Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

Streets of Paris

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Feature Image: Frédéric Glorieux, Selfie on emergency shroud — Avatar en suaire de survie [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0] "Quand des fanatiques m’auront tué, ma tête s’imprimera sur le suaire de survie, pour l’éternité."
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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)

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Feature Image: Sustain/Decay, Voidfront Press
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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

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Feature Image: Drew Brayshaw, The-God-Delusion crop) [via Flicrk, CC BY-NC 2.0]
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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

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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

By  | 
Feature Image: Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), The Sphinx of the Seashore (1879), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 71.1 cm, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, San Francisco, CA. The Athenaeum. From Google Images
Print

“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

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Feature Image: Juan Gris; Chessboard, Glass, and Dish [public domain]
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“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

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Feature Image: Brian George, Archetypal Figure with Bow and Lightning Arrow, 2004 (detail)
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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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Feature Image: Emma Tooth, Breaking Art XIX, 2015
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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.

Deliver Us From Evil

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Feature Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) [CeCILL or CC BY-SA 2.0 fr], via Wikimedia Commons
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The global political landscape today reads like something straight out of Revelations. On a daily basis, we read shocking stories of the cruelties imposed by those in power. Education and healthcare are being gutted, families are being broken apart, minorities are being senselessly attacked, discrimination is being legalized, dissent criminalized, and corruption institutionalized. The very fabric of society is becoming undone before our eyes, and tyranny is rearing its ugly head. I’ve previously written about the structural conditions that led to this crisis. However, there is something more at play here that needs to be addressed: evil.

It’s become unfashionable in intellectual circles to speak of evil. One may speak of “good” in a utilitarian sense of achieving optimal outcomes. One may speak of rights or values or duties, and criticize others for failing to respect and uphold these things. One may speak of culpability and responsibility, of motives and intentions, of trauma and personality disorders, of socioeconomic conditions and mass psychology. Yet it is still taboo to suggest that there is a force of darkness at play in the cosmos. Even for those of us who profess to believe in God, we dare not acknowledge the Devil.

Discernment of Spirits

There is good reason for this. Among those who are quick to cry “evil,” there is a strong tendency to ascribe it as a quality that people either have or don’t have. Those who believe as they do and act as they act are good; those who hold different values, who live in different ways, who are somehow alien to them, are evil. It’s all very cut and dry, and makes a convenient binary lens through which to view the world that neatly avoids any need for subtlety or critical thinking.

This kind of black-and-white worldview might be called “cartoonish evil.” Yet it is precisely in cartoons where we often get a subtler representation of good and evil. There is a long-standing trope in cartoons in which a character is seen with two miniature versions of themselves perched atop their shoulders. One is dressed like an angel, complete with wings and a halo. The other is dressed as a demon, with horns and a pitchfork. Each whispers into the character’s ear about what they should do in a given situation. The angel tells them to seek the higher path —one that serves the greater good and shows greater strength of character. The demon tells them to give into their urges, acting impulsively out of lust, greed, wrath, or any of the other seven deadly sins.

This is a closer approximation to how we encounter good and evil in our own lives. We confront them within our own conscience. There is, however, a further level of subtlety that few if any such cartoons delve into. The Devil, according to legend, can appear to us as an angel of light. We can be fooled into believing that we are pursuing noble and respectable ends when in fact we are serving selfish and destructive impulses. Lesser known is the fact that angels can appear to be as frightening demons. Doing the right thing can be terrifying, and our psyches are equipped with an arsenal of self-defense mechanisms to convince ourselves not to do it.

These phenomena were a central concern for St. Ignatius of Loyola, a 16th century Catholic mystic famous for founding the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits. He developed a series of spiritual exercises to help the initiate discover and develop a spiritual gift known as the discernment of spirits. The “spirits” in this case may be thought of as motives. They are drives within us that seek satisfaction. One might imagine that Ignatius, like many ascetics before him, would encourage a militant attitude of self-denial, refraining from “worldly” desires. Yet with his keen psychological insight, he realized that desires are actually very important. So important, in fact, that God speaks to us through our desires. The problem is that we confuse desires with whims or impulses. One may feel very strongly in the moment that one wants to cheat on their spouse, or get drunk for the third night in a row, or have fast food every night of the week. Yet these desires are fleeting. Upon satisfying them, we do not ultimately feel satisfied with ourselves. On the other hand, one may have a desire to improve one’s health, to spend more time with friends and family, to perfect a skill, or to pursue a vocation. These desires may not burn as bright in a moment of passion, but if pursued effectively, they leave us with a more prolonged sense of satisfaction.

Ignatius gives a number of exercises for discerning such spirits. He notes a number of features that characterize higher and lower desires. Any desire that comes with a sense of urgency in making a decision, unless external circumstances demand it, is almost always from the Dark One. The Devil will tempt us to fall away from pursuing the greater desires of our souls, justifying us in our indulgences. His voice will say, “It’s okay to cheat on your wife; you work hard for your family,” or “Go ahead and lash out at this person; they deserve it for getting in your way.” Such self-justifications are familiar enough to us all that I needn’t belabor the point. Yet when we are on the right path and pursuing our greater good, Satan takes a different route. He transforms from the Tempter to the Accuser. It is here that the Evil One appears truly frightening. While we are on the path of sin and ruin, he wants us to think of him as our best friend, feeding us one temptation after another. Yet when we turn from that path, and pursue our highest good, Satan loses his temper. “Who do you think you are?” he will say. “What business is it of yours to help these people?” Several saints recount experiencing physical battles with demons during their fasts, in which the demon would literally knock them across the room. We may not encounter anything quite so severe, but we may be called to suffer in pursuit of the greater good.

Social Evil

Satan may use society itself as a weapon against those who pursue the greater good. We are not merely individually fallen sinners. Society itself is fallen, and is often led by the darker impulses in humanity. Bigotry, greed, exploitation, indifference to the suffering of others —these are all too familiar in our society. Our entire economic system is based on rewarding greed and discouraging altruism. The profit motive, we are told, incentivizes people to act for the greater good. Yet environmental destruction, a failing healthcare system, and widespread inequality expose this for the pack of lies it truly is. Exploitation is so rampant that it’s difficult to imagine a society without it. The clothes on our backs are produced in sweatshops by children working in deplorable conditions, while our food is produced by agribusiness firms that dare to patent life itself. Evil of such magnitude, institutionalized into the very fabric of our society, seems insurmountable. One is tempted to give up any hope of changing it, and simply look after one’s own interests.

Meanwhile, charismatic leaders are able to stir up fear of outsiders to send people into a panic, leading them to commit atrocities. Fear can be an overwhelming emotion, and the Dark One loves to prey upon it. As long as he can keep people afraid of one another, afraid for their own safety and security, for their belongings, they will do whatever it takes to make the object of that fear go away. They will support mass incarceration, torture, and even genocide against those they are taught to fear. Such fear is a powerful drug, and when people feel vulnerable, they will seek out whoever is selling it. The results can be catastrophic.

The Evil One may even appear as God himself. He’s a familiar God to most of us: vengeful, petty, elitist, judgmental. He sharply divides the world between the saved and the damned. He takes great pleasure in the punishment of sinners, while blessing the saved with great material wealth and good fortune, not to help them in serving others, but as a reward for being on the right side of his good graces. He always picks sides in wars, blessing whichever side the worshipper is on. He can quote scripture to justify his followers in whatever hateful or selfish desires they pursue. They can do no wrong, for God is on their side.

The Problem of Evil

Why does evil exist in the first place? Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries, and I certainly don’t expect to answer the question definitively. However, I would like to do what St. Ignatius did, and study the way evil behaves in order to offer insight into its inner workings. I should first note that the reason Satan can appear to us as an angel of light is because that was his original form. Good and Evil are not equal opponents. Evil would not be possible without Good. It is always and everywhere a distortion of the Good. Satan and his army were brought down from heaven through their pride, which can be a virtue if properly tempered, but without discernment can drag down even the most virtuous souls into damnation. In their pride, the fallen angels seek to spread their misery to others by leading them down the road to ruin.

Evil moves quickly. It leads us to seek quick answers, to give in to urges and impulses, to fear the unknown and fortify ourselves against uncertainty. It makes us feel justified in our own actions, yet quick to pass judgement on others. It takes hold of society, building up barriers against one another, exploiting the weak, casting hostility against outsiders and indifference upon those who suffer. Evil creates suffering while also feeding off of it. Those who carry wounds from their own suffering succumb to temptation to inflict that same suffering on others. Trauma begets trauma. Suffering leads to conflict which leads to insecurity and distrust of others. People build up walls to separate themselves from others, and protect what resources they have from outsiders.

What of the Good? How does it move? What is its place in this grand scheme? If Good is metaphysically prior evil, as we are told by the wisdom traditions of both East and West, why do we not see more of it? The Good works slowly, barely noticeable at first. Someone helps another person carry their groceries, or gives up their seat on a bus for another, or gives them some change for a bite to eat when they’re struggling. Such random acts of kindness may seem insignificant in a world so dominated by evil. However, if one not only performs good deeds, but actively cultivates virtue within themselves, they will be a light unto others, and inspire others to act likewise. The light spreads, slowly but surely, and is recognized by the inner light in others.

The path of righteousness does not offer the same short-term payoff as the path of darkness, but those who follow it will discover over time that a sense of inner peace grows within them, even when times are darkest. This is not to say that such people never face anxiety or depression. This sense of peace is a pure aesthetic appreciation of the Good. One finds comfort in doing the right thing, even when it comes at tremendous personal cost. This inner peace has accompanied many saints on their way to martyrdom.

Evil spreads like wildfire, but Good spreads more slowly, like one candle lighting another, slowly reaching critical mass. This may sound bleak, but the angels know a secret: Evil is unstable, and will inevitably turn on itself. Evil divides humanity against one another, and in the end eats its own. So while the demons preach instant gratification, the angels know the virtue of patient persistence. While Evil consumes itself, the Good grows on the blood of its martyrs and in the hearts of the faithful.

Following the higher path means facing this fallen society and preparing to suffer at its hands. Such is the way of the cross. The good news is that moral courage is contagious. Whenever someone shows heroic virtue, they empower the angel on everyone’s shoulder. The demons will work hard to try to sway them away, and they will still win much of the time, but the angel grows stronger from the support of others. Before long, an army of angels is assembled, strengthened by unity of purpose. While demons sow division and hatred, the angels know the virtue of solidarity. The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out among us, but when it is gathered together as one voice, the Devil trembles.

Those who hope for the intervention of an omnipotent deity should take a closer look at how Good and Evil play out within this world. It is a battle that takes place within our own hearts. The raging fire of darkness tempts people with its immense power, but such power is fleeting, and inevitably leads its followers to their own undoing. The steady, shimmering light of the Good, on the other hand, appears weak and fragile, but those who follow it know that it cannot be extinguished by the darkness, and will outlast it in the end. The powerful will be brought down from their thrones, and the meek will inherit the Earth. In our darkest hour, the light shines through.

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.

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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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Feature Image: AK Rockefeller, happy souls in hell [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]
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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

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Feature Image: Fabrice Florin, Pataphysical Time [CC BY-SA 2.0]
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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

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Feature Image: Colored Appropriation of Hans Baldung's Three Ages of Woman and Death by Cea+ [CC BY 2.0]
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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

Songs of Sodom

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Feature Image: "astral dreams04" by swangull is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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Editor’s Note: For readers who would prefer to read this long-form article offline, click here to download as a PDF (25 pages).

“A belief in clairvoyance, telepathy, or a ‘sixth sense’ is a symptom of schizotypal personality disorder.” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)

We were lost. Daddy sucked on a fat cigar, leaned across the steering wheel, stared at the dark road up ahead and let out a stream of four letter words, which my mother told me never to repeat. She snapped off the radio, got real quiet. The car filled with smoke, my eyeballs burned. I rolled down the window, gulped the night wind, and squinted at the crescent moon, which to my blurred vision looked like a clove of garlic. I imagined the vast black ocean and wanted to be swallowed by it, drown it in its deep dark belly. I often had dreams about being swallowed by something big and black. Holding back the pressure to go to the bathroom, I squirmed in the back seat, my stomach ached, hands clenched, ready for a fight.

“This is not the way to go,” Mama said, getting the map out of the glove compartment. “You should have turned right back there. Now we are going to be late. Shoot. Now we are going to miss the beginning of the movie. I like to see the credits.”

“That’s the Gulf of Mexico,” I said to distract them,” and I know that the Coronkowa Indians lived near here. They were cannibals and used to eat people—”

“You learn that in geography class, Kensey?”

“Yes, mam. I made an A on the test.”

“You did? Well I’m real proud of you, honey. Too bad your daddy didn’t study his geography.”

“It wasn’t geography, Mama, it was Texas history.”

Daddy yelled, “Would you two shut the fuck up!”

We got real quiet again. She didn’t want me to lose respect for that man. That man that was my father. That man that was her husband. That mad man that was driving the car in circles on a back road that seemed to be going nowhere.

“Are we there yet?” I fidgeted, trying to stop what I knew was going to happen. “My stomach hurts.”

“If you don’t shut up,” Daddy glared at me in the rear-view mirror, “I’ll give you something to cry about, you little sissy.”

“Now Big Kensey,” Mama said to Daddy, “you shouldn’t talk to little Kensey that way. Turn right at the next intersection.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Daddy said, between clenched teeth. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Can’t you go a little faster?”

“I’m doing the speed limit, God damn it! I’m not going to get a ticket because of you. Woman, you think you’re so smart, you drive the fucking car!” Daddy slammed on the brakes, the tires screeched, the car came to a dead halt. Surrounding the little car was a big black silence, the big black thing that was going to swallow us, and just the sound of the surf and some crickets singing in unison along the side of the road.

“What’s wrong, sugar?” Mama asked. “I just said to turn right.”

“Woman, you make my ass crave stove wood! Fucking bitch!” Daddy threw the lit cigar in her face but luckily the cigar stuck to the lens of her eyeglasses. Both of my parents, in the front seat of the car, facing each other. She with her mouth wide open unable to scream, a lit cigar stuck to her eyeglasses. He with a red face shouting four letter words. From a distance, faintly, then getting louder, I heard the rumble of a diesel truck, the blast of the horn.

This madman was my father, who taught me how to tie a tie and shine my shoes, and who always said the blessing each evening over our supper. This man opened the car door and got out and disappeared into the dark, just as the diesel truck zoomed past. Kicking up a big gust of wind that lifted my mother’s loose cotton dress, it blew debris from the road into the car through the door he left wide open—a smashed Styrofoam cup, a torn brown paper bag, a knotted up plastic straw, white paper napkins. The cigar was blown off her glasses and into her lap where it made a crimson glow. I guess she didn’t notice it.

She sat there, unresponsive to the faint glow from that cigar on her lap, still wet with my daddy’s saliva. She looked as if she was frozen, numb; a slight small smile on her face as if she was relieved, as if she were warming herself before a friendly camp fire.

Then a spark from that still hot cigar leaped into life, a real live fire that had no respect for anyone’s property, a wild fire she had to pay attention to. Her body became a fluid rapid movement, a trapped bird, flapping its wings. I helped her put out the fire, swatting my hands at it, afraid of touching what was the most vulnerable part of her body. When we were sure the fire was out we sat there motionless. Her white dress had a hole in the middle of it, her pale pink flesh, exposed. I knew something evil was happening.

“I can’t go anywhere like this.” She said quietly, trembling. “We won’t be seeing the movie tonight. It’s too late. It has already started. I guess your Daddy has left us.”

“He’ll come back.” I said, “He always does.” I paused for a moment. “I wish he would stay away. We could do okay without him.”

“Don’t you love your father?”

“I love him but he don’t love me. He caught your dress on fire. Can’t we just leave him?”

“He’s got the money.”

“We don’t need his money. Just get behind the wheel and drive the car.”

“He took the keys. Where can we go? He’ll find us. We’re stuck Kensey Jr., right in the middle of nowhere.”

“Please, Mama, let’s get out of here. He’s delusional.”

“Delusional? Where did you learn that word from?”

“I looked it up in the dictionary. That’s what he is. Delusional.”

“That’s no way to talk about your father.” Mama got out of the car, and chased after Daddy as he stumbled down the dark road.

She screamed. “You walk away? Just like that? When I’m on fire? Look at my dress! It’s ruined. You do this in front of your son? He thinks you’re delusional.”

“Mama, would you be quiet and get in the car?” I begged.

“Is this the way you teach your son? What kind of man are you? What kind of man would abandon his wife and child in the middle of the night on a back road in the middle of nowhere?” They were swinging at each other, shouts, screams, slaps. I still smelled the fire, the stench of mama’s scorched hair.

“I demand respect,” he shouted. “Why can’t you be on my side just once?”

Then I heard the sound of another diesel truck coming from the distance. I saw the glare of the headlights in the rear view mirror. I saw the shadow of their bodies in the fierce white glare, locked together, on all fours, then rolling around on top of each other, then crying, pleading, and cursing. They didn’t see it coming. I watched it all in the rear view mirror. The white hot glare, the loud blast of the big truck’s horn.

I don’t remember much about what happened next.

I began to hurt all over. Everything turned into the color of blood.

I began to feel like I was floating through the roof of the car and then above the ocean, up into the night sky, up beyond the moon and the stars. Flying with my mother beside me holding my hand, she was laughing as we changed direction and headed back toward the earth with tremendous speed. Turning into falling stars we hit the ocean and went deep into the crust of the earth and into the real dark.

I was warm at first, but then I couldn’t find my mama. I felt frozen and couldn’t move and there was nothing there or anywhere except the sound of my father’s growling voice in a language I couldn’t understand. This language was pure evil; the language of the devil. I started screaming but no one could hear me scream. I was all alone in the dark forever, in a great big coffin with no TV, no food to eat, no body to feel. And then I started to forget. I forgot about everything except that feeling of evil and it was the worst evil I ever felt. I was floating and heard some voices talking about me somewhere over my head. As I became aware of the voices they started to whisper and trying to hear them became a strain. I gave up.

I came out of a long dream, a long dream with lots of blood in it. When I woke up I discovered it wasn’t a dream. It had really happened. My father was there beside my bed with a worried expression on his dirty face. There were policemen there, too, and a nurse, with a long needle gleaming in the harsh overhead light. They stood in a silent circle around the bed.

“Where’s Mama?”

Daddy whispered to me, “Son, listen to your father. They want to take me away from you. Tell them not to take me away. Tell them you want to stay with me. Whatever I’ve done, I’m your father and I love you.” He put his trembling hands on my shoulders and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “At first you only remember the bad things, then you only remember the good things and then one day you won’t remember anything at all.” He gripped me tight and cried. His hot tears fell on my neck. He smelled like an old cigar. “If they take me away, you’ll never see me again.”

I asked for Mama again. No one answered me so I knew what had happened. My father was crying and I reached out towards him but the cops held him down while the nurse injected him with a needle. They dragged him toward the door and I pleaded to go with him. “I’ll go with you,” I cried out after him, as they led him in handcuffs down the corridor. “Take me with you.”

The nurse told me they were going to take him to a place where he would be safe. Then she gave me a pill to swallow, looked at her watch, and jotted something down on a clipboard. Closing my eyes, feeling numb all over, I wanted to feel numb like that as long as I could. The pain went somewhere else. Dark, down into the dark.

There was a warm washcloth on my forehead. Then a cool hand on my cheek. Suddenly there was sunshine again. I squinted into a bright room, feeling a stiff thermometer stuck under my tongue, which was withdrawn quickly. I was told my fever was broken, that I was back to normal. The kind nurse left and I opened my eyes. Studying the bright room I noticed in the next bed a scrungy looking teenage boy with matted hair sticking up on his head, unshaven face, a few years older than me. There was a bag of golden liquid tied to a pole next to his bed that leaked through a tube and into the needle taped to his arm. He smiled sweetly at me, got out of his bed, and wrapping his hospital gown around him he limped over to my bed. He placed his lips near my ear and told me I had been screaming for days. He said he had been afraid I was a real goner. He said that he had prayed for my recovery. I felt my tear roll down my cheek and I closed my eyes again and fell asleep.

I made a swift recovery. I was surprised how much I loved the hospital. They were so nice to me. Because I was an orphan, they were extra nice. Gave me a menu each morning, told me I could pick out whatever I wanted, three square meals on time every day, extra desserts. All the TV I wanted. This was the kind of attention I never got at home. And home. Where was my home going to be?

Sharing the room with that teenage boy for a couple of weeks was a lot like having a brother, and for the first time I felt at home with another human being. He had been in a motorcycle accident and ruptured his spleen, was often in pain, sometimes had to vomit, especially at night. When he was feeling good he was talkative, spoke freely about his motorcycle accident. About the girls he had fucked. He knew I had never balled a chick before, that I was too young for that. But he enjoyed telling me the details of his love life. I listened, enjoying his pleasure in the telling of it. I wondered why that special girl he liked never paid him a visit. But most of all I wondered about the feelings. The strange desire I had to share his excitement, to be with him when he was with his girl, to enter his body and become him. That’s when I suspected there was something wrong with me because I had fallen in love, but not with the girl. I had read enough definitions in the dictionary to suspect that I was a bisexual or a pervert or a deviant or maybe even something worse.

My roommate was very good looking.

When I left the hospital, and said goodbye to my roommate, I was depressed because I liked the hospital. I liked the three meals a day. I liked him. Liked him more than I should. When I said goodbye, and shook his hand, I knew I was in love with a lonesome teenage boy with a ruptured spleen, who received no visitors and would be in the hospital for a very long time. I knew I would never see him again. I knew I would miss him, miss his kindness. Miss his talk about girls and sex. I was in big trouble, because I was in love with a boy rather than a girl.

∞

I’m a Caucasian man, well built, wearing tight jeans with a bulge in my crotch. Moving lightly, a trace of paranoia in each step, I’m walking on a tree lined street in Harlem searching for a Love Supreme. I feel as if I have lived here in this Caucasian body, on this street for a short time. I’m a stranger here. Enjoying the brisk weather and the falling leaves, I observe from a distance the kids playing basketball behind a fence. I sit on the bench and daydream and the backstory of this new incarnation returns to me in waves. The mood is tragically romantic. And gay.

My lover, Bismarck, who happens to be black, wants to adopt children. I love kids, too. But I’m not ready for that. We are an interracial gay couple, just starting out, and it’s hard to imagine that happening. Becoming a parent is not something I aspire to, but Bismarck does. He’s the kind of man who likes to hold babies, to rock babies to sleep. I’m Bismarck’s first gay relationship and he’s having a hard time making the adjustment to gay culture. He doesn’t like it.

I hear Motown playing loudly on a boombox. Rick James sings, “Give it to me, that funky stuff, give it to me.” As I sit watching the boys play basketball, suddenly, the ball bounces towards me, and rolls to my feet. A youth that reminds me of a younger teenaged version of Bismarck, shouts, “Pass me the ball.”

I’m too shy, too afraid they will think I’m a sissy as well as a honky. Frozen in a cramped posture, unable to respond, negative thoughts darken the mood. The bright colors start to fade into gray and dull tones. There is a shadow that passes next to me. My attention is distracted by the shadow and I forget my purpose. Forget that I was once a High Priest. Forget the old Negro woman, the Harlem hooker, as I start to get pulled slowly into the lower astral by some demonic force. I start to shiver.

I notice a junkyard car parked across the street. For some reason it looks familiar. As I focus, the blurred outlines of the car sharpen in detail. I notice it carries a Texas license plate, making my heart race wildly. Daddy. It’s my father’s car. He has found me, destroying all my good luck. I’m trapped in my demonic father’s fury. His sins have fallen upon me. I feel swept up into a cosmic struggle, a titanic battle coming towards me. A howling tornado is rushing towards our little village and will turn it into shards of glass and twisted car parts and uprooted trees.

I unlock the door of the brownstone and throw it open, shouting, “Bismarck? Are you home?” It’s a dark, silent house. I turn on the light. My voice rises in a panic, “Baby, are you home?” I walk through the living room, the downstairs, and the upstairs. I return to the kitchen.

My demonic father is standing at the back door. “Who’s there? Son, is that you?” he asks in a gentle southern drawl.

I stare at him speechless as he steps into the light. He’s not what I remember. He’s a small, frail man, silver haired, wearing a faded denim jacket, holding a baseball cap nervously in his hands. “Son, it’s your Daddy. May I come in?”

I can’t speak. I just watch him, tongue tied, wide-eyed with terror. Feeling as if I’m in the presence of my own self when I get old. He walks carefully into the house, and this is the moment I’ve dreaded.

“I told Aunt Peggy I don’t want to see you.”

He smiles. “Well, son, you know Peggy never was a good messenger. That woman doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. Besides, you and I have a lot of catching up to do.” His voice sounds kind of tender, like when he read to me when I was little. “I’m an old man, Kensey, and I ain’t well. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Get out!” I scream, “You don’t belong here! I don’t want you here, God damn you!”

“What are you afraid of? I don’t bite,” he chuckles as he strikes a match and lights up his cigar. “I can’t believe you’re my son. You’re so handsome. You used to be such a scrawny kid. Come give your Daddy a hug.”

I feel the current flow, a surge from his pelvis towards mine, and I block his move. He’s become a vampire, and he knows he’s met his match. I’m no longer the boy he could torture, intimidate, turn into mush. He exhales a cloud of acrid cigar smoke.

“No matter what you think of me, I’m still your father; you’re my son. Nothing can ever change that.”

“What kind of son would I be if I let the man who killed my mother into my house?” Holding steady, connected to my center, I notice a long forgotten southern accent has crept back into my speech.

“You got a good point.” He looks off into space for a moment, a vacant stare in a fog of cigar smoke. He mumbles, “I see what you mean. This ain’t the way I hoped it would be. Hoped you would find it in your heart to forget and forgive.” He looks at the objects on the table. “Do you have an ash tray?”

He notices a picture of me and Bismarck taken on the rooftop of my apartment in the East Village. He asks, “Who the hell is that?” I grab the picture away from him.

“That’s none of your business.”

“You haven’t turned into a nigger lover, have you? That would break your mother’s heart.” The surge comes from the solar plexus and I feel the psychic heat. Once again I resist the temptation to play his way. He says, “I gave you life and I can take it away.” Before I respond to his blasphemy, I hear footsteps at the front door. Bismarck stands in the doorway, dressed in a police uniform. “Who called the cops? I ain’t done nothing wrong. I just traveled a thousand miles to see my son. Is that a crime?”

I kiss Bismarck proudly on the lips and then sneer at my father who turns pale. Daddy has a look of fear on his face. “I hate cigars!” I grab the cigar out of his mouth, and stomp it on the floor. I grab the handcuffs on Bismarck’s police uniform, grab the stick, and strike the Demon Daddy on his shin. A crack of bone. He falls to his knees with a cry and I cuff Daddy’s wrist, just like a pro. I handcuff him to the grate around the fireplace, so that he’s trapped, like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

“You like rough sex, don’t you Daddy? I remember how you used to slap mama’s face and spit on her. Call her a bitch and make her cry for mercy. Fuck you, old man! Now it’s your turn to suffer.” He starts to shake like a dog that’s wet the floor.

“Daddy, there’s something you need to know about me. I want you to know who I am, Daddy. And then I want you to have a heart attack and die. Malcolm X said that the white man must learn to love the black man. Well that’s what I’ve learned to do. That’s right, Daddy, I’m your worst nightmare.”

Bismarck is mesmerized. Before my eyes he becomes like an angelic being, a halo around his head. I get down on my knees, look up into his eyes and say tenderly to him, “Bismarck I love you more than anyone else in the world. You saved my life, baby. I was miserable until I met you. I want you to marry me. Baby, will you marry me?”

“Yes, Kensey, I’ll marry you.”

“Trust me, baby. There’s something that I need you to do, so that Daddy can get to know me better and then he will go away and never bother us again. Will you do this for me?” Bismarck rests his hands on my shoulders and nods his head in agreement. “I want Daddy to know I’m your dick slave. I want Daddy to see my Master’s big cock. I want to service you now.” I unzip him. “Daddy, sorry, you can’t have any. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of cock where you come from.” I deep throat Bismarck with a supernatural fury. We go into ecstasy while Daddy goes into convulsions.

“Goddamn you!” Daddy roars. “I wish you had never been born than to be a nigger lover faggot!”

Before Bismarck shoots his load, I pull off him and cry out to Daddy’s demon. “Daddy, I love it when Bismarck corn holes me. You want to watch him corn hole me, the way you used to corn hole Mama?”

Daddy’s face has turned red, slobbering at the mouth, eyes bulging, gasping for air. He tries desperately to get out of the handcuffs, furious that he can’t hurt me anymore. Bismarck shoots his load on my bare chest.

Daddy stops struggling, his eyes are staring into infinity.

I recite the monk’s prayer.

“NOW BY THE POWER OF THE CHRIST OF GOD WITHIN ME WHOM I WORSHIP WITH ALL MY HEART AND ALL MY SOUL AND ALL MY STRENGTH I ENCOMPASS BISMARK AND MYSELF WITHIN THE DIVINE CIRCLE OF HIS PROTECTION. GET THEE GONE!”

The Daddy Demon returns to the body, opens his red eyes and screams, “That prayer doesn’t work unless you believe in it!” His long tongue slithers out at me but I take a drop of Bismarck’s holy semen, pooled in the hollow space between my nipples and smear it upon the demon’s rough leathery tongue. The Demon cries,” I AM YOU!!!”

“GET THEE GONE!”

And the Demon removes his presence. Daddy’s corpse shrivels up into a fetal position, turns into a big hair ball, and then blows away, without a trace.

I open a bottle of champagne. We raise our glasses and I propose a toast. “Here’s to our future, Bismarck. Here’s to our vast future.” We put down our glasses and embrace. I feel the stiffness of his police uniform, his virile smell, the roughness of his unshaven face. We begin to slow dance, dreaming of things to come. But I stop. I hear a rumbling. We disentangle and I feel that we are being blown apart by a whirlwind. I cling to him until the force pulls us asunder and I’m falling into another world. A hard world with sharp angles, kicks, screams and groans. It is still Harlem, a strict Timespace with dense connections. I am crossing over the threshold, bringing with me the memories of the High Priest, the Harlem hooker, the boy from Texas, and the Demon Daddy, arriving again into impossible living arrangements. I had a mission but I am forgetting my purpose.

“Kensey! Wake up!” I open my eyes to see Bismarck, now, in the physical, waking, world, standing over the bed, calling my name. He brings me back into the sharp angles and the hard surfaces of Timespace, with a past, present, future and many rational perspectives. He shakes me awake, with fear in his face and asks, “Hey, baby, you okay?”

I look around the room seeing phantoms from other Timespaces disappear, going through the walls and out the windows into a black sky. I bring with me my knowledge of the yet to be liberated astral worlds back into the rational world of lawyers and doctors and bills to pay. Someone else was there in the room, behind Bismarck’s tall, muscular, nude body. A thin, light skinned woman wearing an ill-fitting wig and a cotton, pink nightgown stood by his side with a grim look on her face. I was ashamed for I was buck naked, too, and this was Bismarck’s mother.

“What’s the matter with this white boy?” she asked Bismarck.

“Nightmare.” Bismarck said to her, “He’ll be okay. Go back to bed, Mama.”

“He’s sure high strung.” She seemed to float out of the room, back to her room downstairs, the old floors creaking beneath her bare feet. I sensed that she was in the wrong Timespace. She had died of cancer a decade ago, but still hung around haunting Bismarck who was unaware of her influence.

Bismarck returned to our bed. Agitated, I got up and paced the room, with the bed sheet wrapped around me like a toga, and peered out the window into the warm, black night. I stood half naked before him, feeling his erotic, hungry gaze upon my body. I thumped on my chest, trying to return to a heart center, for I felt my energies were scattered across several dimensions. But I knew Bismarck and I shared the same heart, shared a familiar quality of safety. I always seemed to find him, in whatever world we met, like a homing pigeon returning to the right place after flights across great distance.

“Don’t you ever have bad dreams?” I asked.

“Never,” he replied. “Sleep like a rock. I never dream.”

“But everyone dreams.”

“Not me. Now, come back to bed, knucklehead.” He pulled back the covers.

Bismarck had become an intellectual. He has covered up and shut down on his psychic abilities, I thought. It was then I noticed on the table beside the bed, a fat book. The book was Being and Time.

“Do you read that stuff?” I opened the title page and got a feeling of nausea. Puzzled by the sudden exaggerated, intellectual side of his nature, I returned to the bed feeling slightly dizzy. It was as if I was floating again, weightless, transparent, between two worlds, neither here nor there. I rested my head on his shoulder and immediately felt the protection of his big warmth, coming back to planet Earth.

“You know what really impresses a white guy?” Bismarck asked.

“A big black dick,” I reached down and held his sex. He smiled at my provocation but didn’t respond.

“Heidegger,” he answered. “If you quote Heidegger they’re really impressed. They’re impressed to find out a black guy knows who Heidegger was. They also are shocked if you have been to Paris. I’ve been to Paris and I can talk about existentialist shit, and being thrown into the world. If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life. And only then will I be free to become myself. I am more than just a big dick.”

“Sorry that I objectify you. I’ll stop doing that.” I smiled at his audacity, his making fun of white people. “James Baldwin said black people are inside white people and white people are inside black people.” His sex organ came to life, throbbed in my hand, pulsed with pleasure.

I also felt something vague, like a snake slithering in the grass. I meandered through the maze of my troubled memories, searching for the tail of that snake. I figured I would have to wrestle with it. I saw, against my will, an image of a black man hanging in a tree. I felt a wave of terror.

Forcing the image from my mind, not knowing for sure what was real, what was imagined, I pushed back the image of the hanged man into the far away recesses of the mind. Bismarck kissed my lips, as if he could taste the fear.

“I remember something that happened long ago.” I spoke slowly, in a trance state, from the middle of nowhere, “It was a string of pearls. Mama was putting on a string of pearls and I am brushing her thick dark hair. She was getting ready for work. She was a bookkeeper at a store downtown. She was telling me to be a good boy and do what Mary says.”

“Who was Mary?” he asked, sleepily.

“Mary was a Creole, our black maid. I heard Daddy say that we gave her a dollar a day and all she could steal. I was maybe four years old. I remember one morning, Mary watched Mama get into that green Chevrolet and drive off to work. She told me we were going to her house and that we were going to have fun. We waited for the bus. It was a hot day, and her house was by the river. I remember chickens running around in the yard. Daddy had said to my mother, that Mary lived in Nigger Town.

“She had two grandchildren, a girl who was taller than me and a boy who was my size. I can’t remember his name, but I remember he took me by the hand and we walked down to a stream to catch crawdads. We had poles with string on them and we would catch them and put them in a bucket, wiggling and squirming in the noonday sun. We saw a woodpecker hammer its head into the bark of a tree. Swarms of dragonflies were all around us. We watched some big boys shoot a big snake with a BB gun. They picked it up and carried it over their heads with its mouth wide open. Then Mama drove up in the green Chevrolet and she was cursing out Mary, yelling at her, ‘What have you done with my baby? Kensey, where are you?’ She carried me back to the car, hysterical.

“‘What have these people done to you? You’re filthy.’ I started crying. I said I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay with Mary. I wanted to stay in Nigger Town. She said, ‘You hush up. You keep crying like that and I’ll give you something to cry about.'”

“What happened to Mary?” Bismarck asked.

“I don’t remember. I guess that was when I first became aware that I was a white person and that I wanted to live in Nigger Town.”

We were quiet, now. Bismarck was drifting off to sleep, and I was too fragile to initiate love making. He mumbled, “Don’t like being a symbol of three hundred years of oppression.” He rolled over on his side and pulled my arm around his torso. The cat had jumped onto the bed and made himself comfortable.

Out of the window, over the sleepy houses, I could see the moon. ‘Oh mama! What would you have me do? Oh, mama.’ Bismarck’s snore faded away as I followed that snake in the grass, and the snake turned into a cat, and at the end of the meadow the cat turned into a woman, a woman who was running in fear from me. She stumbled and fell in the mud. Mama?

We are both adults, wrestling in a muddy ditch. She tries to run away from me. I shout at her, “I am not your husband! I am not your father! I am not your lover! I am your son!”

She is trembling in the rain and tells me, “I’m afraid of you. I was afraid of you before you were born.” Then she runs into a field of gray and the field bursts into bright sparks and like a celluloid film that gets overheated, the image burns, melts and turns into blinding white light.

The light was so bright that even with my eyes closed it filled the inside of my skull. I opened my eyes. Wide eyed, filled with a nameless fear, I remained motionless for hours, staring at the ceiling, aware of the sound of the traffic. I sensed there was another room, in another village, where my mother slept. I was aware of my body humming, of my irregular heartbeat, of death, of her death and mine. My human body, I knew, had been enslaved, sold and resold, raped and killed, burnt alive. I have been beggar, priest and whore, man, woman, child, Angel and Demon. Each lifetime we think we will make it turn out right but it always turns into just another ugly, unforgiving dream.

∞

As I opened my eyes I smelled bacon frying. The room was still dark, the cat curled at my feet. Bismarck was downstairs cooking breakfast. The cat leaped to the floor as I wrapped a terry cloth robe around me. Then I noticed, sitting in the corner of the bedroom, dressed in a police uniform, was Bismarck’s mother. I picked up her story telepathically.

She had been raised in foster care. Then as a teenager she married Bismarck’s father, who abandoned them. She became a police officer. She was a single mom who raised two sons. One of them was Bismarck, her eldest son. The other son had died of an overdose. She wondered what Bismarck was doing with a loser like me. I wanted her to love me, but I knew that was an irrational want. She asked, bluntly, “What do you want with my son?”

“Love him, I guess.”

“Love?” She looked like she wanted to spit “You doin’ drugs?”

“No, mam, I don’t do drugs.”

“You from the South?”

“Yes, mam, raised in Texas, born in Alabama, Tuscaloosa.”

“Tuscaloosa?” She looked horrified. “The killing fields. More black folks lynched in that hell hole than the rest of the South put together. What are you doing here in New York?”

“An actor. I want to be an actor, but I’m tending bar downtown in a place called the Monster.”

“The Monster? I know that place. An evil place, where all the faggots go.”

I noticed on her lap was sheet music. It was Mahler’s second symphony. “Resurrection Symphony?” I asked, surprised, “Are you working on this music? Are you in the chorus?”

“I’m a soloist.” she laughed, sardonically, “Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!” She stood and faced me, and a chill came from her. “Use an alternate route.” And then she faded into the yellow roses of the old wall paper.

I went downstairs, feeling troubled, trying to figure out what she meant by an alternate route? Where were these ancestors, my father and Bismarck’s mother, located? And why were they appearing in my energy field in such a haphazard way? I let go of my memories of those other realms and pretended that I was a denizen of this slice of reality that some believed was all there is. I realized it was best to surrender my memories of that other world, just to see if I could. Then I heard some delightful music.

The radio played a Schubert quartet as Bismarck cooked. Nothing sexier than my man in the kitchen, dressed in heavy denim and a white T-shirt, moving lightly, gracefully to the music. He was so sure of himself, so completely inside his body. Tall, broad shouldered, with a thin waist, shaved head. I had a desire for him. As I watched him make breakfast, swaying to the music, unaware of my presence, I thought how different we were.

I was not on equal terms with my body. Something was wrong with it. No matter how much I meditated, no matter how much yoga I did, I could never completely relax into it. Bismarck was just himself. I felt his expectation as I put my hands around his waist while he stirred the frying pan. I rubbed my crotch against his butt. “You want a little sugar in your bowl?” I whispered in his ear.

“You sure are horny, all of a sudden.” He turned off the stove. He sat down at the dining room table and ate quickly. He looked like a fine thoroughbred, getting into the starting gate, full of energy.

“Do you always get up so fucking early?” I yawned. “The sun isn’t even up yet.” I sat down and started to eat, too.

“Early rehearsal at Lincoln Center. I like to walk through the park before work.” His viola was in the case on the table. He finished his last mouthful, gulped down his coffee, laced up his sneakers. I felt uneasy. “Are you rehearsing Mahler?”

“How did you know?”

“I’m psychic,” I replied. “Seriously, I am.” Bismarck looked nervous. “What’s wrong, baby? Is it about last night?”

“You should talk to your father,” he said, firmly. “How long has he been out of jail?”

“Not a jail, an insane asylum. And you want me to talk to that pig?” I poured a cup of coffee, my hands shaking. I turned off the radio. My voice rose, loudly “After all the shit he’s done you think I should talk to him? What part of it do you not understand? My father thinks Martin Luther King was an uppity nigger! He thought Hitler was a good man! My father was too fucking weird even for the Ku Klux Klan!”

“That’s not the point!” Bismarck shouted back at me. “He’s still your father. You’ve made up half of this shit. You haven’t seen him since you were ten years old. You don’t know who he is. You always daydreaming. Going off into some fantasy. It’s reality time, baby, it’s time to face reality.”

“I don’t want reality, baby, I want magic!”

“You rely too much on the kindness of strangers.” Bismarck shot back at me.

“I support myself,” I said, feeling defensive, “I have my own place. I can become an investment banker if I want to.”

“Well, good luck, baby, don’t let me stand in your way.” He sat in the chair across from me, with a creased forehead, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. I stared down at his big Nikes. I put my bare foot on his sneaker, feeling my desire for him. Bismarck spoke quietly, in his deep baritone, in a reasonable tone. “Look at it this way. Your father is an old man. He’s sick. He has no power over you. You and me…we’re trying to make a go of it. We need to start with a clean slate. I’m not telling you what to do, but if you got a problem with him that affects me too.” He put his hand on his heart.

“He does have power.” I corrected him. “He’s got the evil eye. He wants to destroy me.”

“Never, never land,” Bismarck said. “You be Peter Pan, living in Neverland with your lost boys down in the Village, almost forty years old, still waiting tables.”

“Okay, girl,” I turned sarcastic, “and if I be Peter Pan that makes you my Tinkerbell!”

“Shut the fuck up! Don’t ever call me girl! Not in my house.” He stopped himself as he saw my testosterone rising to match his, like two alley cats hissing at each other. “Get dressed and walk with me to work. Let’s go through the park.”

I washed my face, dressed fast, and met Bismarck outside on the stoop. He locked the front door. I saw the sun rising over the park at the end of the block and started to feel a sense of vertigo, that weird feeling again, as if I was dropped in the middle of a Hollywood set and that this was just make believe. The quality of the light bathed the park in a celestial glow.

As we walked across the street towards the park, I noticed a big tattooed guy with his shirt off. He was being pulled by two ferocious pit bulls which were snarling at each other. They were coming towards us and I could tell the guy with the tattoos thought we were faggots. I got ready for a fight and sent him a wave of energy. I watched him and the dogs pass us by and suddenly felt a rush of relief that we escaped from being attacked.

Within minutes we were sitting by the edge of the lake in Central Park, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves. Far away in the distance we heard mute sounds of traffic. Above us a jet passed over, like a silver bullet in slow motion. Bismarck closed his eyes while I stayed alert, watchful, determined to protect him. I dared not touch him for he was shy about touch in public and it might trigger a bad reaction.

“By the way,” I said, gently, “did your mother wear a wig?”

His eyes widened. “How the fuck did you know that?”

“Saw her last night. She was talking to you about me. Told you that I was high strung.”

“Oh shit,” he said sounding amazed. “She’s right about that.”

“She died of cancer, didn’t she? She stayed in the maid’s room downstairs, to save you the trouble of carrying her up and down the stairs.”

“Kensey, I don’t want to hear this,” he said, reluctantly. “Deep down inside of you, there is a black woman. You just got a vivid imagination.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. ”I’ve listened to enough Billie Holiday, but it’s not my imagination. It’s real. Your mother is still hanging around your house. I know nothing about Heidegger but feel it’s just a lot of pretentious crap. You are afraid of knowing your past too.”

The ducks floated on the shimmering surface of the lake. A rank smell of rotting weeds wafted along the bank. Voluptuous clouds rose up majestically, reflected in the water. All of it arising and passing away. Rough magic. Breathing quietly, I no longer wanted to be a bodhisattva nor did I want to share the merit of my meditation with all sentient beings. I just wanted Bismarck and me to be okay.

Then it happened. A great rush of wings, bird shrieks, twigs from above fell onto our heads. Crows making harsh cries circled all around us and their shadowy shapes flapped ominously. All of this reflected in the broken up water of the lake.

What I saw next astonished me. It was something I had never seen before. There on the ground, a dozen yards away from us, landed a great hawk. It sat upon the struggling body of a smaller bird that flopped helplessly in the bigger bird’s talons. The hawk was probably young and still a clumsy hunter for it looked confused by the condemning crows who took turns swooping down to peck his noble head. The crows seemed to hate this cannibal hawk that was going to feed on the defenseless bird.

Feathers were flying. The hawk could not fly off with its struggling prey while the crows were attacking him. Determined to take off, the hawk gathered strength for its big flight. I watched his innocent victim struggle. I was tempted to throw something at the hawk but a deeper wisdom held me back. The hawk may appear evil but he was beautiful and I knew I had no right to interfere with his natural desire to hunt and prey on the weaker creatures. He had his chicks to feed.

Finally, awfully, the hawk lifted its wings, which were dappled with delicate creamy feathers, and lifted into the air. He struggled to hold onto his exhausted bloodied prey. He began a crooked flight above the shrubs along the shore, and then flew straight across the lake. He was soon above the trees, finding open space and an escape towards the horizon, as angry crows followed the hawk in hot pursuit.

“Oh shit!” I gasped, in awe. “Did you see that?” I felt chills go through my body. My mind was suddenly empty, without a plan, without a hope. Cuddling up against Bismarck, my body softened into his, overwhelmed by gratitude. “You are right, baby. I do need to see my father. Thank you.” He nodded his head in agreement, kissed me tenderly on the lips, in public. This was a sign that he was letting go of his being stuck in the closet. I released his hand and told him I was going to book a flight to Houston, to go back home, back to Texas. To the scene of the crime. To see my father.

We took a brisk walk through the park as the lazy summer morning started gathering momentum. More pedestrians and bikers appeared, moving all around us. The great Manhattan madness was starting up again.

“Will I see you before you go?” he asked.

“Better get this over with my father before I see you again. I have bad boundaries with you. I can’t help it. When I get back we’ll start with a clean slate. You are inside of me.” We embraced, a long embrace, as pedestrians rushed off to work around us, totally ignoring us, giving us our privacy. I waved farewell to Bismarck as I heard the A train arriving at the station, preparing to go back downtown to the Village.

∞

After Happy Hour at the Monster, I got off work and hooked up with Barry, my best friend. Barry had blue eyes, blonde hair, and was a real hunk. We started out at the Barracuda, on the West side. It was a stuffy professional scene, mostly actors and models. The same old, boring, cookie-cutter crowd. After the Chelsea circuit, feeling discouraged by the slim pickings, we decided to go to a salt and pepper bar down in the Village.

On the back of Barry’s bike, I balanced on the narrow seat while he pumped up and down with his strong legs. Holding on tightly to his broad shoulders, I marveled that we kept our balance after all the booze we’ve been drinking. “I love you Barry!” I shouted over his shoulder.

He shouted back, “Love you too, darling!”

Familiar stores and restaurants looked strange, whizzing past us in a neon blur. We stopped to pee on the street. I told him I was going to catch a flight to Houston, to see my lunatic father.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked.

“Bismarck thinks it’s good therapy.”

“Good luck,” he said, keeping it superficial. He locked up his bike on the street and we strolled arm in arm into the club. It was a late night vampire crowd. Old trolls and an assortment of pretty boys up way past their bedtime, high on coke. The diva sang, “Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree, some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you.”

Barry looked startled as he glanced at someone in the dark corner on the other side of the pool table. Barry looked away. As we ordered drinks and sat at the bar, in the mirror above the bottles, I could see the tall black guy with Dreadlocks, a jewel sparkling in his ear, gazing fixedly at Barry. The black guy’s body was gracefully poised, like a cheetah that’s been running across the savannas, hiding in trees from the lions, ready to leap out of the trees when he feels safe.

“Who’s that guy staring at you?” I asked. “He’s cute.”

“That’s Dr. Feel Good.” Barry said, as he lit a cigarette. “I’ve stopped seeing him. He’s the kinky doctor I told you about.”

“Why did you stop seeing him?”

“He’s a needy top,” Barry replied in a flip tone. “Always checking up on me. Too hot and heavy. He gets on my nerves. Would you stop staring at him? I don’t want to get involved with him.”

“Well, it’s too late now. Here he comes.”

The big cat moved from his perch, floated across the room, as if he was suspended by wires from the ceiling. “If you don’t want him, give him to me.”

“Don’t start with me, bitch.” Barry snapped at me.

The big cat stood next to Barry, waiting for his acknowledgement. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?” he asked Barry.

“I’ve been busy.” Barry replied, blowing smoke in his face.

“Hi, I’m Richard.” He turned to me and introduced himself in a dignified manner. We shook hands, then he gracefully put his arm around Barry, as I excused myself and went to the toilet. They needed to be alone.

As I emptied my bladder, I noticed the latrine next to me was occupied by the bouncer, a big black dude, three hundred pounds of steroid muscles. He had a nose ring, tattoos, and a heavy chain around his neck. Out of the corner of my eye I quickly glanced down at him. Huge. Uncut. I glanced away quickly. He zipped up, ignoring me completely. He didn’t wash his hands.

I had a sobering moment, gazing at my reflection in the mirror. If I pick up someone, then I won’t have to go home alone tonight. Missing Bismark already, I also want to be a no-good slut. I’m torn down the middle! I want that Sunday kind of love, but I love Bar Culture too.

I was startled by a look-alike Diana Ross drag queen who strutted into the bathroom and locked the door. I watched as she opened her purse, as if she was alone in the room, and casually spread out a line of coke on a cocktail napkin. She snorted it through a rolled up dollar bill. She turned, with her bleary eyes heavy with mascara, and offered the white powder to me. I took a hit, flattered by her attention. She smiled. “You’re cute.” She reached down for my dick. I stopped her. She shrugged her shoulders. “Did I get it wrong? Sorry, baby.”

“I’m a married man,” I opened the door, turned to her and said,” You look gorgeous.”

“I am an image,” she smiled at herself in the mirror. “A shadow of a dream, with a beautiful mind.”

At the bar, Dr. Feel Good was wrapped around Barry like a boa constrictor. I felt like I was in a bad porno movie. The bouncer, perched on a stool, near the entrance, was reading a paperback version of Pride and Prejudice. I gathered my courage and walked over, tried to start a conversation.

“So, you’re the literary type?” He ignored my comment but I foolishly pursued it. “Do you like Jane Austen?”

“You have a problem with Jane Austen?” He looked down at me as if I were a nerd. I walked away embarrassed. I had no rhythm tonight. And besides, I was just sabotaging myself. I needed to catch a flight the next morning. I should make my exit. I said goodnight to Barry and the good doctor.

“Take a cab,” Barry said. “Get home safe.”

I wished I had taken a cab. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened. I decided to walk home. I was bombed. Easy prey.

A few blocks away from my apartment I saw him emerge from the steamy heat, a gorgeous kid with a hipster’s walk. Rough trade. The color of French roast. The kind of kid that makes old ladies hold onto their purses. The kind of kid that I’d jump through hoops for. As he walked past me with a high indifference, I averted my gaze, not wanting to appear too obvious, getting a whiff of his strong patchouli oil. As few steps later I was surprised to find him walking behind me. Slowing down my pace, I turned and faced him.

I immediately felt the tornado coming right at me. He kept his eyes steady upon me. I felt like I was, once again, looking into the eyes of the King Cobra who was getting ready to spit. Alert to the danger, I was attracted to it nonetheless. He offered me a stick of gum. The sweet chew made me feel young, blasé, kind of naïve.

“I live with my girlfriend over on Avenue D,” he said. “Had a fight with her.”

“You got a girl? What do you want with me?”

“Pussy is easy to get.” He acted hyper. “A good piece of ass is hard to find.”

There was a construction site nearby. He took me into a dark area behind the dumpster. “You want to look at it?” He whipped it out. He’s huge. Fully erect. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “I’ll fuck you to death.”

“No thanks.” I turned away from him.

“Fuck you, faggot.” He hit me in the jaw.

I stumbled back onto the street, looking for a well-lit area. I felt grit in my mouth. Loose enamel. I was a block from my house. The street was empty. Stumbling towards my building, the street refused to stay still. I put my key in the door, opened it. I was pushed through the door, slammed to the floor with a blow to the back of the head. I kissed the concrete. Managing to rise, I stumbled towards the stairs, felt another blow. The gorgeous kid had a box cutter at my throat. Oh shit. The Angel of Death. Might as well relax. Get ready to meet my Maker. I swallowed the chewing gum.

“Why,” he asked,” did you make me show it to you if you didn’t want it?”

‘Pace, pace, mio Dio.‘  I heard Maria Callas singing from the crazy Italian lady’s apartment.

The kid reached down into my pocket, pulled out all I had, a ten-dollar bill, then walked out the building, slamming the front door shut. During the scuffle, I had pulled off his wristwatch. I stared at it in my hand. I just got mugged and I ended up with a nice watch, more valuable than the ten bucks he got from me.

The old Italian lady peeked through her door. Maria Callas flooded the hallway with her golden voice. Mrs. Pedone suffered from insomnia ever since her husband passed away. She didn’t even like opera, but her husband had been a big fan.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Pedone.” I tried to calm her. She was almost blind, but she knew my voice “Sorry to disturb you.”

“Oh, Mr. Jones. It’s you.” After she sniffed the air for danger, she closed the door.

I stared at the watch. Was this a message? A cosmic joke? I recalled the words to the song… ‘Does anybody really know what time it is?’ I hummed the melody as I climbed the steep stairs, hearing the echo of my lonesome voice. Tumbling into my apartment, grateful to be alone in my bed, alone in the dark, alone and alive.

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

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Feature Image: Claudia Dea, The Kiss of the Goddess, via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]
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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

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Feature Image: AK Rockerfeller, USA Abstract [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]
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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.

How to Live in the Future (Part 2)

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Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888)

“Sexual selection would appear to be a search engine for [compression algorithms] in the implicate order, an ecstatic browsing for patterns that will increase the capacity of any system to produce ever greater amounts of entropy.”
– Richard Doyle

If you plan to live in the future, you have failed already: one of its defining traits is that it’s unpredictable. We don’t need a technological event horizon for this to be true (but they are actually quite frequent). The real Singularity that Church of Kurzweil devotees displace into the fruiting moment of today’s still-juvenile Ecology of Stuff—that sharp discontinuity between what is and what can’t be imagined, lives right now and always now, and we’re inside it. It’s the canopy of stars we pierce when we embody old alchemical engravings, poking our explorers’ heads out through the sky-as-limit-of-the-known. It is the Bardo of Tibetan mysticism, that chaotic space between our incarnations in which everything occurs at once—and every moment is the Bardo, since our lives are tunnels made of gates, and every day’s a new year. Every moment’s an inflection point between the end and the beginning of innumerable stories flowing in all possible directions. (If you don’t agree, just sit and listen long enough, and evidence will come.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Day That Changes Everything is that we’re swimming in it all the time. If some Omega Point in hyperspace, the Eschaton that waits for us at history’s end, draws all mundane phenomena into its all-embracing unity, we’re implicated in that vast conspiracy already. We can celebrate. But particles apparently pop in and out of being all the time, each moment a Creation. All of it occurs at once, a party more than a parade. So point me to “the” Singularity, again?

That said, the future seems to have a character that holds up to the deconstruction of our histories: it’s more of everything. Defining time as the apparent movement of relationships between entangled objects—space as measure of entanglement—“time’s arrow” points to greater entropy, an isotropic, isomorphic cosmos in which every game’s been played and all can come to rest at last. But en route to that final moment, entropy-as-evolution seeks the best-fit path to oceanic stillness, and contrives the paradox of order-as-a-means-to-emptiness: the metabolic flurry of our intricate ecologies, no niche unoccupied, the fractal map of river deltas fitting neatly over our phylogenies and food webs. Winding tributaries and the “tangled bank” of Darwin’s evolutionary wilderness take shape as the inevitable system-seeking-rest, its filaments forever reaching from the trauma of explosive origins to grasp at peace in full and evenly distributed disorder.

Every action has its equal, opposite reaction, though. The liberating “march of progress,” Eros constantly transcending limitation by devising and inhabiting more brilliant and adaptable new bodies, is actually the very definition of conservative: the conservation of momentum, energy, and information as the cosmos rearranges its components to achieve a quicker peace by “stepping on the gas” and dissipating everything more rapidly. The answer to the ever-loving question of how order comes from chaos is that order is just more efficient chaos—an accomplice, not an adversary. Every tidied desk results in larger landfills; every landfill is a mine awaiting artificially intelligent trash harvesters; the ecosystem that matures to weave together DNA and carbon nanotubule microprocessors in an Anthropocene beyond the over-simple categories “man” and “nature” is itself one giant dissipative structure, functioning as an excretive organ of the Sun as it assists in the accelerated burnoff of the Big Bang.

So: two things collide to make a third. The third thing causes a more intricate relationship between the now-three things that make a fourth. Each novel species founds new niches that are filled as soon as luck mutates a nearby organism up the slope of fitness to become a key to fit the lock. The whole thing drives itself, the ever-deepening complexity of Gaia just a crystal growing in solution, ratcheting on up the double helix, just the natural consequence of radiating heat.

(Intelligence is implicated in this: more complex environments create the need for teams of “individuals” to form and endosymbiotically enfold their members into larger creatures—smarter creatures that have more sophisticated needs and new dependencies—and these conditions favor more diverse and intricate societies, which count toward the increasing intricacy of the whole ecology, which favors teamwork as a strategy, and on we go until the Internet appears to link each nucleus of nation-state and corporation into one great planetwide amoeba, and beyond, our pseudopods already reaching into extraplanetary space…)

And so it is that evolution tilts the narrative toward more of everything. We didn’t leave bacteria behind when we got into bigger, and then bigger, huddles and grew tissues, organs, spines, societies; we made a hundred billion previously undreamed jobs for germs to do. It was (and is, in that eternal and apocalyptic light infusing all of time) a transmutation of the flesh: the simple taken up into the great complexity of something both ineffable and vast, and unimaginably generous. No evolutionary layer left behind, each one the platform for and beneficiary of the next. And when we fuse with our machines completely, we will not render humankind extinct; but will explode in our diversity to offer every variation possible upon the theme of “human,” most of which do not exist today.

The permeable membrane of the atmosphere, so wider than the borders of our nations, just as they were wider than the walls of cities, means a bigger social body, made of far more kinds of people, than were necessary to sustain the spirit of a fatherland or motherland. When cities came they made us all a little dumber, as they made us smarter—specialists in pottery or farming or religion lose a little bit of each as far as knowledge was, before, connected through and through to everything, and pottery was farming and religion, all of it one motion, not the purview of an educated expert. (Presumably, and likewise, DNA was once more flexible than it is now, more potent but less realized, far less speciose.) Now, we have so many kinds of jobs, they do not all have names, so myriad are human economic functions; and when our society has stabilized to know itself at global levels as a day-to-day sensation of each local human life, our tasks will be so fluid, numerous, and partial that we will have moved beyond the modern experts in both hyper-specialization and increased awareness of how miniscule our knowledge is to that of the entire Commons. Each of us will be so much more, such empowered emanations of the Biosphere, and so much less, tiny in the corner of our wide experience, compared to egocentric ancestors with relatively static “jobs” and personal identities. Eventually we will take new bodies with each thought, the epistemic line erased between the-generation-as-experiment by blind selection forces and the-metamorphic-flesh-as-proposition by machinery of spirit, assuming selves to take on certain tasks. The arrow is toward more life, more apparent choice, more radiant and dangerous diversity—all hung together, maddest-ever symphony, admired all at once.

This order, which we organize and make explicit, the “invisible environment” of the cosmos’s distributed intelligence as manifested in the Biosphere’s webwork of thoughts-as-species, is already “out there” waiting to be recognized and drawn down from the heavens (metaphorically). That is one way the Singularity is here already—it hasn’t gathered, coalesced, and focused into history yet, but all of it already lies in wait, the Eschaton at history’s end impressing every moment with its tugging yearning, showing itself to us in and as a universe compelled to speak.

And it can be no other way. The game was rigged “from the beginning,” which here means the origin beyond the Alpha and Omega, not “t = 0” but the architecture of the vacuum, in which past and future happen simultaneously, and the end and the beginning codetermine which of all nows swaddles us between. We are a path drawn from all possibilities, the likeliest of pasts and futures shaking hands to meet as now, and that’s why we get so confused about causality—because we haven’t caught our talk of time up to the networked and nonlinear epistemology of ecological, electric modern thinking.

That’s the essence of “time’s arrow”—echoing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the narrative that our spacetime-projecting minds derive from pure unboxed experience in light of our best scientific work, the best-fit story to survive in this World-Wide-Webbed age is this: time moves from Singularity to “Intertwingularity,” and all the while The Great Perfection is and isn’t waiting round the bend for us.

The evolution of self-organizing parts to weave together an Omega Point that wakes up to itself at every level is the equal, opposite momentum to the involution of the already-and-always order ever seeking novel ways to manifest in form, not just potential. Nothing new exists, except new ways of saying it—the future is a dream we apprehend as best our tiny mammal bodies can, the poetry precipitating out of Holographic All to shape and wag our tongues and typing fingers. And as we approach the Eschaton to recognize it as the Self we’ve been this whole time, categories like “new” and “familiar” explode beneath the weight of our original experience, the only thing that ever was, as it unweaves and weaves us and our grand predictions.

So, in short: in some sense it is hard to be completely wrong about the future, if you say, “This thing will be remembered and repeated in some way.” A universe in which all possibilities occur is more entropic, thus more likely. And that makes the only certain thing that we can say about the future, that it is. (And also isn’t.)

∞

Read Part One

Is Myth Dead?

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To anyone who winces at the thought of a story being just fiction, the relegation of myth to the status of untruth should appear unfortunate. The modern definition, “a commonly accepted but untrue belief,” is not at all what we mean when we say “myth” within this project. However, the common definition tacitly defines a predominant myth of our times.

The value that myth provides is demonstrated in the fact that it has been with us since the birth of civilization. In fact, it is because of myth that we were able to birth civilizations. The myths, art, and religions of antiquity sprung into existence together, and were a way for us to relate to one another as populations grew beyond small wandering tribes. The earliest artistic artifacts are religious, or is it the other way around? It is hard to say. Myth and art, still nearly inseparable terms, provide a distorted mirror for us to regard ourselves in. We see ourselves in a new light, the best artists showing us existential truths through the distortion or even complete abandonment of empirical truths. Thus artists, and the myths they weave from their own lives, direct our eyes inward, both as individuals and as a culture, in a new way.

It is a self evident fact that myths speak to our humanity. They convey meaning. This was clear to me from an early age. As a youth I remember staring at the television in befuddlement as documentaries would attempt to discover the supposed “historic truth” of a myth. Did giants actually walk the Earth before the time of King Arthur’s court? How did Noah manage to get every species of animal aboard a single ship? These are the wrong questions to ask, and for the wrong reasons. Myths speak to the narrative, the qualitative, to the side of us which quite simply need stories and images, both grand and mundane, for us to relate ourselves to. It can provide psychological nourishment, and cultures that are devoid of the ability to distinguish myth from literal truth suffer for it. Such a thing could hardly be called a culture at all.

If you bear with us a moment in the premise that myth is something vital to our nature, then an absence of it, or more accurately, an absence of the ability to recognize it, would be a deep cultural and existential crisis. A quick glance at current events makes it clear that we are in just such a position, even though no solid connection between the two has yet been drawn. This is a feeling that I experienced strongly as I passed through adolescence, and I discovered that it was something many others were feeling, though few were inclined to voice it. I tried to convey this in my first novel, Join My Cult!,

Spiritual, cultural apocalypse is much more subtle than mushroom clouds, fallout, and radiation burns. People can deny it. No statistics can prove it. The only evidence we have is a feeling of profound loss, and hope for a future that does not reduce the qualitative values of life to quantities, and for companions to share these stories with so that they can have value, and pass on to our children in the next world.

Apocalypse literally means “lifting the veil.” (Greek: Apokálypsis.) I’m using the more modern version, but maybe not without a hint of the possibility for great transformation in times of uncertainty and turmoil. Lurking in even the most mundane hearts lies the possibility for transformation, however distant. The symbolism of the Blasted Tower in the Major Arcana of the traditional Tarot deck reflects this idea: moments of revelations most often occur at the points when all previous expectations have been utterly destroyed. Emmanuel Kant even hints at this with his aesthetics which include the sublime. The sublime could be the beatific vision, but at the same time, it can include the powerful, horrific forces of nature and the psyche. This is apocalypse, and it is an idea closely linked with the sacred, as we will see moving forward.

Neil Stephenson’s novel Anathem deals with the modern crisis of the sacred as well. The following passage is especially relevant,

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same each day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer other to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

An obvious conclusion of modernity is that we have no unifying myth, as Georges Bataille proposes1“If we state simply, for the sake of lucidity, that today’s man defines himself by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he defines himself also by the consciousness of not having the power to gain access to the possibility of creating a true myth, we have defined a sort of myth which is the absence of myth.”  we live in a myth which is an absence of myth. Our world is a fast-paced, materialistically oriented, cultural melting pot, in which it seems that any need for mythology would quickly boil away. We are, at the same time, untethered from any common shared myth, so that the task of simply creating a new mono-myth that possess the collective imagination is generally less fruitful than the artist may hope, as Bataille himself discovered in his rather ill-conceived idea of re-instituting human sacrifice.2See the introduction to The Absence of Myth written by Michael Richardson.

Even amongst the ranks of those who are generally most sympathetic to the psychological value of myth, there has been increasing question of if myth has any place in our modern lives. For instance, Michael Vannoy Adams presented this material at the “Psyche and Imagination” conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies,

Recently, one Jungian, Wolfgang Giegerich, has argued that, at this stage in the history of consciousness, myth no longer has any psychological function… Ancient mythological figures, he contends, “do not suffice.” They are insufficient because, he says, “even though they may display certain formal similarities” to the modern situation, “they are incommensurable” with it. …Giegerich, however, maintains that the modern psychological situation is utterly without precedent, without parallel. It is so radically different — or, as he says, so logically different — from the ancient mythological situation that any similarity is merely formal and thus insignificant. Giegerich says that the modern situation has “fundamentally broken with myth as such, that is, with the entire level of consciousness on which truly mythic experience was feasible.”

The most obvious conclusion is often not the most poignant one. We do have myths, though they often exist in mediums not surrounded by the aura of the sacred. This will be demonstrated time and again throughout this work, as it is demonstrated in our daily lives if we know what to look for. Modern myths are so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. Those that are considered archaic, that is, they have ceased to function in the manner that they were meant to, become more apparent to us. We call our relics “myth,” but they are not. They are the myths that have died.

On its face it certainly feels more accurate to say that we have lost touch with an understanding of the sacred rather than with myth, though exactly what that means, and whether it is ultimately accurate, also remains to be explored. It is far more likely that we have lost a sense of the sacred, but we cannot as a race lose our myths — certainly not before such a point that we have no beliefs or culture whatsoever.

It is not easy to draw a distinction between myths that participate more in what we might consider the sacred, and those that do not. This is a crisis that I hinted at in Is Myth Dead? although I avoided confronting it directly for a reason. We cannot so easily separate myths from the sacred, nor can we extricate either of them from the biases of a specific culture, least of all the ones we are immersed in. Artistic movements such as the Surrealists did move in this direction. There was a general desire to rediscover, reconnect with some primal, sacred source.

Consider this quote from Bataille’s essay The Surrealist Religion,

Everything Breton has put forward―whether it concerns the quest for the sacred, the concern with myths, or rediscovering rituals similar to those of primitives―represents the exploration of the possibility we again discover, possibility in another sense; this time it is simply a question of exploring all that can be explored by man, it is a question of reconstituting all that was fundamental to man before human nature had been enslaved by the necessity for technical work.

It is easy to make this distinction, and feel a need to somehow return to a state of sacredness, real or imagined, which seems to have been stripped from or lives, from our very psychological beings, by the realities of global industrialization. Let’s resist the urge to see it as such a clear dialectic, and instead move forward under the supposition that we are exploring an ideological history through the unfolding of a select few of the legion of mythic ideas that differentiate the world now from the world four thousand years ago. A multiplicity of myths, not clear, opposed opposites. If new myths are born, re-tethered to something sacred, they must be brutally immediate, possessing unavoidable gravity, poignant, fragile, they must be anything but contrived, planned, and developed with the intention of bringing us the sacred. (She does not come to us on a platter. More likely, the platter will have your beating heart on it.)

For our purposes at the moment it should be enough to highlight that the sacred represents not a single idea, but rather an entire category of ideation — a world-view. It is a world-view that perceives the world manifest to our senses as itself symbolic of an invisible world. The history of civilization is, at one and the same time, the history of myth. Mircea Eliade explores this subject in The Sacred & The Profane,

By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to be itself. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguished it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality.

This conception of the sacred seems to demand the transcendent, the invention of the supernatural. This category is required for no other reason than to draw a contrast with the profane.

It stands to reason that everything is natural; even if the universe is unexplainable, it would still remain “natural.” Forgive the tautology: nature is what is. The distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is only relevant, only meaningful, in the context of the profane when contrasted with the sacred. Needless to say, inventing the “supernatural,” a new category of being to house the sacred, creates its own slew of problems that must be dealt with, such as superstition.

In Eliade’s conception, and I believe it is a point well taken, a sacred object is so because it is a symbol, a link, with the archetype standing “behind” the physical, profane object. A sacred canoe is not just a canoe, it is “canoe,” or it is a canoe within the context of a specific myth pertaining to canoes, or the sacred river, etc.

This distinction also cuts across experiential boundaries. The sacred and profane show themselves not only in the perception of things but also in the perception of time. For instance during a sacred festival — a concept that we have mostly lost touch with in our purely profane holidays3All of the major holidays in the United States, for instance, are profane: means of re-enforcing consumer behavior or an excuse to drink. They borrow iconography, of course, most commonly from Christianity, many of those symbols themselves taken wholesale from Pagan sources. — one enters into the time before time, recapitulating the birth of the world, or some other mythological event which occurs outside of profane time. The phrase “time before time” is an odd approximation, a metaphor created from within the field of time. Sacred time and sacred objects do not truly stand “outside,” “behind,” or “before” their profane counterparts; they are distinguished as occupying two separate ontological categories simultaneously, and there may even be some kind of exchange or interplay between the two, as sacred festivals and rituals demonstrate.4This is to some extent shown in the distinction between kairos and chronos, the time of experience which stands on its own, divine or sacred time, perhaps even an “eternal” moment, and chronological time.

It is to that point, the crossroads of the sacred and profane, that this work is ultimately aimed; for it is in this intermediary zone that myth actually occurs. The constructed supernatural realm loops back into the otherwise inaccessible elements of our own being, as a piece of psychological sleight-of-hand that allows us to conditionally stake a claim in the ever-shifting, dark chaos that is nature itself, un-sculpted by human sensation, consideration, organization and expectation. The condition we must accept when engaging with myth is that we pretend the shadows on the wall, the image on the screen, or the entities in our dreams represent some type of reality.

The realm we call the sacred cannot be left to sociologists, even if … the use of this word has become questionable if we do not frame with reference to sociology. … Science always abstracts the object it studies from the totality of the world. … It might in turn be pointed out that the sacred can just as easily be envisaged on its own. … But a question remains: suppose that the sacred, far from being like the other objects of science, subject to separation, is defined as the exact opposite of abstract objects (things, tools, and clearly definable elements), precisely as the concrete totality itself is resistant to it.5ibid

It may come as a surprise to some that we are never too far from the trappings of mythology in our daily lives. They are in movies, books, our mutually created narratives on the Internet, even on television. They permeate our ideas about ourselves, our relation to the world, and our relationships with others. They can be insightful or vapid. The very drive for people to make complete fools of themselves on reality TV is also the attempt to fulfill a mythic need. To be famous is to be externally mythologized. The thing that many of us find so repellent about these trends in pop culture is the complete and utter lack of the sacred. Myth is not absent.

We relate with these stories differently than people who lived in a world before the computer, television or typewriter. There seems to be something different about how we experience stories, even though the analogy of campfire storytelling and Internet communication is occasionally drawn.6The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking, Jennifer Ryan.

Modern myths of this nature often don’t strike their audiences as deeply because they are perceived as just stories, or movies. The lights come up in the theater and the illusion is dispelled. Or, more frequently nowadays, we lose attention entirely mid-stream and surf to another channel or web-page, to take another fragment into the bricolage of our wandering consciousness. In a capitalist society, myths too take on a capitalist bent. Further, they serve its ends. They are more readily consumed than engaged with, but this does not mean that they do not leave their mark. All of this hearkens back to the lack of the sacred, rather than of myth. The formative or even subliminal effect of the media we’re steeped in is hard to say, but certainly the multi-billion dollar industries of marketing and advertising would be useless if it was not far-reaching.7A note about characterization, and the usage of terms such as “capitalist society.” It should be obvious that, within the contexts we are beginning to explore, “capitalist society,” “existential philosophy,” “corporate culture,” and so on are all myth-structures that were at one point posed, and which have since been presupposed so frequently that they are taken for granted. Like any other myth, they may or may not relate to a series of facts, but more important the effects of the characterization is real. In other words, there are sufficient people that believe in such a thing as “capitalist society” as to make it worth talking about, even if, speaking very strictly, there may be no such thing. Even “culture” can be considered a myth in this sense. This applies equally to phrases like “world-view,” a term which has become fairly commonly even outside anthropological writing. Terms like this sometimes create more questions than they answer. What exactly does it mean? Is it a passive or active process? Can it be willfully changed, or is it provided fully-formed? We will attempt to engage with as many of these terms as possible, but there must be a level of approximation in using such terms, or else we would be footnoting every couple words, and the book in front of you would be thousands of pages long. Let us say that it could be either of these things, in different contexts, and move forward.

There are many examples of what could be considered modern myths embodied in media. Rather than saying that The Lord of the Rings is a modern myth, though clearly it is, it is more relevant to say that every piece of media available contains layer upon layer of myth. Any given myth is implicitly built upon other myths, and myths are used to make them readily accessible to us.

For instance, there are a variety of common myths which allow access to the viewership of a news broadcast with a particular political agenda. The broadcast can further establish or re-establish these myths, and build new ones, but it is already working upon certain expectations. So, you don’t find many polyamorous bisexuals watching Fox News in rapt attention. This is an example of myth acting both as amplification and sorting device.8Many rhetorical devices of modern news broadcasts utilize a knowledge of the power of mythology with startling effect, crippling the rational capacity of the audience with the use of a few well times key words and some ideological hand-waving. Fox News is most well known for this approach, but it is at its core a methodology without any inherent political stance. A “liberal agenda” is as easily served by this approach as any other. If you’re preaching to the choir, amplification both further indoctrinates and further excites the converts. Myths even affect our evolutionary selection processes, but that’ll have to wait.

In the case of the myths that resonate with the multitude on a level deeper than entertainment, the anxiety that underlies the wholesale exchange of the profane for the sacred can produce a nostalgic throwback to the “old time religion.” The mythic aura of a yesterday that never existed drives such cultural movements as we see demonstrated in the movie Jesus Camp, and this trend is evident in many revivalist and reactionary groups across the world, not just Christianity. It is also the basis of many American myths that sprang out of the 1950s, of idyllic family values, which reach from that time, and before, right up to the present.

This defensive reaction, to look backwards in times of chaos, cannot be restricted to one ideology. It is one of the forms of modern mythology that we most frequently encounter. As Samuel P. Huntington explores in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the coming world conflicts will be driven along ideological and cultural fault lines, even if underlying motivational factors in some cases include more material concerns, such as territory or overburdened resources. In other words, even resource-driven conflicts are likely to be painted in ideological terms, especially in regard to the motivating force presented to the people who make up the backbone of any military force. The idea of the US as a “global peacekeeper” is such a myth as well, as much as the idea that jewels could be cut from the bellies of Muslims, a story ostensibly propagated during the third crusade.

In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives — many of them women and children — taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems.

The drive behind fanaticism, and fascism — which is an affliction not unlike fanaticism — is psychological, not material. William Reich explored this in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Consider this, taken from a chapter appropriately named Ideology as a Material Force,

Those who followed … the revolutionary Left’s application of Marxism between 1917 and 1933 had to notice that it was restricted to the sphere of objective economic processes and government policies, but that it neither kept a close eye on nor comprehended the development and contradictions of the so-called ‘subjective factor’ of history, i.e., the ideology of the masses.

The extremists driving ideological conflicts are borrowing from mere echoes of myths originating thousands of years ago, catalyzing the existential fear, hate, or desire latent in a culture, and more pointedly, within the individuals that comprise that culture. Again borrowing from Reich’s study on fascism, or Deleuze and Guittari’s examination in Anti-Oedipus, the principles of personal psychology also control mass-psychology. The fascist of the state is the fascist within. This alchemy produces poisonous splinter factions, fundamentalist groups that cause many of the pathological habits our cultures otherwise exhibit, in concentrated form. The atrocities perpetrated by the State far exceed those any one individual could account for, but the will to those ends must be spread through a sufficient public body for any of them to occur.

Far from being an exception, these splinter groups have been responsible for much of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries that has made its way into the books, whether we are speaking of the rise and fall of Soviet communism, the second World War, or the ongoing strife in the Middle East.

Exploring politics or even religious ideology as the only lens to gaze at myth in modern forms is misleading. We want to look at the very mechanisms of myth, not how it manifests in just the relation of nations, or corporations, or individuals, or the religio-politics of previous eras. It is nevertheless worth noting that the mythologies utilized by these groups have all been re-purposed, whether we speak of the selective use of scripture by religious fundamentalists, or the more bizarre relationship between National Socialism and occultism, which underlined the rise of the Third Reich despite Hitler’s professed abhorrence for the occult. These fringe elements are at most times culturally inert, but have the potential to overcome the whole of a culture during crisis points, as the Nazis did after World War I.

However, myth as a whole cannot be considered a result of such use. Nor can myth be “killed,” in any event. It can be a healing, as well as destructive, force. But we’ve only given the most tentative glimpse at the many roles myth plays in our lives.

Excerpted from The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized Press), 2010. This edition slightly edited. Originally published at Modern Mythology.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ “If we state simply, for the sake of lucidity, that today’s man defines himself by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he defines himself also by the consciousness of not having the power to gain access to the possibility of creating a true myth, we have defined a sort of myth which is the absence of myth.”
2. ↑ See the introduction to The Absence of Myth written by Michael Richardson.
3. ↑ All of the major holidays in the United States, for instance, are profane: means of re-enforcing consumer behavior or an excuse to drink. They borrow iconography, of course, most commonly from Christianity, many of those symbols themselves taken wholesale from Pagan sources.
4. ↑ This is to some extent shown in the distinction between kairos and chronos, the time of experience which stands on its own, divine or sacred time, perhaps even an “eternal” moment, and chronological time.
5. ↑ ibid
6. ↑ The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking, Jennifer Ryan.
7. ↑ A note about characterization, and the usage of terms such as “capitalist society.” It should be obvious that, within the contexts we are beginning to explore, “capitalist society,” “existential philosophy,” “corporate culture,” and so on are all myth-structures that were at one point posed, and which have since been presupposed so frequently that they are taken for granted. Like any other myth, they may or may not relate to a series of facts, but more important the effects of the characterization is real. In other words, there are sufficient people that believe in such a thing as “capitalist society” as to make it worth talking about, even if, speaking very strictly, there may be no such thing. Even “culture” can be considered a myth in this sense. This applies equally to phrases like “world-view,” a term which has become fairly commonly even outside anthropological writing. Terms like this sometimes create more questions than they answer. What exactly does it mean? Is it a passive or active process? Can it be willfully changed, or is it provided fully-formed? We will attempt to engage with as many of these terms as possible, but there must be a level of approximation in using such terms, or else we would be footnoting every couple words, and the book in front of you would be thousands of pages long. Let us say that it could be either of these things, in different contexts, and move forward.
8. ↑ Many rhetorical devices of modern news broadcasts utilize a knowledge of the power of mythology with startling effect, crippling the rational capacity of the audience with the use of a few well times key words and some ideological hand-waving. Fox News is most well known for this approach, but it is at its core a methodology without any inherent political stance. A “liberal agenda” is as easily served by this approach as any other. If you’re preaching to the choir, amplification both further indoctrinates and further excites the converts.

The Fall and the Eschaton

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As much as Western society has become secularized over the course of the past couple centuries, the Judeo-Christian mythos still forms a backdrop to the predominant modes of thought in our society. Two myths predominate: the myth of the Fall, and the myth of the eschaton.

The Fall is the story of how we have been exiled from Paradise, struck down from spiritual perfection to a mundane, corrupt materiality. The eschaton is the story of where we are going: that the pain and suffering we experience has an ultimate meaning that will revealed; that what has been lost will be recovered; that the conflict and misery in this world will be reconciled; that evil will not have the last word. One looks back to a glorious past whose ways we have lost and to which we must return. The other looks forward to a bright and hopeful future, in which there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and good will triumph over evil. The prevailing scientific materialism would suggest that both of these are nonsense, and that history is nothing but “one damn thing after another.” However, I would suggest that few people, even committed materialists, actually believe this. Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.

MODERNITY

06 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 03 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

06 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 03 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The eschatological view has dominated modern thought. Though ostensibly throwing off the yoke of religious superstition, the secular humanism of this time had a fervent eschatology in which religion itself was part of a barbaric past that would be superseded by a future in which humanity would soon be perfected through the power of reason. The Whig view of history, as it came to be known, suggested that the history of humanity was one of ascent. We began as savages, fighting one another for dominance in a world that was, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” and arose into intelligent beings capable of reason, virtue and invention, throwing off the shackles of ignorance, subservience, and superstition. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection seemed to reinforce this view, or at least it certainly did so in Herbert Spencer’s sociological interpretation of it. The belief that advances in science and technology would create a brighter future for all resonates with us to this day, and is in many cases so sacrosanct as to provoke mockery and ridicule toward anyone who dares question it. There are more liberal and conservative versions of it, but the myth of progress is one of the defining features of modernity.

This has provoked a whole series of reactions. Along with the Enlightenment came a Counter-Enlightenment. For “throne and altar” conservatives like Joseph-Marie de Maistre, this upheaval in science, politics, and philosophy was nothing but chaos threatening to destroy an order that had kept society together for centuries. This so-called “reason” of this age was simply an eagerness to overthrow the wisdom of the past. Romantics such as Percy Shelley or Lord Byron saw in the industrial revolution not a march of progress toward a technological utopia, but a corruption of the natural world, in which the beauty and elegance of nature had been replaced with a cold, mechanistic, instrumental logic that commodified the world and turned society into one large factory where everything is mass produced and everything is standardized and robbed of any uniqueness.

In response, figures like Hegel developed a more nuanced approach. For Hegel, history was not so much constantly getting better, but rather unfolding dialectically, with the ideas of one era negated by their antithesis, which in turn are negated by another antithesis. Through this tension of thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis emerges, and the cycle continues on. For Hegel, this is the process by which Spirit becomes self-aware. Karl Marx posited that it was not ideas but material conditions that drove these historical processes, with each era having its own form of class struggle. Yet both of these approaches shared in the eschatological tendencies of modernity. They both saw an ultimate “end of history” toward which world events would eventually lead.

POSTMODERNITY

Another “end of history” was announced in the twentieth century by postmodernism. In this case, however, it was the end of history as a process toward some goal. Modernism, with all its hopes of human perfection and the triumph of reason, had seemed overturned by the brutality of fascism and two world wars. The myth of progress, faith in reason, the perfectibility of man—these could no longer be maintained. We were instead left with a matrix of floating signifiers that only pointed to other signifiers, never getting us any closer to the Real.

Teilhard de Chardin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Teilhard de Chardin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Others begged to differ. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw in evolution a trend toward increasing complexity, with a corresponding increase in consciousness, leading toward the creation of a “noosphere” that would span the globe as a network of ideas and technologies connecting humanity to one another. Henri Bergson conceived of an “elan vital,” a vital force that moved evolution and history forward in a process of ever-expanding value. Alfred North Whitehead developed a metaphysics in which events were the fundamental unit of reality, with each moment contributing novel information not found in its predecessors in a process called “appetition.” Jean Gebser saw an evolution in different modes of thought from early humans to the present day, going from archaic to magic to mythic to rational, and toward a new mode of consciousness he dubbed “integral,” which moved from the three-dimensional spatial awareness of rational thought to a new four-dimensional temporal awareness. Disciples of Gebser such as Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson have spawned a new generation of “spiritual evolutionaries,” who see the expansion of consciousness as not merely a personal goal as mystics, but as a trajectory toward which the cosmos is unfolding.

Oswald Spengler (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Oswald Spengler (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Not so fast, warn a chorus of naysayers. Against the secular modernists, post-modernists, and “evolutionaries,” these pessimists saw in this alleged expansion of consciousness only a loss of ancient wisdom. Oswald Spengler, in his famous book The Decline of the West, wrote of a process by which civilizations are born and grow, but eventually decay from a “Culture” rich in art, music, and religiosity, to a civilization of base materialism, in which economics, technology, and politics are the driving factors. Spengler proved a major influence on one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers: Martin Heidegger. Best known for his work Being and Time, Heidegger challenged the Cartesian view of mind-body duality and the correspondence theory of truth, suggesting instead that knowledge and Being should best be understood in terms of a kind of “unconcealment.” His later works, however, presented a further challenge to modernity, seeing in modern technology the conversion of the world from a mysterious realm of possibilities to be revealed into a “standing reserve” of matter and energy to be used instrumentally for human consumption, leading toward an era of nihilism and total war, which he predicted would ironically be celebrated as a glorious and enlightened era.

Rene Guenon (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Rene Guenon (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Perhaps the greatest prophet of this brand of pessimism was René Guénon. Seeking to bring a Hindu perspective to the West, he conceived of time in terms of yugas, in which time did not advance uniformly, but rather accelerated as it reached its zenith. This zenith, however, was not some glorious endpoint like Chardin’s noosphere, but an abyss of base materialism. The acceleration of time occurred because of a downward fall in which we reached peak velocity as we lost the lightness of spirit. He sought to shed light on the ancient understanding of the cosmos, emphasizing the numerous ways in which the ancients understood the world in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Even numbers themselves were not merely quantitative, each having its own archetypal quality. He critiqued modernity’s neurotic reliance on quantification. Through quantification, we lose our sense of what is unique. Everything becomes standardized, mass produced, broken down into the lowest common denominator. In politics, economics, and religion, he saw in this a kind of misguided egalitarianism that assumed the replaceability of individuals. Through this kind of egalitarianism, we had lost the sense of initiation, in which the wise and learned counsel those below them, and lift them up.

Guénon also criticized the modern lens through which ancient wisdom was interpreted, such as Jung’s understanding of mythology. Of course, he conceded, mythology is symbolic, carrying multiple meanings. But, he cautioned, we would be missing something crucial if we interpret it as merely symbolic. We assume it is so because the archaeological record does not match what these ancient myths tell us. However, he postulated, this is because the world itself has solidified into the shape we see it today, including the fossil record that has been left for posterity. The ancients dwelled in a world that was much more open, more porous in relation to other realities. There is an interesting parallel here with Gebser, who saw magic and mythic consciousness as having their own worlds of perception, so to speak. The difference is that for Gebser, the rational ego is in a sense adaptive, creating a new dimension of perception, even if it suppresses some of the other perceptual modes, whereas for Guénon, this is purely a loss—a fall from grace.

RECONCILIATION

Between the fall and the eschaton lies a messy mixture of sin and grace. There are aspects of our society that are getting better. Medical advances are allowing people to live longer. Society has become more inclusive of different races, creeds, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Yet this inclusion has largely come at the cost of meaning. We are able to tolerate multiple religions by acting as if they were all mere language games with no actual wisdom to impart on their followers. We include people from across different races, genders, and sexualities as faceless members of the same cold and uncaring society where they exist as a number, a statistic, log entry in a vast bureaucratic mess of mediocrity and anonymity. The equality we achieve is a flattening of all that makes us unique. The freedom we attain is the freedom to consume the options society sells us. Even spiritual transcendence has become a consumer commodity. So-called “New Age” spirituality has promoted a culture in which spirituality is a matter of accessorizing: a few mantras here, a little sacred geometry there, sprinkle in some sage, some misinterpretations of quantum physics, and solipsistic belief in the power of one’s own mind over the entire universe, and we call the result “spiritual.” It seems that the modern world has sacrificed a great deal of depth for a rather superficial breadth.

Yet it seems a bit rash to so readily dismiss modernity without appreciating the moment in history it represented. While the Copernican revolution is often seen as “decentering” humanity, or “dethroning” us from our privileged position in the cosmos, it was if anything an indication of humanity’s ascendancy. Aristotle’s cosmology placed earth in the center not because it was special or exalted, but because it was the heaviest of the elements, toward which all other things fall. The sun, representing royalty and divinity, held a privileged position in the celestial spheres. Far from decentering humanity, Copernicus scandalized his contemporaries by demoting the sun to a more gross and undignified position, while the Earth was exalted to the celestial realm. What a perfect metaphor for the emerging humanism of the time, which elevated humanity to a godlike status, moving Icarus-like ever closer to the sun. The traditional forms of authority which had given the world a sense of order and certainty were coming undone, and humanity was becoming the new cosmic center. Humans sought new ways to control nature and engineer society. The world became an object to be molded according to our own vision. A Promethean spirit of invention and exploration began to dominate.

In the twentieth century, this edifice itself began to crumble. Science and technology continued to advance as fast as ever, but the costs of this way of life were becoming apparent. The power of the atom had been harnessed, only to create the most destructive weapon ever. An era of unprecedented economic prosperity was giving way to mindless consumerism. The industrial technology that had propelled humanity into this new era of dominance was now found to be causing an ecological crisis that increasingly threatens to undo civilization as we know it.

Thus, we are now in another crisis, much like the one that created modernity as we know it. From the Promethean spirit that had exalted humanity, we find a new need for humility. The Cartesian world of quantification and extension had rendered nature into an object we could dominate and manipulate. Now, it’s becoming apparent that we need to enter a new way of relating to nature, based on partnership rather than domination. In doing so, we may rediscover some of the old wisdom of the ancients, who had no choice but to negotiate with their natural environment and respect its wisdom. We must look again to ancient wisdom with humility and reverence, but we must do so with discernment. We cannot return to a pre-Copernican universe with its order and certainty. Even if we wanted to, we would only have a surface-level understanding of their teachings, which were handed down through processes of initiation to which outsiders were excluded. We must therefore adapt this rediscovered wisdom to the cosmos revealed to us by modernity. This discerning blend of ancient wisdom and modern knowledge is how a new paradigm can emerge—one that is appropriate to the new era we find ourselves in.

History, I suggest, is neither a long decay from a golden age nor a linear ascent toward perfection, but a cosmic story unfolding with surprises at each turn. Each turning of the age moves us forward, but not as a progressive accumulation of what has come before. We must think of each age in archetypal terms, not merely as good or bad, but as posing a unique set of challenges to be answered. Modernity has exhausted itself as a force and is now in a state of degeneracy, but it served its own purpose at the time, and we should appreciate its collective lessons. Each age brings about a new form of wisdom, and in the process there is often a tendency to discard the wisdom of the previous age. As we enter a new age, we may find ourselves too quick to dismiss the wisdom of modernity even as we seek to revive the wisdom of the ancients. Yet we must remember that our age will have to find its own wisdom, which will itself be superseded. The past shall guide us, but the future awaits.

Banishing the World: Conner Habib on Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult

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Gilles Deleuze

Editor’s Note: I spoke with Conner Habib about his new course, “Banishing the World: Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult,” and learned about the surprising ways in which the most interesting and sophisticated philosophies coming out of humanities converge precisely with occult ideas. Conner’s course is happening this Sunday, October 30th at 3 p.m. EST / 12 p.m. PST. You can register here.

∞

So in a word: What is the occult?

I’ll give you the best but totally incomplete definition I can: The occult is a web of traditions that recognizes the values and qualities of Everything. You might think, “hey, that’s not the cauldrons and tarot definition I was looking for!” But that’s it. The occult takes seriously the unlit underrepresented, ridiculed, and ignored aspects of life—that could be superstition, it could be dreams, it could be a folktale–and works to fold them all into a view of reality.

Who’s your favorite occultist?

These questions are always so much easier to answer when they’re framed as “who’s your favorite right now?” So let me go that route: I’m pretty enamored with the Greek esoteric healer Stylianos Atteshlis (1912–1995), also know as Daskalos. A great introduction to him is The Magus of Strovolos written by Kyriacos Markides; it’s a chronicle of Daskalos’s healing wisdom and acts, as well as his esoteric philosophy. Healers may not be the obvious place to go when naming occultists, but as my friend, chaos magician Gordon White reminds us, occultists must be healers because that’s the urgent work of magick in the world today.

Favorite philosopher?

It’s always in flux, but I’d say right now it’s Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari (1930–1992). It’s not cheating to name two since they’ve done a lot of work together! I’ve never read philosophers who were quite so radical in their vision of existence: they started off by refining (and destroying, in some senses) psychoanalysis and then got deeper and deeper; more and more profound until reality itself became a vast plain that needed a whole new map. I’ve read around them quite a bit in the past twenty years, but now I’m getting more intense in my study and they’re on my mind all the time; I feel such a great love for them right now!

…Philosopher occultist?

Glad you asked this, since I don’t really accept the divisions above. My answer is Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), whose work—referred to as anthroposophy—I’ve studied and practiced for years. Steiner is a Da Vinci-like figure, but even more brilliant. He created a new system of agriculture (biodynamic agriculture), education (Waldorf schools), jewelry-making, medicine, and more. And he expressed an entirely new approach to spirituality and science in his philosophy. A big burden for one person, and he bore it from the start to the end. One of the best things about Steiner is that if you get him, the postmodern philosophy/critical theory stuff comes a lot easier, since much of it is already contained in his work.

What will this class be like? What are people going to learn?

The class is going to be a fun, plain language exploration of how certain philosophies intertwine with the occult. You sign on and there I am, live, talking to you. It’s an hour or so of me talking, a thought exercise or two, and then discussion afterward. It’s an awesome format via Zoom webinar room, so you can ask questions and chat with other participants while it’s going on. Participants will leave with what I hope will be a really great paradox: they’ll understand more and less at the same time. More because the occult illuminates philosophy and philosophy makes way for understanding the occult. Less because when you start getting this stuff, the world appears new. What is this world? I guess that’s another way of saying, participants will get a new path into the world that they can take a walk on whenever they’d like.

Do you need to know anything about the occult and/or postmodernism to receive value from this class?

No! All you have to know is that you’re interested in either one or both! That’s the great thing about a course like this: If you’re a beginner, you get an intro. If you’re further along in your study in one or the other, you get a new layer added by the side you don’t know much about—the occult or postmodern philosophy. If you’re good with both, you get to engage in conversation and be a part of an interested community for a couple hours. So, really, good for all.

So you’re talking about how the occult and postmodern philosophy actually do get along. Surprisingly well. In 120 characters or less, can you describe how and why this is happening? Why are occultism and postmodern philosophy so well-matched?

Both seek to remind/reveal to us how consciousness & matter are related—once you figure that out, a new way of being unlocks!

What books are you reading now?

I’m doing a lot of re-reading for the course. Right now going back into Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s excellent, baffling book, Cannibal Metaphysics. Also for fun: Reading Ulysses and Us by Delcan Kiberd. Joyce was a wizard, for sure. And I’ll also throw in here that I’m working my way through Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer run for the first time.

…And what are you writing now?

I just finished a screenplay which was kicking around in my mind for 11 years; a Patricia Highsmith-style thriller/drama. I’m working on an essay about consent, a book on pornograpy, and reworking an old essay I wrote about the phenomenology of time (which needed reworking since our sense of it is changing). You know, when I answer questions like this, I feel self conscious, because I’m like, what the fuck Conner, eat a donut and chill the fuck out.

You know, it may not be the healthiest thing, but donuts make excellent fuel for writers. Thanks Conner. 

∞

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Taking the Waters

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U.S. Department of Agriculture (CC BY 2.0).

The hills are cut open
and out pours orange dirt
yellow machines, like bugs,
crawl over the flesh of the land.

But here once was the land of our grandfathers,
slow men with weary eyes, and hearts heavy
with northern smoke, planting rows of orange
trees in heat so thick it blurs minds.
So they grew, and kept growing,
bellies fruit full, they multiplied,
tending their vast gardens,
while the dazed animals of the marshes
shuddered and fell away,
dissolving into the fever dreams
of those that came to take the waters.

The citrus trees are torn away now too,
cancers we grew and then excised,
their fruits fall swollen and bleeding,
useless, onto the scraped and shredded earth.
Now aqua and coral
colored stucco houses sprout instead,
groves and groves of them,
grinding their foundations deep
into the unsteady ground.

We are lost and strangers to this place,
this mother of terrors and wonders.
We are not wanted here:
the venom of that
unheeded knowledge
rises up and twists in our veins.
Every creature here
avenges the lands
we have enslaved,
tooth and claw,
ray by ray,
we whither in a world
that was never for us.

There is a rising in the springs
where shade gathers.
There is a snake sleeping
under the steps.
there are things watching
the cars that
flow like eluvium
between billboards
of half formed fetuses
with eyes like reptiles.
They are asking
whether it is better
to grow or
be destroyed.

Autumnal Fallout

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Feature Image: Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004 (detail)
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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.”

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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.

Vis Imaginativa: The Power of Imagination in the Theory of Magic and its Relationship to The Jungian Collective Unconscious

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Feature Image: Max Ernst, "The Stolen Mirror," 1941.
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“Alchemy provides the psychology of the unconscious with a meaningful historical basis.”1 Jung, C.G., Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1970), xiii.

Academic discussions of magic are controversial. Occultism is often viewed as deviant.2Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 3-4. What is forgotten is the huge influence of magic on modern chemistry, medicine, and psychology. Our rational and skeptical modern world has dismissed magic as superstition; it is difficult (if not impossible) to prove the existence of God, ghosts, and demons scientifically.

Carl Jung once noted that “rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious.”3Jung, C. G., “Foreword to Moser : “Spuk : Irrglaube Oder Wahrglaube?,”” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 144.In popular culture, there is still a thriving interest in ghosts, demons, and other sorts of undead creatures like zombies and vampires, as well as aliens. Scientific method has been established as the way to “truth,” yet these irrational constructs of the imagination have not disappeared. Indeed, throughout history, the more rationalism is established as the basis for society, backlash occurs in the revival of religious and spiritual movements.4Goodrick-Clarke, 173-174.

I would like to take a step back from “superstitious” assumptions and focus on imagination and magic, particularly on the relationship of these concepts to Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious. Thinking about D. P. Walker’s concept of vis imaginativa, I hope to demonstrate the relationship between the philosophy of magic and some basic Jungian psychoanalytic ideas.

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Some significations…

Vis imaginativa

“Power of the imagination,” which refers to the method used in magic for interacting with the collective unconscious and its symbols. Walker uses the term to describe an element that runs through all magical theory.

Magic

Refers to a method for enacting change, either in the operator or something external, through techniques incorporating natural influences and imagination. The results of such operations are usually psychological in nature.

Psychology

A broad term describing a very varied field; I am focusing on psychology as a “science of the soul,” and particularly on Jung’s case studies and writings on psychoanalysis.

Soul/ Spirit

These terms have many meanings, and are sometimes used interchangeably. Jung believed they were different, and suggested that one’s “soul” was more akin to a person’s ego, whereas “spirit” referred to “unconscious autonomous complexes which appear as projections because they have no direct association with the ego.”5Jung, C.G., “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 116. Marsilio Ficino also connected the idea of “soul” and “mind.” In his treatise on the mind, he believes that all life has a “motion” towards a particular end. He refers to the motion of the human mind as “the continuous motion of the soul,” and surmises that “in the opinion of some Platonists, the soul is always set in motion and always lives.” While Ficino does not agree with this position, he does connect the soul with the motions of the mind.6 Ficino, Marsilio, “Five Questions Concerning the Mind,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1948), 198. For our purposes, it is safe to say that “soul” refers to the individual, and “spirit” refers to something larger than the individual.

∞

"Evocation” by Odilon Redon - The Athenaeum, Public Domain

“Evocation” by Odilon Redon – The Athenaeum, Public Domain

The Way of Magic According to D.P. Walker

D. P. Walker’s book, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, provides a general theory of natural magic that I think is useful when discussing its relationship to psychology. Ancient philosophers believed in the influence of the planets on human life. The idea of a spirit world was taken a priori, and often planets and stars were associated with either angelic or demonic spirits. The magician could command or use these influences through a variety of means: talismans (vis imaginum), incantations (vis verborum), sympathetic magic and music (vis musices), and through elemental qualities of things (vis rerum).7Walker, D.P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1975), 76. However, all of these have as a central force the vis imaginativa through which the magician uses the powers of his mind and imagination along with planetary influences to achieve a result. Walker suggests two kinds of magical operations—subjective and transitive. Subjective operations are meant to promote spiritual growth and enhance the virtues of the operator. Transitive operations are meant to influence someone or something else; they are an attempt to control nature or an individual.8Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 173-174. In both cases, the effects of the operation are either psychological or psychosomatic in nature. The imagination of either the operator or their subject (if it’s a person) is affected.

Walker notes that Ficino makes a distinction between natural magic and demonic magic.9Walker, 75. Natural magic is more subjective, about gaining knowledge, spiritual and psychological enhancement. Demonic magic is more transitive, aimed at manipulating natural forces to create a material result (money, power, downfall of enemies, winning a desired partner). More modern practitioners of natural magic see one as cooperating with nature, the other as going against nature, but that was not originally the case in the strictest sense. One type of magic dealt with angelic beings, the other with demonic beings. In a society dominated by the Catholic Church and its cosmology, philosophers created a wide gulf between the two classes of “spirits.”

It was important for occult philosophers to demonstrate the piety in their work when it was published. Often within such writings you will find apologetics, and vehement rebuttals against those who accuse the writers of impiety and dealings with the devil. Ficino gives a rather strong invective in his book on alchemy:

Tell me by the immortal God, what is more unjust than for men to hate what they are ignorant of? What more abject? Or what greater madness and potage is there, than to condemn that science in which you have concerned yourself just nothing at? Who hast never learned Nature or the majesty of Nature…Let these crabbed fellows and their followers remain perpetually in their opinion, who know nothing. Which is honest, which is pleasant, which is delightful, which lastly is anything elevated above a vulgar doctrine: and who have attained nothing glorious and famous, but perhaps some plebian business from the black sons of Cadamus.10Ficino, Marsilio, “Liber De Arte Chemica,” in Marsilio Ficino on the Alchemical Art(Amazon Digital Services, 1702).

It is clear, however, that this strict separation between good and evil was not so strict, and attempts to create such boundaries are more like dubious disclaimers than convincing arguments. Walker very aptly states:

We must remember, first, as with astrology, my magic is always good and pious—only other people’s is every bad and diabolic; secondly, that there is nothing necessarily unorthodox in addressing prayers to angels, planetary or otherwise—for this the authority of Thomas Aquinas could be invoked, nor in hoping that they might do something to help you; it is merely perilous, because, as we shall see, it is difficult to distinguish good angels from deceiving demons.11Walker, 89.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance had an uneasy relationship with magic. Ritual acts such as transubstantiation and the veneration of relics were considered “magical” in intent, and this was a point of criticism from Protestant writers like Johann Weir.12Ibid., 153-154. Pope Urban VIII believed in astrology, had his horoscope cast, and was alleged to have carried out magical operations with Tommaso Campanella.13Ibid., 209-210. The question over what type of magic was considered “acceptable” on some level was clearly not settled in the 1500s. Current catechism is unambiguous in denouncing magical practices on the grounds that they violate the First Commandment.14“Catechism of the Catholic Church, Section 2, Chapter 1, Subsection Ii, 2116 and 2117,” (2003). It is clear that the Church assumes that magic deals with external spirits, and assumes that any spirit involved in an operation is not “of God.” This creates an interesting psychological situation for the faithful, as I will demonstrate later on. But suffice to say, the current catechism removes the ambiguity by forbidding any and all magical operations.

Moonlit Landscape by Arnold Böcklin - Sotheby's London, 23 November 2010, lot 4, Public Domain

Moonlit Landscape by Arnold Böcklin – Sotheby’s London, 23 November 2010, lot 4, Public Domain

Psychology and Magic

The study of psychology originated as a means of scientifically studying the mind and its often irrational behavior. The empirical study of mental phenomena has a set of rules different from other sciences. Psychological “truth” is something that can’t reliably be measured statistically, unless it follows a consistent pattern. Psychological theory only goes so far when evaluating individuals. As Erik Erikson noted, “psychoanalysis for historical reasons often occupies a position on the borderline of what is demonstrably true and of what demonstrably feels true.”15Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther (W.W. Norton: New York, 1958), 21. Jung points out repeatedly in his writings that the psychiatrist has little interest in whether or not a psychological perception has any basis in “reality”; they are only interested in the authenticity of the psychological experience. If someone sees a ghost, psychology is not there to determine if ghosts are real, only if the person authentically believes in what they saw.

Psychology comes from the word psykhe, which is the Greek word roughly translated to mean “soul.” Jung notes, “…no one knows what psyche is, and one knows just as little how far into nature psyche extends.”16Jung, C.G., “The Soul and Death,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 131. It is a convenient framework for thinking about human consciousness. It is important to remember that it is only a framework; the psyche is not something located in a part of the brain.

Analytical psychology has generally accepted three “levels” of consciousness in humans: the conscious mind, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The first deals with our everyday thoughts, feelings, and awareness. The personal unconscious consists of our personal memories and complexes—things we have forgotten about or repressed. The collective unconscious is much bigger—it is a collection of memories, myths, and images that we inherit from all of humanity.

Jung defines the collective as having contents that “are not personal, but collective; that is, they do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind. These contents are not acquired during the individual’s lifetime but are products of innate forms and instincts.”17Jung, “Psychological Foundation”, 117. In his treatise on death, he notes another quality of the collective—getting outside of the constraints of space-time (synchronicity).18Jung, “Soul and Death”, 134-135.

Jung was deeply influenced by esoteric writings and their symbolism in developing his own theory of the unconscious. He describes mythology and its symbols as “referring to something psychic.”19Jung, C.G., “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Pantheon Books: New York, 1959), 6. It is known that Jung studied occult literature extensively, and was interested in Gnosticism, alchemy, astrology, and the I Ching.20Goodrick-Clarke, 246. He was also the first to delve into “parapsychology,” which he defined as “the science of dealing with those biological or psychological events which show that the categories of matter, space and time (and thus of causality) are not axiomatic.”21Jung, C.G., “The Future of Parapsychology,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 156-57.

The collective unconscious represents the best theoretical framework we have for why magic and divination work, or seem to work. Jung states with regard to primitive magic:

This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the ‘perils of the soul.’ Primitive rites consist accordingly in the exorcizing of spirits, the lifting of spells, the averting of the evil omen, propitiation, purification, and the production by sympathetic magic of helpful occurrences.22Jung, “Archetypes”, 22.

Dealing With the Shadow

It is interesting to note the parallels with magic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In dealing with spirits, there was some ambiguity about whether one was dealing with angelic or demonic beings—one would seek the help of the angelic, and banish the demonic. In Jung’s terms, this is a means of juggling the collective unconscious. “Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself.”23Ibid., 20. This confrontation is with the archetype of the Shadow, which was often confused with the unconscious itself, and was a justification for avoiding it. Jung says that the unconscious was “commonly regarded” as “source of all evil thoughts.”24Ibid., 6. “In the chambers of the heart dwell the wicked blood-spirits, swift anger and sensual weakness.” It is a mistake, however, to avoid this confrontation: “The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.”25Ibid., 6.

It is not a far jump from the notion of the Shadow to the notion of the “demonic being”. Religion serves the function of shielding us from our own “demonic beings.” The above quote suggests that we need to integrate our inner demons, not banish them. However, Jung considered magical operations to be dangerous because they are “insidious.”26Jung, C.G., “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomena,” in Alchemical Studies (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1967), 118. He uses Paracelsus as an example. Paracelsus was a successor to Ficino philosophically, and pioneering physician, who did not shy away from any type of magical practice, but made many enemies through his arrogance. “Paracelsus was a little too sure that he had his enemy in front of him, and did not notice that it was lodged in his own bosom.”27Ibid., 120. The magician seeks to conquer the unconscious, and this is fraught with dangers. In Jung’s discussion of Paracelsus and alchemy, he quotes Paracelsus regarding the “difficult Adech” who “hinders our intentions.”28Ibid., 170. “The difficulties of the art play no small role in alchemy. Generally they are explained as technical difficulties, but often enough . . . there are remarks about the psychic nature of the dangers and obstacles that complicate the work. Partly they are demonic influences, partly psychic disturbances such as melancholia.”29 Ibid., 6.

“Mere” Psychology

Returning to the vis imaginativa—the “power of imagination” is another way of talking about the power of interacting with the collective unconscious. All of the methods used by magicians are designed to bring about a psychological result, which may occur strictly within the mind, or may have an external (psychosomatic) result. There is a temptation to be reductive, to say that rites and rituals, either religious or magical, are “merely psychological.” However, there is nothing “mere” about psychology. The unconscious is the storehouse of human mytho-archaeology, and with it all of our collective potential and terror. Thus, the psychological results of magic and ritual are very real and powerful. Their power is in the complexity and depth of their symbols.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Jung, C.G., Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1970), xiii.
2. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 3-4.
3. ↑ Jung, C. G., “Foreword to Moser : “Spuk : Irrglaube Oder Wahrglaube?,”” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 144.
4. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, 173-174.
5. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 116.
6. ↑  Ficino, Marsilio, “Five Questions Concerning the Mind,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1948), 198.
7. ↑ Walker, D.P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1975), 76.
8. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 173-174.
9. ↑ Walker, 75.
10. ↑ Ficino, Marsilio, “Liber De Arte Chemica,” in Marsilio Ficino on the Alchemical Art(Amazon Digital Services, 1702).
11. ↑ Walker, 89.
12. ↑ Ibid., 153-154.
13. ↑ Ibid., 209-210.
14. ↑ “Catechism of the Catholic Church, Section 2, Chapter 1, Subsection Ii, 2116 and 2117,” (2003).
15. ↑ Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther (W.W. Norton: New York, 1958), 21.
16. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Soul and Death,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 131.
17. ↑ Jung, “Psychological Foundation”, 117.
18. ↑ Jung, “Soul and Death”, 134-135.
19. ↑ Jung, C.G., “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Pantheon Books: New York, 1959), 6.
20. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, 246.
21. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Future of Parapsychology,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 156-57.
22. ↑ Jung, “Archetypes”, 22.
23. ↑ Ibid., 20.
24, 25. ↑ Ibid., 6.
26. ↑ Jung, C.G., “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomena,” in Alchemical Studies (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1967), 118.
27. ↑ Ibid., 120.
28. ↑ Ibid., 170.
29. ↑  Ibid., 6.

Is Friendship Limited? An Inquiry into Dunbar’s Number

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Feature Image: "Networks!" by Stephen D. Strowes. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy — that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

— Mark Twain, Letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 1867

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Friendship is one mind in two bodies. —Mencius, third century BCE

Earth may be the friendliest place in the universe, if Facebook is any indication. Worldwide, every day, around 5 billion “likes” are generated from 1.13 billion users reaching out to their “friends.” Five new Facebook profiles are generated every second. The friendliest demographic appears to be the 25 to 34 age group, which comprises around 30 percent of users. Craving friendship, 50 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. Overall, people generally seem friendliest mid-week between 1 to 3 pm, when peak usage occurs. No other social media site comes close to Facebook’s popularity. It has more active users than Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined. Each Facebook user is allowed up to 5,000 friends.1The top 20 valuable Facebook statistics – updated July 2016. Zephoria.com. https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. Accessed 30 July, 2016. That’s a lot of friendship. Or is it?

BILL GORE’S REALIZATION

W. L. “Bill” Gore, the chemical engineer who invented Gore-Tex, the waterproof, breathable fabric used in wetsuits, hiking boots, ponchos and tents, as well as inventing vascular grafts and surgical meshes, was one of the first individuals to focus on the limits of friendship in industrial settings. In 1957 Gore left a promising career with DuPont. On January 1, 1958, he and Genevieve, his wife, started their company W. L. Gore & Associates, in the basement of their home in Newark, Delaware. The company was successful and expanded into a large factory. One day Gore walked onto the factory floor and realized that he no longer knew who everybody was. His gut instinct told him that the bigger a company got, the less friendly workers became and the less likely they were to work hard and help each other out. Gore calculated that after putting more than 150 people in the same building, things ceased to run smoothly. People couldn’t keep track of each other, and a sense of friendly community was lost. At the magic number of about 150, everybody knew who was the manager, the accountant, who cleaned the sinks, floors and toilets, and who made the sandwiches for lunch. So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees. When the company needed expanding, he would just build another factory — sometimes right on the parking lot next door.2The Gore story. Gore.com. http://www.gore.com/about/the-gore-story. Accessed 30 July, 2016.

Gore’s vision translated into worker satisfaction. His basement operation grew to become one of the 200 largest privately held companies in the US. The company earned the number three spot on the World’s Best Multinational Workplaces list by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2015. Gore’s company was also named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, earning the number 12 spot in 2016. The Gore company has offices and manufacturing operations in 25 countries, and is cited as a best workplace in China, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain, Sweden and the UK. (2)

DUNBAR’S NUMBER

A friend to all is a friend to none. — Aristotle

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, was paying attention to Bill Gore’s decisions about work force size. Much of Dunbar’s research has focused on why the Gore model was such a spectacular success. The key idea, Dunbar finds, is that humans can hold about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched this idea so thoroughly that the number 150 has come to be known as “Dunbar’s Number.”

Ironically, “Dunbar’s Number” was first coined on Facebook, where a mere 150 friends are often considered a drop in the bucket. Dunbar reports, “There was a discussion [on Facebook] by people saying, ‘I’ve got too many friends — I don’t know who half these people are.’ Somebody apparently said, ‘Look, there’s this guy in England who says you can’t have more than 150.’” Soon Dunbar’s Number was off and running.

Dunbar kept bumping into the number 150 in his anthropological research. This number appeared to be a sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies and Neolithic farming villages all over the world. He found that, from the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150.3Don’t believe Facebook; you only have 150 friends. Npr.com. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends. 5 June, 2011. Accessed 13 August, 2016. The number persists in modern societies. Dunbar found that the self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150. 4Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016

Dunbar realized that military organizations worldwide reflect the same pattern, from Roman antiquity to modern times. A company, a basic military unit, typically consists of 80–250 soldiers commanded by a major or a captain. Although armies are also organized as large battalions, regiments, and divisions, their subdivision into companies helps maintain a greater sense of unit cohesion and community.

Dunbar argues that 150 would be the mean group size for communities with a very high incentive to remain together, such as groups that are under intense survival pressure due to severe environmental and economic factors. But why should this be so? The main underlying reason for 150, says Dunbar, is neurological. The number of social group members a single primate can keep track of appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. He contends that, for every species, the ideal social group size can be computed from the mean neocortical volume of that particular species. In humans, Dunbar states, the size of the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language limits us to managing about 150 friends.5Dunbar RIM. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution. 1992; 22 (6): 469–493. Through countless generations, our primate ancestors found that 150 was the optimal community size. In groups this size, people could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Even today, Dunbar states, “150 seems to be number at which our brains just max out on memory.”(3)

Dunbar is no rogue scientist. He has been showered with honors. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1998) and a recipient of Huxley Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (2014). The simple arithmetic of his argument — that bigger brains correlate with bigger social groups — gives it academic heft. As a consequence, he is now seen as the father of what’s known as the social brain hypothesis.(5) “It’s been very influential,” says Simon Reader, an evolutionary biologist at McGill University. “It has been the dominant hypothesis.”6Reader S. Quoted in: Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016.

THE CHRISTMAS-CARD STUDY

Much of Dunbar’s work has been done with groups of primates, where it is comparatively easy to estimate the size of stable social networks. Primates spend a lot of time grooming each other in social groups, picking fleas and parasites out of each other’s fur. Although humans today don’t have much fur and usually not many fleas, there may well be flea-picking equivalents that might serve as proxies to grooming in primates.

Dunbar, working with R. A. Hill, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Durham, chose Christmas-card lists as one such equivalent. Sending Christmas cards sheds light on how many friends an individual actually cares about. As one commentator says, “[Sending a holiday card] is an investment. You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people don’t incur them for just anybody.”(4)

Hill and Dunbar published their paper “Social Network Size in Humans” in the journal Human Nature in 2003. They state, “[Sending Christmas cards is the] one time of year when individuals make an effort to contact all of those individuals within their social network whose relationship they value.” Their findings: A quarter of the cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. “Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex…. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size.”7Hill RA, Dunbar RIM. Social network size in humans. Human Nature. 2003; 14(1): 53-72.

Dunbar acknowledges that it is misleading to talk about a single, absolute Dunbar number. He actually describes a scale of numbers applying to ever-widening circles of connection. The innermost is a group of three to five, our very closest friends. Then there is a circle of 12 to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. Then comes 50, “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of Southern Africa,” Dunbar writes in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? 8Dunbar R. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2010. Beyond 150 there are widening circles. Fifteen hundred is the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. These numbers, which Dunbar teased out of surveys and ethnographies, grow by a factor of roughly three. He isn’t sure why this is so.(4)

ARE FRIENDSHIPS EXPANDABLE?

There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met. —William Butler Yeats

Like a pioneer in any area of science, Dunbar has his critics. Among them are the architects of social network sites, most of whom are less than joyful about the concept of numerical limits to friendships. Still, many of these cheerleaders of unlimited friendships are interested in the pros and cons of his work.

Dunbar has responded to criticism by continuing to add data fortifying his premise. For instance, a 2011 study found that on Twitter the average number of people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, statistics show that the average user has 190 — more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.(4)

The burning question among social network enthusiasts is whether social media sites such as Facebook stretch the size of manageable friendships. In search of an answer, Dunbar compared the online traffic of people with thousands of Facebook friends with those with only hundreds. He showed that there is no discernible difference in the traffic of the two groups. As Dunbar says, “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world. People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.” Dunbar found significant gender differences. His analysis suggests that women are better than men at maintaining friendships on Facebook. He states, “Girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.”9Loveys K. 5,000 friends on Facebook? Scientists prove 150 is the most we can cope with. Dailymail.com. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245684/5-000-friends-Facebook-Scientists-prove-150-cope-with.html. 24 January, 2010. Accessed 31 July, 2016.

Dunbar does not deny that humans might be able to reset or expand the cognitive limits on our social interactions. After all, we’ve done it before, as when we taught ourselves to talk in our distant past. This made it possible, he argues, for humans to function in much larger groups than our primate cousins. “Whereas baboons bond by taking turns picking each others’ nits, we have rhetoric and gossip and half-time speeches, not to mention singing and storytelling and jokes, to bring and hold us together.” Language, he says, is how humans used their brains to get to 150. And until something as revolutionary as that comes along, 150 is where he thinks we’ll stay.(4)

Most people are fascinated by the fact that Dunbar himself has zero Facebook friends. As one Dunbar watcher says, “He occasionally peers over his wife’s shoulder when she logs on at home, but he isn’t on the social network.” He has a LinkedIn account, he says, “by mistake.”(4)

FRIENDSHIP ADDICTION

If you have one true friend you have more than your share. —Thomas Fuller

4961264599_c0a62068d4_b

“Connection” by Giulia. (CC BY 2.0)

David Smallwood, an addictions expert and author in the UK, believes that many Facebook users become hooked on the urge to acquire more friends in an attempt to appear popular and successful.10Smallwood D. Who Says I’m An Addict: A Book For Anyone Who Is Partial To Food, Sex, Booze Or Drugs. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2014. He and other psychologists warn that Facebook is driving a worrying trend of “friendship addiction” that causes insecurity in those who use it. Smallwood suggests that at least 10 percent of the population is vulnerable to friendship addiction. According to him, you know you’re suffering from friendship addiction when “(1) you judge yourself by how many online friends you have; (2) you believe people with more friends than you are more popular; (3) you regularly comb through your friends’ friends’ lists for people to add to your own; (4) the first thing you do when you get home from a party is add all the people you just met as friends; or (5) you have at least 20 people on your friends’ list you actively dislike.”11 Cooke T. Help! I’m a Facebookaholic: Inside the Crazy World of Social Networking. London, UK: John Blake Publishing Ltd.; 2011: 101. 12Goodchild S. The women addicted to Facebook friendships. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-women-addicted-to-facebook-friendships- 6827630.html. 22 October 2008. Accessed 14 August, 2016.

DEMONIZING FACEBOOK

One man’s god is another man’s devil. — Folk saying

A growth industry has developed that is dedicated to criticizing social media. Many critics view social media not only as a threat to traditional forms of friendship, but also as a menace to one’s psychological and spiritual health. There are numerous Internet warnings along the lines that social networking “kills the creative spirit.”13Ellison JT. How social networking kills the creative spirit. Jtellison.com. http://jtellison.com/how-social-networking-kills-th/. Accessed 28 August, 2016 This warning is mild when compared to websites such as “Facebook and How Satan Is Using It to EAT YOUR SOUL,”14Van A. Facebook and How Satan is Using It To EAT YOUR SOUL. http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/03/facebook-and-how-satan-is-using-it-to-eat-your-soul/. 28 March, 2012. Accessed 28 August, 2016. “Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family,”15 Tashman B. Pat Robertson: Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-satanic-covens-use-facebook-curse-your-family. 17 February, 2015.Accessed 28 August, 2016. and “Shamans Using Sites like Facebook for Black Magic.”16Bhagat R. Cnet.com. http://www.cnet.com/news/shamans-using-sites-like-facebook-for-black-magic-says-malaysian-official/. 9 March, 2016. Accessed 29 August, 2016.

If Facebook has spawned a lot of friendship, it has also generated a considerable amount of hate, especially toward Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Out of curiosity, I Googled the term “Mark Zuckerberg is evil.” The result was more than half a million hits. Many of these websites are redolent with bigotry and anti-Semitism, and are too vile to mention here by name. Condemning Zuckerberg as evil is ironic, considering that he and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, have promised to donate 99 percent of their fortune to various social causes about which they care. Even this extraordinary gesture has evoked criticism, with one scold complaining about “the potential adverse economic consequences of too much philanthropy.”17Hendrickson M. Let’s hope not all billionaires emulate Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy. Forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2015/12/08/lets-hope-not-all-billionaires- emulate-mark-zuckerbergs-philanthropy/#3738f8843705. 8 December, 2015. Accessed 29 August, 2016.

Thoughtful criticism of social media is healthy, of course, and should be encouraged. An admirable example is Dunbar himself, who laments the fact that touch, which has been important in building close relationships among primates, is completely lacking in social media networking.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL FALLACY

We live in an era when rapid change breeds fear, and fear too often congeals us into a rigidity which we mistake for stability.

—Lynn Townsend White

"Networking" by Andrew Malone. (CC BY 2.0)

“Networking” by Andrew Malone. (CC BY 2.0)

Can Facebook destroy the social fabric? In his fascinating book Paper, an exploration of the history of the development of paper, author Mark Kurlansky examines what he calls the technological fallacy, the idea that technology changes society.18Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016. “It is exactly the reverse,” he says. “Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it.” His observations about paper may be relevant to our concerns about the impact of the Internet on friendship. He elaborates:

Technological inventions have always arisen from necessity. Numerous inventions preceded paper. First came spoken language, then drawing, then pictographs, then alphabets, then phoneticism, then writing, and then paper. Paper was then followed by printing, moveable type, typewriters, machine-driven printers, and electronic word processors and the electronic printers that go with them. As needs present themselves, solutions are found. Every idea engenders a need for another.19Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv

New innovations do not always eradicate earlier technologies, says Kurlansky, but they may reveal them in a new light and often invigorate them.

The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted. Electronic calculators have not even ended the use of the abacus, and more than a century after

Thomas Edison was awarded a patent for a commercially successful lightbulb in 1879, there are still four hundred candle manufacturers in the United States alone, employing some 7,000 workers with annual sale of more than $2 billion. In fact, the first decade of the twenty-first century showed a growth in candle sales, though the uses of candles have of course greatly changed…. New technology, rather than eliminating older technology, increases choices. Computers will no doubt change the role of paper, but it is extremely unlikely that paper will be eliminated…20Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.

Kurlansky describes how, after Gutenberg invented moveable type in the fifteenth century and books began to be printed rather than handwritten by scribes, this transition was regarded in some quarters with great suspicion. “Was there a dangerous political agenda? Were [the printers] in league with the devil? When … Gutenberg’s ex-partner went to Paris with cases of books to sell, he had to flee, accused of being sent by the devil.” Critics of the new typeset books said they were unnatural and inhuman. They said that “a certain human touch was missing in the way the letters and the words all had exactly the same spacing… It was rigid and uncreative.”21Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 116-117.

Within only a few decades, however, sentiments had changed. Kurlansky:

By the end of the fifteenth century, Europe, with its paper and printing presses, had for the first time in history become the most advanced civilization in the world. In science, music, art, mathematics, architecture, literature, geography, philosophy — in fact, in most any field imaginable…22Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 117.

It is a constant in social evolution that new ideas, no matter how worthy, commonly face a storm of criticism when introduced. A fierce debate of this sort concerned another innovation in fifteenth-century Europe — the artistic technique of perspective, the rendering a three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional surface. Although the perspectival technique makes possible a truer image of what the eye sees, many rebelled at this possibility for greater accuracy. They considered this new development as too real and they shrank from it. The rebellion against realism in art had been present for centuries. As Alan MacFarland and Gerry Martin observe in their intriguing book Glass: A World History:

It is well known that Plato felt that realist…art should be banned as a deceit, and most civilizations have followed Plato for other reasons. For the Chinese (and Japanese) the purpose of art was not to imitate or portray external nature, but to suggest emotions. Thus they actively discouraged too much realism, which merely repeated without any added value what could anyway be seen. A Van Eyck or a Leonardo would have been scorned as a vulgar imitator.23Macfarlane A, Martin G. Glass: A World History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2002: 59.

This was not just a Western objection. In parts of the Islamic tradition

…realistic artistic representations of living things above the level of flowers and trees are banned as blasphemous imitations of the creator’s distinctive work. Humans should not create graven images, or any images at all, for thereby they took to themselves the power of God. Again, Van Eyck or Leonardo would have been an abhorrence. Even mirrors can be an abomination, for they create duplicates of living things. (22)

So although the perspectival approach gave the world a more realistic form of representation, much of the world turned away, often with a vengeance. Perspectivism was impugned, maligned, slandered, and defamed, and those espousing it were denigrated as heretics, blasphemers, and usurpers of divine authority. Fidelity in art was seen as a threat, a replacement of the sacred by the profane.

Much of the current rancor over digital devices and social media strongly resembles the denunciation of printing and perspectivism. Things haven’t changed all that much. Wholesale endorsement of these developments is unwise, but so too is sweeping condemnation. I’m not suggesting that we let digital devices and social media off the hook, but that their influence is hugely complex and demands unbiased appraisal. And we should always bear in mind that, as Kurlansky states, “The history of technology shows that Luddites always lose.”24Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.

WHITHER?

friend: noun. Origin: Old English frēond, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vriend and German Freund, from an Indo-European root meaning “to love.” 25Friend. Dictionary app, Macintosh OS X. 3 September, 2016.

The shallowness, superficiality, and lack of satisfaction in thousands of digital friendships should remind us that we are forfeiting something vital in the drive to accumulate 5,000 Facebook friends. As a result, perhaps we will regain an appreciation of old-fashioned friendships. Traditional friendships, like the lingering charm of candles, may be seen as a treasure hidden in plain sight, unseen because so common. In this process, we might stop objecting to the evidence that we have the capacity for “only” 150 close friends, and begin to celebrate 150 as a mighty achievement and a treasured indicator of what it means to be human.

It is easy to criticize the digital friendship craze and its sad variations. Everyone by now is familiar with the restaurant scenario of a man and woman ignoring each other, each riveted by their individual smartphone, their faces illuminated by the device’s eerie light, each silently cocooned in their downward stare. But these cartoonish expressions conceal something that should be respected — the deep need in modern life for connections with others, an unfulfilled hunger for a unity that has gone missing in people’s lives. This desire should be honored, not ridiculed. And if the current compulsion to amass digital connections is crude and stumbling, well, it is still early days and no one knows for sure how the digital friendship game will play out.

The primordial need for friendship and connectedness with our fellow humans is a wonderful urge, even if it has become deranged by the digital confusion of quality with quantity. Just as our ancestors’ fate depended on friendship and mutual cooperation in a hostile, predatory world, our fate as a species likely depends on how deeply we engage and honor one another and the planetary biota in general.26Dossey L. One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2013.

So let the friendship circus continue. We will sort things out. Meanwhile, I’m betting on more than 150.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ The top 20 valuable Facebook statistics – updated July 2016. Zephoria.com. https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. Accessed 30 July, 2016.
2. ↑ The Gore story. Gore.com. http://www.gore.com/about/the-gore-story. Accessed 30 July, 2016.
3. ↑ Don’t believe Facebook; you only have 150 friends. Npr.com. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends. 5 June, 2011. Accessed 13 August, 2016.
4. ↑ Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016
5. ↑ Dunbar RIM. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution. 1992; 22 (6): 469–493.
6. ↑ Reader S. Quoted in: Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016.
7. ↑ Hill RA, Dunbar RIM. Social network size in humans. Human Nature. 2003; 14(1): 53-72.
8. ↑ Dunbar R. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2010.
9. ↑ Loveys K. 5,000 friends on Facebook? Scientists prove 150 is the most we can cope with. Dailymail.com. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245684/5-000-friends-Facebook-Scientists-prove-150-cope-with.html. 24 January, 2010. Accessed 31 July, 2016.
10. ↑ Smallwood D. Who Says I’m An Addict: A Book For Anyone Who Is Partial To Food, Sex, Booze Or Drugs. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2014.
11. ↑ Cooke T. Help! I’m a Facebookaholic: Inside the Crazy World of Social Networking. London, UK: John Blake Publishing Ltd.; 2011: 101.
12. ↑ Goodchild S. The women addicted to Facebook friendships. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-women-addicted-to-facebook-friendships- 6827630.html. 22 October 2008. Accessed 14 August, 2016.
13. ↑ Ellison JT. How social networking kills the creative spirit. Jtellison.com. http://jtellison.com/how-social-networking-kills-th/. Accessed 28 August, 2016
14. ↑ Van A. Facebook and How Satan is Using It To EAT YOUR SOUL. http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/03/facebook-and-how-satan-is-using-it-to-eat-your-soul/. 28 March, 2012. Accessed 28 August, 2016.
15. ↑ Tashman B. Pat Robertson: Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-satanic-covens-use-facebook-curse-your-family. 17 February, 2015.Accessed 28 August, 2016.
16. ↑ Bhagat R. Cnet.com. http://www.cnet.com/news/shamans-using-sites-like-facebook-for-black-magic-says-malaysian-official/. 9 March, 2016. Accessed 29 August, 2016.
17. ↑ Hendrickson M. Let’s hope not all billionaires emulate Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy. Forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2015/12/08/lets-hope-not-all-billionaires- emulate-mark-zuckerbergs-philanthropy/#3738f8843705. 8 December, 2015. Accessed 29 August, 2016.
18. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016.
19. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv
20, 24. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.
21. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 116-117.
22. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 117.
23. ↑ Macfarlane A, Martin G. Glass: A World History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2002: 59.
25. ↑ Friend. Dictionary app, Macintosh OS X. 3 September, 2016.
26. ↑ Dossey L. One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2013.

Call for Submissions – Intensification

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It’s that time again. Events around the world are heating up, from the refugee crisis to Brexit to the US elections, there’s a heck of a lot going on right now. The editors at Metapsy are interested in receiving creative, unique, and non-academic (as in: don’t send us your papers) submissions around the theme of intensification. Check out what we wrote about this six week publishing cycle in the Letter from the Editor:

For the next six weeks our publication will be examining the theme of intensification as creative response to cultural crisis. Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them. Transparency is a mode of perception that involves us in the world and permits that world to speak to us, perhaps with us as we also learn to listen. It may apply to any creative, artistic, intellectual or physical activity.

The cultural philosopher and poet Jean Gebser used the word “intensification” as a marker for growth, being, and presence. Distinguishing it from mere expansion, which implies an event or process that can be measured or quantified, Gebser saw an intensification of consciousness as one that led us back to our own primordial and spiritual natures and forces us to pierce through the limitations of the rational mind. Intensification implies clarity, transparency—seeing through without the need to dissolve the boundaries that constitute our lived experience—and most of all, diaphany.

For the next seven weeks—as the political election heats up and our world’s political and ecological crisis continues to come into focus—Metapsy will explore this theme through writing, artwork, and mixed media.

Themes and Prompts

We are especially interested submissions—artistic, visual, audible, literary, philosophical and otherwise—pertaining to:

  • Transparency as an expression of “intensification”
  • Relations in networks: biological, digital, and nonhuman
  • Technological disruptions and their relation to the human life world
  • Political revolution, restructuring, and new modes of relating
  • Surges of creativity as response to crisis
  • Art and aesthetics as doorways for intensified consciousness
  • From supernovas to singularities (to be interpreted by the reader) and…
  • The spiritual dimension

Please see our submissions page to read more about our process and send us your work. We look forward to hearing from you!

— The Metapsy Editors

Letter from the Editor – Intensification

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For the next six weeks our publication will be examining the theme of intensification as creative response to cultural crisis. Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them. Transparency is a mode of perception that involves us in the world and permits that world to speak to us, perhaps with us as we also learn to listen. It may apply to any creative, artistic, intellectual or physical activity.

The cultural philosopher and poet Jean Gebser used the word “intensification” as a marker for growth, being, and presence. Distinguishing it from mere expansion, which implies an event or process that can be measured or quantified, Gebser saw an intensification of consciousness as one that led us back to our own primordial and spiritual natures and forces us to pierce through the limitations of the rational mind. Intensification implies clarity, transparency—seeing through without the need to dissolve the boundaries that constitute our lived experience—and most of all, diaphany.

For the next seven weeks—as the political election heats up and our world’s political and ecological crisis continues to come into focus—Metapsy will explore this theme through writing, artwork, and mixed media.

Unguided Meditation

Creative director Marco Morelli offers a signature note for Week 1 with this piece, an “Unguided Meditation” if you will. “The Loneliest Road (Intensification)” is an experimental soundscape invoking planes of ambience and conversation, memory and monologue along solitary roads. Some of the voices sampled are fellow Metapsy editors, speaking to the importance of art, meaning, chaos and “a-perspectival” creativity as forms of reply to seemingly insurmountable crisis and complexity. If the problems we face are ineffable, perhaps it is the role of “intensification” to invoke that ineffability in ourselves.

Genesis

Perhaps it is poetry, rather than essay, that better speaks to intensification. We begin our publishing cycle with author, philosopher, cultural critic, and poet John David Ebert’s “Poems of Genesis.” Some readers in our community are already familiar with Ebert’s prolific output of books spanning mythology, religion, philosophy, pop culture, cinema analysis and his YouTube lecture channel spanning hours of content. If you aren’t, go check them out right now. Of special relevance to Metapsy’s editorial mission is Art After Metaphysics. In his featured poetry, Ebert lends his voice to an intensity of consciousness:

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.

Submissions

We are, as always, accepting submissions around cycle themes. See our dedicated page for Intensification – Call for Submissions, then go ahead and read our submission guidelines page. Artists, writers, and scholars—we look forward to hearing from you!

Creatively,

JDJ
Editor-in-Chief (aka Mutation Engineer)
Metapsychosis Journal

The Loneliest Road (Intensification)

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Conceived as a 20-minute “unguided meditation,” this audio journey combines music, conversational fragments, and field phenomena to produce a contemplative response to current events, specifically the United States presidential election of 2016. As an immersive mindscape, the audio invites you to engage the world as meditation, and meditation as art.

Headphones recommended. Safe with most medications. Sit and enjoy.

DOWNLOAD AUDIO

Music

“Subterranean Chamber” – Crystalis [artist]
“sounds piano” – reed blue [Free Music Archive]
“Sandglass.1” – maD & Alg0rh1tm [Free Music Archive]
“Billionaire” – Travie McCoy [fair use]
“SELF REFLECT.3” – Jared C. Balogh [Free Music Archive]

Voices

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (and translator)
Jeremy D. Johnson
Marco V Morelli
Jenn Zahrt
Mark Jabbour
Mark Binet
J.F. Martel
Kim Smith
Natalie Bantz
John Davis
Chris Johnson

Text:

“What is Not a Forest?” [SyntheticForest.org]

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.

∞

Rewind the Tape

DISCUSS ON INFINITE CONVERSATIONS

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).

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