Magic, Mysticism & Politics in Poetry: A Few Thoughts in Response to a Note from a Friend
The following is an email I composed in response to an email thread that we at the New Philadelphia Poets have been kicking around amongst ourselves for a few days in preparation for an issue of Wheelhouse Magazine we’re curating or something like that:
I wouldn’t advocate squelching magic. And clearly I wouldn’t advocate attempting to stem the ebb and flow of imagination. I also wouldn’t want to say that one person’s prosody was “wrong” or “foolish”. And my rejection of the idea of disciplic succession, as it were, is more about the tendency for people to latch onto their chosen poetic lineage and to narrowly define the limits of the succession. I would count the Black Mountain Poets/San Fran Renaissance as an influence on my work as well. I’d also count Conceptual Poetry/Oulipo. I’d also count Cage and MacLow. And Langpo. And the New York School. And the Metaphysical Poets. And Patti Smith. And Gertrude Stein. And the Objectivists. I think we’re on the same page here, in the sense that latching onto poetic camps single-mindedly is bunk , right? I know, for instance, that while you might see yrself as part of the lineage of Black Mountain you also would never say, “Well, I don’t like John Donne or Jackson MacLow or Laura (Riding) Jackson because they’re not closely associated enough with the Black Mountain lineage.” You would never go about attempting to tear down the work of Language Poetry or Stein or Jim Carroll in order to advance the project of continuing the Black Mountain School’s influence. It’s that sort of rigidity I object to in the idea of disciplic succession. Because it is a choice and it is not destiny. Which is not to say an author’s choices are the first and last word, or that an author’s choices are destiny. I am certainly not obsessed with the individuality of the author. I’m certainly willing to admit something of an author function, a confluence of social forces which explain certain aspects of a writer’s work and I am also a BIG believer in the importance of the reader participating in the construction of a work.
I don’t object to the notion that we are not in control of our own universe (as writers or human beings of any sort). In fact, I’m rather convinced of it. What I am not convinced of is the potential for that lack of control to auger (the pun is deliberate) something potentially benevolent or enriching about that lack of control. I think the point made about Magic meaning different things to different people is quite true. It doesn’t have to be spiritual or superstitious (although I constantly throw salt over my left shoulder while cooking and don’t toast with water, etc…mostly because I LIKE the rituals even if I don’t think they carry meaning, which I’m guessing is also part of why many poets engage in mystical practice, which is fine). I guess my reticence is sort of Nietzschean in nature, in that it is rooted in my suspicion of hierarchy (which necessarily presupposed by the spiritual…sacred/profane, spiritual/physical; it’s not an equal playing field—one is certainly capable of some things the other is not, the primary difference being I have explanations & evidence for the limited capacity of the physical world and no explanations or evidence for the heightened capacities of the mystical world; ie, I’ve never experienced it and I’ve also found that the significance of coincidence or aberration tends to be something attributed only by those who have experienced such coincidences and aberrations, which means while it may be significant to that person and thus, have great impact, importance and REAL MEANING for them, it hardly constitutes evidence). It’s also rooted in my atheism or rather, what I’d say is more like agnosticism with convictions—the convictions being the belief that while the likelihood of there being a god, an afterlife, or any sort of mystical undercurrent to the world is highly unlikely, I also must simultaneously acknowledge my own inherent LACK of gnosis. I acknowledge that there are things I simply cannot know or understand. The difference is I don’t choose to accord some sort of significance to the inexplicable, I don’t try to read the tea leaves of ambiguous circumstance and liminal experience because I LIKE IT. I like the potential for wonder and curiosity, I like ambiguity and liminal experience. I suppose attempting to sift through it in a search for gnosis, or rather, to believe there is an ATTAINABLE gnosis to be had doesn’t interest me personally. What’s more, I’m fairly sure if there is such knowledge of god or of the universe or what have you…if there is such a kind of gnosis I don’t presume to think I could ever be the sort of person to grasp it. I’m not sure that human consciousness is capable of it. Humanity’s capacity to turn even the most beautiful and spiritual ideas into self-interested clusterfucks of violence and exploitation astounds me. Krsna consciousness, or Hare Krsna, a religion I studied extensively as a teen and found SO beautiful and open and free has been used, in some instances to swindle desperate and confused people out of money and material resources. The Gospel of Christ, one of the most astounding testaments on behalf of humankind’s potential for good and beauty, has been an ideology of exclusion and extermination since it’s institutionalization (never mind the fact that the Jesus Christ was not a historical figure). Look at what has been done in the name of Islam. And how the strife between Hindus and Muslims in India has been a fount of conflict and violence. Even Buddhism has been used as a front to maintain monarchical and feudal control.
I think that religion, mysticism and myth are important maps of humanity’s collective experience. In a lot of ways mysticism and religion are sort of like an act of detournement; absorbing the images of the past, its time. When Benjamin wrote in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that each age was endowed with a “weak Messianic power” there’s always been a sort of fundamental misunderstanding. It is not triumphalist, end of history rhetoric only the socialists win. That’s why it’s “weak”. And the Messianism he refers to is fundamentally rooted in the Kabbalah’s sense of Messianism—the Messiah never comes. Derrida addresses this in Specters of Marx as well. In the second footnote to the second chapter “Conjuring—Marxism” Derrida addresses Benjamin’s concept of messianism. He writes:
The following paragraph names messianism or, more precisely, messianic without messianism, a “weak messianic power” (eine schwache messianische Kraft, Benjamin underscores). Let us quote this passage for what is consonant there, despite many differences and keeping relative proportions in mind, in a spectral logic of inheritance and generations, but a logic turned toward the future no less than the past, in a hetereogeneous and disjointed time. What Benjamin calls Auspruch (claim, appeal,interpellation, address) is not far from what we are suggesting with the word injunction: “The past carries with it a secret index [heimlichen Index] by which it is is referred to redemption [Erlösung]…There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has claim [Auspruch]. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that…”. We should quote and reread here all these pages—which are dense, enigmatic, burning—up to the final allusion to the “chip” (shard, splinter: Splitter) that the messianic inscribes in the body of the at-present (Jetztzeit) and up to the “strait gate” for the passage of the Messiah, namely, every “second”. For “this does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time” (Benjamin, p. 264)
It’s interesting here, the synchrony between Derrida’s reading of Benjamin and Situationism. In the passage that this footnote is appended to, Derrida is discussing the concept of hegemony, specifically as it regards “critical inheritance”, as he calls it. He writes that “a hegemonic force always seems to be represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, whatever may be the conflicts between forces, the principal contradiction or the secondary contradictions, the overdeterminations and relays that may later complicate this schema—and therefore lead us to be suspicious of the simple opposition of dominant and dominated…” (Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 55). What Derrida is also attempting to address in the text is the way in which “mysticism, spectrality” is folded into the logic of capital. Derrida speaks of the provocation of other ghosts, of the multiplicity of this “sociality” as he calls it. There’s always more than one specter, more than one spirit. This mystical experience, this provocation of ghosts not only binds people together in a common experience (the mystical undercurrent), but it binds us together in the socialized relations not of but as commodities are bound together. Producing this “mysticality” (I’m thinking of the “phenomenological conjuring trick” as Derrida calls it…he refers to a passage in the first book of Capital where Marx describes how the table at an auction, seems to dance for the potential customers, how the commodity casts of an aura of exchange-value and mystically transforms itself from a table which can be used into a table which can be bought). “This socius, then, binds all “men” who are first of all experiences of time, existences determined by this relation to time which itself would not be possible without surviving and returning, with that being “out of joint” that dislocates the self-presence of the living present and installs thereby the relation to the other.” (Derrida, p. 154) Derrida is referring to Marx’s labor theory of value when he refers to “men” as experiences of time. People are transformed, mystically, into commodities endowed with use-value in the capitalist system. Derrida goes on to explain how if the “’mystical character’” of the commodity…is born of the ‘social form’”, we must understand this mystical character, this secret. It’s worth, again, quoting him at length since any paraphrase would lack his eloquence:
There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize it in the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. The “proper” feature of specters, like vampires, is that they are deprived of a specular image, of the true, right specular image (but who is not so deprived?). How do you recognize a ghost? By the fact that it does not recognize itself in a mirror. Now that is what happens with the commerce of the commodities among themselves. These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts.
Derrida’s point (or more precisely, Derrida’s phenomenological distillation of Marx’s point) is that while mysticism or spiritualism (remember, Derrida is essentially discussing Marx’s Saint Max section of The German Ideology, the section on mystical experience, Fourier, and Spirit and Marx’s refutation of Stirners “mystical anarchism”) can offer a transcendence of “spectacle” (Derrida cleverly notes that the market is a “front for all other fronts”), but that this transcendence itself is still a reflection of the social system it is enmeshed in and engendered by. It’s not a question of whether mysticism pre-dates capitalism or vice versa either, it’s a question of whether mysticism is somehow singular in the fact that it has not become a reflection of the capitalist system. In another section of the book, Derrida reminds us that even ghosts must be given a body, that the return to the body (revenant) is what makes the ghost visible, that the transformation of the visible into the invisible the arrival (arrivant) of the ghost IS a revenant, a return to the body. It’s another of Derrida’s characteristic double binds, the arrival/return and the departure (the ghost must have left the body, the departure/arrival of the spirit). I wonder however, is atheism too, a reflection of the capitalist system? One would immediately argue not, since it is fundamentally a rejection of hierarchical organization and foundational principles. Still, it can be said that, ultimately, mysticism is not necessarily a hierarchical organizational principle. It can be an event, a transformation, non-hierarchical, completely subjective and unattached to any religion, faith or school. It can simply be an event. As Derrida would characterize it, the event of an event, the spec(tac)ular event of the event of transformation, the anticipated future event. However, if this future does not include a radical change in the social system which it arrives in, I wonder what the transformation means…is the arrival of a return a transformation at all? It reminds me of a passage by Vaneigem in his The Revolution of Everyday Life:
For Power the future is simply a past reiterated. A dose of known inauthenticity is projected by an act of anticipatory imagination into a time which it fills in advance with its utter vacuity. Our only memories are memories of roles once played, our only future a timeless remake. Human memory is supposed to answer to no requirement save Power’s need to assert itself temporally by constantly reminding us of its presence. And this reminder takes the form: nihil nove sub sole—which being interpreted means “you always have to have leaders.”
The future they try to sell me as “different time” is the perfect complement to the different space they try to sell me in which to let it all hang out. They are always telling us to change time, change skins, change fashions or change roles: alienation, it seems, is the only constant. Whenever “I am another”, that other is condemned to hover between past and future. And roles never have a present. No wonder they can supply no comfort, much less health: if a person can create no present—in the role, here is always elsewhere—how in the world can he expect to look back on a pleasant past or forward to a pleasant future?
I’d add another question to Vaneigem’s closing interrogative: how do we know we are not just ghosts who cannot recognize ourselves in the mirror?
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