You know, I can usually tell early on if I'm going to get along fine with a book. But this one On Mysticism, it tricked me, by starting off very well, just the sort of over view I thought I was looking for, an interesting chapter on Eckhart. And then it gradually started to grind my engagement into dust, with chapters on Anne Dillard, Anne Carson, Julian of Norwich, TS Eliot. Now, it maybe that this is all just me. I do appear to repeatedly find Christian explanations of their theology and approach to practice, more than a tad incomprehensible. I am looking to grasp hold of something, or better still someone with a clear head to guide me through it. But my mental synapses keep finding it turns into mush and suffocates my psycho-physical being under its philosophical goop. I keep thinking, this really should not be that difficult to understand, surely? Study, if it holds any function, should not obscure, but further enlighten and open out ones understanding.
If one encounters complicated multi-layered explanations, there is always the potential to become lost very very easily, particularly if you can't follow the logic, if indeed there is any. Then imagine trying to explain Christian Mysticism, which is very far from following any conventional route of practice, at the best of times. My understanding of mystics, Christian or otherwise, is that very little in their approach will be useful to other people. The mystic approach to religious practice appears, in my reading of it at least, to be the very definition of a one off non-transferable experience.
Religious experience generally seems to be like that. Other people's brush with God, or Enlightenment experience, though encouraging, doesn't necessarily help others to follow in detail their example, to obtain the same result. The Buddha thought initially he'd be wasting his time trying to communicate his Enlightenment experience, and he was right. He was convinced to teach anyway, and spent the next fifty years trying out all sorts of different approaches, none of which were a guaranteed foolproof method. Two and a half thousand years of Buddhism continued this search. Because, fundamentally, although the Buddhist teachings have pointers and practices, which are certainly helpful, you still needed to discover what the way forward was like - for yourself. This was inescapable.
With that contextual qualification now given a voice. I will express a general opinion about this book. Somewhere in the middle of this huge blancmange of ideas, there is a fine book on mysticism fighting to be liberated from its opaque metaphors and obfuscating language. Undoubtedly Simon Critchley knows and has thought about this subject matter a lot, but a clear seamless exposition this is not. It lacks one coherent over arching vein of thought or theme, one that keeps resurfacing to bind all this multiplicity of ideas and disparate sources together. It reads, more often than not, as a whole lot of tangential flailing for meaning.
By the end he is rambling onwards about the modern mystical muses within music. Specifically Krautrock, and their influence on punk and post punk, Julian Cope and Nick Cave. Whilst this is not necessarily an unreasonable thing to assert, there might even be something in this. A whole book exploring this could prove insightful. But in the context of this book, it does feels like he's desperately throwing a few last remaining subjective ideas at a wall and seeing if any of them will stick.
CARROT REVIEW - 
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