006: Debased + Exalted, I

On FKA twigs’ "Eusexua," Ethel Cain’s "Perverts," Simon Critchley’s "Mysticism" + medieval Catholicism.

This month’s essay will be published in two parts. This is Part One. Part Two is now live, here. — Michelle 🩸

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Life feels tighter now. Everything down to the shortness of eggs chafes and grates, wearing me down to an inflamed nub. Transcendence feels like a natural thing to crave. Yet transcendence is easily perverted. It’s too easily whittled down to the language of verticality, synonymous with ascension and supremacy: The White House is currently playing host to a Mars-bound sect of techno-oligarchs, eager to transcend humanity through eugenics and transhumanism. On the cultural front, everything that can be said has been said about the greasy critics and thirsty podcasters peddling their self-annihilatory over-aestheticization, granting themselves a little fascism, as a treat. They are all pathetic and obsessed with abandoning little more than morals and ugliness in favor of a “beauty or strangeness [that] transcends its subject.”¹

This version of transcendence ladders up to shining ideals of power and glory. Everything from pain, to illness, the human body, and poverty are to be transcended through grit, discipline or abandon. It claims the language of evolved spirituality in support of the usual hierarchies by insisting that non-whiteness, queerness, femininity and disability need to be surpassed, transcended,and left behind.

Instagram accounts like @marymagdalenestan and @medievalwounds nurture the Tumblr-era obsession with the female mystics of medieval Catholicism like Julian of Norwich and Margery of Kempe. The female mystics of medieval Northern Europe’s espoused a mysticism that didn’t just fly up into Heaven, it exploded in all directions. This transcendence bursts through, it goes everywhere and pushes against everything. It’s not measured along positive and negative values; good or bad; Heaven or Hell. It makes the sky fall and the earth screech open, it turns you inside out and breaks you down into your constituent parts — each of them raw and alive — before rebuilding you anew.

The transcendence FKA twigs tried to convey in EUSEXUA echoes the mystic’s desire to dissolve: “It’s like when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person. You’re not human anymore, you’re just a feeling,” said the “Mary Magdalene” singer in a British Vogue interview, “Or that moment before an orgasm: pure nothingness but also pure focus, in a state of eusexua.” Eusexua — the term twigs coined for the rollout of this album — names a-not-entirely-new form of transcendence the singer attributes to some formative experiences in Prague’s rave scene. It can be “Sticky,” vulnerable (“Striptease”), stupid (“Room of Fools”) and childish (“Childlike Things”). It’s less than human (“24hr Dog”) but also more (“Eusexua”). It starts by encouraging you to let your consciousness pour out of the vessel of your body, but it doesn’t stop there.

Catholic medieval mysticism seems, to me, so at home with our contemporary culture because it sketches a pursuit of the divine that is both messier and wilder than the version above the clouds where everything is pure, white, and perfect. Accounts like @marymagdalenestan and @medievalwounds exploit the meme format to pierce through the numbing, machinic experience of the social media feed with an opposing thrust. Their dedication to the side wound of Christ extends into CapCut fan edits and memes about living in and drinking from the sacred cut. In representing the sacred slit these memes create their own, cutting the feed wide open to propose something bloodier and fleshier, overriding the transhumanist command to “leave it all behind.” They play with the aesthetics of cuteness and abjection to pursue pleasures only previously known to GH’s roach and FKA twigs’ amoeba.

left: from @marymagdalenestan. right: from @medievalwounds

If Eusexua is a breezy inhale Perverts is the shuddered exhale of carbon dioxide. Listening to Ethel Cain’s “Punished” did more for me than any kind of Church-sanctioned confession or penitence. I felt renewed, forgiven, and paradoxically restored to the sting between guilt and debasement — where wrongness is fresh and consequence is suspended. Cain explained on Tumblr that the song imagines “what it must feel like at the edge of the earth with the most shame you could possibly carry as a human being.” Perverts began as a character study of the different types perverts based on the stories from Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff (2008). “Punish” is one of the few tracks that retains explicit ties to this originating project: Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy, she sings. In the morning I mar myself again. Cain wrote on Tumblr that the song is “about a pedophile who was shot by the child’s father and now lives in exile,” where he continues his penance by maiming himself. The shameful voice of “Punish” mourns itself towards the end of the song, Only God would believe / that I was an angel and they made me leave. It only remembers enough to know there must have been a time before shame. But it’s the fall from grace, this unholy descent and abject abandonment, sustains the whole of Perverts.

As a longtime fan of both twigs and Cain, I struggled to split my time and moods across such seemingly different projects. One for dancing, another for brooding; one in love, the other disgusted; one exalted and the other debased. But Simon Critchley’s Mysticism was already in the mail and I had hoped the book would create an intellectual atmosphere from which I’d be able to indulgently listen to both Perverts and EUSEXUA. But it started off as a profoundly unsatisfying read.

Critchley collectivizes his timely desire for “some relief from misery, from the heaviness of the soul, from the slough of despond, from mental leadeness.” He used words like “surpassing” and phrases that looked “towards something larger” to describe mystic ecstasy.² Like me, he feels constrained and he hungers for more. We’re both looking for transcendence and yet, I worried that he was only looking up.

He declared in the introduction that the book is an attempt to describe a countermovement. But I struggled to see how his desires to be “lifted up, rescued, healed” and to move “outside the sticky self” offered any kind of counterweight. How countercultural can a mysticism that moves from “dereliction to delight, from woe to weal,” and aims to ascend “above and outside ourselves” be? It struck me as too vertical. If mysticism is a movement, why choose only one direction? Must we always want a version of more that’s accretive and accumulable? Is up and out always the best way to go? In all fairness, Critchley does well in acknowledging the importance of negative (apophatic) theology and the schools of mysticism that could only name what God is not, and thus moved towards nothingness in a swirl of negations. But I care about the movement. The wild swings, vibrations and vacillations; back and forth, up and down.

screenshot from Isabel Sandoval’s “Apparition” (2012)

If Eusexua is a breezy inhale Perverts is the shuddered exhale of carbon dioxide. Together, they remind me of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s idea of flow. Mechthild of Magdeburg is thought to have lived in what we today call Germany, during the 13th century. Her manuscript, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, compiles her visions and other texts in a feat of vernacular and multi-genre writing. From studying her texts, I know that exaltation and debasement can be conjoined as two ends of the same transcendental experience: As much as she “speaks of how the soul ‘soars’ above itself in returning to God, she insists that this must be understood in conjunction with the soul’s downward, or ‘sinking’ movement.”³ This downward sink, this “‘flowing down,’ or ‘sinking' away from ecstasy into pain, humility, and even into estrangement from God” mirrors Christ’s own debasement through incarnation.⁴ Mechthild speaks of being “wondrously dead” and “under Lucifer’s tail.” To her, God taking on human form was no accident, in fact, it stresses the importance of the body. It’s not meant to be left behind. The point is to flow, back and forth; in and out.

But a mystic, Ethel Cain says she is not. That much she made clear on her 2022 YouTube video diagramming what she calls “the ring,” “the veil,” and “the great dark” — concepts she namedrop throughout Perverts: “Proximity to god is desirable, tearing through the veil and becoming one with god is an unknown and discouraged experience.” Nevertheless, Perverts’ honeyed slide down into shame and abjection echoes the downward flow of Magdeburg’s theology.

She might disavow mysticism but the styles and conventions of mystic literature resonate throughout this album. “Pulldrone” closely follows the form of a mystical itinerary — a step-by-step retelling of the events that lead to an encounter with god — by enumerating eleven steps from apathy to agony. The song points to a wellspring of knowledge / of feeling, of sensation / Beauty, overwhelming… flush against the veil. The following steps parallel Hadewijch of Antwerp’s mystical journey, wherein the “ecstasy, joy and melting into the arms of Christ are decidedly not the end of the mature mystical life, but rather the youthful beginning.” The ultimate goal is estrangement from God, an unfaith that leaves you empty and undone. Which leads us to step eleven of “Pulldrone:” This agony. Here, Cain enacts what Critchley identifies as a hallmark of mystical literature — a collapsing on words that forces language to fall in on itself: I am that was as I no longer am for I am nothing. She remains empty and undone.

Perverts and EUSEXUA stage parallel paths for transcending our selves: Most recent writing on raving describes it as a way of “losing” ourselves and melting into the booming nothingness of the beat. This is how exaltation maps its way out of the self. Shame and disgust, on the other hand, are “activated by the drawing of a boundary line or barrier.”⁵ We feel the sharpness of shame when we’re excluded, othered or rejected. Disgust comes to us at the sight of blood or a maggotted corpse, reminding us of how frail and porous those boundaries really are. Because one draws the line and the other shakes it, shame and disgust electrify the fence that binds us up into the mass of being and consciousness we often call the self, and the debasement they bring maps a second route out of the self.

Unlike Simon Critchley, I am partial to all the “dead, rank and rotting” things he wants to cast aside. Mine is a mysticism of writing, of bits, parts, fragments, blood and worms. A mysticism that answers Elvia Wilk’s call to enact a mysticism for the Anthropocene that “would regard the object of knowledge as a life and inseparable from the mind and body that encounters it.”⁶ I can concede that it might be a rather girly mysticism of play, artifice and fairy tales. A writer’s mysticism of letters, typing, and repetition.

But Mysticism was a powerful read for how it vivisected the workings of mystic literature. Critchley describes how manuscripts of visions and passions were recorded in genre-bending forms that combined courtly romance poetry, theological treatises, plays, and episolary. In his study of their use of language, he notes how the writing often “points negatively to what exceeds the power of statement” through hyperbole, superlative language, and excessive and antithetical speech. When this kind of analysis takes on the form of writing, it reveals writing itself — as a way of truth-seeking and knowledge building — to be an act of mysticism. To be continued.🩸

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📝: Expect to see my writing pop up more regularly on ArtReview, where I recently wrote a column on Silicon Valley’s bet on longevity.

1. for the sake of transparency I’ll note this quote is from Harpers’ cover story on art criticism but I refuse to promote that shit.

2. all quotes attributed to Simon Critchley are from Mysticism (2024).

3. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: men and women in the new mysticism (1200-1350) (1998), 231.

4. McGinn, 241.

5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” 116.

6. Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape (2022), 90.