mystics of the Late Middle Ages, especially the ones associated with the so-called Heresy of the Free Spirit like Marguerite Porete, present an alternative.³ Marguerite was a Frenchwoman who in 1310 was sent to the flames for refusing to renounce her book and mystical manual, The Mirror of Simple Souls. Echoing Simone Weil, who would come a few hundred years later, Marguerite called for a way of living through the will of Love. By surrendering their will to the will of Love, the soul can, through an act of radical emptying, annihilate her selfhood while still remaining in this life.³ Instead of escaping this world through the door of death, in favour of some transcendent space-jump to the celestial heights, the annihilated soul is midwifed into becoming one with the world. It's the death of the individual, dying into the world, rather than dying out of it. 

To me, the most exciting way to approach mystical annihilation is to read it as a gentle realisation in which one (even for a moment) accepts that whatever they call themselves is nothing, but a relationship. Subjectivity is annihilated in its selfhood, and instead mobilised as event-relation - a ‘who am I?’ becoming a ‘when are we?’. 

There is a weird quantum-twang to a God that is not a sole creature, nor an undifferentiated unity, but a dynamic difference without separation. This is not some fringe heresy in Christianity, but the most vanilla doctrine of the Trinity. Just like how pieces of void dance on a subatomic level, Christian spirituality often imagines the three persons of God as eternally dancing trio or as the unbound ocean deep - sightless, swirling and unspeakably full.⁴ Is this God different or separate from the created world? While many orthodox Christians land on a hard ‘both yes and no’, to Free Spirit heretics,  God is neither of a transcendent without nor an immanent within but of a haptic amongst. Terrifyingly, wonderfully, within, between.

By attending to you I'm attending you. My attention becomes attendance. It joins the choir - a gathering of blood, bone, time, spit, hope, joy, fidget, electric current, carbon, methane, ammonia, microplastic, angel tear. All through which we may sing a ‘you’. The choir devours my attention, tending it into its ranks as it reaches the gathering hall. The wooden floorboard. A body dropping. Hands in the air.

So if, according to Free Spirit heretics, the world pretty much consists of nothing but God, and according to scripture God is nothing but Love (1 John 4:7-21)⁵, and the mysticism is about divine union, then surely union through mystical annihilation means going from being a loving creature (as in love being something the creature can choose to do, take on, but also deny and retain) to becoming Love Incarnate. It’s a matter ‘how we do it’, right?

2. Towards an Ecstatic Literacy

When presented with someone like Marguerite and her Mirror of Simple Souls, a deeply technical treatise and manual for mystical annihilation brought forth in dazzling prose and poetry, one of the first questions regarding the contents of the book would naturally be: Did she really do it? And if yes, how?

When it came to experimentation, a window of opportunity in non-institutional religious communities allowed mediaeval laymen and laywomen for a short time to mix more accepted forms of piety with some seriously daring stuff, bordering on magical practices. When engaging with mystical manuals from the sands of time, it is often unclear what was a speculative proposal for a practice, and what were texts that were actively written in conversation with whatever was going on on the floor. Spiritual practices from self-organised Beguine communities and laywomen like Marguerite were always under suspicion from the authorities, regardless of how orthodox or heretical their views were Much of the mystical writings from these traditions were written as pedagogical manuals meant for inner circulation, so it is expected to be coded in double speech. How the writings played into lived experience and what they demanded from their reader is a question scholarship currently explores and there has been some excellent research on the topic.⁶

In many ways, a book like The Mirror… is as much a manual as an anti-manual. On one hand, it follows the well-travelled medieval mystical formula of x-number of steps to take when wanting to achieve divine union. In 2024 this keenness for a sequence of bullet points has a particularly clickbait-y vibe, giving the Middle Ages the optics of being ridden with self-help gurus all elbowing each other in becoming Europe’s Next Top Mystic. In Marguerite’s case, we’re looking at a seven-stage spiritual journey which the Soul must take to become Love with Love. At the same time, Marguerite admits the absolute impossibility of this journey ever being a matter of technique or work only. It is true that the Soul, who through her journey becomes nothing, ultimately gives no choice to Love, but (to quote Meister Eckhart writing a few years later) compels Love to move into her.⁷ However, even the attempt at describing how this can happen or how we get there is doomed to fail. Marguerite about writing about The Mirror: 

I was foolish at the time when I wrote it; but Love did it for my sake and at my request, that I might undertake something which one could neither do, nor think, nor say any more than one could desire to enclose the sea in his eye, or carry the world on the end of a reed, or illumine the sun with a lantern or a torch. I was more foolish than the one who want to do the other, when I undertook the thing which one cannot say, when I encumbered myself with the writing of these words.⁸

So if it cannot be done, is this something to do even? For Marguerite, the Soul cannot become annihilated, because it was never not annihilated. Annihilation in The Mirror is less a supernova and more a dwindling of expectations that you were anything at all to begin with. What is ultimately annihilated is the expectation of sovereignty.

When I listen to the voice of the annihilated soul, I hear laughter, yawning, or how one mumbles in the moments of drifting asleep. Moments in which it is unclear when is one doing something, and what is being done to them. It's at no one’s doing it and at once everyone and everything is doing it. This is the vital passivity of the contemplative. Of a body that has the capacity to accept and the literacy to pronounce that is in fact always in ecstasy. Always extending itself into the world and in/voluntarily inviting the world to extend itself into them.⁹ These moments are not an escape from the created world but the epitome of it.

Can you think of laughter as a way of surrendering?

Can you think of yawning as a way of receiving?

Can you think of drifting asleep as a way of giving?

3. Crammed with Heaven and Alone

When it comes to blurring the sovereign self, the implications of a 700-year-old mystical manual in 2024 are, at best, complicated. Even if there would be such a thing as a homogenous experience of sovereignty, boundaries and the self for Europe in 2024 as well as for 1300, the understanding of selfhood has changed so much in the centuries between that it would take a book just to lay the groundwork for any reasonable statement on the matter.¹⁰

I live in Scandinavia now where my work finds home in artsy and academic spaces, as well as in places of alternative education and lefty subcultures. In these spaces sovereignty, boundaries, and selfhood are always hot topic - both as core issues to investigate but also as grounds for creative experimentation. For an individual, getting to play with boundary loss and the blurring of the self is often a matter of privilege bound to class, education and an a conviction in a more-less stable identity. It rests on a point of security that one can venture out from and safely return to. This individual responsibility in collective unmaking is at the foundation of many subcultures like kink, neo-spirituality, larp and amongst burners. While there is no space here to present the whole argument, it goes without saying that for most humans, creatures and maybe for the planet as a whole, the daily blurring of boundaries and selfhood is not a game they can consent to opt-in and out of, but the very reality they move through and moves through them.¹¹

In my current home of Sweden, there is a lot of interest towards spirituality among urban intellectuals - both as something to incorporate into one’s lifestyle as well as a subject in the arts. I agree with Jamie Sutcliffe when he says that magic and spirituality are being re-discovered so often by the artists and art world, that it’s silly to say that they ever really ceased to occupy a central part of the things people make and experience as an audience.¹² With that said, there can be a certain idealisation and cherry-picking that is peculiar to how the secularised middle-class individual from a Western democracy approaches spirituality. By cherry-picking, I’m not talking about remixing or being creatively heretical to spiritual practices (this is how most of them evolved in the first place) but rather a reluctance to reckon with the implications of how something like mysticism radically and irreversibly challenges the notion of individual and sovereign. 

The ecstatic body is not a state produced by technique but an involuntarily moving reality to reckon with. For the ones who are created-in-the-image, identifying with the God of a haptic amongst foregrounds the creaturely body and soul as being likewise a gathering, a dance, a choir, a sightless swirl. Techniques from spirituality, somatics and art can still play a supportive role in strengthening boundaries or the capacity to blur them at will but only to a point. What mystics like Marguerite and someone like the XX. century author Annie Dillard brings forth again and again that we ultimately don’t choose who gets to venture into us when we get to venture out of ourselves, or if we do so, will there be anything left of us to return to?

Theologian and priest Sarah Bachelard quotes Dillard as someone who ‘insists on the magnitude of the reality we’re invoking in prayer. “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions,” she writes. Or is it simply that “no one believes a word of it?” And she goes on: “The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.” Why? Well, because “the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” In more familiar language, the letter to the Hebrews makes the same point: “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10.31).¹³

Many of my performance work consists of creating small participatory exercises for imagination, attention, sense perception and language. Daisy-chained together these exercises make up parts of longer experiences, spanning from an evening’s show to workshops that demand many days of engagement. It’s undeniably super nice to enjoy tasting the tangible outcomes, moments when the sensory and imaginal spaces really bring forth something in the room, in the air, under our skin. People often say after that it’s as if we’re doing real magic when something starting out as a technical affair (of the exercise) enfleshes as a natural offspring (of a meaningful moment for the senses). However, what mysticism brings me to is rather to ask what would it take for us (performers, facilitators, participants, audience) to commit to engaging in a practice or an exercise without expecting to catch any sensible result or reward. This is the moment when art and spirituality cease to be transactional and begin to hold space for hospitality and intimacy as I understand it.

A common thing I see currently in the art world is mysticism used as an empty shell to project 2024 lefty activist agendas. While this can be genuine in the case when a specific form of mysticism is explicitly tied to liberation politics (either historically or in its current developments), the compulsion of automatically treating all mysticism as activism is just as harmful as making a strawman out of mysticism as an example of religious brainwashing.¹⁴ I find it sad how these days every spiritual practice that comes near the art world is suddenly forced to explain at didactic gunpoint how it will be a tool for dismantling capitalist realism, ushering in some vague eco-punk utopia. While the intentions are kind, mistaking spiritual practices for activism impoverishes mysticism from its hospitality in mystery. Mysticism is not a Holy Hand Grenade for direct political action, but rather each kind of mysticism moves in the waters of its own irreducible and unfathomable sensitivity. Because mysticism is too unruly to commit to a political plan, it often ends up relegated to the role of an incense-filled extra (or TNT for Dillard) to contrast the mundane life of the individual - an evening show or a retreat to engage with occasionally, but always at arms-length never to fully commit to or reckon with what it might bring us out to.

Going back to Marguerite’s annihilated soul, one way to have a more fruitful dialogue with mysticism would be to challenge the dogmas of XX. century scholars like Eliade, Weber, Turner, who contrast the sacred, the enchanted and the liminal to the deeply troubling categories of profane, disenchanted, everyday. What if one starts unsaying quotidian-mystical binary at large, both in the practice of language and in the experience of bodies? The word ‘mysticism’ will then not refer to a realm outside the usual, but rather to a commitment to a loving relationship with a world always more-than. A commitment that is indebted to certain histories of ideas, gestures and bodies. It is much closer to how Lyndsey Stonebridge talks about Hannah Arendt’s possibility for Love as “the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place”.

Mysticism is much more than just a technical affair to excite the mind and the senses. It is not a tool or a method but practice as a way-of-life or way-of-life as practice. Much of lived mysticism is spent trying to stay with the realisation that trust ultimately lacks security and how ‘the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.’¹⁵ Eastern Christian monastics work to live their life in perpetual prayer, but claiming that any of this would bring a guarantee for their salvation in ways the self would understand is considered a great error. Much like opening up to another person, the annihilated soul needs to know when to leave her training wheels behind and plunge into the dark night of trust and faith. 

5. Working, Dancing, Suffering

To me, mysticism is first and foremost a study of how intimacy with the unknowable, the unreliable, the unspeakable, and the unimaginable challenges individual selfhood and sovereignty. Words like ’unknowable’ or ’unspeakable’ can sound comically grandiose when blown up on the scale of an all-mighty God-in-the-sky or some Lovecraftian cosmic crawlie, but I think the really cool stuff starts happening when we scale down the impossible to the inter-personal, the inter-creature, the inter-body.¹⁶ Here, mysticism can hold a language of sensitivity that touches and dances with the exquisite pleasures, anguish and confusion in never fully grasping something or someone, including ourselves - the ‘stranger within.’¹⁷ This could be a crude simplification of the mystical erotics of the Middle Ages as read through feminist authors like Anne Carson or Amy Hollywood.¹⁸ Desire draws the devout Soul into an incessant dance of attraction, repellence and whirling, Christ always staying just out of reach. Carrot-on-a-stick but make it goth. This is a pretty juicy spot to arrive at, but I think we can go a little further. 

I insist on calling mysticism a kind of ’study’ mostly because of Fred Moten. In his book, The Undercommons (written together with Stefano Harney), Moten gives a beautiful understanding of study, as an irreducible convergence of three things: ’working, dancing, suffering… …held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.’¹⁸

Moten’s study foregrounds how instead of unknowable, unimaginable, unspeakable, it might be more helpful to say that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of our activities means our relationships know us can imagine us, can speak us in ways we ourselves never can, never will. This is a truth both art and mysticism can hold, and a truth that is much more nourishing than any retreat weekend or magic trick that tries to snatch answers from the æther.

The myth of the lonely mystic working to escape the world is in part a remnant of popular imagination, outdated scholarship, and of course a consequence of the precarity of immaterial and non-institutional knowledge trying to survive centuries of censorship, persecution and erosion. Thanks to excellent scholarship in the history of religions, we are again and again learning of new and new experimental communities from the past showing that life in faith expresses itself with an abundance of forms and with a critical force that challenges both expectations about mysticism as well as our understandings of practice and community life at large.²⁰ It also is true that much of the influential mystical writings are made by hermits, anchorites and anchoresses who lived and new live most of their life in solitude in the outback or walled-up cell. However, when reading someone like Maggie Ross, a contemporary solitary of the Augustinian tradition, it is clear that their solitude is a marriage to the world by dying into it just the same. Ross’s writing on the silence of God (or God being silence itself) is one of the most intimate accounts of the entangled somatics of lived religion and the inescapable intimacy with the multiplicity of the world even when we think or feel we are alone. While somatics can show us how sense perception is not bound to sensory organs, contemplatives of the dark night like Maggie Ross, Simone Weil and Marguerite Porete can take us further in showing that certain forms of sensitivity elude even flights of sense perception. We, ourselves might not be around to catch what’s going on. But our relationships will.

The title of this text and our residency starting next week at ImpulsTanz is ‘You Will Move Into My Depths.’ I like to think that it is a phrase uttered in a yawning, laughing, drifty middle voice, by both the self and the world as they prepare to sink into one another in a single leap of faith. A drop disappearing in the ocean. The ocean disappearing in a drop.

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Images used

(1) The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete († 1310), Chapter 35 (Dialogue of the Soul and Reason). Late 15th or early 16th century manuscript by unknown French copyist

(3-4) by Marie Laforge taken at a performance of The Abyss Between Our Handds on ⁣⁣⁣20 July 2024 at St. Andreas church in Düsseldorf⁣⁣⁣⁣. Curated by Pina Bendfeld⁣ for The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer⁣⁣⁣⁣ 

Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician and student of theology whose work explores languages of intimacy between angel, creature and computer. They are currently a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts. Their artistic dissertation, titled ‘Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come’ is due in 2026.

Notes:

[1] translation used: Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Translated by Ellen L. Babinsky. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. page 215.

[2] obligatory Zen koan footnote

[3] the name Heresy of The Free Spirit existed more in the inquisitor's imagination rather than in the lived spirituality of the heretics themselves, who, by all accounts, would have probably called themselves simply Christians.

[3] - By ‘her selfhood’ I mean of the Soul, and not of Marguerite. Following the popular interpretations of the Biblical Song of Songs in medieval religious imagination, I choose to address a person’s soul with she/her pronouns in this text regardless of the person’s ‘IRL’ gender(s).

[4] For the trinity as a dance, see the concept of the Perichoresis and the writings of William of Saint-Thierry. For God as oceanic depth, see The Face of the Deep by Catherine Keller, interpreting the opening lines of Genesis.

[5] Beguine vernacular mystics like Hadewijch and Mechtild of Magdeburg give this extra spin by identifying God with the Germanic word Minne/Mine. This is the word to express the stormy romantic love in the songs of the mediaeval troubadours - see ‘minnesänger’, the German word for troubadour, or ‘minnaar’, the modern Dutch word for lover. Medieval mystics writing in their native German and Flemish often employed ‘min(n)e’ to convey a love that brings forth both the desire and the terror when losing oneself to another. See: Birtalan - The Abyss Between Our Hands (performance and upcoming book)

[6] see: Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages edited David Carrillo-Rangel, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, Pablo Acosta-García

[7] See: Eckhart - On Detachment

[8] Marguerite Porete, 171.

[9] See the works of Michael Marder and Simone Kotva for an exploration of ecstasy and permeability inspired by plant life. Their writings open the possibility for ecstasy more akin to photosynthesis, and not just some big orgasmic boom. 

[10] For selfhood and boundaries in the Middle Ages, Barbara Newman’s The Permeable Self is a good starting point.

[11] Some especially complicated bits worthy of a short mention, are the relationship between the capacity to consent and privilege, how subcultural consent mechanics can end up extending whiteness rather than challenging it and how trust ultimately works beyond the consensual. Hey, here’s to another text coming up. For two amazing articles exploring the Scandinavian context, see Another Body Is Possible / There Is No Body B. by Gabriel Widing and Employing Intimacy in Audience Participatory Performing Arts by Tova Gerge - both artists living in Stockholm with strong subcultural ties.

[12] Sutcliffe - Magic: A Gramarye For Artists

[13] Revd Dr Sarah Bachelard - On Not Knowing How to Pray: A Theology of Prayer (YouTube link)

[14] I fully understand that I’m also making a strawman out of lefty artists in the West, but please let me bite the hand that feeds just this time!

[15] part in quotations is paraphrasing Whitney Bauman in Returning Faith to Knowledge: Earthlings after the Anthropocene

[16] This should probably be ’intra-personal, etc…’ but even my PhD-candidate-ass is not pretentious enough to reference H. P. Lovecraft and Karen Barad in the same sentence.

[17] Ok, here you are, Karen.

[18] Decreation and The Soul as Virgin Wife respectively

[19] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 110.

[20] see: Medieval Mystical Women in the West edited by John Arblaster, Rob Faesen