Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

Streets of Paris

By

Music and Lyrics by Paul Maylone

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Lyrics

You will turn me into fire,
You will turn me into war,
I will give my life as openly as so many before.
In my worship of you, paradise is sacrifice;
When entering the gate, both are one and the same.
I will soldier for you now.

They have turned to idolatry,
They have turned as infidels,
Commanded simply in the ways that they are slaves to hell.
In our worship of you, only we the righteous see
And enter through the gate. We are prophecy
And we soldier for you now.

To bring your justice of horrible beauty,
Love in the highest most fundamental.
It’s the greatest thing I’ll ever do when done.

We are in the streets of Paris,
I can feel you in my gun,
Oh the glory of you in the face and fate about to come.
In my worship of you we have seen this day between
The wicked and the faith. Here it comes at last.
I soldier for your will.

I don’t find the architecture
Or the art in foreign stone.
I don’t find the souls surrounding me so no pity is known.
How I’ve worshiped you and longed for you this moment through
The passion of my faith. Here we are at last.
I will hold you now and kill

And bring your justice of horrible beauty,
Love in the highest most fundamental.
It’s the greatest thing I’ll ever do when done.

Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism (Review)

By

Edited by Owen Coggins and James Harris. Columbia, SC: Void Front Press, 2017. Pp. 289. $29.99 full color with CD; $10.00 black and white, book only.

Available here: https://voidfrontpress.org/portfolio/sustaindecay/

Drone. Is. Eternal. Primal origins exposed via mass ebbing forward from the past while an ethereal knell drifts incrementally from the future. The center is I. Investigating such phenomena through linear pathways broaches the absurd. Meditations, philosophical rants, poems, short stories, interviews, diagrams, Rorschach-like images, investigations, excoriations, imaginations, excitations all converge on and are underscored by The Drone. Centered on the I, subjectivity is a given, a process that allows both writer and reader to wallow in ideas and revel in questions of sound and meaning indefinitely. Yet neither form a stable enough subject to avoid contamination by others. The I gives way to the many and the many to the sound, The Drone, infinite, endless, in which the body is “vibrated by sound which, listeners repeat, ‘is to be experienced not understood’.” 1Sustain/Decay, p. 19.

This is the central paradox—to discuss sound is to attempt to understand it. To define the experience relying on processes and states of mind is to limit corporeal interaction by invoking words, words, words. These articles swirl and spiral, philosophically investigating the activity of listening, paradoxically, where the act of hearing, of experiencing sound in body, in mind, eludes words and remains just out of reach. If good music writing implies a desire to listen to the works discussed, the writing here transcends this activity in order to raise questions about the very act of listening itself. As Kristine Wolfe points out, “the purpose of this article and the introductory presentation of these techniques is to inspire the reader to go out and explore his or her individual listening practice as it relates to one’s individual experience of sound.”2Ibid., p. 80. Or, as is expressed by the editors, “…this book is a call to approach composition and attentive listening as ritual practice / / to approach drone music as a training ground for the attention, for cognitive endurance, for a weird absorption from which hidden transformations might flower.”3Ibid., p. 7. A tall order, but a worthy goal.

At its core this volume presents a collection of essays geared toward demystifying the mystical, explaining the unexplainable, revealing obscured connections, and uncovering the previously hidden. In many cases what you get are individual authors “freely thinking about the problem myself and offering my own personal results.”4Caron, “On the Transcendental Aesthetics of Time-Stretching,” p. 129. The title captures it all with some pieces leaning toward drone, others mysticism, and still others philosophy. If you like those things in any order or combination then, by all means, pick up this book, which includes some beautiful images and diagrams. (If you can spring for the full-color version with the Kim Cascone curated disc of transcendigital drones you will not be disappointed, if not, the black and white version sans disc is remarkably affordable, the drones can be downloaded here.)

A quick contents scan reveals complex and intertwined titles that address such subjects as: dronoclasm, the relationship between blackletter, mysticism, and drone metal, the meditative qualities of transcendigitalism as a holistic field of relations, resonant VS anechoic chambers, the hieroeidetic field, sounds heard as light, diagrammatic compositional scores, ritual and otherwise altered consciousness connections throughout history, the relation of the Catholic Church to Pantheistic drone, time-stretching, tone exhumation, absentology, the black death, the existential question of immortality, the embodiment of heaviness in a lingering riff, the entirety of the would-be zine Weirdrone Tales (which in many ways is the most direct drone address here since much of it reads like traditional album reviews), and finally an interview with Attila Csihar from Sunn O))). Yea, it’s a lot to take in.

Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism

Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism / Abstracts

Clearly an ally in meditation and expanded forms of consciousness, the drone is described as dilating time “for both performer and listener, allowing them to temporarily exist outside of time.”5Cascone, “Transcendigital imagination: developing organs of subtle perception,” p. 34.

This extended temporality includes the body as resonant space in which sound “drowns out or mimics ambient environmental sounds, flattening aural differentiations and rendering the audio field a single contiguous object of thought rather than a collection of objects.”6Harris, “Pleromaticatalyst: Ritual Intoxication Toward the Universal Field,” p. 117. Drone, then, has the potential to induce a trance-like state and alter our experience of both time and space.  In doing so it has the imaginable power to transport the listener “through the ‘threshold between our world’ and the ‘world of the spirit,’”7Norman, “Weirdrone Tales, p. 217. however that “spirit” is defined.

Moving between the academic, the technical, the informational, and the purely experimental, this collection poses a schizophrenic assessment of sound, not in a pejorative way, but rather a state of mind in which consciousness, moving from one perspective to another, is overwhelmed by disparate voices all clamoring to relate some aspect of drone. In toto it reads a bit like a David Mitchell novel, with a shifting focus and perspectives all converging on a singular idea. Some authors take on individual drone works, some the idea of drone as a metaphysical reality, others meditate on death and philosophy and time. This is not music criticism in the traditional sense, nor does it purport to be, but is an exploration of sound and perception that occasionally alludes to bands like Sunn O))), Conan, Coil, artists like Cascone, Eliane Radigue, and Scott Walker, among less well-known but nevertheless engaging artists like Trepaneringsritualen and From The Bogs Of Aughiska.

Many of the voices proceed by metaphor, others by less direct routes. At the center is the reader, the I, sifting through the cacophony in search of meaning, in search of an elusive truth, an epiphany about drone. But, like a Beckett play, the reader must listen for what he or she can hear, as continual nuggets of wisdom arise from the din. This is a more honest and impactful experience than a purely linear or academic one. In this sense it is a book designed for exploration as opposed to a cover-to-cover read. Its intent is inspirational, to shake up perceptions and approaches to sound with links to pursue, footnotes to examine, and listening suggestions galore (did I really wait this long to fully dive into the music of Eliane Radigue?). Balancing the three ideas in the title the stand-outs include: “Unstable metaphors for the inaccessible: mysticism, blackletter, and drone metal,” by Owen Coggins; Kim Cascone’s “Transcendigital imagination: developing organs of subtle perception”; Kristina Wolfe’s “Isoluminance”; Gary J. Shipley’s “Non-terminator: rise of the drone gods”; and James Harris’ “Pleromaticatalyst: ritual intoxication toward the universal field.” Other readers will undoubtedly have other favorites.

Floating from time period to time period amid spiritual and religious observances and contemporary soundscapes the drone remains consistently omnipresent, like the angel of death, hovering just out of reach yet connecting all things living and dead. However, as Shipley articulates, “while drone music may aestheticize a timeless catastrophe of sorts, it only does so on the promise that its timelessness is never made permanent, that its endlessness remain only an appearance.”8Sustain/Decay, p. 199. The drone is, and always will be, in contrast to silence and rhythm, a form of timelessness punctuated by absence and an insistent present, best captured by the specter of deconstruction that hovers over this volume (as do H.P. Lovecraft and Deleuze and Guattari). Sustain and decay are not antithesis, but both sides of the same drone coin. While Joanna Demers is quoted as stating that “it’s exceptionally difficult to write about drone music,” 9Ibid., p. 199. this collection imaginatively addresses this challenge by writing about the experience of drone filtered through the mystical and the philosophical.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Sustain/Decay, p. 19.
2. ↑ Ibid., p. 80.
3. ↑ Ibid., p. 7.
4. ↑ Caron, “On the Transcendental Aesthetics of Time-Stretching,” p. 129.
5. ↑ Cascone, “Transcendigital imagination: developing organs of subtle perception,” p. 34.
6. ↑ Harris, “Pleromaticatalyst: Ritual Intoxication Toward the Universal Field,” p. 117.
7. ↑ Norman, “Weirdrone Tales, p. 217.
8. ↑ Sustain/Decay, p. 199.
9. ↑ Ibid., p. 199.

Delusions, by Stanisław Kapuściński: A Review

By

Delusions (book cover) – Stanislaw Kapuscinski (aka Stan I.S. Law)

Deciding to review a book is like being a hotel receptionist in Monaco. Your recommendations are expected to be impartial but with the dullness of uniform options you steer your guests towards the hidden restaurant you fortuitously discovered. You hope they will unfold their napkins and enjoy it as much as you did. This book, the chef claims, was inspired by Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. He may well have observed the famous atheist in the polished steel kitchens of the Royal Society, cooking up traditional fare, steak and kidney pudding, shepherds pie, boiled mutton with gene caper sauce, knowing the palates of his readers will be satisfied with what they had expected, solid and kind to the digestion. Honestly presented certainly, but then the chef has become famous for that, no dressing things up with persuasive parsley. No foreign muck.

In contrast, the author of Delusions, Stanislaw Kapuściński, improvising in a beach shack, has produced a smorgasbord of samples, surrounded by heaps of bright chillies, unusual spotted gourds, sparkling sea salt, freshly slaughtered cows…

His narrative follows the traditional three courses; Man in the Nursery, in High School, in University to tease out the growth and fossilization of Delusions (of both religious and scientific kinds) and also to show the creation of time (past, present and future) cementing and itself created by this division. It is impossible to identify all the flavours that waft from this multidimensional dish, except to urge a reader to order it. It gives a broad education across both centuries and disciplines, and obscure and classical sources. As importantly, it is enormous fun, spiced and aromatic. Unlike his posturing ‘mentor’ the author’s irreverence and wit make his views the more compelling.

Kapuscinski’s intentions are early implied, to match Dawkins bite for bite and (as honestly) to demonstrate the irreconcilable gulf between intellectual reductionism and emotional religious dogmatism, each flailing towards fundamentalism in trying to flatten one another. In that he takes on Dawkins full square and very gently gradually knocks him over. Not by a deft left hook, but by tugging at his shirt. He admires his opponent’s skill and breadth of culture but laments it is not sensitive to the deeper inspiration which might modify his intellectual stridency.

This reader bit into each dish with relish, savouring the fresh flavours of things turned inside out, the familiar used uniquely, the telling argument nailed with just enough illustration, but never too much. (A few infant prodigies to question the central tenets of Darwinian gradual progress or the non-survival of memory) Kapuściński’s erudition is worn as lightly as a tee shirt pulled over well exercised pectorals of Jesuitical education, Gnostic doctrine, Sanskrit sources, mythological and symbolic familiarity of the Bible and Koran which reduces both fossilised religious distortions and scientific certainties (knowing more and more about less and less) over a bright flame, until both cry for mercy. He remains fairly merciless and for that I celebrated.

In the end it is the primacy of mind preceding brain, idea determining creation, and responsibility in the moment of NOW that lies at the foundation of his appeal to ‘pragmatic realism’. The name sounds philosophically chilly, deliberately eschewing inflation, but it belies the passion, and anger, and incipient despair underpinning this very profound work. He gives you himself, grated raw, and dipped into sauces, both sharp and honeyed. The appetite was self-renewing, and consuming pages effortless.

What remains is a deeply humane appeal to reap the best of human inspiration, devoid of dogma, restoring, indeed pleading for, worshipful sanity derived from self-knowledge and true identity. The essence of the individual, one with god, was derived from the only sources that were left standing; the ancient mythical, the repeated mystical and the personal experiential, now indivisible, simultaneously being and becoming in a universe hopefully emptied of delusion (and scientifically proved pretty empty of anything—the two are not unconnected) but waiting for a better use of imagination and light, with little time remaining. For all the chutzpah of this broad-brush annihilation of false stanchions, the ornate pier has collapsed, the crisis he uncovers is urgent. I thought it brilliant.

Editor’s note: You can download the first part of Stanislaw Kapuściński’s Delusions by clicking this link. To purchase a print or ebook copy of the full book, please visit the book’s page on Amazon.

The Name of God

By

Editor’s Note: For readers who would prefer to read this long-form article offline, click here to download as a PDF (27 pages).

He stood upon an old skull, and he crushed it under his dark heel. A snake was inside it, and its blood seeped into the ground.

He stood in the crater where Gods went to die, the valley without light where a bloated Leviathan would rest upon the ground, and spears piercing its belly beneath dark clouds, the sun would turn away in time for it to rot and die. In its carcass, in its open bones a new God would form, a new rotten Beast to occupy the holy Throne.

One man became aware of this cycle, so he travelled to the wasteland to end it. It was a long journey, and he undertook it alone, braving the craggy peaks and the empty riverbeds that led to the lightless hell where religions and nations alike rose and fell like the untamed cycle of death and rebirth he sought to break.

He sought to break it by his own hands, with a will of steel. So he came bearing the Sword, and he came with Knowledge of his opposition. Made of matter, they had no other way than the Sword.

His hair was light and he wore a scarf, rippling with his jacket in the celestial wind. He had a bandage around his left ankle and the tails of his jacket billowed past it, along with the topsoil blown in the infinite wind.

He looked at the archangels before him, and his face was the resentful glare of a child whose ideas had just been shot down by his parents. He could muster no empathy for the archangels, all that took root in his veins was hatred.

Standing tall, he asked them: “So, good old dad’s finally sent his slaves to kill me?”

They stared at him with ruthless eyes.

Michael, the luminous, his decorated sword radiating with heaven’s bliss. It was a thick blade of shining white gold covered in rubies and diamonds, the handsome face of the blond servant eyeing Kasimir with the fury of a dying sun.

And Gabriel, the dark sun, a brilliant blade in each hand. His hair was dark, his breastplate silver and ornate, his wings tucked behind his back.

They were clad in the armor of God, bestowed unto them by the Father himself. Side by side, they stood, monoliths of light and light’s power.

“Metatron awaits you at the gates of Heaven,” said Michael, nothing but intensity in his voice, the atoms quivering in the air and his wingspan luminous enough to blind all the world’s seers. Abraham himself would have dropped the knife and ran. “Even if you slay us here, he will destroy you.”

The ragtag traveler, clothes and scarf billowing all around him, now found it in himself to grin. He was tall and thin, a steady tower, his hand on the sword sheathed at his side. “This world has given me nothing. It has given my generation nothing. You offer us fields of ash and demand we plow? I would rather gut you on the road, and start anew. I would rather Satan himself rise and take control of this Earth, than to pretend for one moment longer that God is good.”

A massive gust of wind blew across the cracked and battered plains, his enemies’ heavenly robes cascading all around them. There was a dark sky, and darkened mountains all around, shaped like tetrahedrons, great monoliths of cultures that once garnered respect.

“Do you even know who I am?” asked the young traveler to the archangels.

“It is of no consequence,” affirmed Michael in the darkness. “No one will know your name.”

The traveler raised his fist, hands trembling, his teeth bared like an animal. This insult, he could not take. And so he spoke:

“No. Everyone will know my name. Mine is the name of all humanity, set against this world and all its suffering.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Enough. Save us your madness.”

The traveler’s grin only grew wider. “You know it, but you refuse to speak it! Your damned pride…” He held his sheathed sword out before him, standing steadfast in the fearsome breeze. “I am the demon to end all demons, the echo of all discontent. And you bastards are nothing but false light serving a false God.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“You serve a Demiurge, the weaver of a world where injustice reigns by the peonage of matter and all the hell it inflicts upon its children. Born of bloody wombs, and to bloody Earth we set our flags. For what? And for whom?”

He grinned, bracing against the wind in the dark valley’s final hour.

“Demiurge.”

Michael raised his sword to the Heavens, the gusts intensifying as he set his will to destruction. There was a heretic before him, a damned little imp with bandages wrapped around his ankles and wind caressing the stubble upon his chin.

“Gabriel,” began Michael. “Stand witness, and tell the creator how I silenced that word upon his lips.”

Cain’s eyes were alight with wonder. He unsheathed his sword slowly, and swept it to his side.

“You think you can silence me? You think you have the right to silence your own children?” A single glint of sunlight escaped from the clouds. “THEN COME AND TRY!”

Michael surged toward him, wings wide, leaving a curtain of light in his wake.

Cain, triumphant, blocked his blade with one hand.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER?” he roared, staring the archangel in his eyes. “I CAN REALLY MATCH YOU?”

He gazed upon nothing but Fear.

“HOW DOES IT FEEL?” demanded Cain, relentless as he pushed against his nemesis’ sword. “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO FINALLY BE OVERPOWERED?”

He kicked Michael in his chest.

“DIE, YOU DEMON WITHOUT A WILL!”

Cain brought his sword down with the wrath of all the souls who were black carbon splattered on the roads of Hiroshima, centuries of malcontents from the human beings cast out of the world without hope of light or grace.

Michael desperately blocked his attacks, grimacing as he was driven backward by a single man.

Gabriel watched in awe, twenty feet back, trying to compose himself.

And then, the blade nicked Michael’s silver armor.

The archangel’s pupils grew huge.

“GABRIEL! HELP ME!”

At this, Cain drew his second sword. One in each hand, black and thin like needles to be driven into the eyes of a God.

“Cowards,” he muttered, crouching then bursting forth as he charged the twin archangels. “COWARDS, BOTH OF YOU!”

The shining paragons of God’s light, feathers and silver and steel, whipped across the windswept valley beneath the unholy sky, clashing blades with the rebel who sought to topple the Heavens.

He parried both of them, his strength more than enough to suffice.

One of Gabriel’s arms flew off at the elbow.

His wings pulsed outward, flying back to escape the battlefield. He held his bleeding stump beneath dark clouds as he watched Michael be overwhelmed.

“URIEL!” screamed Gabriel, staring wide-eyed at his wound, and reinforcements arrived.

The crimson-clad angel broke through the sky with a flaming broadsword, fluttering blonde hair and crystal armor gleaming like the full moon, clashing her fiery rage against one of Cain’s swords.

And there Cain stood, blocking Michael with one hand and Uriel with the other.

She gazed upon him with fury, flames crackling between them.

Cain only laughed. “How many of you will it take? Three? Five? All of Heaven?”

He shoved Michael to the side and slashed furiously at Uriel with both swords, the airborne angel blocking with her stick of flame.

“YOU THINK THAT BLADE GIVES YOU PATHOS?” he bellowed, grazing her arm. “NO! YOU HAVE NO WILL! YOU HAVE NO FREEDOM! SO DIE!”

Michael soared at him from behind. Cain ducked beneath him. He threw one of his swords at Michael’s back, stabbing him beneath the shoulder.

The archangel screamed out in pain. It was clear that he’d never been cut before, and he’d never seen his own blood.

It was this lesson that the angels immediately learned, and they were not ready for it.

Uriel charged Cain from the sky, an eagle from above, locking her fiery sword against his.

“You will not kill us!” she cried, golden hair hanging past her face. “We are the ground beneath your feet! We are the structure of your very mind!”

She flew against him with all of her might, Cain’s heels digging into the dirt as he was pushed back through the dust and the plains.

Uriel screamed: “YOU WILL NEVER TRIUMPH OVER THE FATHER!”

Michael, crazed with anger, shoulder bleeding, began to sprint toward Cain.

Cain, eyes panicked, fell flat on his back. Uriel soared over him.

Michael charged with reckless hatred. Cain raised his sword just in time to stab him through the heart.

Uriel turned, and her jaw fell open.

“You’re the first to die,” said Cain as he reached out, wrapping his hand around Michael’s and easing the blade of Heaven from his hand.

Lifeless eyes gazed back at him.

“NO!” screamed Uriel, who flew at him like a freight train.

Cain rolled out of the way with both swords in hand.

Uriel’s momentum was too much—she crashed into Michael and lodged her flaming sword through his chest.

The brilliant armor of Heaven burned black, gleaming silver breastplate charred, and the corpse of an archangel hit the ground. Red blood pooled all around him, and Gabriel saw.

His eyes widened, his jaws trembled, and he screamed. He screamed the cry of a woman with a stillborn child, or the cry of a father burying his young sons.

Cain rose to his feet as the wind rose to a new high, sweeping his jacket all around his torso and blowing his hair against the billowing black Above.

He had his black sword in his right hand, and the shining blade of Heaven in his left. With them both he was as the conqueror of God, and now the Leviathan’s corpse in the distance became clear. It was a great beast pressed against the mountainside, drawing its final breaths as its lungs collapsed beneath its own weight.

“You’ve already lost,” he announced to the archangels, frozen like traumatized infants. “When power betrays the powerful, they bleed like anyone else.”

He aimed his sword at Uriel, and narrowed his eyes in accusation.

“You’ve always defended the world of power. Now you can witness first hand why it’s rotten, and why the Demiurge must die.”

Uriel was crouched beside Michael’s corpse, tears running down her cheeks. She turned toward Cain, clinging to her flaming sword.

“You’ve done this,” she spat, staring him in the eyes. “Do not blame God, and do not sully His name with that word!”

Cain approached her, unsatisfied. “Bullshit. Look at this world your creator has made! Do you know what rules it? Power! Want proof? Then let me stick it through your skull!”

He brought the blade of Heaven down on her, and she barely blocked it.

Gabriel began screaming again, in utter disbelief that Michael was dead. In utter disbelief that his arm had been severed. In utter disbelief that Uriel, tears in her eyes, was losing to Cain.

He watched as Cain sliced off both her hands, then took her head.

It flew through the air, landing in the dark earth.

Her sword’s flame faded, and her headless body slumped to the ground beside Michael.

Cain grinned as he turned toward Gabriel, madness in his eyes.

“Why?” demanded the last remaining archangel. “Why…why…WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?”

He walked toward him, sheathing his black sword and holding the blade of Heaven with two hands.

“Why?” begged Gabriel, dripping blood from his arm. “WHY?”

Cain stood before him, and held the sword against his throat.

“That is the question that everyone in the world asks of our creator,” he said, and true flames burned in his eyes. “Every human being who has been thrown away like meat cast to the rocks; every child killed in war, every man starved, every woman raped and every baby stillborn.

“They all ask: ‘Why?’ There is no answer. Only now, that you suffer, do you ask the question. Only now, that you are powerless, do you question power. Well…

“Allow me to show you how much sympathy I have for you, defender of God.”

And then Cain grinned.

“Not God. Demiurge.”

He decapitated Gabriel, and stood upon the ruin of the archangels. Their blood soaked the cracked ground and now lonely streaks of light shone through the turmoil in the sky.

He looked to the distance, to the cruel mountains at the edge of the wasteland, and he knew what awaited him there.

∞

“Stand back,” ordered Raphael, slowly stepping backward.

Cain twirled the blade of Heaven in one hand.

“I mean it!” he shouted, backing up against the opening of a small cave. “You will not harm the Christ!”

“And why do you defend him?” demanded Cain. “So that he will die anyway?”

Raphael scowled. He wore a silver crown, black hair parted past his forehead.

“So that the creator-”

“Can watch another hero writhe in pain? No. I’ve seen enough of his world, and I’ve heard enough apology from the likes of you.”

The two fought against the mountainside, but it was no fight at all. Raphael blocked twice, three times, then his foot was cut and he staggered to his knees.

“Please-”

He was cleaved in two, and his bloodied flesh joined the rest of the archangels in graceless death.

Cain, victorious, stood against the reddening sky. The cosmos was changing. The Leviathan heaved its final breaths.

He turned toward the dark cave, and there he saw it.

It was the progeny of all humankind, the cross silver and great, too massive for any man to bear. Along its edges, gleaming silver. All along its cross a majestic moon, a wish, a dream, the shape of the transcendence, the burden and the way—the object of all prayer and the resurrection of the innocent blood that stained the Earth.

And at its base, the man slumped against it. There were chains all around his torso and his chest, hanging from his outstretched arms and around his neck, tying him to the cross and to his fate.

The Christ kept his burden, staring past Cain and into the bloodstained sky.

“You know why I’ve won, don’t you?” asked Cain as he approached him in the cave. “It is because my time has come. That’s all there is to it. For too long, the old regimes have upheld broken laws as the end-goal of history. Now they see that their reign was only the start…”

The Christ stared straight ahead. “You sound like an archangel.”

“No,” he objected, hurt by the comparison. He approached him and dropped to his knees. For the first time, Cain felt a pouring of warm myrrh in his heart, the desire to be accepted by his hero. “You misunderstand me! I fight for you, my Lord!” He slammed his fist against his own chest. “It is because you suffer that this world must change! It is because a world built on crucifixion of the innocent must be repealed!”

They looked right at each other, a moment that had no parallel.

“What do you mean?” asked the Christ.

“You know it better than anyone,” asserted Cain, staring into his eyes. “The body is a crime. The damnable, obliterable body, crafted by a most insidious weaver to house the highest of highs and fall victim to the lowest of lows. For whom do I fight? The poor, the murdered, the dispossessed masses who have no power in a world where power determines all! Your God, Yaldabaoth, has made it this way.

“He has made it so that even you, light incarnate, are killed by your fellow man! He has made us in his image—the image of power. God, in this world, means nothing but power. I intend to change this. I will crush Yahweh with my own hands, and usurp his throne. I shall rend angelic flesh, and slay the tyrant creator. I have lived my entire life for nothing else. I am Cain, the spirit of rebellion, and by God I will have the Demiurge’s head.”

He rose to his feet, and turned his back on the Christ.

“You bear the cross for him,” he said, then he shook his head. “You die over and over in his world, and nothing ever changes. Your fellow Christians, in all nations, in all eras, would crucify you in a heartbeat. No one wants to hear your message. No one wants to follow the most obvious thing of all: do unto others as you would have done unto you…”

The words spiraled from his soul.

“In a world like this, where light is snuffed out by those who desire power, why should you carry the burden? Why should you continue to suffer for the violent and the ungrateful? No, I say you should be freed!”

He turned to face the massive cross, and he slashed the blade of Heaven through the Christ’s chains, severing him from its weight.

Immediately, it came crashing down onto him, pinning him to the ground beneath its shining form.

“Damn the Demiurge!” shouted Cain, dropping to the ground again. He threw his weight against the cross, trying to shove it off of the Christ, pinned to hard and darkened Earth.

When the cross clanged against rocky ground, he gazed upon a broken man.

“Do as you will,” whispered the Christ. “I am not made for this world, I am not made to fight. The world has rejected me. My own Christians have rejected me. Crucify me, and reveal the name of God. Do whatever it is that you will.

“In this world, love is as good as surrender. So rend angelic flesh, Cain, and exhaust your fire.”

∞

The cross was erected in the center of the wasteland. It was a shining monolith, the only hope in the dark landscape all around. The sky was now pregnant, red and orange, filled with great swaths of black and gray.

The Christ was on his knees before the cross, his chains severed and his heart free. He knew what came next.

Cain stood before him, looking down at the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It has to be done to open the way to God. If there were any other way, I’d—”

“I am not naïve,” interrupted the Christ. “You’ll do what it takes to achieve your goals. You are not so unique. So make me suffer.”

Cain was silent. There was nothing to say, so he went about his task.

There were three nails.

One, for each hand.

And one to drive through both feet.

“You know,” thought Cain aloud as he stared at the nails in his palm. “If I really am Cain, then that means I only reject power because it doesn’t serve me. That cannot possibly be. I don’t think I’m Cain at all. In fact, I think I am Lucifer.”

He looked up, and gazed at Christ.

“Lucifer and Christ, brothers in arms against the Demiurge. That is the way it should be.”

∞

He wailed in pain.

Crucified, his blood was the blood of all humanity.

He sacrifices everything, for us.

That is love.

The great silver cross was stained with blood.

It stood beneath dark clouds, and the clouds took notice.

As they parted, Lucifer looked up. Stray beams of light fell upon his face, and upon the Christ.

“Is it the moon?” he asked. “Or the sun…?”

And then, the letters came to him.

“Y…”

Lucifer began to smile.

“H…”

The Christ grit his teeth in agony.

“V…”

All creation came to its apex.

“H.”

The shining blue letters of the seal appeared in the clouds above the cross, the seal to the gate of Heaven.

“The Tetragrammaton,” said Lucifer, in awe as it manifested in the world. “The name of God…”

Brilliant light ushered forth from the seal, illuminating the wasteland and bringing hope to the world. Finally, in the crucifixion, man had gained the attention of God. His holy name appeared in the clouds and it was the link between matter and spirit, flesh and soul.

And it came with the fist of judgment.

“This is the voice of Metatron,” came the radiant sound from the seal. “I am the right hand of God.”

Lucifer grit his teeth. Immediately, his soul clamped shut with fury. “YOU’LL DIE LIKE THE REST!”

“No. I will not even fight you. I will send seraphim like waves of the abyss, and they shall smother you like the ant you are. No man can interfere with God’s plan, and this, you shall learn the hard way.”

The light faded from the seal. The dark landscape lost its fleeting brightness.

The Christ closed his eyes, accepting the course of history.

There was silence.

And then, the wave.

Seraphim poured forth from the seal by the thousands, a terrifying mess of light, feathers and eyes. They were not even humanoid—they were akin to demons, monstrous worshippers of God.

They surged toward the earth like spears, each of them a weapon destined for its own death smashed against the shoulders and the skull of the rebel who had come so far.

“HOLY! HOLY! HOLY!”

Their battle chant was louder than the wind, and the gusts arose at Lucifer’s back.

“HOLY! HOLY! HOLY!”

They were a monolith, a pillar of force descending to crush Lucifer and the Christ with him. All of them as one, they were a tidal wave of Heaven’s might. They shook the skies and the Earth below, feet trembling and bandaged ankle seeking to find its grip.

“SILENCE!” bellowed Lucifer, raising the blade of Heaven and his right hand’s sword. “YOU COWARDS KNOW NOTHING OF THE WILL!”

He crouched, baring his teeth, and surged forth into the sky.

He flew at the angels head-on, buffeted by the wind, screaming as he crossed his swords above his head.

“HUMANKIND, GIVE ME STRENGTH!”

The pillar of seraphim collided with him, an impact that echoed throughout the wasteland.

He shredded them with his swords, ascending upward through the mass of angels.

He cut through them all, soaking himself in their blood, battle-weary Lucifer eviscerating the armies of heaven.

With his heart pounding in his chest, he let loose a scream that drove fear even into his own heart.

The pillar of angels had become a funnel of blood, and it began to part against the red and orange sky, recognizing true power when they saw it.

The seraphim, alive and dead, collided into the ground when they reached it, mindlessly crushing themselves all around the forgotten Christ. Like drills, they impaled themselves into the Earth.

Lucifer, drenched in the blood of angels, swords in hand, had reached the blue seal.

He stabbed the blade of Heaven through it.

Immediately, he heard Metatron’s scream.

He reached deeper into seal, grabbing armored arm and feathered wing.

He pulled as hard as he could, ripping the wounded Metatron out of Heaven and into the world.

When he had him in his hands, bleeding, he stabbed him through the spine.

Metatron went limp—and Lucifer threw him down to the earth below.

In the clouds, the wind was at its mightiest.

He looked down at the legions of dead seraphim, and the corpse of Metatron that fell and impaled itself on top of the cross. The beached Leviathan desperately tried to climb over the mountains of the valley below, but its organs bursting within, it fell.

The Christ was still silent. In the face of such power, he could do nothing but bleed.

Lucifer grinned one final time, and reached up through the seal.

He was levitating in the air, and he was drawn through it.

There was only one word for it all:

Victory.

∞

“So this is it,” he muttered in disbelief, suspended in a shimmering sea of blue. “You… are God?”

There was a human embryo floating through the water, in the far distance.

Yes. I am God.

The words invaded his mind, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

“Then this place is your grave,” he growled, moving his arms through the water, swimming toward the embryo.

The water turned gold and purple, a gorgeous sunset reflected on the water’s edge. It turned red, then pink, then it was nothing but white.

It was the number zero, then zero ascended to fifty, fifty to one-hundred, one-hundred to one million, then back to zero. It made perfect sense, and then it didn’t make any sense at all. His feelings changed with the tides.

The colors of the ocean around him continued to change, infinite water in every direction, the colors of the heart imbued by God the creator. Light was the synthesis of all colors, and as the sea turned to overwhelming light, he grit his teeth and found his anger.

“WHY?”

Why what?

“YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!” he roared, grasping at the sea in rage, inching ever closer. “WHO ARE YOU, DEMIURGE?”

I am who I am.

“YOUR ANGELS ARE DEAD! YOUR CHRIST IS CRUCIFIED!”

He propelled himself through the sea, surging ahead by will alone.

“YOUR RETRIBUTION HAS COME!”

And who do you think it is that you’re talking to?

He narrowed his eyes. The embryo wasn’t far away now.

“An infantile monster, that’s who.”

Then you know me.

It was hard to see now. The water all around him felt dark and oppressive, even though it was lighter than ever. He reached out toward the outline of God, the embryo floating in the sea of soul.

“I do,” he said, finding himself surprisingly calm. “I do know you.”

So kill me.

His hand brushed against the embryo, sending chills down his spine.

He reached out again, and this time grabbed it by its neck.

“You rigged the game, and left us all to die,” he said. “Now come your sins.”

Only you can destroy me, Cain, or Lucifer, or whoever it is you believe yourself to be. Slay the Demiurge, and make right the world.

He nodded. “I will.”

He crushed the embryo in his hands, seeing the red splatter amidst a sea of light and gold.

The ocean still shimmered.

And then it disappeared, and the new world began to form.

The word of God became incarnate within Cain, and reality ushered forth in His image.

∞

The Christ, crucified, watched the Tetragrammaton flake and break away.

Metatron’s corpse was impaled above him, the blood of God’s right hand dripping onto his forehead.

It ran down the bridge of his nose and fell to the ground. On the cracked earth of the wasteland, the blood of an archangel joined the blood of Christ.

There is no such thing as a sinless being. Incarnate in the flesh, we must all choose to kill or be killed. When there are others who depend on us, pacifism is no longer an option. You see, I did not come to bring peace: I came to bring fire and the Sword.

The truth is that the order of Cain is no different from the order of Abel. Had Cain been chosen by the Demiurge, he never would have rebelled. It would have been Abel, indignant and denied, raising the banner of the oppressed. Cain realized this himself.

And Lucifer, the rebel king…

Christ looked to the Heavens, the dark and parting clouds, and saw His ascension. The God of the new world, with great pale wings and angelic form, rising to outer space to oversee the new creation.

His wings extended into the cosmos, into the stars, His eyes black and round and His flesh a seamless shine without differentiation. He was the ur-soul, the primary being, the second moon and the harbinger of fire.

The fire originated from the cross, from the heart of the messiah, and the wasteland became swept with its grace. The body of the Christ was immolated, the corpse of Metatron reduced to ash. All the rotten Leviathans and all their discarded bones burned and became nothing. The valley was overcome with fire, then the mountains, and the whole world.

The clouds broke, and the oceans emptied themselves. As gravity faded, the materials of creation floated out to the stars.

The great oceans poured into the cosmos, into the dark and the abyss. But the white hand of God stopped them from being lost, and He wove the seas all around Himself.

God, remade in the image of Cain and not Abel, looked over His scarred and beaten Earth.

Without water, it could be seen as it was; a wounded planet, a dark rock, abandoned to its suffering and forsaken by love. It was covered in dents and trenches, great holes inflicted by comets and the stars. It was a punished place, home to punished beings.

But punishment solved nothing, so it had to be remade.

He saw this, and triumphant over the world, He floated in space.

He floated between two massive walls of water, all the oceans of the earth, which he wove into a wheel. A great wheel encircling His star-sized form, His great black eyes wide with hope for the future.

He expanded His luminous wings, radiating nothing but light and light’s power.

He was the archangel to trump all archangels, the completed form of the Ein Sof.

He inherited Earth’s gravity, and all that fell from its surface merged into His wheel of water.

Larger than the moon, the ashes of all life on earth came together around Him. The legacy of life joined the water, which became pregnant with its possibilities.

The water was now shining with light, a great golden wheel rotating around the form of God, ascendant over the Earth and gazing down upon it.

All the Earth was burning, and without gravity, its pieces began to break off and disperse into the stars. The whole planet was breaking apart into three massive chunks, and then the thirds broke apart from within.

God too saved them, melding the form of the Earth into His divine wheel, and empowering light with the reality of matter. Matter is the means through which all light must pass, and God knows this.

Now, the wheel was shining so brightly, and imbued with so much power that no being could control it. The principles of evolution, set forth by the universe itself, would decide the rest.

The oceans, imbued with life, were to become the primordial ooze.

From dust, slime shall crawl.

And from slime, Gods shall evolve.

“Mine is a world of light and will,” He declared, His great black eyes alight with wonder. “The corrupt order of the Demiurge is dead, and now a new God stands triumphant!”

He ushered forth His hand, the will incarnate, and the pieces of Earth left the wheel, reforming where the old Earth had been.

The moon, beginning to become lost, was pulled back by the force of gravity.

It remained unchanged.

The Earth reformed, with great dents made for the oceans to fill.

The golden wheel of primordial ooze still surrounded God, and He returned it to the world.

The oceans flooded back to their place, and from them it was inevitable that life would rise.

“I am God, the universe itself,” He said, with the voice of none and all. “I am who I am, and my law is law. The principles of creation are mine to bend, and they bend to my will.”

The blueprint of creation appeared before Him, a great set of algorithms floating in space, the form of the tree of life and its ten Sephirot.

“This blueprint is vile, but I shall weave it into a new form,” He said. “The principles of evolution, the soul of the world, will be changed, and a new world will rise in its image.

“A world of light and will, of fire and fury. I have slain the Demiurge, and now all creation can proceed anew.”

He expanded His wings, ascendant in the sky alongside the moon.

Tweaking the blueprint before Him, evolution began once more.

Life arose from the seas, and reality began to unfold.

∞

As time went on, the material world revealed itself.

The light of the sun stood beside creation, and as light shined upon the calming waters of the sea, the possibility of sentience arose. The reflection of light on the water’s surface made possible the reflection of thought in the minds of men.

But at Earth’s origin, talk of humans was immature.

The patterns that sculpted humanity were at work from the emergence of the first life forms, and beyond them, from the Big Bang itself.

The universe is no stranger to patterns. When suns die, they become black dwarfs. When stars greater than suns die, they become supernovas. The black hole awaits at the end of the road, and the all-consuming void traps even light. Where does the black hole lead? To another chance.

God, once known as Cain, or Lucifer, or man himself, looked upon his creation with a frown.

He gazed at his hands, unfamiliar.

All time was nothing in the eyes of God, and there were no shortage of moments to realize that something had gone wrong.

The ten Sephirot sat in the palm in his hand, and yet, they meant nothing.

He gazed upon the evolution of the world, when the apex of matter was nothing but a mammal, a rat.

It ate flesh, and its flesh fed others.

God’s eyes were vast and dark, the roundest, blackest eyes that reflected the stars and the Earth itself.

When he saw this rat, which would in millions of years become the progenitor of the entire human race, he knew that he had overlooked something.

I am not all-seeing.

When he realized this, his eyes grew wider than they had ever been.

He gripped his chest, and suppressed his cries.

This cannot be. It is impossible for nothing to have changed. I killed the Demiurge. I slayed his archangels and I ended his world. Where is his legacy? Why does it remain?

The tree of life lay before him, blue script brought forth from subtlety.

And yet it was dirt in the hands of false Gods.

He made a fist, the evolution of life closed to him, and his wings surged outward.

In the blink of an eye, he watched as humanity emerged, and defied his will.

He watched as Abel murdered Cain, and nothing else had changed.

No! No, no, this cannot be…

In denial, God faded from the night sky. Human beings could no longer see him, and they wondered where he had gone.

In truth, he had shriveled.

He lost his divine form, as humanity failed him again and again, and withered into a form that was truly familiar. A sick thing that yearned for a womb that could not exist.

The neoteny of God was the tragedy of humankind, and all the world’s history unfolded with differences that did not permeate the surface.

It was a world where black men had white slaves, and the British crown fell beneath the boots of Indian masters.

The Arab world was the center of commerce, a bastion of corruption, of bankrupt intellectuals defending Islamic bankers and Islamic crimes.

Women stood in skyscrapers, and ordered the ruin of the world.

Black gold flowed through the veins of civilization, and wrought its end.

Natives held their land, and as time went on, they exploited it themselves.

Abel, prosperity incarnate, was spited.

And Cain was more than happy to inherit his will.

The patterns of all creation overwhelmed even God, defying his will the more he attempted to assert it. His creation was beyond him, his work inheriting its own ends and pulling away from him.

As he felt this pull, he withered, and lost his wings.

Great, white angelic wings falling against the darkness and rotting among the stars.

His body became small, his eyes trembling as they watched the world’s end.

He tried to cover them with his hands, but he could not.

He watched as nuclear warheads devastated the planet, and then as a new humanity arose in the wasteland. He watched himself be born, and he watched himself slay the archangels and find the name of God.

He watched as Christ was crucified, for the thousandth time, and war was waged against his domain.

The myths, repeated.

The misery, repeated.

He found himself shriveled to the state of an embryo, and watched as he reached out and crushed his own skull.

The world was remade, again, or not.

It didn’t matter.

Earth could only be remade so many times, before the whole enterprise burned out.

Before the stars incinerated their reserves, and the universe gave way to chaos.

In between explosion and entropy, there was the Word.

And it ate itself.

The God of the new world, whatever Word he held as his name, held all this Knowledge in His mind, and He could not take it.

His body white and His eyes gleaming black, He screamed and begged for the end of everything.

“I HATE THEM! I HATE THESE WORTHLESS HATEFUL HUMANS!”

He dug his fingers into the flesh of his chest, crying, screaming, in absolute despair.

“NO MATTER WHAT I DO, I CAN’T CHANGE ANYTHING! NO MATTER WHO I KILL, NO MATTER WHO DIES, NOTHING IS SAVED!”

God felt the sublime insanity of His own creation, His own existence, and His progeny resting in the skulls of apes. He felt all that He had staked on the world, and all that had let Him down.

He dug His fingers deeper into His flesh, and He drew blood.

Red blood, the same as Gabriel had bled on that fateful day.

“I’VE HAD ENOUGH!”

He reached deeper into His own body, blood staining His pure white hands. He wrapped His fingers around His beating heart, and straining for breath, He tore it free from his chest.

He held it out to the cosmos, in front of the scarred and beaten Earth, as His final work.

“I KILL MYSELF, AND END THE CYCLE! LET ME ROT!”

He crushed His own heart in His hands, and at once, they came.

The four archangels emerged from the far reaches of the universe, demons that shone with the brightest light and yet exuded darkest darkness.

They flew to his body, and landing on it they feasted upon his flesh. They were beings with feathered wings and hard beaks, monsters so foreign to the human being that no eye could bear their witness.

They ate God alive, feasting upon the divine flesh and picking clean His bones.

When they were finished, they pulsed out their wings and soared away from Earth, never to return.

All that was left of Him was a skeleton, fragmented bone drifting through the empty universe. As life destroyed itself for likely the final time, His final legacy was a jawbone attached to a spinal cord, floating in a vacuum.

The sun, finally, bloated and burst. It took the whole world with it, granting the gift of life and also its absolute end.

In this end, the will saw its defeat.

And still, no one understood why.

∞

He stood before the cross in the dark wasteland, the Christ on his knees before him, and he hesitated.

The Christ turned toward him, and smiled. He smiled without condescension, only the understanding of a rebellious child, how downcast and withered was his will, and how deserving of empathy…

“What’s the matter?”

Cain shook his head.

“I just realized,” he began, and he dropped his swords. The blade of Heaven stuck into the dirt. “I’ve done all this before.”

He paced forward about twenty feet, utterly lost.

“Have you exhausted it?” asked the Christ. “Your fire?”

Cain’s eyes widened.

He saw himself, as God, killing himself against the cosmos.

He saw himself as the withered embryo, killed at the hands of those who had been squashed by power.

He looked at his own hands, and he saw that they were his own.

They always were.

He turned toward the Christ, and grit his teeth.

“What is this?” he demanded. “What the hell are you?”

Finally, Christ stood.

Against the dark clouds and the edges of the valley he stood before his shining cross, and there was jubilance in his voice.

“In other worlds, in other dimensions, in time linear and not…you’ve killed me. You’ve killed me as a means to killing the Demiurge, the one who wove this world to worship force above all.”

Cain was looking right at him, and he nodded. “I have the memories to show for it. Now explain.”

“There is nothing to explain—you saw it yourself. You’ve done this before. Now if you think it will work, then do it again.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I can’t. I can’t because it won’t work.”

“And why is that? What’s the one thing here that never changes?”

Cain realized.

“Me. And you.”

“And you always kill me?”

“I do.”

Wind swept across the wasteland for the first time in ages, a cosmic wind that carried with it the hope for a different world.

“Who are you?” demanded Cain.

“Well, who are you?” he asked back. “Your name always changes, and yet your soul stays the same.”

“How—”

“The name of God is yours,” said the Christ, triumphant. “Demiurge, scourge of all humanity.”

The wind blew through his jacket, and his hair.

The corpses of the archangels were strewn throughout the wasteland, the rotten Leviathan on the mountainside, and now he knew who he was.

“WELL WHAT SHOULD I HAVE DONE?” he roared, defiant.

The Christ continued to smile.

“DON’T LOOK SO SMUG, DAMN YOU! IT’S EASY TO DIE UP THERE!” He pointed right at the gleaming white cross. “IT’S EASY TO SURRENDER YOURSELF TO THE WORLD! WHAT SHOULD I HAVE DONE? IN THE WORLD OF THE DEMIURGE, OF THE ARCHANGELS, SHOULD I HAVE JUST LAID DOWN AND DIED?”

He received no answer.

“WELL? SON OF GOD?”

The Christ faded.

The wasteland faded.

He, too, faded.

But he was left with the question:

“What should I have done?”

You should have loved.

The fire originated in the cross, and in the molten core of the messiah’s heart. At the end of the Earth, and at the end of everything, the fire still burned. The fire of resurrection that transcended all force and returned at the end of days.

You were the very God that you hated, and all else was fantasy.

Yours was a sin of blindness.

So easily you pointed at the crimes of others, and so easily you ignored your own.

You crucified me.

Truly, yours was the will of power.

You were the snake swallowing its own tail.

Who were you?

Look around, and then look within.

That’s where you’ll find me.

The molten beauty of the messiah blossomed forth, and it became a new sun. A new light, a new future.

What is love?

Surrendering yourself for the other.

That is all there is to it.

At the dawn of the new world, check your name.

Who are you?

I will tell you who I am:

I am paradox, I am light.
I am the world, and its transcendence.

In the world of power, I abandon power
In the world of fire, I am wood
And in the world of decay, I am resurrection

I am paradox, I am light.
Abandon the way of the Demiurge,
And suffer
Suffer the weight of the cross, and follow me

I am paradox, I am light.
In the apex of all contradiction
Is where you will find me

I am not matter, I am love
I am you, and you are me

Find me

Saturn in Scorpio in the First House

By

“Saturn is for dense souls with shallow histories.”

We will build our grave here on earth. Is it grave? Our bodies reduced to the skeleton of gluttony and the like. Or a marker where our former bondage and body lies? This is a result of the flesh we build in action, substance and sustenance.

The villains, if you will, have their will, they were here and are again to learn how best to be a crook. In a staff they lead in droves. It is no herald but they hear, give them their time. We can affirm through their meeting guise, whether we wish to crook the droves or shepherd the course.

If you can’t cry it’s a wasteland

Phantasms on the other side

Face and place lingering vestiges

The waste you can’t home in your bone

Give in to God, give up the devil

God in the rings of Satan for God so loved the world that he gave will toward temptation. Each ring represents temptations, trials and tribulations—defined limitations encased in fossilized amber.

The rings of Saturn are radio waves, concentric waves multiplying,

The interior is karma

The rings of Saturn are sonograph, concentric waves magnifying

Karmic patterns from the center

Spin a sequence on these concentric rings

You will know that you are not as high as the world. You are lowly.

Saturn as Satan does not reveal your worldly ambitions, rather he reveals how they lack ambition, how they are shaped by the constructs of your own skeleton with its pervasive fear and tumult: the devil in us all. And knowing this leads to Saturn’s gift, Saturn on water floats in time and limitation, as every man’s Satan. Saturn is man in time and limitation at an earthly level and the discovery must be God—meaning for his life in such a short period—or he will be absolved to Hell, the suffering which comes with an impermanent fleshly body and its emotional turmoils.

Saturn restricts man but provides a window of opportunity.

You run around in circles but must be still. You seek great achievements but must be still. You want to disappear but can’t. You want out of yourself but are brought further inward. The boundary you seek to destroy is the one that will remove you from your pain and responsibilities.

God called to this soul but it stayed afar. Jupiter mingled in some future verse, its benevolent gaseous swirls squared against Saturn’s pained weariness—Jupiter declaring youth and Saturn declaring that your learning is defeat in every man as old as life and death, a becoming God met in stained glass relief, where ashram and asylum meet, father and son, the hope for all humanity.

The staid soul. There was no destination or creation, though it was created. The universe pulsed in all perimeters, but the soul was apart. There was no light in this soul, just a Nothing without its center.

A voice called out. “Child…” Was this God? and this soul hadn’t asked.

Leave, thought the soul.

“But there are dues.”

Yes, there are many lives wasted. Careless, empty lives in bodily form. Lives when and where death is everyone. Lives when life is everyone dead.  Lives we call life but the life act is always the slaying and never anything more.  Lives stretching in all directions, the arrogant collection for lives, many lives, other than One at eye, but the body as the greatest one, over which God as a whole is dead.

Now the moment arrived. Many lifetimes condensed. This soul in question did not wish for God’s intimacy or any. It wanted only the lingering emptiness. The float. Dissolution and severance. The voice repeated, again.

“There are dues.”

And the message repeated.

In burnt offerings and sin
Offerings thou hast taken
No pleasure.

Then I said, ‘Lo, I have
Come to do thy will, O
God.’

The soul looked out. From the encompassing height and breadth came a rather mystifying resonance. It was a body. It appealed. It was the body of those in the slaying. It was the bodies of all the soul had ever been. They merged at the head of a great entreaty.

“You cannot go back.” The soul entreated upon its Nothingness, the nothingness of these bodies where life never lived.

The Nothing is a void. Pitch, unending. Dictators, murderers and the like live in this first Nothing. They have only met vacancy. Without understanding the genius in two, one cannot create and give. Without undergoing this process such souls become a God unto themselves alone and destroy. If a soul does not actualize the soul—bringing this means into seed where it may grow in the void—making One from many and with a boundary at viewing where their limits may be overabundant—then that soul will remain unenlightened, stagnated.

In the body the ego would have to choose. It could descend into the nothing forever and remain unenlightened or it could work with the nothing. All great creators create from the nothing. It is the place the shaman penetrates before piecing together, it is the place where we discover our problems and make our solutions, the place where we discard and begin again.

This soul wanted the Nothing void—the place where it could dictate its course alone, not necessarily where it could dictate others. Even still, this dictation was a mean loss.  The soul, who was a soul, for it was the sum part in the entirety but could not translate this along its human course, could not refer to the other in any way; therefore its cosmic course remained at a standstill. This soul was infused with the wrath and control of a typical dictator, though it carried its weight in this void as a still frame, separate from We. This soul and those of the same type who lived in the void slaying life, were but dead collapsing pulsations, odd appearances sent to earth to even out a score, without knowing it the even in it all, and with their odd a means to illuminate and offer a difference.

“If you go back you shall not return again,” stated the giant.

“How goes that?”

“If you take on the earthly realm you shall complete what you have avoided.”

“There is the Nothing only…” the soul concluded.

“If there is the Nothing, why do you thus float about?”

The soul pondered the giant’s words. “Floating…you speak these words yet you are one that floats, giant. You float all alone at this great distance, sealed away.”

The giant smiled in his passive, yet sly way. “Here is a place for souls such as yourself. Those that float come onto me.”

Was this soul floating for such a long while? Surely this soul wasn’t floating, always staid and afar.  Far from jubilant Jupiter, far and aloft from anywhere, yet foresight calling with from a distance with companionable change.

“Never has this soul floated anywhere.”

“You’re here. Floating as far as this.”

“No.”

The soul grew terrified. It stayed away, it was never brought into the One. This was Hell. Where it would be brought finally into its mirrored demise at every stage, what it cost and couldn’t contend with, without any choice, now – for the kindness and solidarity, the we and all in the vast equation would not let him stay apart but would force him to stand together.

“This is where you are. Relinquish your soul here. The floating souls that you see are in such a state. They are here from all phases. But they come not knowing God. They have all reached the top and plummeted. They have all misused their lives and the lives of others. This place is not for sightseeing. Not for carousing and conquest. Here you will find only what you have been and what you are. “

Since the time you were born you were alone. This you knew instinctively. Life was before the womb and in that place you determined how it would be. No progress would be made if you followed the same lines of action and conquest. Those lines were worthy but they had served you as far as they could. In those lives you had never known the self in any intimate way. What you had known was identification: with money, other people, and particularly, with the law. The law was the highest truth and you followed it faithfully. This law was your own rigid internal system of right and wrong. Thus, you followed it stubbornly and never wavered. People were treated in the harshest manner with your law-abiding system. You were inflexible and grave in the law being carried out. Only this left no room for negotiation, clarity or camaraderie.

The task in this lifetime is to create a will that doesn’t impose upon others, but includes and validates them. The truth is never a law, but a matter of opinion, as people believe differently. Maintain your truths but remove the law that wishes that other people live and react a certain way.

The insecurity you have always felt is a result of power being misused. You feel powerless in order that you may find strength in your weaknesses, and not weakness in strength. The many obstacles you have faced, as well as the slow growth and isolation, are instruction along the path of wisdom.

If you were going to remove the false self and collapse from your intoxicated height, you would find out what insecurity and thus insight were. Consequently, the surest way to reach that goal was through mistreatment from your family.

You have been bound, stripped, and left parched and bleeding but as the wounds close you are given an epiphany—a hold onto your actions. The scars that are left behind are reminders of the work you have done.

You are directed by your own consciousness and soul identity towards this search, arduous and terrible though it be, so that you may know emotional and physical limitation.  This limitation is felt at a personal level through little self-esteem, many delays and much hardship.  You have had no choice but to feel the crushing weight of time; there could not be a speeding up. You are restricted in time because you altered the physical plane adversely before; meaning, you manipulated time as a curse or dictated the unpleasant removal of someone else’s time (experience).

Conversely, your soul has taken on this weight though you have been the victim many times before and/or because you could not properly attune with a lawful system and manage volatile emotional upsets in other lifetimes, therefore in this you must account for them. With time and growth, you will surely unpeel the layers of victimhood and direct a path of responsible and sensible confidence. If not, you will live in a purgatory of your own crystallized making.

By sitting and not fighting the ponderous time weight that disturbs your hopes and dreams, by studying, working on your projects and calmly and slowly proceeding, you can break your karma or you can earn good karma—you can build a life and not rush into an old one. By understanding that this restriction is an awakening, you can make amends and earn your grace. The one day, miraculously, what you’ve wanted all along will be yours.

“What of God?” this soul asked.

The giant pulsed in its amber weight. “Once you commit your soul here you shall know God in time.”

“So be it,” breathed the soul.

The day was mild and brimming with sunshine. The hour was the afternoon and the day was the longest in the year.

The head breached many places, recalling along its way little happiness through its many earthly incarnations and much strife with no channel then—indeed perhaps the gravest misery of all.

Along the way it gasped for air on its left side. Its ear smothered against a contracted wall. Its tight fist ballooned and let loose among the waste. The hours were the epiphany of the soul’s life. It was the struggle for God in time and the struggle for life in time. The hours raged in this unrelenting cesspool without release. Such dark haunts floated above this birth. Further Nothing fragments…further voids calling, cajoling.

“We are the Nothing,” they repeated in one horrifying voice, a void of life speaking for Life created somewhere with our discovery. Beckoning us, however sinister, to bring the Word of God into the Nothing and out as a collective We.

Now . . Thought the soul. It is given up. The conquest and wandering, of being in charge, nearly, of finding this or that but never within. This soul must reach steadiness.

“Remember, God in time.”

With this struggle the soul knew its disadvantages. There were many. And of these so-called disadvantages, you shall see, the advantages.

The first became a later glance in the mirror.

However much this soul tried as an adult, it could not remove a dark, fleshy mole near the left ear. To do so would cause a bloody avalanche. The mole opened just a bit on the top with prodding, but sank as molasses back into its seat. Sometimes, if picked, pieces would flake off and the mole would turn a pink color. The pink would gradually turn brown again.  The mole had its history. The history declared: Ye shall not tear from life nor obliterate in death.

So it was that the soul was born as a female, rather reluctantly, as only that sex could even the thread. The child thus born knew its life. It knew the outs and ins, the starts and stops; it knew it would be unloved from the first.

When the nurse came before the child with camera, the child looked on with steely, unwavering resolve. The child put up two fists. Tucked in white linen with circus animals surrounding the periphery, she was not defiant or self-defensive. The circus animals on this linen were symbolic of man’s preying nature and, the circus, childhood’s craziness. This child was determined to make amends and find God in time.

Saturn is the solitude of your undoing. This is a gift. I’m writing all the souls of these men. Hoping they find a sole, hoping they find an insert for their feet, a place to walk with crook and shepherd the course.

At Play: A Personal Odyssey in Chess

By

“New possibilities appeared, but still no one could say which side had the advantage. Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain—and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard, and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and absorbed him. There was horror in this, but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides chess? Fog, the unknown, non-being…”

Vladimir Nabakov, The Defense, 1930

Impulse

For a brief span in the 1970s, every American was a chess player. This, it is said, was the impact of one Robert James Fischer becoming the first world champion of the Cold War era who was not from the Soviet Union. But Dad had discovered the game earlier on. He was fond of his set; he had bought it long ago, in the mysterious before-time when he and Mom did not even know each other yet. I was permitted to play with them, but I understood there was something special about the carved pine- and ebony-wood toy soldiers in the box with the sliding top. Their usual field of battle was a solid, smooth plain of alternating squares, also made of wood and also to be handled with great care, as it already had enough small chips and scratches to suit its owner. These were special objects, not to be thrown or lost. For in those days adults played with toy soldiers, too.

Of course, whenever adults were in command there were rules, and many were quite strange. Towers and horses and little men were not allowed to charge boisterously at each other; dramatic arguments over who was the stronger or the rightful owner of a square never arose. No, these were wars of long silences punctuated by the sudden sound of two pieces of wood clicking together or the slide of felt across varnish and a warning not to take one’s hand away “unless you’re sure.” Equally odd was the near certainty of there being more warriors milling about on the sidelines than in the fight as it progressed. I came to have a special affinity with these unfortunate spectators, mute and unable to intervene, waiting and waiting. I knew how they felt, except that bedtime never came for them before the all-important question of who won had been answered.

Such are the shadows then: a lingering scent of gravy, powdered cocoa with delightful huge marshmallows, the tones and rhythms of Miles Davis and a Bird named Parker, the hum and banter of people enjoying company. And Dad was there, resting folded arms on the table and holding his head slightly to the side as he stared into abysmal depths across from whomever dared join him. As much as I loved my relatives, I could only sit and sip and fidget until he nodded, looked up, and smiled. “Gotcha,” he would announce before turning to me with a wink. And for one more day all would be right with the world.

1 b4!? e5
I have the Black pieces. My opponent is the Chess Titans program which came with the accessories package on this laptop along with Minesweeper and Spider Solitaire. I have it set on Level 5 or 6—high enough at the moment for my delusions of grandeur. The “Titan” routinely hands me my butt when I refuse to heed the little voice in my head that sounds like Dad, the one telling me to think and not to merely react. Reacting is all one does when foolishly trying to match the speed of a computer; racing a cheetah makes as much sense.
I cannot assume the Titan is just throwing out novice mistakes. Sure enough, this crazy sequence has a name: the Sokolsky Opening. Yes, I had to look that up.
2 Bb2 f6
I’m not familiar with this opening, so I take the orthodox route of shoring up the defenses in the center. But 2 …Bxb4, 3 Bxe5 Nf6 was also possible, and would have been more suited to my preferred style, which is the security of briefs over the open-ended chaos of boxers. I always feel better after building a proper castle for the king.
3b5b6 4e3Bb7 5d4e4(?)
Likely too early for a counter-attack, but committing to the defense of the e5 square now with 5 …d6 may lead to 6 dxe5, with 6 …fxe5 and an exposed king-side or 6 …dxe5, 7 Qxd8+ Kxd8 and a permanently exposed king. Plus, early queen trades bother me.
6 Qh5+ g6 7 Qh3 d5 8 c4 Ne7 9 cxd5 Bxd5 10 Nc3 Bb7
So much for orthodoxy.

“Chess,” so runs the famous proverb (which has questionable evidence of existence prior to the 20th century), “is like a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.” It is for this reason the most interesting games will always be between more or less evenly matched opponents. Of course, one seeking to improve his or her play accepts the challenge of tougher resistance, but at the point where one player is so clearly the superior the interaction is more properly called a lesson than a game. As an exercise of skill between equals, chess can be a vital and emotional contest, and one in which the agony of a defeat cannot be cushioned with invective hurled at luck as when cards or dice are involved. One wins because one overcomes the will of the other, and this often requires immersion in total effort, a “point-like unity” of problem and solver.1EPO, p. 48 A scene from the 1993 film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, with Ben Kingsley and Max Pomeranc putting in touching respective performances as teacher Bruce Pandolfini and prodigy Josh Waitzkin, shows the idea with brilliant concision. Bruce bids Josh remember to annihilate distance: “This is you!” he states firmly, emphatically slamming the White king down on the board in front of his student for whom chessmen will soon cease to be “just pieces” and chess “just a game.”

Imagination

I caught on to the strange rules of the adults soon enough. In the last great age, it seems, before the personal computer and cable television there were many games: Monopoly and Scrabble, Stratego and Parcheesi (for us suburban butchers of Hindi), and the entertaining light-and-sound show of Electronic Battleship. But chess ruined me. Nothing grabbed my imagination like doubled lines of tense, battle- hardened figurines eager to radiate energy in straight and diagonal lines—or that weird L jump of the horse which I practiced on the kitchen tiles over and over, trying to cross the room only in steps of ‘two- up, one-over.’ Chess was the great puzzle that, unlike my snap-together cardboard geography lessons or Lego models, never had the same solution twice. Its possibilities and combinations were an endless source of fascination and frustration alike. The fascination came from just how much there was to consider even in supposedly simple positions as I pored over the creations of the masters, pretending to understand half of them. The frustration was because no matter how hard I tried I could not beat my father.

I played too fast; I played too slowly with too much second-guessing; I was hyper-aggressive and careless; I was defensive and over-cautious—nothing worked. First, my ponderous fortresses would crumble, leaving my king prey to all the converging fire of the enemy. Then, I would engineer a breakthrough but, astonished at my own success, stumble over some distraction and see my attack fall apart. Most often, I just did not see it coming. I do not remember—and certainly would have enshrined the time and date on a homemade plaque if otherwise—winning one game with the old man. But my little brother, from time to time, did. It was indeed galling to watch his face light up and his voice assume the mock solemnity of his best Spock impression. (“Wise,” he once announced as he snatched Dad’s queen, “but not wise enough.”) It wasn’t fair. The beauty of Anderssen’s Immortal Game was lost on him. In fact, if he ever learned that the Sicilian Defense had nothing to do with thick-crust pizza, or even knew Capablanca from Mr. Clean I could not tell. Yet here he was, occasionally springing some trap or just finding a way to do what study and dedication obviously could not.

As the years rolled onward, it became increasingly pointless for me to play my brother as I began to see weak spots in every one of his positions or to create them at will and mercilessly exploit them. But he could always say he’d beaten Dad a few times. For a long time, I could not understand how.

11 g4
The voice of my Dad is back. I need to look at chaos as a broadening experience and not just a threatening one.
11 …Bg7 12 f3 exf3 13 Nxf3 Nd7?
But chaos does not mean the absence of careful thought! It was high time to get my king out of the center. Now I lose unless…
14 Be2?
That is called dodging a bullet, plain and simple. The Titan also missed 14 Bc4! which would have allowed White to castle (either side in fact) while keeping me from doing the same. My next moves are quick no-brainers.
14 …O-O 15 O-O Kh8
I can breathe now. My position is suddenly a springboard from which I can try to pounce on the loosely placed opposing pieces.
16 g5 f5 17 Rfd1 Rc8 18 Ne5 Nxe5 19 dxe5 Qe8 20 Qg3 Rd8 21 Bc4 c6
Among other things, a White pawn advance to e6 would be a pain in the neck for me. But 22 bxc6 Qxc6 would be a pain in his. Both of us have to watch those long diagonals.
22 Rab1 Nd5 23 a4 f4
I can use open lines, too! His advanced pawn will be isolated and harder to defend. More importantly, I am beginning to activate my springboard.
24 exf4 Nxf4 25 Rxd8 Qxd8 26 bxc6 Bxc6 27 Nb5 Qd2
Going for broke…

The essence of strategy is the art of achieving a goal in the face of opposition to that achievement. Because of this, strategic situations represent great examples of “self-completing polarity.”2EPO, p. 210 Chess is not possible without a coming together of opposites. Before we get to the legends, the politics, and the quirky personalities of professional play—and there are many—we are confronted with a narrative of interlocking correspondence: light and dark, attack and defense, move and counter. Elemental forces collide but do not disappear in a blinding flash of matter and antimatter, rather they twirl around forever, distinct yet incomplete in themselves. Chess is two wills locked not only in combat but also in cooperation. Players must together create the conditions allowing one to emerge triumphant—or not. Is this not akin to tragedy—to King Lear or Oedipus fulfilling his sad destiny as he seeks to escape it? Yet though the king may fall, he may never be consigned to the fog of non-being outside the margins of the battlefield. This is important as a point of etiquette as well as symbol. Though games have endings, The Game does not.

Calculation

I stand by my heroes, perhaps no more loyally than when they fall. Hero-worship is probably how I got through the initial shock waves of the divorce; only later did the realization come that the truly remarkable thing about my parents was how long they stayed together, not their parting. The strange rules and games of the adults having become mine at last, I found ways to pick up pieces and move on. Analysis creates pieces, smaller doses of reality that, for a little while, can be used to lessen the otherwise overwhelming impact of the whole. Putting the pieces back together is a daunting but intrinsically creative process. One is never able to reconstruct past configurations totally. This, of course, is the essence of what we humans call change.

Eras end. The space is different, the room is smaller, but familiar tones and rhythms flood its air, and the same battered but proud armies face each other again on the same weathered quadrilateral of wood and memories. We chat away like work colleagues now, Dad and I, exchanging our usual sarcasm-laced commentary on politics, the deceptive simplicity of relationships, and what passes for music these days. Played on our level, chess is certainly not about the myriad combinations or sheer history an expert brings to the board but it is still about avoiding that last mistake. At this moment, I am desperately trying to do just that, making each move with the extreme conviction that it will keep me alive for one more. The slow dance continues as Herbie Hancock uses his own white and black to throw melodies into our ears. Then, it happens. My running king reaches a safe square. I exhale slowly. Dad squints, unable to keep the admission of having missed one off his face. Now he has to exchange the last major pieces, and my pawn will reach his back rank two steps before his reaches mine. He nods, looks up, and smiles, playfully flipping me the bird. “You win,” he says. And he winks as he answers my unspoken question, confirming what I had only recently begun to suspect: “Your brother and I always had fun; you and I always played chess.”

That was the passing of the torch. Of course I remember it well and anyone who has ever looked up to another knows of the sweet bitterness lodged in such a moment. Longed for so obsessively, “the” day had finally arrived, and with it a sobering sense of loss far outweighing any thrill of victory.

Sunday, May 11, 1997: Deep Blue plays 19 c4, Kasparov resigns…

Eras end. The great battle between the human brain and artificial intelligence was fought and finally decided, it is said, in favor of the latter. Nature lost, but life continues and I really should get over it; after all, as I write these lines it has been twenty years.

Yet what is the truth behind the fact? Was this really a struggle of “man versus machine” or something obscured, as usual, by the sensationalism of media hyperbole? Deep Blue was built—and later dismantled—by humans, a tribute at least as much to our mental powers as to “its” own. Likewise the grandmasters of our time achieve their status partly through access to sophisticated electronic databases which exponentially extend the reach of their preparations. Kasparov, still my personal pick for all-time chess badass, had faced problem-solving intelligence all his life, including that simulated by powerful computers. Suddenly, the simulation could calculate whole games in microseconds, crunching out ways to sidestep deep traps and to evaluate long-term positions rather than immediate material advantages, potentially on a regular basis. So what? It could still only express that awesome power one move at a time—one legal, readable position per turn.

I remain of the opinion that my hero was not beaten except by the psychological disadvantage of having a psyche. I am not qualified to judge the merits of 37 Be4 in Game Two. I can barely follow the analysis which “proves” that game should have ended with a draw—or others which “prove” Kasparov was indeed right to resign a lost position. The real question remains unanswered—and the world will never know the answer as Kasparov was denied his very human instinct for timely revenge and no one else got the chance. Binary code has enabled our machines to out-calculate us; extending and multiplying our abilities is what we design all our tools to do. But can our machines truly out-play us—or is it necessary for us to help them do so?

28 Bc3 Qc2 29 Ra1 Bd5 30 Bf1
White needs his bishop to keep my knight from the wicked fork check on e2.
30 …Be4?
Dad is speaking again: you are never as vulnerable as when you think you are invincible. There is always a way to drop the ball! Putting the bishop here takes away the only refuge for the queen if trouble comes in the form of 31 Nd4!. I grit my teeth. Chess is about inconveniently turned tables, all right. Yes, says my internal mentor, and also about remaining calm. Now… find the escape: 31 …Nh5, 32 Qe1 (the pawn-doubling queen trade 32 Nxc2 Nxg3, 33 hxg3 Bxc2 is not best for White) Rxf1+, 33 Qxf1 (not 33 Kxf1 Qg2#) Qxc3. Not dead yet. Good boy.
31 Nxa7??
Stronger computer programs—possibly even higher settings of the Titan—will no longer grab material free at first glance only. This pawn-hunt removes the knight from the defense and dramatically reduces my problems.
31 …Bd3 32 Bxd3 Qxc3 33 Rd1 Bxe5
“Remember me?”
34 Qe3?
The final blunder. White breaks one pin to set up one much more devastating. The aria begins.
34 …Bd4!, 35 Kh1 Bxe3, 36 Be4 Qb3, 37 Ra1 Bd4, 38 Rc1 Qe3
Computers do not resign, but it’s over: if 39 Re1, Qxe1#, with 39 …Qxe4# on any other rook move. Saving the bishop does not work either: 39 Bg2, Qxc1+; 40 Bf1 Qxf1#. I win.
This time.

Integration

My elder son thrives in the motion and decision of physical action; he was throwing a football in a spiral of accuracy and grace far surpassing mine in very little time. He is fully capable of processing large amounts of information, but there must be readily discernable purpose to keep his interest. He has little patience for the delicate intricacies of endless ramifications. I say this because the temptation to emotionally favor my complexity-seeking younger son is greater than I am comfortable admitting and obviously to be resisted at all costs. Siblings come from the same place but rarely the same mold; it is important that as I love one because he is me I love the other because he is not. I simply acknowledge without judgment that so far as chess is concerned the younger may be the one to carry forward and shape the emergent family tradition. And, as he too has a mind of his own, that tradition will have to wait for the attractions of Nickelodeon and War Robots to fade a bit.

The seed has been planted, though. My set, purchased in the mysterious time before I met his Mom, is generic hard plastic and not nearly the equal of the work of art which inspired me in former days. Yet it has been out often enough, pored over long enough, and explained with the unconcealed enthusiasm of one who wishes to pass a torch one day. My son cannot yet comprehend the true depth of joy compressed into my grin when he sets his miniature teams to charging boisterously at each other, nor the great waves stirring my soul when he traces lines and counts squares, holding his head slightly to one side as he considers his arrangement. “Now the king is trapped,” he says…

I can well imagine the author of The Ever-Present Origin sauntering over to some battered table outside of some Swiss café on some pleasant late summer day, smiling softly and knowingly as he finds secret moves leading to victory after long meditations. Gebser devotes exactly a fraction of a footnote to the subject of chess in Part One of his magnum opus.3EPO, p. 31 I do not know if he played. He may very well have turned to other pursuits with what leisure he had at his disposal. His name does not appear among the greater and lesser deities of the game, those tournament and match players whose decisions and painful mistakes are emblazoned for all time in the books, but that is no matter. His was another mission, to illuminate the connectedness of spirit, emotion, imagination, and analysis in how we humans operate, and to explain why we should not feel the need to ignore any approach to understanding ourselves and others. Chess is mental activity par excellence but few of its practitioners, from the greatest to profound mediocrities like me, would claim it to be exclusively so. For it is clear that a rich, multifaceted experience lies not far under the surface, reaching across generations and cultures alongside sports, music, and other arts to remind us to be fearless in our creativity, to make connections and to value them, and to always leave ourselves time and space, amidst the troubles of our planet, in which to celebrate our common humanity.

All noted references are from The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser (Ohio University Press edition, translated by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas, 1985).

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ EPO, p. 48
2. ↑ EPO, p. 210
3. ↑ EPO, p. 31

The Long Curve of Descent

By

Brian George, Hawk Mummy Floating on the Ocean, 1992

One morning, when I was four years old, I was sitting on the third-floor back porch of my family’s three-decker. It was 1958, and Worcester, Massachusetts, was still regarded as the industrial heart of New England. Looking out, I could see smoke puffing from tall smokestacks, a freight-yard and a railroad bridge, hills with houses perched on them that rolled into the distance, and, a few miles off, on one of the highest hills, the gothic architecture of Holy Cross College. How wonderful the day was! I could not have asked for a more perfect moment. My grandmother had given me a large chunk of clay. And then, I was no longer looking out over Worcester; no, I was hovering above the Amazon, making snakes, canoes, and villagers out of the substance in my hands.

As I worked, however, I became frustrated. It occurred to me that I had succumbed to a creative block. I grew angry. I could not believe what I was seeing. My hands were small. My mind just barely worked. My imagination seemed like a blunt instrument. As absurd as it sounds, I remembered what it was like to create real snakes and villagers.

Since that morning, I have explored a variety of methods to get from the place where my feet are planted to the larger space that surrounds me, which is not, of course, mine in any personal sense. The path has been a labyrinthine one. My raids on the inexpressible have imposed many contradictory demands. Scholarship and meditation have opened onto vision, onto a mode of knowledge as intimate as it is vast. An ocean, of a sort, boiled, and I could feel the enormous pressure on my skin. Convulsing on the current, I was thrown here and there. Over time, the heat of vision has given way to a much cooler sense of transparency. But always, there are gaps, which demand that I let go of any sense of certainty, which also ask that the reader play a more active role. When a leap of association has been left hanging in mid-air, the reader should use his or her intuition to complete it, thus creating a connection that could not otherwise have existed.

Without gaps being left, and without the active participation they require of all involved, visionary writing may serve as no more than a travelogue. This approach has led some to accuse me of obscurity. Obscure my work may be, but it is not accidentally so, and I would be happy to be able to move more directly towards my goals.

In a critique of my essay “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman,” Dave Hanson wrote:

So as you step in and out of the implicate order I can only suggest looking at your intention, honing your control, looking for opportunities to heal others, and seriously questioning everything you experience on the journey. I would like your writing more if it was more simple and direct, but that is me. I don’t know that just because something comes to us from ‘the spirits’ it is any more meaningful than the sound of the toilet flushing. I’m surrounded by people who ‘see things.’ I don’t understand the underlying meanings of most of it, so I plant more vegetables.

My dog died. I miss him. I can feel his body under my hand. My wife is working too hard and worries too much. I have a broken ankle and hate crutches. I can’t do what I love to do and when I’m back on my feet I’ll waste precious time. A Native American spirit showed me a painting I am supposed to do, over twenty years ago, and I haven’t done it…Can your visions help heal another? That’s all there is.1In August of 2009, I posted an essay in Reality Sandwich called “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman.” “The Long Curve of Descent” grew out of an exchange with writer and shamanic teacher Dave Hanson. I have kept Dave’s comments exactly as they appeared. My response, however, has been expanded and revised a number of times, most recently in April of 2017. It might seem absurd to waste time and energy on something as insubstantial as an online forum. I take dialogue seriously, however. I like to be surprised. What sense does it make to prejudge the source of this surprise? I find that offhand comments—whether from forums or ongoing correspondence—can serve as creative prompts, which nudge me to see things from unexpected angles, to give form to my intuitions, and to say things that I might not otherwise say.

I responded: As regards “healing”: my small role as a healer has to do with the reclamation of collective memory. In my explorations, bits and pieces of lost history become clear, “as if lit for the first time by a brilliant star,” as de Chirico would say. For whatever it is worth, I then attempt to tell others what I see. For me, healing has to do with the discovery of our wholeness, which exists, to some extent, beyond us. This challenge is like the real gesture that we make with our prosthetic hand. There is water in a cup. It waits for centuries for us to drink it. Yet, though broken, we have never ceased to be whole.

Upon birth, having exited from the All beneath the stern gaze of Necessity, we are only allowed to bring a few meaningless details with us. One by one, the pages vanish from the book, as, earlier, our footprints had vanished from the ocean. Only mist marks the biodomes of the cities that we left. A buoy clangs, in the distance, somewhere. We have forgotten more than even the omnipotent are aware of, far more than they know themselves. Trauma locks the doors to the dark theatre of the body. We Are What We Eat: the bread of dreams, the sewage of the dead. The rest is junk DNA—or so our controllers would prefer us to believe. A strange presence guards the other half of each symbol.

I would speak truth to the powers that oppress us, who are not in any way the monsters that we think. As we breathe out, they breathe in, and vice versa. It is our pose of wide-eyed innocence that has tempted them to act badly. Our stealth has been impeccable; it has, perhaps, been TOO impeccable, by a factor of 10,000. We have shown few tells.

“Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we here for? Where are we going?” These are the questions that the writer and the artist have been hoodwinked by society into asking. Such questions are stupid. We should know better. It is possible that they constitute a crime against the Soul. In the stomach of each reader, I would plant and tend the acorn of Omphalos, the one intersection, in order to make the asking of such questions obsolete.

Brian George, Archetypal Figure with Bow and Lightning Arrow, 2004

You correctly place a great emphasis on healing, but please do not underestimate the energies that one can transmit at a distance, or the shock of synchronistic knowledge, whose spark jumps from the writer’s hand. “You have just woven together about ten important things that I was thinking about today,” wrote one reader. “There is a project that I’ve been putting off starting for a year, and now you have pushed me to do it.” One well-placed action can reconstitute the Web. True, cyberspace is not hyperspace, but perhaps it can function as a crude approximation. And it is always possible that the one is—very sneakily—preparing us for the other.

You have asked, “Can your visions heal another?” I tend to view myself more as a catalyst than a healer—a role that has a higher percentage of the energy of the Trickster—but the two roles are related. The term “shaman” is used somewhat ironically in the essay. I would make no claim to be one, any more than I would speak casually about world transformation, as so many do. There are more than enough snake-oil salesmen. Preferring to learn from real snakes, I would reverse engineer the most dangerous of toxins. What the snakes do not know, the birds may be willing to volunteer, so long as one is open to the removal of one’s head. From long before Gobekli Tepe had been built, such birds have been looking for new spheres with which to juggle. They may or may not choose to return some version of the plaything to its owner. Neither snakes nor birds see safety as important. As goes the head, so goes the year from which it comes.

Jasun Horsley once pointed out that whenever I would go to write “2012” it would always come out “2112”—a kind of metaphysical Freudian slip. One antediluvian date is probably just as good as another. Can one individual be healthy if the world died long ago? As I probe my wounds, I am hesitant to give others the peace of mind that I do not allow to myself. Shock at one’s corpse-like decrepitude can be viewed as a big plus. “Vision” and “healing” may not always coincide.

Since the end of the Paleolithic Era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of descent, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque. We do not remember what our hands are for. Our speech is inert. Our intelligence cannot exit from the top part of the skull, a door whose key has been broken off in its keyhole, an aperture that lacks oil. Once, our story had been written on the leaves of a great tree. The leaves have been torn off. The glyphs on them are illegible, and the tree is now a stump. Preprogrammed from beyond the clockwork of the stars, the decline that we have experienced does not appear as such; no, some trick of perspective causes us to hallucinate an ascent.

Brian George, The Conjuration, 2002

Archetypes break like toys, left over from a childhood that never did exist. We discard them. We ask, “Why is it so difficult for us to see into the cosmos?” We speak loudly. We do not hear the response. The cultures that we dismembered have been sucked into a cloud. Their outcries circle, and then fall like rain. The last civic structures are consumed by a decentralized plutocracy. “Who put you in charge?” we demand. “Do you have any vision at all?” The answers we get do not correspond to the questions that we ask, or rather, they do not correspond to the answers that we want. “May you live in interesting times,” goes the Chinese curse. We do, for better or for worse, live in “interesting times,” in which we must reconfigure all traditionally fixed roles. At the age of 62, I am just beginning to figure out what my public role might be.

A role is a social construct, with a set of rules attached; society can make no rules that the Self is obligated to obey. Why should space concern itself with the shoe size of its mouthpiece? To point people towards what they know but have chosen to forget may be no more than an exercise in futility. Some types of exercise are almost certainly good; others, not so much. Still, I find myself at a perpetual beginning as I test the strength of my lineage, tongue-tied, a bit nervous, as naked as a child who has just stepped from the womb. And here I had pretended to have the answers to each question! “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself,” as Whitman said.

For such is the prerogative of the preexistent Voice, and of its vehicle: WE.

All periods cohere in the one moment of my Memory. With a shock, one notes that the old becomes new. By the power of my austerities I have vacuumed up all of the water from the ocean. Cities shine there. I am Death—the Shatterer of Worlds. My weapon liberates multitudes.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ In August of 2009, I posted an essay in Reality Sandwich called “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman.” “The Long Curve of Descent” grew out of an exchange with writer and shamanic teacher Dave Hanson. I have kept Dave’s comments exactly as they appeared. My response, however, has been expanded and revised a number of times, most recently in April of 2017. It might seem absurd to waste time and energy on something as insubstantial as an online forum. I take dialogue seriously, however. I like to be surprised. What sense does it make to prejudge the source of this surprise? I find that offhand comments—whether from forums or ongoing correspondence—can serve as creative prompts, which nudge me to see things from unexpected angles, to give form to my intuitions, and to say things that I might not otherwise say.

Poems of Degeneration

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Fans of John David Ebert are likely familiar with his books and YouTube videos—a treasure trove of philosophy and cultural criticism. It’s less well known that he also writes poetry, which is partly why we’re so pleased to debut a sampling from his new book, These Things We No Longer Are. The book’s poetic cycle is divided into two halves, “Poems of Genesis” and “Poems of Degeneration.” We present selections from each in corresponding installments.

Descent of the Angel

Rilke knew it:
Angels are not benign at all
they are huge and monstrous
giants from behind the stars
with bat-wings
and heads shaped like a panther’s

And if you were to be so misfortunate
as to encounter one of them
the radiance alone would sear you blacker
than a Hiroshima shadow
which deed they have never forgiven us

For stealing a power
that was theirs exclusively
and not for the hands of some tiny homunculus
crawling upon a blue and white mote
circling the ruins of an ancient star
and trailing a dead moon behind it.

Peter

At first the teeth went
chipping away one by one;
then muscles, cartilage, nerves
became visible
as the skin wore away
like an anatomic model;
even your cells did not survive
this devastation
burning away in telephase;
yet the body remained.

Only now it was different

somehow;

Transformed:
with elongated arms
and thin spidery legs
and a pink, eyeless face;
you even had a second pair of arms
that grew from your back like strange membranous wings.

At first you did not know what to do
but in time you realized
how to use this new body
for the second arms had claws
and could rend and cut
while the atrophied arms, the ape arms
hung down limp and useless.

And you knew then
that this second body
was not your own
but engineered for chaos
by the Makers
who left you to die
in a heap of debris:
a mountain of yellow bones and scattered
chunks of disused brown and gray organs
along with other biohazards.

Then
then it came to you
the realization
slowly, at first
but then dawning
that it was time
to find your makers

and kill them.

Dead Men

There they lay on the hill in the rain:
round barrow shaped dirt hills full of dead men.
The earth was so soft that when you stepped in it
you thought your foot might sink into one of the skulls
or gently cave in the ribcage of some dead man with all his memories still drifting like a fog through his head.
As the gray rain continued to pour down on the dead men
surrounded by a eld of pine trees
you looked at the sign somebody had painted that said, “Dead Men”
and you wondered who they were and what might have killed them.
And then suddenly the thought came to you, very quickly: you didn’t belong there
these were dead men and they didn’t like to be disturbed
and before one of them could begin to stir and awaken like the dead of the apocalypse
pushing his mound of dirt about as he writhed his way up through it
you decided, very quickly, that it was time to get back in your car and go.

Five Skulls

Five human skulls
Arranged in the red dirt
At the top of a hill
Baking in the sun
Where a man
Wearing a dusty black burnous
Taps on each one of them in turn
With a long wooden stick

After a time he grows weary
And returns to his little house
Made of woven palm fronds
With a floor of crushed seashells
And sits listening to the wind
while drinking a cup of tea

The Angel of Death

Cracked earth; dry and white
Broken like pieces of clay glass
Which no one will ever set foot upon again

The ocean has withered to small shrunken pools
Creeping through valleys
Where the sea bottom is now a sandy desert
Strewn with weeds
And the rusted shells of long deserted ships
Cast aside like so many relics
Which nobody will ever think of again.

The buildings, too, are empty and haunted
With weeds and moss creeping upon their walls
Cracked shells like the ruins of radioactive Pripyat
Where no one will ever set foot again.

It is the angel once more
the angel of death with his huge leathery wings
And his mottled shrunken skin like a mummy’s
And two small caves where eyes should have been
With his long staff ending in a scythe with broken
Chips of missing teeth

Civilization is his hunting ground
And he settles upon the carcass of an abandoned automobile

Sitting upon his haunches
Staff thrown over one shoulder
Waiting.

Reading Albert Murray in the Age of Trump

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Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in The New Republic. It is reprinted here with permission.

In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s protagonist asks: “Could politics ever be an expression of love?” Our current climate of division, fear, anger, recrimination, and even resignation clearly points to an answer in the negative. However, the writings and ideas of Ellison, and his close friend of fifty years, Albert Murray, should caution citizens of the United States to keep in view how and why we’ve come so far, and to hold on to the vision of possibility within our democratic principles.

As members of the Greatest Generation, Murray and Ellison lived through the Great Depression under Jim Crow, the global threat of fascism during World War II, and the revolutionary 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s ethic of Christian love and tactic of non-violent resistance moved the nation closer to a democratic ideal. The Civil Rights Movement itself is proof that politics can be an expression of love as well as struggle. Where do we go from here: chaos or community?

The writing of Ellison and Murray both contain the vision and value to not only cope with our current predicament, but to confront the blue devils of chaos and entropy with skill, resistance, and resilience, as witnessed in the Library of America’s Albert Murray: Collected Essays and Memoirs, a definitive collection of Murray’s nonfiction from 1964 to 2004, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin. Murray transformed what Stanley Crouch aptly called the “decoy of race” into cultural idiom via a three-step process; his blues and jazz paradigm of humanity faced the harsh reality of life heroically, embracing inclusion and celebrating difference, affirming life itself along the way.

ALBERT MURRAY: COLLECTED ESSAYS & MEMOIRS, Edited by Paul Devlin and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Library of America, 1049 pp, $45

ALBERT MURRAY: COLLECTED ESSAYS & MEMOIRS, Edited by Paul Devlin and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Library of America, 1049 pp, $45

Albert Murray, born in Alabama on May 12, 1916, was a special, even quintessential American writer for the twentieth century: Local and global, black and Western, he was a modernist who respected the myths and rituals of early humans as much as he loved the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce and William Faulkner. Murray didn’t confine himself to ideological boundaries—it’s little use boxing him into liberal or conservative camps, into one academic field or another. As a pragmatic American pluralist of the blues, his vision extended to the implications of quantum physics and Einstein’s four dimensions. Murray, like Ellison, championed the humanities, especially literature and music, over the structural determinist regime of sociology, which he felt stratified people into rigid ethnic and racial categories.

The political and the aesthetic intersect in Murray’s worldview, though he scrupulously avoided partisan political propaganda and the “politics of unexamined slogans.” Murray staunchly supported the Civil Rights Movement as the culmination of a century-long post-emancipation battle for black rights beyond the chains of ethnicity or race. He valued activism and protest as tactical measures, but doubted the long-term political value of what he called “the politics of moral outcry” to induce guilt and fear in whites.

The current backlash against identity politics presents an opportunity for progressives and post-modernists to reboot their strategy and rhetoric. “Producing guilt may or may not be fine,” Murray suggests in the introduction of his first collection of essays, The Omni-Americans (1970), “but stimulating intelligent action is better. And intelligent action always needs to have its way paved by a practical estimate of the situation.”

Murray was also a theorist of “elastic” human individuality: He renounced biological race and the racial worldview and instead emphasized culture as a more viable basis for understanding and interaction. American identity combines roots from Europe, Africa, and, of course, Native Americans, all mixed together with modifications according to region, economics, social power, cultural influence. The last people on earth who should adhere to ideas of biological, ethnic, or racial purity are Americans. (The increasing use of DNA tests—popularized in part by Gates’ PBS series Finding Your Roots and powerful short videos available on YouTube—demonstrates just how mixed, and mixed up, we really are.) “We can no longer afford to traffic in simple-minded and culturally inaccurate terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ if they are meant to tell us anything more than loose descriptions of skin tone,” wrote Stanley Crouch in 1994 in the closing essay of The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race. “We are the results of every human possibility that has touched us, no matter its point of origin.”

Murray’s blues idiom worldview, which he described as a secular form of existential improvisation, is summed up by his phrase “elegant resilience,” a synonym for “swinging” in jazz and “flow” in hip hop. “A definitive characteristic of the descendants of American slaves is an orientation to elegance,” he writes in From the Briarpatch File,

…the disposition (in the face of all of the misery and uncertainty in the universe) to refine all of human action in a direction of dance-beat elegance. I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.

Philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Danielle Allen have described a worldview they call “rooted cosmopolitanism,” which I think describes Murray and the blues idiom to a tee. Rooted cosmopolitanism counters the insular nationalism exemplified by the conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who recently said: “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” Murray, unequivocal about his local Southern roots and nationality as a black American, believed that Americans are heir to the best of culture from all times and places—a global, cosmopolitan conception. Likewise, the blues is a vernacular music rooted in the black South of the United States that’s connected to Western church music harmonically as well as to music globally. The blues idiom is America at her best because it synthesizes “everything in the world as a matter of course, and feed[s] it back to the world at large as a matter of course.”

Albert Murray

“Elegance in style and thought,” a classic photo of Albert Murray

In Murray’s first published work of non-fiction, “‘The Problem’ is Not Just Black and White,” which appeared in Life magazine in 1964, was a swashbuckling dissection of seven books on the Civil Rights Movement. Murray had retired as an Air Force major two years before and he was game to wade in heated waters of public discourse, so his friend Ellison, by this time an icon of American letters, hooked him up for his debut.

Murray came out the gate slicing and dicing white liberals and black radicals alike, as well as giving affirmative nods where they were due. Injustice has many levels and Murray focused on the ideas and images that undergird it: Redneck racists, grounded in regional and racial tribalism, were all-too-obvious for Murray; it was the liberal condescension underpinning an attitude of white superiority that was more stealthy and treacherous.

Nowhere do the smug assumptions which underlie the ideas of white supremacy work more insidiously than among the so-called American liberals, the self-styled “friends of the Negro.” Their methods are rooted in the jargon of social science, their judgments based on tricky statistics, their proposed solutions basically materialistic—and seldom if ever do they stop to consider Negroes as people. Instead, these authors’ good intentions become so enmeshed in misinformation and guesswork that their books wind up preaching the same false generalities as white supremacists. The only difference is that their attitude is condescending rather than malevolent.

In the review, Murray isn’t afraid to name names: jazz critic Nat Hentoff, Charles Silberman, author of 1964’s Crisis in Black and White, and immigration historian Oscar Handlin, among others, get the boot. Murray shakes his head at the Washington bureau chief of JET, Simeon Booker, for his report on the so-called new black militancy: “Booker, like most other reporters, Baldwinizes too much about the Negro’s new liberation from fear of the white man,” he writes. “But he has his facts backward: What the Negro has always been concerned about is the white man’s sometime hysterical fear of him, a fear that expresses itself all too often in terms of lynch mobs, police brutality, racist juries, unconstitutional state laws, and fanatical defiance of federal authority.”

In The Omni-Americans, Murray demonstrated how and why black American culture is central to the American mainstream, despite social, economic, and political obstacles. Twenty four years later, Murray would thrash Andrew Hacker’s thesis in the New York Times bestseller Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) by listing major U.S. cities with black mayoral leadership, and referencing the multi-million dollar salaries of black athletes accepted by fans of all backgrounds in various sports, as counter-examples. “Two nations? Only two?” Murray asks with incredulity. “What about the Asians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other not very white U.S. citizens from Latin America and elsewhere? One thing that does not seem to have changed very much during the last twenty five years is the pessimism of white academic experts on black prospects.”

The Library of America volumes also include Murray’s unpublished work, such as his fascinating 1966 essay on Black-Jewish relations titled “U.S. Negroes and U.S. Jews: No Cause for Alarm”—which, as Gates and Devlin explain, was commissioned and then rejected by the New York Times Magazine. The editors instead published James Baldwin’s “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” a year later, presumably because of Baldwin’s greater fame and visibility, and the likelihood his incendiary title would draw more attention.

The Times editors could condescend to Baldwin’s repetitions of “hatred” throughout his essay to feel sorry for the poor, poor Negroes. Murray, who didn’t tolerate condescension, took a more measured approach than Baldwin, stating without reservation that blacks on the whole are not anti-Semitic, that Jewish philanthropy and support of civil rights for all is greatly appreciated, but that some blacks resent some Jews for certain social and economic atrocities. I suspect that what may have ultimately closed the door to publication was Murray’s audacious, stinging stand regarding particular Jewish intellectuals who were, he claimed, “persisting in misrepresenting and misinterpreting the rituals and motives of U.S. Negro life in terms of clichés and values peculiar to the Jewish tradition, [and] have been propagating and ‘documenting’ a new theory of Negro inferiority.”

By the publication of The Omni-Americans, a collection of pieces he had published in The New Leader and several other periodicals, Murray was primed to influence the national discourse on race, culture, and American identity in the post-Civil Rights era. “After all,” argued Murray in the introduction, “someone must at least begin to try to do justice to what U.S. Negroes like about being black and to what they like about being Americans.”

Henry Louis Gates’s 1996 New Yorker profile, “King of Cats,” recalled Murray in the ‘70s as a “lithe and dapper man with an astonishing gift of verbal fluency, by turns grandiloquent and earthy.” Walker Percy, one of the notables Murray spoke with for his 1971 memoir, South to a Very Old Place, thought The Omni-Americans “well may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture, published in this generation.”

A key Murray insight is that the different perceptions of white and black Americans result not only from the social effect of race, but also from distinctive ethnic and cultural idioms. Nevertheless, he writes in one of the most quoted passages from The Omni-Americans:

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world as they resemble each other. [Emphasis in original]

Americans of any stripe share in the promises found in the nation’s founding documents, as well as our motto, E pluribus unum: out of many, one. The promises of our social contract clearly remain unfulfilled, but to Murray they remained ancestral imperatives, lodestars for fugitive slaves fleeing for freedom via the Underground Railroad. His image of E pluribus unum was “that of a mainstream fed by an infinite diversity of tributaries.” The hue of that mainstream is “the color of infinity.”

Murray’s method in The Omni-Americans was akin to a research detective’s, which in The Hero and the Blues he described as: “finding clues bearing on the nature and cause of specific troubles.” His concern was less “political injustice as such” as the “inaccuracies and misconceptions that contribute to and even rationalize injustice.” Positivist social science, which employed the tools of clinical psychology to pathologize the image of black citizens, reinforcing stereotypes and racial bias, was his main culprit. Under the guise of objectivity, he argued, the social sciences abstracted and obscured the lived reality of black folk. The insidious result was the media, policy-makers, and even black spokesmen taking “social science fiction” as real, spreading confusion and harm.

Stanley Elkins’s Sambo model, the Moynihan Report, Kenneth Clark’s renderings of black degradation, and William Styron’s projection of emasculation, sexual repression, and servility onto his fictional portrayal of Nat Turner were each subjected to withering critique in The Omni-Americans—Murray’s most polemical book. He also deemed the protest fiction of James Baldwin and Richard Wright inadequate, not only as representations of the fullness of black American life in Harlem and the South, but because he found their “frames of rejection” too beholden to moral outcry to leave enough space for individual agency and the novelist’s ambivalence about the human condition.

Murray employed “Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy” as the sub-title of The Omni-Americans. He considered race a “sterile category,” “hardly useful as an index to human motives as is culture.” Here are Murray’s aforementioned three steps—deconstruction, re-framing, and reconstruction—crucial to liberation from the shackles of racial thinking.

Murray first deconstructed white supremacy by unmasking it as “sociopolitical and psychopolitical folklore.” He did the same for the corollary of white superiority found in discourses of black “cultural deprivation,” “self-hatred,” and so-called “culture of poverty” by coining the phrase “the fakelore of black pathology” as a tactic of homegrown deconstruction. Second, he re-framed race as idiom: A characteristic mode of expression of a people. During Murray’s youth to middle age, “Negro” was the accepted term for native-born U.S. black folk. The “Negro idiom” was a “style and way of life” lived by African-derived Americans. Murray extended the “Negro idiom” from an ethnic domain to an expansive aesthetic with the blues and jazz as primary metaphors.

Third and finally, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American, a hybrid mixture, a synthesis and composite brought together by the values and principles of the nation’s “sacred” founding documents: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. Omni-Americans are the many comprising the oneness of American identity. That oneness is an idea, an ideal, a democratic horizon of aspiration, yes, but without such a vision, the people and the very nation may perish.

To Albert Murray—who experienced the full breadth of the twentieth century, passing away in 2013 at 97—human life was much more than the political survival of the fittest. If, however, there were an existential threat to the Republic and to humanity, as was the case during World War II, Murray’s response would have been to fight those authoritarian dragons of chaos with the best tools at one’s disposal—perhaps even employing an update of what Murray called Reverend Dr. King’s “political jiujitsu,” using the opposition’s own strength against them.

If politics is the art of the possible, then to Murray, art forms such as the blues and jazz, enactments of American civic ideals in sound, are resilient frames of acceptance and pathways of possibility. Murray’s matter of ultimate concern, divined from the thousand or so pages of this Library of America edition, was art and improvisation for life and humanity’s sake. In the midst of the pain, chaos, confusion, hysteria, conflicts and uncertainty of the moment, and apprehension about the future of our nation, the ability to express joy is paramount: to sing, swing, stomp the blues, dance our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and to freestyle on the breaks, dissonance, and asymmetry of our lives for as many measures as we’ve got, because the black and the blues will most certainly be back tomorrow.

Reading Group for Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts

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Starting May 4, 2017…

Metapsychosis: Readers Underground is hosting a group reading of Gregory David Roberts’ acclaimed novel Shantaram.

David Gaian and Marco V Morelli will host a series of 9 live conversations, in addition to online discussions in our forum at InfiniteConversations.com.

Here is David and Marco’s intro to the book and group:

To join, sign up for a Readers Underground subscription, which costs $2/month (or $20 for the year).

Join Us

Note: If you’re a  Cosmos Co-op member, you already have access to this group included with your membership.

Reading Schedule

Start Date: May 4, 2017

Live Conversations

We’ll do a weekly live conversation using the Zoom video conferencing app. The first live event is on May 4th at 6 PM Mountain Time (time-zone conversion).

All live conversations will take place every Thursday at 6 pm MDT, unless otherwise indicated. See the full reading schedule ».

These will be cooperative dialogues. After a brief introduction from David and Marco, we will open up the conversation and invite all to join in.

Online Discussion

There will be a dedicated channel for Shantaram on InfiniteConversations.com.

Each major section will have an open topic created by the moderator and posted each week. Readers are welcome and encouraged to expand the conversation with their own topics and replies.

Join Us

About the Book

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”

So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.

Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.

Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.

Buy the book: Amazon.com | B&N | Powell’s

About the Author

Photo by Anoush Abrar

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. A gifted writer and student, he became addicted to heroin when his marriage collapsed and he lost the custody of his daughter. When he committed a series of robberies with an imitation pistol, he was described as the Gentleman Bandit. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison, he escaped and journeyed to New Zealand, Asia, Africa, and Europe. For ten of those fugitive years he lived in Bombay-where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured in Germany, he served out his sentence there and in Australian prisons. Upon his release, he established a successful multimedia company, and since the international publication of Shantaram, he is a full-time writer, at home in several countries.

[Source: Amazon.com]

Hosts

David Gaian is the co-founder and COO of Symbio Life Sciences, a Colorado-based Public Benefit Corporation. After more than twenty years of international consulting work in molecular science, bioremediation, fair trade, and global community development and more than thirty years of diverse planetary living, cultural immersion, and spiritual exploration, David and his wife Dasha have finally unpacked, settled down, and started a family amongst the welcoming “natives” of Wild Sage Cohousing Community in Boulder, Colorado.

Marco V Morelli is the founder and CCO of Cosmos Cooperative and creative director of Metapsychosis Journal. He studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, and worked for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute from 2003 to 2007, co-authoring the book Integral Life Practice, before leaving to follow the pathways of art. He is currently at work on a new book of poems, stories, and essays titled I AM THE SINGULARITY.

Participation

This reading is open to all Readers Underground and Cosmos Beta members.

If you’re not yet a member, please sign up today!

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HyperNormalisation (Review)

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I don’t know how many people have the stomach or attention span for a sprawling, nearly 3-hour documentary covering the last 40 years of our civilization’s slide into metacrisis and narrative collapse. But for those who do, Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalisation, produced by the BBC, is well worth your time.

Released in October 2016, during a moment of peak political irreality (which obviously continues), the film traces and attempts to weave together a complex web of storylines, including the financialization of the economy; the spread of suicide bombing in the Middle East; the emergence of the internet, big data, and the surveillance state; the role of nihilism and narcissism in creating an atomized, subordinate society; the pull of techno-utopianism and our escape from material reality into social media; the promise and shortcomings of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring; the rise of Donald Trump and the appearance of a political technology (oddly, yet unsurprisingly, influenced by Russian avant-garde science fiction) whose very intent is to shock, distract, confuse, and destabilize consciousness through practices of “perception management” and “non-linear warfare”; and, neither last nor least, the failure of artists, intellectuals, and the counterculture (i.e., the “liberal class”) to provide an effective, alternative vision for the world or advance a coherent political agenda.

It’s a lot to face and take in, and Curtis, who also wrote and directed The Century of the Self and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, doesn’t sugar coat. He tells a bleak, even horrifying tale of how these forces have collided and colluded to produce our interlocking crises. From this out-of-control global reality, Curtis argues, we escape into perceptual bubbles that deny, obscure, and oversimplify the ugly truth of the death-dealing machinations of power behind the scenes.

The result is an experience of “hypernormalisation,” where nobody really knows what’s going on, what’s real, or who or what to believe, but we go along with it anyway, as if it’s normal, because we don’t know what else to do.

Disturbing scenes of blood-streaked rooms, bombs blowing up people and buildings, drone attacks and dead children (killed by those same bombs) blend with archival footage of political super-villains (Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin play prominent roles) and other key players and events. The scenes are carried forward by a dark, mostly electronic/ambient soundtrack, along with Curtis’ stark narration, which connects the disparate dots, like piecing together fragments of a puzzle from the chaos.

Unfortunately, HyperNormalisation does not offer the compelling political vision of a future that Curtis faults the liberal class for lacking. But the documentary serves as an incisive critique of our social complicity (which also appears to be personally our own) in the whacked out state of affairs.

The film manages to draw a messy and complex narrative into tenuous focus, and in so doing perhaps dispels some of the narcotic effect of easier, more simplistic explanations for how we’ve gotten to the brink as a civilization, and where we might be going next.

Watch HyperNormalisation on ThoughtMaybe.com

Prose for the Paranoid

By

I am, I am slightly ashamed to admit, a little paranoid at the moment.

Some of it is genetic. My family has a history of “nerves”. My lovely cousin, who shares a big batch of genetics with me along with a childhood of school holidays spent together indulging our creative whimsy, is also prone to this state of heightened concern about what You think of me. We sometimes dream about being able to go back to those times where we did not have to worry about careers or non-careers. About how the money is drying up but it’s still your fault if you don’t have a satisfying career. About making our way in the world when we feel so highly sensitive. In that school holiday world of our childhood, we did not have to worry about ensuring our survival in it, and so we were free to dream of different ones. Alternate worlds unravelled out of us, effortlessly. Every day we climbed out of bed into the six weeks of a warm-to-hot Australian summer that felt like six months.

A desire for a return to such a world is not such a childish concept, really. The kind of world where you are able to rise above Maslow’s hierarchy seems really quite a sensible one. It’s an egalitarian one where all of the forms that are daydreamy are incorporated and valued within that world, not cut out of it by austerity, by misanthropy. Where it is safe to be human, unthreatened by the robotic, sleeping advancement towards the AI wiping Us out of it altogether. It’s not a childish world. It is, perhaps in our one-eyed cynicism, a utopia. But it is more a childlike than a childish one. Those two concepts are in actual fact a universe and a half away from each other.

My partner and I have new neighbours. We live in an “entry-level” street in the Dandenong Ranges, on the very outskirts of Melbourne’s hem, which means that there is a whirlwind of ‘For Sale’ billboards that regularly go up and then come down in the yards of all the people we don’t know yet whom we share the same street with. I think idly about going to introduce myself. If the current predominant facet of the diamond that is me was one of the less paranoid ones, I would maybe actually consider doing it.

But do people even do that anymore?

Because I’m not the only one who is paranoid in our Lever & Kitchened public commons, there is no basis upon which I can go and introduce myself to the people who live next door without it feeling on some level like an affront. (At least, not when I don’t have kids, who are the perfect buffer.) In some squirming part of their psyche that’s been distorted by too much screen time, face-to-face time is just so…well, physical now. It’s too messily analogue, too variable, too unwieldy. Too uncanny and uncategorisable. A human being, with all her brokenness bounded by her skin’s wholeness, is just Too Much on your front doorstep. Too alive. What is the point of her?

And of course, paradoxically, at the same time all the humans we come across are Too Much, we quickly judge them as Never Ever Enough. And so when I finally present myself to the neighbours, when we unavoidably run across each other, I will be aware of all the categorising our world of brands has entrained in them. I will be painfully aware of their propensity to box the whole messy being in front of them into easy-to-manage, easy-to-dislike categories. I will be Too Old or Not Young Enough. I will be Too Inclined To Use Big Words (if the brainfog’s not too bad), or will be Too Vague (if it is). I will be Too Friendly or Too Aloof because my neighbours’ thermostats are wildly temperamental and also very fussy about what temperature of person they can accommodate. They will be looking for a reason to put me into the Other box so as to allow them to go inside and return to their screens more quickly, without any quirks of discomfort about how they don’t know their neighbours and now they don’t even want to. They’ll return to the comfort of their screens, where everything good is happening somewhere else and to someone else. Far away. It’s safer that way, even though it hollows out your guts.

And I will judge my new neighbours for their obvious lack of understanding about the importance of banding together, of the absolute necessity at this time for the grassroots of Us to come together to renew the ground under our feet before our floppy culture really does crumble for good. The grassroots is always where the new flourishing comes from. Isn’t this what we want and what we thirst for? We yearn for safety within the commons of community where we are not necessarily friends, and we may sometimes even feel like enemies, but we are in a different category of neither friends nor acquaintances nor enemies but fellows within a community, a unity in diversity, a strength more powerful than any multinational corporation could be.

I will go inside feeling sad that my new neighbours do not understand all this. I will go inside and return to my screen and search elsewhere for those people who know community, who practise permaculture, and who are not judgmental. I will feel scared while looking online for these people in a place that is not here. What if I find them? Then I will feel inspected in a different way. I will feel not the heavy, metal stare of instant categorisation. This will be a different kind of look. I will feel even more exposed in one way, because the initial look will be friendly. A probe of interest maybe, from people who are comfortable juggling the wholeness of people and so who are not offended by the ways I am Too Much or Not Enough. They will not notice nor be offended that my tits are not acceptably perky. They will accept my many contradictory elements, my we-should-pay-more-tax socialism, my paranoia, my dislike of neighbours who pop in out of the blue but who I paradoxically wish to be part of my community.

And so I will withdraw again from the people on my screen who are the grassroots, and I will withdraw into writing an essay. Into tackling the subject of paranoia—learning, as the saying goes, what I think and know and feel about something by exploring it, tonguing it, smelling its opposite ends.

And then I will think about the people who will ultimately read that essay that I am writing, with one-and-a-half eyes set on maybe getting someone to publish it for a hundred bucks so I can pay for the food shopping that week. Writing will buy me a tiny little bit of self-respect while my partner pays for the roof over us, the water that goes into us, the air that warms and cools us, for the rubbish collection that takes away both our rubbish and the rubbish of our neighbours who I haven’t even met but who I already dislike because they disappoint me by their non-understanding of the need for community regeneration.

And so then I will start thinking about the faceless editor at the end of my internet connection who will read and judge and critique my piece of writing. Even though I have had many good and encouraging rejections asking me to please submit again, at this moment I just simply can’t bear the whole fucking game of it. It’s a burden, submitting stuff into a space where we regularly talk about “content” without feeling freaked at how empty the box is when it has not much that’s not linked to you needing to buy something. I’m just too fucking paranoid right now. And so I will stop writing that essay because the world has ridden in on its laser horse of judgment and judged me wanting with its pointy harsh fluorescent laser. Futility will ride in afterwards, like the two horses of the writing apocalypse. What’s the fucking point, really?

And so I will sulk until the urge to write is too itchy, and finally I will turn to the only space that really satisfies when feeling paranoid. When the world is too much or too little, a launch into the space of fiction provides a safe landing. Here, you are the god of your own world. But not the nasty god that orders Old Testamentonians to bash other tribes’ babies against rocks. Or at least not unless that god, who seems like the bad guy at the start of the story, is actually instructing this horror because (as you find out in the second to last page of the story) the other tribe is actually robots from the sixth dimension who in the 21st century will try and kill the humans with AI (and whose babies, by the way, cry very realistically).

And then, just to not make it quite so good-and-bad simple Cartesian, the god himself turns out in the end to be one of the many aliens who has tinkered with your species over the years. And so then your story goes from science fiction to esoterica, and it turns out that although this god is a good god overall, you really need to learn not to call him that because just because his species is from the sixth density doesn’t mean they are gods in the ultimate sense of a completely good being you could absolutely depend upon.

And then you try and write something about the good god idea being really the Source From Which All Comes, Good and Bad, but it’s really hard to write about that stuff so you will leave it out when you finally write the essay and submit it maybe to somewhere like Asimovs or something.

Etcetera, etcetera.

In fiction, since you are the god of your own world, you can love all the people who inhabit the stories that sometimes come unravelling out of you like ribbon. Only later, whilst in the shower washing your tits with the unacceptable level of perk, do you realise that you have been daydreaming. You have been flowing through your own mind in pleasure, pondering things that maybe are very droll and dry like politics, but putting disparate pieces together to see what space they create in the middle. And then into that space pops a scenario, maybe populated with two people. From them a ‘what if’ emerges. And suddenly there is this little glowing orb of possibility that rushes you out of the shower and towards a pen or a keyboard to start fleshing the story out, not knowing where it goes. If you’re a god in this world, you’re not separate from your own creation. You are making it while you’re inside it and it is all far, far too big for instant categories and labels. You have suddenly slipped, unnoticed, into this world, and in describing it a few paragraphs back you were an excruciatingly self-conscious first person, and now you are in a wide, warm bath of the second person.

Here, finally, is a space big enough to breathe.

Alliance in Arms

By

He’s a big barreled suave broad caster (he casts broads) who smokes a cigar, the phallus broadcasted on his exclusive speaker. His voice is pinched with a husky drawl, ever sure, and he declares whatever he wants and you appease.

The Brute: Step right up in this horse race, honey. Pick your horse. I’ve got Fight, Flight and Response . We got blue, green and red, honey. You pick your horse and your color…a pause and grin: I picked it honey, its Red. The horse is Flight.

The Wise Man stands tall with aged hair, a philosopher of intent, set and a crook at his back. What crook is this? Is it the weight of the world on his shoulders, the burden of sins from these cheats, so claimed, yet they are in their way. It’s the burden and grace which arrives when the crook is a weigh, some scale balanced, and some wisdom given and gained.

The Wise Man: Pick your poison or purpose. Is it a poison with a purpose? Or a poison purpose? Or a poise and purpose.

The Maiden is fair of face and hair. An innocent infantilized. Let them decide, where is all, some center thrown from the mother, a birth digress, a stopping feat. Father gathering her sheaves in hand but it’s not fair, an unfair process and progress. A woman solely bred in men.

Maiden: I’m so helpless in this design.

The Wise Man: Don’t be so helpless in this you designed it, what do you wish? This brute gives a clue, without knowing it, there’s dear blue.

The Brute: This design is red, he’s fitted, get set. Lorrie, the broad is cast, panic. What a waste, Flight, Helpless can’t steer her mane, this design in circles. It’s a Hopeless blue. Your type can’t conclude.

Maiden: This design haunts me. What can I see, where can I go, how do I feel, all these maids around in fleece, I’m sheared from head to toe, and these remnants scattered. My design is obsolete. Calling and haunting me, they do.

The Wise Man: Take your hand, it’s not false, it’s yours as you want it. A black recess made stronghold. Don’t give up your hold on your right. Fight. You can build your own design.

Maiden: I don’t compare. Not for anything worthwhile, beauty can’t exist as it is and develop inside the lines of my mind; it’s deranged in might, yet passive in defeat. The way is outside me, floating. I’m this helpless cause. Horses that run but aren’t free.

The Wise Man: She’s become the brute, but doesn’t know it…in time she’ll give up the mime. In time she’ll combine.Flight: Wo. Fight: Man. Response: Human kind.

Maiden: It’s in me but it’s gone then. How old? Years until I meet me somewhere. Colors in a sea and smear, running faces, running laps, Flight, and chastised speed…anger never aired. What women did this to me; they are the ones, no protection from this animal force? I could not receive it nor create it; it was given, not provided for.

The Brute: Women they are my ultimatum, she is not dear, they are each a helpless witch I possess.

Maiden: There’s no beauty reckoning, we all break, there’s no me in she, I’m a man, it’s safe and sound…the noise is mine but it isn’t, how can I know, the face and stance, the course, the horse and colors, the way to anger against men is all women are brute, thus I’m a me helpless she, power substitute, whose feminine is masculine displaced inappropriately instead….Women can’t stand, they can’t think, they can’t feel, they are hated.

The Wise Man: Therefore you are a helpless he, for women is you and with this expression you’ve fled from the receptive creation, and the mate in your creation.

The Brute: You are embedded in my style. Lines spasmodic and my center. Spiraling red looking glass that cracks, petrified, a repeating pattern, this broad cast in space. Nowhere set.

The Wise Man: This is it. What can you do in this, your baby is, you’re her the helpless, you repeat and what is achieved? No mother could love your maiden. No mother could suckle your baby. No mother can love your earth, you’re mass, a tyrant: horses, colors, and course, the podium enlarged, the broadcast cast and its skill. You give this whether you know. To women a hell in home they can elope, and without you, just herself. Ovation and a standing. Women are the slate you write your epitaph on. It’s you.

Maiden: What man could take away and bore, his scape to my bone, a vision I couldn’t be. They were all alone. Their design etched in stone. They could do anything fly in the air, land on their feet, crash cars and toll bells for supper one minute and crook the next, the cheat sheet, white blanketing, like snake skin, a cloud—no molting for me into something else.

The Brute: It life, red to sear. Watch her grow diseased, fall and its light, for me.

Maiden: It’s here, this fear, what design we can make. A blue vitality stretched across eons. Flight, with its second sight, the brute sows what he reaps, a green fight for life. I create this response.From this poison and bewitching arrives wisdom.

We’re cast along the broad race to fall. We’re built up in the broadcast to race the next. We fall into a summit in our time and rise to fall in time. This wisdom in Wo-man runs its course with its poison antidote. It has it has its poise and purpose.

Suspension Framed the Matter and Cast Our Source

What Relief Can We Make from this Still Expulsion

It is Our Design

The “Other” Globalization and Fear of the Feminine: a Mythological View

By

The advent of the Internet for the average citizen in the 1990s has proven both a blessing and a curse. One of its positive attributes is the way in which it introduced the world to itself. For the United States in particular it meant finally having a reliable and accessible channel to the rest of the world, allowing a glimpse of what was beyond our isolated position in the Atlantic. Communication across the globe has become cheap and easy, and allows us to expand our knowledge of other people and cultures. This leads to two possible outcomes: one possibility is that this will break down barriers of prejudice and nationalism. The other possibility is that it will reinforce these barriers. What we now see going on in the world is evidence of the latter.

“Globalization” is a dirty word to many people, but what does it mean? Jonathan Cobb provides an excellent summary of the economic definition of the term in his recent Metapsychosis article, “The Global Abyss.” When we hear about “globalization” in the capitalistic sense, it deals with colonialism and exploitation, and therefore it is rightly a “dirty word.” The terms of IMF loans required that they be spent developing businesses and trade. They were not to be used for public welfare of any kind. As incentives were offered to companies who opened up shop, labor was often exploited. This led to populations staying poor and international businesses getting rich. If there is one thing that the political left and right tend to agree on it’s that big business is exploitative. Here in the United States, prior to the rise of the Internet, we may not have noticed the exploitative nature of our home-grown companies before, but now it is happening to us. Legal decisions like Citizens United provide corporations with influence and rights that are harmful to the average working citizen. Jobs are being outsourced to places where unions don’t exist, and labor is so cheap it almost qualifies as slave labor. Technological advances and increased automation will require new thinking about the “work” economy, but in the meantime we are left with a workforce dependent on both manufacturing and service jobs.

But “globalization” can also mean something like the opposite of “nationalism.” Nationalism is often experienced as separate nations making war over resources and promoting false ideas of racial or ethnic superiority. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson referred to these latter ideas as “pseudospeciation”: the idea that one group of humans is superior to another on some kind of economic, cultural, or moral grounds.1Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. W.W. Norton, 1993, p. 10. In contrast, globalization is a perception of the world as one “country.” On a broader scale, this is embracing the collective human race over individual ethnic and political groups.

My own research in myth and psychology suggests that the underlying principle of this “collective” ideal is “feminine” in nature. In Carol Gilligan’s work entitled A Different Voice she speaks to the differences in the way boys and girls think. Gilligan illustrates this by presenting the “Heinz’s Dilemma,” which is a psychological problem constructed to test the moral and emotional maturity of children. The dilemma runs thus: Heinz’s wife has cancer. Heinz can’t afford the medicine his wife needs to get better. Should Heinz steal the drug or let his wife die? When an 11-year-old boy and girl from roughly the same background and education were asked to provide a response to “Heinz’s Dilemma,” they both thought of the problem in very different ways. The boy who answered this question gave a very rational, legalistic response to the problem. The girl offered a more ambiguous response, feeling that neither solution was adequate. She asked, ‘Couldn’t people raise money to help Heinz buy the drug? Wasn’t there another way?'2Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Women’s Conception of the Self and of Morality. Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 30. The girl’s way of thinking was frustrating to the researchers who rated her as lower in maturity than the boy. Gilligan points out that she is not immature; rather, she is thinking about the broader community rather than just the individual or the details of law. This mode of thought might be called a “feminine” way.

This distinction, between an individual/masculine perspective and a collective/female perspective has been made by several psychoanalysts over the years. Jung used the term logos to refer to the psychological “masculine” while the “feminine” is akin to eros. “Masculine” is related to the hero’s journey, the warrior moving away from the safety of home to make his way in the world, to later bring back his “boon” and provide a benefit to the community. The last part of the journey is seen by Jung as a reunion of “masculine” and “feminine,” which is about integrating once again with the collective—love, family, sharing, and community. Others, like Erich Neumann, likened the rational, conscious mind to a masculine Heaven and the collective powers “that threaten to devour” to the feminine Earth.3Neumann, Erich. The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology. Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 172. When feminine energy is described in this manner, as something which erases individuality and devours identity, it’s not surprising when it becomes something to be feared.

If we apply these concepts to our “globalized” world, with every person belonging to a network connected by technology, where social groups and shared experiences dominate our reality, we begin to see the problem. What happens when these two groups bump up against each other? If one group values independence and the other values inclusion, do they see one another as a threat? In Western culture, “feminine” or “collective” thinking has become associated with what is evil or weak. This frightening view of the collective, akin to the archetype of the Terrible Mother, is what drives a lot of the current global political and social narrative. It represents a fear of change, and on a broader level, of death. We don’t want to embrace the Other, or lose ourselves in the collective. Recognizing what we have in common might threaten what makes us special.

This view does not necessarily have to do with individual women per se, nor does it apply only to females. The terms “masculine” and “feminine” can apply to men or women, and all men and women have both masculine and feminine attributes.

This broader psychological view is important when we consider the role of narrative in our culture. Narratives which are accepted as truth often become the foundation of future behavior. The general assumption is that truth is supported by authoritative evidence. Library science has many theoretical and philosophical writings on the notion of the “authoritative.” It is assumed to be knowledge conveyed by an expert, and reviewed by that expert’s peers. The “expert” has spent time studying the question, problem, or topic in depth. For this reason, secular society prefers science over religion as a basis for its laws and decision-making, as noted by Alan Watts.4Watts, Alan. “The Ceramic and the Fully Automatic Model.” YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfNbmwiTIlE

While this is a very sensible approach to information about the world, nature, and the universe, it tends to fall too much on the side of logos. The “irrational” side of consciousness—intuition, emotion, perception—is viewed as unreliable and therefore false. The entire category of religion is labeled as such by some materialists and atheists, because belief in a god requires “faith” in unseen forces. Along with religion goes personal experience. Since an individual’s experience is easily influenced by emotions, the assessment of that experience is judged as not being objective. What is “felt” is dismissed in favor of what is “logical”; the “feminine” aspect of our consciousness is discredited and the “masculine” aspect is seen as the only credible one.

This is the root of the narrative problem. When society’s narrative is overly rationalistic and “masculine,” there’s no room for the “felt” truth of the individual. Likewise, when a “feminine” narrative arises out a common experience and a shared feeling, there can be a resistance to hearing any rationale behind what happened. A fundamental human desire is to feel validated. When our experiences are dismissed and our viewpoints ridiculed or ignored, we respond negatively to the sense of rejection. It doesn’t matter if we are actually right or wrong in a factual sense; not being listened to or believed is still alienating.

Fear of the unknown is also part of the equation. When confronted with new viewpoints or when forced to accept changes brought about by crisis, personal insecurity can bring about defensive behavior. Our belief in the principle of cause and effect makes us look for an “answer” to problems that are not easily articulated or defined. When we can’t seem to make sense of what’s happening, we look for a quick fix. One way is to demonize the supposed “cause” of the problem, thereby creating a scapegoat. Another way is to cling to belief systems that spell out every detail of behavior and promise to speak with the authority of the “ultimate” (i.e. God).

If we put all of this together into a society that pits reasoned, scientific observation against what is felt and shared, you end up with a backlash against both. This is why we are now left in a world that is increasingly fascist and nationalistic, with each side believing they are the superior group of humans based “on some kind of economic, cultural, or moral grounds.”

It also puts us into an information environment being described as “post-factual.” Facts no longer matter; an individual’s preferred narrative is all that matters. This may appear to be an appeal to the “feminine,” where large groups of people all buy into the same story, but it actually demonstrates an absence of the feminine: there is a war of worldviews, and accepting another’s worldview is viewed as weakness.

The choosing of a bullying, xenophobic white man for President of the United States reflects the narrative of a frightened America now on the defensive. He has identified and named our scapegoats and now we are going after them. It’s an action movie where the vigilante guy who doesn’t play by the rules destroys the evil villains. But where is the re-integration? In this version, Odysseus never comes home and “plants his oar”—he perpetually goes on plundering and making war. It is a hero narrative that has all the battle scenes and none of the re-integration or offering of boons to society. Carl Jung warned about repressing all of our natural archetypal instincts during the tumultuous events of his time.5Jung, C.G. “Epilogue to ‘Essays on Contemporary Events.’” Civilization in Transition. (Collected Works, v. 10), Pantheon Books 1964, pp. 235-236. The problem may be even worse today. The repression and neglect of the collective has led to something like a mass psychosis, with each side being driven mad by the Other.

The reader might object that much of this is rather abstract and somewhat general. But it is important to look at the drives, fears, and a priori assumptions that drive human behavior. It is no longer sufficient to simply dismiss certain narratives as “irrational” or “delusional” because they appear to originate outside our group. “Feminine” and “Masculine” thinking lies within us all. We must look deeper into the views we don’t understand to unearth the threads that tie us all together. We live in a world that is post-mythical. There is no longer a single convincing narrative that unites everyone. Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers during their Power of Myth conversations that any future myth has to be a global one.6Joseph Campbell the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Doubleday, 1988, p. 32. The time has come to write our new myth story; one which embraces the truth about who we are as people, the power of connectedness, and the real threats to our humanity.

The Internet has been a terrifying force for spreading harmful falsehoods that affect entire nations and the entire world. But the Internet is not “evil.” It has the potential to unite as well as divide. The question becomes: how does the individual find their way past collective fears and scapegoating without fear of losing themselves or their values? Even if we feel safe in our own familiar spaces, isolation and alienation will not lead to happiness.

We need to look at the positive aspects of the collective without fearing for our identities. Much like the Hindu concept of the divine, we are One with many facets like a diamond. We are not separate from each other—our shared experience of life happens in relationship to what is around ALL of us.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. W.W. Norton, 1993, p. 10.
2. ↑ Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Women’s Conception of the Self and of Morality. Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 30.
3. ↑ Neumann, Erich. The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology. Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 172.
4. ↑ Watts, Alan. “The Ceramic and the Fully Automatic Model.” YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfNbmwiTIlE
5. ↑ Jung, C.G. “Epilogue to ‘Essays on Contemporary Events.’” Civilization in Transition. (Collected Works, v. 10), Pantheon Books 1964, pp. 235-236.
6. ↑ Joseph Campbell the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Doubleday, 1988, p. 32.

The Global Abyss

By

It seemed unthinkable. A narcissistic reality show star with an authoritarian personality and a highly volatile temperament was elected to the highest office in the land on a platform of bigotry, xenophobia, and bullying. He was quite possibly the least qualified man to ever make it to the general election, let alone win the election. Yet against all expectations, here we are. The question has come up repeatedly over the course of this election as to whether he could legitimately be labeled a fascist. One Marxist history professor I spoke to suggested that “Bonapartist” would be more accurate, but for our purposes, “fascism” is about as useful a term as any to describe the current political atmosphere, but whatever the case, he is certainly part of a global far right uprising that has taken the Philippines, Britain, Brazil, and Turkey, and may soon include France. How did we get here?

Many pundits have been quick to point out that the Democrats sowed the seeds of their own destruction by pursuing neoliberal policies that outsourced jobs and abandoned the working class. I do not disagree with this, but I think it behooves us to look closely at what neoliberalism is, and how it developed in the first place.

The Global Empire

Our story begins in 1492. When Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola, he and his fellow conquistadors enslaved the local population to mine gold for the Spanish empire. Later colonial powers including Britain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands all followed suit, using enslaved peoples to extract natural resources from their homeland for export to their colonial masters. Finding indigenous slaves troublesome because of their tendency to know the lay of the land, slaves were purchased from kingdoms in Africa, before they themselves were conquered by European powers, and its citizens subjugated under laws that reduced them to indentured servitude. Resources previously held in the commons were privatized, and crushing debts were imposed on the population. After slavery was abolished and those countries gained their independence, those debts remained.

In the aftermath of World War II, two new superpowers emerged: The United States and the Soviet Union. The two competed with other over control of the rest of the world. An economic pact of countries from the capitalist west resulted in the Bretton Woods system, which established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. These institutions issued loans to foreign governments, denominated in US dollars, with the intended purpose of developing and modernizing their country through infrastructure projects. This seemed to have great results at first, and countries were encouraged to borrow more. These debts compounded upon the existing debts they owed to their former colonizers since gaining their independence. At the same time, the leaders of these countries were being advised by western economists, who advised them to pursue policies that favored export-led development, switching from subsistence agriculture to cash crops and selling natural resources to the developed world, which had itself developed its industries through long periods of protectionism, opening their borders to trade primarily in finished goods. The US itself had major farm subsidies to give its agricultural exports a competitive edge. It didn’t help that many of the leaders of these countries were themselves educated in prestigious European and American universities, where they were taught the same economic canon that western advisers were feeding them.

This economic dogma was built on the idea of growth: People were made better off by expanding the scale of economic activity. In a growth economy, all boats would be lifted, so there was no need to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom so that others could have a bigger piece of the pie. Instead, the pie itself would become larger. Policies were implemented that promoted free enterprise while taxing the poor through payroll and consumption taxes. Capital markets were opened so that investment would flood into these countries. So-called “export processing zones” were established offering a barrier-free environment for corporations to set up factories to produce goods for export.

These policies in many cases did result in growth, but the benefits did not spread to everyone as promised. Instead, they created a small economic elite while dispossessing countless others. Land and resources were sold off to extractive industries, forcing people off their land and into the cities to look for work, where they found it in factories built by Western corporations, the profits from which went not to their own country, but into the hands of corporate shareholders. These factories, otherwise known as “sweatshops,” would often have small dormitories for workers to live on-site, while working long days under poor working conditions with military-like discipline in order to send what little wages they made to their families. Others who were unable to get jobs in these factories ended up in slums, living in small improvised shacks put together from pieces of wood, scrap metal, and whatever else they could get their hands on, while turning to whatever kind of enterprise they could manage, legal or illegal. It’s a myth that poverty, in and of itself, produces crime. It is countries with high levels of inequality that see high levels of crime and violence. It is the existence of a wealthy elite that pushes others off to the margins, leaving them having to fight for survival any way they can.

Many countries had no choice but to take on these loans, due to their existing debt to their colonizers. When the loans went bad, as they tended to do in times of economic crisis, the World Bank and IMF implemented “structural adjustment programs,” in which they would send in advisors to “restructure” the economy according to a set of prevailing economic theories that became known as the “Washington consensus.” Those leaders that refused to go along with this scheme put their lives in danger. The CIA would often come in and arm rebel groups, supporting juntas that were friendly to American business interests. Guatemala, Iran, Chile, El Salvador, and several others all learned firsthand the consequences of defying the Washington consensus. When the CIA failed, only then would the US commit troops to the ground, as in Iraq and Libya.

Austerity

All of this extracted wealth funded the most prosperous economy in America’s history. Labor unions were strong, wages were rising, and a very progressive income tax redistributed this influx of money broadly to ordinary Americans. Even modern progressives who now look back fondly upon this time scarcely realize it was financed by blood money. This prosperous period began to see cracks in its façade sometime in the mid-70s. Factories began to close as corporations outsourced them overseas, where they could hire cheap labor and import the products back into America. Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America each did their part to break up unions and dismantle the welfare state in their countries. Clinton signed the infamous NAFTA treaty, sending American jobs to Mexico, and bringing in an unprecedented wave of immigration from the south.

For the first time, the developed world was beginning to apply the Washington consensus to itself, with one notable exception: rather than using these economies to supply labor and natural resources, they would be service-based consumer economies that would buy the products produced in these other countries while working service jobs that produced nothing. These service jobs themselves were propped up by what is known as the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate. These extractive industries produce no value of their own either, but live parasitically off of wealth produced elsewhere. Rent and debt thus became a ghostly platform upon which neoliberalism constructed its house of cards, which came crashing down in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Obama came to power on the promise of fixing the economy, and bringing America back to prosperity. He bailed out the auto industry, passed a stimulus plan, and pushed the country’s first universal healthcare law, commonly referred to as “Obamacare.” However, Obamacare proved to be a huge corporate giveaway, the stimulus plan proved too small, and the so-called “auto industry” he bailed out was producing most of its cars in Mexico, and most of its activity in America was in the FIRE sector. Thus, it turned out to be yet another bank bailout. The economy did make a recovery, but mostly in low-wage part-time work. The fundamentals are still as weak as ever.

It is in this environment that we have just witnessed the most shocking election in this country’s history. A woman who was in the eyes of many the very embodiment of this neoliberal establishment faced off against a corrupt, authoritarian, narcissistic billionaire who campaigned against everything she stood for: feminism, political correctness, multiculturalism, and most of all, neoliberalism. The fascist won, and America is now in uncharted territory. This man promised to ban Muslims from entering the US, called Mexicans rapists and murderers and threatened to deport millions of them, declared war on the media, and threatened to jail his political opponent. The future has never looked more bleak.

Contradictions

What happened here? How did we arrive at this dark abyss? To understand this, we need to understand the inner workings of capitalism. Capitalism is built on the basis of profit. Profit, in accounting terms, simply means walking away from a deal with more than you came in with. However, if everyone is trading with each other, then for every profit there should be a corresponding loss, such that the two cancel each other out. On balance, there should be no aggregate profit. Yet capitalism sees massive profits for international corporations. So where is this profit coming from? It is extracted, first from the earth’s natural resources and then from the labor power of the workers. Labor, treated as a commodity, is consistently undersold. Land and natural resources have been monopolized, dispossessing people of the means to work for themselves, and forcing them to sell their labor for a wage just high enough to keep them working there. The surplus value they generate goes to the capitalist as profit, along with rents from natural resources.

But profit is not stable. All else being equal, it will tend to diminish over time as a result of competition. In order to maintain aggregate profits, capitalism must continuously expand. New natural resources and labor markets must be tapped to keep the cycle going. It is not merely that neoliberal ideology has everyone believing in growth as the solution to all economic problems. Capitalism does, in fact, structurally require growth in order to maintain itself. The neocolonialism of the 20th century funded the economic prosperity of America and the generous welfare states in Europe. However, sometime in the 70s, globalization started to reach certain limits. There were fewer new resources they hadn’t taken control of yet. There were fewer labor markets that could provide cheap labor. Western governments started to roll back the policies that had helped enable the standard of living their citizens were used to. Its grip on the Third World was starting to slip, so it had to start squeezing workers in the First World. Unions were crushed, jobs were outsourced, and the whole society was shifted towards a FIRE-sector economy. Even as the economy came crashing down in 2008, the main concern was not saving the workers or industry, but rather the banks, who were bailed out to the tune of about $700 billion. “Austerity,” as it’s called, was the trend in Europe where their welfare state apparatuses were slashed in order to discipline labor and increase corporate power.

It is in this context that the new Far Right has emerged. The target of their anger: globalists. What is meant by this broad term? In some respects, their anger is directed at many of the same groups opposed by the Left: international bankers, corporations that ship jobs overseas, politicians who sign trade agreements like NAFTA, and so on. But along with this anger against the elites, they also tapped into a popular anger against marginalized groups that had been brought along with globalism. Along with NAFTA came immigrants from south of the border seeking to escape the economic conditions wrought by neoliberalism. Refugees from the Middle East poured in seeking sanctuary from the conflicts wrought by US interventionist foreign policy. They do not care if these people are victims; they are contaminated with the stench of this social decay. Their grievance with globalization is not so much that it has disenfranchised so much of the world, but that it has cost them their own national identity, while forcing them to adopt to a global world of “political correctness” and multiculturalism.

Across the world, we are seeing a rise of ethno-nationalism, seeking to reclaim a national ethnic identity and essentially closing off the rest of the world to focus on the needs of a specific group identified as the rightful inheritors of the national legacy, to the exclusion of all others. It is a symptom of a culture in decay, in which the familiar structures of are withering away, while the new structures leave everyone isolated and abandoned. The result is a cathartic impulse to make their country great again, by purging those who are seen as symbols of this corrupted world order in a kind of cultural death drive that consumes the nation.

The Arc of History

In the short-term, the nation may in fact find renewed prosperity as the increased military and prison infrastructure provides a boost to the economy, while property of those groups that have been purged can be confiscated and redistributed among the “chosen” group. In the end, however, this primal upheaval devours its own and self-destructs as the forces of globalism can no longer be contained. This emerging fascism is a futile attempt to halt the unstoppable momentum of an emerging globalized world.

In the end, it is not a matter of whether we have globalization, but rather of what kind of globalization we have. As we fight the fascist menace in the years to come (and fight we must), let us also start building a new global economy. Through networking and organizing, we must attempt to build an alternative global economy, based on cooperation and mutual benefit rather than profit. Where local autonomy is respected while rhizomatic trade networks grow organically. The globalization of the world was brought about by plunder, but it can become the platform for our redemption. We cannot reverse the path it has taken, but we can steer it toward a new world of our making. Though the path ahead is dark and frightening, know that our liberation awaits us, if only we have the courage to claim it.

Autumnal Fallout

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Editor’s Note: The Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a point of peak intensity, nearly leading to nuclear war, with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 14–28, 1962. We are pleased to present here, not only the author’s remembrance of those and related events, but also an audio recording of him reading the essay below.


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Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004

Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004

Student at Rochester University: “Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?” Dr. Robert Oppenheimer: “Well, yes. In modern times, of course.”

∞

It would be hard to communicate to someone growing up today just how widespread was the fallout from the threat of the Atomic Bomb. From July 16th, 1945, when the first bomb was tested over the Jornada del Muerto Desert, its occult light had continued to throw shadows from each object. The danger was not abstract; it was imminent, and it changed our whole way of looking at the world. At any moment, a chain-reaction might reach out to take us by the hand, and there was no telling where we would end up. By the time that we got there, our hands might no longer be able to grasp objects. Our minds might be blinded by their own illumination, which was said to be brighter than 10,000 suns. Our vision might no longer go where we directed it; instead, it might plummet to the far side of the planet. We might not be able to distinguish the brain of Einstein from a cloud, or from the folds of the shockwave that had spread out from Ground Zero, or from the elegant simplicity of the equation that he dreamed. Which direction would be “up,” and which would be “down”? Our feet might get no traction on the sky.

I vividly remember grammar school nuclear holocaust drills in the early 1960s: Get under your desk, put your head down on your knees, then put your hands on your head. (!?!) Yes, that should work, much as closing your eyes would make you invisible to the rest of the human race. The mind boggles at such unintentional comedy, in which the punch-line is the city going up like flash-paper. Such unintentional comedy was not a laughing matter! We did not consider laughing, yet how was it possible to do anything else but laugh?

In retrospect, I can see how truly small we were. Our lineage was obscure, and deliberately so; we were not left with the flicker of an idea about our strength. At the end of the last ice age, a war had rearranged the whole surface of the Earth. Cities popped like bubbles. Words became armies and chants destroyed empires. Millions died. Suns ate each other. Mirrors fought against their own reflections. Whales left their bones on the Andes. Gigantic chunks of our memory were wiped out. When we crawled out from our net of subterranean tubes, there was not much that we recognized. We were few in number, and hungry. Our eyes were hypnotically fixed on large objects in the foreground. Space, somehow, had become opaque, and even the laws of physics had been altered.

In 1962, we were only just starting to remember how to say our ABCs. We were the interchangeable extras in an internecine drama, whose stage-sets we saw, but whose scripts were directed from the depths of the Unconscious. Use us once and throw us away. We were caterpillars whose chrysalises would not have a chance to develop. Instead of wings, we would have Thalidomide-style flippers. It didn’t really matter if we were crouched beneath our desks or playing in the schoolyard. At best, when the blast took us, we might leave the imprints of our shadows on a wall. Looking backwards over our shoulders, these would seem as poignant to us as 18th Century cut-out paper silhouettes. Steam would leak from them, due to pressure from trapped oceans. Then tiny lightning bolts would flash, decalibrated. Our DNA would unzip. We would see the light, an artificial one, yet we would not know if the light saw us, and our voyage into it would seem more terrifying than staying where we were. Yanked back through our navels, we would wake up neither here nor there.

Brian George, Bird with Vortex and Primordial Bow, 2004

Brian George, Bird with Vortex and Primordial Bow, 2004

We had too much unfinished business. We would not be able to move smoothly to the outer edge of light, and then into the space beyond. A network of past actions would confront us, of which we were, until then, almost totally unaware. Our primal forms would get stuck. A great stadium would unfold out of a storm-drain, towering through the void, just as that storm-drain had unfolded from a pinhead. There, a supernatural Olympiad would be held. Banners would flap in the epileptic breeze. With four limbs or eight, and screaming for our blood, the best of the interspecies champions would appear. They would pop up from their periods. We would first have to determine how many hands we had. Also, why did none of them hold weapons? With a hiss of electricity, we would move straight into our targets, like boxers that had landed punches on the chin of the Beyond, only to find that they were miles from the fight. In the meantime, as we watched, our opponents would have cut us limb from limb. They would eat our hearts and flatten out our force-fields. The records of our passing would be less clear than a Rorschach blot. Runes would comment on our ambiguity. Sailors tangled in Sargasso wrecks would wag their fingers in judgment, as they boasted about the progress they were making. The human sculptures from Pompeii would mock us for our lack of “significant form.” In 5000 years, if our relics were to be shown in a museum, the curators would have to install electron microscopes, through which visitors could observe the haunted skid-marks that we left.

We were fetal nebulae. We were seers who could not read their instruction manuals; yet we could not do without them, and we chewed on them like pacifiers. 12,000 years ago, we had turned to run from the Lords of the Scalar Flying Guillotine, and we only just noticed that a flash had wiped them from the Earth. What a joy it was, to discover that the vitrified city that stretched before us had belonged to someone else. It was the purest of good luck that such a thing had happened. We were wide-eyed children, who would not hurt a fly. Nothing scared us more than the mile-long shadows that stretched out from our feet; some day we would figure out the best way to remove them. There were bad people out there. To teach them a lesson, we would suffer. The rumors of our death had not been greatly exaggerated. The horror was prodigious. Few had ever observed such suffering as ours! Yet mistakes were made. We were weather balloons that had crash-landed on the sky. If we saw the light, then there was no reason that we would have wanted to experience such a thing. There were presences within it, protean ones, who seemed all too familiar, and the light itself looked painful. Rituals would be held, or so we had heard, in which they would force us to confront our ancient fears. There was one thing that did not add up, however: that these protean presences trembled at the thought of our return. We were just the tiny children of the Jornada del Muerto Desert, with wide eyes that we did not dare to open. We were ciphers in training. We would have left the one world just to prove that we were impotent in the next.

Brian George, Black Sun with Descending Skeletons, 2002

Brian George, Black Sun with Descending Skeletons, 2002

Sides had been chosen, an age ago. It was 1962. There was no way to avoid the confrontation that was coming. There was no way to sidestep the jagged ruins in the foreground, whose spectral light illuminated the darkest corners of the Psyche. Still, “Duck and Cover” may have been as useful a strategy as any other, and I can appreciate the thought behind these Vedic Neo-Dada preparations.

Ritual gesture can have an impact on a multitude of levels, and to “go through the motions” is at times the only practical course of action. Duck and Cover was, I think, a legacy from the Second World War, during which the U.S. government launched massive rubber and scrap metal drives, which, as it turned out, were designed more to improve public morale than because the government didn’t have access to rubber and scrap metal. The principle seemed to be: it is always better to do something rather than nothing. In the face of an invasion by the Absolute, we must see to it that we died in the proper crouching pose.

My memories from the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis are quite strange and, I would say, almost wonderful. The emotions that it stirs are bittersweet and complex; an ache starts in my solar plexus and spreads upwards to my heart. The crisis happened in October, about a month after the start of the school year. In Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived, it seemed as though the leaves were just beginning to change color—red and gold—and yet, already, there were many on the ground. Still, I can hear them crunching underfoot as I walked to school at 7:30 AM, and, still, I can see them floating from the trees. With each foot that they fell they seemed to move ever slower, coming almost to a stop, until that morning became a memory of itself. Then I fell into that memory; I have not stopped falling since.

This was probably the first time that I became aware of the possibility of my own death, as well as of the possible destruction of the rest of the human race and the planet. But the sensation was that of the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival: a sense of the beauty and the transience of all things washed over me—or, perhaps I should say: blew over me. Behind the wind, there was another and much bigger wind that seemed like it was always just about to blow. This wind was the wind of our own depth of coiled energy, an alchemical wind, which for aeons had been sealed in its althanor. We sensed that we were guilty; we did not know of what. We were just kids on our way to school. We were only trying to get away with staring out of the window! Why should we be expected to pay the price for the dismantling of the third dimension? Still, it seemed that we were somehow in this up to our ears.

As we stared at our hands, it was easy enough to tell that our solidity had been compromised. They flickered, at times, like a TV signal that was not quite coming in. There were many questions that we did not think to ask. Among these were the following: If we were the receivers, then from what station was the signal being broadcast? Was only the bull’s-eye of the circular test pattern real, and why did it remind us of a nuclear alert? Would the late night hum continue to get louder until it shook apart the atoms of each set? Just who was in control of the vertical and the horizontal axes? There was information missing. We should probably have worn our adjustable antennas! Then again, there was no one left who could be trusted to adjust them. Our teachers only added to the metaphysical static. Our parents were the servants of a technological pod. They were not really our parents. In any case, they were dealing with their own pre-programmed problems with adjustment.

We knew too much, by far, without knowing that we knew anything. Just recently, we had decided to take our powers out of storage, and our ignorance was a danger to the cosmos as a whole. In our toy ships, with shovels in hand, we would set sail from our sandbox! With our miniaturized brains, we would boldly go where no man had gone before! The path was not a straight one, however, and the arc of our discovery bent towards the Abyss. We had stepped into the last act of a drama that had been set in motion years before our births, in the springtime of the world. Then, war was a game that the omnipotent seers played; death was an adventure, and the ocean was a vast but comprehensible text. Not only could we read the glyphs inside each atom, we could also read the emptiness on which they had been written. The gods were our contraptions. We had little respect for the authorities that would bar our access to “junk” DNA. We were living mirrors, from whose backs the mercury had not yet been removed. An oath prompted us to throw away almost everything we had, recklessly, and to cover our tracks by destroying the horizon. How infinitely strange it was to be a leaf that somehow did not know that it was hanging from a tree. At last, we had tied the year into a perfect figure eight. October, as predicted, had arrived.

Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head

Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head

It was the 14th of October, 1962, and the Doomsday Clock was reading at 12 minutes before 12:00. As we made our way to school, with our book bags on our shoulders, we could hear the newly fallen leaves crunch underfoot, like the bones of ancient warriors, like the husks of derelict gods, and we were struck dumb by the wonderful stillness of the moment. The beauty of the flame-like foliage was a harbinger of the descent of actual flame; the gentle falling of the leaves was perhaps a prelude to the imminent vaporization of our bodies, and to the gentle descent of our ashes through the air.

Poems of Genesis

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Fans of John David Ebert are likely familiar with his books and YouTube videos—a treasure trove of philosophy and cultural criticism. It’s less well known that he also writes poetry, which is partly why we’re so pleased to debut a sampling from his new book, These Things We No Longer Are. The book’s poetic cycle is divided into two halves, “Poems of Genesis” and “Poems of Degeneration.” We present selections from each in corresponding installments.

Gods

There was a time once when poets
Sitting on cracked marble urns
Invoked the muses;
Or when the angel whispered
Into Matthew’s ear
The tale of a man
Who came to earth as a god;
Even Milton’s Holy Spirit hovered
Like a dove upon the vast abyss
And made it pregnant.

Though I make no such pretense
to an invocation here
The poems that follow in the present cycle
Are full of gods.
And that should be enough.

 

When The Moon Was Gigantic

In those days
Volcanoes ruptured the earth
Like an accordion of rippling stone
Where cataracts of glowing magma striped
The ground with ribbons of liquid rock

During the daytime, clouds of ash were thick
Enough to erase the young sun from a sky
That was only then changing from salmon pink
To a deep aquatic blue

The moon rolled
Slowly
Across the sky so close to the earth that it seemed you
Could reach up and touch it
Vanilla neon

Enormous fern trees erupted from the ground
And huge gold and red dragonflies owned the air
While the wet green creatures with four legs
That had only just wandered from the azure seas
Were laying their eggs out of the water
To be safe from predators

Because
One day out of one of those eggs
Would hatch
a tiny pink animal

That would awaken with gods sleeping in its neurons

 

Lilith

…it went on like that for many years
cutting rows into the ground
with a stone tied to a stick
planting seeds and watching them grow.

His house was made out of stone blocks
stacked to form a dome like an igloo
with dusty sunlight pouring in from the
always open front entrance

And the small bed in the corner cut
from the skins of animals: bear skins mostly.
It was already dirty and stained.

There was never enough to eat.

Years went by like that.
And more years.

The worst part of it was that sometimes
He could see processions of angels striding over
The arched green hills
Thin, giant figures radiating light and walking upright on their hind legs
Carrying posts and poles and banners and insignia
And they never said a word to him. They didn’t even know he existed.

Nobody knew.

Inside his head he could only think: you didn’t say it would be like this.
But there was no response because there never was any response.

One day a panther stuck its head into the entrance while he was sleeping.
He heard its distinct snuffling, awoke quickly and threw a stone at it.
It went away.

Years went by.

There was a river not far from his house and each day he went there to bathe.
And each day on his way back, he looked at the green plants in the earth
And yearned.

And yearned.

But then something strange happened.
One morning he awoke with a pain in his side and when he pulled away
the animal skin, there it was: a pulsing, throbbing orifice in his side through which some kind of small creature was presently making its way out. It was gray but shaped like he was and he watched in horror as the wet thing that came out of him snuffled as it drew its first breath.

He put the creature inside a wooden box that he had made, but soon it grew too large for the box, so he had to make another, larger box.

The creature was like him as it grew over the next few days, rapidly shedding its skin each time. Soon it was regarding him from the corner of the stone house with brown wary eyes.

It looked like him…but it wasn’t like him.
Something was missing from between its legs and its chest was soft.

It kept growing. Soon, it was larger than he was, standing over him, demanding food from the garden.

He watched it grow scales around its feet, which slowly turned into the talons of a bird. Wings sprouted from its back and it could not speak to him except in grunts.

Then one day it flew away.

 

Nietzsche

At times, Nietzsche sounds hysterical, I admit.
He signed his last letters “Dionysus” and “The Crucified.”
But we must remember that his soul was warped
By loneliness, sickness and poverty.
Too much, in other words, of too little.
A fate that was like Van Gogh’s, perhaps,
Only Nietzsche did not cut off a piece of his ear
And offer it to a terror-stricken prostitute;
Instead, he sliced entire cartographies from his brain
And made a Clearing
For the gods to come take him.

 

Autumn Leaf

Somewhere, in the late afternoon,
as the red sun lay burning in the trees,
the wind blew through the field
that I was standing in
and I paused to pick up a dead thing:
an orange autumn leaf
which had blown past me.

I held it in my palm, a piece of the past,
gone brittle
as the shell of a cicada.
Then I realized that what I was holding
contained within itself a whole universe
of pulsing atoms, not dead at all,
but merely waiting for another form
somewhere else, in another field, perhaps,
or another life. Some of these very same atoms
may stand in another field some day,
beholding the ruined miniature cathedral of another dead leaf.

But isn’t the universe like that?
Gigantic to us, but in the hand of a god,
no more than a leaf,
a universe of burning suns
to be held in the palm
in the late afternoon, and then discarded
as the wind blows among the trees
of the dawning evening.

 

Making

Gods, it is true, like to make suns:
They light up hydrogen in black space
And then step back and watch it burn
A hole into the cloth of the abyss;
Then they fashion billions of them
Into fiery spinning pinwheels called galaxies
That go surging and crashing into each other
Star into star with fiery incandescent burning
Sending far-flung bits of star debris
Dying like meteors into the cold darkness
Of infinite space

Gods make living forms, too.
They set fire to proteins, amino acids, lipids
Blood whirling, pulsing pumping and circulating
And then step back to watch
What crawls through the black mud
And over the mossy green hills
And through the emerald trees
With teeth fangs claws
Tearing each other to pieces.

But then:
what is the birth of a sun or a living form to you and I?
We are made of fire and blood
Woven out of earth and sea
And we swarm
Over the earth
Starlight burning in our veins.

Come, my love, forget about the gods,
For we will make forms of our own:
We shall bring them out into space
And set them into Time
And then we shall leave them behind
And return to the dark.

Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things / Part Three

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“It is wonderful indeed,” he said. “We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?”
– Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

Contains spoilers.

The Wild God Downtown

Towards the end of the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait,” the narrator resolves to break out of the digitized trance of a hypermediated existence. “Like a patient on a table / I’m gonna walk again / Gonna move through the pain,” he cries. To “walk again” in this context means to locomote outside the automated neural factory illuminated only by that “flashing light” that has settled in our brains. It means ceasing to live in the prefab dreams of others, be they those of peer groups, corporations, nations, or societies. In that dream kingdom, we do not make our lives by our own effort but rather allow ourselves to be moved from fixed state to fixed state, static idea to static idea, concept to concept, as if on a conveyor belt or a stretcher. Learning to walk again—and most importantly in the song, to wait again—requires us to embrace those “intolerable intervals” that a binary apprehension of reality allows us to overlook. It asks us to navigate the world as though it had just come into being, consciously choosing each step, moving with bated breath in the soft but steady light of strange new constellations. As William James says, the trick is to “put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy” for the flow of events of which you are part. Intuitive sympathy demands that we give up our sense of discreteness, of being closed egos hovering in a binary cloud of static things or “its,” in order to make ourselves continuous with an incomputable torrent of things-in-the-making. This means going analog, living analogically, even in a wired world.

For millions of people, the information revolution has resulted in a life made up entirely of human expectations and ideations. Everything in the environment exists only insofar as it serves a human purpose, and the being of each thing within this environment is exhausted in its human apprehension. There is a sense in which these millions of people are the lucky ones, because only the least privileged among us have to deal daily with the elemental forces of the offline wilds outside the digital hotspots. But that knee-jerk defense—“You should count yourself lucky”—is profoundly disingenuous. While we may be comfortable while plugged into our machines, we are ultimately no better protected from the elements than those who live otherwise. There isn’t a person alive now who won’t one day have to face a natural disaster, automotive misadventure, fatal disease, psychotic episode, or uncanny experience which will put all the conveniences of late capitalism into razor-sharp perspective. There will then be no screen bright enough to provide a distraction and no concept compelling enough to furnish an explanation. “So when the lights cut out,” the narrator in the song says, “I was lost standing in the wilderness downtown.” When even the luminous façades of the urban shopping district take on the look of the wilderness they were designed to conceal, you know that things are out of joint. The world you thought you knew has revealed its viscous flipside by turning upside down.

What is the Upside Down, really? Earlier I mentioned the scene in chapter five when Dustin, prompted by Eleven’s description of the place where Will was taken, turns to a Dungeons & Dragons manual for insight. “The Vale of Shadows,” he reads, “is a dimension that is a dark reflection or echo of our world.” The very name “Upside Down” hints that the place isn’t an alternate universe so much as another face of our world, our world cast in a foreign light. In this sense, the D&D text is accurate. Yet the actual appearance of the Upside Down suggests something different from the cold and ghostly shadowland implied by the passage Dustin reads. The Upside Down that we experience has a subaqueous, vegetal texture. It doesn’t seem an ethereal “echo of our world” so much as an even more earthly version of it: overgrown and murky, wild and visceral. Its topography is that of Hawkins, with the same woods, houses, and swimming pools; only, this is Hawkins without its human apparel, Hawkins restored to primeval forces to which it has always belonged. It is this primal nature that is right next to us though we don’t see it, as the game manual suggests. The Upside Down is the non-human aspect of the human world—the primordial stratum of instinct and the unconscious hiding beneath the dayworld of rational subjectivity.

As far as we can tell, the Upside Down in the first season of Stranger Things has only one permanent resident. Earlier in this essay, I argued that Demogorgon was metaphysically tangled up with the character of Eleven, such that each can be described as consubstantial with the other. But from a slightly different perspective, the creature is also consubstantial with its territory. The Upside Down follows it wherever it goes, manifesting traces of itself whenever it arrives or departs. When the creature devours someone, that person is not consumed so much as transported into the bowels of its world. Furthermore, the fact that the creature’s face consists solely of a flower-like mouth suggests that it is one organ of a greater organism, and that the creature is part of the Upside Down in the same way as a mushroom is part of the mycelium that remains hidden underground. Just as the Greeks used the name “Hades” to denote both the god of the underworld and the underworld itself, so the creature and its territory are elements of a single entity.

But perhaps we shouldn’t overstate this Hadean correspondence. No less than the Vale of Shadows, the image of Hades conjures up something static, cold, bone-dry. The dank, vegetal quality of the Upside Down leads me to think that if there is a Greek deity that relates closely to Demogorgon, it isn’t Hades but Pan, the god of nature. To the Greek mind, the vision of nature embodied in Pan bore little resemblance to the tame and placid pastures that the Victorians timidly associated with the goat-god. Originally, Pan was an object of fear, because the nature he personified was terrible. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman described Pan as a deity “whose demonic shape turns the concept ‘nature’ into an immediate psychic shock.”1James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, 22. The god’s name lies at the root of the term panic, which the Greeks reserved for the peculiar form of madness that shepherds experienced when they encountered him in the wilderness. To see Pan in the outer world is to sense him within, for as Hillman writes, Pan points us to the abominable unity of “nature out there” (the greenery, the mountains, the storms) and “nature in here” (instinct, soul, dreams, the unconscious). Pan affirms all that is negated in our reduction of nonhuman percepts to human concepts. In the figure of this god, the Greeks bodied forth an image of physis (nature) as embracing both hyle (matter) and psyche. Pan unveils the earth’s abiding primordial form, the “landscape before man” which endures despite the conceptualizations of the intellect. Seen in a Panic light, then, the Upside Down isn’t an alternate dimension, a kind of Oz, but the “inscape” of the dayworld and the “outscape” of the nightworld, to use Hillman’s language. It is our world stripped of any comforting veneer of conceptual tidiness, the deep psyche and also the deep earth or Gaea of the Greeks.

Is Pan an evil god? Was the medieval Church right to repurpose this horned and hoofed figure as an icon of Satan? There is no doubt that Stranger Things depicts Demogorgon as a creature of irremediable darkness and depravity. But the evil unfolds in a context that can help us understand why Pan, in this setting, must necessarily manifest as a devil, and his world as a kind of hell. Given the correspondences that link Demogorgon to Eleven, one could arguably identify the Upside Down with the girl’s wounded psyche. But from another angle, it can also be read as the dark collective soul of the whole town of Hawkins. After all, this is a community steeped in lies and self-delusion. The police chief himself describes Hawkins as a place where no crimes are committed, where instincts are kept in check and blood is never spilled. But he claims this even as a secret laboratory within the town precinct carries out diabolical experiments on a kidnapped child. It is chilling to realize that the majority of the men and women who work at the Department of Energy compound must live in Hawkins. Like the security guard who switches the surveillance tapes on Hopper without knowing—or perhaps even wanting to know—what it is that he is covering up, everyone employed in that particular facility is to some extent complicit in the crimes committed within its walls. Indeed, since the place is a publicly funded establishment, and its work done in the name of national security, even Americans who live beyond Hawkins’ borders are also, in a way, involved. The crimes committed against Eleven are state crimes; as such, they implicate an entire population. The perverse CIA program known as MK Ultra, under the aegis of which Dr. Brenner has been carrying out his experiments in horror, is no invention of the Duffer brothers—it really existed. In treating the Netflix series as nothing more than an entertaining summer binge, then, even viewers can become implicated, however peripherally, in the events depicted on the screen.

I have already mentioned Eleven’s guilty countenance throughout the narrative, and tied it to her potential awareness that she had a hand in creating Demogorgon. But couldn’t we also argue that in its most profound manifestation, this sense of guilt stems from the girl’s realization (itself the result of the brutal treatment she suffers) of an inherent vice of the human soul, an inborn capacity to reduce other beings to abstractions when the stakes are high enough? Remember the scene where Eleven, after refusing to murder a cat for her minders, proceeds to kill the guards who try to lock her in her cell. That the act was perfectly justified doesn’t necessarily make it easier to live with. The thinker Gilles Deleuze often wrote of “the shame of being a man,” using the word “man” to signify that part of us which presents itself “as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all matter.”2Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1. In using concepts to deny the truth of a world that transcends our personal judgments, we effectively turn our backs on the unfathomable Real. What is buried, forgotten, or denied, however, continues to exist underground. The evil of the Upside Down—the evil of Pan—is our own collective evil rising from the muck of shallow unmarked graves.

The Consolations of Contingency

In 1890, the weird author Arthur Machen published a novella that shares some startling similarities with Stranger Things. In it, a scientist carries out an illicit brain surgery on an orphan girl. His goal is to make “a slight lesion in the gray matter” that will enable the girl to see the world as it really is. “You may think this all strange nonsense,” the scientist says to a friend whose has come to witness the event. “It may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”3Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan, 26.

Seeing Pan means coming face to face with the Real, that is, with ontological excess, all that is left out of conceptual apprehension. We are constantly compartmentalizing our experience, associating certain things and dissociating others, in order to tolerate the world and live fitter, happier lives. But despite our semiotic inventiveness, the world remains what it is, and the past continues to exert its influence on the present. If the fantastical tradition to which Stranger Things belongs is right to depict the Real as a nightmare, it is because it must manifest as such to those who would prefer to remain ensconced in illusions. The Real is dangerous because it upends all prejudice. It opens up a world that exists whether or not we are there to think it, a world already replete with inscrutable meanings that defy rational analysis. Impervious to our judgments and preferences, it is a place whose very fiber recoils from the touch of intellect, being accessible only by way of the most primal emotions.

Yet the horror of the Real is an epistemological horror: it inheres primarily in our subjective relation to the world. At the ontological level, the Real isn’t evil but amoral. Bury or ignore it, and it becomes a nightmarish abyss. Enter it by way of trauma like Eleven or the little girl in Machen’s novella, and it will take on the form of a living hell, fired up by the fear, anger, and pain that brought you there. But approach the Real in the spirit of intuitive sympathy that James counsels, and it will show its true nature as the locus of all creation, the irrational heart of the world. Every intellectual boundary falls before it, and the truth conveyed in the phrase “Stranger things have happened,” namely that no imagining is so absurd as to be inadmissible, becomes resplendently self-evident.

In sympathy and intuition, life ceases to be apprehended in terms of dialectical computation—either this or that—in order to be experienced through analogy—both this and that. Since the immediate appearances or “likenesses” of the world are then indistinguishable from the world itself, every experience can be said to involve a direct perception of reality as such. But this is perception understood in a visionary and imaginal register. Throughout Stranger Things, the viewer is urged to consider the power of an imagination restored to the order of dreams, visions, stories, and magic. This creative imagination can be accessed in moments of slow or idle time, for in such moments we sink back into the analog reality that undergirds the conceptual projection.

But if the creative imagination is a more direct avenue to the Real than the intellect, it follows that it is the imagination, and not reason, that can tell us what nature is really capable of. Possibility is revealed in what can be dreamed, not in what can be argued to be obtainable given a particular state of affairs. Why? For one, because any particular state of affairs must remain permanently hypothetical. “Given what we know, x is impossible,” the rationalist says. But the fact is that we don’t know, not for sure, and we never will.4For insights into the primacy of imagination over reason, I am indebted to Quentin Meillassoux’s interpretation of the work of David Hume. See the chapter titled “Hume’s Problem” in Meillassoux’s groundbreaking work, After Finitude (2008), and the whole of The Number and the Siren (2012). Unrestrained by a closed rationality, the imaginal mind can utilize the intellect to concoct immanent virtualities that reason, bound as it is to what has been observed to be the case in the past, would immediately expulse from the ambit of the thinkable. As any dream will confirm, the universe as the imaginal mind apprehends it is open and ambiguous, capable of bringing forth the most spectacular transformations. If something can be imagined, then it could be the case, because the power that enables us to imagine it comes from the depths of nature itself. It is the power that shapes dreams and galaxies, all that the intellect then reduces to useful, albeit limited and relative significations.

That the universe is not governed by reason is the most frightening thought as well as the most liberating. It is frightening because it gives the lie to any belief system that would make anything necessary to the functioning of the cosmos. No one thing needs to be in place for the rest to burst into being: not you, not your consciousness, not your god. Everything exists by virtue of a monstrous, gratuitous creation that is never finished but goes on constantly: unceasing becoming. The human, in such a universe, is neither more nor less important than any other element. Deer grazing in a forest, autumn leaves rustling in the wind, a shred of fabric clinging to the rim of a drainage pipe, a flicker of electric lights, a drop of blood dissolving in a swimming pool: even the most trivial detail of the universe is our equal, bathing in the even light of creation.

Many viewers of Stranger Things disapprove of the fate of Barb, Nancy Wheeler’s friend who suffers a horrible death at the hands of the creature through no fault of her own, and for no reason at all. Some critics have said that this part of the story evinces a gratuitous insensitivity on the creators’ part. While I agree that Barb’s death is gratuitous, I don’t feel it is any more gratuitous than anything else in the show, let alone the real world. In fact, my sense is that the fate of Barb is one of the most important elements of Stranger Things, as it leaves us in no doubt as to the contingency of human life in a truly weird universe. If rationality isn’t the founding principle of the Real and there is no ultimate reason holding everything together, we must come to terms with the fact that no one is exempt from the freeplay of a reality that, ultimately, is equal parts cosmos and chaos. “Eternity is a child at play,” Heraclitus uttered. “The kingdom belongs to a child.” That image ought to be at least as fearful as it is cute.

But the dark truth conveyed in the character of Barb finds its counterbalance in the incredible creative power that Stranger Things attributes to the Cosmic Child, a power which is also present in each of us. Although this power finds an outward manifestation in Eleven’s psychic abilities, it is at work in more subtle ways elsewhere in the narrative. Joyce Byers finds her son because she rejects Hopper’s probabilistic thinking (“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred times when a kid goes missing, the kid is with a parent or a relative”) in order to envision the “other time,” the one that proves probability to be a poorer guide to the Real than infinite possibility. Hopper, for his part, musters the strength to save Will in the final episode by allowing himself to imaginally relive the death of his daughter, an event that he has done everything in his power to banish. And I’ve already mentioned the boys’ ability to tap into the virtual by means of tabletop roleplaying. As beings in a bristling world of beings, becomings in a continuous stream of becomings, we humans are on an equal footing with the dust mites and chrysanthemums, the moons and supernovas; but because the power that creates these varied things is indistinguishable from the things themselves, we have direct access to that power insofar as we, too, are such things. This gives us an agency through which we can perceive and navigate this universe of things-in-the-making. It grants us the ability to leave the husk of a closed, private existence to intuit and sympathize with other beings, human or not. In doing so, we acquire the sense that the Real has no limits, and that much is possible that the naked intellect would assure us is not. While this may or may not include reading minds and flipping cargo vans with a thought (who are we to say?), it does at the very least include envisioning an alternative to the way things are with the world. The urgency of Stranger Things stems from this potent political implication, concealed as it is beneath a thick quilt of conventional entertainment.

The neoliberal animus against idling, dreaming, and waiting comes from an insatiable hunger to reduce life to manageable processes in a global system predicated upon a doctrine of control. It is this animus that drives much of the information technology industry. But like this industry, neoliberalism is rooted in a way of thinking that predates it by centuries, namely a rationalism which, torn from its imaginal grounding, seeks to preserve the sovereignty of human interest by reducing the nonhuman world to an all-too-human intellection. It is said that with secularism, the devil performed his greatest trick by convincing us that he didn’t exist. Well, with neoliberalism, the capitalist system has effectively convinced us that only it exists, and that any imaginable alternative is simply impossible. It would be naïve, I think, to maintain that technology plays no part in the chicanery.

We have lost the capacity to believe in what the creative imagination tells us is possible. If we are to harbor hopes of countering neoliberalism and its capitalist religion, which are well into the process of indenturing billions and desiccating the earth, we need to reconnect with the rhythms and timbres of the nonhuman. This means reinvigorating the analogical mind that gets drowned out in binary computations whose stranglehold on our time grows tighter each year. We must realize that conceptual knowledge, however useful for orienting ourselves in nature’s labyrinths, encompasses only a fraction of an ever-expanding and unknowable nature that no rational model will ever fully comprehend. To live consciously of this truth is to live in the wilderness downtown, that is, in an Upside Down world. While there is no point in downplaying the horrors that such a world can spawn, there is also no overstating the hope it makes possible. Only a lawless universe, one that allows for every manner of death, madness, and chaos, can also allow for the most wondrous expressions of life, the most astounding marvels yet imagined, and things stranger still.

∞

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References   [ + ]

1. ↑ James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, 22.
2. ↑ Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
3. ↑ Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan, 26.
4. ↑ For insights into the primacy of imagination over reason, I am indebted to Quentin Meillassoux’s interpretation of the work of David Hume. See the chapter titled “Hume’s Problem” in Meillassoux’s groundbreaking work, After Finitude (2008), and the whole of The Number and the Siren (2012).

Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things / Part Two

By

You have confused the true and the real.
– George Stanley, in conversation with Samuel Delany (epigraph to Dhalgren)

Contains Spoilers

Digital Affects

More than for its supernatural content, Stranger Things has garnered attention for its intoxicating re-creation of the 1980s childhood, with its roleplaying games, homemade mix tapes, and unsupervised night journeys on banana-seat bikes. As someone born in 1977, I found this to be the most infectious quality of the show. It got me thinking about what it was like to live in a time when PCs, mobile phones, and tablets weren’t around, and when electronic screens, while venerated in the form of those stacks of TVs that graced the front window of appliance stores, weren’t so present as to be deemed ubiquitous.

The Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire recorded a song on this subject called “We Used to Wait.” It describes the era “before the flashing light settled deep” in our brains, when time seemed to stretch out to infinity.

Now it seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what’s stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive.1Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”: http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?lyrics=20359

Strange indeed. One of the great ironies of the digital era is that all those hours we save thanks to our digital devices are purchased with another form of time, one that can’t be tallied in hours and minutes. During slow time spent idling, during transitory or empty time spent waiting or “wasting hours just walking around” as the song puts it, one is left alone with one’s thoughts. In this form of time, the veil between mind and world begins to fray, and a spirit of free association sets in between the environment and the images it evokes in us. Utility, function, and signification cease to be the prime determinants of meaning, and with their retreat, more expansive or imaginal insights come to the fore. It isn’t that this form of time has ceased to exist today but that the human environment seems deliberately designed to eliminate it. Idle time now has to vie with that other, more productive time if it is to have a place in our lives at all. For young people who have spent every spare moment of their lives in front of screens, there is a danger that the vying never even registers, and that slow time for them manifests only as malignant time, useless and to be killed on sight.

It’s no secret that digital media has transformed even the most solitary moments of our lives into an opportunity to shop, socialize, or work. Socioeconomic pressures once restricted to the working hours are now active around the clock.2See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children in the United States spend an average of seven hours a day in front of screens; the figure increases to almost eleven hours a day for adults. What happened to these hours before all the screens lit up? In the Dungeons & Dragons scenes that open and close Stranger Things, we get a tangible sense of an important difference between the digital present and its analog past. There is little doubt that if the story had been set today, verisimilitude would have dictated that the kids be playing video games in those scenes, because the user interfaces that mediate our interactions with each other and the environment remain active even when we are physically together. The D&D scenes remind us that before the advent of digital life, people and especially children were largely left to their own devices—or lack thereof. Can Stranger Things be read as an attempt to reveal a lifeworld that the new age foretold by Apple in its 1984 ad seeks to replace? That’s my impression. I believe that the series shows us how pre-digital modernity, though itself obsessed with machines and yearning for much that we take for granted today, remained essentially caught in the tendrils of a primal or elemental plane of nature that the technological mind, true to its rationalist underpinnings, is committed to removing from the human experience altogether. As we shall see in the conclusion of this essay, the supernatural elements of the show can be interpreted as metaphors for this deeper level of nature.

The rapid progress of digital technology has been predicated on the ideals of innovation, efficiency, and control. Since these ideals naturally had to be in place before the progress got underway, it would be absurd to blame information technology alone for the death of slow time. When Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “time is money” in the eighteenth century, he knew that most of his contemporaries would immediately catch his drift. The industrial revolution that spurred the development of a global technological infrastructure aspired to the same ideals that drive digital culture today. Even so, the cog-and-gear machinery of the industrial age had a clunkiness that acted as a constant reminder of the Promethean undertones of modernity’s efforts to remake nature in its image. Pre-digital technologies were too slow, too caught up in pneumatic chugging and pumping and spinning, to allow their users to overlook their essential artificiality. Through speed and efficiency, digital technologies give material substance to a picture of life that existed only in the realm of noble aspirations until they became commonplace. In a sense, the information age can be said to have turned a certain opinion about life into a fact of life. It has made an ought into an is.

Yet the differences between digital and analog go beyond their respective degrees of speed and efficiency. As its name implies, digital technology apprehends reality in terms of discrete units of data, whereas analog apprehends it as a continuous flow of indivisible change, which happens to be what reality actually is. A digital still camera transcodes the light that strikes its sensor into a discrete series of ones and zeros; continuous light is thereby broken up into a discontinuous series of fixed values, data which the camera’s software then interprets to form the image on a matrix made up of distinct pixels. Analog photography, by contrast, doesn’t “interpret data” at all. The chamber opens, light strikes the emulsion, and the crystals explode to generate a photographic image. Nor are the crystals in the emulsion separate from each other like the pixels in a dot matrix, for they burst into one another, becoming entangled and fractal. The chemical process by which analog cameras capture images is essentially no different from the process by which mirrors reflect objects, in that the light which makes an object visible in a mirror is the same light that makes one appear on a negative. The two processes are uniplanar; they occur on the plane of physico-chemical events. This isn’t the case with digital cameras, which must translate the source light prior to the production of the synthetic image. While the term “capture” is still used to denote the recording of an image or sound using digital devices, this term technically applies only to the latter’s analog predecessors. Digital media devices don’t capture, they reproduce. And they reproduce on the basis of a prior computation of sensible change as fixed, neutral data. The data is indifferent to whether the media is visual, aural, textual, or what have you. A digital camera deals with light, a digital sound recorder deals with sound waves; yet both devices transform their material into the same type of binary data. Technically, it all has to turn into ones and zeros before being reconstituted as “content.”

None of this means that digital photography and sound recording are intrinsically inferior to their analog counterparts. The idea that even the worst Polaroid is somehow “better” than the most sublime digital photograph is, of course, absurd. Through the swift development that is part and parcel of an information age, the digital has reached such high levels of sophistication as to be limited only by the imagination and vision of users. But that brings us right to the point. The ideals that guide the evolution of digital technology—innovation, efficiency, control—have nothing to do with imaginal vision at all. In fact, if we uphold Heidegger’s key distinction between techne and poiesis, they tend to work against it.3For Heidegger, the Greek term techne refers to the technical act of giving natural things a form adapted to our utilitarian needs. But techne implies a deeper though often concealed process of poiesis, which inheres in that poetic and creative revealing of the world that characterizes art. See “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings (1993). It only follows that a culture spawned around this technology would serve to propagate its ideals, however implicitly. As a result of this message-in-the-medium effect which the proliferation of digital into every area of daily life only intensifies, the technological worldview increasingly appears to us as an accurate reflection of objective reality, whereas in fact it consists in a reduction of the Real to the categories of the human intellect.

The Desert and the Forest

The technological worldview that thrives in digital culture is what the American philosopher William James, at the turn of the twentieth century, called “intellectualism.” It consists in a radicalization of the rationalist belief that concepts have primacy over things, in that only the communicable aspect of things has objective value. In other words, the intellectualist believes that the Real is exhausted in its conceptualization. To borrow James’ words, he or she thereby carries out “a great transformation of the perceptual order” of lived reality into “a conceptual order” of fixed ideas, which is then (mis)taken for lived reality.4William James, A Pluralistic Universe, 232. Intellectualism takes for granted a dualism that was already present in Plato and Aristotle but became decisive only when Descartes split reality into two separate substances—mind and matter, subject and object—at the beginning of the modern age.

Alfred North Whitehead, a younger contemporary of James, saw the Cartesian split as the moment where everything went wrong with Western thought. “What I am essentially protesting against,” he wrote, “is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses.”5Alfred N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 30. The history of modern philosophy can be read as a relentless contest to determine which of the two sides in the split—the “objective” or the “subjective”—is the real one, and which is the illusion. In one camp, we have materialism, which insists on the necessity of the objective “out there” and the contingency of subjective “in here.” In the other camp, we have idealism, which assumes the inverse position. But for all the furor with which the two positions have battled it out over the centuries, there is one point on which they are in perfect agreement. It is the pivot of the perpetual teeter-totter. According to both materialism and idealism, human reason is the arbiter of the Real. Both philosophies hold that the universe is rational at its core, and that the human intellect can therefore penetrate its deepest recesses. As a result, both materialism and idealism remain chained to a deeper dualism even if they claim that one term in the duality is unreal. Regardless of which argument one opts for, then, there is the same tremendous negation of the experiential world, the same abject denial of the paradoxical yet sensible universe of embodied existence. Concurrent with this negation is the conjuration of some “substance” that underlies the illusion, and which alone qualifies as real: mind or matter. Either way you cut it, the world of experience is hitched onto an abstract idea in the name of objective Reason.

If I have argued for the metaphysical implications of art in the past, it is because every great work of art cries out against this kind of world denial. As empirical as any natural science, art implicitly affirms the immediate reality of the appearances that make up the cosmos, all that John Locke dismissed as the “secondary qualities.” So far as it can be considered a work of art, Stranger Things is no different. But whereas many artworks affirm the reality of this world simply by their form, the Netflix series also does so in its content—at least if one is willing to go beneath the surface and make the symbols speak, conscious intentions on the creators’ part notwithstanding.

But before getting back to Stranger Things, I want to dig a bit deeper into how post-Cartesian dualism relates to the digital culture that arose in the final years of the last century. The upshot of the rational bifurcation of nature is that it subordinates all things to human interests and purposes. Since only humans seem to have the capacity to form communicable concepts, only humans can perceive reality. Reality belongs to humans—specifically, humans who enshrine reason as their modus operandi (the “civilized”). It isn’t hard to see the allure of such an outlook to a culture bent on planetary conquest such as that of early modern Europe. Intellectualism puts the whole slippery, turbid, amorphous business called nature into a manageable conceptual framework. As James puts it:

Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable—look at the narrow range of it which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval.… But with the faculty of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as if we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require without entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is harness up reality in our conceptual system in order to drive it the better.6James, op. cit., 247-48. (Emphasis added.)

Notice how this passage could almost have been taken from a text praising the virtues of digital media. Thanks to it, we can shop for groceries without getting out of bed, travel without consulting a map, make friends without going out. We used to wait but must wait no more.

In spite of his abhorrence of “vicious” intellectualism, William James was the first to admit that concepts are incredibly useful, even essential to life as we know it. Yet there is a difference between recognizing the purely practical advantages of conceptual thought and deciding that conceptuality defines reality as a whole. It is in the nature of the intellect to reduce things to concepts in order to better navigate among them, but only intellectualism can make the extra move of deciding that the reduction is really a penetration, and that what is left out of the equation is less real than what is retained. Because of its immersive and ubiquitous qualities, digital culture lures us into just such an intellectualist frame of mind. James contended that because the Real exceeds our intellectual capacities, the intellect ought not to be made absolute. My contention is that this is precisely what an uncritical engagement with the digital ends up doing.

In the ambiance of our times, it often seems as though only what is representable and communicable is real. This is because the digital absolutizes the intellect by supplanting experience with information. We can see the signs of this shift from experience to information all over the culture, from the widespread belief that no memorable event has really taken place unless it has been photographed and shared on social media, to the hitherto unimaginable phenomenon of people shambling into high-speed traffic while absorbed in a game of Pokemon Go. But one of the most compelling signs of the shift involves the science fiction trope of artificial memory. Philip K. Dick used it with characteristic prescience in “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a 1966 short story set in a future when the memory of, say, a trip to Mars can be artificially implanted into the minds of people who can’t afford to travel there physically. Another memorable example occurs in The Matrix, when Neo uploads the skills of a kung fu master directly into his brain, thereby shirking the “intolerable interval” of having to learn the martial art through practice. In both cases, the assumption is that experience and information are interchangeable because experience is conceived as a mere configuration of neutral data sets. And that is intellectualism distilled to its essence. What it misses is the fact that in actually going through the motions of traveling to another planet or mastering a martial art, there is a literal infinitude of details, sensations, and singularities that the propositions “I have been to Mars” or “I know kung fu” could never encompass. Information is an entirely intellectual quantity. In perceiving lived experience as mere information intake, we effectively reduce experience to its infinitesimal computable fraction. Reality is lost in the process.

Because it surreptitiously upholds a view that places the conceptual intellect at the center of things, digital culture can be described as a concrete enactment of anthropocentric dualism. It takes for granted an absolute distinction between thought and matter. It implicitly conceives the universe as an expanse of inert data to be arranged into concepts no less inert. There is no hyperbole in describing such a place as a dead world. “Welcome to the desert of the real,” Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix, that Gnostic paean to the computer age.7With this line, the Wachowskis are quoting the work of the digital prophet Jean Baudrillard. According to digital culture’s latent metaphysics, the Real is a wasteland, a place devoid of meaning or significance until some mind shapes it into a meaningful mirage. Whether this mind belongs to a human being or a vast artificial intelligence is immaterial. When all experience is conceived as information, the universe appears to us as it would to any computer, namely a series of fixed states without interval, motion, or becoming—a zombie cosmos.

Fortunately, this dead world isn’t the real one. James again:

What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.8James, op cit., 263-64.

Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas, but a turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is accountable to neither the predilections of reason nor the strictures of logical grammar. The conceptual order having been restored to its place as one facet of a pluralistic universe, the Real ceases to look like a desert and appears instead as a veritable forest, full of movement and teeming with strange forms of life.

The simple fact that no rational model has been able to account for the infinite richness of embodied experience is reason enough to hold that the Real is more poetic and imaginal than rationalistic and conceptual. Life isn’t an either-or but a both-and affair, the governing logic of which is analogical (as in a dream), not dialectical (as in a bank). Reality, in other words, is analog. After all, even the most sophisticated digital device is at bottom an analog machine, in that the forces that make stars explode and rivers flow and are also responsible for firing up its electronic circuits. Only the spirit in which the apparatus was made tries to convince us otherwise. Digital media supports the dominant rationalist ethos by promulgating a mode of existence that perceives nature as eminently knowable and therefore susceptible to technological control. But the truth is that the Real cannot be known, and it will not be controlled. It outstrips the concepts we manufacture to navigate its depths. Indeed, as William James himself says, nature is definable only as excess.9James, A Pluralistic Universe, 286: “Only concepts are self-identical; only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more…” (Emphasis added.) This makes it strange in the ontological sense of the word. Ours is a weird world. Accordingly, only portrayals of the world that embrace the Weird as constitutive of reality as such deserve to be called realistic.

∞

Flip the tape / Part Three

DISCUSS ON INFINITE CONVERSATIONS

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”: http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?lyrics=20359
2. ↑ See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013).
3. ↑ For Heidegger, the Greek term techne refers to the technical act of giving natural things a form adapted to our utilitarian needs. But techne implies a deeper though often concealed process of poiesis, which inheres in that poetic and creative revealing of the world that characterizes art. See “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings (1993).
4. ↑ William James, A Pluralistic Universe, 232.
5. ↑ Alfred N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 30.
6. ↑ James, op. cit., 247-48. (Emphasis added.)
7. ↑ With this line, the Wachowskis are quoting the work of the digital prophet Jean Baudrillard.
8. ↑ James, op cit., 263-64.
9. ↑ James, A Pluralistic Universe, 286: “Only concepts are self-identical; only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more…” (Emphasis added.)

Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things / Part One

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Since when does reading a story constitute an incantation calling up its imagery before the body’s eyes and not the mind’s?
– Thomas Ligotti, “Alice’s Last Adventure”

Contains spoilers.

The Strange and the Weird

We say that something is strange when it defies reason, when we can’t find an explanation satisfying enough to stop wondering what it is. There are at least two ways in which this can happen. A thing can be strange in effect or strange in fact. In philosophical terms, the first kind of strangeness might be called epistemological, meaning that it has to do with how we perceive things; the second kind of strangeness might be called ontological, meaning that it has to do with the way things actually are at their inmost.

Epistemological strangeness arises when, though I can conceive of no rational explanation for the thing before me, I nevertheless maintain the belief that some explanation would obtain if I had more information. If cryptozoologists captured a Bigfoot and determined that it was an extremely rare bipedal ape, the whole Bigfoot phenomenon would prove to have been an instance of epistemological strangeness—strangeness in effect. In contrast, ontological strangeness arises when an event is unexplainable in principle because it defies rational explanation in an absolute sense. This is an inborn strangeness pointing us to the strangeness of reality itself at the fundamental level. Certain phenomena that particle physicists study seem to be ontologically strange. And according to the imaginal or “daimonic” interpretation of the Bigfoot phenomenon found in the work of John Keel and Patrick Harpur, ontological strangeness also defines the real Bigfoot, the one that forever eludes capture even though people have been seeing it for centuries in the wilderness of North America and will probably continue to do so for as long as there are forests for sheltering mysteries.1See John Keel’s classic paranormal investigation The Mothman Prophecies (1975), and Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality (1995).

In art and literature, absolute strangeness is called the Weird. Weird things aren’t things I don’t yet understand but will understand when I know more about them. They are things that elude all possible explanation because they are rooted in unreason. There exists in the West a “weird” artistic tradition going at least as far back as Edgar Allen Poe and including such luminaries as Arthur Machen, Alfred Kubin, H. P. Lovecraft, Daphne Du Maurier, Philip K. Dick, Robert Aickman, and David Lynch. While these artists are all singular, there is one trait they have in common: a stubborn love of irresolvable ambiguity. Because you can’t get to the Weird without being absolutely ambiguous.

On the surface, it would seem that the hit web series Stranger Things deals with epistemological strangeness, not the Weird. Thanks to its proud emulation of popular adventure and horror films from the 1980s, the show boasts a cloak of familiarity. It isn’t until you think about it afterwards that what seemed epistemologically strange in the moment—the monster, the Upside Down, the feats of ESP and telekinesis—was strange in the second sense, and that the web series bears only a formal resemblance to the Spielberg, Carpenter and King narratives it draws upon. The latter are full of strange things, but the things in Stranger Things are, well, stranger.

Is the show a work of science fiction or fantasy? For all its deployment of tropes belonging to both of those genres, Stranger Things admirably avoids the one that neither of them seems able to go without: exposition. The creature and its world are never rationalized; this, despite the fact that the story includes a scientist—Dr. Brenner, played by a subdued Matthew Modine—who is in the ideal position to deliver the obligatory expert soliloquy. Without that necessary dose of exposition, it is impossible to say which of the two broad speculative genres could lay claim to Stranger Things.

It is true that chapter five contains some speculation as to the nature of the threat the characters face. First, there is the fable of the flea and the acrobat, which the science teacher Mr. Clarke offers up to illustrate how one might travel to another dimension. Second, there is the passage on the “Vale of Shadows” that Dustin finds in his Dungeons & Dragons manual. If Mr. Clarke’s fable had proven definitive for making sense of the situation, Stranger Things might legitimately have qualified as science fiction. If the passage on the Vale of Shadows had done the trick, it would have been a fantasy. But as it stands, each explanation implies an entirely different frame of understanding, the first hearkening to modern science, the second to magic and the supernatural. Moreover, since the first speculation is clearly a high school teacher’s attempt to vulgarize a complex piece of quantum theory, and the second comes from the an adventure game rulebook, we can add that there is something artificial about each of them. The rationalizations on offer seem to have been deliberately framed by the filmmakers as human fictions intended to make sense of an inhuman reality. The absence of authoritative answers leaves the viewer to speculate for herself after the final episode has ended. The show remains open, ambiguous to the end, and it is this quality that raises it above the normal run of generic entertainment to make of it something that defies genre, something genuinely weird.

Demogorgon

So, while Stranger Things draws on the fantastical American films and novels of the past, the way it frames its prodigies make them stranger, on close scrutiny, than the bizarreries of formulaic conventions. But the weirdest thing in Stranger Things may be neither the creature that stalks the woods of Hawkins, Indiana, nor the psychic abilities of the young government abductee known as Eleven. Far weirder, I think, is the synchronistic event that sets the story in motion, and what this event might imply to those who wish to see more in the series than a suspenseful tribute to eighties pop culture.

Since this synchronistic event is never acknowledged in the narrative and plays no part in the plot, it is easy to overlook. Nevertheless, as with any other instance of synchronicity, it assumes tremendous importance if seriously taken into consideration, since it cannot be grasped without calling into question our whole working model of reality. Here is how it happens. At the very moment that an extraplanar monstrosity escapes from a secret government laboratory on the outskirts of town, four boys are playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement of a suburban house. Mike, the dungeon master, is narrating a scene in which the adventurers encounter Demogorgon, an obscure pagan entity mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost and resurrected in Gary Gygax’s classic roleplaying game as one of the most challenging foes in the Monster Manual. Will, who plays the party’s wizard, attempts a fireball spell but doesn’t roll high enough to harm the creature. After Mike’s mother sends everyone home, our hapless boy-wizard bikes off into the night, only to meet Demogorgon in the flesh.

What are the chances you encounter a demonic humanoid on the very night your fifth-level magic-user fought one in the Caves of Chaos? Without the preceding prologue revealing that something nasty was in fact set loose in Hawkins that night, the most sensible explanation for the monster’s appearance would have been that the boys’ imaginative play had brought it into being. Had this been the case, Stranger Things would have stood as an explicit endorsement of the Christian Right’s efforts to ban Dungeons & Dragons in the eighties on the basis that it enabled kids to commune with the demonic. Fortunately, the teaser assures us that the connection between the D&D encounter and subsequent events in the real world is coincidental rather than causal. But that’s just what makes it weird. As Carl Jung realized when he introduced the concept in the 1950s, synchronicity is not a causal process. Jung agreed with the skeptics that synchronistic events are coincidences, but he maintained that they are coincidences that mean something. What made his theory controversial was that it made meaning integral to the event instead of regarding it as a caprice of subjective interpretation. In other words, Jung saw the expression of meaning as a property of the natural world rather than a surface effect of human mentation. Synchronicity, for him, was a real psychophysical process, but one that the modern worldview could recognize only at the cost of abandoning certain rationalistic assumptions about how the cosmos functions.

And so Will and his friends imagine a monster in a game only minutes before he encounters one in reality. If nothing else, the event suggests the interrelation of mind and world. If the psyche can enact worldly events that haven’t yet occurred or are happening elsewhere, we cannot continue to hold that the products of the mind are mere figments. They must rather be seen as real events in themselves, imaginal ones that can conspire with their material counterparts in obscure ways. My sense is that this interpretation bears out when we consider other aspects of the series, and that the creative and destructive power of the imagination is one of the great themes of Stranger Things. Recall that the central figure is a little girl who has learned how to affect the physical world with her thoughts, and who, as a consequence of this eldritch ability, has inadvertently let into our world the nameless evil that takes Will away.

Is the creature an alien, a demon, a ghost, a spirit? Are there others like it? What does it want? If it survives on animal flesh, what did it eat before Eleven opened a portal to its desolate domain? During a flashback in the fifth chapter, we learn that Eleven first encountered the creature during a remote viewing exercise conducted while she was still held captive in the government laboratory. The event seems to have put an end to a series of such exercises, the aim of which was to use Eleven as a psychic weapon against the Soviet Union. Note that in this first encounter, Eleven sees only the creature, not the place she eventually refers to as “Upside Down.” The being appears in the blackness of her private mental space, and when she touches it, a fatal connection is made. Only then does the Upside Down reveal its own existence in the form of the yonic rift that materializes in the lab.

These details raise an interesting question: Did Eleven merely happen upon the creature in her psychic wanderings, or did she create it? Until season two comes along to explain everything to death (one can hope it won’t, but it probably will), we are free to speculate. Anyone thinking through the flashbacks that punctuate the series will note that the creature’s first appearance occurs as a bit of a non sequitur in the context of Eleven’s backstory. Ostensibly, Dr. Brenner’s intention was never to contact other planes of existence but to develop Eleven’s psychic faculties in order to spy on (and assassinate) Communists. The fact that a savage monster pops up in the midst of these comparatively mundane psi experiments leads me to believe that its appearance has as much to do with Eleven’s psychological trauma as with a wrong turn she might have taken on the astral plane.

There is no mistaking the signs of complicity between the girl and the creature. Eleven is racked with guilt from the beginning. Thanks to Millie Brown’s impressive performance, it is clear that she feels responsible for the horror that has come to Hawkins. Once we take note of that, some striking parallels come to the fore. For instance, Eleven flees the laboratory on the very night the monster breaks out, as though the latter had freed her from her cell. Both the creature and the girl exhibit an insatiable appetite, the one for mammalian flesh, the other for Eggo waffles and whatever else Mike gives her to eat. When the boys set out to find the portal to the Upside Down, Eleven uses her powers to lead them astray; indeed, she never sheds her reluctance to help them find the being that took their friend. Finally, there is the curious fact that while the creature appears to be attracted by blood, it never comes when Eleven’s nose or ears bleed as a result of her psychic exertions.

When Eleven finally decides to come clean with the boys about what’s going on, she indicates the creature using the lead miniature representing Demogorgon. True to D&D lore, the miniature has two heads. Considering the initial synchronicity and the fact that the Dungeons & Dragons book proves a helpful resource in dealing with occult forces, one wonders how deep the connection with the game goes, and whether the bicephalous miniature hints at a dyadic entity, such that the creature can be said to be an aspect of Eleven, an embodiment of her id, or a tulpa spawned by her anguish and rage after a lifetime of torture. The idea that Eleven’s unconscious mind had a hand in producing the monster dovetails nicely with the implications of the initial coincidence, namely that the wall between psyche and matter is a thin one, boasting windows and doors.

I am not arguing that the creature is “really” Eleven’s creation in the sense that this was the Duffer brothers’ intention. As far as the filmmakers’ designs are concerned, the surface narrative is compelling enough: Eleven encountered the creature by accident as a result of being pushed too far by her abusive minders. This is all one needs to get in order to follow the story. Nevertheless, certain elements in the show do reveal an affinity between girl and monster, one that verges on sympathy. Yet this “sympathy” is metaphysical in nature. It is not present in terms of actual fact within the narrative but exists at the level of the virtual dimension of the fictional world.2The term “virtual” has a long history, one dating back to medieval philosophy. The fin de siècle philosopher Henri Bergson described the virtual as the ideal or spiritual aspect of material reality, and it is this conception (further elaborated upon by Gilles Deleuze) that I have in mind here. It is very different from the digital conception of the virtual, which signifies an immersive simulation of material reality, that is, a representation rather than an element of the physical world. The virtual becomes apparent when we look at the world aesthetically in terms of oneiric resonance, symbolic correspondence, and imaginal power. In Marcel Proust’s formula, it is “real without being present, ideal without being abstract.”3Quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 58. Virtuality is an aspect of the work of art just as it is an aspect of the real world. Beings flow into one another in the virtual. Everything means more than its purely practical or workaday apprehension would dictate. In this preternatural light, the charade of a cosmos composed of separate, discrete objects gives way to a multitude of prodigious connections. Even the most commonplace things begin to seem stranger than they normally appear.

Obscure Objects

On the most obvious reading, the title of the show is a reference to the phrase “Stranger things have happened,” which suggests that however outlandish a purported event may seem, the past assures us that it cannot be so bizarre as to be deemed impossible. The notion of infinite possibility is therefore built into the title of the series. Furthermore, since the title’s source phrase focuses on what has gone on in the past (“Stranger things have happened”), the viewer is subtly alerted to the series’ retrospective orientation as soon as it appears in the opening credits. It is as though we were being told: “Here are some curious events that happened in another time. Beside these, even the strangest occurrences of your own day will seem ordinary by comparison.”

That other time when the bar for strange was set is the fall of 1983. It is a significant date, since we are then on the eve of 1984, a historical juncture that looms in the popular imagination as the demarcation point that George Orwell set between the open society he cherished and a new reign of tyranny rooted in the perverse logic of thoughtcrime and doublethink. Interestingly, in the autumn of ’83, we are also weeks away from the launch of the Macintosh line of personal computers. Apple’s publicity campaign for the new Macintosh included a memorable Super Bowl advertisement, the content of which gives a sense of the significance contemporary Americans attributed to Orwell’s prophecy. An athletic blonde, the only spot of color in a drab dystopian world, hurls a sledgehammer at the giant screen from which Big Brother addresses an audience of shorn mind-slaves. As the screen explodes, a narrator says: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” In no uncertain terms, the ad claims that Apple’s new product heralds an era of freedom in the very year that Orwell set his age of oppression. It is interesting to watch this advertisement from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, when personal computing, though a liberating force in some respects, has served as a platform for the establishment of a surveillance society of such breadth and scope as to leave Orwell’s clunky third-world police state in the dust. Suffice it to say that, in retrospect, 1983 is something of a symbolic threshold. By transporting viewers with impressive verisimilitude into late months of that year, Stranger Things simultaneously places us in the shadow of Big Brother and the dawn of a brave new world defined by the digital.

Of course, the digital culture touted by Apple was already alive and kicking in ‘83. Personal computers had been on the market since the mid-seventies, and the Internet was just a few years away. But for all the attention it pays to historical minutiae, Stranger Things is conspicuously unconcerned by the digital realities of the eighties. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, the roleplaying trio of rejects whose search for their missing friend forms the heart of the story, are classic science geeks. One would expect them to be obsessed with computers. Yet the machine that has them salivating at school isn’t a Commodore 64 but a ham radio, an apparatus that could hardly have felt like the cutting edge one year after Tron came out. As a matter of fact, computers are entirely absent from Stranger Things. There isn’t a single Atari console or coin-operated arcade game to be seen. Even the secret government lab where Eleven received her sinister education in the supersensory seems to function without a hint of digital tech, the scientists’ tests being performed on what appear to be analog machines.

It’s a curious omission to say the least, because one of the most compelling aspects of Stranger Things is its obsession with the lost relics of the 1980s. When it comes to technology, however, the show’s interests seem to lie squarely in the objects that preceded the digital revolution foretold by Apple, and the roles those objects can be made to play in the workings of the Weird. That brings us back to the title, and to a different interpretation of its meaning. If we read the first word not as an adjective but a noun, and the second as denoting physical objects rather than events, “stranger things” can signify “things that have to do with strangers,” or more relevantly, things that are themselves strangers to the viewer. In scene after scene, we are shown objects foreign to life in the later information age. Almost by virtue of their having disappeared, these objects seem to acquire an uncanny power in the fictional universe. Jonathan’s Pentax camera can capture the form of the monster in the woods. Boomboxes, ham radios, incandescent light bulbs, rotary telephones, and walkie-talkies can become instruments for communicating with the disincarnate. Roleplaying games (conceived here as virtual machines, different in kind from the video RPGs that would all but replace them in time) can be veritable oracles, imparting knowledge of the occult and allowing their players to imaginatively enact, albeit unknowingly, events destined to happen in the near future. Throughout the show, these props are framed so as to appear as fetishes in the original sense of the term; they are objects of power, “magic items” in D&D parlance. Given the comparatively dull behavior of the real-life devices littering the lives of viewers, it isn’t hard to derive from Stranger Things the intriguing proposition that by estranging ourselves from the technologies of the past, analog technologies, we have lost an avenue into certain obscure regions of the Real. Read this way, the title of Stranger Things echoes a memorable line from the screen adaptation of another work of prophetic nostalgia, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”

Of course, the idea that modern technology is a magical phenomenon, that automation by natural forces and possession by occult ones are at bottom the same process, goes back at least to the discovery of electricity. The Spiritualist Movement of the nineteenth century had good reason to name its main publication The Spiritual Telegraph, for as Erik Davis notes in his marvellous book Techgnosis, the revolutionary character of telegraphy lay in its “groundbreaking transformation of energy into information.”4Erik Davis, Techgnosis, 61. (Emphasis added.) The allure of the electric, and of the apparatuses its mastery made possible, was such that occultists and scientists alike “looked to electricity to explain the raps, creaks, and table-hops that occurred during séances.”5Ibid. No doubt, this is partly because there is something uncanny about inanimate objects behaving like animate ones. The alien intelligence we sense in thunderstorms also seems to exist in our electrical automatons, especially when these are not performing exactly as they should.

It is this enduring ambivalence of energy and will, nature and artifice, matter and spirit, that the Duffer brothers reawaken with those unsettling shots of malfunctioning light bulbs, telephones, and tape recorders. As in the films of David Lynch, these electrical blips and glitches are signals portending the imminent intrusion of inhuman forces in the human world. The association feels right because we know, instinctively, that electricity isn’t human-made; it is an immense force of nature that humanity has harnessed for its own relatively minor purposes. It therefore retains in our minds all the wildness, unpredictability, and autonomy of the non-human universe from which it comes. There is a sense that this wildness remains present in our technological contraptions.

Or at least it does so when the contraptions of a certain type, if we’re to go by the implications of a period piece that gives the analog gadgets of its period a preeminent role while omitting their digital counterparts entirely. Why did the creators of Stranger Things, consciously or not, insist that the objects capable of dialing up the supernatural aren’t the familiar devices of the twenty-first century but the analog ones that have become strangers to us? It is not my intention to argue that one would have better luck contacting a deceased grandmother with a rotary telephone than with a mobile. Nevertheless, I believe that Stranger Things’ implicit affirmation of a power at work in analog technology makes metaphysical sense, because the analog and the digital embody opposing conceptions of nature and reality. My thesis is that the Netflix series, despite its nostalgia and playful pastiche of late-Cold War Hollywood films, returns us to modes of existence that the pervasive algorithms, codes, and interfaces of Apple’s utopia are threatening to make obsolete.

∞

Flip the tape / Part Two

DISCUSS ON INFINITE CONVERSATIONS

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ See John Keel’s classic paranormal investigation The Mothman Prophecies (1975), and Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality (1995).
2. ↑ The term “virtual” has a long history, one dating back to medieval philosophy. The fin de siècle philosopher Henri Bergson described the virtual as the ideal or spiritual aspect of material reality, and it is this conception (further elaborated upon by Gilles Deleuze) that I have in mind here. It is very different from the digital conception of the virtual, which signifies an immersive simulation of material reality, that is, a representation rather than an element of the physical world.
3. ↑ Quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 58.
4. ↑ Erik Davis, Techgnosis, 61. (Emphasis added.)
5. ↑ Ibid.

Stranger Things Mixtape

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Welcome to our first Metapsychosis mixtape! A "mixtape" is an evolving collection of media on a particular subject or theme, curated in the spirit of sharing things we love.

We're happy to share the beginnings of our first mixtape on the acclaimed Netflix series Stranger Things. Enjoy!

REALITY IS ANALOG

Philosophizing with Stranger Things

In this deep-delving exploration of some of the prominent (and not so prominent) themes of Stranger Things, J.F. Martel argues that the hit Netflix series casts a haunting shadow over our times, restoring the strangeness of an analog world that the codes, algorithms, and interfaces of the digital age have all but rendered obsolete.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

REALITY IS ANALOG

Philosophizing with Stranger Things

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The Electric Symposium

The Stranger Things Episode: Talking Analog Weirdness

In this kickoff episode of The Electric Symposium I am joined by author and Metapsychosis contributor J.F. Martel, as well as Metapsy editors Natalie Bantz and Marco V Morelli. Together we talk about J.F.'s latest essay, "Reality is Analog," our curious fascination with the "lifeworld" of 80s analog, and the Metapsy team's various theories behind the pop cultural Netflix sensation, "Stranger Things." Pop in the tape and press play.

The Electric Symposium The Stranger Things Episode: Talking Analog Weirdness
The Electric SymposiumThe Stranger Things Episode: Talking Analog Weirdness
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Antagonistic Cooperation as Mind Jazz: Ralph Ellison vs. Amiri Baraka (as Reimagined by Greg Thomas and Greg Tate)

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Greg Thomas and Greg Tate to Metapsychosis. Greg Thomas shared this video with us, a brilliant example of the free play of thought we seek to cultivate, with sly contemporary relevance; and Brian George graciously offered a review, while providing historical context for readers unfamiliar with the protagonists (and their doubles).

On February 16th, 2016, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, located just off of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted a debate between cultural scholars Greg Thomas and Greg Tate, with Thomas acting as an advocate for Ralph Ellison and Tate acting as an advocate for Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Alternately, given the prominence of the readings from both authors, the debate could be seen as one between Ellison and Baraka, with Thomas and Tate acting as the commentators. Both incisive and free-flowing, the rhythm of the exchange could be described as a kind of “mind jazz.” The debate was conceived as a (slightly belated) tribute to the 50th anniversary of the publication of Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a book over which Ellison and Baraka clashed.

Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man – book cover

Ralph Ellison, born in 1913, was a novelist, scholar, social and cultural critic, trumpet player, sculptor, and photographer. His novel Invisible Man, published in 1953, is a densely layered modernist narrative that resists all fixed interpretation. A poll of 200 literary critics in 1967 found it to be the greatest novel written by an American since the end of WW2. References to African-American folk tales and traditions coexist with influences from such works as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” the first reading of which was, according to Ellison, a “moment of awakening.” In his psyche, James Joyce shared a table at a bar with Charlie Parker. During the 1930s, Ellison had been a fellow traveller of the Communist party, but, unlike the majority of writers with whom he had been associated at that time, he never defined himself as a “social realist.” This youthful experiment with ideological excess left him with a deep skepticism about purely intellectual systems of belief; direct action, to be effective, should be motivated by the call to shared sacrifice, a willingness to speak truth to power.1In a famous argument, when Hannah Arendt criticized black parents for endangering their children by sending them off on Freedom Rides, he counseled against false caution, and he pointed her toward the long tradition of African-American resistance, in which even the most modest of gains had been purchased at great cost. Arendt later apologized. In his view, however, people’s animosities were as tangled as their affinities. No dialectic would mechanically unfold, nor could an ideology mandate progress. Rather than being the predictable result of four centuries of institutionalized violence and injustice, he argued that “much in Negro life remains a mystery.” An intricate web connected things, such that African-American culture defined mainstream U.S. culture as much as it was defined by it. For Ellison, liberation was, of necessity, a matter of personal development, vision, discipline, and virtue. The Invisible Man is invisible not only because his true nature goes unrecognized by society at large but also because so much of his life takes place at a great depth.

Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka] – Blues People – book cover

Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in 1934, was a poet, playwright, cultural and music critic, and social activist, for whom poetry was a weapon. He believed that any metaphorical revolt should be followed, in due course, by a physical one. In 1954, after being discharged from the US Air Force for possession of communist literature, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he met many avant-garde poets and developed a passion for blues and jazz. Totem Press, which he co-founded with his first wife Hettie Cohen, published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and a number of other Beat writers. Like Ginsberg, Baraka was a seminal figure in the formation of the 1960s counterculture, and much of his writing shares the explosive, open-ended energy of this period. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, but in keeping with the root meaning of “revolution,” the way forward over the barricades led in a complex curve back to Africa. Baraka was a founder or co-founder of a number of organizations, including the New York Poets Theatre, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, and the Spirit House Players, the last two of which performed edgy, confrontational, socially-engaged works, focusing on such topics as police brutality. If his call to arms did not lead to the revolution he expected, and instead to that of Reagan, his ritual gestures again speak to the violence of the moment. Baraka is credited with having helped to close the gap between written and oral literature, and he is seen as the direct predecessor of both Spoken Word and Rap.

The opposition of Ellison to Baraka is almost too perfect in its symmetry, as if it had been engineered to illustrate some sociopolitical theory. If only the two writers had been able to actually meet or correspond or debate in public forums, each might have served as a valuable catalyst for the other. A space might have opened up beyond what might be seen as a ritualized Oedipal conflict. In this space, Baraka might have shared with Ellison some portion of his experimental energy and Ellison might have shared with Baraka some portion of his subtlety, his sense of the irreducible complexity of the world.

In 1958, when Baraka was still LeRoi Jones, he did make several attempts to reach out to the older writer, whom he then admired. He wrote to Ellison, praising his two essays on jazz, and shortly afterward sent him a copy of Yugen, a Beat magazine that he was editing. For whatever reason, Ellison did not respond. After this, a good number of years went by during which they did not comment publicly on each other’s work. Then, in his 1964 review of Baraka’s (then still Jones’s) Blues People, Ellison wrote, among other things, that Jones’s “scholarly analysis frequently shatters into the dissonance of accusation,” and also that “The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give the blues the blues.” One would think that such sharp words would have been enough to prompt a counterattack or a defense of aesthetic principles, but Baraka did not choose to respond. In his 1965 essay “LeRoi Jones Talking,” however, he wrote that Ellison’s fate in American letters was “a cautionary tale, that of a black man isolated and enshrined in the lily-white academy and unable to generate more significant writing.” Sadly, the distance between the two writers was too rigid and too great.

Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979

Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979

In their debate at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Greg Tate and Greg Thomas have attempted to correct history by staging an exchange of perspectives as it could and perhaps should have occurred. In their re-imagination of the Ellison/Baraka opposition, direct challenges alternate with playful taunts. These exchanges have the energy of a competition but the warmth and generosity of a collaboration. Such a paradoxical tension is perhaps similar to what happens in a jazz group, where the players must constantly push each other to take risks, if not to the breaking point, and where they must somehow be both competitive and telepathically attuned. Jazz trumpeter and critic Steve Provizer told me once, “People always underestimate the athletic side to jazz. The traditional attitude is ‘Prove what you can do or get the hell off the stage.’” In these debates, Greg Thomas and Greg Tate do indeed prove that they are virtuosos of the affectionate provocation, the anti-gravitational riff, and the context-shifting aside.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ In a famous argument, when Hannah Arendt criticized black parents for endangering their children by sending them off on Freedom Rides, he counseled against false caution, and he pointed her toward the long tradition of African-American resistance, in which even the most modest of gains had been purchased at great cost. Arendt later apologized.

There is a Hydrogen Bomb on Your Raspberry Eyelid

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Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series featuring Jenn’s poems. The first part is titled “Dialogues with the Inscrutable.” Also see Jenn’s appearance on the Infinite Conversations podcast discussing this series.

~∞~

Linear entrances are escaped to make room for spiraled crossovers and run-throughs. A bonding specific to the shape of enzymes. Undeserving. They had the ability to see the reflections, and ignored the power of the sense. A number beyond calculation was hated unconsciously, and it lay itself open only to her.

On rooftops and deserted roadways, she would, in times of chemical storms, spread her legs across the sky to take in the pieces. If those ways could be set in her every cell, an achievement above superstitious palm tree shade could be wrought. No longer chains constructing a cycle of indigestion. She wants to see the sun in the most abstract way possible, farthest from firsthand the better. And she was on her way…

A lapping tongue wrinkling around submissive liquid. Yellow flicker of petal drop, chord strung and muscle prompt upward. The final lick.

Suggesting movement, the assembly diagonally divides to escape eye contact. But the watch still reads 12:42. On the horizon, after the vaginal crevice that has been carved out of centuries of river existence, a UV ray is recognized as day. The claustrophobic nature of the government stood. Walls to be built up again.

More roof. An official decree to change the color of the atmosphere! The obvious lyrics ring too often. Shouting unison vocabulary to the proper figurehead, again, the burnt edges are passed by. Bullet proof glass serving its purpose. The watch/12:42. Desensitized to guns among acute sensing of knives!

Expansion and contraction; the breath of the lung the universe is! But wasn’t he right when he said it would contract!

And it is. One day she will have captured the sun from infinite positions, reflected in tin cans on the beach, the muted shine of brick walls.

Assembly harasses the conquistador and his push pin mistress. A compunctual reliance on the sex of animals. He was really a photographer.

A concession made because her lip sallowed so carefully. The crease part opened in a calculated simulation of arched feathers. He liked the skin texture of the chin. At least she was a rotten flamingo, barely absorbing the color of the food she ate, in her renegade consumption. She was reading.

Her skin displayed poor nutrition. A beak protruding from his aura longed to apprentice her, teach nutritional habits, to coddle her and feed her chewed morsels. Line after letter and word, the pauses of the space bar, she kept reading. Or was it the headphones. He took his shoes off. The spark on the winged insect’s mechanism defracted an energy ray and ricocheted the wave off of a window angled toward the vehicle. The E lit up and devoured the word, she went blind for a second as the bus broke off the matrimony of light and page, her eyes proceeded along with the speed limit of the road. He would have bought her some carrots.

An abrupt stop brought her electronics to a halt and a yellow tape tug to accompany her exit. Limp hair echoed to him, follow her. Vacant sentience entering physical residence…THEN…She stood on a platform in the middle of the room and spat out a sentence that shot through the heads and executed war with collective morality, a collection begun from the first exposure to that white light and true inhalation. A cough full with mucus of womb and fetus. This statement so profound and simplicit. It spun tops and cartwheels of ideological carnage out of all systems, a discreet spin cycle of turntable echo:

“Direction is emoted from the whiplash corner of a remote lack of control”…

…and she broke a thin, young tube of glass, releasing a chasm of sperm into the heavy air. All around her watched as the descending pictures came from the ceiling, lathered in blue ejectiles holding each snapshot.

“Bidding starts at 20,000”

Everyone reached for their respective walls. Enclosing the glittered audience in solitaire sardine caskets, his view of her was obstructed and all that was left, her bare foot in the air. She imploded; her voice an integral fuse inside his finger. Shaking entrance into the wallpaper of auctionary fixtures. He noticed a special flick of memory as the picture tore between his arms. Submissive riot, they all relished in the approval. Shard of pulp, and they were one on the platform; frozen encapsulation of 20,000. Reduced to 11,010 after implosion. Assimilation. I closed my eyes and stepped out of my pencil sharpener. The phone cord was my communicatory intestine. I am a song of hybrid motion. Mannerisms of lactation draw in rejected catheters. The tardy progression of the seed production was halted because of her absorption. Lucid terminals continue evacuation into her spongy womb. A broken water. Small pod vomited, bulemic onto sheets of prime metal…Proper…The flick at the end of her flooded hair, descending cascade of droplets. A landscape, steel vegetable lush caught the inescapable blue tendencies of the desolate wind. Her violent heartbeat timing the drip from her amphibious locks. A percentage of her iridescent scales fall down, and she moves on, all fours. The puddle of her emergent body was left five feet behind her as her lilac face…

…and she drooled, thought to herself “I will sleep with the urgency of urination between my legs.” Hairs struck her back and stomach. She was shredding by the ashram. A furnace slug of shoes turned the opposite way of how one takes them off when they enter a Japanese bordello. She was staring at burning sticks through a lens of dog slobber. It was the deliberate mass of glowing sarcasm. They suffocated in the atmosphere of her dilated pupil…

…silence allows room for:

She stood, a diamond on her shoulder, dressing her in vinegar. She stood long enough to transport her brainwave into his hands. Willpower overtook; a semi-expected answer. A special penetration into a different tongue would have been the outcome; their embrace reflected on the chandelier, and increased into the vortex, the continuous equal of other dimensions. No such entrance was made. Proper spoken word occurred and a shoulder tap separated forward movement…

…the glare penetrates her eyelids. She looks over the rooftop to the asphalt below. The tops of all the cars stare at her with bleached white rays of sunlight. Tiny reflections of the star make themselves known, they do not discriminate and allow phosphorescent halos from the deepest black void. It burns deep into the skull, claiming her, singing her hair.

She is the X quotient, the variable, the volatile chemical. Her claws have groped and scaled…

…Her silk gown billows; harsh light blinds, empty hands.

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two

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Editor’s Note: The following is Part Two of a two-part essay. Read Part One here.
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002

Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002

“The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and tortures were to the sea-green prophet.”—Giorgio de Chirico

~∞~

If we are a storehouse for the “seeds of every form and the sprouts of every sort of life,” as Pico della Mirandola argues, who knows but that we might not scare ourselves? “The New Man is living amongst us now!” said Hitler, “He is here! Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. Even I was afraid of him.” Once, we were not so easily impressed. We had not yet volunteered to be eaten by the gods, they to whom we had recklessly given birth. We were not afraid of giants, who burned as brightly as atomic bombs, nor of tiny beings with large eyes, who were skilled at creating simulacra. Our craniums were large, and open at the top, but we did not necessarily need large bodies to go with them. One size fit all. It was endlessly interactive. Mercury had attached its power to our ankles. We did not need wings! Few realize that the oceans fill the footprints that we left, that megaliths mark the vast multitude of our navels, or that the sky is filled to overflowing with our tears.

Much stupider than they think, Earth’s top one percent are nonetheless quite adept at playing games. Let us posit: that they rule by reactivating some antediluvian trauma, the fear of which has been bred into our bones, the records about which have been hidden in the coils of junk DNA, which they, and they alone, have somehow learned to read. Such feats of micromanagement! All data is then made to correspond. Not being actual prophets, of course, their reading of these records is hit or miss at best. “As you are figuring out the world,” they say, “we will have manufactured a new one, and then another one after that!” This does not mean that they are actually in charge. Like us, they are subject to whatever spells they cast, and, as the apparatus of the Great Year turns, they are swept along with the other 99 percent. No part can ever be taken from the whole, nor does the One increase when added to itself. We move as One, unconsciously, and pushed forward from behind.

Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003

Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003

As we free ourselves from the common wisdom, paranoia may be the most immediate of temptations. All conspiracy theories may be true, or none of them, or a fact from this one and an archetype from that one, but in the end such labyrinthine explorations may not lead to greater freedom. The trap is this: that we are always the good guys, and someone else is always to blame for every evil in the world.

Appearances to the contrary, it is possible that the things that matter most are actually very simple. As citizens of the greater city of the cosmos, who have now been grounded, it is our job to remove the layers of obfuscation that cut each person from the core of his/her power, so that each may again serve as a kind of movable Omphalos. Gently but persistently, we must bring our attention back to what I will call the “Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) Code of Conduct,” as this was understood by the Ancients. The 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” that correspond to the seven “Anamnesian Virtues” are below. These are formatted as injunctions. To the extent that they can be interpreted at all, there are some that must be followed to the letter. There are others that might put the practitioner into conflict with the Authorities. In your cultivation of virtue, or “virtu,” if you go with the classical understanding of the word, you must read not only with your own eyes but also through the eyes of your opponent. You must read between the lines, as well as what is on them. Obey at your own risk. These 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” are as follows:

1) We must love to act well for the sake of acting well; all action is circular, and no Uroboros can remove the tail from its mouth.

2) We must work hard and stick to our projects through any and all obstacles, until, as if by magic, we one day finish what we started. Looking back, we must thank all of those forces that conspired to destroy us. We will have died more than a dozen times since we set forth from our blackened port. We must not be so naïve again.

3) We must learn how to accept the full responsibility for our actions, and be the first to gladly admit it when we are wrong. If we discover, as in a dream, that we have caused harm to the innocent, we must accuse those who have dared to point their fingers at us, for it is they who have tainted our otherwise spotless minds.

4) We must cultivate a smile, and be able to transmit warmth from the solar plexus. It is in this way that our energy will tempt space to self-organize. As much as does the sun, we will then be able to micromanage each event.

5) We must be willing to meet each person on their own terms, however self-deluded or sociopathic they might be. We will know that we have succeeded when their flaws become an almost exact mirror-image of our own. We must then kiss the horror that confronts us in the mirror.

6) We must be generous with our friends, but more generous with our enemies. We must hold them as close as Teddy bears. For they MUST be kept off balance. We must trust that our sense of style will make up for the catastrophic damage that we cause.

7) Putting fears aside, we must do our best to act with some appropriate degree of courage, which may mean standing still. We must practice death, as though our lives depended on it, and be willing, at any moment, to shrug off what we love.

8) We must speak honestly, to the extent that we can hide behind a mask.

9) We must keep to the Mean. We must do nothing in excess, except when we choose to violate this rule. This is part of the natural equilibrium of the Mean. Lacking excess, it would not know what it is, or how to tell its butt from its elbow.

10) We must act justly. We must treat others in the way that we would want them to treat us, especially when they deserve a good slap across the face, which, at the appropriate moment, we must know how to apply.

11) We must kill first and ask questions later, like the gods, so long as we have the best interests of our sacrifice at heart.

12) We must care for the orphan, and marry our brother’s widow. If needed, we must be willing to make love to our neighbor’s wife. Grave indeed are the responsibilities of the caretakers of the cosmos!

13) A window is open, and we must thank it. As was done “In Illo Tempore,” we must be able to zip from one place to another with no need to cross through the intervening distance, for this will reduce our dependence upon gas.

14) As blunt as need be, we must perfect what Hemingway called our “built-in bullshit detectors.” We must, if and when we choose, speak truth to power, or else operate beyond the edges of the stage. We must cultivate a sense of the innate law of the omniverse. It is utterly obscure. It is as soft as a breath.

15) We must boldly go where no man has gone before, at first together, then more and more alone. No other will survive the wreck. Once having washed ashore, you will there find Argos, your aged dog, who has been waiting with bated breath for your return. He is a good dog. He wants only to lick your hand before he dies. A loyal companion, he will even then share the deep intelligence of his nose. He will be waiting with his cold head resting on his paws, on the last dock, as the ocean swells.

16) To the one side Birds and to the other Snakes: Keep eyes wide open, but do not enter any contest where you would have to stare them down. Do not offend them with such words as “high” and “low,” for, already, they tend to regard you as a snack.

17) We must cultivate curiosity, for there would be no world without it.

18) We must stay alert, and have no fear of boredom. A wait of 12,000 years is not other than the blinking of an eye. We are not, in fact, obligated to bring new worlds into existence, however much we might like to pretend that this is so. No, for we are on a wheel. On this wheel, each of the spokes functions like the gallery of a museum, and, from where we stand, we are free to wander into and out of any period that we choose.

19) We must be able to bring objects across a threshold with us, whether gargoyle breastplates or stringed philosophical instruments, and then fully translate them into this world from our dreams. Do it well, and these objects will blend seamlessly with other props in the environment, although some few may note their faint radioactive glow.

20) We must be good little boys and girls—or else! But no, we are free to be as difficult and subversive as we want, so long as we keep the Bindu always before our eyes and the apparatus of our primal energy intact.

21) We must cultivate the ability to break through any mirror, leaving, as we go, little evidence of our passing. Moving in and out from behind the surface of projection, we must snatch the archaeological relics that we need.

These seven virtues and 21 maxims will allow us to stay grounded as we venture to reconstruct the non-dual architecture of the city, which exists in no one place. For observe, my wide-eyed shipmates, there is no such thing as time, and the lightning bolt that directs us falls crazily where it will. The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. We cannot leave, for we never did exist, and, in flashes, it now seems that the whole world is transparent. This transparency then continues to open up and spread, period after period, world after world.

Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served, and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. They are subtle. They may make no sense. We must harmonize the scalar energy that spills from the HAARP technology of the Everyday Object. We must break the Sumerian seal that prevents us from speaking with our own reflections in the mirror.

Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up. Said Tertullian, “I believe in the Resurrection BECAUSE it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. It is possible that good vision depends on our having nothing much left to lose. For there is no place that does not see into your bones, your muscles, and your nerves. Of limitation the master, perhaps this is the reason that you have allowed yourself to be blind.

At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.

We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension from the vantage point of another. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Bypassing the need for hallucinatory display, we can glimpse just how the dimensions fit together, and why they interact as they do. If we desire to reset the parameters of our vision, it will be necessary to begin at the beginning, like those long-eared poets who lifted up dead cities with their words. Joining hands, they danced upon black waters. Withdrawing to their austerities, they each embodied the previous holders of the lineage. They felt no need to speak. When they did speak, what was hidden became clear. Like them, we must not only find a way to begin at the beginning, we must determine just what a “beginning” is.

Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992

Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992

The world is almost infinitely complex, as is time, and human nature, but we should start by drawing a circle on the ground; we should place our feet at the center of a turning 10-dimensional torus, which can be statistically renormalized as a circle no more than 10 feet wide. There, we will begin our invocation. It should be there, in this circle, and not elsewhere, for there is no other space. This circle will be powered by our breath, and its centripetal vortex will then gather up what it needs. Visions will be allowed to visit, but fears and traumas and hatreds and projections will be required stand a few feet off. A standing wave will lead us to the center of the sun, inside of which are cities. Back home, at the edges of the circle, we will find that our bioenergetic vehicles have been transformed into stones. At first worshipped by the masses, they will later come to be seen as normal parts of the environment. In passing, we will note that a day takes 24,000 years. Hieroglyphs buzzing in geometric networks will spontaneously rearrange themselves. The earliest strata of creation will no longer be above us, but rather somewhere closer at hand. Rooted in the philosophical silence of our stones, which do but do not resemble us, we will traverse the disfigured wonders of the landscape. We will gather what we need, no more and no less. We will improvise as we go. Thus will we “walk on the ruins of a vast sky,” as Yves Bonnefoy said.

We must start from where we are, and trust in our own direct powers of perception. If we know, with close to 100 percent certainty, that there will be earthquakes in an earthquake zone, then we will know that this is not the ideal place to build a chain of nuclear power plants. We will laugh as we stare in wonderment at the expert who would be so rude as to disagree! If we know that all reserves of oil are going to give out in our lifetimes, whereupon our way of life will stop, then we had best make haste to reduce our carbon footprint. We should do this not in order to be politically correct but rather to strike a blow against the tyranny of the object. If we fear that, for purposes of GPS surveillance, we may one day be implanted with a microchip, then we had best soon rediscover how to come and go from our bodies. If Monsanto has insured the triumph of genetically modified Frankenfoods, then it might be best to think small: a few out-of-date seeds could be planted in the yard. With some luck, we will figure out how to farm before the last of the trucks stop running. At the end of a night of purgatory in a pup tent, we must prostrate ourselves before the pure light of the Ur-Plant. We must beg it to expound upon the occult depths of green, as well as on why our shoots are just barely coming up. It is important that we push beyond our embarrassment to ask. We will, ideally, have no use for assault weapons. Instead, we will share a good meal with our neighbors. Joyously simple, and on our backs carrying the sum of our experience, like the weight of the whole world, we must dare to be as naked as at the moment of our births.

Brian George, Key Figure, 2004

Brian George, Key Figure, 2004

We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.

In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock, and, although we can envision it as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use only the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere that we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, and in bodies that have not yet been created. There is no door to the Macrocosm. Again, we must find the key.

Alone and Behold: A Review of Werner Herzog’s Latest Film

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On the day of its release, Werner Herzog’s latest film, Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, launched not just in theaters, but online as well. I felt it fitting to choose to stay at home alone and “rent” the movie right away. As the pixels on my laptop flickered with Herzog’s visions, I reveled in the juxtaposition of my solitude while consuming this film whose subtitle espouses connection.

Midway through the film, as if on command, a colleague from South Africa sent me a message. How apt. My solitude has been penetrated by a message from half a world away. I tell her to watch the movie because halfway through it is already stunning, and she brings up her own perception of the irony that we are communicating while this film is streaming into my life. She mentions something about telepathy at the very same moment the film begins to discuss the possibilities of telepathy and that soon we will be “tweeting thoughts”… “It is already happening,” I think to myself. I tell her about the synchronicity, and she replies, “weird.”

The macrocosm of any film is contained within the microcosm of the first scene. Lo opens with a shot of the campus of UCLA. The frame focuses not on the architecture, but on a tree-lined campus road, with students traversing the space in slow motion, allowing us to see movements in a way not possible to the naked eye. Herzog narrates that none of the students are aware of the role this space played in giving birth to the internet and what significance it holds for how we live and communicate now.

As he introduces us to these unknowing suspects, I reflect. Those students are avatars for us. We are also in the dark. Do we know where the internet was born? What traces of its nascence are present for us now? What it actually looks like? As a filmmaker who focuses on showing what cannot be seen (La Soufriere, and more), Herzog shows us a mundane image, while the “revolution” he speaks of, as the shot lingers, suffuses its very fabric, invisible and totalizing.

We move to “some sort of shrine” down a “grotesque” hallway, as Leonard Kleinrock, our first tour guide and internet pioneer, at once proclaims the sacredness of what he’s about to show us while he vigorously slams and slaps that very object representing this veneration, the first computer of the internet. “This is a military machine, you can’t break it” rings out like a mantra, subtending all that is to follow throughout the film. The camera closes in on the computer in a type of body cavity search, as Kleinrock describes how it smells (“delicious, old”) and what its parts are. “This machine is so ugly on the inside, it is beautiful.”

Historical record, due to the IMP LOG books stored in that room, has it that the internet was born on October 29, 1969 at 10:30 PM in Los Angeles (or Palo Alto, CA, respectively, if you want to clock the recipient of the first missive as well, given that it can only be successful if the receiver actually receives). The camera shows Kleinrock holding this document, and we can make out the scribbles of proof, “22:30 Talked to SRI host to host.”

This is followed by a closeup of the machine’s plaque: Interface Message Processor. IMP. The mischievous child goblin at the center of it all. Following the rabbit hole opened by this linguistic play provides illuminating avenues of analogy between what imps are and how we interact with the internet. But Herzog does not do that in his film.

While many gems of documentary footage, old and new, throw our current usage of the internet into relief, I would like focus on a few that impressed me deeply. And while I have tried my best to minimize spoilers, I assume that you have seen the film because you can stop what you are doing right now and stream it immediately to your computer and watch it before continuing to read on. Done? Ok! Let’s dive in.

Piha beach, New Zealand – by Jenn Zahrt

The vast expanse of Piha beach in New Zealand recalls the same scene in Lo and Behold introducing the thoughts of Ted Nelson. Imperceptible ripples on the water caressing endless black sand a world away from my domicile. In March of 2015, I spent an afternoon here, sinking my fingers into the ocean. Here to, as in South Africa, the water taught me lessons. – JZ

In an outstanding scene of the film, a scene where Herzog pays someone a rare compliment, we visit with Ted Nelson, an internet pioneer. Nelson describes his relation to the early days of the internet in terms of water and interconnection, and, given this, what hyperlinking should have been, but did not become.

Standing on a deck, with a cozy, gray harbor behind him, he says, “Writing is the process of reducing a tapestry of interconnection to a narrow sequence. And this is in a sense illicit. […] This is a wrongful compression of what should spread out. In today’s computers they betrayed that because there’s no system for decent cut and paste, and they changed the meaning of the words cut and paste and pretended it was the same thing.”

Losing breath, Nelson continues without pausing, “So a guy named Larry Tessler whom I consider to be a good friend nevertheless changed those words; I consider that to be a crime against humanity and he doesn’t even understand why because humanity has no decent writing tools.” By which point you almost want to take a breath for Nelson.

He closes his eyes, as though going back deep inside his mind, as if resetting himself, and says slowly, “In any case this is the problem of interconnection, representation and sequentialization… all…” with eyes still closed, he cracks a smile, pauses, and opens his eyes again and looks up, just past the camera (likely to Herzog), and says, proudly beaming, “…similar to the issue of water.”

The wrinkles on Nelson’s face mimic the ways he discusses the flow of water between his fingers. I was sucked into his description like an acupuncture needle into thirsty flesh, for just this past May, I spent an afternoon swimming in South Africa’s Magwa river, two hours by foot away from any road, dipping my hands in a rill and watching the water open around my fingers and close again behind them, just as Nelson describes. I entered my hand into the water in various ways, and observed how the water and air mixed together, or did not mix around fingers. I felt the power of the water against me, and pushed back, or didn’t, and let what I observed sink into my awareness. That day left me soaking in new realizations about the nature of water.

So when Nelson evokes water and the impossibility of describing systems of shifting structures, connections, and relations, I instantly related with him about how ineffable these insights are. I also instantly felt a sense that if one has not spent enough time around water, in a quiet and personal way, the words coming out of this man’s mouth would sound insane. But Herzog saw something in him that only film could capture. Herzog’s response to Nelson came not only through a verbal compliment (“to us you appear to be only one around who is clinically sane”), but his cinematography also followed suit.

As we are introduced to Ted Nelson, the camera focuses on an idyllic harbor. We see a shot of a house with a stone relief on its siding. A woman’s face, like Gaia, eyes closed in contemplation, rests in stillness as the camera captures a light breeze moving leaves of the plants that flank her face. The camera cuts to a shot of the surface of water, rippling, with Herzog’s voice still resounding, “…the web as we know it took a different route, but Nelsons ideas are still dormant.”

As Herzog allows us to climb inside Nelson’s world, we are taken to his computer screen, where he demonstrates his vision of what copy/paste should have been, but did not become. While we view Nelson’s hypertext, and the interlinking scrolls on his screen, the periphery begins to shift ever so slightly, up and down. Nelson lives on a house boat. The room itself undulates with the water’s current, underscoring the uncertain foundations at the heart of Nelson’s ideas.

What Nelson holds to be a kind of impossibility—“humanity has no decent writing tools”—Herzog expresses command of. The weaving of the filmic tapestry, the visual and aural connections and details that Herzog pays attention to, resist the “sequentialization” that frustrates Nelson. While the nature of temporality forces film to be sequential by definition, it also contains elements that defy Nelson’s interpretations.

The “writing” Herzog performs demands a deep listening and seeing. We must listen to what Herzog does not say while listening to what he does say. We must see what he does not show, while looking at what he does show. And we must do both of these things simultaneously.

While this could be said for the reading of any filmic text, with Herzog, it is particularly important because he writes as much in absences as in presence. In a film about the internet, which cannot really be depicted as such, we enter through human stories, woven together in Herzog’s brand of synesthesia. The gentle movements of the house boat inducing a kind of subtle nausea and poetic unity capture the essence of Herzog’s touch.

Here is another such woven thread: While interviewing Jay Lockman, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Lockman says, the “enemy” of radio astronomy is ourselves, rather, the “natural radio signals we make on earth, either deliberately or accidentally.” The signals from outer space that they are looking for are so subtle, that human interference poses the biggest threat, including microwave ovens, cell signals, and radio signals, and Herzog rejoins, “Music stations…playing Elvis.” Lockman laughs, “playing Elvis.”—a tacit casting of Elvis as enemy. For radio astronomy to work, it needs the silent, remote wilderness of West Virginia.

Later, exactly 1:11 minutes into the film, entertaining the idea of an internet on Mars, Herzog cuts to a shot of the Chicago skyline at sunrise. His voice-over defamiliarizes the scene, catapulting us into another world, a world devoid of humans, the dystopia we have been skirting around the entire film. As the camera pans across lake Michigan, Elvis begins to croon, “Are you lonesome tonight?” Why, yes, Werner, I am! Alone and watching your movie. And there’s Elvis, jamming the star signals, as if on cue. “Do you miss me tonight, are you sorry we drifted apart.” The camera continues to pan and lands on the planetarium, Herzog notes, “the only point of contact.”

The camera skips indoors, and we are told that there is “a monument for those who have levitated and left. Yes, things must be real good out there.” We see astronomy porn—carefully constructed shots of astronauts and planetary models—before returning to the shores of Lake Michigan where we “meet some stragglers” in the form of buddhist monks milling about, conversationless. Herzog narrates, “they’re all on their smart phones. Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.” The connection with the divine is lost as they dive into their magic rectangles, plugged in to another reality. Elvis continues, sweetly, “tell me dear, are you lonesome, tonight?”

Indeed. Historically, film launches were public affairs, with screenings in theaters, the theater itself forming a very specific kind of public space. Now, headphones on, with darkness of the night slipping through my window and around my screen, I consume this film alone, save for the few messages I send back and forth with my friend in South Africa. And Herzog has successfully converted Chicago into a dystopian paradise, replete with texting monks, and supersaturated with Elvis.

In the final scene, closing a film replete with visions of what the future holds for human/machine interfaces, and all the bleakness Herzog is known for teasing out of such visions, we are shown a group of men from West Virginia playing instruments together around a fire, singing, “Let me be your salty dog, I won’t be your man at all, honey let me be your salty dog.” The lyric defies what machines, and even humans, can provide. How fragile we are on this planet, and how fragile this digital ecosystem is, how ubiquitous and unseen, and yet by the end of the film, what we have done is take a long hard look at humanity, who now, surrounding a fire, in song, appears not to have changed at all from its prehistoric roots.

Over and against the cosmological highs and lows he’s taken us to, Herzog lets the salty dog have the last word.

Originally published on JennZahrt.com

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part One

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Editor’s Note: The following is Part One of a two-part essay. Read Part Two here.
Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002

Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002

“And, spread across solemn distances, your smile entered my heart.”—Rainer Maria Rilke

~∞~

In a comment on my essay “The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution,” Okantomi wrote, “I often feel like I can see what is happening in the world, as well as what is just about to happen, and what will almost certainly happen later on, and it’s like no one else sees what I am seeing. It’s eerie, shocking, and finally depressing.” People do have visions of the future, both individually and collectively. Quite often, these visions are troubling, but few bother to follow the implications of their vision to the end, let alone change their lives. One way or another, though, our visions have ways of making themselves felt, even if we do not register what it is we are seeing. The world is a kind of eyeball. There is no such thing as a “safe space.”

Such visions do not necessarily depend upon telepathy; they can be equally present in the automated workings of the culture, in the demographic analyses that drive the decisions of corporate boards. Hollywood blockbusters, for example—such as Star Wars, The Fountain, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Planet of the Apes, Avatar (and all of their various spinoffs)—strike me as a potent vehicles for contemporary mythmaking, whatever their variations in quality, whatever the motives or self-awareness of their directors. There are cues. There are occult knots. Our responses are overdetermined. Our hands freeze in mid-air as they reach for their absent weapons. Our lips form the first vowels of a chant that will atomize a whole city. As we stare into the distance, the ancient world resurfaces as a technological dream on the horizon. We remember the collapse of complex systems, the hierarchical clash between the rulers and the ruled, but we mix and match the specifics of the story. Our best efforts to solidify the Rorschach blot of the future only point us towards the enigma of our origins. To discover what we know, we must sometimes pause to observe what we create. Seized from afar, as by the magnetism of an almost nonexistent teacher, we are pulled by a current all too eager to instruct us. An unresolved agenda speaks to us from the screen. The screen also acts like an iron curtain, through which the bodies of the living may not pass.

Or, in a different mode, people give form to the future through their fears, by what they do not do as much as what they do, by their belle indifference when presented with a series of ultimatums. Our psyches are jagged. Whole periods have gone missing. As crises converge, our refusal to act is a testament to the scale of the coming upheaval. We finger the rigid outlines of our scars, as if they belonged to someone else. We shape the future by our under-the-skin sense of all of those things we know but go out of our way not to think about: that reserves of oil will almost certainly run out in our lifetimes, that the U.S. doesn’t manufacture much of anything anymore, and that there is not enough locally grown food to sustain most cities in a real emergency. There are many things that it seems better not to know. The future is one of the better places in which to store such unasked for knowledge.

It is always possible that the march of progress will indefinitely continue, that “someone will think of something,” that our way of life will require only a few small modifications, that windmills and solar cells will save us. As ancient souls, we know this is absurd. The problem is, of course, to separate and categorize these alternate versions of the future—in simplistic terms, to discriminate between the more false than true and the more true than false. We can see the details but somehow miss the pattern; we can see the pattern but somehow miss the details. To see clearly we must see from more than one location, from all of the 360 degrees of a circle, and then out beyond the 28 U-Turns of a labyrinth, there to access the ten-dimensional records of a sphere.

Brian George, Star-Bird, drawing, 1990

Brian George, Star-Bird, drawing, 1990

Sadly, there are laws that prevent our switching out of “power save” in order to reactivate the full scope of our senses. The art of remote viewing is no longer taught in schools. Bilocation is now seen as unscientific. There are industries devoted to the proposition that a human being has less predictive power than an algorithm. The age of the tool has passed and the age of the prosthesis is at hand. We see what is put before us; we do not see the long shadows that are standing behind our backs. We now see with our eyes; we do not believe that it is possible to see with the solar plexus. From their underground bases, speeding all ways at once, like boomerangs, and with superhuman stealth, suspect forces play games with the horizon. Fear and hope pump out a kind of metaphysical fog, crackling with static, which makes every level of the process difficult and tests our ability to translate the first hieroglyphs that we wrote.

As light can manifest as either a particle or a wave, or both, but not at the same time, so too the future both IS and IS NOT there. It is there for those beings with a panoramic view, as it is for us at the moment of our deaths, but it revolts against all functions that we would force it to perform. It is present in those flashes that it chooses to transmit; it does not see fit to instruct us as to the gaps in our methodology, through which we will fall. We want to believe that our systems are moving each year a bit closer to perfection. How accurate this is! Yet we forget that “what is perfect will soon end,” as it says in the Tao Te Ching. The language spoken by the future both IS and IS NOT similar to that spoken by the present. Floods of information are provided, yes, enough to create the appearance of a world, but too often disinformation is more attractive than the truth. Trolls and gremlins are among us! Fear forces us to misjudge the location of our navels. We dread the constant vigilance that is imposed by the Ideal.

Through the years, and especially in the early 1990s, I have sometimes found myself projected into the future, both in terms of specific images and through wider visionary overviews. These experiences felt urgent. They also, to some extent, seemed almost pointless to report. Before an event, few would have any reason to pay attention to such images, and afterwards, reading poetry would be way down on the public’s list of priorities. I was able to see certain details as well as certain patterns; at first, there was no good way to present these as a narrative, any more than an ocean consists of a series of steps. If steps existed, they were miles down. How is it possible to tell the story of an ocean? The traumas that had possessed us from the time of the Younger Dryas were nonetheless starting to make sense. A finger to my lips, I have spent years keeping secrets. I pretend, when asked, to know much more about football than I do.

In retrospect, certain passages stand out, as having started in one world and then ended up in another. What began as vision had some tangential relationship to fact. For example, references to the destruction of the World Trade Towers popped up five or six times in poems from 1992. “A monster stalked his head through the air vents of the World Trade Towers. He could not find it, for the towers themselves had disappeared.” “The World Trade Towers for a fourth time fall; their shadows stand.” There were other lines from this period that possibly pointed to the BP Gulf oil disaster: “Not one leaf stirs. The sea has met its death by accident. The tree Yggdrasil has been hacked at the root.” And to Fukushima: “You have thrown a wave at the reactors of the Nephilim. Rods overheat, and the whole of the ocean is not enough to cool them.” From the standpoint of vision, what was real was that our way of life was far more fragile than we thought. The complexity of our systems was a liability rather than a defense, and, the more complex they became, the more out of touch and vulnerable we were. What we called “facts” were a way of keeping our eyes fixed on the foreground.

There were dozens of references in my books To Akasha: An Incantation for the End of History and The Preexistent Race Descends to the idea of a “mile-high wave.” To Akasha was structured around this image, and it was a phrase that I never expected to hear in the evening news. But, during the BP Gulf oil crisis, reporters began to speak about what would happen if the vast lakes of methane under the Gulf were to explode. One consequence of this would be a mile-high wave that would rise up to wash over two thirds of North America.

On a day to day level, I might sometimes prefer not to focus on such things. In this, I am no different than the great majority of my race. Signs do not always wait for us to notice them, however, nor do they necessarily take an esoteric form.

December 21st, 2012, was a date that left many prophets disappointed, yet it was on this date that Warner Bros. released a movie called The Impossible. Based on actual events, it tells the story of an English family on vacation at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand, who were separated when the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 struck. After a movie-length ordeal, they are once again reunited. This was the tsunami that killed 230,000 people and displaced 1.7 million more. Many critics gave it positive reviews. Eric Koln, of Indie Wire, on the other hand, gave it only a B-minus grade. He argued that it suffered from a “feel-good” plot within the context of mass-destruction. Already anxious, I had no desire to see or judge the movie for myself. Waves haunt me, as they have for the past 12,000 or so years, and this one seemed just a local instance of far greater things to come. For me, the Paleolithic glaciers are still just about to melt, and a rise in sea-level will destroy the cities on most coasts.

But why, you may ask, do so many of our predictions turn out to be wrong? Now that 2012 has come and gone, and the visions of its cultic devotees have proven far less than accurate, this issue may be a big one, whose repercussions are only now just beginning to be felt.

It is not that we do not know, perhaps, but rather that there is no way to determine what we know, or to differentiate a corporate logo from a hieroglyph. We see, but we have forgotten how to read. We believe that our minds penetrate beyond the ends of our own noses, when, in fact, they rarely penetrate that far.

Brian George, Bird Arising out of Snake Arising out of Pot, drawing, 2002

Brian George, Bird Arising out of Snake Arising out of Pot, drawing, 2002

If we humans cannot travel from one side of the omniverse to the other, it is perhaps because, at this point in the Kali Yuga, we have gotten much too big. In the Satya Yuga, when the sun still had a face, we knew enough to avoid getting tripped by our own feet. We could enter through the keyhole of the pineal gland to then exit onto the pyre that the Birds had built to burn us, where, as we watched with bland amusement, our bones would turn to ash. Our 10,000-year life-spans allowed for much experimentation.

We inhabited our bodies from the outside in, like the visitors to a museum—the Smithsonian Institution, let’s say—and not, as in the present, from the inside out. The bright tunnel that leads to the edge of the known world, and the aperture that opens out of Life and onto Death, to some can seem as frightening as a kind of demonic kaleidoscope, which, ignoring the instruction manuals that were left to us by the Ancients, they now wait for 70 years to touch. Then again, on the other side of the aperture, we may draw to ourselves beings who are adept at playing games, and who are quick to realize that our skill-set has grown rusty. We may inadvertently have traveled with big targets on our backs.

It is certainly odd: that even though some part of ourselves may be living in the future, our predictions are far more likely to be wrong than to be right. As Okantomi suggests, prophesy may have less to do with the prediction of the future than with the ability to see clearly into the present—to boldly recognize patterns that are just beginning to be formed or to probe into patterns that have long been in existence, but which, for whatever reason, have not yet become visible.

For the most part, this involves a set of classical virtues rather than a bag of supernatural powers. Let me translate these as the “Anamnesian Virtues.” These are real virtues, however much they have been formatted by an artificial author. To the extent that they remain on this side of the existent, we must acknowledge that they are fragments from a long since vanished text, which was copied and then recopied into half a dozen languages before once again being lost. Tibetans would refer to such a text as a “terma,” a “hidden treasure,” whose contents could only be deciphered by a “terton.” Such a text is obviously prone to mistranslation, if not self-serving paraphrase; so too, perhaps, with these “Anamnesian Virtues.” These virtues are coupled with another 21 “Anamnesian Maxims.” I will speak of these later on. But first, let us look at the seven virtues. These are as follows:

1) Detachment: the capacity to see the ocean that will swallow up all things, and to listen as it whispers in your ear. You should, paradoxically, become even more empathic as the degree of your detachment grows. You may act on this, or not. You may spill your blood as a purely symbolic gesture, in service to those humans yet unborn. You may feel the pain of the multitudes that you kill.

2) Foresight: the capacity, while still in love with life, to be dead, and productively so. So too, the longer you are dead the more alive you will be.

3) Self-reliance: the capacity to stand on your own as you free yourself from the force-fields of the common wisdom, and then not complain too much. This will be more of a challenge if your head, hands, heart, and feet have been removed. Most prostheses will require some amount of training, after which you will become 100 percent free.

4) Balance: the capacity to see the right in every wrong, as well as the wrong at the dead center of each right. By the blinding light of the hypersphere, we can see that even the most generous of our actions is a crime; at one and the same moment, every crime can be regarded as a type of revolutionary act, as a flawed but useful reinvention of the law. Strange indeed are the methods of the stern Goddess of Necessity!

5) Hindsight: the capacity to remember just when to shut up, and the knowledge that you have seen these things a great many times before. To all others has a role and a position been assigned; to the seer, only the pathos of descent.

6) Stealth: the capacity to bring your full energy to a project when there are few who understand what you are doing, and none who will reward you. Only in this way will the dead be prompted to grant access to their libraries.

7) Simplicity: the capacity to make do with whatever Fate deposits. We must do what we were meant to do. We must go where we are meant to go. The shortest distance between two points, however, may turn out to be a labyrinth. We must read each accident as a catalytic cue in order to discover the true outlines of our work.

As Lincoln said in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, “We must disenthrall ourselves.” These are the key virtues that will help us to develop the breadth of vision that we need. They are of use to both the solitary artist and the multitude. No line divides the subject from the object. “One thought fills immensity,” as Blake argues in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even good habits must be probed and then, finally, dismantled. All crutches must be thrown away, as you free yourself from the advice of experts, from the urge to see your side win and the other side destroyed, and from the high-tech wet-dreams each day generated by the media. At the end, there should be nothing left but space.

Brian George, Sky-Net, drawing, 2004

Brian George, Sky-Net, drawing, 2004

Conversely, you must have the courage to accept that you do not, in fact, create your own reality. For the “You” is inextricably bound to the experience of the “We.” The “Body Politic” is an actual body, however much we might choose to view it as a metaphor. You are one of 6 ½ billion being swept along through the veins of a metastasizing empire, whose reach is interdimensional in its scope, but whose key principle, at the moment, is nowhere to be found. Its search engines troll for evidence that it has not ceased to exist, as there, just up ahead, the ghosts of failed super-beings beckon from the fallout.

Our Spiritual Evolution: A Response to Chris Dierkes on St. Paul’s Ode to Love

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Prelude: 5 Brief Thoughts on Love and Our Human Spiritual Evolution

  1. Love is a verb.
  2. God Is Love. The Greek Scriptures (New Testament) tell us that “God Is Love.” (1st Letter of John 4: 8, 16)
  3. The poet Blake says, “And we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
  4. We humans are meant to evolve, and grow closer to God. This is at the heart of Christian theology. The 2nd Letter of Peter says near its beginning that we are to become: “participants of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4). How might this growth happen?

Finally, here is a statement that seems simple, but is truly complex:

  1. “We all want to love, and we all want to be loved.” 1A clear echo of this truth appears in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25: “Then happy I, that love and am beloved.” I have searched but not yet found if another has more of a claim on this saying than Shakespeare.

Part I: Evolution and the Divinization of Humanity

This reflection is a response to Chris Dierkes’ provocative article, “Love is Patient, Love is Kind: St. Paul’s Advice For Contemporary Esoteric Spirituality,” on 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s stunning ode to Love. I agree with much that Dierkes writes, especially his vision of the deep unity, and interdependence, of our human family, today and in the future. This unity and interdependence is a necessity for us, if we are to reach an indescribably bright future.

The purpose of this essay in response to Dierkes is this: I would like to add the element of human evolution—a Human Evolution that is also participated in by the Divine, and led and guided by the Divine—to the instruction and guidance that Dierkes has given us. 2With the term “evolution,” I am not referring to the various scientific theories that come under the umbrella of evolutionary biology. Scientific study of evolution is a young pursuit, and raises more questions than it answers. There is no clear picture of our biological evolution. Much work remains to be done. (For example, the fossil record still does not support Darwin’s theories, although Darwin said it would.)

When speaking of “evolution,” I mean human development in recent millennia, with a powerful Spiritual component. The Catholic Church held a positive conference on Darwin in 2009 at the Vatican, saying that evolution is a very possible way in which life developed on earth. Many Christians support “theistic evolution.”)

Our Evolution: Recent Beginnings

Until 11,000 years ago, our ancestors had to be, physically, ever-vigilant against great dangers. One constant threat, for example: Beware the saber-toothed tigers! These fearsome cats were all around the globe, for millions of years. Their tactic: ambush. Our ancestors were in constant danger from these and many other threats in their environment. Death was always close, ever only a misstep away.

Life was hard, certainly by our standards.

During ice ages, some groups of our ancestors survived because they were better at extracting bone marrow from the bones of animal carcasses, and eating it. God is bold.

Once I asked one of my vital teachers about these things. He smiled briefly and said, “Ah, those great dark mysteries.”

Today, my hunch is that these difficulties helped humanity to enter into our physicality. To learn, deeply, about our bodies, and about our physical environment. We have millennia upon millennia of deep concern for our physical existence in our collective unconscious, in our selves. Already, we see in this a beginning of wisdom, and of love. There was a healthy concern for life and self-preservation, and this even extended to the immediate family and clan of our ancestors. (We see in this “extension” of self the rough early roots of love, even altruistic love.) They had to help each other to survive. There was also basic curiosity and observation, and a trying-to-understand what was going on in the world. Another great teacher, in her class on the Scriptures, said, “When the farmer knows the time to plant the seed in the earth, that is already wisdom.” I guess that our wisdom starts organically, slowly.

Humanity learned and developed. Slowly.

Such recollections remind us of the immense gratitude we can have for our forbears. They got us here. And they have delivered far more to us than our mere physical existence.

These thoughts also remind us that our Humanity has evolved, and is still very much in a state of evolution. Although most of us have far more ease, and even many comforts, in our immediate physical environments, we are very much a Humanity on the move. And although we no longer have to be ever-fearful of saber-toothed tigers, there is still fear around us at times, as well as a lame partner of fear: pride.

Our development continued over millennia. At the end of the Bronze Age, there were advances in how society organizes itself and lives. The parts of the Code of Hammurabi and the Mosaic Law that curtailed violence were a leap forward, for their time. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Here there is shown a concern for keeping society healthy and united; there is a warning against being violent to others; there is a taught movement away from violence; and there is a lawfully controlled expression of violence, to curtail greater violence and societal harm.

Deeper than that, less mental energy is wasted on revenge. One is allowed to make an end to plans of retribution. This is huge.

We were beginning to learn how to focus our attention on Reality, and how to focus our attention in ways that participate in, and contribute to, Reality.

Thousands of years later, Shakespeare would take this up. A major theme of his poetry and drama is: We humans have the power to bless or to curse. Let’s bless. In every way, it is better to love, to bless.

Returning to our chronology: We arrive at the First Axial Period. Around the globe, in the first millennia BCE, there are deeper spiritual awakenings. Our societies had evolved enough to produce great literature and art. Systems of trade and record keeping. And quantum leaps forward in spirituality.

Although the family unit is still as close as a tightly wound ball of rubber bands, our psyches, slowly, begin to expand and to have inner space. (Romans 7 & 8 are about this evolution of our psyche: at the end of Romans 7, Paul shows how we finally arrived, historically, at the newly formed “inner person,” a huge development for Humanity. Paul’s early grasp of human history, 1700 years before “history” became a science, is amazing.)

Jesus arrives and tells us that it’s time to love each other. Thousands of years earlier, this would have been an impossibility, as we would have automatically attacked members of other tribes who were near “our land,” or stealing “our food.” Recall the Code of Hammurabi, from about 1750 BC, says “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This gets repeated verbatim in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Deuteronomy, two books of the Torah of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). Deuteronomy 19:21 says “Show no pity; life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (The Hebrew word for “bread” is related to the Hebrew word for “war.”)

Jesus, however, presents pity, mercy, and love as the only path forward for our human evolution. 3For the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has declared this year (2016) as the Year of Mercy.

We see that positive changes in our immediate environment, and the possibility of leisure and deeper thought, allow for our further, and more potent, evolution. Good developments work together. Society becomes more proficient at ensuring our physical safety. Thought, art, music, and all manner of insights on how to make things better, happen. Spiritual breakthroughs can even occur in safer society, such as those brought to us by the Axial Period, and by Jesus. And these make society safer yet. There are positive cycles of evolution.

In the midst of this development, there is a pivotal evolutionary turning: We slowly, so slowly, see that we may let go of our fear and our greed, and we may love our neighbor. Nor is it smooth, this process: there are many forward and backward lurches and lunges. In the midst of this turning, all people in growing societies learn about something good: TRUST. Mutual trust occurs in better societies, even if not all people have found their way to love, yet. Trust and comfort with our society arrives on the scene. Again, this ‘trust’ is not total love and trust of individuals; it is more complex and nuanced—it is a trust, in part, that society will keep checks and balances on those who might do us harm. While there is some authentic ‘trust’, there is also shrewd judgment about how others will act under the constraint of societal rules and expectations.

Again, our evolution goes hand-in-hand with greater purposeful leisure and thought and the possibility of intentional spirituality. Monet would have never been able to paint the light when it was “just so,” if he was constantly worrying about the saber-toothed tiger that might be in the bush behind him.

So, Jesus began to spread the news that the time had arrived in our evolution where we could love each other. However, only ten days after Jesus left (at what Christians call the Ascension), and went UP to out-of-our-sight, Someone came DOWN to us. And this changed everything.

The Evolutionary Meaning of the Pentecost

Eleven confused and nervous men were huddled in the upper room. Their teacher had been resurrected, then left them without instructions about how to proceed. They had witnessed amazing things. They had no idea what to do. And the authorities were hunting them, to kill them for religious treason.

At that moment the Holy Spirit descended, and the terrified disciples suddenly had lights on their heads, as if they formed a 9-branched Hanukkah menorah, with more branches constantly being added. The work of the 2nd temple largely done, the Shekinah was leaving the “beit,” the old stone temple, and moving out into Humanity. The Holy Spirit was now entering the Human Person. As Paul says, “YOU are the temple of God,” and, “YOU are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.” People were surprised to hear such things said about human persons. However, God wants mutual indwelling: God in us, and us in God. But God wants us to help make this happen. When we try, God will act. 4If the reader notices a merging between anthropology and spiritual events portrayed in Scripture, that is precisely what is intended.

The 7-branch menorah was always in the old stone temple.5The first temple (attributed to Solomon) was destroyed by the Babylonians, at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. After the Babylonian Captivity, the great Iranian liberator of the Hebrews, Cyrus, allowed them to return to Jerusalem, and encouraged them to rebuild the temple. The second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans. Both temples had extensive underground sewer systems to transport the blood of the sacrifices away. But much later, this menorah will grow. It will sprout two new branches, leave the temple, and take up residence in the human family.

The 9-branch menorah is in the human family, in the human home. Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, takes place in the human family and human home, primarily. It represents the movement away from temple, to a presence of God in the Human Person, in the Human Community. This menorah is in the Mystical Psalm Structures, which shall be discussed below.

When the Holy Spirit enlightened the 11, and Mary, and others very soon thereafter, the 11 instantly became like supercharged pinballs bouncing all over the Eastern Mediterranean, founding churches, teaching people, strengthening communities, healing people. There were teleportations (see Acts 8:39-40) and many miracles. Their learning curve did not stop. As Jesus had promised them, the Holy Spirit came to them. The presence of the Holy Spirit was so thick and palpable, you could almost feel it in the air.

The Acts of the Apostles, an amazing action-packed Scripture, describes a bit of this awesome Spiritual saturation of the early community. This stunning new reality is the milieu in which Paul is writing that letter to the Corinthians.

Prior to his conversion, ultra-orthodox Paul was unsettled by the energy and compassion of this early Christian community. His powerful left brain had not learned to think outside the box. He didn’t even know that he had an anima.6In Jungian psychology, the “anima” is the collection of “feminine traits” that are in all people, including men. These “feminine traits,” for Jung, included compassion and tenderness. A goal of life is integration, through which a person harmonizes all their capacities in a strong and seamless spectrum. Jung loved John’s Gospel, a Scripture in which human integration holds a central place. At the Cross scene in John 19, the “woman” (Mary) reenters the man (Beloved Disciple), reintegrating the Feminine and Masculine after they had trod separate paths ever since Eve was born of Adam, as described in Genesis.

He murdered the Christians, who aroused great hate in him.7A bit of humor: Nietzsche, that witty misanthrope, says that the fact that 11 human persons stuck to the same story, even dying for it, proves that God is real!

Then he too saw the light. Saul became Paul.

And he bounced about even more than the others, teaching and building and healing and preaching and giving. Loving.

He really got the ways of the Spirit. His profound knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was an ancient continent-sized dry parched sponge hidden in his soul. One bath with the Holy Spirit thoroughly soaked him, and he was so soaked and swamped that he needed a few years of Zazen in the desert to figure out what the new orientation of the universe was, and to integrate his movement to greater dimensionality. He learned new realities, deeper aspects of Reality. As he (or his students) writes in Ephesians 5, “two become one.” The Spirit sometimes operates in realms where logic, causality, and old systems of human relating are transcended. He started “at Gamaliel’s feet” (Acts 22:3) and went to being a star student of the Holy Spirit.

Was there a relationship between the Pentecost and our human spiritual evolution? Let’s return for a moment to the anthropological perspective. With the Axial Age, more interior space developed in us. This was great for creativity, but bad for old family structures. This results in breakdown of clans and tribes. On the positive side, inventions, technology, and much later, “job fairs” arrived to humanity.

This also results in INDIVIDUALITY, which is a crucial part of our evolution. (Dierkes mentions individuality, saying Paul’s letter represents a “total critique of Western culture’s pursuit of radical individualism.” I wish here to show how individualism is a needed, if only temporary, part of our evolution and person.)

Of course, we acknowledge that we also need community, now more than ever. But this will be, for the first time, a community of articulated individuals. A powerful, intelligent community. And fun, with art, with social style and real culture.

But as things develop, difficulties arise. There are emotional roller-coasters in evolution. The individual, alone and lonely, becomes more fearful and greedy. Even though our natural environment is much safer, we want to hoard money and possessions. Especially today. The New Testament, written when Humanity had already achieved a lot of progress, says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10) Indeed, the countless illegal and immoral and corrupt transactions that led to the subprime mortgage disaster of 2008 are a proof of this.

Again, fear and pride have a sloppy polarity with each other.

In Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings, Saruman the Lonely, who craves power and separation from humans, lives in a tower, above and cut off from human contact. His pride is stoked when Gandalf comes to him for help, and he descends and talks down to Gandalf, establishing his superiority over him, eliminating equal friendship and community.

Saruman the Lonely, in his conversations with his captives, captors, and orcs, is often seen to be oscillating between pride and fear. Opposite him, Gandalf loves, moves, communicates, cares, dances with hobbits, and, as a result of his human development and commitment, he is given even greater power yet.

The desert monks of Egypt, those great Ammas and Abbas, living in the intense afterglow of the Pentecost event, tracked the internal emotions with great precision.

The monks understood anger, for example. If anger is not given proper expression, and is suppressed or repressed, it contaminates reservoirs within us: Repressed anger can develop into fear, all the way to anxiety. Or, in a different direction, repressed anger can also develop into sadness, all the way to depression and despair.

Anger is a part of our world. If the Iliad of Homer is the first book of Western Civilization, then the first word of Western Civilization is “anger,” as it is literally the first word of the ancient text of the Iliad.

Part of our human relationships, and communal conduct, is helping people declare and express their anger in positive ways. Anger, worked with constructively and well, becomes the capacity for greater love. Paul knew this.

Suffering, worked with constructively and well, widens and expands our spiritual circuitry. We become capable of receiving more grace, reality, Holy Spirit.

Today, we can, and must, drop our fear and greed. Because today, we are being called to something….

We are being called to Love. Many people succeeded in figuring out the reality of love, and how it is singularly appropriate for human existence. Again, we see here a merging of two seemingly distinct storylines: The growth of Love fostered by our Scriptures, religions, and religious founders (Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad) does indeed merge into a “scientific or neutral” understanding of anthropology.

Christians, Muslims, and others invented our first orphanages, hospitals, and even education for poor children. These were shocking and revolutionary concepts. They changed our society and introduced far more Love and Compassion into our Human Family. Additionally, this individual-driven advance of our communities helps, in return, provide the societal setting for greater individual progress in the next generations. Individuals help community, and community helps all the individuals.

Indeed, the hard-won individual interior capacity for love is also manifested in greater communal concern. And a stronger community both allows and encourages people to be more loving.

So let us take our fear and greed, and transform it into a conscious concern for our community. Rather than shrink in fear and greed, let us reach out to each other in greater trust, awareness, respect, and love. This is our evolutionary vocation.

Part II: Now, and the Future

Blue -- Malak Mattar

Artwork by Malak Mattar, a 16-year old Muslim artist from Gaza; shown here with her permission

Humans are more complex today, as is our Humanity. We have more interior space.

In our recent quest for individuation, which was/is necessary, we have sometimes been seized by fear and greed—but some of this was bound to happen. It’s perhaps made more understandable by the bewildering speed and coldnesses of modern society, and by the potentially terrifying lack of integration and order, as things emerge in chaotic ways. As we recognize any fear and greed we’ve accrued, let’s be rid of it.

Today we have more access to traditions and to spiritual ways, but there are more distractions that would keep us from immersing into a discipline. There is less (positive) pressure to stick with one method. His Holiness the Dalai Lama said something like: “Pick one of the world’s major religious traditions, and do it.”8I have not been able to find where this statement was recorded; if I have erred, I ask pardon. To follow a tradition deeply has not been easy to do in today’s world. But, as always, the Divine will meet us where we are–and some of us have found growth and learning by moving among multiple traditions, and by engaging a combination of practices. The key thing is to practice and to love.

Our practice is an anchor in a world with so much going on. Our humanity is doing many things, some of which are wonderful, some less so. The wild openness of “things human” is all over the map today:

  • We are becoming a charitable humanity, and the world responds (with mixed motives) by sending aid to a natural disaster in any part of the world. Bravo!
  • Human rights are at an all-time high, at least in the law books. Bravo!
  • The divide between rich and poor is the hugest ever, and growing. Oops.
  • In this time of the growth of love, we have more and crueler and world-ending weapons than ever before. Oops.
  • Our MSM (mainstream media) is not media, but corporate zionist neo-lib or neo-con factories of deceit that lie to us to keep us misinformed, distracted, and fearful. This intentionally works totally against the positive trends of our ongoing evolution. The MSM would take us back to the Stone Age. Oops.

And yet, amidst this vicious chaos (which is sometimes intentionally fostered by governments and media), the Spirit is here, guiding us, despite the demons who would corrupt our society.

1 Corinthians 13—Love Evolving Today: The New Pentecost, or, a New Axial Period

Chris Dierkes’ essay accomplishes an adroit transfer and application of 1 Cor 13 to today. Let us consider our contemporary context in the light of our spiritual evolution into the reality of love.

Above, we considered how Paul was the lead swimmer in the Spiritual flood of the Pentecost. Paul does not talk much about the historical Jesus. (Yet the Christ is always there as the context, in whom Paul lives and moves and has his being.) On the other hand, Paul talks a lot about the Holy Spirit. Paul gave his communities very much instruction in the ways of the Holy Spirit, especially when he was with them in person.

There is something similar to the Pentecost happening in the entire world today. Just as Dierkes sees echoes of the people of Corinth in us today, so too is our world experiencing an immense tide of the Spirit, as did Corinth.

The “Good Pope,” John XXIII, called today the “New Pentecost”—an astounding and shocking statement for a Pope to make.9Pope St. John XXIII called for Vatican II in a surprise statement at St. Paul Outside the Walls, in Rome, on 25 January 1959, the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. He said this era would be a “New Pentecost.” Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, S.D.B., says that leading up to Pope John’s decision and announcement to convene the Council, “He was ‘provoked’ by the Spirit of God and by internal and external ferments that caused some discomfort.” What Cardinal Maradiaga has described is precisely how the Holy Spirit works today. The psychologist Carl Jung speaks of Synchronicity. This happens when our internal thoughts, dreams, or memories have a striking parallel to external events in our waking day. There is an alignment of our internal “microcosm” and the external “macrocosm.” The Holy Spirit often communicates with us, and teaches us, by Synchronicity. The fine article by Cardinal Maradiaga: http://americamagazine.org/issue/5153/article/new-pentecost 

A New Pentecost means:

  1. a new immediacy of relationship with the Holy Spirit, and
  2. a rebirth of Christianity, and perhaps of all Humanity. Or, for non-Christians, we could call this a New Axial Period. One fruit of this time: The sharing between faiths, traditions, and religions is at an all-time high. How blessed we are.

There is something going on today. Something wonderful.

The great sage and mystic Bruno Barnhart said that we are on the threshold of a new Axial Period.

There are many mystics walking about our Earth today. Something is emerging.

A bit less than halfway through his essay, Dierkes recounts Paul’s list of the spiritual gifts from 1 Corinthians 12.

Today, there are far more gifts. Really.

Today, spiritual gifts include advances in the ability to share our minds and imaginations, and so to effect profound psychic healing in wounded people. The expansion of our human psyche, aided by our evolutionary growth, has allowed the Spirit to develop greater gifts within us.

An example: I know a mystic woman and man. The woman had been abused as a child. The man imagined himself loving her, over a period of time. Their minds, memories, and imaginations merged. They did not touch physically.

The Divine respects the human person. The Divine could have instantly healed her. But that would disrespect human history. So the Divine situates us for an end-run around the historical reality.

The woman now has two sets of memories and imaginings to choose from. She can imagine sexuality in a new light. She can see herself being loved by a man who loves her. From that new vantage point, she has new emotional responses…. Already, her deep psyche is healing. Already, she knows new realities.

The woman was a mystic before the man was. They work together, even if they’re not on the same continent.

The woman is strong now (she was previously weak), and is a Spiritual TITAN. She is DEEP with the Holy Spirit. The man is of a lesser spiritual stature.

Nowadays, the man is led to new women, and is with them, psychically, not physically, for a short time or a longer time. There is often not much actual conversation between them. Often there is no normal communication between them. But the Spirit tells the man who his next neighbor is to be.

People are healed, and become mystics themselves. The psychic integration and healing in each person—the integration of anima with animus in all of us—allows for pronounced individual Spiritual evolution in a significant way.

This is happening today.

Perhaps you have your own experience of, or have received, Spiritual gifts.

There is evolution, even rapid growth, in Paul’s Ode to Love. This perhaps can be accelerated in the New Pentecost of today. Verse 13:10 speaks of an impending perfection, completion, or maturity. Then he says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child . . .” It’s unusual that he discusses a child’s “reasoning.” Perhaps he’s referring to less-evolved adults who constantly “reason” with fear and greed in the mix. Paul, who often speaks on multiple levels of meaning at once, would be happy to see an end of such primitive ways of social calculation. Bring on the love and the mature human beings! This verse continues with a rather rapid growth, from “child” (or even “infant”) to “man”: “But when I became a man (aner), I put away childish things.”

Childish things, such as fear and greed, now put away, what positive things are found in Spiritual adulthood, in our evolved human maturity? A direct mature relationship with God:

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then, face to face.” (13:11)

Our evolution has a fulfillment in a far deeper love relationship with God.

John’s Gospel has a similar radically quick growth-evolution trajectory. John too discusses the evolution of humanity by using an image of the fast growth of a single human life. Chapters 13-17 of that Gospel, whose author learned much from Paul, are the Farewell Discourse. In this long talk, Jesus teaches his friends about the approaching arrival of the Holy Spirit, who will “teach you everything.” (John 14:26) Chapter 16 has a woman giving birth. The end of the situation is what we expect, but is also different from what we expect:

“The woman has grief when she bears, because her hour has come, but when she brings forth the child, she no longer remembers the distress, because of the joy that a man was born into the world.” (John 16:21, emphasis added) “Man” here is “anthropos,” which could also be translated as “human.” Again, we see a quick trajectory from “child” to “mature human person.” This is evolution.

More things, many more things, are happening today. Some of you know this. If you don’t know it, then meditate, or pray, and be at peace, and ask for the Divine to alight upon your shoulder.

Two paragraphs earlier, Dierkes says, “Esoteric or paranormal experience were apparently quite common in the Corinthian church.” Absolutely spot on.

Recall, this is in the sunburst of the first Pentecost.

Today, we are in the New Pentecost. And so there is much more Spiritual reality among us. And, we are also the beneficiaries of two millennia of human evolution that have happened since Paul wrote to Corinth.

Things are more complex today, and are meant to be more complex.

We need the Spirit today. It is our only Evolutionary Path forward—to walk with the Spirit.

We are getting into such complex situations, that a more evolved human person is needed. This is happening. A Divinized Humanity is emerging. God is real. God’s Spirit is with our evolving Humanity. Right now. (A religious sister, Dr. Mary L. Coloe, PBVM, speaking of John’s Gospel, says that the Holy Spirit wants to become part of our DNA.)

The future Humanity will all ‘believe’ in God because we will all have immediate knowledge and experience of God. As Paul hints at the end of 1 Cor 13, Faith will partially evaporate, in a good way. Faith will eventually be lovingly placed back on the tool shed wall (Rule of St. Benedict), because we will see face to face. With God. Bruno Barnhart said, “Gnosis is faith experienced.”

The reality of the Spiritual realm, as it becomes more undeniable to all, will affect many things in positive new ways. Even science will want to acknowledge this “newly proven Reality.”

The future scientist will, of necessity, be a mystic. Because of the complexity we are entering, the thunderous overwhelming array of choices that will be before us, the shocking spectrum of possible courses. With the Spirit, we will navigate this with ease.

The New Axial Period, the New Pentecost, will be a time of universal acknowledgment of the Divine. Nor will everyone be necessarily corralled into one religious camp, or forced into “the one and only” correct mosque, church, or zendo. Truth loves dialogue. There will still be endless learning before us. And endless dialogue as we journey together in Allah, in whom we live and move and have our being.

Some of the “proofs” of the existence of God are occurring right now. For example, I have been studying the Mystical Psalm Structures—a recent rediscovery. Another essay shall present them. These structures are hidden, by the Spirit, in the Psalms of David (which the Qur’an mentions three times as the Zabur of Dawood) of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). Those who composed the individual Psalms were unaware of the Psalm Structures. Yet almost every page of the New Testament reveals their Christian authors consciously speaking of the Mystical Psalm Structures, but in intentionally concealed ways. The New Testament authors know of these realities, but do not quite place them plainly on the table for all to immediately see. They, instead, give many hints, clues, and innuendos. Once you have broken the code of the Psalms (and the Psalms should be the least organized book of the Bible!), then you see that the Mystical Psalm Structures are referred to constantly in the New Testament. Jesus of Nazareth knew the Psalm Structures. (Paul saw the Psalm Structures after his conversion, and taught almost all the other New Testament authors more deeply about them.)

These structures are not limited to the Judeo-Christian Bible. The Qur’an was given to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) by the mighty Angel Jibreel (Gabriel). The Qur’an is brimming, flowing over like a fountain of life, with mystical knowledge of the Psalm Structures (again, the Qur’an refers to the Psalms, the Zabur of Dawood, three times; the Qur’an also refers, sometimes positively, to Christian monks of Egypt, Italy Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon (who knew the Psalm Structures deeply)).

Outside the Abrahamic traditions, the Bible and Qur’an’s mystical realities have connections to Chandogya Upanishad, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Taoist art, among possibly many more. Could this just be a wild accident? Or is there something more to these correlations? Forthcoming writing discusses this, and shows that it is not an accident.

Back to 1 Corinthians:

Paul shows us a light prism before such prisms were invented:

In Chapter 12 he discusses the Holy Spirit. In verses 4, 5, and 6 he mentions the Spirit, the Lord, and God, and so there is here a rare appearance of the Holy Trinity in the Bible. Unity in multiplicity, and multiplicity in unity. The word “one” appears at least 13 times in this chapter, and its first appearance describes the Holy Spirit as “One.” But then the one light of the Holy Spirit shines through the prism, and a rainbow of Spiritual Gifts beams out of the triangular glass. Dierkes lists them, although the list has grown much longer today.

There is another discussion of multiplicity and unity, this time connected with the reality of the Body of Christ. We are all members of one body. This is not easy to wrap our heads around.

But then towards the end of the great hymn to love of Chapter 13, these gifts start to be pulled back into the Godhead. They will disappear, no longer needed. The many various gifts, these strands of light of every color, are rewoven with each other, gathered together, and are taken up and gone again.

The gifts disappear into another united group of three—but this time, it is not the Trinity. It is the HUMAN theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. The gifts have served their purpose by making humanity more like God, and more like the intensely hot relationship of love that is in the Godhead-Trinity.

The Body of Christ emulates the Trinity. We grow in Love. 1 John 4 repeatedly says, “God Is Love.” Therefore, the Spiritual gifts help us learn to be more Divine, as we make the Body of Christ, the Human Community, more like the inner life of God.10Genesis 1:26-27 opens a miraculous window into the inner life of God: “And God is saying, ‘Let us make humanity in our image, as our likeness….’ And God is creating the human in (God’s) image, in the image of God he created (the human), male and female he created them.”

Paul has another chiastic structure holding Chapter 13. The final verse of Chapter 12 is:

“But STRIVE for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

Then there is Chapter 13. Following Chapter 13, the first verse of Chapter 14 is:

“PURSUE LOVE, and STRIVE for the spiritual gifts.”

Both exhortations have the verb “strive,” which is related to our word “zeal.”

Paul adds something new, however, to the exhortation that appears after Chapter 13. He says, “Pursue Love.” We pursue God, we chase God as our divine lover or beloved. Paul encourages us to be more like God. We become beings of Love.

Again, the gifts return to Holy Spirit, but with something new: they return to God WITH US HUMANS, who are now mixed with the content of 1 Cor 13, which is Love. But later the New Testament says, “God Is Love.” Humanity is now partaking more deeply in God.

Remember that rainbow of light that is taken back into God? Well, it now includes us, all the members of the Body of Christ (or World Soul, nous-sphere, etc.).

The bundle of dancing colored light now includes God and Humanity together. The Divine-Human strand now enters back into the reality behind the prism, the Godhead.

God is in us now, and we are in God now.

The Second Letter of Peter says precisely the same thing. Peter says that we are to be partakers of the Divine Nature. This is shocking, and it’s right in the New Testament of the Bible. In the 4th verse of his second letter, Peter says that we are meant to be “participants of the Divine Nature.”

Eastern Christianity, such as the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox, have deosis as a central part of their faith. Deosis (and theosis) is the understanding that God wants us to evolve and grow and be lifted up by God into God. There are many versions and various teachings about deosis in the Eastern Churches. The Western Church also has deosis in its theology, but it does not receive the prominence that the Eastern Churches give to it. We progress in Divinity, and become more Human.

Spiritual People Today: Helping Love Evolve

In his article, Chris Dierkes addresses how some of the same personal and societal foibles that people had in Paul’s Corinthian community appear in us today. This is entirely to be expected, especially given the necessary, yet difficult, fracturing of society and family structure and relationships that modern society, with our recent adventures in individuation, has facilitated.

Before and after the great hymn to Love, Paul urges us to strive for the higher gifts. To want spiritual gifts, he says, is a good desire, a healthy desire.

The Mystical Psalm Structures have a lot to do with the education of desire, and with the varieties of love.

The Greeks had various kinds of love, and several words for love. Three of the important ones are philia (kind sisterly and brotherly love, communal love), eros (erotic love), and agape (profound Love, Divine Love, Humans Learning Divine Love).

Paul’s Chapter 13 is all about Agape. The highest form of Love.

This does not mean that eros and philia get left behind, no. They are found in and among Agape. But it’s good for us to really focus on Agape, and, sometimes, we may have to leave eros, and even philia, to the side for a while. We’ll be able to pick these up again later, in far better ways.

Let’s return to the statement in 2 Peter 1:4, where we are urged to become partakers of the Divine Nature. Peter does something astounding here. He takes the phrase “Godly/Divine Nature,” which in the Greek is 2 feminine words, and splits them, placing the masculine word “partakers,” or “participants,” between them. Masculine inside the Feminine. The Feminine contains the Masculine. There is a hint of Human sexuality with the Divine here. This is in accord with the stunning 26th verse of the Bible (see footnote 10).

Heaven is not milquetoast. The trials on earth serve to strengthen and prepare us to be able to, actually, sustain the ecstasy of heaven. To be near the Divine. Closeness to Allah requires tremendous strength, training, appetite, and desire.

Yet this same verse of Peter’s, 2 Peter 1:4, also has a warning about lust. [ ! ]

Peter is acknowledging that in the presence of the Holy Spirit being given to us, we must move with care and maturity in our lives. Such care leads to great rewards.

As we proceed on the journey, good actions are increasingly set closer to potentially bad actions. Our accuracy sharpens. The final Surah of the Qur’an, the amazing Surah 114, speaks of this. The struggle is often more internal. The purer and stronger our conscience is, the faster, further, higher, and deeper we’ll fly.

Let us be teachers.

Let us be astronauts, sailors among the stars, of Agape. This will lead us to a greater appropriation of the Earth, and the earth of our bodies. (Modern mystics also report having mystical experiences at the minute, even cellular, level of the body.)

Let us love our sisters and brothers dearly. Let us care and teach them. If we’re spiritual teachers, let us guide them perfectly. Let us ask the Divine for help in this.

As Dierkes says, the “question of the ethics of our psyches is absolutely crucial.” And how!

What if the future of Humanity is a shared mind? Paul says elsewhere, “Put on the mind of Christ.” He’s not kidding.

Bruno Barnhart, speaking of what has already begun in these our days, said, “It’s like one mind, and it’s like a billion minds.”

The Spiritual Gifts of today affect our psyches, souls, and hearts even more than in Paul’s day. This being the case, we owe it to the human community, and they to us, to be constantly refining our consciences, our springs of intuition. The conscience is vital! The conscience is the hinge of our connection to the Divine, for Divine Intuition and Divine Inspiration arrive to us through our conscience. If our conscience is inoperative, we will miss the Holy Spirit entirely. We’ll miss the boat.11For those new to this notion, the Examen of Conscience can be helpful. The Examen was begun perhaps by the desert monks of Egypt. St. Gregory the Great developed it further, as did St. Ignatius Loyola after him. The Examen can be a hugely insightful and transformative Spiritual practice. It aids our growth in self-knowledge.

People, if we are going to be sharing our minds and souls with each other, we want them to be as clean and as strong as they can be. Again, cleanliness here does not mean milquetoast. The phrase “Purity of Heart” has as its end the strengthening of our heart, the ability to take staggering amounts of Divine joy, to cleave into the radiant joyful furnace that is all good.

Additionally, if we would like to receive direct communication from the Holy Spirit–which is happening today–the crisp operation of our conscience is necessary. The Holy Spirit may teach us new languages to communicate with us.

If you are lost now, and have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. Jesus tells us in the Farewell Discourse of John’s Gospel (Chapters 13 – 17) that when the Spirit arrives—when each of us receives the Holy Spirit personally—the Spirit will teach us what we need to know. I can say with confidence and experience that this is exactly what happens. It’s divine…and it’s human. It’s amazing. You will know when it happens. And today, it may be happening more than ever.

The Emergent Spiritual Community

If we want to bring all of our mind, heart, will, imagination, memory, and desire to this new body, this new community, this new Kosmos, this Body of Christ, this World Soul, then we want to bring ALL of something else to this gathering:

We need to bring all of the community.

We want everyone to be there.

Back in the Hebrew Scriptures, every single one of the great ancient prophets speaks of social justice. Every. Single. Prophet. Ever. Speaks. Of. Social. Justice.

Care for the poor.

Care for the orphan.

Care for the widow.

Care for the stranger.

Care for the indigenous.

Care for every single human person that is in the community.

In Psalm 72, which is both a Ladder Psalm and a Menorah Psalm, the best and highest leader is the one who cares for the lowest and the weakest and the most disenfranchised. Why? Psalm 72 has the answer to that as well:

When all people in a community are loved and cared for, then joy, for all, will be at a maximum. Mother Earth will know that her children, all of us earthlings, are at a maximum point of community. And She, Mother Earth, will be happy. The Earth can heal Herself. And she will. Harvests will be more bountiful than ever. There will be a global Thanksgiving. Kosmos will happen. A joyful universe, as Romans 8 promises.

Dierkes too mentions the periphery, the forgotten, the marginalized (in about the 43rd paragraph), as does Pope Francis in all of his documents. Dierkes writes: “….Paul reminds us that those who seem on the periphery, the forgotten, marginalized, and oppressed ones, are the indispensable ones.”

In the next paragraph, Dierkes says something vital, regarding community: “….Paul’s vision is one of radical interdependency or inter-being.” I’m considering getting that line tattooed on my forehead.

Paul says elsewhere that we are all parts of each other. Our evolution involves a deepening love for our community.

Dierkes then criticizes “radical individualism,” which I partially agree with; above, we discussed the evolutionary necessity of some individuation. I would entirely agree with Dierkes, however, that now we need to bring ourselves, as more articulated individuals, back to community, and joyfully immerse in our community(s).

Conclusion

With Dierkes’ article I have minor disagreements, regarding perspective and vocabulary. The only one I’ll mention here is towards the end, when he discusses love.

He says that love is wishing the best for others. That’s Step One.

And it’s proper for all of us, especially in early training periods that we go through, to have this attitude so it becomes a mindset for us. Yet Luke’s Sermon on the Plain develops this further, establishing a return motion too: “Give, and it will be given unto you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall be poured into your bosom; for the measure you give will be the measure you receive.” (Luke 6:38)

John’s Gospel says that Fountains of Living Water will start flowing in our Hearts. This happens only after we have worked grown in giving, in loving others. (The Qur’an echoes this, speaking of Gardens under which streams flow….)

In these verses, our boot camp training and early efforts of love become smoother and more mature. We become builders of community. What’s more, there is a return of love coming to us.

This statement, disarmingly simple at first, is quite complex:

“We all want to love, and we all want to be loved.”

This speaks of multiplicity and complexity. They are 2 completely different action-groups, to love and to be loved! It seems both active and passive! And if we dare to love, then we are left in the vulnerable position of having to hope for reciprocation! Yet the two radically different actions are united by one love.

A going and a coming in one ellipse, one sphere.

If a huge new continent were to be discovered today on our wonderful Earth, we would be stunned and ecstatic. Imagine the rapture with which we would want to explore this new place that we never knew was here. “Truly God is in this place, and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16)

This new Kosmos is here. It is arriving. We must help with the delivery. The more we strive and pray and be and authentically love, the more it will be realized with us right here and now.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ A clear echo of this truth appears in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25: “Then happy I, that love and am beloved.” I have searched but not yet found if another has more of a claim on this saying than Shakespeare.
2. ↑ With the term “evolution,” I am not referring to the various scientific theories that come under the umbrella of evolutionary biology. Scientific study of evolution is a young pursuit, and raises more questions than it answers. There is no clear picture of our biological evolution. Much work remains to be done. (For example, the fossil record still does not support Darwin’s theories, although Darwin said it would.)
3. ↑ For the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has declared this year (2016) as the Year of Mercy.
4. ↑ If the reader notices a merging between anthropology and spiritual events portrayed in Scripture, that is precisely what is intended.
5. ↑ The first temple (attributed to Solomon) was destroyed by the Babylonians, at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. After the Babylonian Captivity, the great Iranian liberator of the Hebrews, Cyrus, allowed them to return to Jerusalem, and encouraged them to rebuild the temple. The second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans. Both temples had extensive underground sewer systems to transport the blood of the sacrifices away.
6. ↑ In Jungian psychology, the “anima” is the collection of “feminine traits” that are in all people, including men. These “feminine traits,” for Jung, included compassion and tenderness. A goal of life is integration, through which a person harmonizes all their capacities in a strong and seamless spectrum. Jung loved John’s Gospel, a Scripture in which human integration holds a central place. At the Cross scene in John 19, the “woman” (Mary) reenters the man (Beloved Disciple), reintegrating the Feminine and Masculine after they had trod separate paths ever since Eve was born of Adam, as described in Genesis.
7. ↑ A bit of humor: Nietzsche, that witty misanthrope, says that the fact that 11 human persons stuck to the same story, even dying for it, proves that God is real!
8. ↑ I have not been able to find where this statement was recorded; if I have erred, I ask pardon.
9. ↑ Pope St. John XXIII called for Vatican II in a surprise statement at St. Paul Outside the Walls, in Rome, on 25 January 1959, the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. He said this era would be a “New Pentecost.” Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, S.D.B., says that leading up to Pope John’s decision and announcement to convene the Council, “He was ‘provoked’ by the Spirit of God and by internal and external ferments that caused some discomfort.” What Cardinal Maradiaga has described is precisely how the Holy Spirit works today. The psychologist Carl Jung speaks of Synchronicity. This happens when our internal thoughts, dreams, or memories have a striking parallel to external events in our waking day. There is an alignment of our internal “microcosm” and the external “macrocosm.” The Holy Spirit often communicates with us, and teaches us, by Synchronicity. The fine article by Cardinal Maradiaga: http://americamagazine.org/issue/5153/article/new-pentecost 
10. ↑ Genesis 1:26-27 opens a miraculous window into the inner life of God: “And God is saying, ‘Let us make humanity in our image, as our likeness….’ And God is creating the human in (God’s) image, in the image of God he created (the human), male and female he created them.”
11. ↑ For those new to this notion, the Examen of Conscience can be helpful. The Examen was begun perhaps by the desert monks of Egypt. St. Gregory the Great developed it further, as did St. Ignatius Loyola after him. The Examen can be a hugely insightful and transformative Spiritual practice. It aids our growth in self-knowledge.

In the Crack

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1.

I feel hands on my body, male-gendered, quasi-human hands, but without physical bodies, invisible; at night they come to study me. I see reams of code, and one of these invisible beings is reading off the code to a vast intelligence. They are studying my body, my night body, my hybrid body, a phase space, a little night music.

The entity reads off the code telepathically, in an unknown language, sharing cognitive frameworks with a vast network of unseen agents, with multiple, hidden agendas. I don’t know how I know this. But I know this. I am more curious than I am afraid. They communicate with tones.

“Can you speak English?” I ask the invisible entity.” I want to remember this.”

“He is awake.” A voice, which sounds computer-generated, speaks. “All biological processing appears to be normal, and will continue to be normal. All organs and glands are functioning normally; heart action, respiration, assimilation, digestion, circulation are normal and will continue to be normal.”

My eyes are closed but I can sense that I am stuck in the in-between, what some would call the bardo, the crack in the cosmic egg. They are trying to make the passage easier, as hands move with precision across my spine and hover behind my physical heart. The voice goes from the highly cognitive into a more affective tone. “Flow,” the voice chants. “Flow…flow….” An electrical charge moves, from his fingers, through my spine, feeling like the prick of an acupuncture needle, bringing both pain and pleasure at the same time.

“Who are you?” I ask. A white noise, a spinning without motion, a sense of vertigo, like when you come home drunk and collapse into bed, a difference in scale. “Are you a teacher? Can you teach me something?”

“No,” the voice responds. “But you can teach us something.”

I wait for instructions. Words mean little, but the auditory digital habit is hard for me to give up. I seek explanations when there are none to be had. A blue light appears in the visual field. It pulses on and off. “We want to study your brain,” the voice says, and I silently consent. “Look at the blue light.” I gaze upon the blue light. The blue light becomes a beam which goes directly into my physical brain and moves in a circle-eight fashion from ear to ear, then steadies into the center of my cranium. I feel a wave of fear. “All finished.”

“But who are?” I ask, destabilizing the experiment.

“I am you,” the voice says, humanly. “We are the Night.”

“But how can you be me?” Words, words, words, huge volumes of dictionaries swirl meaningless content as I struggle with the neuro-semantics of this moment.

“Because,” the voice says, carefully, as if speaking to a lost soul. “We share the same heart. And you are not the body—you are the Night. You are one of us.”

“I want to see you,” I say, fearful of ancient warnings about seeing the Face of God.

Without warning, I lift up and out of the physical, out of the matrix, into an empty white space and view below me a wide spectrum of violent acts, wars, murders, famines, which shakes me profoundly. This parade of violence intensifies into an act of overwhelming horror: I witness a mother with an axe chop up her innocent children.

“Who has created this?” I protest in anger.” Who created this dream? Who is the dreamer of this dream?”

“I am,” a commanding male voice comments from behind and above me. I turn around slowly in my still-human shape, with a front and a back, a left and a right. I share with the voice an up and a down but I am fighting to maintain a structure, a human structure in the midst of anti-structural energetics. He shimmers, a blue-black image, and smiles. “You control the horizontal, we control the vertical.” I settle down, the spinning stops. We are in synch, attuned.

I am speechless, floating in the void, beholding a shimmering, transparent, naked, black man without organs, a God form, with a blue flame in the center of his head. Attracted and repelled by this mysterious figure, I find words. “But why the violence?” I cry out in despair.

“Because,” the Black Man says, “I love the drama. It is beautiful.” He smiles slyly. “And who are you that you can ask such a question?”

I am being seduced and my resistance is weakening, my moral sense lessening. He is beautiful, and he is beyond good and evil. But I am not. I feel the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and here, in this in-between, without foundation, floating in a white void with a black God form with a nihilistic kind of charm, I fear madness. That way madness lies.

He says, “Do you see the blue flame in the center of my head?”

“I do.”

“Touch it.”

My right dream hand passes through his transparent head, and with my extended index finger, I touch the blue flame and feel the human and the other-than-human converging, as a blue light flows into my night body. “Do you like it?” he asks with sadistic pleasure.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” I cry out in ecstatic agony.

“Then take this.” The intensity is too great to maintain subject/object duality. “Give up form.” But I don’t want to become sugar—I want to eat sugar. I want to worship God but I don’t want to become God. Above me is an ocean of bliss and, as I merge with that semen-colored, moon-colored ocean of orgasmic bliss, I hear Peggy Lee singing, Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is….

And then before I enter that zone of bliss, I resist and recall all the lonely people, back there, down there, in the bars, the pool halls, all those little people in the dark, the drunks, the frauds, the fools; and, instantly embraced by a thought form, I fall, back down into the chaos, back toward planet earth, that little blue pearl floating in the middle of nowhere, toward the human body.

I am moving at a great velocity, down, down, down, confused. My thoughts and feelings blur. I am in a crib somewhere on my back looking up at the light coming through dirty windows. My child mind contemplates the body. How many fingers do I have? How many toes? And if your right side floats off, which side is left? Which side is right? And do you have a right to know which is left and which is right? I hear wind chimes and see the flower print of the wallpaper.

Then I grow up into a man’s body. Back to the human zone, to the world of form, to the world of objects, to the infinite horizon, to the force of gravity, to coffee and chocolate, to a shared reality, which we share with the birds and the reptiles….

But I remember something as I lie on my back and breathe deeply, slowly, a tear streaming down my face. I remember that the Sons of Shakti and Shiva are returning, the Children of Kali; we control the vertical, we control the horizontal, we will marry heaven and hell, we have lifted the veil of Isis, we have flown over the rainbow where blue birds fly. And we are coming to your house.

We are going to burn down the house, baby, we are going to burn down the cornfields, we are going to make love among those flaming fields, we are going to make love while they are burning, burning—

2.

Manhattan, Saturday night, 1995. I cranked up the music and prepared to go out. Slipping into my other persona, I tried to admire myself in the mirror. “Live fast, die young,” I told my reflection. I changed into some Calvin Klein khaki shorts and a white t-shirt. Lacing up my combat boots, I felt euphoric. Time to go out, time to let go, time to get down.

Up on the roof, I finished my cocktail as I viewed the hot, red sunset. I watched pedestrians and traffic down below. Geared up for a night on the town, bored rock stars roamed the streets in dark limos looking for sex and drugs. Men in tuxedos and women in couture hung out on the stoops next to bag ladies and thieves, as a big banner in red letters advertised the Contemporary Dance Festival at St. Mark’s Church. The intelligentsia had gathered outside the Church to smoke cigarettes. Tiny galleries full of bad art offered free wine and cheese to the art fags as the drug dealers hawked their stuff openly on the street.

“Kiss my black ass!” some drunk yelled. Some asshole played the drums in an apartment down in the courtyard. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll call the police!” someone screamed from a window.” I finished my drink. The cacophony downstairs made me giddy with excitement, ready, willing, and able to join the human comedy. I was determined to stop in the Locker Room first to say hi to my old friend Barry, the cutest bartender in the East Village.

Quickening my pace, feeling the menace of the big city all around me, I noticed that everyone out tonight was wearing as little as possible. I loved it. Perspiring slightly, I paused at St. Mark’s Place, waiting for a car of heckling kids from New Jersey to pass.

“Hey mister,” a dirty young woman, sitting on a blanket, growled at me. “Why do you faggots all look alike?” I ignored her. Before the light turned green, I started walking away. “Why don’t you faggots go back to faggot land!” she screeched.

“You’re in faggot land, you stupid bitch!” I yelled back at her, quickly dodging a speeding cab. I opened the door to the Locker Room. Enveloped in cool shadow I sat in my regular place at the end of the bar. The bartender was my best friend, Barry, who gave me a sloppy kiss. He was wearing a tank top, revealing his washboard abs.

“Hi, Kensey, what’s up?” Barry greeted me with a wide grin on his handsome face. “I have to tell you about this guy I picked up last night.” He winked at me and made a gesture that meant we would talk later, as he was swamped with the first wave of customers.

I sipped the vodka he poured and enjoyed the air conditioning. Scanning the bar, I noticed that nasty queen Carlo hustling this tall black guy I’d never seen before. The black guy was wearing slacks, a white shirt with a button down collar, open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up, and a gold cross around his neck. He wasn’t listening to Carlo. His eyes wandered across the bar and met mine as I cocked my head to one side and nodded my head to the beat of the music. A smile played upon his features and I returned his gaze, feeling hopeful, feeling asymmetrical, leaning to one side. I nodded my head ever so slightly. He disentangled himself from Carlo and moved down to my end of the bar.

“Hi,” I said, feeling his big warm hand in mine, “I’m Kensey.”

“Joseph,” he said with a deep voice. “You live around here?”

“Not far.”

He glanced down at my thunder thighs and smiled, as if we shared a dirty secret. He said he was from out of town. He offered to buy me another drink. By the second round, he was resting his hand on my thigh. By the third round, his knee was pressed against my crotch. By the fourth round, I was calling him Joey. I figured it was a smooth, easy pick-up, from out of town, gone tomorrow, no regrets. We made small talk; he seemed like a nice guy, stable, working class, in a hurry. He excused himself and went to the bathroom.

“I met this real weirdo last night,” Barry said, turning his baseball cap around and shouting over the music. “He’s a proctologist. He’s into kink and raunch.” Barry, a blonde, blue-eyed devil, still had, at the age thirty-eight, one of the best bodies and filthiest minds in town. I adored him. I leaned forward, eager to dish the dirt. Other customers were listening, too. Barry loved to perform. “Met him at a happy hour at the Lash. He invited me over to his place. We get into the cab and he whips out his huge piece! Well, I was a little stoned and drunk so I got down to work. I love cab sex. A bus drove past; all of these little yentas were pointing their fingers at us as I went down on him in the back seat. It’s a long, long ride up to Harlem.”

“Was he black?” I asked. Barry gave me a naughty look. “Who paid for the cab?”

“He did,” Barry said, loudly, so that all the customers could hear. “He takes me upstairs to his huge apartment, leopard skin rugs, grand piano, mirrors everywhere. He starts acting real mean. Calls me his bitch. Wants to act rough. Gets into this black master, white slave routine, which I find so tired.”

“The lady doth protest too much!” said the English professor, the one with the fruity Oxford accent.

“What kind of role model is he anyway?” Barry asked, while he mixed the professor a martini. “He’s a medical doctor for Christ sake, up all night, smoking, drinking, whoring, acting like a sadist. Goes into his office the next morning and sticks proctoscopes into people’s asses all day!”

“Nice work if you can get it,” said the professor as he sipped the martini. We all laughed. He left Barry a big tip and wandered off to the pool table. I was looking around the bar for Joey. I hoped he hadn’t left. His bag was still under his stool. I watched anxiously.

“I don’t know if I’ll see him again.” Barry poured himself a shot and gulped it down. He leaned over toward me and said, confidentially, “It’s just more of the same top bottom rigid patriarchal bullshit with racial overtones. Who needs that?”

“We do,” I said. Joey reappeared, headed my way.

“Who’s your hot date?” Barry asked. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“He’s from Philly. I’ll tell you about him tomorrow.”

Barry walked away, giving us privacy.

“What’s your name again?” Joey asked, leaning against me.

“Kensey Jones.” I slurred my words slightly. He placed a hand on my thigh. He put his other hand on the small of my back. “Let’s go back to my place shall we?” I waved goodbye to Barry. He blew me a kiss.

As we walked back to my apartment, I learned that Joey’s stride was wider than mine, that he was a couple of inches taller, that he liked to play basketball in his spare time, and that he was an auto mechanic. He ran his own garage, after serving in the army as a drill sergeant. He recoiled from my touch.

“Don’t hold hands,” he said. “Not in public.” I noticed the bit of gray in his goatee, spreading to his short crinkly hair around the temples. I guessed he was an old-fashioned, straight-acting hipster. I had a soft spot for these hard guys. I imagined that underneath the tough exterior was a poet, a social activist, someone good, but I was usually wrong. “Where are you from?”

“Texas,” I said proudly, “but I’m a New Yorker now. I’ve been living here a long time.”

“A Texan.” He smirked. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-three.” The same age, I thought, that my mother was when she died, the same age as Christ when he died on the cross. “How about you?”

“I’m turning forty next month. An old man—”

“Yo, Kensey!” A guy I knew shouted my name from across the street. “You go girl!” He gave me the thumbs up sign. I waved back at him.

“Looks like you got a reputation.” Joey said, his tone souring, tense, on edge.

“I get around.” I opened the front door, cautious, careful. “Five flights up.” As I climbed the steep stairs I felt his body heat right behind mine. When I opened the door we were both out of breath.

“Nice ass,” he said.

“Gee, thanks.” I got the door open, turned on the overhead fan, and assumed I would be getting fucked. I had already prepared for that, had the condoms and lube in a drawer near the couch. “Sorry I got no air conditioning. It broke.”

Sitting back on my black leather couch, Joey looked even bigger than he did on the street. He took off his sandals and put his bare feet on my coffee table. He had a scar on the sole of his right foot that looked like an exploding star. I wondered what he must have stepped on to get a scar like that. The purr of the overhead fan softened the street noise. I turned up the music. Etta James was singing, I want a Sunday kind of Love. Joey acted like Pimp Daddy Cool. A real tough guy, as if he owned the place. He unbuttoned his shirt. I knelt beside him on the floor. I put my hand on his knee. He nodded his head. He had another scar across his forehead. I reached over and touched it.

“Where did you get a scar like that?”

“Someone threw a TV set at me,” he scowled.

” Impressive,” I said. God only knows the trouble he’s seen.

“So you’re into black guys?” He leaned his head back on a pillow, looking at me through lowered lids.

“No, baby, I think black guys are into me.”

“You just want a black guy to fuck your ass?”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“No problem,” he said, spreading his legs wide open. “No problem at all. Do you want me to give it to you nice and easy or do you want me to really take you?”

“Okay,” I said. I knew this script really well.

I moved the coffee table out of the way. I held his stiffness. I unzipped him. His cock was a bit crooked. Then I proceeded to deep-throat him. A nice cross-breeze lifted the thin curtain like Kim Novak’s scarf in Vertigo. He was gazing out the window, not paying attention to my excellent service. The twin towers of the World Trade Center rose like a mirage above the roofs of the dingy tenements. The red light on the top of one of their giant antennae winked on and off as a yellow moon, almost full, came too near the earth.

“Can your neighbors see us?” he asked, distracted by the view.

I pulled off his dick to gasp, “I hope so.” I accepted with pride my own surrender to his big black cock. I felt all those eyes out there, watching us, silently, imagining hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, staring at us through their binoculars with a sense of envy and outrage. His shirt was off and I felt that hard body, tense body, lonely body, his body, my body, blending, his pants around his ankles. He had long, strong legs, his legs, my legs, getting tangled together, with a smell of talcum powder, a taste of vodka. He reached over and squeezed my ass.

“Take off your pants,” he whispered.

“Yes, sir.” I said, in my best southern drawl, playing the new recruit. I pulled off my Calvin Kleins.

“Turn around,” he commanded, playing the drill sergeant. “Bend over. Spread those cheeks. Are you clean, soldier?”

“Yes sir,” I said, starting to get into it.

He ate out my ass. He slapped my ass. With a wet finger he probed me. He put on a condom, squeezed out the lube. I took it all inside me just like a pro. He looked towards my bedroom. With his sex inside me, he carried me in his arms, like a sleepy child to the bedroom. My arms around his neck, floating, he lowered me down on the bed like he was doing squats at the gym. I tasted his sweat, smelled his industrial strength deodorant. He turned away from my kiss.

“You’re white, I’m black,” he said, thrusting into me, expressing his pent-up male rage.

“White men have the power, I’m fucking a white man.” I moaned and acted like I enjoyed it.

He pulled out and shot his load on my chest. He collapsed across my body like someone who’d been shot. We were quiet, breathing the same breath. “Put your arms around me,” he said. I obeyed. Then he started to cry. He cried softly. I felt his hot tears spill onto my neck. “I’m sorry,” he said, like an actor who had forgotten his lines. I stroked the hard muscles of his back as his tears dropped onto my chest. “You’re a nice guy,” he said, “and I’ve been treating you like shit.”

“I’m used to it. I don’t take it personal.” I held him till he stopped crying. I knew why he wept. He was grieving for someone he loved.

I went into the bathroom, rinsed off his semen and tears. I asked the Peggy Lee question, while looking at myself, bleary-eyed in the mirror. ‘Is that all there is? I wondered. ‘Is that all there is to love?‘ I wrung out a washcloth. I got a glass of water. I went back into the bedroom. “I can’t see you in the dark,” I whispered.

Turning on a lamp, I startled the pitch-black Zulu warrior, reclining on the white cotton sheets. I handed him the glass of water. He drank it. He put the glass on the table. Feeling like the Good Samaritan, I washed him off with the cool washcloth.

“Thank you,” he said. He looked up at me, watching carefully.

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re a nice guy,” he repeated. His breathing had returned to normal, his trembling lids closed softly over those sad eyes. His face now looked as serene as the young Buddha in blissful meditation. The crucifix on his coal-black skin flashed fiery gold in the lamplight. He opened his eyes slowly. He reached over, stroked my cock. “You haven’t come yet.”

“Do you want me to?” I asked, whispering as if we were in church.

The roles were reversed. Joey was on bottom. I folded him in my arms, suddenly grateful to him for giving himself to me. What beauty in that gesture. I kissed his crucifix before I moved upwards with my tongue to praise the graceful curve of his throat, his ears, his lips. He liked to kiss after all. He turned onto his stomach. My tongue slid down his back, to the base of his spine, got him wet.

“You won’t hold my hand in public,” I taunted him, “but will you let a white boy fuck your ass?”

“Easy, baby. Easy.”

I entered him slowly, wrapped my arms around him. He felt like a sleek and slippery dolphin. I rode him, Zen-like, slowly and gently, across still, sparkling waters, hearing soft, percussive sounds, faraway voices inside my mind, floating, distant from shore. Pulled down into the center of him, coming back to planet earth, gravity-bound and heavy, on top of him, sweating, I finished with a cry. The little death. We were still. His breathing almost stopped. I studied his face. A dream child, drooling on the pillow, he wasn’t back home yet. He was still in that other world.

“Marry me,” he mumbled, half asleep. “Marry me.”

“Okay,” I said, kissing him. “I’ll marry you.” I pulled out of him, tossed the wet condom on the floor, wrapped the sheet around him and turned off the lamp. I watched the darkness, the darkness that I loved, the darkness that set me free every night, the darkness I knew before I had a name, the darkness before the Big Bang.

∞

I got up early the next morning and did my yoga while Joey slept. I was sitting on my cushion in a lotus pose, when Joey walked sleepily into the living room.

“Hey, Kensey. What’s up?”

I opened my eyes. “I’m meditating.”

“Are you a Buddhist?”

“No. I’m into stress management. I’m studying to be a yoga teacher.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “Can you teach me how to relax?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He looked through my books and CDs as I made coffee. He put on some jazz while I scrambled some eggs. We shared the paper. He read the sports section. I read the movie reviews. I watched the expression on this handsome stranger’s face, his muscular mechanic’s arms folded across his broad chest. I got a feeling of deja vu.

He looked up. “Yeah?” he said. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” I said, changing my mind. Now was not the time to give away my secret. A wave of shyness overcame me. “Last night, you asked me to marry you.”

“I did?” he said, evading me. “I was drunk, man. We were having sex.” He swaggered, “You didn’t believe me, did you?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t believe you.”

“Don’t know why,” he said, now avoiding my gaze. “I got so sad. That happens when I drink. Don’t like to drink. I hate the bars.” For a second he looked uncertain—vulnerable. I just waited. He asked the million-dollar question. “You got a boyfriend?”

“Not really.” I shrugged my shoulders. I tried to overcome my reluctance. “How about you? Got a lover? Is that who you were crying about?”

“Not anymore,” he said, changing the subject real fast. “Man, I like the way you look. You look fine. I had a good time last night.”

“Me, too.” I returned his compliment and invited him to the movies. I was relieved when he said yes. It was a Sunday kind of love.

As we stood in line, waiting for tickets, he stood a discreet distance away from me. I couldn’t understand his stiff aloofness. I guessed he was kind of closeted back in Philly. I noticed looks of envy from other gay men. It would be obvious to most New Yorkers that we had just slept together.

Sitting side by side in the dark theater, he lost some of his reserve. We had eaten all the popcorn. The movie was almost over. While watching Bruce Willis beat up a lot of people in an orgy of violence, Joey’s large, warm hand slipped into mine, as casual as a big posh car sliding smoothly into a suburban driveway.

It was a warm but breezy afternoon. We walked around, not talking much. I took him to the lake in Central Park, near sunset, and we sat on the big rocks at its edge as the sky turned fuchsia. I admired his strong profile. Joey sent a pebble skimming across the surface of the lake. Surrounded by cackling ducks, we didn’t talk much, but I dared to hope again.

We walked to the Port Authority without saying a word. I gave him my business card and asked him to give me a call. I saw he had an urge to kiss me but he stopped himself. We were out in public. He offered his hand. I held it a little longer than necessary, feeling its weight, its strength, its weakness. He climbed onto the bus. I watched him find a seat and throw his shoulder bag into the overhead compartment. I waited for the bus to pull out. We waved goodbye to each other.

∞

Joey didn’t call. My expectations faded into disappointment, which I protected myself from as best I could. I pretended I didn’t care, berated myself for being a romantic fool, persuaded myself that I was a single man and always would be, that I didn’t need any of that kid stuff, but I was lying to myself. I missed him, seemed to see him everywhere. Whenever I saw a black man with Joey’s build, my heart skipped a beat, just like love-sick Jimmy Stewart as he searched the sad streets for every blonde babe who looked like Kim Novak. He wasn’t just a man. Joey had become, against my will, a symbol for something, but what?

He had asked me to marry him. That was it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was always Joey, because he had asked me to marry him. No one had ever asked me that before. The question stirred up a controversy within me that was ancient as it was deep. We couldn’t get married, we couldn’t be normal people, and shouldn’t even try. “Marry me,” he had cried. Pedro would have told me to be careful.

Those summer nights, up on the crooked roof of my building, I’d listen to the hum of the downtown traffic and dream of Joey out there somewhere in the vast cosmic ocean. I’d find a star and focus until my mind became still. I closed my eyes and imagined being with Joey again. Opening my eyes, I returned with a dazed feeling, not knowing where I’d gone, not sure of where I was. In angry desperation at Joey for not calling, I decided to go out and find some rough trade, someone with a swagger and a strong build, someone to make me angry, someone that I would throw out of the house for stealing money out of my pants pockets. I sought out sex without love as much as possible, but somehow the desire for love kept coming back to me. Marry me. Fuck that shit. Marry me. Marry me.

∞

“Who’s OJ?” I asked the bartender who was fixated on the TV.

“OJ Simpson,” he answered. “Football star. Won the Heisman trophy back in the sixties—”

“I’m a faggot,” I said. “What do I know about football?”

“Killed his wife. Just happened. Been on the news all day.” The bartender mumbled what sounded like “white chick.” We watched OJ being led into custody, on the loud TV screen.

“Too bad,” I replied. “He’s really cute. “I felt the burn of the cheap tequila hit my stomach.

“He was my hero.” A fat black queen at the other end of the bar had overheard what I said. “I had a big crush on him.” He slumped forward, knocked over his beer bottle. Grabbing the bottle, half of it spilled, he barked at the bartender,” He ain’t guilty till he’s proven innocent. You white motherfuckers want to lynch him. Turn that shit off. I had to watch that shit all day. I’m here to have me some fun—” The black queen stumbled over to the jukebox, dropped a coin in the slot, and selected a song. The bartender switched to the porn channel, where naked men made love to one another in a misty locker room.

Boy now go, walk out the door, don’t come around here, you’re not welcome anymore. The diva’s voice filled the bar. The fat black queen mouthed her words.

The bartender wiped up the spill at the other end of the bar. Alone at this end, I enjoyed the defiant lyrics. I watched the fat queen, slightly drunk, move to the music, her big bulk shaking like jello.

“I love this song,” he said, to no one in particular. “My coming out song.” He laughed to himself.

I gazed out the grimy window to view the building across the street, where the unmarked door of the Bijou swung open, and a parade of men and boys kept going in and out of it.

Turning my attention back to the dimly lit bar, I watched the homeboys play pool. One player, a gangly youth with baggy pants, glanced my way, scratched his balls, yawned. No action here. I’d rather be across the street.

I will survive, sang the diva bitterly, as long as I know how to love….

I don’t want to survive, I thought to myself, I want to get off the wheel of samsara. I want to share the merit of my meditation with all sentient beings.

Sighing deeply, I closed my eyes, and recited my mantra, silently to myself, resting on the cool ocean of bliss, beneath the scattered debris stirred up by my monkey mind. I felt the earth beneath me, big, black, formless, holding me softly. The noises faded, as I turned inward. Looking into that darkness, darkness that the blind do see, I wanted to sink into that shimmering blackness, to disappear, to fade far away into the forest dim—

“Hey pal,” the bartender said. “You can’t sleep in here.”

“I’m not sleeping,” I said. “I’m meditating.”

“Whatever,” he said. “You want another beer?”

“No,” I said, “not yet. I’m waiting for a friend.” He discarded my empty bottle, walked away with indifference, and joined the cluster of men at the other end of the bar, watching the TV screen.

A man, his skin the color of deep dark chocolate, crossed the room. I remembered Joey. He smiled, leaned across the bar. “Where were you tonight?” he asked in a Jamaican accent. He checked out my coat and tie. “Just got off work?”

“Work at home,” I said, feeling overdressed in this sleazy pool hall. “Massage therapist.”

“Oh,” he said, “is that so? I got a pain in my back—”

“Strictly legit,” I said. I handed him my business card. He glanced at the card, “I work uptown, downtown, all around town.” He put my card in his back pocket. “Tonight I was at Carnegie Hall,” I explained. “One of my clients gave me a free ticket. I should have gone straight home, but here I am. Feeling restless.”

“Are you a bottom?”

“Okay. Whatever.”

“I’m going to the Bijou,” he said. “Meet me there.”

I watched him walk out the bar. I reached into the fish bowl of condoms on the bar, took a handful, put them in my back pocket. To be or not to be at the Bijou, that was the big question.

I still had some vague hope, that if I sat at the end of the bar I’d meet Joey again. If I found him, I wouldn’t need the Bijou—that big ugly sex cave, full of slithering reptiles—but it was too late for me to turn back now. I was on my feet, unsteady, walking a thin line toward the door. I was off to the snake pit. I felt a pang of sweet regret. I paused, my hand on the door, having second thoughts.

I wanted the kind of love that smells as fresh as a newborn baby, but I knew with a cold despair that I was destined for the Bijou, and that the next morning I would smell like cigarette smoke and stale beer.

Without much confidence, I walked out the door of the bar, smelling the hot fumes from the street. I crossed the street, wishing that I had stayed on that cool bar stool. I opened the door of the Bijou and got a whiff of the poppers coming up the steep stairs. On the walls were tacky posters from old Broadway musicals. At the foot of the stairs were a large potted plant and a glass booth, simulating the lobby of a dentist’s office. From behind the glass booth, a guy read a newspaper in Arabic. He had luscious eyes and full lips, but you could tell from his dull expression that he was hetero. I plunked my money down. We didn’t look at each other.

The Arab guy buzzed me in. I felt the bars of the turnstile against my pelvis give way as I crossed over onto the other side, feeling expansive, wide open, ready for adventure, with none of that chit-chat bullshit you have to put up with at the bars. I took a moment to stuff my money in my shoe, just in case, wary of the pickpockets.

I entered the labyrinth of hallways, a maze of doorways gaping wide into narrow cubicles the size of small closets, rooms large enough for two men to have stand-up sex. A small bench allowed one man to sit, if he chose. There were many men that were so used to such cramped spaces that they didn’t like to have sex lying down. I saw some guys I knew. We pretended not to notice each other. If you were out to have anonymous sex, it was polite to pretend that you didn’t know anybody, but you still knew them and they still knew you.

Men standing in dark corners feigned indifference, men in the doorways rubbed their cocks, men sat down in the dark and snored with mouths wide open. Tall men, short men, ugly and beautiful, beardless youths, hairy old men, working class men who worked in the deli, corporate lawyers putting their kids through college. Asians, blacks, Hispanics, tourists, the healthy and the infirm and the crazy. We are the hungry ghosts. I am no better and no worse that anyone down here.

I saw Father Andrew in a sweat suit and sneakers talking to some troll at the end of the hallway. I avoided him. He was the last person I wanted to see in a place like this. I leaned against the wall and watched the porn flick. It was in French. A pretty Parisian boy was gangbanged by muscular brutes. I watched with fascinated disgust. That pretty boy, who was gangbanged, had a mother who loved him.

“You are looking for me?” the Jamaican whispered in my ear.

For a brief moment, we were young lovers. I felt the joy of instant gratification. He took me by the hand and led me through the maze to an empty cubicle. He locked the door behind us. A naked red bulb created a lurid glow. We kissed. He pulled off his shorts and t-shirt, leaving only his socks and shoes on, the floor sticky with cum. I snorted the poppers he offered me. He fondled me, loosened my tie, unbuttoned my pants. We knelt down before each other and took turns sucking each other’s cocks. His was huge. I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate on my sensations, as I had at the concert, letting the meaning of the music happen without trying to force it. He lifted me off my knees. He turned me around, unwrapped the condom. He tried to penetrate me but was too big.

“Don’t want to hurt you,” he said. He turned around, moved his ass towards me.

We switched roles. I slapped on the rubber. He faced the wall and took a quick inhale as I entered him carefully from behind. The exclamations of other copulating men created a rising power in me, bonded as I was with all those other lonely men out there in the dark. We were thrown through space like Lucifer into the fiery pit, burning, scalding, into the center of the sodomy circle. God roared, Let there be light! Us cocksuckers cried out, Fuck you, God! We love the dark!

The Jamaican moaned, thrashed like a man in the electric chair, and spilled his seed on the concrete floor. I pulled out of him. We put on our clothes.

We sat on the couch in the lounge area, held hands and watched TV. Cops and robbers. Car chases. Shrill screams. Bloody corpses. I watched his passive face in the flickering blue light.

“I thought you were going to fuck me,” I said tenderly, trying to prolong the moment. “But I fucked you instead.”

“It was a good fit,” he said in a flat tone.

He kissed me on the lips, rose to his feet, moved lightly through the exit door. I waited for a minute then felt panicked. Fighting off my disappointment, I followed him through the exit door. I looked for the Jamaican, hoping that he waited for me somewhere in the shadows, but the street was empty.

The gray morning light crept over the old tenement buildings as a garbage truck growled, devouring mounds of trash. Heavy black plastic bags, stacked in the back alley, were being heaved into the truck’s gaping mouth by weary-looking men. I stepped on a used condom, kicked a broken bottle, and cried out, “Joey!” I felt the presence of all the men that got away. A fat rat scurried into the corner of the stinking side street.

3.

Deeply troubled, I walked the desolate downtown streets to visit Father Quinn. Avoiding well-lit streets with crowded cafes, I traveled the back streets, where the homeless were gathered, huddled in the cold. It began to rain. Glancing furtively over my shoulder to be sure I wasn’t seen, I slipped into the entrance of the rectory.

Searching under the mat, I found the secret key, and opened the front door. I walked past the empty reception desk and down the pitch-black corridors. Then I paused, afraid I’d taken a wrong turn. It was a relief to hear the tinkling of Father Quinn’s harpsichord in the distance. I approached his door, left slightly ajar, and listened for a few seconds before I slipped in. The room was warm and dim. I closed the door, shook off my raincoat and hung it on the coat rack behind the door.

Having warmed my hands at the fireplace, I sat down and waited. He was playing a slow passage from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The elegant syntax of the music contrasted with the chaos of the wind and rain beyond the grimy windows. I loved the sounds of both and tried to hold them in my mind at the same time. Andrew stopped playing and came out of the music, the way a great actor removes his make-up after a demanding performance. He sat adjacent to me in a high backed chair.

“That was beautiful, Andrew.” We were on a first name basis. Although he was close to me in age, I liked to treat him as if he were advanced in wisdom. He was a handsome man, a red-haired Irishman with a slim build. I was not attracted to him, though he did make frequent passes at me. His attraction created a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

He acknowledged my compliment and waited. Gazing into the flames in the fireplace, the crisp crackle of the wood, I watched the images take shape in my mind, gather force, swirl into view.

“I feared that I had died,” I said, uncertain of how I could put the experience into words, “That I was left in this limbo, this halfway house for the recently departed. I walk around this place and found on a desk a piece of paper and a pen. I write my name, Kensey Jones Jr., and watch the words disappear. I look into a mirror and there is no reflection looking back at me. I wonder if I’ve turned into a vampire. One of the hungry ghosts. Then I see the knob of the door begin to turn. Three hoodlums appear ready to jump me. I grab a sword and chop off their heads. Their heads shrivel like balloons filled with hot air, letting out loud flatulent noises.” I paused, uncertain how to proceed. “It’s hard to describe.” A strange sigh came out of me, “I cross through an open door and enter a hallway. There is a wide door. I call out, ‘Where am I?’ My voice seems to have altered, as if it didn’t come from my location but is evenly distributed throughout this big space. I enter a room which has no ceiling. Gathered on the floor are hundreds of black women, kneeling, washing the floor, silent. I ask one of them, ‘Excuse me, miss. I need help. Can you tell me where we are?’ She remains silent. I asked her, ‘Can you direct me to a teacher?’ Again, she says nothing. I get down on my knees and take her face in both my hands and look into deep sad eyes and say,’ I love you.’ Those are the magic words. She points her finger over my shoulder. I turn around slowly and see a giant black woman. She is an angel.”

“And how do you know that?”

“The way she looks. Her presence is huge. She’s radiant and highly intelligent. I cry out,’ Help me, help me.’ I hear organ music; I float into the air. Behind her is an altar with a plastic Jesus, a red light bulb in his chest flickering on and off as she speaks. It’s in a musical language that echoes in my head. I ask her if she could speak in English. She has to turn down her vibration to do so. She asks, ‘How did you get here?’ I say that I don’t know. I ask her, ‘Do you know where I’m from?’ She says, ‘You’re from planet Earth.’ I ask, ‘Have you been there before?’ ‘Many times,’ she says. ‘You take the God stuff way too far,’ she warns me,’ ‘I’m on a much higher plane than you are but we don’t think about God that much, nor should you. We’ve got work to do. And so do you. Your job is to be a human being. Go back to planet Earth where you belong. Forget about all this God stuff.’ She put her hands on my head. It’s like a bolt of lightning. Then I’m falling at a high speed through black space, a luminous black space until I see a tiny planet, like a blue pearl floating in a black void. As I enter the stratosphere I feel my self float light as a feather toward the earth’s surface. I see the United States, I see my neighborhood in Texas, and I see the backyard of the house I lived in when my mother was still alive. I am on a cross, crucified in my own back yard but free of pain. I am in ecstasy. I cry out, ‘Mama, mama, I’ve had a vision.’ My mother appears in the kitchen door, drying her hands on a towel. I say, ‘It wasn’t a dream, it was a vision. The kind of vision that mystics have had throughout the ages. I can’t speak of it—I go into unspeakable bliss—for I am within and beyond all worlds, including this one. It’s impossible. Yet the desire to express it is strong. It’s my mission in life, and I know I shall never fulfill it.’ My mother looks at me sadly. She says, ‘That sounds just awful.’ She scolds me like I’m a schoolboy. ‘It’s time for you to do your homework.’ I returned fully into my physical body, as an adult in my bedroom in Manhattan. I walked around all day feeling disoriented, laughing, and crying. What’s happening to me, Andrew?”

“Would you like some sherry?”

“No thanks, I’m giving up drinking.”

“That’s a mistake.” He poured the amber liquid into two glasses and handed one to me. He raised his glass. “Cheers,” he said. I enjoyed the sweet warmth of the liquor going down. “How is your boyfriend, what’s his name?”

“Joey,” I said. “I’m going down to Philly to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family.”

“Good. You should have lots of sex with Joey. Help you stay grounded. Give up meditation for a while. You don’t need it.”

“But I love my meditation—”

“Follow the black angel’s advice. You have taken this God stuff way too far. I should know. I’m a priest. Look what it’s done to me.” His eyes had turned gray with pulsing red pupils, picking up the glow of the fire, like some wild nocturnal beast. “This too shall pass.”

“But I don’t want it to pass, I want to express it—I want to live it—”

“So wise, so young, do not live long,” he said sternly. “Let it go.” He rose from his chair and glanced out the window.” Stopped raining. Vanity. All is vanity. Many mystics, go to the office, the supermarket, surf the web and never go to church at all, or they end up sucking cock at the Bijou till the crack of dawn, which is what I intend to do tonight. Are you going uptown? Perhaps we can share a cab?”

“But Andrew, you can’t go dressed like that?” He was still in his priest uniform.

“Quite right,” he said. “I must get incognito.” He took off those heavy bible-black shoes and stepped into the bathroom, leaving the door open so I could see him sit on the toilet. He moaned. “My hemorrhoids are acting up again. Occupational hazard.”

He flushed the toilet. Washed up. I heard him talk from the bedroom as he got into his street clothes.

“Each man kills the thing he loves,” Andrew quoted, as he sauntered briskly over to the door and opened it. “After you.”

On the street, he looked quite mysterious in his black trenchcoat, like a detective in a film noir. He whistled for a taxi. After we got in, he gave the driver directions and sat back, his hands in his pockets, Quite handsome with his fine silver hair, I looked at my own reflection in the window as the dark city streets sped past and felt bewildered by my own anxious face.

The cab stopped in front of the Bijou. “I forgot my wallet,” Andrew said. “Can you loan me a few bucks?” I asked the driver, who broke a larger bill. When we got out of the cab I handed Father Andrew a twenty. “Are you coming too?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I’m going to walk home from here.”

“Remember what I said.” The street lamps and the light drizzle created a swirling halo effect around his head.” Stay in your body, drink lots of alcohol and have lots of sex.”

“I promise.” I said, giving him a peck on the cheek. I watched him enter the unmarked door of the Bijou.

Andrew had become the guardian of my heart in the midst of the cold, gray city. I continued to walk through the city streets, aimless, observing the skeletons of the trees, almost stripped bare of leaves, wondering where all the sweet birds were. The streets had dried out after the rain but the cold had set in. I loved seeing the mist ride on my breath. I hoped to feel sleepy after the meal I’d had at the diner but felt, instead, wide awake, overstimulated by the beauty of the city at night. Thoughts raced through me. I vowed I would do my best to do as the Black Madonna had told me to. Be a human being, she had said.

I began to slow my pace and start the trek back home. The inner voices and perpetual dialogues ceased for a while. The bars had closed. The great city was spread out before me, almost deserted, except for the hopeless stragglers like myself, stirred up, unable to sleep. I walked the crooked pavement and imagined that Walt Whitman and Hart Crane had done the same, taking refuge in the shadows while waiting for the stranger. It was a city of drunken poets, dreamers, and hungry ghosts.

In front of my building, there was a homeless guy searching through a dumpster. He had pulled out computer parts, bottles, and old clothes, and had put them in black hefty bags and piled them onto a shopping cart. He was a black guy with a lighter-than-average complexion and long, kinky, wild hair and a missing front tooth, which reminded me of a cartoon character that had peed in a light socket when he grinned. I returned his smile. The sun would be coming up soon. Like two vampires, eager to return to the crypt, we acknowledged each other’s presence. I began hunting for my keys before I noticed that he was looking down at my crotch.

“I’m no faggot,” he said in a childlike way. “I’m a man and you’re a man.” I found my keys and unlocked the door, but paused before I opened it.

“Where do you live?” I asked gently, the way you would talk to a child who had roamed beyond his neighborhood.

“I live in the Bronx,” he said. “With my daddy.”

“You live with your daddy?” I asked. The man seemed to be simple-minded.

“What are you doing out here on a night like this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still looking at my crotch. “What are you looking for?”

” For God,” I said.

“You won’t find him here. Only the devil lives around here.” He pointed to the street and began to laugh. I laughed with him. The distance between us, I felt, was not so great. I felt he was safe. Besides, I needed some company, and it was cold outside.

“I’m a man and you’re a man,” I said, repeating his statement. “What do you like to do?”

“If I told you that,” he said, starting to laugh, “I take the chance that I’ll lose you.” I felt the presence of the black angel.

“Would you like to come in?”

“Someone might steal my stuff,” he said, looking up and down the deserted street. “Lots of devils live around here.”

“We can hide it in the hallway.”

He left the shopping cart and the hefty bags out in the hallway, like I’d suggested. Removing his boots before he came into my apartment, I imagined how confined he must have felt being indoors. It must have been like a foreign land to him. He started to undress. He took off ten layers of clothing (I counted them all), folded them neatly, and put them on a chair. I was spellbound by what I witnessed.

There before me, totally naked, the thick garments having been removed, was an exquisite physique, classically proportioned as you might see on one of the best dancers of the New York stage. His cock throbbed, stiffened. I wanted to fall on my knees and worship, but I didn’t. I stood there, staring, too stunned to move.

“You want to touch it?” he asked.

I moved closer to him, afraid he might smell bad, but he didn’t. I reached down and held his balls in my hand, weighed his massive testicles in the palm of my hand, pulled back the foreskin and saw twinkling dew at the tip of the head of his penis.

“A strong brown god,” I murmured.

“You got a dildo?” he asked bluntly. I fetched my dildo from a back closet. “Got some lube?” he asked, squeezing a blob of it onto his hand and applying it to the dildo. Then he got on his knees and sat on it before unzipping my pants and pulling my dick out. “Slap my ass,” he said. “Call me your bitch.” I leaned across his back as he put my cock in his mouth and slapped his ass. I took control of the dildo and moved it rhythmically in and out of his butt. “Yeah, man, give me a double whammy.” He came quickly, shooting a wad on some books I had on the floor. With a look of rapture, he pulled out the dildo, found a paper towel, wiped his ass with it, washed his hands and put back on the ten layers of clothing. How do I know this isn’t a dream? I asked myself, as I watched the prince put on his toad costume.

“You got a hat I could borrow?” he asked. “I lost mine.” I went into my closet and found a thick woolen hat that he pulled down around his ears. “Thanks. This is for you.” He handed me a stick of deodorant. I gratefully accepted his gift. To do otherwise would have been an insult.

“You can stay here if you like,” I said, pointing to the couch.

“Got business to tend to.” He was eager to get out of the confining space I offered him, so that he could be out under the night sky, enjoying the stars, looking for bargains that people had thrown out in the street. I felt for a moment his immense freedom. In my flesh I will see God. He retrieved his boots from the hallway, laced them up, and before he left, offered me an army salute. “Later, chief,” he said.

I closed the door, bolted it, cleaned up after him, and tossed the dildo into the wastebasket, feeling it would be sacrilegious to use it again. I lit a candle, collapsed on the floor, fully clothed, and wrapped a blanket around me. “My God, my God,” I whispered to the dark, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

A flood of purple, then of gold, came through the curtains of the back windows and glazed the objects in the room; the old tenement buildings, turned radiant, shimmered, as in a fairy tale. The fat pigeons, perched on my fire escape, flapped their wings, ready to take their first morning flight.

The Metapolitics of the Noosphere

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Editor’s note: The following piece is part of an ongoing series that cultural historian William Irwin Thompson has been running on his blog. We’re featuring it as the first in a new section we call “Microdoses.” These will often be shorter, experimental publications like visual art, film, music, podcasts, and the poetic, philosophical “mind-jazz” that Thompson’s style embodies so well here.

Microdoses are hypertexts. Connective, interlinking ideas between larger thought-pieces and works of art. They’re assemblages, which in their inter-weaving, reveal the “patterns that connect.” We consider the Microdose to be a digital mutation of the literary fragment.

There have been a few developments in the 2016 election since these pieces have been written. For the sake of these “microdoses,” quick-fire mind jazzes on the political landscape as they occurred, we’ve kept them in their temporal slice of time.

Preface

The term “metapolitics” was coined by the poet and cultural historian Peter Viereck in his 1941 book, Metapolitics: the Roots of the Nazi Mind. I confess that this book had a strong influence on me as I was writing my first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, A Study of an Ideological Movement (Oxford University Press: New York, 1967).

Politics is expressed in ideologies that are territorially based, but when an ideology is lifted from one location to become a universal ideology, it becomes more messianic and its leaders become avatars of a new worldview. Think of Che’ Guevara. For me, the cultural shift from an identity that is based upon a nation or a territory to one based upon a state of consciousness—indeed even a seizure of consciousness—expresses the transition from politics to metapolitics. In several of my other books, I have called this kind of movement a shift in individual identity from territorial nation-states to noetic polities. ISIL, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram are current examples. I have also maintained before in more than one of my books that: “Evil is the annunciation of the next level of organization.” ISIL, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram are the evil forms of planetization that use the Internet to attract followers, but other forms like science are also noetic polities. New forms will emerge as new global institutions come forth to deal with the crisis of industrial civilization and climate collapse. [1] Nations will increasingly become like organelles within the cell. Our present planetary system of communication satellites that supports our new social media has become what printed media and the railroads were for the spread of modernism. In this blog I am trying to take a few more steps in this exploration of an unknown new world.

6.28.2016

I. Donald Trump and His Nativistic Movement

Generally populist demagogues present themselves as voices of the people and they appeal to their sense of resentment and jealousy of the rich. One thinks of Huey Long. Donald Trump represents a new sort of cultural emergence. He is a billionaire based in New York City, but presents himself as the common man of the Heartland enamored with simplistic solutions. Mexicans, Muslims, and menstruating women become his favored scapegoats and objects of derision. He represents the new American cultural fascination with Winners that has been created by television. Politics is just another alpha male Super Bowl and TV is a medium that profits from attack ads, sound bites, and polarization in shouting matches rather than solitary reading and reflection. Trump is what Joe Six Pack would like to be, and his hideous Las Vegas High Rollers Suite sort of taste—expressed in the photos of his penthouse apartment on the Web—is just the style Joe Six Pack would chose if he won the Powerball Lottery. In his marriage of corporate elites and mass vulgarity, Trump’s brand of Republicanism recalls the union of the I. G. Farben and Siemens corporations with the new masses of the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930’s. We had White resentment then for the Treaty of Versailles, and we have White resentment now for the new multicultural America in which these angry white working class men and women now feel like aliens in their own country. When Trump says “Make America great again,” his supporters know it is a code for “Make America White again.” Hillary has lost her historical traction; the coming election is an example of McLuhan’s “cultural retrieval” of the thirties with Bernie’s reprise of FDR’s New Deal socialism and Trump’s reprise of Mussolini’s populist fascism. “The medium is the message.” And we need to remember that in the nineteen-thirties, radio transformed politicians like FDR and Churchill into cultural saviors, and television transformed the presidential election of 1960, so now social media and the Internet are transforming this election of 2016.

II. Polarization

The Republican Party got trumped because it had no intellectual philosophy of governance. It just had a clot of negations of other people’s ideas. You can’t run a complex, multicultural, nuclear-weaponed nation-state with the gut feeling that government is bad, and so the less we have of it, the better off we will be. Thus, being against philosophies of governance, climate science and evolution in particular, and science in general, left the Republican Party without an intellectual immune system and the infection of nativism and white male anger took it over.

Nativistic movements arise when the “mazeway” of paths in a culture become incoherent and confusing, and this incoherence often arises when a culture is shifting from one worldview to another. The Ghost Dance in America and the Boxer Rebellion in China are classic examples. In successful cultures, intellectuals arise who aid the transition by articulating the new worldview. Such was the case in Europe with the Renaissance and its shift in world views from religious medievalism to scientific modernism, from hierarchical kingdoms to bourgeois nation-states. But even in the case of Europe with its Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment, there still appeared the bloody Thirty Years War, and England had to go through a civil war with Cromwell to bring forth a parliamentary republic. But England and its American colonies kept thinking, first with Locke and then with Jefferson. Yet even with the American, French, and Irish revolutions, revolution was followed by civil war.

With the new polarization of the United States between the social democracy of Bernie and the white nativism of Trump, the USA is entering a danger zone of political polarization that can lead to civil war. The coasts express a planetary cultural awareness, but the Heartland—from Montana down to Texas, the Midwest and the Deep South—expresses nativistic values. It is ironic that this nativism has found its leader with an elderly man showing the signs of the onset of senile dementia [2] who is a billionaire and a New Yorker. Trump’s new nativistic movement has emerged because it is really about multiculturalism versus White Protestant America.

So it is time for America to do some serious thinking—thinking about science, climate change, immigration, and the ideas needed to govern a complex multicultural technological nation-state that lives within a world economy. Fortunately, the northern part of North America has already started with the election of Justin Trudeau to the premiership in Canada. Now it is time in this national election for the USA to follow Canada’s lead.

III. Trump, Islam, and the Politics of the Noosphere

When I was too young to read Aristotle on the polis—when I was in the eighth grade and studying ancient history in LA—I learned that the Greek polis emerged in the Assembly of wise seniors and able-bodied young men who could defend Athens in democratic hoplite formations against the attacks of the Persian Empire. War was no longer a warrior’s individual heroic display in his Homeric aresteia, but a collaborative effort.

The Persian Empire was a communication system held together by good roads and fast horses with messengers and military outposts. An empire, as opposed to the Greek democratic polis, was the territory of the subjected. The territorially assembled were subjects and not citizens. From the dawn of civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China, empires had an ethnic and religious dyadic system of identity of “us” and “them.” Even to this day, the Han Chinese maintain a system of exclusion of “foreign devils” and hold to their system of identity by using the communist party as its priesthood.

The Roman Empire, by contrast, introduced the idea of the citizen, and St. Paul in Syria was proud to be a Roman citizen and used his citizenship as a means to transform a local Palestinian prophetic movement into a universal religion. Classical Rome tried to use its clumsy system of polytheism as the cement for imperial identity, but it was not successful, and Persian Manicheanism, Mithraism, Gnosticism, and Christianity remained attractive alternatives. With Emperor Constantine first, and then Justinian, Christianity proved to be a simpler and more effective way to hold an empire together. Even after the final collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., Christianity survived and grew during the Dark Ages and Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in 800 A.D.

What is happening today is that these two ancient and archetypal forms of empire have returned and are competing for dominance. The so-called American Empire sought to absorb civilizations into its multicultural identity. With the Marshall Plan, and the postwar Bretton Woods American Dollar economy, it first absorbed Western Europe. Now it is trying to show that Islamic Civilization can also become American. The Umah and the oil barrel can both live in peace within a new expanded “us.” So when I walk the streets of my city, Portland, Maine, I see little girls in hijabs playing baseball in the local schoolyard, and I see Somali women wearing the Dirac and Guntiino. This multicultural America is what Trump wishes to eliminate in his nativistic movement of a return to White Protestant America. In this nativist vision, if immigrants come to America, they should wear blue jeans and American college sweatshirts. Paradoxically, Trump’s vision is isomorphic to the Han Chinese vision of empire and identity in which China seeks to shut out the incursions of the World Wide Web.

If the USA follows Justin Trudeau’s vision of a multi-cultural North America, and is able to absorb Islamic Civilization, as before it absorbed Irish Catholics and Central European Jews, then the Roman model of Empire rather than the Persian will emerge, and thanks to the Internet and the politics of the Internet that Bernie Sanders exploits so well in his fund-raising, the Noosphere first articulated by Russian Vernadsky and then by French Teilhard de Chardin will emerge as a global noetic polity.

Sanguinal polities are based upon blood lines; imperial polities are based upon territory and an imperial language. With the emergence of English as a global language with a world English literature of writers like Salman Rushdi and Amitav Gosh, the Noosphere is no longer a visionary idea, but a cultural reality. To put a stop to this cultural evolution is what Trump is all about, but as a global businessman he doesn’t stand a chance to succeed. He can obstruct and impede, and set back cultural evolution in favor of a new American Dark Age, but he cannot succeed in the long run. Mongolian nomads sacked India and Persia, but eventually the Mongolian Empire became the world’s largest. However, I do not wish to fall into a simple Whig vision of history as an inevitable march of progress. In Indian Partition after the Second World War, the united kingdoms and nations that was India fell into Islamic and Hindu nativist visions and now face off with one another and threaten nuclear war.

Nativistic movements can do a lot of damage, so as these two archetypal forms of empire face off with one another in this American election of 2016—as they did in the emergence of  classical Greek democracy after the battles of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis—let us step back, look at the Big Picture, and vote to enhance the emergence of the Noosphere by realizing that Islam helped to create the European Renaissance and can now become as American as hamburgers and falafel.

IV. Brexit

I don’t think we Americans should characterize the recent Brexit vote as an another version of nativism with blond Boris Johnson serving as an English version of Trump. The EU bullied Greece, and the neoliberals—who define culture only in terms of a theory of markets of rational self-interested individuals—enforced economic austerity rather than Keynesian public investments. Yes, there is an element of anti-immigration among the working classes, but that is because the corporate managers dump cheap labor into their communities to break up labor unions, and then retreat behind their gated communities to avoid the social consequences. Planetization and Nativism are entwined forces. As we saw before in the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions in China, when the global economy expands, time contracts and becomes mythologized in new compensatory systems of identity. In the EU and the UK, as well as the USA, it is time for a new Big Think about the role of nations in the globalist capitalist system where they are seen as encultured societies with differing systems of identity based upon class and language and not simply as rational agents operating in a market system.

Now that the vote is in for Brexit, I hope Scotland leaves the UK. And this time the Scots should do it right by getting rid of the monarchy. A much harder call is what to do about a new Scottish currency. Ireland has the Euro, but the Euro is massively undersupported. Better brains than I will have to figure that one out, but new thinking is called for—perhaps one in which Scotland faces westward to support its currency with Canadian and American dollars rather than English pounds. On the political level of governance, there should be a county by county referendum in Northern Ireland to let the people decide whether they wish to be part of the Republic of Scotland, or the Republic of Ireland, or the Monarchy of England. Monarchy is an expression of what Jean Gebser would call the Magical structure of consciousness. It expresses a system of dominance that we inherited from the apes rather than a system of representation. It is useful in holding a collection of warlords and warring tribes together on a higher level of organization, but it is not an appropriate form of government for a modern nation-state. And yet, there are many people in the Old World who still cling to this Old World form of thinking. They may no longer believe that the king’s touch cures scrofula, but they do have faith that the face of the monarch on their currency secures it as a fiduciary instrument. Qui iudicent populum.

In the transition from nation-state to noetic polity in our process of planetization, there are two missing institutions that we will need in the immediate future. I do not expect to see them in my lifetime, but I believe they will arise before the end of this our twenty-first century. The first is the creation of tricameral legislatures for nations and the United Nations in which the third body is a congress of scientists elected by the university faculties of their respective countries who can provide governments with real scientific facts about climate collapse and other global catastrophes. [3]

The second is Professor Saul Mendlovitz’s proposal for a United Nations emergency military force that can go into nations that subscribe to the UN Charter and remove dictators that are violating the human rights of its citizens. [4]  We should not let dictators like Syria’s Assad slaughter its citizens and destabilize Europe by creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. The Blue Berets should step in and take away the dictator for trial at the World Court in the Hague, just as the UN did with Slobodan Milosovic in Bosnia.

Yes, such interventions are a violation of sovereignty, and the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council—especially China and the US—will always veto such an action. So the challenge of our century is to redefine sovereignty, just as the United States had to redefine states’ rights in order to transform a loose federation of sovereign states into the United States of America; and that political evolution, certainly, was no easy transformation and  actually took a civil war to effect it.

The first institution can inform and the second institution can implement laws that address global climate collapse and its attendant catastrophes by compelling nations to comply with UN standards for reducing industrial pollution. China and the USA can no longer consider the atmosphere to be a public sewer into which they can dump their toxic by-products of industrial manufacture. Perhaps such an institution could become an extension of the World Health Organization. One cannot control the outbreak of pandemics by concretizing national boundaries with walls, so as the catastrophes of the present increase in number and ferocity, some new UN institutions will need to come forth.

After a civil war in 1848, the Swiss created a national federation that energized the language and culture of the canton, so some form of compensatory cantonization will need to be part of the process of planetization. If these cultural and ecological challenges cannot be met because of the reactionary blockages of religions and nation-states, then Homo sapiens will simply experience extinction and the meek of the insects will inherit the Earth.

Notes

  1. See David W. Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  2. See Sophia A. McClennen, “Maybe Donald Trump has really lost his mind: What if the GOP frontrunner isn’t crazy, but simply not well?” Salon. April 25, 2016.
  3. See William Irwin Thompson, “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature” in Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture (Imprint Academic: Exeter, UK, 2004, 2009), pp. 137-143.
  4. http://www.globalcommonsecurity.org/gcs/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mendlovitz-UNEPS_Statute.pdf. Professor Mendlovitz proposed this idea at the Lindisfarne Fellows Conference at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM in 2007.

Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination

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The real voyage of discovery does not consist in looking for new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.
—Marcel Proust

Sunflower Events

What can art tell us about the nature of consciousness? The question is meaningless if it refers to the personal convictions of this or that poet or musician, this or that genre, school, or movement. The goal of this essay is to explore what the things artists make—the works of art themselves—tell us about the nature of mind and matter, self and world, over and above their creators’ personal beliefs. Is there a metaphysics that art as such implies? Or maybe the question is better framed in McLuhanian terms: What is the message of the medium of art with regard to the nature of consciousness?

The first thing that strikes me is that art is not discursive. It doesn’t constitute an attempt to represent things—to talk or think about them. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings isn’t a piece of music about sadness. It is a sadness in itself. It is a sadness that has acquired a form outside the private experience of a subjective mind. If after the death of the last living thing on earth, there remained a radio playing the Adagio over and over again among the ashes of civilization, there would still be sadness in the world.

Works of art like Barber’s famous composition do not represent but enact the movements of experience. By doing this, they preserve these movements in material form. Only poor art tries to represent or reproduce, and that is why it generates only clichés, stereotypes, and opinions. Genuine art isn’t representational but demonstrational and imitative. It is deeply implicated in the experiential dimension, all that we associate with consciousness. But whereas most of the time we approach consciousness discursively from an assumed outside perspective, works of art catch it from within, in media res. What art gives us is consciousness in action—not consciousness of the world, but consciousness in the world.

American medicinal plants New York,Boericke & Tafel,c1887. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/84253

Helianthus Annuus, from Charles F. Millspaugh’s American Medicinal Plants, 1887.

In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, I try to show this by comparing a  technical drawing of a sunflower found in a botanical guide with one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. The technical drawing as such makes no claim to art beyond a broad, utilitarian sense of the term. It has a diagrammatic function. Its goal is to communicate the concept “sunflower,” helianthus annuus, outside of any particular instance of the species. What we are given in this image is the sunflower as an ideal construct, the quintessential sunflower of which every physical specimen is a more or less exact copy.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888.

Van Gogh, in contrast, captures the sunflower as an experience, a singular encounter. The resulting image exudes a presence that is like an alien sentience. Sunflowers are no longer instances of a type but sui generis. Each is a unique and unrepeatable event in reality’s unfolding. It’s only after the fact, when the intellect steps in to take apart the experience, that we label the image “sunflowers in a vase.” If the botanical drawing suggests something like Plato’s metaphysics of ideal forms, the painting throws us back to the likes of Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher who held that there is no fixity of being, only a flux of becoming.

In Van Gogh’s work, something familiar is reimaged in light of an ineffable newness that inhabits it and makes it an event. We realize that there is no such thing as sunflowers in the abstract, but only these sunflower-events that the intellect then classifies according to generalities which exist only in and for it. The way I put it in Reclaiming Art is that, while the botanical drawing eliminates every anomaly in order to represent the generic specimen, the painting removes all that is general in order to preserve only the anomaly. That’s why even the most naturalistic work of art contains a note of strangeness, a soupçon of the Weird.

Art isn’t concerned with how the world appears to the intellect because it operates at the level of sensations as opposed to concepts. The term “aesthetic” denotes an engagement with reality at the pre-conceptual level of instinct and intuition, affect and vision. Van Gogh’s picture conveys its sunflowers as pure sensations, that is, as that which exists before the intellect subsumes it in a generalization.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers [DETAIL], 1888.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers [detail], 1888.

Sensations are the immediate data of consciousness. Before the intellect reorganizes it according to general ideas, reality is a sensuous affair through and through. That’s why it isn’t wrong to speak of aesthetic experience as unmediated. There is always a moment, before the intellect does its thing, during which reality reveals itself to us directly. Something exists before we name it, before we attribute a function to it, before we subordinate it to our ideas, beliefs, and judgments—before “we” come into play at all as rational subjects. This is what I call the Real. It isn’t generic reality but the raw Real that comes to us in works of art.

A Play of Forces

Nothing in the foregoing implies that the aesthetic imagination is opposed to intellect. Novels, poems, films, paintings, and even choreographies are full of general ideas and concepts. But when such things appear in an artwork, they do so as sensuous events within the aesthetic world that the work evokes. They are on a plane with everything else, because the intellect too is in the Real.

Take for instance the idea of Christianity in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. What is it that makes this novel, written by a fervent Christian, different from those fundamentalist paperbacks we find on drugstore bookracks? It’s that The Brothers Karamazov doesn’t absolutize Christianity. It doesn’t raise Christianity above the fictional universe in order to make it a given on which the significance of other things depends. On the contrary, Dostoevsky allows his Christian faith to exist on a plane with the other forces that make up his universe.

At the sensuous level of aesthetic vision, all things—even ideas, concepts, opinions and beliefs—manifest as forces. In philosophy, it was Friedrich Nietzsche (and Baruch Spinoza before him) who showed that even the most abstract concepts are, at bottom, feelings in disguise. At any rate, this is how they appear to the aesthetic imagination. Concepts have no transcendent power over reality. They don’t hover above the spatiotemporal universe, shining down upon it. They are no more (nor less) “objective” than anything else. Like all things, concepts are events in a world. You use them as you’d use a hammer, to build something up or tear something down. Even the loftiest conceptual system fully belongs to this world. Judging by the novels he wrote, Dostoevsky didn’t conceive of Christianity as a theory to be accepted as true or rejected as false. He saw it as a force that inhabits us, opening up new possibilities and closing off others. A similar view runs through the work of Nietzsche, who was above all a great aesthetic thinker, maybe the greatest who ever lived. And Nietzsche’s key insight is that the world is shaped by a primal energy of desire. Look at any concept or idea closely enough, he says, and you’ll see that within it there burns a sensuous force, a “will-to-power.”

A scene from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Illustration by Alice Neel for a never-published edition, 1930s.

A scene from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Illustration by Alice Neel for a never-published edition, 1930s.

Aesthetic vision apprehends the universe as an immanent field of living forces. All of reality is ensouled, willful, alive. Small wonder, then, that works of art present the world as innately sentient. The forces that compose the aesthetic worlds of a writer, filmmaker, or painter are not the blind and brute entities of physics. They are forces of desire, or what John Carpenter, in his brilliant film Big Trouble in Little China, refers to as “furies.” Any painting or piece of music could serve as an example. The colors and lines that make up a painting, like the notes and sounds that make up a symphony, are more than the isolable elements they appear to be for the intellect that breaks the work down to its constituents. They are interdependent furies vying with one another, forming alliances or waging war to produce what is called a composition. The same is true of other art forms.

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. [1]

When Chekhov advises writers to remove extraneous details from their narrative work, he means that every element should enter into a dynamic relation with every other element as well as with the work as a whole. This is because each one is itself an intentional force that alters the world of which it is part. The rifle on the wall isn’t just a rifle on a wall; it’s a will, an intention, a desire that at some point must fulfill itself. In art, guns want to go off. This is the case not just with inanimate objects but also with with places, settings. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining presents the Overlook Hotel as a living creature with at least as much agency as the hapless family trapped inside it. Likewise, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the dank and foggy marshes of Kent, Miss Havisham’s rambling house, and the city of London all exert a presence that makes them more than mere backdrops for the actions of human figures. As a matter of fact, in the work of both Kubrick and Dickens, human characters are themselves the expressions of places which are every bit as alive and ensouled as they are, sometimes even more so.

Artists are people who can experience the world imaginally at the level of sensations or aesthetic forces. Matter for them is alive and vibrant. Through their eyes, life in its broadest sense leaves the domain of biological entities to become an energy coursing through all things. And by “all things” I don’t mean static objects but events, becomings, each relating to every other. The aesthetic imagination sees the world as a clash of forces, an agon radiating a strange vitality which defines the Real. “Art,” wrote the American philosopher Susanne Langer, “is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature.” In it, all that the human intellect normally claims as its exclusive property is restored to the forces that compose a pre-human imaginal world. All that ordinary awareness deems to be mere objects is also restored to those forces. There is only the agon, the Event that is a kind of miracle occurring at each moment. Art captures the moment to preserve the miracle.

The Transcendental Field

Under the terms of ordinary subject-object awareness, the experience of, say, a vase of sunflowers “belongs” to us, in the sense that we are the basis on which such an experience can be said to exist. But when Van Gogh perceives a vase of sunflowers, he experiences it as belonging to something bigger than his subjective mind. This “something” is what Jean-Paul Sartre called a transcendental field, a kind of proto-consciousness in which beings arise as subjects and objects.

Deleuze defined the transcendental field as “a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self.” [2] It is this field that produces Van Gogh as a subject and the sunflowers as an object at one and the same time. Subject and object are the two poles of an unprecedented event. The painting is an embodiment of the event, embracing both the experience and the act of experiencing.

The transcendental field isn’t projected by a conscious mind. It is the impersonal locus from which conscious minds emerge. Because Van Gogh stayed true to the field, allowing his self to fold back into the event instead of insisting that the event was happening for him, he produced a work no one can dismiss as just another object. The painting is alive, the sunflowers too. The life and agency we would normally ascribe only to the human mind is present in them. We can’t in good faith continue to say that the sunflowers are just “contents” of “our” perception, at least not unless we also admit that we are contents of their perception, since the sunflowers here are creatures in their own right, watching us watch them. This, I think, is what Paul Cézanne was getting at when he said that in the heat of creation, he and the landscape he painted formed a single “iridescent chaos.”

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904-06.

The subject-object structure that the usual conception of consciousness assumes doesn’t obtain at the aesthetic level. Normally, when we talk about consciousness we mean mind, personal awareness, self-consciousness, the “I” that knows itself aware. But as every psychologist knows, subjectivity represents only a very small part of psychic reality. We would do well here to consider one of the key insights of Sartre’s seminal essay, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936):

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. (…) In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; it is they which present themselves with values, with attractive and repellant qualities—but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. And this is not a matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because of the very structure of consciousness. [3]

I wonder what Sartre would have said on the subject of the neurological condition known as blindsight. People who suffer from blindsight are cortically blind, but able to respond to visual stimuli as though they could see. For instance, a person with blindsight will report being unable to see anything when a red handkerchief is dangled in front of them. Nevertheless, when asked to name the color of the item they will answer correctly, “red.” Blindsight is consciousness without awareness, perception without sight. It takes the “con” out of consciousness to confront us with a more primordial sentience that is completely objective.

Which is to say that psyche can be uncoupled from subjectivity. C.G. Jung was right to describe his collective unconscious as an objective psyche: it is the weird sentience of a transcendental field, “a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self,” an unconscious that isn’t a repository for static archetypes but the energistic field of Nature understood as an eminently creative and dynamic process. Cézanne’s iridescent chaos is a perceiving chaos. It is in some strange way alive: it sees, thinks, and desires. Nietzsche’s utterance, “And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you,” has more than metaphorical value.

When we imagine that it is the forces shaping the universe that perceive and not the subjective minds that are born and die inside this universe, we are close to the imaginal vision conveyed in art. As a metaphysics it amounts to a form of animism or panpsychism. The panpsychic universe is one that exists in itself, objectively, just like the material cosmos of scientists, but whose molecular sentience produces minds all over the place. Experience or perception is not the cause of existence, but its perpetual correlate. To be is to perceive.

Everything is Alive

Matter is physical, matter is psychic: both statements are true when made in unison. As soon as one is used to negate the other, however, the aesthetic vision is lost. For then concepts are placed above the sensations that shape them, the intellect is raised above Nature, and we are inevitably left with some form of anthropocentrism. The panpsychism of art, by contrast, entails that human consciousness is just one manifestation of a sentience that precedes human intellection. The Real ceases to be the comfortable theatre for human action it is for idealists and the hostile no-where it is for materialists. It is very much our home, but our home is a haunted house: strange, uncanny or, to borrow a word from weird literature, eldritch. Eugene Thacker, in a probing analysis of Fritz Leiber’s story “The Black Gondolier,” describes a moment where “everything human is revealed to be only one instance of the unhuman.” [4]

Img 6 -Vilhelm_Hammershøi_-_Interior_with_a_mirror_(ca.1907)

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Mirror, circa 1907.

The above image by the great Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi contains a couple of empty rooms in a turn-of-the-century flat in Copenhagen. There are no human subjects in these rooms. The feeling of emptiness is reinforced by the mirror, which reflects nobody. Yet somehow, sentience isn’t absent from the image. There is a haunting presence here, immanent to the place itself. The rooms exhibit what J. G. Ballard called a “transcendental geometry,” intimating a non-human life that thrives even in the most humanized spaces. We’ve all experienced it before, be it in an empty hotel corridor, an old house, the depths of a forest, or some derelict urban area: a presence that precedes and exceeds us, that perceives us even as we perceive it, a strange form of life irreducible to our own minds, but pointing instead to an alien knowing underneath the familiar world. There is nothing cozy about this presence; indeed at times it verges on the frightening. Facing it means confronting the “it” that shapes all things, even the most familiar ones, even a couple of empty rooms, even the eyes, brain, and spinal cord with which I perceive those empty rooms.

Hammershøi here gives us a glimpse of this occluded reality. When we allow ourselves to enter into his painting, there is a chance that it also enters us. Who hasn’t experienced a film, play, or concert so powerful that for hours or even days afterwards it seemed to refashion the world in its image? We are all poets when this happens, seers beyond the ambit of a closed, all-too-human subjectivity. What disappears in such moments of encounter is the judgment underlying the view that humans are the centre of cosmic attention. Philosophically, these moments challenge any conception of consciousness which, construing the world in terms of representations for human beings, reduces the teeming forces of the cosmos to the props and decor of an all-too-human stage.

The notion of consciousness implies two things: a spatiotemporal perspective, and a power to choose among potential actions or thoughts from this perspective. As Henri Bergson argues in Matter and Memory (1896), to be conscious means to be able to discern. My consciousness is my freedom to direct my becoming as a being in a world of beings. Consciousness, at bottom, is discernment. But what is the difference between discernment proper and the judgment referred to above? Simply, there is discernment when I act with the awareness that my perceptions and thoughts are contingent and relative. Given a different set of circumstances or a new perspective, I would perceive and think differently. This is consciousness in the world, consciousness as a field in which my I and the objects it apprehends arise on the same plane.

Conversely, there is judgment when I act under the belief that my perspective is necessary and absolute; that is, when I assume that my perspective is the one from which final statements can be made. Explicitly or implicitly, this is what happens whenever the subject is posited as the source of consciousness, whenever experience is attributed to a pre-existing experiencer, in short, whenever subjectivity is located outside the phenomenal world. Discernment supposes in an open reality; judgment, a closed one. I judge when I decide that consciousness begins with me or my group, that objects exist only in correlation with me or my group, when I choose to perceive the ever-shifting horizon of my human perspective as the absolute horizon of reality itself.

An Allegory

Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “All art is quite useless.” What he meant, I think, is that the aesthetic nature of the work of art allows us to feel the ultimate “uselessness” of all things. It connects us to what the Buddhists call sunyata, emptiness or openness. Art makes us see things for what they are in themselves instead of limiting them to the uses we normally put them to. To see the world aesthetically is to see beyond the judgments of self, culture, and society. For insofar as it belongs to the order of dream and vision, art isn’t part of culture. On the contrary, it is the intrusion of Nature into the human realm. And what the intrusion reveals, ultimately, is that in truth there never was “culture.” Words, concepts, beliefs, ideations are forces in a universe of forces. As Paul Klee said, if humans aren’t the masters of the universe, it’s because each of us is “a creature on a star among stars.” [5] To see things otherwise is to judge the world, to arrogate the right to decide on the purpose and nature of things that in reality exceed us.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1662.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1662.

Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (1662) shows a bourgeois woman weighing gold and pearls strewn on a table before her. On the back wall is a picture of the Day of the Lord, when Christ will break into history a second time to judge all sinners. Vermeer’s painting has often been interpreted as an allegory on the sin of vanity, i.e. pride and egoism. If the woman is preoccupied with the value of the jewels, it can only be because jewels are scarce and exclusionary. As material possessions, they indicate her privileged place among mortals. Their value, itself an outcome of human judgment, augments her personal worth over other beings. The fact that she is facing a mirror lends support to this allegorical interpretation, as does the aforementioned picture on the wall. In Early Modern Europe, mirrors were still luxury items, and few things bespoke social status like an oil painting in the home. Vermeer’s inclusion of a picture within his painting speaks to what artworks in general signified in his time. Like gold, pearls, and mirrors, they were coveted tokens of prestige.

Given these signs, the viewer comes to an obvious question: Shouldn’t someone who takes the doctrine of Revelation seriously find better things to do with their time than count their riches? The juxtaposition of the figure’s activity with the image on the wall seems to imply a clear moral message. This woman would be better off valuing the “treasures of Heaven” over the “treasures of this world.” When we add that the painting has affinities with a tradition, widespread in the Netherlands of the time, of moralistic “vanitas pictures” in which mirrors and gold prefigured as symbols of vanity, the interpretation appears confirmed. [6] Vermeer’s painting contains a moral allegory, and not a particularly subtle one, what with the judgment of God looming in plain view. And like all allegories, this one asks us to judge. We are being asked to judge the woman in the foreground. “Look how vain she is,” the painting seems to be saying. “Don’t be like her.” You can imagine the pious nods of the upstanding bourgeois who clued in on this while gazing at the picture in some austere but proud parlor of Delft in the late 1600s.

But if the painting’s allegorical function finds its proof in the presence of that picture of Judgment Day on the wall, that same picture introduces a note of irony into the overall painting that is absent from most vanitas images of the period. In fact it constitutes an example of an aesthetic rift. Briefly, what I mean by a rift is a gap, breakage, inconsistency, fissure, excess, flourish or other imperfection in the otherwise smooth surface of a work of art. It is what sets certain works apart from the rest within a specific class or tradition. In Reclaiming Art, I argue that rifts are what make the difference between “masterworks”—perfect examples of form—and “classics,” which deserve that name precisely because they each belong in a singular class of their own. Looking at vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, we find no shortage of masterworks. In fact, with its emphasis on the realistic rendering of material possessions, the genre was particularly well-suited to displays of technical virtuosity. Most vanitas pictures, however, are known today only to experts on the period and art history students.

Few would argue with the assertion that Woman Holding a Balance stands out of the lot. Likewise, few would deny that Vermeer’s work isn’t just a masterful example of a genre but a true classic, a singular work that stands on its own, defying comparison. On the other hand, many would probably resist the argument that this painting, which in the end portrays an everyday activity of the Dutch bourgeoisie, is an act of subversion undermining an entire moral order and touching on the non-human core of human existence. This is what I would like to demonstrate in the conclusion of this essay.

The Last Judgment

Vermeer’s picture, I believe, contains not just one but three rifts, each of which extends and transforms the irony of the overall picture in order ultimately to annul the judgment that appears, on the surface, to be its message. The first has already been touched on. It is the explicit reference to Judgment Day in a picture that clearly didn’t need it, given the fact that moral allegories were common, even expected, at the time it was made. The second rift has a self-referential or “meta” function. It is that this reference to divine judgment takes the form of a painting within a painting. Had the image been a bible on a lectern or an angel wagging its finger, the allegory would have remained intact, because the notion of an actual transcendent judge in whose name humans could judge the living and the dead would have remained plausible. But the fact that we are faced with a painting of judgement is significant. The woman is being reprimanded for her apparent love of luxury by an object which is itself a thing of luxury—and this irony appears to us within Vermeer’s own painting, that is, within another luxury item. No artwork can decry the “treasures of this world” without itself being such a treasure—not even a Cathedral or a Buddhist shrine. Absolute judgments can’t be communicated through art without relativizing themselves absolutely. An artwork may seem to communicate one thing, but insofar as it is art, it will express something else.

Aesthetic works are necessarily material in nature. Regardless of the message a work appears to convey, its existence inheres in space, time, matter, and energy. Materiality—stone in sculpture, light in cinema, movement in dance—is its indispensable condition. The beauty that genuine art brings into being is the beauty of matter itself. It is the sublimity of a Nature always transformed but never eliminated or replaced. No painting could deny this world of becoming without at the same time affirming it in beauty. Vermeer’s image points us to this truth. It shows us that beauty, meaning, and truth radiate from this world, not from the next. The very conception of a transcendent reality on the basis of which judgements become necessary and absolute as opposed to contingent and relative is, in itself, an idea in and of this world. It too is an earthly treasure. The painting transmutes judgment to discernment in a rift through which we see that all judgments are contingent. All of them belong to the sublunary world of becoming, because Being is a flux of becoming and nothing beside.

The third rift is the clincher. Whereas a true vanitas picture of the period—a masterwork—would have loaded the scales with jewelry, Vermeer leaves them empty. He thus ensures the failure of his work as an allegory even as he subverts allegory in every form.

As mentioned above, the allegorical interpretation demands that we judge the woman for her vanity. Seeing her weighing gold and pearls in front of a picture of Judgment Day, the morally upright viewer reacts with disdain and comes away with a moral lesson.

Img 8 - Vermeer-detail

But since the scales are empty, the question arises: Who is doing the judging here? In reality, the only thing the woman has been weighing is the transience of the moment itself as an event in time. John Berger describes the effect beautifully in his 1972 documentary, Ways of Seeing:

Gradually, the painting becomes more mysterious, less easily explainable. The light falls on her face, on her fingers, on the scales, on the pearls. The moment has been preserved. And as we realize this … we also realize that like every moment, it was unrepeatable. It is as though she is holding the moment between her finger and thumb, in the scales of the past and the future. Despite its apparent celebration of property, this painting is about the mystery of light and time as we look up at the stars. [7]

Vermeer’s painting confronts us with the absolute immanence of a world without judgment. The fact that the scales are even is significant, as it tells us that only in immanence—immanence that is “not immanent to anything but itself,” as Deleuze puts it—is true justice achieved. This is why Nietzsche said that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” [8]

So, it isn’t in the picture on the wall that we see the real Last Judgment but in Vermeer’s painting as a whole, which bodies forth the judgment against judgment that frees the cosmos from an anthropocentrism that would make the human perspective absolute. Though this universe includes humans, it also includes the light of the sun, the undulations of marine blue fabric, pearls produced over years in the shells of mollusks, gold forged over eons in the depths of the earth, and religious myths that are like the beautiful waking dreams of humanity. With judgment gone, all things are allowed to exist in an immanent frame. Revelation ceases to be a forever-postponed future event to become an ever-present unveiling wherein the world discloses its immediate suchness. “The apocalypse is the way the world looks when the ego has disappeared,” Northrop Frye wrote. [9]

The elements in Woman Holding a Balance form together a single miraculous event, a clash of forces, an explosion of the new—terrible, beautiful, and real. The painting enacts this event even as it embraces the judgment that would deny it. In the frozen moment where immanence irrupts into the imagination, there is nothing left to judge, not even judgment itself, because even the most anthropocentric act of judging is a non-human event shaping the human world. Is this what the voice in the Book of Revelation means when it says, “Behold, I make all things new”? Is divine judgment less a moral invective than a creative act through which the human world is restored to the innocence of the Real? That is what I think the myth on the wall is telling the woman. It is what Vermeer’s picture, I believe, is telling us. It is what art as a medium reveals all the time. Art liberates the forces that judgment seeks to contain and control. It connects us to a reality that exceeds human consciousness, even as it makes us the conscious creatures we are.

This essay is based on a presentation given at the Science and Nonduality conference in San Jose, CA, in October 2015. An earlier draft appeared on the Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice blog under the title “Consciousness in the Aesthetic Vision.”

Notes

  1. Anton Chekhov, quoted in Valentine T. Bill, Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom, Philosophical Library, 1987, p. 79.
  2. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by Anne Boyman, Urzone, 2001, p. 25.
  3. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existential Theory of Consciousness, translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, Hill & Wang, 1960, pp. 48-49.
  4. Eugene Thacker, in a lecture: https://vimeo.com/groups/86415/videos/22862986
  5. Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee, edited by Jürg Spiller, G. Wittenborn, 1961, p. 63.
  6. Mark W. Roskill, What is Art History?, University of Massachussets, 1989, p. 148.
  7. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, BBC, 1972 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 33.
  9. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Penguin Canada, 1982, p. 172.

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