Period of HOZ

What remains of her painstaking hermetic researches is riddled with holes; a situation exacerbated by her eventual vows of monastic silence. Like one of her icons, the Spanish religious reformer Teresa of Àvila, Bauer professed a deep devotion to silence; a theology extending beyond mere contemplation into occasional examples of outright antisocial behavior.

During the earlier half of Bauer’s time at the monastery, two ‘Oecumenist’ magazine articles featured her religious views. The latter, published at Easter time, dedicated its cover and major editorial to the theme ‘God of the Gaps’. The guiding thread throughout her hyper-apophatic death of god theology was the realization that the spacing between functionally distinct signaletic clusters is itself communion, fully unfolding the Renaissance recognition that zero is a number in its own right. Bauer linked this to several threads; most prominently the idea that the silence god offers in response to prayer (as, for example, to the forsaken Christ on the cross) is an expression of divine love to be received masochistically. She understood the shift in her own thinking on this matter to be in correspondence with the way that Gothic subculture changes Punk’s formulation of nihilism from a negative to a positive statement (from “nothing matters” to “the nothing matters”).

In the words of one of Bauer’s poems:

“Dort außen herrscht nicht der Vater.

Nur das Loch einer Mutter ohne Geschlecht.

Nächtlich verkehren wir mit ihm.

Es wird verkehrt.

Ein Gräuel, die Erinnerung.

Es offenbart sich durch uns.

Wir sind außer uns selbst.”