My body felt comfortably worn out after a long day of convening with water and sun, and the artful balancing act of maintaining a daylong buzz. It was one of those moments of exceeding pleasantness that one finds themselves wanting to hold onto. As the light dimmed to a purpled grey, I found myself lifting my phone to take a quick video, as if that might preserve the moment. Stephen drifted just downstream from me. A natural star, as the camera passed over him, without any prompting he lifted his can, downed what remained, then sighed with complete contentment, and said “I fucking love Texas.”

It’s a feeling I know well. In my thirty-four years here, it has overwhelmed countless times: standing on the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains looking across the Chihuahuan Desert towards Mexico, and then bubbling quickly back up in the hot springs along the Rio Grande where I have several times soaked muscles aching from the hike to that vantage point. When I got married at Enchanted Rock. Topping Guadualpe Peak. Seeing the bats emerge from beneath their bridge as a child visiting Austin. Waiting for the sun to warm the chilled basin of Palo Duro Canyon. Camping on Padre Island National Seashore as a teenager, hot boxing a tent and running towards our stinking bit of ocean in perfect synch with the boys. Shopping at Recycled Books in Denton. A random glint of headlight against the base of an overpass on a rainy night in Fort Worth.

I fucking love Texas.

I have lived or worked in her small towns, progressive bubbles, and two of her major cities. I have hiked or camped in twenty-seven of her state parks and both of her national parks, swam or paddled in a dozen of her rivers and lakes, eaten more tacos and drank more Lone Star than I care to know. It is the only place I have ever called home, but this morning I am writing from a hotel in an undisclosed location on the eve of the biggest interview of my life. If it goes well, then my family’s plans can proceed and we will take the opportunity to escape Texas. Because as much as I love it, I also fucking hate Texas. Its burgeoning theocracy. Its complete implosion of public education. Ken fucking Paxton. How it has sold any remaining bits of its soul to a couple oil billionaires. Its stupid ass power grid, medieval reproduction rights, steady chiseling away of lgbtq+ rights, and the list goes on.

My wife is a teacher and a damn good one, but she cannot do another year in the Texas school system. And we have a daughter to think about now. This is not the place we want to raise a kid, so here I am. On the road, looking for housing, and trying to land a job. If the interview goes well, things are going to move very quickly. If it goes poorly, well then, it’s back to the drawing boards. Either way, it’s going to be a very busy summer.

If you read these posts, but aren’t mired in the Notes section of this website (bless your purity of soul!), then you might not have seen my recent announcement. I will be taking a short vacation from my usual posting as we figure everything out. Gnostic Pulp just hit 50 posts. That feels like as good a benchmark as any for taking a vacation. Call it quality control. Splitting time between home life, work, apartment hunting, and surfing the job boards, my brain is feeling rather wrung dry. It is high time I plunge it back into the wet slippery stream of the world, juice it back up a little.

Say, now that you mention it, this locale in which I find myself seems to have some rather accessible mountain hiking. Some even indicate literal streams. What am I doing sitting here in this dingy hotel room? My interview is a whole day away! Perhaps I have only been able to stomach so much of the man-at-the-desk lifestyle of the writer because I have lived locked within a vast labyrinth of private land my whole life, have had to drive hours just to reach some bit of nature that is not just a spool of trail wrapped through a cedar grove suspended in a sea of ranch land:

“Dedalus deadass came to Texas as a land surveyor and with his straight lines and barbed wire built a labyrinth of private ranches, trapping us all within,”

as I have the black geyser/zoomer roughneck apparition say in my unpublished manuscript before he lights a cigarette and erupts into a pillar of flame that then scythes into the night like a colony of bats.

But I kid. The Gnostic Pulp project will continue wherever I am on this Earth. And these end-of-the-month round-ups will continue right through this vacation, so you might say that there has never been a better time to update that subscription. Not to bribe, but a little extra dough sure would help smooth over this transition and get things up and running again all the more quickly. . .

Anyway, as I was saying, this last month has been quite exhausting. For the first time since we began our Full Moon Tarot ritual, we actually missed the full moon and had to draw our cards on the first night of the waning gibbous. And then I literally fell asleep at the divination table. To be fair, the table in question was our bed, but still. I fell asleep in the middle of discussing what my card might mean in our current context.

How appropriate, then, that I drew this sleepy boy:

Sometimes the symbols of the Tarot are deeply mysterious. Other times, they are right there on the surface, as is the case with the Four of Swords. It’s the Take a Load Off, Pal Card. Hang up your swords and take a breather. It encourages rest, meditation, solitude, all of which have been in short supply, and will be in short supply again soon whichever way this interview goes as we’ll either be packing up our life and moving out of state, or I’ll be hitting the job boards once again.

Either way, I will be heeding the card’s message and resting where I can, so if you’d like to keep up your Gnostic Pulp fix then go ahead and smash that Upgrade Subscription button and come on back behind the paywall where we are all soaking in rejuvenating waters.

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The beach is not a happy place. Joy Williams understands this.

Her third novel, Breaking & Entering, takes place primarily in the Florida Keys, as well as some towns along the Gulf Coast. We follow young married couple, Willie and Liberty, as they break into the empty vacation homes strewn through this part of the world. While it is not made explicit, such empty decadence is what makes the vacuousness of the world in the novel so palpable. That people are allowed a gratuity so ridiculous as owning empty vacation homes in the Florida Keys is exactly what makes the world Willie and Liberty are traversing feel so empty and unreal.

The song I have chosen for this week’s [Exit Music], November Rain by Mount Eerie, is especially relevant and it might be worth transcribing its lyrics here because they really cut to the bone of the novel:

“I can see the lights of the unoccupied second homes
that they keep lit up for no reason
reflecting on the barely moving water
on an inland sea where people park their money

I live year-round in a vacation place
I love the winter wind in my face
harrowing beneath trees this big and groaning
no echo loud enough above the blowing

All these absentee owners miss
the huge embrace, the pressing kiss
of this specific November rain in the long darkness
but that’s OK. I’ll drink all the rain while I trespass

They keep the outside light on though
I guess to let everyone else know
keep away, this patch of night sky I also claim as mine
but don’t they realize all our stolen wealth
is built on screaming bones?

In their lights that dot the hillside
I see blinking eyes”

Willie and Liberty are not thieves. They are not out to steal back all those screaming bones. No, there is something creepier going on. A creepiness imbued in them from living in such a creepy society as one whose citizens want to claim a patch of night sky for themselves. It is something like “the thrill of wearing another man’s skin,” to quote Dennis Reynolds. Willie is into it. This thing they do. He likes to leave a pile of his hair in the center of the living room for the homeowners to find upon their return. Willie is what one might call a walking red flag, but fear not. Willie can go on his own way, for here we will be following Williams’ lead and taking for our focus Liberty and her dog, Clem, a white Alsatian who she found in a mailbox as a puppy. The dog has an arresting effect on people, much as the book seems to, and by this I do not only mean its contents, but its presentation.

I manage a failing coffee shop. It is kept alive by college students, but in the doldrums between semesters business reduces to a trickle. By midday, the rest of my team has long asked if they can dip. I stay behind to go down with the ship, manning the cafe alone through those empty afternoon hours for which the owner insists we need to stay open. During this time, I get a lot of reading done. I sit on my throne of milk crates behind the register with a book, putting it down every half hour or so when a customer walks in. Rarely is this commented upon, but with this book in particular almost everyone who caught a flash of the cover asked about it.

Despite the fact that I operate this here blog in which I write at great length about what I have been reading, I have never exactly excelled at answering the on-the-spot inquiry: “What’s that book about?”

“Oh, a couple in Florida who breaks into vacation homes,” I might say, adding rather vaguely, “it’s very strange and dreamy.”

All and all, a pretty poor description of one of my favorite novels, but almost without fail the inquirer appeared smitten. Several declared they’d be ordering themselves a copy, in which I encouraged them, even while doubting it was anything I said that had convinced them to do so.

No, it must have been the cover, and that’s not just me saying it.

begins his review with a discussion of the cover as well:

“Let’s start with the cover. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to but: the cover. Book’s been out for 35 years and Joy Williams’ reputation has only grown and no one’s touched it. Why mess with perfection? The best Vintage Contemporaries cover in a crowded field of contenders. . . Microcosm of the entire book on there: woman, dog, beach, seagull, a general air of uneasiness. (Special shoutout to cover artist Rick Lovell: you didn’t have to go this hard. The repeating diagonal lines on the left side of the shadow on the door, Liberty’s swimsuit, and Clem’s ear?) It helped me connect with my wife-to-be. . . I hope after death that I open my eyes to this exact image, first thing, and then God (the dog, naturally) beckons me into the beach house of the afterlife.”

Whether or not Clem is God (certainly not ruling it out)1, he definitely has the same sort of magical effect on the characters within the novel as the cover does on those of us outside of it. On more than one occasion, Liberty is asked if she is willing to give him away, as well as whether or not he says his prayers, and the much more typical does he knows any tricks (he does not). She is told he is the color of the inside of Rothko’s forearm, that he displaces space so effortlessly, that he was recently seen in the remote jungle, that he and her elicit confessions— and that is how they should be taken, he and her, an irreducible pair, much like the two characters in La Force, or Strength2, the eighth or eleventh Major Arcanum of the Tarot depending on the deck in question.

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La Force

Rider-Waite-Smith (and its endless variants) is the most popular deck today. Unless you have a more intimate relationship with Tarot, its images are probably the ones you are most familiar with, but the Marseille deck came first and placed La Force in the eleventh spot of the Major Arcana. Waite moved it to number eight, swapping it with Justice, “for reasons which satisfy myself”. Aleister Crowley kept the original placement for his Thoth deck, but assigned the Hebrew letters that would come with switching the cards, giving the arcanum a Schrödingerian vibe, a liminal bothness, like a wave-particle.

In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes that the change is connected to the secret deck of the Golden Dawn and that “the connection to a secret order suggests the idea of initiation.” As we have discussed before, liminality plays a central role in initiation rituals as the neophyte must be stripped of their previous identity before they can be elevated to their new role. In this sense, Strength is something of a cocoon card, which works out because Liberty is something of a pupa.

Interpretations of Strength vary, but what is clear is that there are two forces at play: woman and beast. That it is a woman portrayed rather than a man suggests this interaction is not one to be won through brute strength, but rather through a redirection of energy, as in martial arts. Woman and beast represent some form of higher and lower, interpretations offer a smorgasbord of specifics— mind and body, heaven and earth, ego and id, love and passion— but most agree that it is not a matter of the higher conquering the lower, which can only lead at best to a stalemate, if not outright repression. Rather, it is the need for the energies to become aligned, for the two to be centrifuged into one, creating a unity that can go further than either alone:

“Strength allows the inner passions to emerge, as the first step in going beyond the ego.”3

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Marseille purist. As such, he identifies La Force as the first card in the second decimal series (11-20), giving it a special connection to the final card in the series, Judgement. He also points out that it is the only card in the (Marseille) deck to have its name aligned in the left margin, making room for the twenty lines on the right, which give the impression of the title being spring-loaded and ready for launch. Indeed, Strength does represent incredible potential energy, much like a compressed spring:

“Strength holds in potential everything that Judgement will realize, which is to say the emergence of the new consciousness.”

So Liberty is in the cocoon awaiting the emergence of a new consciousness. She is at odds against herself, locked in some silent struggle of which she herself appears only half aware, but it causes her to flit through life, occupying vacant homes much like a ghost. The book’s dialogue reflects this. The majority of which, especially in the first half, takes place between Willie and various strangers as Liberty simply looks on. One even says to Willie, “Your wife looks sad.”

To which he responds, “She’s just one of those wives.”

Willie believes he has Liberty all figured out. He even tells her at one point that he could write her diary. While it is true that Liberty struggles to affect things according to her will, constantly being talked over not only by Willie, but her mother and their friend Charlie who is supposedly in love with her, she is not totally without agency. In each town they go to, Liberty takes it upon herself to care for injured animals and neglected children. In the particular town in which the present day of the novel takes place, it is Teddy and Little Dot who she adopts, and it is through these relationships we learn something of how she got to her current state.

Liberty wasn’t always this way. By all accounts, she was a happy child filled with vitality, but her parents abandoned her when she was still quite young and Willie’s family took her in. While living with them, she became pregnant. When she told Willie, his response was to gather all the pills he could find and have a pharmaceutical picnic.

The overdose does not go according to plan in that they both survive. The baby, however, does not. Liberty wakes up to find herself in a psychiatric hospital where she is held for some time. She is told that she will never again be able to bear children, and then she is unceremoniously released. Or part of her is. The rest remains as if severed, or disappeared.

Only Willie is waiting for her on the other side. He informs her they are not welcome back home, and so begins their life of drifting. They have undergone the first stage in Victor Turner’s three stages of an initiation or rite of passage: Separation, in which “the ritual subject is detached from their previous, fixed position in the social structure.”

Or as Jodorowsky writes of the woman on the card,

“she is not situated in either time or space.”

It is as if Clem is the only thing that keeps Liberty tethered to the earthly realm. One might even say he becomes her body, or at least fills in for her body, keeping her place reserved while waiting for her to return, like any good boy would.

Strength

Simone Weil writes about another kind of force in her famous essay, The Iliad or The Poem of Force. For Weil, force is something like destiny:

“it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns a man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.”

While Weil is writing primarily about war, Liberty’s suicide attempt might have revealed the same possibility of death that lies locked up in every moment. This clarity of vision strings up the mind, and castrates the soul. One cannot live in such a way. They become locked up, given over to their fate, drained of vitality. Breaking out of this petrifactive constraint requires a rare strength, but “only he who has measured the dominion of force and knows how not to respect it is capable of love and justice.”

This frozen state in which one is given over to force maps quite nicely onto Turner’s second stage, Liminality. Sometimes called the ‘threshold or ‘betwixt and between’, this phase is the central stage of an initiation in which the subject passes through a realm with few of the attributes of the past or coming state. During this ambiguous, transitional period, the standard social structure is temporarily suspended. One leaves structure and enters anti-structure.

While traditional rites of passage follow a pattern that eventually liberate the neophytes from this phase, no such rite is in place for Liberty. In a sense she is trapped in limbo and has been for years. Since it was Willie’s doing that got her stuck in the first place, it is only his disappearance that finally allows her to start the journey towards the final stage, Reaggregation.

About a quarter of the way through the novel, Willie gets up from breakfast and walks out of the diner, never to return, leaving Liberty to spend time in communitas4 with her fellow neophytes. This includes Teddy, one of the children in her care. He has been forced into any number of extracurricular activities by his father’s girlfriend, anything to keep him out of the house. His current enrollment is a sex-education course for which he is assigned to carry around an egg for a week. An egg! What could represent the liminal phase better than that?

Then there is Charlie, Willie and Liberty’s friend, a very successful real estate agent, and an alcoholic who is beginning to feel trapped in the liminal stage of a years-long drunk:

“Where am I calling from? I am calling from home, specifically from Room 303 of the Paradise Hotel on the corner of Coconut and Main. Every time I wake up in this room, I think I’m a case of mistaken identity. Do you see Room 303? The linoleum floor painted red, the single window scraped by palm fronds, the hostile eye of the TV, the ant cakes in the corner, the bureau, the bed, the bottle, me?”

He has pegged all hope of escape on Liberty to whom he repeatedly confesses his love. He has big plans. He is going to stop drinking, they are going to run away together, they will take Teddy, too, but he wants to rename him Reverdy, a French name derived from reverdier, meaning to flourish anew. Which is what they will all do in this dream of his. While on the phone with Liberty, he declares that he will have one last drink and then their new life will begin. This declaration is immediately followed by the sound of breaking glass and a cry, and finally a click as Charlie drops his final drink.

༄༄༄

Though Willie does not return, he does eventually call. The telephone plays a big role in this book: disembodied communication. It seems Liberty is not the only one whose mind/soul has been severed from her body. Williams paints for us a very heady Florida indeed, and maybe one in which are all indicted: a world trapped within the frozen momentum of what has been built around it, possible actors becoming passive neophytes, all of us allowing “intolerable sufferings [to] continue. . . by the force of their own specific gravity.”

Willie asks Liberty to come find him, giving truly psychotic directions:

“Come to me tomorrow. . . Walk to the end of Buttonwood Beach. Go down around six in the morning. That’s when the Gulf is going to be pouring back through the Pass. Jump in, and it will sweep you about a quarter mile down Long Key to a yellow house. I’ll meet you there.”

Despite the distance, Liberty remains under his spell. As Weil writes, once someone has given themselves over to force they will act without sense of self-preservation. Ditto for the neophyte in the midst of a rite of passage or initiation ritual. They have placed their trust in the process. Likewise, Liberty follows Willie’s instructions. She submits herself to the ocean, with Clem following loyally behind. And they are actually delivered, as Willie promised, to a yellow house on Long Key.

Here, Liberty meets a quite literal embodiment of Strength.

Meet Poe, the seventy-five year old body builder who is peaking for her birthday. A truly iconic Williams character. So much of her fiction features drifters encountering the numberless weirdos populating this land, but this scene might be the epitome of that variation:

“Willie came into the room, followed by the old woman. She was tanned and balding. She was oiled up, her hair was short, gray, and grew in tufts. She squatted down and looked upward at them as though to view them better, gazing at them as though they were forlorn, barely sentient creatures in a hutch. Thick, crisscrossing bands of muscle moved in her legs. Her face was gaunt and cruelly scarred, and her breasts were as high and round as a girl’s.”

Poe’s own husband spent his life trapped in the mechanics of force. He actually did enter it through war, as Weil writes about. During World War II, his ship was sunk and he spent days floating in the ocean, watching his comrades lose their minds and die one by one.

During this time, Jesus appeared to him.

“He maintained that he was fat, had green eyes and bitten nails and that he was dancing. He danced with my husband. My husband said that he had never known such happiness.”

Her husband never came back from that experience, making Poe an expert in dealing with those trapped within the Liminal. If the Tarot represents a cyclical journey, with each repetition occurring higher up an ascending spiral, then Poe might be a manifestation of Strength from The Next Level. If so, she has surely descended in order to assist Liberty in her own journey, for it is only after meeting her that Liberty admits “she had disappeared long ago, she knew, and so had Willie. But it was time to come back or to vanish.”

While the whole book has a rather dreamy atmosphere, everything that occurs after Poe’s appearance takes on an even more otherworldly feel, as if she really has set things back in motion after a long static period. After eliciting the story of their relationship, Poe offers Liberty and Willie the house, asking them, in return, to kill her, so that she can go out at her peak. This request is shocking enough to make Liberty recoil. Willie, on the other hand, seems more than willing. Perhaps Poe foresaw this split, perhaps not. Either way, it is what finally breaks Liberty free. She exits the house in horror, Clem following behind her, and Poe shouting at her back “You are saved, you are saved.”

Reverdier

Some have speculated that the book post-Poe is occurring in the afterlife. While it does grow increasingly strange, I think it might more fittingly be placed in the archetypal space of the Tarot, or the phase shift of an initiation ritual. The last section marks the culmination of Liberty’s long liminality.

“Willie had gone and entered someone’s life now. He had entered someone’s life because he couldn’t find his own anymore. He would have lived in [Liberty’s] life, she realized, had she not lost hers as well. He had to live somewhere. They had lost their lives beneath the damaged trees years ago. She could still see the dappled light of that morning. It was the way she had seen everything since, stained and scattered.”

But as she emerges from the ocean and back onto dry land, it is like the beginning of the emergence of her new consciousness. Everything old falls away. Willie is gone, left behind with Poe. When she returns home, her mother calls and severs whatever remaining ties, saying she has been reunited with an earlier abandoned child and must focus her energy on her. Then she learns that Teddy’s father has lost it and is giving everything away. He wants to give Teddy to Liberty. Fearing for the child’s safety, Liberty takes action.

Instead of Teddy, she finds Charlie. He is tapering off his chronic drunk with beer at a chaotic party at a bar called The Gator. Through some drunken misunderstandings, he winds up gut stabbed in the parking lot after confronting Teddy’s dad for peeing on his Caddy. They had been about to go looking for Teddy, but instead they must start towards the hospital. Charlie, however, is losing a lot of blood, and isn’t exactly thinking straight. He drives them into a car wash, wanting to get the piss off his car.

In the mayhem, Liberty realizes Clem is not in the car, but it is not because they have been separated. “Dog’s a dream,” as Charlie says. He’d been reserving her a place amongst the living, and now that she is finally willing to reclaim it they have integrated. Liberty’s higher and lower energies align and it is as if she has come back to life. Good boy, indeed.

Despite Charlie potentially bleeding out in the passenger seat, the final image is a beautiful representation of Liberty’s emergence back into the world, as symbolized by her literally taking the wheel as the car she is maneuvering is released from the conveyor track of the car wash it had been passing through, and returns to the freedom of the open road.

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[Exit Music]

The product of their weaving flows out of slit windows in the tower in a great flood that covers the earth with a layer we might name the psychostrata.

“In the central painting of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre,’ were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

The World—there you have it, folks. I needed some sort of magical eye to break open this book, and Pynchon slipped it in right under our noses, like a muted trumpet painted upon a bathroom stall. The World. Just like that, I knew exactly the text to consult. I broke out my copy of the anonymously penned Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism and got to reading the final chapter. And would you believe it? I found exactly what I needed. I swear to God, anytime I get a hunch about consulting that damn text, it becomes a synchronicity machine.

Despite the painting’s rather dour atmosphere, it agrees perfectly with anon’s entry on the arcanum known as The World.

“The world is a work of art.”

Here we should clarify that The World is something different from Earth. Earth is a planet, a vast and complex system of systems, a miraculous hunk of rock in outer space. The World is that top layer, the psychostrata. It is more like what we have previously referred to as a lifeworld: a cosmology, humanity’s way of creating meaning by situating themselves both in the cyclical cosmic order (The Sacred) and in the day-to-day life down here in the flow of history (the profane); it is the artwork made from the medium of human society, and, traditionally, it has been created by those who live in it. Perhaps exuded would be a better word because it is not entirely a conscious creation, but simply something humans do. It is not built like a house and then lived in. Its upkeep is the stuff of life, a living, breathing creation that responds to changes in the environment in order to sustain a certain homeostasis; it is an on-going process, a collective emission.

As we explored in a recent post, something has hijacked the production centers of the psychostrata called modernity. We most recently named it the Imperial Germ. Whatever its name, we can see it personified here in the masked figures in Varo’s tower. They have taken over the on-going process of creation, broken contact with the Sacred, and taken production fully into their own hands.

Without the Sacred, the profane is not really the profane. If one is done away with, the other goes with it, leaving behind only a vacuous liminality in which the active participant is replaced by the passive neophyte. Events continue to happen and new things appear, but there is no consideration for where they might have come from, who might have put them there, or what ideological implications their origins might imply. Rather than being couched in history, catastrophe seems simply to materialize, as if out of the clear blue sky on a Tuesday morning. One is encouraged to ignore the past and instead exist “as if suspended in an aqueous solution,” to quote Joan Didion.

Meaning is made through interaction between persons, human or otherwise, but profit can only be extracted from that which has been made object, and profit extraction is the prime directive of the archons in the tower. As long as the vertical strike of the dollar sign serves as modernity’s axis mundi, we are doomed to this sickening liminality, this false world: the Black Iron Prison.

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The Dancer

Such is the situation Oedipa Maas, heroine of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, finds herself in at the start of the novel. She is a content-enough housewife in the dying days of the long fifties. Like her fellow countrymen, she has accepted the ultimate liminality of her world, if not by choice then by circumstance. Settled into a lackluster marriage, she scrounges for kicks by getting drunk at Tupperware parties, tending her herb garden, and grazing the grocery stores of Californian suburbs to the tranquil melodies of muzak.

As would happen for so many in the sixties, this hazy bubble pops, and quite violently. For Oedipa, it is pierced by news of the death of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. It is not so much that she is taken over by grief, but that she is named the executrix of his rather sizable and endlessly convoluted estate. Untangling the mess he has left behind will require Oedipa to apply parts of herself that have long gone dormant. It is the classic call to adventure. While she never outright refuses it, she does drag her feet a bit, looking around bleary-eyed and hitting snooze a couple times. Eventually, and without too much effort, her lawyer prompts her into accepting the task:

“‘Hey,’ said Oedipa, ‘can’t I get somebody to do it for me?”

‘Me,’ said Roseman, ‘some of it, sure. But aren’t you even interested?’

‘In what?’

‘In what you might find out.’”

In accepting the quest, Oedipa steps out of her passive role to embody the central figure on The World card. Here we will take anon’s lead and examine the Marseille edition which features a naked woman dancing within a garland, a wand in one hand, which Alejandro Jodorowsky identifies as a symbol of the active principle, and a philtre1 in the other, which Jodorowsky identifies as a symbol of the passive principle. In the four corners of the card are her animal companions: a lion, an eagle, an angel, and, I am told, a bull.

For the author of Meditations, the Tarot is not a mere complex of symbols for divining the future, but an “invaluable school of meditation, study, and spiritual effort.” Each of the arcana offer a lesson and a practice to embody. The World is the arcanum of analysis and synthesis. It teaches the art of distinguishing the illusory from the real, making it a sorting machine, much like Maxwell’s Demon, and quite an astute summary of Oedipa’s task.

As the novel unfolds, Oedipa becomes increasingly entangled in the intricacies of Inverarity’s estate. As she continues to pull at the mysterious threads tangled within, she quickly finds herself enmeshed in the secrets of a centuries-old private mailing firm called Tristero whose shadowy presence haunts the entire novel. She becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of their identity. This obsession puts her in real danger of losing herself in the twisting halls of what you might call Chapel Perilous, “a psychological and spiritual state, often described as a liminal space between reality and delusion, where an individual confronts profound, reality-challenging experiences.”

Though she shows some vague and innate ability for sorting with Maxwell’s Demon, the field Oedipa is traversing becomes increasingly fraught. Any lead she follows threatens to swallow her whole, a dangerous situation when almost everything she encounters presents itself as a possible lead. Indeed, this is an aspect of art that we have turned to our advantage here at Gnostic Pulp. As with dreams, each detail therein can be tapped for that ever-ambiguous substance called meaning, but this meaning can never be exhaustively extracted. Dangerous enough when contained in an artwork, this becomes an existential danger when speaking of an aesthetic universe, that is, of a World that is art.

This idea is a touchstone in Pynchon’s fiction. He never tires of reminding us that is exactly the kind of world we live in. Nothing appears accidentally. Each object, every lowly artifact, from a used car to a lightbulb, has a history as vast and complex as our own. Oedipa’s husband, Mucho Maas, knows this. In fact, he is almost disablingly haunted by the fact that we are embedded in history, that material has memory, as is so beautifully illustrated in a scene in which a bottle of dandelion wine goes through a fermentation at the same time wild dandelions are blooming in the field, “as if they remembered.”

For Mucho, the weight of history is so crushing that it prevents him from holding down a job as a used car salesmen. The psychic and physical sediment that has accumulated in each vehicle is too much for him. He cannot stand to be near them. Since the Sacred has been cut off, his World provides him with no tools for dealing with the onrush of all this meaning, so his innate sense for it totally overwhelms him. Beyond that, the archons in Varo’s tower would prefer he not be so aware of such things, and in fact later in the novel this defect is taken care of through LSD trials in a wink towards MKUltra and the in-flooding of drugs used to disrupt and destroy any political movements or ideas that might have proven dangerous or irksome to the Tower’s continued production of reality.

This artwork They are commissioning is not one that is meant to be seen, but rather to conceal and control. One might imagine these archons sending out their agents to actively wipe any fingerprints history might have left at the scene, so to speak.

As Oedipa begins to dig into her assignment, Pierce Inverarity appears to be aligned with Them. He was a California land developer, after all, not exactly a sympathetic character. He had substantial holdings in San Narcisco, a city of which he is considered a founding father. There are several sections in the book referring to the natural landscape being stripped to a blank slate in order to be subdivided and suburbanized for his various developments, a step necessary in destroying the Sacred, as described by Mircea Eliade, who is invoked in this text by Pynchon’s multiple uses of the word hierophany, “the manifestation or eruption of the sacred into the ordinary, ‘profane’ physical world”, a word coined by Eliade.

Looking at Varo’s painting, it is hard not to see Inverarity in the window, peering down from his tower as bulldozers clear the land much like the freshly woven tapestry pours over and replaces the natural landscape. However, in the book’s most famous passage, Oedipa sees his project, San Narcisco, not as a town, but as a printed circuit. As something that can be mass produced. If that is the case, then perhaps Pierce is less archon than he is one of the weaving girls. He may be a founding father, but the founding father of a single instance of something that is practically plucked off the factory line. Each identical suburb can be said to have its own founding father, so zoom out a little and Pierce is a much smaller fish than he first appears. He may be visible in the tower window, but he is not in charge. He represents the ruling class of yore, the landed gentry coming up against the newly globalized cartels of control and capital coming out of World War II that are so thoroughly explored in Gravity’s Rainbow.

While he is not in charge, Inverarity’s position in proximity to power does allow him some insight behind the scenes. It may be that he is encoding messages into the fabric he is feeding out of the slot in the tower, a secret code for Oedipa to find and climb, like Rapunzel’s prince, so that she might get a peek inside.

The late literary sleuth, Charles Hollander, hints as much in his work decoding Inverarity’s name:

“‘Inver’ means ‘mouth’ in Gaelic; thus Inverness is the town at the mouth of the Ness, the river that flows out of Loch Ness. And a ‘rarity’ is. . . a thing of ‘unusual or exceptional character, esp. in respect of excellence.’”

While Hollander concludes that this means we can take the name to indicate that Pierce is a “smart-mouthed prick”, he glosses over his more important insight; if we return to the river mouth idea, then we see that Inverarity is the source, or mouth, for everything that flows out of this intrusion into Oedipa’s life. Furthermore, ‘rarity’ might indicate a rare river event, especially when placed so close to the word ‘pierce’, as if a dam has been pierced. Taking all this together, this gumshoe, at least, cannot help but think of a flood, and a rare one at that, maybe of the 1000 year variety, the kind that rearranges the world in its aftermath, maybe something. . . diluvian.

Is Pierce embedding clues in the fabric of reality in order to communicate to Oedipa that there is some force trying to remake the world to its liking? And should we, as readers, extrapolate some real world proxies? Pierce Inverarity, by all appearances, was a man in charge, but his death changes the way Oedipa sees her world. In looking into it, she reveals shadowy forces controlling the exchange of information who are secretly shaping things in the dark. Written in the mid-sixties, what other analogue could this be but JFK and the CIA?

At the same time, there is the possibility that Inverarity is just messing with her, that he really is just a smart-mouthed prick. He is certainly not above it. The last interaction Oedipa had with him, about a year before he died, was a 3AM prank call, so the whole trail of breadcrumbs he has left might be yet another, far more elaborate bit of trickery. Trickster reigns in liminal zones, after all.

Know who else is liable to follow breadcrumbs? Geese2.

Oedipa fears everything she goes through over the course of the book might well be a wild goose chase, and these two options are again corroborated by Meditations on the Tarot. Here, the anonymous author writes that the Arcana

“has its two aspects—a teaching aspect and a warning aspect. . . [The World’s] second, hidden name [is] ‘Folly’” (629).

Although it feels timeless, Meditations was actually written around the same time as Lot 49, and it senses the same ephemeral liminality as Pynchon. Making contact with anything real requires an act of sorting the shit from the clay. Anon visualizes this as The Sphere of the Holy Spirit and the sphere of mirages.

“But it does not at all suffice to distinguish the truth within this reality, i.e. to distinguish the action of the sphere of the Holy Spirit from the sphere of mirages. For the sphere of mirages, also, is real—but reality is one thing and truth is another thing. A mirage is certainly real, but it is not true; it is deceiving” (646).

While the World Varo’s tower produces is false in some sense of the word, it is very real in that a billion people live within its deception. While we here at Gnostic Pulp have some disagreements with the anonymous author over what might be categorized as a True World—he lists both gnosticism and Marxism in the mirage category— we can agree that a successful sorting must come through a pure longing for the truth. As he points out, chasing the ecstasy of revealing the truth will only lead you further into Chapel Perilous, as happens to any number of conspiracy-pilled people, and as is the looming threat for Oedipa Maas.

Their World

“Properly speaking, there is no longer any world,” Mircea Eliade writes in The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.

“There are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.”

Published less than a decade before Lot 49, Eliade is circling in the same waters as Pynchon and anon. While he contends modernity has done away with the Sacred and exists only in the profane, and I have claimed we are stuck in a liminality outside both the Sacred and the profane, we can agree on many other points, primarily that the World does not exist, or, if it does, it is not a true World in that it is not emitted from its inhabitants, but is applied from above, by the archons in Varo’s Tower.

That it is a tower is vital as it serves the necessary role of axis mundi, or universal pillar, which all Worlds, even false ones, require. An axis mundi is a structure that “at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below. . . Such a cosmic pillar can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable world extends around it” (Eliade 36-37).

That modernity’s tower has been hijacked by archons, by the capitalistic cabal, by Pynchon’s They, has repercussions for the rest of the lifeworld. Its center, the place from which it all flows, has been taken over and now produces a false fabric, not only without but within.

Quoting Joséphin Péladan, the anonymous author of Meditations writes that the deepest creation occurs not in anything material, but “in the abstract.”

“Neither Dante, nor Shakespeare, nor Goethe carried out evocations, and all three understood the occult; they were wisely content to create eternal images; and in this they were incomparable mages. To create in the abstract, to create in the souls of men, vivifying reflections of the mystery—this is the great work” (628).

This is the lesson the archons have taken to heart and the true strength guaranteeing the tower’s existence. It is something Pynchon explores in all of his work, the nefarious implanted systems of control, the replicated tower within. Eliade writes about how a world reproduces itself at every level, as above so below, the cosmic and the personal. The kingdom They have created is within you, as evidenced in-text by the pedophilic tendencies of a heavy percentage of the male characters, including Oedipa’s own husband, her co-executor who runs off with the teenaged girlfriend of one of the boys in the band, The Paranoids, spurring him, in turn, to pen this song:

“And the older generation
has taught me what to do—
I had a date last night with an eight year-old,
And she’s a swinger just like me”

It is an obsession with control, objectification, and profit extraction that is entwined in the very fabric of our false world. It shapes not only the economy, but the people living under its influence. In the fallout of Epstein, one can see quite clearly how deep and widespread is the rot.

SAGE

If we want an actual, physical axis mundi, some nexus point to trace this all back to, a hierophany where this false World intruded, we might look towards the obelisk of black lava rock that now stands at the Trinity Test Site.

The Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb is the wellspring of so much of modern technology; it accelerated advancements in computing, medicine, and materials science, so that its imprint is within nearly all consumer technology to this day. We have lived in the atomic bomb’s World since that first test on July 16, 1945, exactly as David Lynch shows us in the famous sequence in Twin Peaks: The Return. The first nuclear explosion created or at least cemented the intrusion into what once was our World, and it is out of this explosion that the false World has flowed.

One of the entities that rode that flow, alongside Judy and Bob and all the rest, was the internet. The first prototype for a SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Direction Center was up and running by 1955. Over the next decade, twenty-two more would come online, and I mean that quite literally as SAGE is the earliest ancestor of the internet we have today. That’s right, kids. Ol’ Grandpa Internet started as an air defense system, an interlinking of radar and launch sites that blanketed the United States, and could respond to threat from anywhere on the network in case central command had fallen:

“SAGE was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SAGE directed and controlled the NORAD response to a possible Soviet air attack, operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s.”

These stations were connected by dedicated cable that provided the first electronic messaging capabilities. Quite rudimentary by today’s standards, but bleeding edge at the time. Few would have known about it, but perhaps Pynchon’s time at Boeing got him hip to this electronic net that was ensnaring the nation. The whole underground W.A.S.T.E. messaging system could be a nod towards just that, or so sez Mike Judge.

So the internet began as a vast surveillance system with a kill switch that could initiate nuclear armageddon. Its cables tunneled underground and its radar cloaked the sky, mimicking the three-layered cosmic unity traditionally provided by an axis mundi, but rather than tying a People into The World and creating a holistic and meaningful worldview, this one exerted total surveillance and control, an all-seeing eye with a knife to the planet’s throat.

JFK threatened this new World’s prime reason for existence by seeking to destroy the CIA and cool tensions with the Soviet Union, and that could simply not be allowed. The archons acted, but in response awoke a counterforce.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Archon

One gets the feeling that in 1964, Black Iron Prison Inc. was riding a high. Who could blame them? The fifties had been going just swell; if only they could stamp out those pesky jazz cats, things would be perfect. They had just gotten away with killing the damn president. Surely no one could touch them. Besides, with the surveillance technologies coming down the pipeline, automation was already underway. They had been forced to hold things in place through their own strength for so long, but now the undergirding of a new system of control had begun to be put in place, one their forebears could scarcely imagine. This system could do the heavy work for Them.

So maybe they got a little lazy, or perhaps they underestimated the complete pacification of the citizenry just a bit. Either way, there was a brief lapse in their reign, and that is why it is so important that Pynchon set the book in 1964. It is the most contemporary book in his bibliography, one of the few times he has commented so directly on what was practically the present moment, and it has remained a breakpoint that he returns to throughout his career.

What gets called The Sixties for simplicity’s sake actually began in 1964. The start is popularly pegged to the debut of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and continues on until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. This is the famous decade that is so often invoked as an era of total revolution, of free love and the freeing of the human spirit, yaddy-yadda.

The Sixties™ have been repackaged and sold back to us for so long and in so many ways that the real thing is almost totally obscured behind its simulacra, but, however briefly, it seems there really was a true sense that everything was on the verge of change, that a window long-shut had been pried open if even just enough to get a sniff of the fresh air on the other side.

Oedipa gets a sense of that feeling over the course of her investigation. There are true counterforces taking shape, worlds within worlds. Those who, like herself, have seen the inside of the tower could not simply go back to their old way of life.

However, this open window would be slammed back down with extreme violence in what Michael S. Judge in his incredible reading of the book has named The American Reconquista. These are the years in which the archons in The Tower roll out their whole array of new weapons and technologies in response to the counter cultural threat. The Tower would be reinforced. Newer and more powerful technologies of surveillance and control would alloy the fabric pumped out by the imprisoned weavers.

What Oedipa sensed, what she was actually chasing, and what initially catches the nose of so many who wind up lost in Chapel Perilous, was not really a single conspiracy. Discovering the full history of Tristero would not provide the balm she longed for, nor would pinpointing Kennedy’s assassin, for it is the very falsity of her world that Oedipa has got the scent of; it is the obelisk studded in the desert, pouring out its fabric to cloak the earth. For those who peer inside, the vision is so dire that they will sound crazy when they try to deliver the message to the people back home. Simply glimpsing the truth is not enough to redeem the World.

What a World needs is some kind of Sacred connection, not a state religion, not even necessarily religion at all. The right approach to science could probably provide it. It is simply a connection that brings the human into contact with the cosmic, that gives meaning to life by consecrating the past and the future. Oedipa’s quest was never meant to save the World. If she manages to successfully sort the real and the false, which is a question that remains open at the end of the novel, she will still have to live within the same World as before. With her new knowledge, this is in some ways a worse situation than she was in to start with. She will have returned to the beginning, but at a higher level, climbing the cyclical spiral journey of the Tarot, ready to perform as a more able Magician for her next go round.

As Alejandro Jodorowsky writes of the arcanum, it represents the anima mundi, a sort of individual rather than societal connection with the Real. The Dancer, “freed from self-destruction. . . begin[s] to glimpse the suffering of the Other and put[s] [them]selves at the service of humanity.”

The World must be redeemed not in the Sacred realm of Tarot archetypes, but down here in the profane, in the flow of history, by us. Realizing our situation is only the first step towards what Oedipa’s friend, Jesús Arrabal, calls ‘an anarchist miracle’. Here we might take ‘anarchist’ in the sense that it is not a World prescribed from above, but one built from its base, and with no ulterior motive, but simply as shelter from the storm for all those who dwell within, human and otherwise.

A miracle, indeed:

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, we anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet. . . if any of it should ever happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.”

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[Exit Music]

Just like that, I was committed to devoting an essay to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. No big deal, right? I was going to have to do something with it eventually if I wanted to finish covering Big P’s bibliography.

As it turns out, this little book is extremely popular and has been covered from just about every imaginable angle in the last sixty years. In trying to find some unmapped territory, I first had to do some reconnaissance into what had come before. This brought me into contact with a wide range of responses, some truly inspired, others a real chore to get through. This all culminated with a reading of Charles Hollander’s Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, an incredibly thorough analysis that situates the book as a secret coda for the JFK assassination.

At almost half the length of the novella itself, Magic Eye is a fascinating but exhausting analysis. Though I was often thrilled while reading it, upon completion I felt deflated. Hollander does try to shoehorn a “but it’s still art that stands on its own” kind of ending, but his theory is such a one-to-one mapping of X-actually-means-Y that it felt like watching someone skin a beloved pet while describing their anatomy, a feeling that reminded me of the final story in Joy Williams’ latest collection, Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child, in which the pelican child’s animal siblings burst into John James Audubon’s camp to find that

“the beautiful pelican child was pierced through with cruel rods and was arranged in a position of life, her great wings extended, her elegant neck arched. But her life had been taken away, and her eyes were fathomless and dark. A specimen, the cat screamed behind him. He has made of our sister a specimen!”

“But look at you!” my dear readers might well be crying. “You are a hypocrite! Are you not also an Audubon, stalking through the literary forest, trapping innocent books in your mental snare, and, gasp!, interpreting them? What are these preceding 47 posts if not just that?”

“No,” I say, quickly citing Sontag: “‘The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?’ That’s not what I do! I think with these works, not about them. If anything, I’m more like ‘Bro. . . What if X was, like, actually A? Wouldn’t that be kind of wild?’”

“Haven’t you heard? Sontag is cancelled. She won’t save you. She was a bully.”

“But-but-but,” I stammer. “I’m not an analyst. I’m not a critic. I’m an eclectic. Ask ! He vouched for me once. He gets it— There’s interpretation and there’s interpretation:

‘There’s a difference between a person who wants to show you something and a person who wants to prove something to you. The difference is that between ‘still open’ and ‘already closed.’”

“Aud-u-bon! Aud-u-bon!”

“No. Why are you calling me that? He was a great naturalist, a lover of nature!”

“Tell it to the birds!”

. . .

Ahem. Apologies. I seem to have been momentarily overcome by a touch of paranoia. Must have been brought on by all the research I have been doing for my next piece. Hazardous material, I tell yah. But I am getting all ahead of myself. This is only post #48. It’s the end of the month reading roundup, a treat usually reserved for paying customers only, but what the hell? Maybe I’ll give the rest of you a little taste this month. If you like what you see, drop a five in the jar and stick around for another month.

Oh, and I should probably point out that the pelican child in that Joy Williams story I mentioned? She is revived in the end by Baba Iaga’s magic. Yes, she flies about as beautiful and happy as ever, although she no longer speaks, but what is language compared to life?

After the dreadful incident with Audubon, Baba Iaga takes it upon herself to travel about with a lamp “that illuminated the things people did not know or were reluctant or refused to understand.” She would hold it over a person to reveal “how extraordinary were the birds and beasts of the world.”

Likewise, The Crying of Lot 49 was revived for me as soon as I put away the secondary material and returned to the book itself. The dead material, arranged by all the analysts’ careful hands into imitations of life, reclaimed its autonomy and began prancing about of its own volition, and I beheld it in a state of wonder, feeling inspired to proceed in my investigations in the spirit of Baba Iaga rather than that of the accursed John James Audubon. Behold my lamp!

As if blessing this intention, my Full Moon card this month was the Nine of Cups. Nicknamed by some “the Wish Card”, it is widely considered a good omen—quite the turn around from last month’s Tower!

For the uninitiated, the Nine of Cups (at least the Rider-Waite-Smith version) features a very content-looking man seated upon a wooden bench, an array of goblets arranged atop a curtained bar curved around him; all of this takes place against a rather startling yellow background. He is dressed in a black and white robe and looks to be wearing a red turban or a feathered hat, either way a real statement piece.

As with any card, this one represents a brief station in time, a moment in flux. The bench looks rather uncomfortable, the goblets will lose their shine, their contents might well lead to a hangover.

Have you experienced A Golden Moment? They come along from time to time, most often for me while in nature. Perhaps when reading a book in the backyard, going for a hike, or sitting beside the river. It is something with the sunshine, when it hits you just right, warm and full in the dying hours of the day, and suddenly it is as if you are transported to a place where everything is exceedingly beautiful and still, and it seems nothing outside of this moment can touch you.

These moments prove rare and seem to be inordinately short-lived. I used to agonize over the ephemeral nature of them. I wanted to somehow contain them, to be able to return to them at will, make of each a bead to string along a necklace I could finger throughout the day, but such desires will scatter the moment even faster.

The dude on the card’s got it right.

Just gotta sit with them while they last.

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Books Read

—The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (Charco Press, 2024; translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne)

Roque Larraquy has got to be my favorite discovery of the year. Unfortunately, I have now read the only two books of his that have been translated into English. I can only hope that someone gets around to translating Informe sobre ectoplasma animal (Report on Animal Ectoplasm) soon! I mean, what a title. The kind of title that makes a guy want to get back to his Spanish lessons. . .

Anyway, I tackled this one in my most recent post, so, if you missed it, check it out here, or, even better, go out and get yerself a copy!

—The Veldt Institute by Samuel M. Moss (11:11 Books, 2025)

I first became aware of Samuel Moss through his online press, ergot.: “a literary website interested in furthering the innovative and experimental tradition in horror.”

I had a story published there a while back, and it remains probably my best publishing experience. Most online journals will put your story out, maybe post about it on social media one time, and then you never hear from them again, but Sam maintains a very active Discord for contributors. It is quite humbling to be in there with some of the revered names that have appeared in ergot., and is a great resource for discovering not only other writers, but opportunities, as well as interesting discussion.

Needless to say, when his novel dropped last year I was happy to buy a copy.

11:11 did an incredible job. This might be the best-looking book-as-object from a press of that size on my bookshelf, and the content within lives up to its packaging.

If you have read Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, imagine the brilliant, wandering atmosphere of the first two-thirds without the somewhat tacky ending, and you’re beginning to enter into the realm of The Veldt Institute.

If dread is the undercurrent of horror, there ought to be a genre in which awe plays that role. Not a fawning awe, but awe in its true sense. A dumbstruck and decentering awe. An awe that rewires those who come in contact with it. That is the effect the veldt, a seemingly endless grassland, has on the narrator who is attending the strange institute at its center, if an endless plane can be said to have such a thing.

One of those writers whose presence in the Discord is humbling, , interviewed Moss on her Substack where he gave his elevator pitch as:

“The most compact, if not most accurate, description we’ve landed on is, ‘If the Institute from Thomas Mann’s ‘Magic Mountain’ was run by Gerald Murnane and located in the Zone from STALKER.’”

If that doesn’t sell it for you, well then I don’t know what you are doing here.

—The Earthen Dark by Brad Kelly (RarePoverty, 2025)

This one is another book by a friendly internet acquaintance. invited me on his podcast earlier this year. Speaking of horror, podcasting is a terrifying experience for one such as myself who seems to have only the most rudimentary connections running between my brain and my mouth, but Kelly was a gracious host and I had a good time, but reading his book was an even better time, as concurs in a recent review.

I won’t lie. I got a little worried when I saw the tagline “blue collar cosmic horror” because I am working on putting out a print version of my own novel, “The Warehouse”, which might be described in a similar way, but there is a whole corporate horror genre, so bring on the workplace horror for those of us who have never done a day of “respectable work” in our lives!

In The Earthen Dark, we follow the cancelled anthropology professor, Jim, down into his new job in the sewers of Detroit, but, once that manhole cover eclipses the sun, we are truly in the underworld. It is all Jim wants to return home to his wife and child, but each time he emerges from down under it is into another variation of hell. Like Mulholland Drive’s Man Behind Winkie’s, there is someone, or something, that’s doing it, but I, for once, won’t be spoiling that here.

One of my favorite parts of the book were the snippets from Jim’s writing that are included before every chapter. Each has to do with the underworld in some way, and though many seem more fantastical than the cosmic entity in the sewers—make room Pennywise!—they are taken from our own reality, and they will each send you down rabbit holes1 of their own. My personal favorite was about Seymour Cray, the father of the supercomputer and hobbyist tunneler who claims that elves appeared while he was digging and it was them who told him how to construct his computer.

Perhaps it makes sense that elementals would want to promote supercomputing considering the role rare earth metals play. If AGI was ever actually on the table, then these aelfs would be assisting in ensouling the mineral kingdom. . . Wait a second. Is that what Gene Wolfe was actually on about in The Wizard Knight?

I might need to rewrite an essay here.

—The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (Harper, 1966)

This was my, I think, fourth time to read Lot 49. While there are sections of it that really sing, I won’t lie. I really do dread the middle section with the play. It bogs me down worse than the densest tangles of Gravity’s Rainbow. I know it is thematically appropriate and, according to Hollander, is key to providing the coda for the Kennedy assassination, but I am always glad to have that section behind me.

And I hate to tell you, Mr. Hollander, but, as it turns out, it does not seem to matter “whodunit”. We are, as they say, in a post-truth era. Quaint mysteries such who shot the president and why? are now a choose-your-own-adventure game. Slot in whatever scapegoat you want. The CIA? Great. The fact that the CIA is a world-historic evil that has unleashed hell on every continent has become a meme. Everyone knows what they have done and it does not matter.

If that is true, then what remains of the book? Does the pelican child fly or is it an antique specimen collecting dust in the corner?

Something I have been noticing in re-reading Pynchon as of late is what happens to his prose when the pov character is in a car on the highway. Oedipa coming into San Narciso is such an incredible bit of writing, as is the scene in which she gets caught in traffic leaving San Fransisco. It is echoed many decades later with Doc lost in the fog at the end of Inherent Vice, and again in a brief passage in Bleeding Edge when Maxine is driving out of the city and the buildings are said to be standing sentinel, as if they somehow know what’s coming. All of which makes perfect sense. Pynchon is the premier author of America. What is one thing that is even more American than schizoposting about JFK?

Sitting in traffic on the highway.

Books Sampled

—Walling, Boundaries, and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations edited by Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Benţa, and Joan Davison (Routledge, 2019)

Absolutely fascinating anthology of anthropological essays pertaining to the practice of walling. I will most certainly be returning to read the remaining essays soon, but had to put it down to attend to some more immediately pressing projects.

I just so happened to luck upon a copy at the flagship Half Price Books during a recent visit to Dallas and was able to nab it for ten bucks. It was my introduction to the Contemporary Liminality Series of which it is a part. Unfortunately for me, these are academic books, and likewise priced, but I may need them nonetheless.

Victor Turner’s groundbreaking work with liminality is what got me back into anthropology years after graduation and these books cover other Gnostic Pulp Bingo Card topics, including Trickster, Gnostic Fools, Alchemy, and so much more.

—Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić (Vintage, 1989; Translated from the Serbian by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric)

I kind of bounced off this one after fifty or so pages despite being intrigued by the concept. Feel like if I had discovered it during my early-20s Calvino obsessive era, it might have clicked for me, but alas. . . Not today.

On-Going

—The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade (HarperOne, 1968)

The dude was a total monster, but he’s got some interesting stuff to say about religion. I have had a couple of his books on my shelf for a long time, but had never gotten around to them. I was feeling in need of some nonfiction after knocking out so many novels this month, and Eliade was referenced quite a bit in Walling, Boundaries, and Liminality, which I took as a sign, and am glad I did.

—Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Spectra-Banta, 1992)

Here we gooo!

I have been looking forward to this one for a long time.

This will be my third KSR, having previously read The Ministry for the Future and The Years of Rice and Salt, both of which I quite enjoyed. I hear the Mars Trilogy is supposed to be sweeping in scope, as were Ministry and Rice and Salt, and that is something Robinson excels at. He has a wonderful ability to zoom in and out of a story with real grace, not to mention a genuine belief in the future, which I am hoping will provide a nice booster shot for myself in these rather anti-future times.

. . .

If you enjoyed this more free-wheeling brand of post, consider upgrading your subscription and you will get one every month! And a big thank you to all of y’all who do support Gnostic Pulp financially. I put probably too much time and effort into this project, so your support truly does mean a lot to me. Thank you.

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[Exit Music]

For a typical post, I try to choose a song that is thematically relevant in hopes that it will tie everything together, but these monthly roundups don’t usually have much in the way of a tight theme, so I just use it as an excuse to include a song I’ve been digging that month.

This one is my favorite from ’s new album:

As a student, I focused primarily on physical anthropology. I wanted to be Biruté Galdikas and study orangutans in the field while promoting the conservation of their home.2 As a laborer, I took what work I could get. Like I said above, that amounted to a handful of gigs doing archaeological grunt work. And now, ten years into the self-led portion of my education, my interests have turned to cultural anthropology. It’s, perhaps, the most anthropology proper quadrant of anthropology, but I had little interest in it in school. These days, I can’t get enough, and I’ve got a growing binder of printed pdfs to prove it. I have become fascinated by this attempt to get an approximation of another world view, to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Robert Redfield:

“‘World view’ differs from culture, ethos, mode of thought, and national character. It is the picture the members of a society have of the properties and characters upon their stage of action. While ‘national character’ refers to the way these people look to the outsider looking in on them, ‘world view’ refers to the way the world looks to that people looking out. Of all that is connoted by ‘culture’, ‘world view’ attends especially to the way man, in a particular society, sees himself in relation to all else. It is the properties of existence as distinguished from and related to the self. It is, in short, a man’s idea of the universe. It is that organization of ideas which answers to a man the questions: Where am I? Among what do I move? What are my relations to these things?. . . Self is the axis of world view.”

Of course, anthropologists lack a neutral view from no where. They are lensed by their own world view, or lifeworld, to merge a similar concept that has run through so much of the Gnostic Pulp project. It is of equal size to any they might study, so that another cannot simply be brought inside their own to be safely dismantled beneath laboratory lights. In that case, how can another be properly described? Experienced in the field, yes because we are all human and have access to the same range of potential phenomena, but whether this experience can be communicated effectively to those without that firsthand knowledge is a point of contention.

Such issues lay at the heart of today’s stories of interest: Jorge Luis Borges’ The Anthropologist3, as found in his 1969 collection In Praise of Darkness, and the 2020 novella, The National Telepathy by fellow Argentine Roque Larraquy.

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The Anthropologist

While Borges himself needs no introduction, this particular story is not among his better known. It begins with the narrator stating that it was told to him in Texas: “El caso me lo refirieron en Texas,” but it concerns events that unfolded in another of the Southwestern states.

For those who do not know, Borges spent some time as a visiting professor at the University of Texas in the early 60s, and fell in love with the city. He once told an interviewer: “Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Austin are, perhaps, my most beloved homes.”

Anyone who has visited the Texas capital might have sensed some of the city’s Borgesian attributes. It is constantly lost in mirrors of its own projected self-image and wandering the labyrinths of time, trying to recreate (or else package and sell) its ‘Slacker’ heyday. Hang around long enough and one starts to get the sense that its much mythologized Golden Age never actually occurred; that it has always existed in the past, as a story that Austinites tell themselves, one they can make up, change, and adapt as they go. Add to these Borgesian elements Texas’s similarities to Argentina: wide open spaces, cattle economies, a shared pride in their cowboy/gaucho heritage coupled with a suppressed indigenous history, and it makes sense he felt so at home here that he wrote us a sonnet.

Anyway, with this bit of biographical information, one might imagine the story being told to him by an associate at UT, a member of the anthropology faculty, for it is just such a personage that sets things in motion, but Edgardo Krebs, a historian of anthropology at the Smithsonian, argues the story has older roots. For Krebs, it is a response to Borges’ longtime frenemy, Alfred Métraux, the Swiss-Argentine anthropologist, and to the practice of ethnography in general which Borges felt had a fatal flaw:

“If seen as a contest between interpretation (Borges) and description (Métraux), ‘The Ethnographer’ represents a defeat of description.”

Borges did not believe it was possible to describe a world view. They are too all-encompassing for those native to them to get outside of, somewhat like the water to the proverbial fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, and they are too complex and adapted to their own context to be recreated in any model. Any attempt to describe a world view is doomed to fail because it will first have to be translated into terms understandable by those in the audience world view. It’s like translating a poem. It can be done in theory, but the end result is never really the same poem.

Of course, that has not stopped anthropologists from trying.

Alfred Métraux spent much of his childhood in Argentina, growing up in the Andean province of Mendoza. He developed a deep love of the landscape, knew the pampas intimately, rode a horse to school, and many of his playmates were Mapuche Indians. One might say he truly was more Argentine than most Argentinians, but, in late adolescence, his father sent him back to Switzerland. In Europe, his education continued, eventually culminating in Paris where he met lifelong friend, Georges Bataille, and obtained a doctorate in anthropology. By the age of twenty-six, he had made a name for himself through his work on Easter Island and returned to Argentina where he fell in with the Buenos Aires intelligentsia centered around Victoria Ocampo’s journal, SUR.4

This is how he met Jorge Luis Borges who took him to his favorite bridge, Puente Alsina, which stands on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and which Borges saw as a liminal, almost sacred space standing between the final settlements of the city and the nauseating vastness of the pampas.

“After long walks that sometimes lasted most of the night, Borges often ended at the bridge. As in a ritual, he stood on it to experience the thrill of that border, the lights of the new city behind him; ahead, in darkness and silence, the tantalizing wilderness, a nonhuman presence that preceded the city and its inhabitants and would endure after their memory had been erased.”5

He took Métraux here once, “but he was not impressed at all.”

Could it have been this slight that prompted Borges to challenge the man’s life work? Probably nothing quite that simple, but it is funny to imagine him being so petty.

Métraux, for his part, was frustrated by the abstract mythologizing of the pampas. He’d actually spent time out there and felt he had a more intimate connection than even the locals of Buenos Aires:

“I love the Argentine landscape deeply, selfishly, and I am sure that my life would lose meaning if I were to be separated from it for long. . . I am convinced that I know your land better than all of you. Who among you, in Buenos Aires, has been to Catamarca, the Calchaquí Valleys, the Quebrada del Toro, the deserts of the High Andes, Aconquija??? . . . How can you love the pampas if you have only seen them from a train, on the way to Mar del Plata? Who among your friends has slept under an algarrobo tree, or a quebracho?”

The Secret Kept

In The Anthropologist, an unnamed professor sends his student, Fred Murdock6, to live among an unspecified indigenous nation, most likely one of the Pueblo peoples given the region and the fact that Murdock lives in an adobe hut during his time with them. What we are told is that Murdock works, like Métraux, as an ethnographer among the indigenous people of the Americas, and that his advisor wants him to learn el secreto que los brujos— “the medicine man’s secret”, so that the university press can publish it.

Murdock accepts the assignment readily and Borges, it should be said, treats his character respectfully. Despite his youth, he is never described as some voyeur eager to perceive the sideshow attractions of a presumed “primitive culture”, but rather as an honest seeker, a young man hungry for knowledge and experience. His interests are said to span from Persian Sufism and the unknown beginnings of Hungarian, to algebra and war. It is the professor who frames his task as the uncovering of some occult knowledge of the desert. Murdock himself simply spends two years in the field acclimating to his hosts. He gradually learns the language and the culture, keeping notes for a while, but eventually deciding to burn them. At some point, he comes to dream in his new language and his tongue changes its palette, too, adjusting to the new diet. Murdock changes the way he dresses, lives, and, finally, the way he thinks—eventually coming to see things through another world view, “in a way his reason rejected.”

This is a real phenomenon described among anthropologists, although one that is not always spoken about. Essays on this topic are collected in the astonishing anthology Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience in which anthropologists struggle to come to terms with experiences they had in the field which align with their hosts’ world view, but not their own.

Edith Turner describes how she witnessed a visible spirit form during a ritual she participated in while living amongst the Ndembu in Zambia. Remember, this is a trained scientist, a lecturer at the University of Virginia. The Turners were highly respected in their field. Admitting the following could have damaged her career:

“Just then, through my tears, I could see Meru sway deeply, and everyone leaned forward. I realized along with them that the barriers were breaking. Something that wanted to be born was now going to be born. . . Suddenly Meru raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. It was a gray blob about six inches across, opaque and something between solid and smoke” (83).

A little later on in the essay, she writes “if I were to have become analytical I would have had to be a different person from the one who saw the spirit form.”

That is to say, she had not brought the Ndembu world view into her own, but had become acclimated enough that she could step between the two, one analytic, the other more intuitive: two different kinds of seeing. Only one of these granted access to the reality of this spirit form.

Likewise, it is only once Murdock has become properly acclimated that the healer tells him he must begin remembering his dreams and relating them to him every morning. Over the course of this Practice, Murdock realizes each full moon he dreams about mustangs. It is after this revelation that his host shares with him his ‘secret’. Shortly thereafter, and without saying goodbye to anyone, Murdock leaves, returning to the city where one would expect him to go to his advisor who has been patiently waiting, and reveal his acquired knowledge. Instead, the student tells him that he will not be sharing the secret.

“‘Are you sworn to an oath?’ asked the professor.

‘That’s not my reason,’ answered Murdock. ‘I found out something out there in the desert that I can’t tell.’

‘Do you mean to say the English language is inadequate?’ the professor may have said.

‘No, that’s not it, sir. Now that I have the secret, I could explain it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t really know how to tell you, but the secret means a great deal to me. . . The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.’”

The professor, to his credit, honors Murdock’s decision and does not press him. Instead, he asks if he will be returning to live on the reservation, but Murdock, again surprising the reader, says no, that he can apply what he learned any place and under any circumstances.

One must suspect what he learned is not “a secret” at all, but access to his hosts’ world view in a similar way as to what Turner describes in her essay. The story then ends, rather matter-of-factly, with the following sentence:

“Fred married, was divorced, and is now a librarian at Yale.”

And that’s it. That is the whole story, but, for Krebs, these two pages are a rebuttal of ethnography as a practice, or at least a rebuttal to any claims that it might lead to shareable results that reveal something essential about its subject. Borges never challenges the idea that Métraux may have learned the “medicine man’s secret”, so to speak. He may well have experienced another lifeworld, but that experience, even if explained in a hundred different and even contradictory ways, cannot be described in any way that can transmit the fullness of the lifeworld itself.

Lost in Borges’ Labyrinth

The anthropologist Marvin Harris, working in the generation after Métraux, developed the theory of cultural materialism. While it remains a somewhat controversial school of thought, it provides a useful analytic tool that “strives to ‘create a pan-human science of society whose findings can be accepted on logical and evidentiary grounds by the pan-human community.’”

In other words, it seeks to describe all human activity through material conditions, thereby revealing an underlying code that can make sense of any given world view. That much should appeal to someone of my political persuasion, but cross-cultural studies are complicated and one should be wary of the application of any supposedly universal tool.

I had a professor who was a disciple of Harris and taught almost directly from his book, Cows, Pigs, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. He seemed to take glee in dismantling sacred practices in other cultures—always saying things like “They think they grow extra yams to set aside for the dead, but that cache sure comes in handy in case of a drought.”

No doubt material conditions play a role in the development of cultural practices, up to and including the sacred, and maybe those set-aside yams really have helped people out in a pinch, but such reductive descriptions fail to describe a world view from the inside. Instead, I am reminded of the computer in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy giving “42” as the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” Maybe there is some technical truth to it, but the answer is rather meaningless because the inquiry is poorly formed.

One might be able to adopt a given world view through immersion, to experience it for oneself, but it cannot be adequately disassembled and explained in the terms of another world view, for every lifeworld is bottomless. Yes, even our own much maligned one which, for lack of better word, we might call modernity.

In this way, ethnography might be more fruitfully thought of in the same way as some other Borgesian characters view their work:

“The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”7

We are treading similar ground as in Two Dicks and Everything is Weird Fiction, but arriving back here this time has left me feeling somewhat nauseous. Perhaps that means I have ascended a ring up the spiral. Maybe I have arrived back in the same place along the x-axis, but the stakes certainly feel higher. While I have always taken the things I write about seriously, there has also been an element of play to it. Like these ideas were intellectual games I could play with inside the magical circle of art, and then set aside in order to return to my life, but more lately that separation has broken down, and these ideas have taken on such weight that I feel a real trepidation when toying around with them. Ideas have consequences and far-reaching implications. For that reason, I think it is worth reiterating here that none of this has been to say that there is no capital-T Truth.

While I consider myself a materialist, or at least a materialist*, researching this piece took me into Borges’ labyrinth where I felt that identity being challenged. How could I hold dialectical materialism in one hand and such a squishy, enigmatic reality in the other? In trying to reconcile the two, I felt lost and on verge of philosophical crisis; every turn I made only led to further questions. I longed for some final revelation. In what inner lair awaited the labyrinth’s minotaur? Each corner, I prayed “this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the fucking beast, cries from far inside [my]self whose manliness and violence [would] surprise [me]”, but no such encounter took place. Instead I was delivered from the twisting hallways by angelic intervention, and plopped down safely outside. Rather than choose between the two, I got beyond the question and saw the two sides are not actually in opposition. For that, I must thank Phil Ford and . As is so often the case, the most recent Weird Studies episode was perfectly timed to throw me a line.

Things might look, and indeed, behave differently through the lens of the various world views, but that is not to say reality itself is totally dependent on perspective, that there is no material basis. There is. It’s just that Marvin Harris did not push it far enough. It’s not that we are modern, as they say on Weird Studies, it’s that we are not modern enough. Reality cannot be taken in in its entirety, but what we are served up is still a true expression of the thing in itself:

“It’s like allowing the thing in itself to melt into the appearances, such that every perspective isn’t just a perspective on a thing, but an expression of the thing. And so the thing in itself becomes the appearances. And so then you’re in a world of perspectives, but every perspective is giving you the world in itself.”

Here we might be served well by one of Martel’s usual touchstones, Henri Bergson, and his two ways of knowing which I hinted at earlier: analysis and intuition. Those born unto a certain lifeworld are sure to experience that lifeworld in an intuitive way; anthropologists who spend enough time in the field, like Métraux, Edith Turner, and the fictional Murdock, may even be capable of arriving at that intuitive level, but their work can only be communicated, translated, as it must be, across lifeworlds, in the analytic form. By breaking it down piecemeal, and, in so doing, losing something essential.

While analysis may fall short, the intuitive route should not be taken lightly. It may be possible that one can eventually adopt or gain access to another world view through direct interaction, but to do so is no small thing. To change perspective is to both change who you are and what the world is to you. Seek at your own risk.

The Secret Abused

Roque Larraquy is the contemporary Argentinian author of three novellas, two of which have been translated into English. Needless to say, he is far less known than Borges, but he is a name one would do well to familiarize oneself with.

Larraquy’s bread and butter is lambasting men in power who believe their high place in the hierarchy is a sign of their supreme intellect, but who, in actuality, are utter morons—which reminds me of yet another Texan-Argentine connection:

Larraquy first plied his trade in the 2010 novella, Comemadre, in which psychiatrists at a sanatorium in suburban Buenos Aires near the turn of the century advertise a phony cure for cancer in order to lure dying people in for a quack doctor’s experiment. Rather than being treated with an experimental cure, the desperate patients are given sugar water then have their heads cut off while attached to a contraption that blows air into their newly exposed vocal chords. Meanwhile, a panel of doctors looks on, asking questions of the recently deceased whose heads can continue to communicate for a few seconds after the decapitation. In this way, it is hoped, some vision of the afterlife might be communicated.

It goes about as expected.

In his second book to be translated into English, The National Telepathy, we return to early twentieth century Argentina. This time, a group of wealthy men have paid a rubber company to import a small group of indigenous people that have been abducted from the Peruvian forest. They are delivered to Buenos Aires where they are meant to live in Argentina’s first Ethnographic Theme Park. This park will also contain exhibits from Oceania, Asia, and Africa, featuring people living in approximations of their ‘natural habitat’.

In other words, it’s a human zoo.

The idiocy and deep set racism of these men is on full display during their committee meeting and Larraquy lampoons it hilariously. Here, as in Comemadre, he masterfully threads the needle between nausea and humor, and in so doing reveals the mental prison these men have locked themselves in. They cannot imagine the reality of a world view besides their own. Everything outside of their immediate circle exists only for their entertainment or profiteering.

Due to some bureaucratic blunders, the Peruvians must be kept, for the time, in the apartment of Amado Dam, the novella’s central figure, at least until their paperwork can be sorted out. Unbeknownst to Dam, there is a stowaway amongst the Indians’ belongings. Encased within “a vegetal object about the size of a dog, resembling a nut or a shell,” is a sloth.

In discovering the sloth, Amado Dam, receives a nasty scratch that results in a fever as well as a psychic connection with one of the women among the indigenous Peruvians being held in his apartment.

In an earlier scene, this woman was shown to escape and navigate the streets of Buenos Aires with astonishing ease, and even speak a little Spanish, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, much to Dam’s associate’s disbelief. All this despite the given instructions that the Peruvians should come from the most remote and uncontacted people possible which means the psychic connection goes in both directions. The unnamed woman has seen as much of Dam’s mind as he has of her’s.

And it is not that he has simply seen through her eyes like she has been equipped with a GoPro her whole life and he has been given a chance to review the footage. No, he has felt through her body; he has adopted her perspective.

As Larraquy writes, “memory is not a static record of a series of phenomena, nor a narrative piece clearly distinct from others, but. . . a fever in the body that warms the air.” For the memories to make any sense, he must not only feel them bodily, but they must also be interlinked with the entire world view that makes sense of anything the woman sees, that situates her as a subject, and fills in the blanks to Redfield’s questions: Where am I? Among what do I move? What are my relations to these things? In that way, the sloth’s fever incepts Dam not just with another person’s memories, but with an intuitive knowledge of a foreign lifeworld.

It is a gift of unbelievable proportion.

Murdock only arrived at the same place through years of transformative experience. Dam, meanwhile, takes the back door. He arrives via a short cut thus lacks the respect such knowledge should endow. He is totally unchanged by the experience. Rather than internalizing the knowledge and gaining access to a new way of being, he immediately begins plotting how to turn this power to his advantage, and by the end of the book the secret has been acquired by the post-Perón government who has developed a method to “collect data” from anyone suspected of “anti-Argentine activities”. This is done by abducting them, stealing their blood, and injecting it into a sloth, so that trained ‘Intrusionists’ can peer into their mind.

Since these agents and the suspected dissidents hail from the same lifeworld, the exchange is not as dramatic an experience as Dam’s. It really is just an exchange of memories. The intrusionists, however, have been trained in putting up a mental firewall, so that they share only selected or made up memories. The abductee, meanwhile, has no defenses against this secret weapon, and, because it must remain secret, whether innocent or not, once abducted they cannot be released. Instead, they are forced to become intrusionists themselves, continuing the state’s interrogation of suspected dissidents.

It is a perverted inversion of what was once a sacred act, a bastardization of something potentially revolutionary, and a damning condemnation of modernity’s fallen lifeworld, or at least that part of it to which everything can be seen only for its profit potential. Around here, we call it the Black Iron Prison. It is the dark side of modernity, the modernity that is not-modern-enough, that seeks hegemony and threatens the continued existence of all other lifeworlds. In this, it is not something unique to modernity, but rather like modernity has become infected by an ancient entity, call it the Imperial Virus.

According to the social scientist, Marius Ion Benta, modernity has swapped the sacred and the border. The sacred typically plays an animating role in the center of society, and by this I do not mean a state religion, but a holistic way of seeing that unites one with the world and people around them, giving life intuitive meaning and direction. Such is the most important function of a world view, and it is this that the Imperial Virus attacks on the home front.

The border, meanwhile, is meant to act as a perimeter, thereby creating the limits of the subject. In a healthy lifeworld, borders can exist on a vast gradient, ranging from lines on a map to literal border walls to rivers and other natural boundaries to even more amorphous things, like ancestral hunting grounds dictated by the migration patterns of prey animals. Of course, modernity does have its national borders. One could even say they are more codified than ever. However, the nation state is not the edge of modernity’s lifeworld. Besides, the issue goes far beyond militarized borders between nations. It is the very concept of the border that the Imperial Virus fetishizes. By replacing the sacred with this border fetish at the heart of our world view, borders become replicated throughout every level of modernity’s lifeworld.

The average citizen really is allowed access to such an astonishingly small portion of our society. Roadways act as thin ribbons through a vast world of locked doors; the majority of space is protected behind the walls of private property. We are railroaded through a series of spaces where we are only welcome if we are spending money, or else making someone else money through the surplus of our labor. Such replication exists at every level, from the existential in which we imagine ourselves as walled off units, totally separate from the people and the world around us, to the mundane. Look no further than the screen already before you for evidence of such things as paywalls and firewalls.

Walls and borders aplenty, but no officially sanctioned sacred. The temples have been replaced by wall ideology and the gods have scattered to the hinterlands. They must now be sought on one’s own time if at all.

Finally, with the walls brought into the heart, they no longer exist on the outskirts meaning there is no container for modernity. This thing can just keeps pushing out and trying to grow. The Imperial Virus denies the legitimacy of any of its neighbors, and instead aims to replace them by replicating itself, by slicing up connecting flows into piecemeal units, and fixing them with a numeric value.

Throughout history, other lifeworlds have become infected by the Imperial Virus and behaved similarly. It creates terrible destruction, but it is an untenable position that must eventually burn itself out, usually taking the host lifeworld with it. It certainly feels as if we are in some early stage of that process right now, a terrifying prospect, but the end of a lifeworld is not The End.8 Take it from a guy who has spent some time digging up bones: the world is always ending. The only reason she don’t quit for good is because people are continuously making her anew. None can say what the next iteration will look like from inside or out. It will be a new formulation with some unprecedented perspective, and the world will turn to meet it with a fresh face.

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[Exit Music]

And it is not only us fans. Publishers apparently feel the same need. Most recent editions have made sure to plaster Ursula Le Guin’s “He’s our Melville” quote front and center, often alongside the line from the Washington Post putting him in the lofty company of such contemporaries as Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. Why, then, do we never see Wolfe’s name on their covers?

Perhaps, despite it all, we refined readers of literature still blush when caught out in the ghetto of ~genre fiction~, no matter what we may tell ourselves. Science fiction and fantasy may have had their token writers elevated into the canon, but few are their number and typically that promotion is signaled through a gentrification of their book covers. For Wolfe, this has only occurred with bank-breaking Folio editions. How is the frugal performative male reader supposed to seduce any sensitive dame across the cafe with a cover like this in hand? There’s simply not enough matcha in the world.

shirks all this nonsense in his essay, Terminus Est, in which he promotes Wolfe’s work using no merit beyond its own innate radness:

“There are very few images in [Wolfe] that would look out of place if airbrushed on the side of a van.”

While Coberly is writing in reference to Wolfe’s magnum opus, The Book of the New Sun, it holds up just as well in relation to his late career work, The Wizard Knight. Published as a duology composed of The Knight and The Wizard, the series consists of the kind of imagery one might find animating the back panel of a pinball machine: knights with pituitary conditions locked in combat with demonic sea dragons, ogres that’d have Shrek stuttering in fear, and shape-shifting fairy queens who make full use of their polymorphic abilities when teaching new partners about the ways of love.

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A Beefcake Sorcerer in King Arnthor’s Court

They say you never forget your first, and that much is certainly true of Able of the High Heart, man-boy hero of The Wizard Knight. He loses his virginity (in an enchanted cave, no less) to Disiri, that very shapeshifting Queen of the Moss Aelf. Afterwards, she works her magic on him, transforming his scrawny teenaged body into a Shrek-in-human-form-like hunk. Then she disappears and Able spends the remaining 800 pages trying to use his newfound strength to win her back, but Disiri has her own plans. Unbeknownst to her dumbstruck admirer, she has incepted him with a message to deliver to the king. Everything Able believes he is doing to make himself worthy of Disiri, he is really doing to make himself worthy for a meeting with the king so that he might deliver this message.

So Able of the High Heart begins to travel around the realm, having encounters, and leveling up, so to speak. His inner knightliness and outer hunkiness begin drawing in loyal friends, and he eventually builds a party worthy of any RPG. It starts with a half-blind servant who is the first to see the latent greatness in him and eventually grows to include both a talking cat3 and a talking dog4, an all-but invisible ogre with super strength, a petulant squire or two, some horny Aelf groupies, a fast travel pegasus, a small squadron of fellow knights, some half-giants, and a magical sword that conjures a legion of dead warriors each time it is drawn.

Still, Able does not win his every encounter. Actually he is killed once—Yes, of course he dies and is resurrected. He is the hero of a fantasy novel written by a Catholic. What were you expecting?—and spends the better part of two decades in Skai, a sort of Valhalla stand-in, but when he returns, with all sorts of new powers and skills, hardly any time at all has passed back in Mythgarthr.

With Able fully leveled up and the whole squad together, few are the powers that can stand in their way. After an overly lengthy showdown with some giants known as the Angrborn, his reputation finally becomes such that he feels ready to approach King Arnthor.

That might all sound like a plot straight out of any number of fantasy titles, but there is a reason Gene Wolfe is not as commercially successful as George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson. His writing famously, one might even be tempted to say gleefully, tests the patience of readers with its unreliable narrators, dense religious and literary references, atemporal revelations, and arcane vocabulary. That said, The Wizard Knight would be an interesting place to start with his bibliography as it is among his most accessible works. Though this might actually prove more dangerous in the long run, like being lured into a trap. The reader would play the role of Thor in the Norse myth referenced in the novel in which the god goes giant hunting. He searches a cave for the giants without luck only to slowly realize the cave is a single finger hole in the giant’s glove.

With The Book of the New Sun, one’s defenses are up pretty immediately, which makes sense based on the narrative conceit that it is a text from the future, written in a language that does not yet exist, and the humble author is doing his damndest to translate it in a way that is legible, so hey cut the man some slack. Here, in The Wizard Knight, the framing device is a bit different. We have a narrator who is actually motivated to relate his outlandish experiences in terms understandable to those of us on Earth in the present day. The books are written in the form of a long letter to the narrator’s brother, penned by a man who was spirited away to Fae in childhood.

That’s right folks, it’s an epistolary novel, meaning we never get outside of Able’s narration. He is writing long after the end of this tale, looking back upon his journey; he sets the pace, makes call backs across hundreds of pages, or preemptively refers to characters and events we won’t encounter for another few hundred pages.

Still, a determined enough plotophile might be able to brute force their way through all the Wolfeian trickery and simply enjoy the broad strokes of a fantastic bit of sword and sorcery. Most readers, however, are going to pick up on something weird rather quickly, if only via a subtle, queasy feeling in their gut. This uneasiness is simply part of the experience when reading Wolfe. Like the novel’s cosmology, he is always working on multiple levels at once. The ground never feels quite stable, the narrators never exactly trustworthy. Some hint of meaning is always lurking just beyond the reader’s grasp.

The War for Tolkien

The Best Introduction to Mountains, Wolfe’s essay on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, might actually serve as The Best Introduction to The Wizard Knight. The essay was originally published in Interzone Magazine in 2001, just a couple years before the publication of The Knight. It is both a tribute to Wolfe’s literary hero, and an investigation into what Tolkien was up to, beyond his language games, out there in Middle Earth.

“What, then, did Tolkien do? And how did he come to do it? The second question can be more easily answered than the first. He was a philologist (Greek philo-logos, a lover of words), and he had somehow escaped the modern cast of mind that makes us glory in ignorance and regard our forebears, who somehow muddled along without washing machines and air conditioning, with contempt.”

Tolkien’s work has long been an ideological battleground. During what we are now calling the long 2016, it was popular to deride it as reactionary, or even fascist, and to all but write off fantasy as a genre for the same reason, what with its inherently evil races of orcs, idealized monarchs, and Christian undertones. And now we’ve got ICE sharing LOTR memes on their Twitter and actual ghouls naming their AI-driven surveillance/murder corporations after a magical seeing stone from The Lord of the Rings, appropriately used to broker communication between the two most evil characters in the trilogy5.

Case, closed, right? Tolkien, you’re cancelled.

Well, now hang on there just one sec—

While it’s true that Tolkien (as well as his disciple, Wolfe) had some real boneheaded political stances, he surely would have seen Palantir for what it is: the most evil company in the world. And there’s plenty of reason to believe this isn’t simple wish-casting better politics onto our problematic faves. Tolkien really was deeply suspicious of modernity. This distrust did not stem from the usual reactionary impulses, but rather from the destructive tendencies of mechanized and industrialized capital he had seen firsthand in the Great War and in the massive industrialization taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century. He personifies this destructive tendency in his work as the corrupted wizard Saruman the White.

takes up this argument in his piece, Shire Anarchy, in which he writes about about how Tolkien (and we can extend this to his disciple, Wolfe) was sympathetic to anarchist ideals. His suspicions of modernity focused upon the ruling class, and all those who sought to hold power over their fellow man. His devout Catholicism meant he held a deep reverence for human dignity.

The Shire serves as a premier example of Anarcho-Monarchism. While something of a contradiction in terms, this simply means a system in which there is a King, but one who serves merely as a ceremonial role model.

McBryde writes:

“Hobbits acknowledge a distant kingship in theory, [but] they do not require such a King to govern the affairs of the Shire effectively. . . What they required was simply a collective reassurance that their way of doing things was how a good king would like to see things done.”

Wolfe concurs. Here he is once again in The Best Introduction to Mountains:

“There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms. The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was.”

The Way

One might say these Catholic boys, with their similar penchant for this weird brand of clockwork anarchy, had stumbled onto an almost Taoist understanding of governance. If there is to be a King, may he perform his role well, and in so doing everything below will emanate orderly. Admittedly, it is a worldview that makes little sense without a religious undergirding to provide it with its implicit shape, or Way, to bring it back to Taoist lingo.

Here, we can return to Ursula K. Le Guin and her interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. There are a handful of chapters that act as advice on governance in that ancient text. As we will see, Lao Tzu’s writing does not sound so dissimilar to Tolkien and Wolfe’s views.

Here is Chapter 57, which Le Guin titles ‘Being Simple’:

Run the country by doing what’s expected.
Win the war by doing the unexpected.
Control the world by doing nothing.
How do I know that?
By this.

The more restrictions and prohibitions in the world,
the poorer people get.
The more experts the country has
the more of a mess it’s in.
The more ingenious the skillful are,
the more monstrous their inventions.
The louder the call for law and order,
the more the thieves and con men multiply.

So a wise leader might say:
I practice inaction, and the people look after themselves.
I love to be quiet, and the people themselves find justice.
I don’t do business, and the people prosper on their own.
I don’t have wants, and the people themselves are uncut wood.

In her notes for this chapter, Le Guin brings attention to her choice of the word monstrous in the second stanza. She clarifies that she means new, novel, or unnecessary to living. One might think again of Palantir, or any amount of technology that has been invented not to improve the lives of those who use it (or have it used upon them) but for ulterior, indeed, monstrous reasons of control, surveillance, and mass death, all in the name of profit extraction.

Le Guin is not some technophobe set totally against anything new. Far from it, as she expresses beautifully in Always Coming Home, which we explored here at Gnostic Pulp quite early on, but she does carry a healthy suspicion of technology that does not serve a clear and beneficial end. Wolfe, befitting his training as an engineer, explains this sentiment in the simplest of language:

“It is not just my own belief but a well-established scientific fact that most change is for the worse: any change increases entropy6 (unavailable energy). Therefore, any change that produces no net positive good is invariably harmful. Progress, then, does not consist of destroying good things in the mere hope that the things that will replace them will be better…but in retaining good things while adding more. Here is a practical illustration. This paper is good and the forest is good as well. If the manufacture of this paper results in the destruction of the forest, the result will be a net loss. That is mere change; we have changed the forest into paper, a change that may benefit some clever men who own a paper mill but hurts the mass of Earth’s people. If, on the other hand, we manufacture the paper without destroying the forest (harvesting mature trees and planting new ones) we all benefit.”

A new paper mill coming to town is practically a trope of villainy in Americana. The extant forest is taken as self-evidently superior to whatever profits the mill might churn up, and the townspeople will surely band together to stop it in the end. . . Even if this strain of political thought is buried somewhere deep in the American psyche, it has rarely been allowed to find its true expression in reality. Instead, this ideal has suffered long abuse and become hopelessly curdled.

Mythgarthr, the human realm in The Wizard Knight, has also lost its way. It is up to Able to set things right through an act of redemptive revelation. For Wolfe, that means uncovering a forgotten wisdom, thereby awakening in the King’s (as well as his readers’) conscious “the truth that society need not be as we see it around us.”

This is the message that Able is meant to deliver, but it is hidden even from him. The only thing that sustains his quest is the love he feels for Disiri.

A Gnostic metaphor might be mapped onto Mythgarthr’s situation, starring Disiri in the role of Sophia, and Able (whose true name is Arthur, as we find out on the final page) as the redemptive Christ figure, sent to boot out the demiurgic Arnthor, the half dragon king, thereby restoring the rightful order. Such a metaphor could be stretched out quite nicely, but I’d rather make a pivot in order to talk about another king.

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

In 1984, Thomas Pynchon asked the question, Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? In 2026, the answer to that question seems to be a resounding NO, at least not if you want to participate in society. I sometimes dream of trading in my iPhone for some kind of flip phone, but even my job requires I have three different apps, and I’m a goddamn coffee shop manager.

Luddite is often thought of as an insult meaning technophobe, someone with a childish, unserious, or even reactionary view of the modern world. It is true, we do live in a technological world. One cannot escape it by simply planting their head in the sand, but none of this is what Pynchon was calling for when he penned the essay, and it’s not, he reminds us, the original meaning of the word ‘luddite’.

The word goes back to 1779, when one Ned Lud, “in a fit of insane rage”, broke into a home and destroyed two stocking frames, or machines used for knitting hosiery. As Pynchon makes clear, this was no mere act of technophobia. Such machines had been around for two centuries by that time. What had ticked off old Lud was their continued centralization under the hands “of men who did not work, only owned and hired.”

Lud had been automated out of his job as a weaver. The only way left for him to make money through his trade was by working for one of these men who owned all the machinery in one of their proto-factories. He would not own the means of production as those weavers of yore, meaning despite the technological improvements which could have drastically reduced the work load of weavers everywhere, he would instead be working longer hours for less pay.

Seen in this light, Lud’s attack was not senseless technophobic mania, but an act of class war:

“Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery—especially when it's been around for a while—not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work—to be ‘worth’ that many human souls.”

Pynchon, Le Guin, Wolfe, and Tolkien no doubt have very different politics, but they each share a suspicion of the kind of progress in which technology marches forward, but the vast bulk of humanity is left behind. All four might be welcomed beneath the Luddite banner, but, if such a movement hopes to gain any traction, it will have to rebrand a bit. Luddite has too much reactionary stink on it. Let us take a lesson from Mark Fisher and call it the Acid Luddite Party. Now we’re cooking. The acid implies a certain open-minded coolness. We are not closed to technology as such, but believe it should be working for us, not upon us; that never-ending growth is a cancerous delusion; that there is goodness in the natural world that is worthy of preserving; that if we all just had a little more free time, we wouldn’t need a goddamn robot to write our shopping list for us.

Not One Drop for AI Slop, we might chant at our rallies.

But enough party politics. Let’s get back to Able.

Seven Layer Cosmology

Progress has been treated for the last few centuries as one of modernity’s major gods, but Wolfe suspects we have things backwards. When ‘progress’ means nothing more than the continuous progression of numbers in a few bank accounts at the expense of the rest of the planet’s living beings, well that’s no kind of progress at all.

We are worshipping the wrong thing and it is having wide-ranging effects.

The universe of The Wizard Knight is quite literally having that same problem. Their cosmos are constructed of seven layers:

1. Elysion: Heaven, realm of the Most High God.

2. Kleos: Heaven’s slightly dodgier neighborhood, realm of the angels.

3. Skai: Basically Valhalla, land of the Norse gods by another name, the Overcyns.

4. Mythgarthr: The medieval “Earth” world dominated by humans.

5. Aelfrice: Basically Fae, realm of the fairies.

6. Muspel: The upper layer of hell, here there be dragons.

7. Niflheim: Hell hell, realm of the Most Low God.

Those in each realm are meant to worship those in the realm above them, but from Mythgarthr on down things have gotten to be something of a mess. The humans have largely forgotten the Overcyns, with some even turning their worship towards the Aelf in the realm below. Likewise, many among the Aelf have warred against their creator, Kulili, and pledged themselves instead to Setr, a Dragon of Muspel. Some of these dragons have even moved up into Mythgarthr and begun mating with humans and their offspring have claimed the throne.

Disiri is looking to set all this right, and her will is what starts this whole tale in motion. It is important that Disiri is the Queen of the Moss Aelf. Like Tolkien’s Treebeard, she comes from the natural world and speaks for that which has no voice. In that, Mythgarthr is far luckier than us. We have converted the entire biomass of the world into capital and burnt off an absurd amount of energy in such a compressed amount of time. When nature sends her emissary to us, it will not be an elf queen, but heat waves and floods, blizzards and droughts, hurricanes, vast fields of dead crops, and a refugee crisis the likes of which we have never seen.

When Able finally does manage to get his meeting with the King, it is Disiri’s message that speaks through him. She tells him how the bad example set by the humans of Mythgarthr have emanated downwards and everything is in disarray, but this could all be remedied if only King Arnthor would play his role as the Good King.

Rather than engendering a spiritual transformation, Arnthor has Able arrested. He is made to surrender his belt and sword and then delivered to the dungeons where he is kept throughout the beginning of a disastrous war with a clan of cannibal barbarians known as the Osterlings who represent the fallen state the rest of humanity might decline to if they do not heed Disiri’s message. By the time Able is finally freed from his imprisonment, King Arnthor’s army has been scattered. The Osterlings control much of the realm, and the survivors are left in miserable conditions. Able, with some help from Skai, is able to rally an army. In a whirlwind final hundred pages, he rejoins the King and slowly begins to retake the realm.

In the end, Able does not claim the throne for himself nor has the universe been redeemed, but a few good lives have been, and that’s a start. Able has performed heroically, and in that way fulfilled the role of the Good King despite his lack of a throne. This inspires those around him to fulfill their own roles just as heroically. It may seem a small thing, but, as Wolfe writes of Tolkien, a handful of seeds can be the start of a forest.

For Wolfe and Tolkien, Christ was this Good King on which to model one’s life, a teleology for this forest to grow towards, and their worldviews make little sense without this center beam. For Le Guin, it was the Tao that the forest grew out of. If none of these ring true for you, Pynchon gives us another option, one that does not emanate from above or below, but lies immanent in our own preterite selves:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!7

[Exit Music]

I did not have to wait long for this ill omen to bear fruit. Just a couple days after its reveal, I came down with something nasty. It gave me a raging headache, a twisted stomach, and sapped me of all energy. For several days, I totally lost my appetite, my ability to concentrate, and felt constantly exhausted. I took to sleeping in, at least as much as my schedule allows, and forgoing my early morning writing sessions. By the time that sick spell passed, the in-laws had arrived to stay with us for our daughter’s first birthday, and after that it was Spring Break. For the rest of my family, that is, who got a week off from teaching and daycare. With this change in schedule, I elected to take another week off, so that by mid-March I had not written a thing, nor did I much feel like it. I was in a creative funk. Not only had writing lost all appeal, I couldn’t even settle on anything to listen to on my commute. No music sounded good, none of my podcasts held any interest. During this time, the allure of my phone seemed to increase. I was called to doomscroll, to gaze into the horrors we were committing in Iran. To be, once again, aghast at the cruel stupidity and stupid cruelty of my home land; in the face of which, a handful of weeks without writing is nothing.

I’ve been doing this with some consistency since I was sixteen. That’s over half my life now spent devoted to writing. You Shall Write Every Day is a maxim I have left far behind and am all the better for it. I usually feel like I know writing’s place in my life, and while it is one of great value I fully accept this is never turning into a career for me, but, being the stupid Spiritual Gumshoe that I am, I often forget that an Artistic Practice is no replacement for a Spiritual Practice, so a long dry spell like this still sometimes represents something like a crisis of faith, especially when it concurs with such outward, overwhelming events.

As a seasoned Spiritual Gumshoe, however, I have at least learned not to traverse these streets without my bag of tools, and, when feeling so lost as this, I eventually will remember how helpful it is to stop and consult Ramsey Dukes’ compass. Here, we see that Art and Religion both trek North, guided by Intuition, but they diverge easterly and westerly depending on whether that Intuition is paired with Feeling or Thinking, so treating Writing as a Spiritual Practice is something like trying to travel East and West at the same time. It simply can’t be done and trying to do so will tear you in two.

That’s bad news for me who once again finds myself alone with my carpet bag on the cosmic road. I spent a steady year practicing zazen daily and was beginning to think I’d finally found my path, but when Baby came along my routine was totally changed and now I am more than a year out of habit; my zafu eyes me from the corner of my room like a neglected houseplant that I just can’t work up the energy to water.

While that, no doubt, remains a problem to be addressed, it is a separate-ish problem. When I release writing from my requirement for it to be both Art and Religion, it no longer strains against itself. It becomes free to bound off in its given direction. This is easier said than done, and it only happened for me (this time) when I put it aside completely for a little bit and, quite literally, tended my garden. We spent a couple weekends clearing the native flower beds of last year’s dead growth—you want to leave that shit in place until you see new growth. Your neighbors might not appreciate the sight of dead plant matter, but that’s Home for some very helpful insects.

Next, we went to war against encroaching weeds. I made the mistake last year of letting some giant ragweed go to seed in the green alley behind our yard and its babies jumped the fence and are going to town amongst my yarrow, flame acanthus, and rock rose. After much careful plucking of ragweed shoots, I mulched the blackberry bramble to hopefully allow for easier access for curious toddlers this summer. Then I removed the turf from another corner of our yard and planted some fall aster, Greg’s mistflower, and coral honeysuckle as we continue our project of returning our tiny plot to something closer to its native state—a job we hope our landlord will appreciate as much as the butterflies!

Finally it was time for the most temperamental patch of all: the vegetables. In Texas, you never can be too sure when the final freeze of winter is going to blow down out of Oklahoma. It’s just as likely to occur in February as it is in April. You don’t want to plant your veggies before it, but you also don’t want to wait too long because summer has a habit of stepping on spring’s toes around here, and if your veggies aren’t well established they’re going to get fried by the heat. After consulting my father-in-law, who, like all self-taught gardeners, has his own personal mixture of scientific knowledge and esoteric beliefs, I decided it was time.

I sowed another winter’s worth of our homemade compost into the dense, red clay soil of our backyard, yanked the bindweed shoots that had recently emerged, cursed their leviathan root system twisting far beneath my feet, and finally popped my cucumber, corn, green bean, and zucchini seeds straight into the ground. The tomatoes and peppers I started in pots. And for five days immediately afterwards, we were blessed with mild spring temperature and plenty of rain. Pop, ye old wizard!

Just the other side of that, though, came a couple nights that dipped to a degree or two above freezing. And a week later, it soared towards a record breaking mid-nineties.

Despite this whiplash, more than enough plants have survived to fill my garden bed, and according to the forecast things are leveling out again for the next couple weeks, so here’s to hoping for a bountiful yield in the months to come! Even should another heat wave or cold snap steal away many of these young plants, they have already paid dividends. Something about being in such close communication with the Earth unlocked me and I felt a great creative energy return and have rushed to keep up. This was the influence of that second card, the Eight of Wands: “It represents frenetic, spontaneous, and erratic movement as well as the struggle to focus and direct that energy. It is the card of sudden excitement and fast journeys.”

When an old tree dies in the forest, there is a sudden in-breaking of sunlight into what was for so long shaded by its canopy. Seeds that have lay dormant in the soil suddenly spring to life as there is a mad rush to lay claim to the new niche. Likewise, after nearly a month without writing pretty much anything, I feel suddenly bubbling with ideas again. Not only for writing, but there’s this new vitality in my listening. I’m fighting the urge to break into a new medium and to start in on Language Transfer’s Spanish courses. I must remind myself that all these shoots will be competing for the limited sunlight and nutrients, that many will have to die off for any one of them to thrive. But hey, that’s not the worst problem to have and having my hands in the dirt was certainly one component of breaking out of this holding pattern—hence the continued plant analogies— but there were others.

You get out what you put in, they say, and there were a few choice pieces of art that helped me along my way, but for that you will have to pay the man at the door. And do it quick. Things have been getting rather precarious around here. We pay him what we can, but still…he’s been getting a little desperate, and who can blame him? Have you seen the price of gas?

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This feeling only intensified after I saw them during a childhood fever.

Laying on the couch, I watched as the walls, toys, television, everything most familiar to me, slipped out of its skin and revealed its interior. They teemed beneath the veil of everything, these tireless, crawling beings—an ocean of movement interweaving everything. Call them machine elves or coral insects if you will, but, to my childeyes, these things were ladybugs. Secretly, to myself, I named this vision The Ladybug Feeling because it was accompanied by an uncomfortable bodily sensation of prickling and depersonalization. It scared and fascinated me, and over the years I tried on occasion to will it back into existence, but only ever achieved the vaguest stirring. It was strongest when I was sick, especially if I had to be held home from school with a fever. That’s when the ladybugs were most likely to reveal themselves to me, as if, in our privacy, the world whispered its great secret.

I could sense the ladybugs were tired of holding their usual shapes, that they wanted to remake the world, but, just at the cusp of transformation, something forced them back into place. Perhaps this was the confining gaze of God, or simply the familiar grooves worn by Kenneth Batcheldor’s UCP. Either way, my own weak gaze was not enough to pop them over onto a new track. If sick days were truly the gateways to different worlds, as they once seemed, then, if everyone had a sick day at once, perhaps all together we could actually get the world to change shape.

Well, the world did have its universal sick day, about six years back now, with COVID-19. Quarantine kept the majority of people confined to their homes for months. It really did bring the status quo to its knees. More than a million people died in this country alone. I mean, things were so bad that the government of the United States of America cut checks to its citizens. Here, in the US of A, people were paid not to go to work. If ever the ladybugs were going to break free of their restraints and shape themselves into something new, this was the time.

That did not happen. Instead, the entire thing was memory holed, at least as much as possible, leaving only an ambient ocean of trauma that has never been dealt with. America knows only one direction: onward.

But what if it wasn’t that simple? Maybe things did snap back into place, but not quite so rigidly as before. The old skin has lost its tightness. It has slackened. Sloughed off a bit. The body, perhaps, has even died, but the ladybugs are still trapped within, not yet free to shape themselves. This thing first must fill with gas and burst. It is far too complicated a system for instant reconfiguration. That’s what I never understood as a child. The world is configured of numberless processes, of which the virus is only one station along the way.

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Pharmakonic Texts

Outside of being the author of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs is probably most well known for his association with the Beats, his lifelong heroin addiction, and finally for his killer bar: “language is a virus.”

It’s one of those oft-quoted lines that intuitively feels true (or at least it feels cool enough to say that the speaker wants it to be true), but what was he on about?

Animals communicate in a myriad of ways. Apes can even be taught to sign to a certain extent. Whales and birds sing. Insects vomit information-containing chemicals into each other’s mouths. Even plants and fungi can pass along data, but, it seems, only humanity has developed what we can rightfully call language, and we did so in the most distant mists of our prehistory. This has afforded us incalculable advantages, so if language is a virus it is one that has become fully symbiotic with its host, as much a part of us as our gut biome:

“Would you offer violence to a well intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis?”

It is unknown exactly how long spoken language existed before the written word made its relatively recent arrival, but to Burroughs it doesn’t exactly matter for the written word remade the spoken word in its own image, so to speak. It was in this remaking that language became a control machine, and it is only through another remaking that we can free ourselves of its shackles.

In an insightful essay on Michael S. Judge’s fiction, calls the work of William S. Burroughs a “pharmakonic text”, borrowing the word from Jaques Derrida who, in turn, copped it from Plato, for whom the original Greek word (φάρμακον) could mean either remedy or poison; it was also closely related to pharmakós (φαρμακός) meaning human sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat, further expanding and obscuring its meaning. This kind of ambiguity is central to Burroughs’ negative poetics.

To call writing a pharmakon, as Derrida does, is to name both its powers to heal and to poison, to control and to liberate. Such ambiguity is central to Derrida’s reading, as well as Burroughs’ understanding. Language’s power to control is obvious. The written word is a mechanism for binding. It not only binds symbol to thing, but it binds time by freezing information on the page. It can also bind the reader’s mind through the use of those black magic techniques we all learned in elementary school: pathos, logos, and ethos. There is no shortage of humans who have weaponized the virus and are putting it towards their own ends of control using these methods. Mass media has allowed apparatuses of control to perfect their use, and for decades they have been wielding language with deadly efficiency, but corporate advertisements and political messaging are only the most overt forms of this language virus.

It works in far more subtle ways as well. And not all of them are so nefarious.

“A virus is a copy,” Burroughs writes. It has no will, but to replicate itself. The harm it causes its host is only ever to that end. Morality should not be applied to the virus itself. In fact, its genetics can be implemented in the cure, as with vaccines. Haines writes of Burroughs’ body of work as an attempt to use this other side of language, its ability for liberation—

“For Burroughs, Control is the name of the pervasive condition in which human beings are reduced to being either agents or victims of a self-replicating virus whose ultimate aim is total subjection of the other—of Otherness. So much of Burroughs’ life and work was a protracted defense against this entity (alternately known to him within his fiction and his life as the Nova Mob, the Venusians, the Ugly Spirit, et al.) and its efforts to thoroughly liquidate otherness in the name of a monological, tyrannically consuming Identity.”

The Virus

In 2026, the Virus has appeared in my reading with startling regularity. Like any well adapted virus, it did not give itself away immediately. I did not realize I had been exposed until long after I’d had adequate time to pass it along. In hind sight, I noticed its presence dating back to the very first book I read this year: ’s The Squimbop Condition.

For sufferers of Squimbop Fever, symptoms might include: 1) taking a captive, slitting his throat with a butter knife, and decanting his fluids into a bath tub, 2) being convinced “by forces outside our understanding, that they were once half of the iconic duo [the Brothers Squimbop], and that, if only enough radical violence could be enacted, a profound enough sacrifice, then that duo could be resurrected”, and 3) a monomaniacal drive to “puncture the veil and reconnect with the real world on the other side” (102-103).

This last one might be enough to classify Squimbop Fever as a gnostic pathology, and in that it is not alone. Octavia E. Butler’s Duryea-Gode disease (or DGD), as found in her short story The Evening and the Morning and the Night, is a condition which causes its sufferers a “persistent delusion that they are trapped, imprisoned within their own flesh, and that that flesh is somehow not truly part of them” (70). This anti-materialism is an ancient Gnostic belief and one that has never sat easily with me, but it seems to have taken hold with the population at large. There is something similar going on in the looksmaxxing trends of today, this pathological desire to hold flesh as rigidly unblemished as you can, of trying to bind time with cosmetic procedures. The neurotic fear of aging, playing out both micro- and macro-cosmically, a vampirism of the elderly upon the young.

Shortly after my bout of DGD, I became a vector for the disease within ’s Drippy Trippy Doom. Kane appears well-versed in his Burroughs and even names three stories in his collection PHARMAKON I, PHARMAKON II, and PHARMAKON III. This series of stories is written as diary entries by the incorrigible Dr. Bendigan who is brought in to investigate a cult in the Californian desert. He brushes aside their stated beliefs and diagnoses them with cultivating Control for its own sake, of wanting to own the eyes of the last man staring up at the sky. Bendigan, who himself seems to be familiar with Burroughsian Virus Theory, closes out his initial entry like so:

“Food analogy: one must be careful only when selecting what food to swallow. In the realm of knowledge, data passes into our digestive system whether we choose it or not. One has a responsibility to ruminate with agency, as if one’s mind were a stomach, the neurons acting as enzymes of agency. May you, dear reader, gestate some truth from this raw material, and may their nutrients open new vistas for your empathetic imagination to plumb” (69).

With constant internet access turning us into baleen whales, swimming through the internet, jaws agape, constantly filter feeding the polluted waters abounding, how can we be careful of what data we ingest, what language invades us when we are so constantly immersed in it? What structures are these viruses forming within us that we mistake for organically occurring ideas? I believe it was Conner Habib who said that one of the most important spiritual practices of the modern age is to periodically acid wash all of our accumulated beliefs so that only what is True remains. What is a fever but the body’s acid wash? How exactly one goes about doing so in the soul and psyche, however, is another matter.

Finally, we arrive at the ur-disease, the one that finally made the motif stand out for me: Virus B-23 as found in Burroughs’ late career masterpiece, Cities of the Red Night.

Cities of the Red Night

The book, the first in a loose trilogy, starts out straight forward enough, at least for Burroughs. We get a brief history of Captain Mission (more often seen spelt Misson) and his short-lived pirate utopia in Madagascar. The ears of David Graeber readers might perk up here as they recall his Pirate Enlightenment. Although the story of Misson is thought to be apocryphal, Graeber concurs that Madagascar was—

“the place for radical social experiments. Pirates did experiment with new forms of governance and property arrangements; what’s more, so did members of the surrounding Malagasy communities into which they married, many of whom had lived in their settlements, sailed in their ships, formed blood brotherhood pacts, and spent many hours in political conversation with them.”

Burroughs takes Mission’s story and expands it into the seed for a worldwide anarchist revolution. The Articles, as instituted by Captain Mission, would abolish slavery, hold all property in common, abolish the death penalty, and institute complete religious freedom. The pirate foresaw this attracting the oppressed from all over the world to their cause. While it doesn’t exactly work out that way for him, his movement is picked up later on in colonial America and this narrative makes up one of the book’s three main strains.

The second follows the private investigator Clem Snide as he pursues a missing person case. His original ticket brings him to Athens where he discovers his subject is dead and missing his head. Snide then takes another case that brings him to Mexico City where an archaeologist has gone missing. It’s in pursuing this case that the book starts to get properly screwy.

Cue the third strand, the titular cities: Tamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis. This series of cities is said to have been located in the Gobi Desert some hundred thousand years ago, back when the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river. These cities, Mario Vrbančić writes, present “not just the unconscious, imprisoned in psychoanalytic language and symbolism…but the enlivening of dead possibility.”

The pirate rebellion could have happened, Burroughs insists. All the pieces were there: “The chance was there. The chance was missed.” These cities, then, exist in some kind of liminal, non-actualized space. As such, they are shifting, unstable, beautiful and horrifying at once, burning with colors one aches to see, existing simultaneously as ancient Mongolian city-states and futuristic space ports.

As the straight forward narrative of Book One crashes into the bulwark of these cities at the start of Book Two, accordioning in on itself, Burroughs’ old negative poetics erupt from the previously flat surface. The novel becomes one of image and reverie, largely centering on fever, sex, sex magic, and hanging. The binding control of narrative is broken even as there is a mad rush by various characters to reclaim it.

Fittingly, the Red Fever’s role in all of this is ambiguous as well. Like any virus, it mutates. Stories about it swirl with inconsistency, much like they’ve grown around Covid. It’s a lab leak; it’s a means for population control; it’s radioactive; it was sent into the past; it causes sex frenzies; it came from the jungle; it came from the Gobi Desert; it came from outer space; it’s lethal; it's liberating; it allows for the transmigration of souls; it’s all a story written in counterfeited imitations of ancient texts; it’s a high school play.

All of these layers and contradictions interrupt any primary narrative from taking control. Like Clem Snide using the I Ching and playback recording techniques in his investigation, they allow an element of randomness, of disorder into their midst. No clean message is allowed to grow. Instead, Burroughs constantly undercuts himself, revealing the falsity of the language, and allowing images to stand on their own, freed from all binds, becoming depthless as dreams.

Magical Working

An invocation, nestled at the start of the book, between the pirate history and chapter one, invokes Ix Tab, Goddess of ropes and snares, patronness of those who hang themselves. This Mayan psychopomp is eating good throughout the novel as the secret to transmigration is discovered to be contained in the ejaculate of the hanged, and a secret cult learns how to replicate themselves through the ages, sending their own soul into new vessels, endowed with the power to chase out the vessel’s native soul, but might all this endless cum be serving some other purpose?

It occurred to me that the book might be collecting this semen for its own meta magical working. Burroughs was famously interested in the work of Wilhelm Reich whose orgone accumulator actually receives a few mentions throughout Cities. It also happens to crop up in Kane’s Drippy Trippy Doom1:

“‘Electricity messes with the orgone accumulator.’

‘The what?’

‘Where I accumulate my orgones.’

‘Of course’” (39).

For Reich, orgone was the universal life force and was closely associated with sexuality, which he considered to be the primary energetic force of life. If sex magic is powered by orgasm, then Cities of the Red Night carries a huge charge as the male orgasm to page count ratio is off the charts. Could Burroughs be using chaos magic in an attempt to break language as a machine of control and reshape it into a means for liberation in the mind of his readers? Might the ambiguous nature of the Red Fever and the Cities reveal the illusory nature of all our creations? Showing them to be imaginary structures of varying permanence and usefulness, held together by systems of control?

If language binds symbol to the thing itself, Burroughs’ techniques tirelessly gnaw at the sinews. Breaking them completely would deliver us to a realm of total chaos, but he might have achieved some amount of loosening, gained a little bit of wiggle room, which is good because the thing itself tends to be rather loose, constantly in flux, divided into categories primarily for certain uses necessary to a shared existence. While one cannot live in such a state, it is good to remember such every once in a while. Traditionally, such reminders have been one of Trickster’s roles. He breaks and reaffirms at once. It is also what ritual does, delivering adherents to a liminal space where they can see the undergirding of society, and then, afterwards, reaffirming society’s authenticity and their role within it.

This brings us back to the ladybugs and their infinite plasticity. Earlier, we asked how to free them once they become ossified? David Leo Rice asks the same question, and takes some cues in answering it from Burroughs. His work, too, accumulates orgone in the form of masses of dead Squimbop. Death becomes as commonplace in his work as fucking is in Burroughs’.

Can all this violence be towards some end?

“‘This stalemate must end! The nuclear era has guaranteed that no decisive victory is possible. We cower, instead, in terror of the earth-shattering technologies our forefathers fashioned out of the quantum disturbance of the last World War, and satisfy ourselves with an endless succession of proxy wars that never result in the clarifying epochal shift we so profoundly crave and, indeed, deserve. No, instead, these minatory witnesses…have locked us into an endlessly self-perpetuating present. A zombie present, decades beyond its expiration date, children reliving the lives of their parents to ever diminishing returns, and yet the era has refused to expire because our fear of the future…has sealed us inside a loop where time can only grow stranger and stranger and stranger as we play at War without allowing it to swell into the kind of seismic historical shift that man-to-man combat, in its very essence, exists in order to activate. The putting of things to rest, like a battle in a ring of fire in the days of old. The very reason we wage War, the dim yet sacred hope of peace on the other side, is an utter sham so long as these monstrosities lord over the battlefield, mocking it in silence’” (155).

This feeling of frozenness is such a powerful presence that I sensed it even as a child. Burroughs has been writing about it since the 1950s. The desire for some great release is swollen to throbbing proportion, but systems of control hold us in place as rigidly as nuclear bombs promising mutual annihilation. However, as we hinted earlier, there might be some leakage. Not the release we crave, but a slow dribbling, a shift in atmosphere; a swelling.

Rice returns to this feeling in his long essay titled The Feast of Fools: On Carnival, Imagination, and Heresy in the Age of the Trickster. He envisions this swelling as an overlay of town and carnival. Whereas, you once had the carnival visit town and offer a physical and temporal zone for the townspeople to visit for a few nights of blowing off steam before returning to town with renewed vigor, much like rituals and rites of passage in more traditional societies, you now have a carnival that has set up its tents within the town, a blurring of chaos and order. There is no place to go to safely blow off steam, nor any home to return to afterwards. It is all happening at once. I encourage all to go read this essay as it offers some of the best advice for navigating such a world, but if I had to boil it down for you in as few words as possible, I would say: to survive in carnival-world, study The Magician.

Finally, I earlier called all the diseases we have here discussed gnostic pathologies, and in writing this piece I found myself arriving at a new understanding of Gnosticism. While I have never been very comfortable with the anti-materialism of the tradition, I came to see the pleroma not as some transcendental place, but as the base, material level of reality, what we have been referring to here as the infinitely plastic realm of the ladybugs. The shapes that it takes are a delusion in a certain sense as they all flow from one source, but in another, equally valid sense, nothing could be more real. As it turns out, it is pharmakonic ambiguity all the way down. Any perceived falsity is not necessarily evil, but rather a precondition for a shared universe. Even the much maligned demiurge need not be a villain. They are simply the nexus who holds together our created lifeworlds. It is only when that demiurge insists on hegemonic godhood, on becoming an unstoppable machine of control, that we end up with a situation like we have today, one we seem to be frozen inside of, but even here there are lines of flight for those magicians pirate-hearted enough to seize them.

[Exit Music]

I know how this sounds. Of course I tempered my initial paranoia with cold reason, but that reason was shortly blasted out of me. I could not deny what I saw. As sickening acceptance settled over me, my initial response was to sound the alarm, but I stayed myself. Though I must confess, originally this was only out of fear, for I dared not cross such a monster. You see, this being they have brought forth, or are in the midst of bringing forth, I do not know which, is of such vast and horrible proportion that, even after frantic investigation, I have still only glimpsed a single hand and a single leg.

Is it that this is all they have yet activated, or does their servitor exist on such a scale that my eyes could not behold the full breadth of its stance? I do not know. Though I have not slept and done little more than scour my humble library for further hints, I have failed to locate its other two appendages (if indeed only two more it has) nor its animating head. Like a paleontologist who happens across an ancient bone some millennia removed from the rest of its skeleton—I hope! I hope like a scientist and not like a dog with a bone, for it would make me a mad dog indeed— I have had to piece together the rest with what knowledge I have, and that knowledge tells me any alarm would be useless. This being, once raised, will not be stopped. Cannot be. The machinations of this league of writers have been as careful as they are powerful, so that I feel certain that, whatever their intention, it will be fulfilled.

If it wasn’t for my meddling deep in that section of the library, and a bit of lucky (or perhaps unlucky) happenstance, I am sure they would have carried their task out in total secrecy. Their creation might even now move amongst us, bending its masters’ will towards reality, unseen despite its massive stature, for it possesses an obscene cloaking ability, and is capable of moving through a medium unglimpsed by us sweet dwellers of the dayworld. And these are only some of the powers granted by the two known limbs. Who can say the scope of its full capacity?

Call me a coward if you will, but I have chosen to put my faith in this brute. Too long have I scurried the corridors of the Black Iron Prison like a rat, searching for any seam through which I might squeeze. Let us for once match might with might. Arise, ye young titan, and may your unseen head pierce this false sky; may your arms bend black metal and allow the true light of the sun to wash against our paled faces; arise and fulfill your fate; wrestle the demiurge to the ground, and smite him his final blow!

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Leg

It is common practice in secret societies for one cell to have no knowledge of its brother cells, or even for one member of a given cell to be uninformed on the activities of another of that same cell, for the left hand to not know what the right is doing, to borrow a fitting phrase. This is meant to protect the collective. If one is discovered, they cannot be forced to disclose anything about the others, for they know nothing. In such a fashion, I believe these writers are working, for their texts give no indication as to who else might be involved. Instead, each writer has been tasked with the sole purpose of manifesting a single body part. Not only does this protect the larger project, but it will endow the being, when it comes together, like Megazord, with an incredible amount of psychic power, for each limb will have been lovingly crafted. Beyond that, they seem to have chosen writers with healthy readerships, and it will be these readers’ focused attention that further charges the given limb, so that I shiver to imagine the being in toto.

The first glimpse I received caught me totally off-guard. As I have said, I had snuck down to my library for a bit of reading of the usual sort when the leg stepped down hard right in front of me. It was a single leg, psychically projected directly into my reading room. I marveled at it, and wondered if it could see me in return, but I don’t think it was truly there. I believe some force was giving me a special vision, though for what purpose I cannot say. Still, I dared not move until the vision dissipated. At the time, I did not know what the hell to make of this apparition, and naturally feared that I might have simply lost my grip, but soon I would begin to piece it together.

The manifestation of this first limb had been trusted to none other than Brian Evenson, one of the living masters of the new new weird, or whatever we want to name this crop of artists who are currently working at the height of their powers. He will give it a fatal charge, indeed. Few writers of strange tales can point to a generator more potent than Evenson’s official excommunication, not direct from the Pope, but from America’s own Rome out in Utah.

This leg bookends his collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, starring in the opener, appropriately titled Leg, and reappearing in the last and titular story. If this double appearance as both alpha and omega was not enough to draw my attention, then the obvious Moby-Dick references certainly did. Recently I have been deeply immersed in a careful reread of that foundational text, and will be the first to admit that I have grown liable to draw connections with it anywhere and everywhere, but these associations were too direct to mistake, and it makes good sense. If they are going for power than what tappable source more bountiful than the leviathan himself?

In Leg we have the story of a starship captain named Hekla who, like Ahab, wears one false leg. Unlike Ahab, Hekla’s leg is not simply derived from the bone of a living creature, but is itself a living creature:

“When she needed to walk about her vessel this served as a leg for her, but once she was alone in her quarters she would unstrap it and it would unfurl to become a separate being, something she could converse with, a trusted advisor, a secret friend” (1).

We receive only scant details of this leg’s origins. It first appeared to Hekla, as a being “made of angles and light”, directly after she lost her natural leg, volunteering itself to play that role for her, and thereby saving her life. It then served her well for many years before eventually revealing to the captain its knowledge about a space-dwelling creature of titanic proportion, something that might be a worthy foe that the captain might like to hunt:

“‘On the winds of darkness is a creature as long as this vessel, and that moves in a slow, undulating pattern across the currents of space. Its back is quivered with spines, and it is long and thin like a snake but has the head and metal-breaking bill of a bony fish’” (5).

When the captain is swayed to this venture, only the navigator prevents the hunt from commencing. The ship is duty-bound, and that duty overrides even the captain’s orders. Distraught, she returns to her cabin and confides her failure in the leg, saying the navigator would sooner die than break course, and as much as she wants to hunt this creature, she is unwilling to kill her navigator.

It is then that the leg reveals another secret: it can take the captain’s form, or the form of anyone it pleases, and do what she is unwilling to do. With the captain’s permission, leg takes her form and kills the navigator, giving Hekla the freedom to pursue that creature, but then only a few clipped paragraphs later Hekla herself is dead and the leg is proven to be the larval stage of that very creature it urged her to hunt:

“Soon it reached its mature form and became snake-bodied with the head of a bony fish, as it had always been meant to do. It is no doubt out there still, swimming alone along a current of darkness” (5).

Sentience, shape-shifting, and this final form are quite the array of powers to pack into a single leg, but there is another, very important one that Evenson slips in. It is a blink-and-miss-it inclusion, but he specifically describes the monster’s beak as metal-breaking. Now why include this odd detail if not designing a creature capable of destroying the Black Iron Prison?

By granting their creation such vast power, this clandestine operation is playing with fire. Egregores are not loyal in the way that tulpas and golems are generally believed to be. As a joint-stock creation, they are open to a far greater influence than those singly devoted beings, but this explains the need for a writer like Evenson. Such might surely requires a hell of a battery. It can acquire some charge by tapping into Moby-Dick whose captain is also becoming that which he hunts, starting with his whale bone leg, but allusion alone is not enough. Such power needs eyes. To maintain an egregore requires mental energy and devotion. This means readers.

But beyond all that, some counterbalancing force is required to prevent this leg from leading the egregore to a similarly doomed fate as in the story, something capable of channeling that snake-bodied fish into a force for good, or else we will have only replaced one cruel god with an even more horrible one.

Hand

That the creation of one hand was trusted to none less than Michael Cisco further convinces me of the rightness of my suspicion that whoever is behind this project has recruited only the brightest luminaries of the field. Cisco might not have quite the name recognition of Evenson, but he has a fiercely devoted following and a demonstrated understanding of egregores, for what is Animal Money if not an audition for his role in which he proves his familiarity with the physical effects that psychic phenomena can have?

Such a writer as Cisco is just the man to provide the counterbalancing force that will prevent Evenson’s leg from taking over. For similar reasons, I have been looking high, not low, in my search for the remaining conjurers, wearing out the spines of my copies of the mature generation of weird fiction writers: Miéville and Ligotti, VanderMeer, Barron, and Link, but to no avail. I am but one reader and no doubt there are writers I am missing. It is also possible they have intermixed less recognizable names so as to better avoid detection, but would these limbs then not prove underdeveloped in their charge? Another possibility is that my monolingual tongue has once again betrayed me and the remaining works exist in other languages, for the Black Iron Prison effects far more than the anglosphere. The literary zeitgeist has moved on from North America, after all. I suspect it currently inspirits that continent directly to our south whose works I read in translation, but with whose modern canon I am not familiar enough to confidently pinpoint the most likely candidates.

It could also be time, not space, that I must travail. Surely Evenson and Cisco, good Deleuzians both, would not deign to release an egregore of Lovecraft’s design upon the world, but what about their more direct ancestor, Robert Aickman? Is his cold hand that other for which I have been searching? I suppose it cannot be ruled out, but the fact that both Evenson and Cisco’s collections dropped in 2021 has me believing this is a contemporary project being carried out by contemporary writers. The political current of weird fiction has shifted well away from its more reactionary origins, so a political project spanning generations makes little sense. No, this must be a response to the dire situation into which we have been descending, so most likely is that I am simply missing the corresponding recent works of the originally listed authors, or some near relations, but I must admit the possibilities are dizzying!

For that reason, let us focus on what is in front of us: a leg and a hand. The hand in question is to be found in My Hand of Glory, the fourth story in Cisco’s Antisocieties. Like Leg, it tells the story of the odd discovery and subsequent incorporation of a powerful body part. Here, the hand is discovered in a box beneath a tree on Christmas Day. A present indeed, but from who?

In this story, Cisco is borrowing from a bit of old European folk magic. A Hand of Glory is the pickled appendage of a hanged man, cut off while the man is still hanging. It is common to take the left hand of most criminals, but the right of murderers, for it is that hand which is assumed to have been the one to “do the deed”. A variety of powers are attributed to these totems which were made to serve either as candles or candle holders, and in this new form they would continue their afterlife of crime, as the Hand of Glory was commonly a magical tool of thieves.

An Incomplete List of Some of the Hand of Glory’s Abilities:

1. As long as the Hand’s candle is burning, those in the house being burgled will be held in a sort of coma, or deep sleep.

2. The Hand’s candle casts light only for its holder.

3. A veil of darkness will be cast upon any waking person in the Hand’s vicinity, other than the holder.

4. Any lock will open to the holder while the Hand’s candle is lit.

5. The Hand’s candle can burn forever.

Of course, to simply find a Hand of Glory, or even to use one, would be more in line with a gothic tale. Cisco’s piece must act not only as a servable bit of weird fiction, but it must also generate the magical charge needed to provide the egregore with a hand, so it is only right that the Hand of Glory replaces the narrator’s natural extremity:

“My left hand had come off by itself, during the night, and floated down towards the foot of the bed…I went directly to the box, opened it, pulled out my hand of glory…and I pressed the severed end of the ragged, leathery wrist to the numb and raw stump of my left arm” (45-46).

The suturing of this Hand of Glory to the body of the narrator endows him with many of the powers associated with the artifact, but rather than using it for simple thievery, he says he wants to steal back “all those stolen moments wasted trudging through one weary day after another” (50).

By believing in the Hand, I have been blessed by its candlelight, and this light has awoken me to the truth. I see how Hekla’s ill-fated journey was initiated by a similar desire to escape ennui. The leg did not disclose its information about the monster until the captain complained of being bored, of the monotony of floating through space all day. That, diary, gives me hope. I have attached my devotion to the enemy of suffocating boredom, and is not the very air of the Black Iron Prison an ambient monotony, a slow and constant choking, ever present even apart from its more acute punishments?

The Hand’s light has stirred me. No longer can I fail to see “who is awake and who is asleep”, and like Cisco’s narrator, I too am shocked to realize how many sleepers there are, “and how many of those who pretend to the great wisdom are not only themselves sleepers, but among the most deeply asleep” (52). But I cannot hold them solely accountable. It is this infernal prison air, the tainted tallow light which is all there is to see by in such a dungeon as ours.

As is written in the scriptures, in the Book of Melville:

“To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!” (481).

Then what is this Hand of Glory’s light, but a small flame of the true light? A captured bit of the sun, shining down here in hell? This egregore, then, our Prometheus, has brought us the light of the gods. May its Glorious light blind the archons, our wardens! These magnificent conjurers have located the enemy, and they have shaped their creation into the only thing it fears: a being of metal-breaking light, charged by the vast battery of our collective power!

I cast my sprinkle of devotion into the great vats already gathered. May our will guide thee, oh Giant. Break open the wrought iron ceiling encasing us, let us fill our lungs with great gulps of that uncorrupted air, and see each other, for the first time, in the true light of Day!

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[Exit Music]

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Five of Cups

As I mentioned last month, every full moon my wife and I draw a single Tarot card each. For her, the Snow Moon revealed The Chariot and the next day she rode straight into an offer for a new position at work that has proven to be a major improvement. Meanwhile, I received the Five of Cups. Not a particularly good omen. It is often said to represent grief, loss, regret, or an excessive focus on the negative. As seen below, it features a rather gloomy young fellow standing on the bank of a river with his head bowed, shoulders slumped, three spilt cups before him, town walls in the distance. Importantly, there are two cups still standing behind him, though he does not heed these.

If I were to approach this scene from behind, I’d assume from his stature that the young man on the card had a phone in hand and was staring down into its glow. In such a case, grief, loss, and regret would be perfectly normal responses, as anyone who has spent any time online in the last month should well know. Shit is bleak, to say the least. The latest tranche of Epstein emails has further revealed the total, utter rot this system is built on. Meanwhile, Washington drools over the possibility of war with Iran. Stability is nonexistent. It feels as if almost anything could happen from day to day. And the idea of any justice being served seems remote enough to be fully dependent on some kind of divine intervention. Yet we are expected to go on, working, paying our taxes, sitting in traffic, making rent, going to the grocery store. It all rings so hollow. We live in a false world made by monsters.

And yet—

There are two cups left standing behind the young man’s back.

The Two of Cups is among the best omens in the deck. It represents harmony, attraction, balance, connection. These are the actual human relationships in our lives. One might think of this as the microcosm that so easily gets lost against the macrocosm of geopolitics and national tragedy. Of course, it would be equally dangerous to turn and focus exclusively on the two standing cups and forget about the huge mess behind us. Such would be to bury our heads in the sand. To plug up our ears as the world burns.

I spent much of this month feeling truly frozen, gutsick with anxiety and dread as I watched so many horrible events play out, and felt unable to put my energy anywhere productive. What good is writing and reading? It became difficult to focus on either. Instead I just kept picking up my phone every few minutes, and it was like my screen was a portal that dumped every awful revelation directly into my lap, but out the window everything looked about as usual1. And every few minutes, I still had to manage a “Would you like oat milk with that?”

The Five of Cups could not have felt more appropriate, but was that an excuse to simply wallow? I have a young daughter to take care of. I cannot simply sink into despair, but neither did I want to suppress these feelings, close myself off from the very real suffering going on, and pretend that everything is right and good.

In pondering this card over the last month, I kept returning to the Middle Way, a central practice in Buddhism, and one that sometimes gets mistaken for an idealized centrism, but in actuality is a much more active and on-going way of being that values fluidity and attention, of living amongst contradictions, like water feeling out its path.

Domyo Burke, Zen priest and host of the Zen Studies Podcast, has a lot to say on the topic in episode 191: Contemplating the Future: The Middle Way Between Dread and Hope:

“Practically speaking, how do we find the Middle Way between hope and dread, denial and obsession? We start by reminding ourselves that the Middle Way is not a fixed place, it’s a path of practice. It’s probably best described as not getting stuck in extremes. Not falling into duality. Being real.

You may find it helpful to think of your practice, as I do, as containing three essential ingredients. As I’ve discussed a number of times, the ingredients are facing the truth (or bearing witness), staying strong (taking care), and taking action (engaging the world with generosity). Only you can know how that balance should manifest in your life, and it’s a balance that has to be maintained. That’s why I like to call these ‘ingredients’ – like you’re constantly cooking your life. As conditions change, your practice will need to change.”

That last line feels particularly insightful. Conditions are changing. Of course, looking at our phones and saying “Shit’s crazy” was never enough, but now doing nothing more than that might actually drive you crazy. Yes, it might take the three biggest spills at any one time and deliver them into your lap, but only as spectacle. There’s probably not much you can directly do about those except watch in slack-jawed horror, but put the phone down and turn around and there are sure to be two locally contained (ie not yet spilled) problems just behind you, and maybe you can find and join some group who is helping to do something about those, and in the process get that inner water flowing again, and you won’t feel so stagnant and fucking gutsick and crazy—but excuse me. I’m just talking to myself now.

Y’all are here to check out a list of books, so please follow me. This way.

Have your tickets at the ready.

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“Motherfucker, you gotta recognize where you are, and then you gotta get past that. You gotta be unemotional. You can’t sink into this hole. You live in the oubliette. Your job is to crawl up the ladder, motherfucker. You live in the HOLE. You’re in the HOLE. You are a RAT. And the rat, when he’s in the hole gets fucked. People only throw trash in the hole.

You need to eat a body. And you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry a plague around this whole world, that will change this whole fuckin’ world. And all your enemies will vomit black bile and will choke on blood and will grow boils and die. But only if you get together with your other RATS. And you come up with some kind of super plague, to fuckin’ end your enemies and—

End. This. Nightmare.”

I am sorry to report that in the six succeeding years, we have not ended this nightmare. In fact, the nightmare has only deepened. If you are reading this in the year 2026, I don’t think I need to go too much into the weeds here to flesh out what I mean by this.

People have been throwing around the phrase the New Dark Ages, and it’s no real surprise why. Still reeling from a global pandemic that was never, and probably never will be, adequately addressed, a rash of tyrants, mass paranoia, and an economic future our tech overlords are increasingly pushing towards serfdom, a renewed interest in the so-called Dark Ages only makes sense.

Speaking of our tech overlords—you may know Alex Karp as that geeked out old guy who went viral a couple months back and said that Mexican nationals should “wake up scared and go to sleep scared”. I am sorry to say he is the CEO of Palantir. Palantir, if you have not heard, is a tech company who, among other things, provides mass surveillance for the government. Their AI powered data-analysis is used both by ICE and Israel to track and target individuals.

Recently, Karp complained in his book that American arms manufacturers are constrained by too many ethical constraints. He really is speedrunning his way to the inner circle of most-hated billionaires. Still, he has done one useful thing. His recent comments about AI making us all work like peasants pulled taut in my mind the lines connecting the trilogy of albums by British avant-folk musician, Richard Dawson. An evil tech company producing the tools to bring us into darkness of future’s past: that’s all the ingredients for his Trilogy for All Time.

Readers of the music and culture mag, The Quietus, will be familiar with the publication’s golden boy, but, in case you are not, Richard Dawson is a musician from Newcastle. I have used the descriptor ‘avant folk’, but take your pick. His genre of choice might equally be described as freak or experimental folk, at least those are the labels other reviewers have attempted to peg him with. In a now 12-year old interview with The Guardian, Dawson says the term he prefers is “ritual community music”, and he probably is too nebulous for any prescription more specific than that. His career spans nearly twenty years and he seems to reinvent his style with each release1. Even the albums making up this loose trilogy vary wildly, but the message remains consistent:

“There has to be more than this.”

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Then

Released in 2017, Peasant ushers in the trilogy with a mighty ‘Herald’ of brass that builds majestically for two minutes before breaking down into a series of disquieting fart jokes. Mood set, we move immediately into ‘Ogre’ which situates us, as if with a camera fading in from above, in a small village in the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bryneich, in the vicinity of modern day Newcastle, where we will be staying for the next two thousand or so years:

“A dice of houses cast with clay and sheepdung
Through a soup of starlit peatsmoke
Gradually emerges as we descend.”

Bryneich, or Bernicia, spanned the region of northern England and southern Scotland back in the post-Roman power vacuum of the 7th century. Little is known about the area during this period. Even the origin of its name is less than sure, although best guesses have it derived from a Celtic word meaning “the Land of the Mountain Passes”. This lack of known facts gives Dawson freedom to sketch out a whole world here. He uses touchstones from our shared storehouse of medieval imagery, both historical and fantastical, but he has little interest in the high fantasist’s knights, kings, or royal courts. Instead, the stories pool in the lowest levels, around beggars, paranoid villagers, and in the anarchic zones beyond the king’s reach.

Around the same time this album was released, Oisín Fagan’s brilliant debut novel, Nobber, came out. It is another work set in the Medieval Islands of the North Atlantic, but this time over in Ireland in the summer of 1348. The bubonic plague has swept through the country, killing many, scattering leadership, and generally confusing the known order of things. It feels like a literary extension of the universe Dawson is creating and I often think of Nobber and Peasant as a pair2.

During times of upheaval, faith in the status quo weakens, and people become more open to radical change. However, as so often happens, rather than seizing the opportunity and striving towards a common good, a despot moves in. The town of Nobber falls into chaos, and is eventually beseeched by conmen.

Arriving just in time to witness a mob of townsfolk commit a murder, the conman then uses his witness as blackmail to take control. Thanks to the chaos of the moment and the collapse of the old status quo, there is no structure to resist him, and he is able to take over the town quite easily. With the aid of plague-necessitated quarantine, he uses blackmail, fear-mongering, and threat of violence to propel himself to a place of ultimate power. With the villagers trapped inside their houses, Fagan holds us to bear witness to a sick town losing its collective mind3. Confusion, dead bodies, and rot seem to crowd every home while a mysterious and maddening knock sounds at every door.

Chaos reins.

Fagan’s novel shares its claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere with Peasant, but both the book and the album remain shot through with hope. While Dawson uses sudden lifts in mood, Fagan intermixes a deadpan humor into the intimate confusion, often to stomach-churning results. Despite the dreadful circumstances, the thing that flutters just off the page, never fully gone, yet always just out of reach, is Pandora’s dingleberry, hope:

“The lands are emptied out now and there are too few peasants to till the earth, but still their only wish is that their wages be raised. They could, in this confusion, or any of the ones that so often beset us, seize the country, reign it eternally, make it in their own lowly image, but even their dreams are limited by coin. Even they are trapped within its dreams, they who gain nothing by allegiance to it.”

Such is the curse upon Dawson’s own characters. They may never relinquish their hope, but it is rarely a collective hope, centering, more often, upon getting through another day, or escaping some immediate circumstance. Dawson doesn’t belittle these characters though. They are products of their milieu and he treats them with great tenderness and respect. Each song on Peasant is titled for a different medieval archetype: Soldier, Weaver, Beggar, etc, but he is not content to stick with the familiar; instead these archetypes are exploded into specifics through a genius of oblique lyricism that one sees compared to no one so often as Joanna Newsom4:

“Leaving the path lured by an emerald
I wander into the Bog of Names
Now I'm stuck fast
Calves sorry henges
Glued with the silence of newts in the gloaming
My leather flask froze to my hand
Globelets of wine rubies on my chin.”

These are the kind of lyrics that sound anything but lyrical when read on the page. Like Newsom, Dawson eschews the easy rhyme, forcing his Geordie tongue to find some other way to alchemize beauty out of the dense syllables, but this is not just him showing off his writing chops. It is this careful attention to the microcosm that creates the macrocosm5 and, after a few listens, one begins to feel themselves fully transported to this distant backwater of the Dark Ages.

Like the temporal games Pynchon plays in Gravity’s Rainbow when he maps post-war Europe onto the United States of the 1960s, Dawson draws on the old paranoia and daily struggle of the medieval subject until it slips over our own day and age like a thin veil. As this most recent tranche of Epstein files has revealed, the complete and utter rot our system is built upon would make the most decadent of medieval courts blush.

Backlit by those horrors, the track ‘Prostitute’ has become a standout on recent listens. As you may have already guessed, it tells the tale of a prostitute, a young woman who is sold into a life of sex work after her father dies.

“How is it so
A child can be bought for a year's worth of grain?
In this day and age
It's hard to explain but it happens again and again.”

Power vacuums like the one in Bernicia create the perfect conditions for this situation. With no institutional powers in place, the social safety net is nonexistent. Naomi Klein covers this quite thoroughly in The Shock Doctrine. When Neoliberalism destabilizes nations to do their societal looting, the effects are most felt by the people living there.

explores this in relation to the post-collapse years in Russia:

Homelessness was virtually nonexistent in the Soviet Union, but in the 1990s, it became a widespread crisis. The number of homeless children surged to levels not seen since the post-war years, when many were orphaned during the Great Patriotic War. By the 1990s, this figure had skyrocketed, reaching approximately 2 million.

Under these economic conditions, prostitution proliferated. The fall of the Soviet Union proved a bonanza to the oligarch class, both here in the west and in Russia, and it is far from an anomaly. It is a recognized pattern that neoliberalism both creates and takes advantage of. Many of the Russian and Eastern European women who tried to escape their circumstances by following ‘modeling’ careers west, only found themselves enmeshed in the web of Epstein. For the titular character of the song, however, there is one major difference: namely that this is the seventh century and the map is less set. Hope persists beyond the horizon.

The song opens with the woman asking “Is there no reason for me to exist, but for as a plaything of miscreants, malingerers, dastards and knaves?”, but it takes a turn when the narrator’s client “choke[s] to death on a dummy of puke” and she is able to seize this opportunity to steal his horse. Dawson ends on a chill-inducing note of triumph as she rides out of this “country of demons made flesh,” towards some unknown border.

‘Prostitute’ is not alone on the album in her hope to find a better life some place else. ‘Soldier’ hopes for the same. On the eave of battle, his heart is full of dread, as the refrain goes. It’s only the thought of returning home, marrying his love, and finding some better place where they might raise a family that keeps him going. In thinking of that, the final repetition of the refrain changes to “My heart is full of hope”. It is one of the high points of the album and marks out one of the most important through lines in the trilogy: the dichotomy of hope and dread. While dread may be the primary feeling here (in fact Dominic Angelella refers to Dawson as the Poet Laureate of British Dread) overlaying the trilogy like a heavy blanket, hope continues to poke its nose through.

Like Prostitute, Soldier’s hope is born of the more liminal era in which the album is set. The borders aren’t so hard drawn. In the wake of the Roman occupation, things have not yet settled. If danger persists, so does magic. There are ogres and seers and shapeshifters, and it still seems possible that some better life might actually lay a horse ride away. In our collective imagination, this is the era of Happily Ever After, but what happens when the place you already are becomes that better place others are escaping to?

Now

With Peasant, I focused primarily on the lyrical content, largely because if I were to talk too much about the music I’d quickly be out of my depth, but I must say something here because the sonic qualities of these albums are equally as important to the mood and there is a major shift between each. Here, with 2020, we leave behind the acoustic strings and backing chorus of Peasant for something much more modern, heavy, and fragmented, befitting of its setting in modern day Newcastle.

Released in 2019, 2020 has proven a bit prophetic. While it might not have been particularly difficult to diagnose that things were going rather poorly in jolly old England at the time, that 2020 would become shorthand for how truly off the rails we have gone was impossible to know. Until then, those particularly privileged citizens of the West might still have managed to convince themselves that this was all somehow for them; that the rest of the world was there merely to act as mine, refinery, and storehouse for all their needs, but that illusion was becoming harder to maintain without some real high wire mental gymnastics. Neoliberalism’s shock doctrine had come home and the social safety net was becoming threadbare.

In 2020, the hope that Soldier and Prostitute clung to has in many ways diminished. The world is now fully mapped. There are no more mysteries beyond the horizon. The ebbing tide hides no ogres. People are simply trapped and stewing. This had been the case already, but quarantine went and made it quite literal.

At the same time, the total opposite is true. In an essay about Tolkien, Gene Wolfe wrote that in “one very real sense…the Dark Ages were the brightest of times… [because] they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms.” There may not be much hope of escaping the role you were born into, but at least you are assured a role. For that reason, each track on Peasant is titled after one of these definite positions, none of them particularly enviable, but there you go. In 2020, such is far from a guarantee, so there does remain a kind of liminality, but it has soured into a sort of invisibility beneath society rather than beyond it. Danger of falling into this zone is the stick that propels the whole thing forward. What Karp seems to be saying about everyone working like peasants is that society has become a game of musical chairs and the number of seats are dwindling. If you find yourself left standing at the end of the song, there will be no recourse for you. Down in the hole with the rats you go.

For that reason, the songs on 2020 are named less after specific societal roles than situations. The only two tracks that are explicitly about particular roles are both about workers who loathe their jobs: ‘Civil Servant’ and ‘Fulfillment Center’.

I was working in a warehouse myself when this album dropped and I used to listen to the ten minute ‘Fulfillment Center’ on repeat as I made my drive to and from work. It was the most miserable job I have ever had. Ten to twelve hour shifts toiling away in an invisible warehouse just off the highway, all with a wrist-mounted computer that tracked our pace, making sure we remained up to the company’s par. I woke up each morning feeling as if I’d been run over by a truck, and that grueling monotony took every bit as much of a mental toll. There would sometimes be tears in my eyes by the time I pulled into the parking lot and listened to the outro one final time before bracing myself for the day:

“There's more, there has to be
More to life than killing yourself to survive
One day, I'm going to run my own cafe
Ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh.”

This line echos one from ‘Prostitute’, but here there is no chance to escape. My managers could have all choked on dummies of puke, but there would still be no border I could have turned and driven my pallet truck towards, no better country to raise up a family in. They simply would have been replaced by the company and we’d move on. The best one can hope for is to work on their own terms, ie run their own cafe. Dawson taps directly into this feeling of helpless misery that appears ever on the brink of boiling over into action, but never quite to any effect.

It is present in Fulfillment Center—

“A gentleman who spoke little English
Started to scream at the top of his lungs
No one could understand what he was getting at
Everyone stared ahead and kept working until
Someone came from on high to escort him from the building.”

—as well as in the opener, ‘Civil Servant’, which is something like the white collar version of ‘Fulfillment Center’:

“I don’t want to go into work this morning
I don’t think I can deal with the wrath of the general public
And I don’t have the heart to explain to another poor soul
Why it is their Disability Living Allowance will be stopping shortly.”

It’s one of the most universal feelings in contemporary society. Practically everyone I know, whatever their political leaning, hates their job, and yet on we go clocking in and out, spending the majority of our waking hours laboring away for the benefit of someone further up the ladder, totally alienated from ourselves and our fellow humans, meanwhile that resentment just eats away our interior.

I don’t think I will ever forget the feeling I had after my first shift. I was sixteen and had just been hired as a dishwasher at a fast food taco shop. By the end, I was soaked in dish water, reeking of lard, and probably on the verge of dehydration6. The next day was Saturday, no school, which meant I could work the lunch shift. My second shift began in just twelve hours. My life no longer felt like it belonged to me. It was no longer this long, flowing, free expanse of possibility, but instead it was chopped up, punctuated by work into these short gasps of free time. It was a true existential horror I felt, but I didn’t know how to voice it. When my dad asked how my first day went, I tried to tell him, but, if I was expecting sympathy, I got none. He’d been broken upon the wheel of his own twenty-plus years of commuting to an insurance job he hated.

A similar lack of solidarity haunts 2020. Many of the struggles are totally insular and could be solved by an honest conversation that will never happen. Rather than an ogre besieging a town, Dawson kneads in modernity’s more ambient anxieties, such as the stress to perform well that a child feels during a soccer game (‘Two Halves’), the melancholy of empty-nesters (‘Fresher’s Ball’), the fear that a partner is cheating (‘Heart Emoji’), and the unmoored paranoia of a life lived online (‘Jogging’).

These may be rather mundane, everyday realities7, many of them playing out totally in the psyche, but Dawson weaves this heavy feeling of dread that elevates each to a song-worthy Event, an archetype in itself, and he does all this as if a character from within the sung-about universe, someone who foresees the vibeshift several years before it was given an official name:

“I know I must be paranoid
I feel the atmosphere
round here is growing nastier
People don’t smile anymore.”

So if this is meant to be the good place on the other side of the border that others are risking everything to reach, there must be some reason why it feels like such utter shit. As we see in rather stark reality today, it has become those crossing the borders in hopes of finding a better life, rather than the vampires at the top of the system who have pilfered up everything for themselves, who bare the brunt of the blame for the bottoming out of society. Dawson does not shy away from this. While he writes his characters with pathos, a lot of them are still total wankers. In ‘The Queen’s Head’, “the fat-headed butcher” blames a flood on immigrants, and in ‘Jogging’ a Kurdish family has a brick put through their window; the police know who did this, but still they do nothing.

The peasants might be angry, but they have no access to the king or anyone in charge, and they are terrified of falling through the floor to even worse conditions, so they are more than willing to step on the heads of those beneath them to keep their own above water.

We are rats in a hole.

Forever

The Ruby Cord stands at the end of this cycle as both a sort of dystopian future that this trajectory leads to, and a further layering of life as it is right now. It picks up five hundred years after 2020. We are delivered into this distant future by a forty-one minute intro (‘The Hermit’) which itself contains a quiet, minimalist eleven and a half minute instrumental before the first lyric. It feels, if you surrender yourself to it, as if you are being carried to this very distant place, but it is something of a demanding album. In a way, it is a call back to Dawson’s earlier career, a reminder that Peasant and 2020 are Dawson at his most accessible. The Ruby Cord is sonically more similar to Peasant than 2020, but it is stripped down and much slower, making it feel far more remote and alien than its predecessors. Fitting for its role, but not an album to simply throw on after a long day.

While Peasant and 2020 situate us quite concretely in a time and place, The Ruby Cord is unstuck. Is it future? Is it past? The opening imagery is rather medieval, and if you thought we were going deep into the microcosmic with Peasant, oh buddy.

Alexa, zoom in on that leaf through which the sun is shining. Enhance.

“Vaporous shafts of a burgeoning sun
skewer the forest-floor onto a world fresh begun
all in the Name of the Harvest,
i.e. our ever-onrushing plasma.

Shadows of leaves
mottled by the cleaves
of caterpillar’s ardent mandibles
form a basketweave of glowing mud,
bluebells in bud.”

Such pastoral lyrics make up the vast majority of ‘The Hermit’ as our titular character walks through this landscape apparently void of humanity’s encroachment, naming flora and revealing some of his past, but then “a storm of info [breaks] across [his] retina,” giving The Hermit the ability to access deep data banks about every lifeform around him. It is a shock as the listener realizes this character is a cyborg or at least technologically augmented in unknown ways, but then The Hermit lulls us back into his spell by using his new ability to return to examining the surrounding plant life. The song ends when a robot suddenly appears, or seems to. Upon “higher magnification”, it turns out to be a man dressed as a knight of old, “submerged at the waist in unyielding concrete.”

And what can the poor listener ask, but where the hell are we?

By the onset of The Ruby Cord, society has properly collapsed, but its technology remains strewn across the landscape. If I think of Peasant in tandem with Nobber, than The Ruby Cord might be an optimist’s prequel to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home which also takes place in a distant post-collapse future, and features an odd mix of the futuristic and the archaic, but in Le Guin we see a new society that has reorganized its relationship to technology in a healthy way. With Ruby Cord, we have not yet reached that time. Rather than a loving community, the album is spotted with individuals, or ‘Hermits’, who must make use of the available technology in their new desolation, or else it will continue to make use of them.

In ‘Thicker Than Water’, we follow a narrator whose family is locked within some virtual reality Matrix. He rips off their goggles and destroys the screens, but to no avail. Nothing changes. They are gone. He then flees down the abandoned highway system, “once the rumbling arteries of a great city,” now showing no sign of life, without purpose or direction.

It is a rather ambiguous song because Dawson is not simply spamming the touch grass meme. If his message is pro-luddite, it is only in the sense that Pynchon meant it in Is It OK to be a Luddite?, not a blanket rejection of technology, but an insistence to not let it become more than a tool, a prescient message as AI threatens to displace countless human roles. If our economic situation was differently calibrated, this might be a cause for celebration, a liberation from work, but instead it is an ushering of unprecedented numbers into that shadow zone beneath society.

That is where the suspicion of technology we see in ‘The Tip of an Arrow’ comes from. A father, named Temperance might I add, making for the third reference to a major arcana on this album8, tries to teach his daughter about the importance of doing things by hand, and not always resorting to the retina-display access to the internet that has been laced into their bodies:

“That in a world such as today’s
Where each person can display a bounty of data
On the quivering cave wall of their eyeball at the merest flick of a lash
The only facts of any worth are not so easily dispersed
Yes, it matters how we learn
Real knowledge must be earned
Everything else is a husk:
Wisdom’s simulacrum”

For philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing. The first, analysis, is the type of knowledge that an artificial intelligence might offer, a step-by-step guide, such as one might find on wikiHow or any number of YouTube tutorials. Certainly useful under the right conditions, but it is a knowledge from outside.

Intuition is a direct and intimate form of knowledge, the kind of second nature, or flow state, that one is able to enter into only after something has been baked into one’s being through repetition. This is the knowledge of the practiced musician or athlete. Think back to ‘Two Halves’, the track on 2020 where the kid cannot get out of his own head during the soccer game and winds up botching every chance he gets. He is outside the game. To truly play, one must lose themselves in it. The hunter must approach his prey in the same way. There is a sort of becoming-animal that is necessary.

It is this embodiedness that we have lost touch with by the time of 2020, and that is why prescribing exercise as a medicine actually does have some positive effect on the narrator of ‘Jogging’: an elemental medicine for an elemental disease, as Gaston Bachelard would say. Each time we gaze into our phone, we swim through a world of detached images. The various exhibits representing our own time in ‘Museum’ might be from an actual museum of the future, but it also works quite well as a metaphor for what one comes across on social media: “Scared young soldiers wielding guns/Shoppers idly flicking through clothes/Gently spinning astronauts/A classroom deep in thought/Throngs of cheering football fans/A doctor crying alone/Riot police beating climate protestors/Babies being born.”

The barrage of images one scrolls past are totally removed from context, and the carouseling effect of the scroll metabolizes each into an equilibrium of importance, adding false weight to the totally mundane, and robbing the actual weight from true horrors.

These three albums emit a call to remember that whatever abstractions history might consists of, backwards-flying angels or what-have-you, it is made up of individual human lives. That could maybe serve as the thesis for this trilogy which is at once epic in its scope, and touchingly intimate in its details. For all of our millennia of macroscale fuck ups, something keeps hope alive on the micro side, that is, in our daily lives. What is communicating to us from beyond this Black Iron Prison of our own creation? What is the source of this in-breaking hope that so consistently keeps afloat the dream of a better alternative in the midst of such dreadful circumstances?

Perhaps it is only that The Ruby Cord is set in the future and the future is unsure, indeed, it is “pregnant with an infinity of possibilities,” to return to Bergson again, but its characters are not as shackled as those in 2020. Once again, they have returned to a more liminal space of possibility, a zone. One cannot live in a zone, but it is only from such a place that the New can be born. Eventually, this must coalesce into something more stable, a new world in which we can dwell, but what that will be is never settled.

The final song of the trilogy, ‘Horse and Rider’, is an exit from the zone, towards a new, as-yet-unknown settled place. It might actually be a return to the end of ‘Prostitute’, but this time told from the horse’s point of view:

“Leaving behind a rose horizon, frozen in place
You lean forward in the saddle to embrace
I wonder if my lady knows there’s no way back
To the world from which she was born?
And that the only way out
Is forward and down?”

As always, Dawson jukes the listener. One might expect the only way out to be through, but instead he weaves to “forward and down”, which is a position used in horse training, but it is also the direction which creates a spiral. This, again, is reminiscent of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, in which the spiral plays such an important role. The heyiya-if, a two-armed or hinged spiral, is the sacred symbol that lays at the center of the Kesh’s cosmology. For the Kesh, it is from this still center that everything emerges, but it is far from static. It is open. It breathes. It brings in and it lets go.

In ‘The Fool’, Dawson tells us that “love is older than the sun”. Typically we think of the sun as the source of all life. Not only for its light and energy, but because its gravitational pull is what spun all of this into being, but if love was here first then love must have spun the sun into being meaning it’s all spirals birthed in love, baby. Onward we go, spiraling. Over unseen churning seas, my fellow rats. Nothing is sure and we have no one but each other. Ahead, towards never ending passages through the cold and dark. Forward and down, my fellow rats, forward and down, ever towards the end of this nightmare. There is, there has to be, more to life than killing ourselves to survive.

[Exit Music]

For that reason, I have decided it would be fun to continue my “Moby-Dick is About ____” series. This project began last year with Moby-Dick is About UFOs in which we covered Cormac McCarthy’s deeply Moby-inspired text, Whales and Men. Today we continue with the second entry of the series which will be tackling ’s 2014 novella, McGlue.

Like McCarthy’s screenplay, McGlue is haunted by the specter of Moby-Dick. Yes, The Whale looms so largely in American literature that an author can hardly write about the sea without drawing the comparison, so you might as well lean into it, as Moshfegh does. She sets her nautical tale in the year 1851, the very year Moby-Dick was published, and McGlue, the titular character, is sometimes referred to as Mick, which is clearly just Moby Dick with the “oby D” omitted. Read aloud, this, of course, sounds like ‘obeyed’ which might remind an astute reader of exactly what Jonah failed to do, but we’ll just put a pin in that for now. . .

It’s all in good fun to go fishing for esoteric connections, but there is an important and rather obvious reference that appears on the very first page:

“My head. Just last spring I cracked it jumping from a train of cars” (1).

The cracked head is an important image in one of the most well known lines from Moby-Dick:

“Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

What is truly strange, though, is that these aren’t just neat references a young author was making to one of the foundational texts of her nation’s literature. These details are historical fact. As Moshfegh told the Chicago Review of Books, she found the inspiration for this story in the periodical archives at the library:

“And then I come across this tiny little announcement that’s titled McGlue. It went something like this: McGlue from Salem has been acquitted of the murder of Mr. Johnson in the port of Zanzibar, due to his having been out of his mind, at the time of the crime, because he was in a drunken blackout, and had suffered a head injury from… jumping off a moving train, several months earlier.”

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In the Brig

If you have not read McGlue then the preceding description sums up the bare bones of the plot pretty well, but what makes the novella work is the mood Moshfegh imbues it with. It’s a nasty little book, as is her style, but it is shot through with moments of dazzling beauty thanks to Moshfegh’s prose, which is really quite astounding here in her debut. The narration picks up after the crime and takes its focus, instead, on McGlue’s slow journey towards confession. As for McGlue himself, he is no lovable Ishmael. Imagine, instead, someone closer to the drooling guy being held in the drunk tank in Twin Peaks: The Return.

McGlue is also being held in custody, but, rather than the Twin Peaks sheriff’s department, he is in the dank brig of a nineteenth century ship. He is not sure why he is in jail. In fact, he seems to have very little recollection whatsoever. When he is told what he did (murder his friend, Johnson, allegedly), he does not seem capable of registering the idea. He is so out of it that he is not even sure if the stain on his shirt is dried blood or mud. Hell, his own name comes to him as something of a surprise:

“‘McGlue!’

This McGlue. It sounds familiar” (1).

Everything from outside seems to thud against some defensive layer. This is the protective functioning of an overactive Self. It is the Self’s job to preserve our sanity and to maintain our reality system. At its unhealthiest, it can warp our entire worldview in order to protect our self-perception as perennial Good Guy. Every accusation might be a confession, but only we have the direct, lived experience and interior knowledge of our own actions, and with all this raw data we can mount any defense, endlessly weaseling our way out of ever internalizing responsibility.

McGlue’s mental defenses are impenetrable. Any attempt to draw a confession or even ask a question just bounces off of him. He stews in his filth, hallucinating, cracking wise, tossing about slurs, and bumming drinks however he can. This is the mind we occupy throughout the novella. Cracked upon the train tacks and pickled in rum, it moves seamlessly through time, dream, and hallucination. It seems he is totally incapable of sobering up, in part because his captors continue to supply him with a variety of booze, but mostly because his constitution is set against sobriety. He tells us at one point that even as a kid he had ways of getting fucked up without alcohol, including auto-asphyxiation and holding himself upside down until all the blood would rush to his head, so, when his captors fail to provide him with anything to drink, McGlue is more than willing to go analog by poking around in that crack in his skull, pushing the buttons on his brain until he triggers the desired effect of blacking out.

What Was That About Jonah?

As Moby-Dick’s Father Mapple discusses in the sermon he delivers to those gathered in the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel, Jonah tried to hide from God. He was called upon to travel to Nineveh and proselytize, but he refused and instead hightailed it in the opposite direction, hoping to hide in the distant, Godless land of Spain.

McGlue confesses to something similar:

“There was a time I knew there was a god hearing my thoughts and I was careful what I let get said and there was a time the shame of what I heard up there made me bang my head against the wall” (60).

For Jonah’s disobedience, God sent a storm to threaten the ship carrying him which only ceased when he was cast into the water where he was immediately swallowed up by a big fish2.

It is not hard to draw a parallel here: Jonah disobeyed God and wound up in the belly of a whale; McGlue is accused of murder (thereby breaking one of God’s commandments) and winds up in the brig. They are both given time to think about their sins. Jonah comes around to his rather briskly, in that ellipsied fashion of myth. The whole Book of Jonah takes up only two pages, and by the top of the second page he has already ignored God’s call, been cast into the sea, swallowed by a whale, experienced his dark night of the soul, and had his moment of redemption:

McGlue, meanwhile, needs a bit more time. While it is a rather short book, it is magnitudes longer than The Book of Jonah, and McGlue is a deeply stubborn and repressed character. Though he fights desperately against it, all outside forces are pushing him towards anamnesis, an unforgetting. He must face the reality of his crime and confess, or he will remain forever swallowed up inside his whale.

Anamnesis

While some readers may be familiar with the word ‘anamnesis’ thanks to Philip K. Dick’s 2-3-74 Experience, it may be all Greek to many others. In fact, it is a Greek word, derived from ana (“again” or “back”) and mnesis (“memory” or “mind”). Literally, it means remembrance, but it carries a heftier connotation than mere recollection. In the Gnostic tradition, it means a remembrance of one’s divine nature. Rather than original sin, there is original salvation, if only it can be remembered. What prevents this remembering is the crack in the skull in need of mending.

Ishmael, for whatever reason, seems innately attuned to his true nature. When he hears God’s call, he does not run. He is aligned with Divine Will, whether it comes from his own God, or his friend’s idol, who he trusts to guide him to the ship they are meant to sail on:

“Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me.”

It occurs to me now that maybe Ishmael’s acceptance is not exactly so innate as I first thought. Remember, he is writing his account in retrospect. Perhaps when he actually lived through all this it was with some consternation, but, while floating along upon Queequeg’s coffin amongst the ruins of the Pequod surrounded by that vast void of open water, he underwent his own anamnesis, and in so doing retroactively adjusted his lived experiences, or else gained something akin to total recall, giving him the ability to go back in his memories and experience them again with this new, expanded insight in a way not dissimilar to time travel. What else might account for the incredibly lucid details Moby-Dick is comprised of?

Is, then, Moby-Dick About Time Travel?

But no. Let us not go down that rabbit hole today.

Anamnesis breaks the frame of Self. It lets us see ourselves from outside as Other while at the same time gives us a glimpse of the inside of Other-as-Self. This could be how Ishmael taps into his peculiar “first person omniscient” perspective.

This sort of blurring of identity is all over Moby-Dick. We get a beautiful illustration of it when Ishmael and Queequeg are monkey-roped together, Queequeg hanging off the side of the boat, stripping a whale while Ishmael has him anchored around his waist:

“So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint-stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and the ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals.”

What Ishmael admires in Queequeg when they first meet (that he “seemed entirely at his ease; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself”) could equally be applied to himself. Perhaps it is for that reason that the two get along so easily, becoming overnight bosom friends who split their money down the middle, stay up late to gossip in their shared bed, and leisurely throw their arms and legs over one another, as totally at home with each other’s bodies as they are with their own, because, in some sense, they understand that they are not entirely separate, but united in their divine nature.

Much has been speculated about the possible sexual nature of this union, as has been of Melville’s own sexuality. Was he in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne? Did he sublimate all of that repressed attraction into the creation of Moby-Dick?

While we cannot speak for Melville, we can pretty safely say that McGlue has deeply buried his own sexuality, and that might lay at the root of his issues. Sure, he may have spent some time turning tricks with other men, but that wasn’t gay. It was in exchange for money and booze. Okay so the sight of the female body might disgust him, remind him of the smell of fermented cabbage and soured milk, make him feel smothered, oppressed, and panicky, but that’s just guy stuff, right fellas? He still reviles homosexuality anytime he suspects it in another. This is the nineteenth century, after all. Not only that, but he hails from Salem, a place where the memory of those who were seen as different being burned at the stake must still be fresh on the mind. So he deeply buries that part of himself, maybe so far down that even he is not fully aware of it. Nonetheless, this repression curdles something in him at a structural level.

One gets the feeling that if it were McGlue who walked into The Spouter Inn and was told he’d be sharing a bed with Queequeg, things might go a bit differently. If anyone tried to throw their legs lovingly over his, he’d probably stab them in the heart then go off somewhere to finger his brain.

Cracked

In our Moby-Dick class, we were invited to ask ourselves how exactly God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh. There is nothing about him appearing as a burning bush or in any other corporeal form. Instead, we get the simple introductory line: “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah.” Was it simply a feeling? Did he feel, as modern Christians are fond of saying, called to do something? Is it the same kind of inner longing that delivers Ishmael to sea? Or that same faint prickling that sometimes agitates McGlue’s conscience?

Was McGlue’s call from God really just to remember his crime? Or has it been repeating itself ad nauseam for his whole life, like a distress signal, to accept himself for who he is?

Either way, his continued refusal lands him in the belly of the whale where he has such ample time to think that even a mental gymnast as skilled as himself starts to slip. As he is transferred from the brig to an actual holding cell in a Salem prison, his conscience manages to land a few good blows. In his new cell, he finally loses the security of his alcohol blanket, and sober memory threatens to come in for the knock out punch:

“Something has altered beneath the few still live wires on the surface of my brain. I am beginning to be thirsty for something more. I can barely explain it. And I feel I don’t know anything. I never did, as a kid or man, nothing. I always refused to learn” (90).

It takes one hundred thirteen pages for McGlue to do what it took Jonah only a handful of paragraphs: pray. When the realization of Johnson’s death finally sinks in, he has no where left to turn. He admits that no kind of drink could “Take the stink out of this one…Johnson’s dead” (113). But even then, he does not pray for relief, for forgiveness, guidance, or any of the rest; he prays to die.

Having finally accepted the reality of Johnson’s death, he still manages to squirm away. Rather than face the facts, he inserts a knife into the crack in his head and starts twisting it around. Somehow this does not kill him, but when again he wakes up he has been transferred to a hospital or sanitarium and become totally unstuck in time, and possibly paralyzed, or at least tied up.

It is only in this state that he actually experiences anamnesis and can finally recall the full details of that fateful day.

Johnson knew McGlue well. They’d been traveling together for a long time. Surely he must have known how his friend would react when he professed his love to him. You see, Johnson, too, had hidden his sexuality from the world, but not, like McGlue, from himself. Still, he understood it was a love that could never be requited, not in their world, and living in such a way was destroying him. When he confessed, it was because he wanted McGlue to kill him.

“‘You or me?’ I ask. ‘One of us has to go,’ one of us says.

His knife is pretty and he says, ‘Just go ahead and do it.’ My rigging knife is rusty and he sees it and says, ‘Just go on’” (144).

At least that is how McGlue remembers it.

This ambiguous ending might leave some readers disappointed. Obviously the guy is a monster, right? His moment of anamnesis was meant to either prove him innocent or, if he is guilty, then it should have awakened a higher self who could play the role of inner judge, someone who could deliver the only sentence that might get through to him: a miserable conscience, but we get neither. McGlue severs his conscience with the knife leaving us with only a muddled answer. His anamnesis is neither redemption nor condemnation. The aperture has become too large for either. In a sense, McGlue is able to squirm away yet again, but in another sense McGlue no longer exists. Like Pip, his individual identity has been overwhelmed. This dubiety may well leave the reader with an uneasiness, but why? What is that exactly? What ending would have satisfied that part of us?

Here we might turn again to Jonah, to the second two chapters, which Father Mapple does not touch upon. After the whale spits Jonah out on the beach, he finally goes to Nineveh and does as asked. Much to Jonah’s chagrin, the people actually listen and repent. After all he has gone through, he had been hoping to at least witness a good divine demolition of a debaucherous city, but no. Now God is going to show mercy? Where was that mercy when you sent Leviathan to eat me?

This resentment might serve as a good reminder that Melville’s quote implicates us all. The crack is not simply McGlue’s, nor Nineveh’s. These are people who, as is written in The Book of Jonah, “cannot discern between their right and their left hand.” Meaning, the fault, the crack, extends into The World that made them. That crack in the world, ye ol’ Black Iron Prison, surely would have prevented McGlue and Johnson from ever living their love openly, so Johnson says what Jonah says, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

That longing, that thirst McGlue feels for something more, is beyond personal salvation. It is a longing for universal redemption, for the crumbling of the Black Iron Prison. Like whale oil, anamnesis might provide light, but sometimes light does nothing more than illuminate a small bubble that exposes a vaster darkness.

Near the end of the famous forty-second chapter, The Whiteness of the Whale, Melville writes about just such a type of anamnesis:

“Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?”

As we see with the colt, anamnesis does not always mean the awakening to camaraderie that Ishmael experiences. It dropped Philip K. Dick into the bottomless pit of Chapel Perilous, turning his final years into a desperate, Ahabian search for meaning. Indeed, Ahab is a much closer analog for McGlue than Ishmael. There is no easy fix for either. In that sense, these two are Gnostic heroes. They see that the world is fallen and false.

Any true mending for McGlue would require massive societal change. Perhaps this is what accounts for the few stray references to Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion that was just beginning, half a world away, at the time this novel is set. Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Christ, really was remaking the world. His rebellion mobilized peasants, destabilized the Qing Dynasty, and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom which ruled over a huge swath of southern China, encompassing upwards of 30 million people beneath its banner. While it lasted, Xiuquan remade society into something of a proto-socialist vision, albeit with theocratic characteristics, but in the end it fell in an unfathomably bloody conflict that claimed more lives than World War One.

While some lucky few might find divine satisfaction amongst their fellow man, there are others in whom that cranial crack is cloven all the way through. In that way, McGlue, Xiuquan, and Ahab are all connected. None can find any earthly satisfaction. If they are to have comfort, it seems it will have to be ripped from God’s own hands.

As Ahab asks, "How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” Whether that wall be a whale, centuries-old dynastic rule, or the few inches of skull separating the brain from the open air is totally up to circumstance. Punching through it may lead to freedom, but it will necessarily be a self-annihilating freedom.

What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now?

[Exit Music]

While it may behoove one who runs a literary blog to posture as if there is nothing they have not read, this will offer a peak behind the curtain. While I have maintained a pretty steady 50 books/year pace since my mid-twenties, I must admit that leaves a lot of ground left to cover.

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Ace of Wands

Every full moon, my wife and I do a single card pull from one of our Tarot decks. This past moon, the Wolf Moon, she received the Queen of Swords and I got the Ace of Wands.

I do not mean to say that I chose the following books based on this card. Rarely could I tell you why I have chosen to read the book I am reading at any particular moment. When it is time, I simply stand before my bookshelf and let its influence move through me. That is how I see these full moon cards, too. They are not at the forefront of my mind throughout the month, but their influence is shining down, seen and unseen, like the moon.

“At the beginning of some situation, no card could signal a better start,” Rachel Pollack writes of the Ace of Wands in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Not a bad pull for the start of a new year. The card is often associated with inspiration, energy, passion, and potential, and indeed its reveal did mark the beginning of a very fruitful creative period for me.

I spent the better part of 2022-23 at work on my sixth novel manuscript1, but it just wouldn’t come together, leading me eventually to abandon it. Since then, I have focused my energy on short fiction, and more lately on this here project, unable to work up the gusto to start anew on something long form after such a let down. But then, earlier this month, while out on a run, in what I can only describe as a moment of gnosis, an idea struck me that revived this old piece. I quite literally ran home, dug up the file, and have ever since been working on it with a sense of urgency that I haven’t felt in a long time, waking up at 4:30 in the morning to write before work or before the baby wakes up, depending on the day.

This same energy has carried over into my reading. I have knocked out more books this month than usual. As all dedicated readers know, there are periods when pockets of time seem to open up, little burrows one can while away in, seemingly without time proceeding at its usual clip outside, and then there are times when these burrows are sealed shut, and it feels impossible to get any reading done. My friends, I have been living in a bonafide prairie dog town of temporal reading burrows. Firstly it’s January, meaning a dead month for service industry, so I have read a lot at work. Secondly, on the days when it’s just me and baby at home, the best way for me to get her to nap is to put her either in her stroller or her car seat. Seeing how winter has finally arrived down here, we have mostly been going with the car seat, which gives me an hour and a half of sitting in the car with no where to go. I have largely spent this time parked in the driveway, reading.

And finally, speaking of the cold, we were snowed in for a 80-hour period, so that also gave me ample reading time. All that to say, I am trying to keep in mind Pollack’s warning. The Ace is always received as a pure gift, as signified by the yods’ presence on the card:

“We cannot cause or produce them by any normal means; they come to us as hands emerging from clouds. Only by reaching the high states of awareness shown in the later cards of the Major Arcana can we understand the sources of these bursts of elemental energy. In ordinary situations it is enough to experience and appreciate them.”

So that is what I have been trying to do, enjoy and utilize this energy, for, when it goes, I know all I’ll be left with when I try to wake up before the crack of dawn is cold-handed discipline beckoning me to get out of bed and trudge down the hall to the office.

But Anyway, let’s get onto the books. Please, follow me behind the curtain.

Oh, I’m sorry. Initiates only.

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It was a phone call from an old friend who had just read it that convinced me to slot it into my immediate queue. He had a rather novel take that convinced me now was the time to pick High Castle back up. In his reading, the book was not only about AI, but it offered a rather hopeful outlook on the on-going cultural battle that seems to be going anything but our1 way at the moment.

While mostly remembered as an alternative history book about What if the Axis Powers won WWII?, there is a lot more going on in TMITHC than that. It largely takes place in the Japanese-run Pacific States along the west coast of North America where an industry of Americana collecting has taken hold. The Japanese are obsessed with American antiques, and a counterfeit market proliferates. As such, there is much discussion about the authentic vs. the false, historicity, yaddy-yadda, providing ripe ground to explore through a modern AI lens.

But as I got to reading, the United States abducted the President of Venezuela, ICE murdered an innocent woman and began its occupation of Minneapolis, and The White House doubled down on its posturing over a multi-front invasion in which Greenland, Mexico, Iran, and Cuba were all on the table. Suddenly, the AI subtext seemed less important than the surface level question:

Did the Nazis actually win?

Standing at this crossroad wondering which line of inquiry to pursue, I did what I thought Dick would do: I broke out the I Ching.

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Book of Changes

The I Ching plays a major role in The Man in the High Castle. Characters are constantly consulting it before taking action, Hawthorn Abendsen co-authors his alt-history within the alt-history with its assistance, and famously Dick himself used it in plotting out the novel.

“We are absurd…because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates them. Do you see?” (70).

In investigating his own work in the Exegesis, Dick hits upon what exactly makes books such as these alive: they introduce something new into an otherwise closed system. This is the whole of Christianity, with the Christ figure as the something new entering the closed system of the world. For Dick, this introduction is the tiny tug that “sets a sequence of mounting, growing changes in motion, ending in massive (total?) enantiodromia: victory. Over world. Since all reality is one field the effects of the initial perturbation end only when the final enantiodromia occurs, and all the ‘counters’ flip over to their opposites” (633-634).

Humbly, I asked The Oracle how I should approach this essay on The Man in the High Castle.

Rather than throwing yarrow stalks, I use the three coin method. By flipping my three pennies six times, I am able to reveal a hexagram. Majority heads is a broken line, majority tails is an unbroken line; three heads is a broken changing line2, and three tails is an unbroken changing line, meaning they flip into their opposite.

I started flipping and revealed my hexagram from bottom up:

Two tails and a head: unbroken line
Three tails: broken changing line
Three tails again: broken changing line
Two tails and a head: unbroken line
Three tails: broken changing line
Two heads and a tail: broken line

This means my original hexagram was 51 Chên, The Arousing.

As anyone who has spent time practicing divination might concur, synchronicities abound, sometimes in a rather Tricksterish way. If there’s a particular card you really don’t want to see during a Tarot reading, it often has a way of showing up. And in my dabbling with the I Ching, something similar seems to occur. Whatever hexagram I receive will appear again elsewhere.

Last year, I read Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game in which the I Ching also features somewhat prominently. This inspired me to dust off my own copy and throw the old coins. I don’t recall the question, but I do remember receiving Hexagram 56, the Wanderer. Then, to get a better hold of the I Ching itself, I put on the Weird Studies episode on it. Not only does the Wanderer show up again here, but both hosts report how this is the hexagram they get most often.

All that to say, it came as no real surprise when the Arousing appeared in The Man in the High Castle.

“God appears in the sign of the Arousing. Thunder and lightning. Sounds—he involuntarily put his fingers up to cover his ears. Ha-ha! Ho-ho! Great burst that made him wince and blink. Lizard scurries sand tiger roars, and out comes God Himself! (164-5).”

Okay, you tricksterish little book, I thought, so of the 64 possible hexagrams you want to reveal one of the handful that is named in the book, that’s fine. This isn’t even my real hexagram. The changing lines mean it becomes something else, so ha—

Ruh roh.

It becomes Hexagram 43 Kuai, Break-through, which also appears in the novel.

I simply laughed as that stomach-twisting feeling of synchronicity coursed through me, and read on. What else could I do?

Break-through is received by Julianna Frink after she murders her Nazi abductor in order to save the author Hawthorn Abendsen. We even got two of the same changing lines. Julianna’s are the second, third, fourth, and sixth while I received lines two, four, and five.

Okay then, I Ching, we can play it that way. I’m not afraid of a few synchronicities.

Unlike the majority of the characters in The Man in the High Castle who have the hexagrams and their meanings memorized, I must consult my physical copy. Flipping through to hexagram 51, I read that “Chên symbolizes the eldest son, the beginning of things in the east—the Spring.” And I understood this to be referring to the original AI essay I had in mind. If I were to stick with the plan, the reading appeared favorable:

“Caution brings good fortune.”

Immediately, it felt the original idea was the way. Writing about the Fourth Reich felt somewhat like discourse-chasing which would cheapen the actual horror of what is happening, but at the same time if it is true that “The Empire Never Ended” then what better time to write about it than when the Empire is acting so brazenly?

Continuing, “Kuai actually means a break-through as when a river bursts its dams in seasons of flood.” Reading from the second hexagram, I imagined the face of American Empire that has managed to stay so well hidden for so many of its citizens even through all the horrors it has committed. The dam providing the body of obscuring waters is now bursting and the face is revealed. Many who would not recognize it in any of its more subtle forms are being affronted by it now for the first time.

“One must make the matter known
At the court of the King.
It must be announced truthfully. Danger.
It is necessary to notify one’s own city.
It does not further to resort to arms.
It furthers one to undertake something.”

Well now that complicates things, for this would indicate I should switch tactics and write the Fourth Reich essay.

Best to read a bit further.

Hm, yes. Right.

Ha, good one, I Ching:

“The weak line symbolizes an inferior man in a high position.”

Now for my changing lines; Nine in the second:

“A cry of alarm. Arms of evening
and at night—fear nothing.
Despite the weapons, no fear—because one
has found the middle way.”

The middle way. This possibly indicates an approach that would take in both, as further confirmed by Nine in the fifth place, the line that is said to be the governing ruler of this hexagram:

“In dealing with weeds,
Firm resolution is necessary.”

All the weeds must be removed, or else they will simply return. The two are not actually separate. I think of the weed I contend with the most in my own garden: bindweed. It is a nasty specimen with a root system that can run for acres. Pulling out one vine does nothing to the plant. All these manifestations arise from the same root.

Alas, they were never two essays, but one.

The Root

Listeners to Michael S. Judge’s podcast, Death is Just Around the Corner, of which I believe there are a few here, will be familiar with his Fourth Reich theory. This is not simply to say Orange Man Bad, Mango Mussolini, Trump is Hitler, etc, but that the United States onboarded whatever was useful from the Nazis following the war. These tools were implemented largely in our intelligence apparatus which has been carrying out covert operations all around the world for the last 80 years, killing untold millions of people, toppling governments, and destabilizing entire societies in the name of American business interests.

History is written by the victors, as they say, so we get to tell ourselves that we are the Good Guys, that our enemies “hate us for our freedom”, and then we spend billions of dollars propagandizing that into consensus reality, and we accept it, receiving as our end of the bargain all the treats, cheap decadence, and relative stability that such ridiculous surplus provides.

As and discussed in a recent episode of Method and Madness,

“The narratives of World War II are still the primary narratives…of who’s good and who’s bad. Our whole worldview is about that conflict. We’re stuck in this ambiguous state where it’s like we both never want to return to that…yet we have also been taught that that is the source of meaning; that the only way that a genuine heroism or a genuine move into a new chapter of history can happen is through a genuinely definitive world war.”

So what is the common understanding of the war that forms our primary narrative? That fascism arose in Western Europe in the early twentieth century, largely due to the manic charisma of a couple Really Bad Men, but the powers of liberal democracy (USA, England, and France) were able to eradicate it from the land thanks, in some small part, to a temporary alliance with a questionable force in the east (USSR) who would have to be taken care of after the war, but this could be done in a more civilized fashion (The Cold War), as befitting of the high moral standards of liberal democracy.

In a sense, this bourgeois narrative is the false world we inhabit while a more accurate analysis is akin to the in-breaking of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the alt history novel within The Man in the High Castle in which the Allies actually won the war. The book becomes a sensation in Japan and the Japanese-controlled Pacific states, but it is banned in the Greater Reich.

The world of Grasshopper does not map directly onto our own world, as the hinge point in TMITHC is the successful assassination of FDR by Giuseppe Zangara, who really did attempt to shoot the president-elect on February 15, 1933, but failed to pull it off, largely because he was too short to see over the crowd. Had Zangara found his target, Dick foresaw the continuation of both the Depression and the non-intervention policy keeping the US out of the war long enough for Germany to conquer Europe. In this scenario, they then go on to invade the east coast of North America as the Japanese Empire invades the west, and the United States falls, and is split between the two, with a neutral strip in-between called the Rocky Mountain States.

Rather than an alt-history novel, the in-breaking force into the fiction of our own narrative might be considered to be historical materialism. It reveals not exactly that the Axis Powers secretly won World War II, but that our simplistic bourgeois analysis is fraught with inaccuracies. As we touched on way back in our Gravity’s Rainbow piece, the corporations, such as IG Farben, that empowered the Nazi war machine, were not torn up and scattered, nor were the men behind them imprisoned or executed for their horrendous crimes, but rather given a slap on the wrist before being allowed to return to their positions of power, or else they were straight up absorbed into the United States via Operation Paperclip3, which gathered up whatever of Nazi Germany the US found useful and integrated it.

Beyond the aftermath, the war itself was never so clear cut in its two-sidedness. American corporations were not above dealing with German ones. Not only did Standard Oil and General Motors sell the formula for producing the fuel additive tetraethyl lead, a necessary ingredient for powering tanks, planes, and other war machines, but they directly supplied it to the Germans until the Nazis were able to get their own production up and running.

As Gravity’s Rainbow makes clear, the thing that came out of the war was not a victorious nation-state, but something transmogrified. While it still wears the nation-state as a mask, the second half of the twentieth century saw the birth of that which has superseded the state: a cartel of international corporations and intelligence agencies. This is what is meant by fascism.

Gabriel Rockhill goes into great detail about this in his work in Counter Punch:

“A paradigm shift is necessary in order to understand the history of actually existing liberalism and fascism. The latter, as we shall see, far from being eradicated at the end of WWII, was actually repurposed, or rather redeployed, to serve its primary historical function: to destroy godless communism and its threat to the capitalist civilizing mission. Since the colonial projects of Hitler and Mussolini had become so brazen and erratic, as they shifted from playing more or less by the liberal rules of the game to openly breaking them and then running amok, it was understood that the best way to construct the fascist international was to do so under liberal cover, meaning through clandestine operations that maintained a liberal façade. While this probably sounds like hyperbole to those whose understanding of history has been formatted by bourgeois social science, which focuses almost exclusively on visible government and the aforementioned liberal cover, the history of the invisible government of the national security apparatus suggests that fascism, far from being defeated in WWII, was successfully internationalized.”

What’s All This Got to do with AI?

AI is being marketed as a miracle tool, capable of performing basically any task. Even calling it “intelligent” implies that it is as plastic and adaptable as the human mind. While it no doubt has useful technical abilities in specialized fields, it serves only to further enshitify our daily lives. It is not living, in PKD’s sense, because it has no ability to create the New. It can only reshuffle the old into novel formulations. Nonetheless, it is being forced down our throats at every turn. That’s because the one thing it is really good at is making certain people a whole lot of money.

As we discussed in our recent piece on Michael Cisco’s Animal Money, the economy is basically made-up bullshit, but it’s made-up bullshit with real life-or-death consequences for billions of people, so its current total dependence on AI is rather unnerving. Not only has it proven to be a useful tool for imposing precarity on those who have largely been cushioned from it in the past by supposedly putting the vast majority of white collar jobs on the automation chopping block, but according to Harvard economist, Jason Furman, excluding AI, the GDP grew only 0.1% in the first half of the last year.

That is, we are totally stagnant without it, and “it” is a bunch of hot air that a handful of tech billionaires are trying to spin into reality. And folks, I am sorry to report they have had no shortage of success. As readers have no doubt noticed, you can’t even Google something anymore without prompting an AI overview.

Social media is bursting at the seams with AI videos and images, but somehow I am always surprised to find the people who use it actually roam the real world. I suppose that’s the privilege of having cool, creative friends who are staunchly against it. Still, beyond my little bubble, AI is running amok. Upwards of 80% of college students report they are using it to write or assist in writing essays. Far more nefarious than a little bit of college cheating, 16% of adults report having used AI as a “romantic companion”, and a third of children report that using AI chatbots feels like talking to a friend, with 12% reporting they do so because they have no actual friends. If you thought the rich veins of the Loneliness Epidemic had already been mined out by vulturistic endeavors, I hate to break it to you, but we are just getting started. Meet friend.com, a wearable-AI necklace that one can chat with throughout the day.

The Empire may not have ended, but it has come home, and now we are the surplus to be extracted for profit. All of this is meant to destabilize society, ensuring that whatever workers cannot be replaced by AI at least feel the pressure of precarity, so that they will think twice before stepping out of line. Solidarity is being gutted as the line between friends and chatbots is blurred. Any cultural investment in the arts has been foreclosed upon. And the endless drip feeding of AI content has blurred reality itself.

As we have said, The Man in the High Castle concerns itself deeply with questions of the authentic vs. the false. For example, the occupying Japanese have developed an obsession for collecting American antiques from before the war. Use-value be damned. Any old thing, from a Mickey Mouse watch to a butter churn, becomes covetable simply by virtue of its historicity.

To satisfy this obsession, and to enrich themselves in the process, manufacturers have begun a whole underground industry of fabricating replica antiques.

“The factories…turned out the pieces, they made their profits. The wholesalers passed them on, and the dealers displayed and advertised them. The collectors shelled out their money and carried their purchases happily home, to impress their associates, friends, and mistresses” (48).

Frank Frink, who has just quit one of these factories, finds himself wondering if the collectors have ever even asked themselves if the objects are genuine. When he and his old foreman, Ed McCarthy, go into business together, producing custom, original American art, something that has not happened since the war, they use their insider knowledge of the counterfeit trade as leverage to get seed money from their old boss, Wyndam-Matson, threatening to blow up the whole scheme if he doesn’t fork over what they need to start up their own business.

Old Wyndam does what he must to protect the integrity of the counterfeit trade, and the boys get to making some jewelry.

Antique dealer, R. Childan, agrees to display this new line of EdFrank pieces in his shop, on consignment that is—a real insult. But his seller’s instincts prove right, for a time. There is no organic interest in the art objects until Childan gifts a piece to a client, hoping to impress this client’s wife. When Childan meets his client again, he asks about the piece, and his client confesses that he did not give it to his wife. Instead, he had showed it to business acquaintances, fellow collectors of American antiques, and they had laughed at it, and, the client admits, he had initially laughed along with them, but the piece slowly worked on him.

“I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. Why is that? I may ask. I do not even now project onto this blob, as in psychological German tests, my own psyche. I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. You see?…It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. It has separated from it and hence has managed to come to homeostasis” (175).

These art pieces act, like the I Ching or the Bible, as an in-breaking force that is able to deliver something New into a closed system. As writes in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, “The power of art is opposed to illusion” (51). In fact, it is through studying one of these EdFrank art pieces that Tagomi finds himself transported from his false world to our authentic one. In something of a darkly comedic scene, he is made aware he is in our world through police interference, heavy traffic, racism, and an ugly ass highway system.

It may not be pretty, but at least it is real and somewhere within us there seems to be a longing for that authenticity.

That is why The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is such a sensation. It reveals reality. When Julianna asks the Oracle why Abseden wrote it, she receives Hexagram 61: Chung Fu, Inner Truth. It is all the proof she needs that the book shows what is real, that Germany and Japan lost the war. This means the characters’ reality is false, but even the author who revealed this truth is unable to face that fact. Though he seems to believe it on some level, he is quick to turn away.

When confronted by a truth that challenges your whole reality-system, turning away is by far the easier option. This cognitive dissonance is what has driven followers of both the Democratic and Republican parties totally bonkers. It’s hard to face the truth of being complicit in a world-historic evil empire. And to be fair, everything has been invested against our seeing it, and if we do see it, they have doubled down against our ability to do anything about it. I feel as if I see it well enough, and yet what do I do? I continue to live about as cushy a life as the combined paychecks of a barista and a public school teacher can buy.

What is it that Jesus said? That the truth will set you free?

I wonder what he was on about.

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[Exit Music]

These are the kind of thoughts Federico Campagna’s Otherworlds might awake in its readers. Not since reading Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire has a work of history so stirred me. Though their subjects are half a world apart, with Galeano’s focus being on the colonization of the Americas, and Campagna’s covering the history of the Mediterranean region, what they share is that they are both historians of the preterite, the passed over, and the defeated.

Where I come from, defeat is a dirty word. It’s never something you admit. To do so is practically unamerican, perfectly literalized by MCU Captain America’s catchphrase: “I can do this all day,” most often muttered when he’s getting his shit kicked in.

In the US American imagination, only a temporary loss can be allowed, the kind that just makes you work all the more, hit the gym even earlier, watch tape harder, chug raw egg yolks, and run the steps up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art so that you make sure you win the rematch in the sequel by doing the same thing but better, smarter, stronger.

True defeat is something else. It is related to death, therefore we squirm away from it, deny its existence, for ourselves, anyway. There is nothing to do with true defeat but sit with it, there is no end beyond acceptance. This kind of defeat requires a quiet inward turn and is accompanied by melancholy, an aching sadness, and a hollow longing, but, as Campagna explores, at the bottom of this fall there is also a deep-rooted love and the chance for a renewed humanity.

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The Milwaukee-Mediterranean Connection

I read Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket two times, nearly back to back, only breaking to take a foray into Campagna’s Otherworlds in between, a synchronous choice, as it would turn out, but more on that in a bit.

While I did enjoy my maiden voyage, that enjoyment felt rather surface level, and I’ll admit I got turned a bit around in Pynchon’s labyrinth. It might be among his most straight forward novels, but it’s still Pynchon, and without many secondary sources yet available, I was left to chart the territory on my own. Keeping track of everything might have killed the emotion somewhat because it wasn’t until my second time through that I felt overtaken by the deep sorrow that saturates the book. I cried at the end. Not big blubbering sobs, but heavy tears did blur my eyes as I turned my gaze towards the nearby bookshelf and scanned towards the Ps, locking in on the better half of a row that is taken up by Pynchon’s decades of work, cataloging the rise and fall of the American Empire, and for a long time I could not look away.

In his goofy yet endearing review, William T. Vollman writes that Pynchon practices a cynical sweetness, which is certainly on display in the final pages. Our hero, Private Eye Hicks McTaggart, has already been shanghaied to Budapest to track down a missing cheese heiress, and then dragged around Central Europe on a wild goose chase. Insult is added to injury when a messenger from back home arrives to tell him that his lady love is now carrying the child of her mafiaed-up boyfriend, and Hicks will be shot on sight if he is caught sniffing around anywhere near her, meaning, effectively, the door back to America has been slammed shut.

Score another for Thomas Wolfe.

The year is 1932. The depression is on. Hitler is a year away from rising to power, the Old World is set to burn, and Hicks is stuck over there. Things are looking pretty bleak for our big dummy. While McTaggart might well be Pynchon’s least sympathetic protagonist, an ex-strike breaker with a severe aversion to practicing any agency whatsoever, it’s hard not to feel bad for the guy. He longs to be back in the safe MidWest embrace of Milwaukee, attending fish fries, drinking beer, going out dancing, and maybe rolling a frame every now and again.

Pynchon, the old sap, can’t quite leave him totally forlorn; he throws him a bone in the form of a kiss from a Hungarian biker chick as well as a letter from home, penned by Hicks’ old sidekick, a sweet, streetwise kid who is preparing to hop a freight with his girl and ride it towards LA where he will join the growing private investigator sector.

But what about for the rest of us? That letter includes no small nod toward Doc Sportello, the LA-based investigator in Inherent Vice, which kind of short circuits the hopeful tone because we know how that whole scene winds up, so while the book is nominally set in the early 1930s, Pynchon is up to his old temporal layering, and one can’t help but feel its end catches us up to the breathing precipice of this very moment.

As in Against the Day, set just before the kick off of World War One, the world of Shadow Ticket is on the brink. There is a sense of dread looming over everything that should be familiar to anyone living through the current moment—the feeling that there is something already in the chute whose release cannot be stopped:

“This year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point…rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continent, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential” (157).

Fiume

Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History covers the history of the Mediterranean region in broad strokes, from mythological times to the current day, largely through the lens of migrants, the vanquished, foreigners, and other outsiders. It is a preterite history favoring those who are usually passed over and highlights not only their contributions to major movements, but also the minor histories of everyday life of those second class citizens, as well as how defeated societies reform themselves and return in new guises. It is a vision of history that gives the lie to hardline borders and emphasizes cross-cultural influence, especially in a place like the Mediterranean where three continents converge.

Campagna dedicates the latter half of the penultimate chapter to Fiume, a city of much importance in Shadow Ticket. In Pynchon, there is always a Zone, a bit of territory that rips through the map and provides a brief respite, an anarchic freedom, before being, once again, overtaken, and recoded, the hole in the map patched back over. In Shadow Ticket, that is the hinterlands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and one of its crown jewels, the port city of Fiume, which defined itself in opposition to the rest of twentieth-century Europe:

“[Europe] wanted to channel the youthful energies of ‘progress’ into a plan for the total development of human potential. But such ambitions came at a cost. In return for the advancements brought by the scientific reorganization of society, institutions had to become inflexible: their function was not supporting life, but correcting it. Inside the factories, the thrilling speed of the new means of production and transportation was accompanied by an unbearable acceleration of work rhythms. On the streets, the spotlights illuminating the new goods and services cast the shadow of an unprecedented impoverishment of the masses…it was now imperative to sacrifice those whose contributions to ‘total’ progress had proved suboptimal. Whether individuals or entire peoples. The weak and ‘degenerates’ had to succumb for the greater good of all. In short, humanity had entered the age when it would test its ability to annihilate itself” (Campagna 270-271).

World War One did away with the final vestiges of an earlier system. Out of it, the industrialized nation-state had fully crystalized. A wave of nationalism swept the continent. Liminal zones, vaguely defined borders, and no-man’s lands were a thing of the past. National borders would now be hotly defended and those within brought to heel.

The old Hapsburg Empire had held together a vast sweep of land for centuries. Its break-up following the war led to the creation of the states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, with Poland, Romania, and Italy acquiring the remainder, leaving only Fiume, a port city on the Adriatic, which for a long time had served as the landlocked Hungarian Kingdom’s only outlet to the sea. After the break-up, the city was hotly contested not only by Italy and Hungary, but also Yugoslavia and powers such as the UK and the United States, with Woodrow Wilson suggesting it serve as the autonomous home of the League of Nations.

Such a liminal situation makes the perfect set up for one of Pynchon’s Zones, these pockets of potential that seem to lie, at least momentarily, outside of history.

They Should Have Sent a Poet

Angered by what he considered the loss of an Italian city, Gabriele D’Annunzio headed a small expedition to take over the port town of Fiume in September 1919. D’Annunzio is often remembered as an Italian poet, but he was also an “acclaimed novelist and playwright…a decorated war hero many times over, an aviator, a transgressive performer, a fashion innovator, a pioneering advertiser, an egomaniac and an avid consumer of cocaine” (Campagna 272). He may sound like a Pynchon invention, but D’Annunzio was a real man, and his escapade really did claim the city, removing the occupying Allied forces, and declaring it an independent state known as the Regency of Carnaro, which he was able to hold for more than a year before finally surrendering to the Italians in December 1920.

While it is sometimes considered a proto-fascist project as Mussolini would go on to adopt much of D’Annunzio’s pageantry, such as the Roman salute, the balcony addresses, and Achilles’ cry of “Eia, eia, eia! Alala!”, many leftist leaders at the time saw things differently. UIL, an Italian national syndicalist trade union, declared its support, as did Lenin. While Antonio Gramsci did not trust D’Annunzio, he did think his movement had something to it.

As for Campagna, he sees Fiume as another example of an age-old tradition in the region. Each chapter in Otherworlds is devoted to a different defeated people of the Mediterranean. The book illustrates brilliantly how defeat itself is what opens avenues towards new ways of being, often carried out in the shadow of history’s ‘victors’.

Fiume, though far from perfect, was one of these attempts at a new way of life:

“Fiume called to itself all the rebels against capitalism and Anglo-American imperialism: the then nascent fascists, but also the syndicalists, the anarchists and the communists. ‘I stand for communism without dictatorship. No wonder, considering that my entire culture is anarchic. It is my intention to make this city a spiritual island from which an eminently communist action can radiate towards all oppressed nations’” (274).

Despite being heavily besieged, the atmosphere within the city grew ecstatic, as befitting of a society run by a Decadent poet. D’Annunzio announced the launch of a new constitution that established a “republic based on socialist principles, ruled through a democratic system, and geared towards a spiritual revolution fueled by art and poetry” (275). It recognized and confirmed the sovereignty of all citizens without distinction of sex, lineage, language, class, or religion, gave full authority to all citizens of both sexes to choose and engage in all industries, professions, arts, and crafts, and endowed all with civil and political rights, protecting minorities both religious and ethnic.

D’Annunzio saw the transformation of life into art as the ultimate revolutionary objective. Like fellow Decadent, Oscar Wilde, he supported revolutionary socialism because it was the only way to liberate the individual.

Indeed, an atmosphere of Carnival enlivened the autonomous zone during its brief reign. Despite laying under siege for its entire sixteen months, it was kept supplied and fed partly through acts of piracy. Such anarchy was commonplace in this short-lived zone, which Pynchon describes as so:

“When d’Annunzio’s republic was young…Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoise” (271).

However, as with all Zones, the dream eventually had to come to an end. Under fire by Italian dreadnoughts, Fiume was forced to surrender. The energy that had enlivened this experiment into its festival atmosphere would quickly curdle. Many of D’Annunzio’s followers went on to join Mussolini’s fascist movement while others fiercely opposed it, holding steadfast to the dream of collective freedom and individual dignity that briefly bloomed.

“The following decades would swallow them all” (281).

You Can’t Go Home Again

What was so heartbreaking about finishing Shadow Ticket wasn’t just Hicks’ sad ending. I mean, I felt for the guy, but I didn’t like him all that much. It was turning and seeing the long line of Pynchon’s books, occupying nearly the length of a shelf on their own, and spanning sixty-two years, from V’s publication in March 1963 to last year’s Shadow Ticket. John F. Kennedy was president when he published that first book for crying out loud. He lived through the most mythologized era of modern American history. He saw its potential and its failures and then he saw all of that turned into a cartoon and sold back to the masses.

Potential and failure have been two foundational motifs which Pynchon returns to again and again, so perhaps it is only fitting that all his energy, all those words so carefully fitted together, the thousands of pages so clearly1 prescribing the rot in the system, led us here, to the ultimate failure, Donald Trump’s America where all that was once chthonic in American Empire has risen to the surface to roam the streets as our own homegrown gestapo, murdering and abducting with impunity.

Meanwhile, in our foreign policy, with two and a half years of live-streamed genocide under our belt, we now totally forego the neoliberal courtesy of covert intelligence operations and instead outright kidnap world leaders as we simultaneously contemplate invasions on multiple continents.

All the while, the looming climate catastrophe silently approaches totally unacknowledged, but at least the war on protein has ended.

While everything seems both so incredibly stupid and so incredibly bleak, it is not exactly that we are doing anything unprecedented in US American history, but that we are no longer even attempting to hide it. That’s what makes this feel as if we have entered a new era. How long can that go on before the wheels totally fall off, before we finally learn what true defeat tastes like? What Fiumes might be built by those who resist, and what new humanity stands on the far side of all this? For surely the cat cannot simply be put back inside the bag.

Some kind of reckoning is at hand.

“‘There is no Statue of Liberty…no such thing, not where you’re going.’

‘You said you’re taking me back to the States.’

‘We are, and then again we’re not.’

‘Meaning what?’

“It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile’” (290).

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[Exit Music]

“He says he’s been living under a paving stone and I believe him. . .

‘You’re lucky you got it. Some people don’t even have that!’” (450).

This exchange takes place in the anarchic back half of Michael Cisco’s Animal Money, the 780-page opus of the New Weird. It is, of course, a reference to the famous Situationist slogan (as is the epigraph of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice).

In May 1968, a Parisian uprising, sparked by student demonstrators, brought France to the brink of revolution. Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the paving stones, the beach!) was a poignant rallying cry that cut to the heart not only of May 68 but of every revolution, a reminder that that which is being revolted against is not the territory, but the map. A revolution is a war between those who would prefer the current paving stone continue to smother the world and those who are trying to lift it to let the earth underneath breathe for a moment.

We often think that to go up into abstraction is to broaden possibilities, but that is false. Abstraction is a paring knife; it is clean, precise, and it quickly calcifies. Reality wriggles nauseatingly beneath. Lift any stone, paving or no, and you will see. Underneath is a look into what Deleuze calls Pure Immanence, reality undivided by any constructs; the total flow of everything into everything. By lifting the heavy stone, revolution releases this anarchic power. A sea of pure potential roars beneath our feet with no guarantee about what it will eventually coalesce into. This is exactly the chaos Cisco’s book dips into as its narration degrades (or expands?) into the Possible.

While the novel resists any easy summarization, it is broadly a fantasy book about money, or perhaps a book that reveals the fantasy of money. It kicks off, lucidly enough, at an economics conference in the fictional South American city of San Toribio, Archizoguayla, where a group of five economists stumble, perhaps accidentally, or maybe through an act of gnosis, onto the concept of animal money. Before it is ever clearly defined, the new currency scampers off into the world, and begins to challenge the status quo, which is just as well because the status quo is poised to destroy the world.

“What will destroy this world of ours won’t be, probably, the booms of nuclear war or the slobber of rising waters. Those things could destroy this world, but they won’t. Most likely, not. This world will be destroyed by its economy” (80).

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Social Currencies

In another big ass book about money (Debt: the First 5000 Years) published only a few years earlier than Cisco’s, the late David Graeber undoes one of the biggest illusions about the history of money that most laypeople simply take as truth. To be fair, it is still taught in economics classes as such—in fact it is quite foundational to our modern myth. I am speaking of the idea put forward by Adam Smith that the barter system is some sort of precursor to our current system of trade.

It is not uncommon to hear this vision evoked rather romantically, as if returning to it could be an antidote to capitalism, but in reality its imaginative capture keeps us locked within capitalism’s logic by simply swapping out one currency for another while the underlying structure remains in place. In this way, the insidious idea that There Is No Alternative becomes subconsciously reinforced. Luckily, it’s bullshit. No society has ever run primarily on a barter system:

“There’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not” (28).

Rather than trading twenty chickens for one cow, or whatever shit Adam Smith was pedaling, societies without money operated (and continue to operate) via complicated networks of IOUs in which one shares what they have with their neighbor in expectation that their neighbor will return the favor when needed.

As an example, Graeber recounts the experience of fellow anthropologist, Laura Bohannan, arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria. Immediately, her new neighbors began bringing over little gifts: a few ears of corn, a chicken, some tomatoes, a handful of peanuts, etc. Bohannan, not yet understanding the custom, took note of who gave what, as if she was to be sending thank you cards after a baby shower. Luckily, some neighbors took pity on her and stepped in to explain that those who had given gifts expected something other than a thank you in return. It did not have to be the same thing, but it should be something in the same ballpark value. It would be inappropriate, however, to calculate the exact value, thereby paying off her debts. Such would be to sever ties with the person in question. Better to give something of slightly more or slightly less value, so that a connection remains open: someone owes someone else, ensuring further dealing. In this way, Bohannan’s new neighbors were tying her into their community.

“There are endless variations on this sort of tit-for-tat, or almost tit-for-tat, gift exchange. The most familiar is the exchange of presents: I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one” (105).

This form of exchange is alive and well in our own society, even if it has become a rather minor player. Still, working in the service industry, I see it almost every day. Two friends come in for coffee and bicker over who will pay until one says some variation of, “You got lunch. Let me get this.” To continue arguing beyond this is to commit a social faux pas and things get awkward, so that tends to do it. It’s not that two coffees cost the same as two entrées, but the gesture weaves a social bond. The standing imbalance insures further dealings with one another.

Small, close-knit societies can run quite well on such an arrangement, and have little need for money. When one is assured of future dealings moving in both directions, then the need for mutual aid is a given. Social indebtedness, especially with built-in mechanisms for wiping the slate clean after x-amount of time, function just fine.

That said, many such societies do still have a form of currency, it’s just that they rarely used it amongst one another. Money is best spent to settle feuds, or upon strangers with whom there is little trust or likelihood of future arrangements.

So how do we get from social currencies of mutual indebtedness to our current arrangement?

Well, as weird as we like to sometimes get around here, we remain good materialists, and hold faith in Marx’s claim that the mode of production is the prime driver in shaping one’s experience of reality. As capitalism spread, people were removed from their social context and turned into individuals in a new global marketplace, and the old bonds of social currency between neighbors were broken.

Graeber points to the African slave trade as the most violent and sudden severing point, but this is only the most obvious example, and he spends some time tracing less stark transitions from human to commercial economies:

“I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt” (163).

In a competitive market economy where almost all interactions occur between strangers, money has to step in as a universal measure of value, and it has to be guaranteed by a powerful actor: the state. Graeber traces this gradual transformation across the Axial Age, the Middle Ages, the Age of the Great Capitalist Empires, and all the way up to our current moment, starting in 1971 when the dollar was taken off the gold standard, an era he names The Beginning of Something Yet to be Determined.

We have returned to a system primarily reliant on debt, but debt no longer functions as a social fabric binding person to person. Now each person is bound individually to an inhuman creditor. Debt carries interest, and this is used as a form of forceful coercion. Our creditor sits heavy in the center, its vast weight creating a sinkhole into which money is drained from the hands of the vast majority of the population to land in the coffers of a few individuals. Without any instruments in place to reset the mechanics, no debt forgiveness, no jubilee, the inequality only continues to grow, so that the top 1% now owns nearly a third of the wealth, while the bottom half fights over a measly 2.5% of it.

Money has never been more imaginary, yet it has never been more unequally distributed. It is a system so obviously dysfunctional and cruel that a whole religion has been thrown up in an attempt to obscure this fact. A protective whirlwind of mumbo jumbo tries to convince us that this whole thing does not just boil down to some numbers on a screen somewhere that could just as easily be changed, but that it is reality itself, just the way things are. Sorry, life is unfair. You gotta pull yourself up by the bootstraps, yaddy yadda.

Behind the pseudo-scientific language of economists, there is a senseless festering. Profit extraction is a protected right of the world’s true hegemonic religion: capitalism. Everything, from people to attention to housing to the flora and fauna of the natural world, and now even differences in opinion, can be assigned a value and then strip mined for that value, leaving nothing but blanched landscapes in their place. While powerful forces1 keep this ridiculous system propped up, the profit motive is eating the bones of the world.

The Invisible Hand

Adam Smith theorized a non-human intelligence that would regulate the market. He called it the Invisible Hand. It was to be a built-in force that incentivized self-interested people to act for the public good. This puppet master was to be what prevented a free market system from running away into total inequality.

And how’d that work out for you, Mr. Smith?

Animal Money’s most obvious forerunner, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, also concerns itself with the real role of the Invisible Hand. For both Pynchon and Cisco, the Hand removes the economy from the realm of the common interest and acts as the god at the center of a fantastical reality that lifts its own needs above all else. Interchangeable or not, it does still require human actors, and these religious zealots have delivered humanity into one tragedy after another, even as the vast majority of the world’s population suffers for it. Yes, a tiny, priestly class profits, but even more than that, their blood god gorges:

“Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. . .The true war is a celebration of markets.”

Writing in the wake of another bout of financial turmoil and the first stirrings of the re-emergence of class consciousness en mass, both at home with the 2008 crash, Obama’s horribly bungled bail out, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as abroad with the Greek crisis rocking Europe and Hugo Chavez and the Pink Tide sweeping Latin America, Cisco set out to write a fantasy novel about money, one which might reveal that money itself is a fantasy. That none of it is real. That it’s all just a whirlwind of names and numbers and documents kept spinning by a constant input of energy.

In Animal Money, the Invisible Hand has become a true entity, the demiurge at the center of this false system. Like the fascist politician in the novel who has his tongue eaten and replaced by a parasite who whispers public policy to him, our society has been infiltrated by an alien bloodsucker who pulls the strings from within, and not only within the system, but, far more insidiously, reproduced inside the system’s inhabitants, that is, ourselves.

More than any individual person2, it is the demiurge’s illogical logic directing things, and this alien god’s shadow haunts the novel:

“Glancing up, she notices something in the sky, or rather in the air, in the act of disappearing behind a building. She is able to prolong her view of it for a few seconds further by stepping back and observing its funhouse mirror reflection in the windows across the street. What she sees is like a coagulated mass of pale, virtually colorless balloons, resembling…a huge puffy white cartoon glove practicing piano fingering” (336-7).

As god of this system, the Invisible Hand cannot allow the validity of said system to be challenged, so when our five economic professors develop the idea of animal money they become targeted by this unseen force.

But what exactly is animal money, anyway?

At the onset of the book, economists have gathered for an academic conference in the fictional South American city of San Toribio3, Archizoguayla. Following a series of debilitating head injuries, which one must suspect are the result of divine providence from some in-breaking spirit4 who has selected our five economists as its avatars in the fight against the demiurge, they are prevented from attending the conference proceedings, and instead come together to share their work among one another.

The mysticism of economics is made literal in Animal Money, so that its economists are truly members of a strange, priestly caste, complete with its own gods, rituals, secret phrases, and signifying face tattoos. Only after a consultation with the economic divinities (the Dii Lucri, principle among them Mercury, who the economists call Turms, “his Estruscan name” (11)), the economists decide to discuss their work in the hotel bar:

“We discuss each paper…In the criss-cross of our conversation the idea of animal money appears. None of us can account for it, none of us can take credit for it” (16).

In a parody of economic language, it is never made precisely clear what animal money is, but, speaking in long jumbles only rarely demarcated by quotations, and in which one narrator might take over for another without signifying as much to the reader until later, and even then only through subtle hints, the economists quickly get swept up by the idea. They call it qualitative rather than quantitative; it would be handing someone an experience of time in different flavors; it would be escape-money free from the grey limbo of exchange. Animal money is like two people coming together to make a baby, or to exchange ideas. Neither loses anything of value in the interchange, and both come away with something greater. Instead of a halfing, animal money exchange results in a doubling for both parties. And finally, it is said to be a variation of Pierre Klossowski’s concept of living currency.

A Brief but Necessary Look at Pierre Klossowski

This throwaway line about Klossowski is worth digging into a bit here. Cisco is clearly inspired by the Frenchman. Not only does he receive one of the few name drops in the nearly 800 page novel, but Cisco also has an academic article examining Sadeq Hedayat’s novella, The Blind Owl, through a Klossowskian lens5.

While not exactly a household name, Pierre Klossowski was the guy who inspired all your favorite guys. Elder brother of the painter Balthus, he was a French writer, translator, philosopher, and artist whose work on Nietzsche greatly inspired Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Deleuze who credited him with “bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx”.

In a great, short introduction to some of his major concepts, Craig () of the Acid Horizon podcast, notes that Klossowski’s early work derived its ideas from Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila. Under their influence, Klossowski revealed that the Self is yet another paving stone underneath which there is The Teeming of Soul. For Klossowski, the soul is not a unified kernel that will survive death, but rather a chaotic realm made up of impulses, or impulsional forces, each in a state of constant struggle with one another6, and incommunicable to the Self, or what Klossowski calls the Suppot.

“The image of the Soul is imageless.”

Attempts to communicate these impulses to the Suppot occur through images. However, these are translations and they ultimately betray the incommunicable character of the Soul, whether they occur through writing or art or even theoretical concepts. Klossowski calls these attempts to define expressions of impulsional forces Simulacra, and notes that they can only ever form outlines, aspects, or contours of the complete set of forces at work within the individual.

Here, one can’t help but think of desperate Melville writing:

“But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.”

The third and final concept defined in the introduction is the Phantasm, which is a conglomeration of impulses into an affective or emotional state. While these phantasms might steer the Self, which Klossowski doesn’t see as acting out these impulsional forces so much as being acted by them, they remain opaque. Indeed, to lift that paving stone is to reveal a chaotic underworld of impulses, simulacra, and phantasms, but such is also to go beyond the atomized individual of the marketplace, as these impulses tie us back into the world. As Deleuze and Guattari later flesh out with their desiring-machines, the Freudian ego dissolves into innumerable drives that ultimately erase the boundary between inside and out.

The market atomized us into individuals, and Freud further atomized the individual into the id, ego, and superego, but Klossowski shows a way back into the collective. It is not by zooming out, but rather by zooming in. Eventually everything breaks apart once again into the multitude.

In Living Currency, Klossowski expands his thinking, challenging traditional Marxism by proclaiming that “The real producer and consumer is not the purely fictional unity of the individual, but rather his impulsive phantasms.” It gets messy however because influence is flowing in both directions, so as the impulses create the economy, the economy creates the impulses.

Daniel W. Smith writes in his introduction to Living Currency,

“Klossowski had already argued that the impulses repress themselves through the creation of ‘the organic and psychic unity of the subject [suppôt]’ (LC 48), but he now extends this claim to the economy, which supports the subject like a scaffolding or prosthesis. Each implies the other, for once an individual acquires an organic and moral unity, its impulses and phantasms can only be expressed insofar as it is the possessor of this unity, which is itself supported by the hierarchy of material and moral needs of the social formation in which it exists. ‘This hierarchy of needs is the economic form of repression that existing institutions impose by and through the consciousness of the subject onto the imponderable forces of its psychic life’ (LC 48).

If one’s soul is unknowable, and worse, at least partially derived of impulses limited and directed by the social formation in which one exists, how can one break free? Cisco refers to those caught in this trap as “the deadly conformity of the misled” (361). Marx names it false consciousness. We here at Gnostic Pulp feel that, if you are so inclined, calling it the demiurge serves just fine, and how does one escape the demiurge?

Gnosis and Love, baby. Gnosis and Love.

As Mr. Tweedy sez,

“Our love is all of God’s money.”

Now Back to Animal Money

The ostensibly private conversation between the five economists about animal money does something. It is as if, simply by theorizing it, the economists have turned over a box of living beings that disperse into the world. Animals begin to spontaneously participate in trade, popular uprisings break out across the Americas, and multiple varieties of alien arrive on earth.

As animal money spreads, the demiurgical forces begin to work against the economists. In one of the book’s most disturbing scene, what can only be described as an archon (“he isn’t any one person in particular; he’s the guiding spirit that bides darkly in upper corners” (327)) prevents one of the economists, “the remaining Professor Long”, from delivering a presentation on animal money by warping reality around her:

“The moment she gets up to leave, there is someone passing behind her chair she bumps into. She reaches to open the door and someone darts in, compelling her to stand back. She steps out onto the sidewalk for a smoke but there is already someone stepping there, already lighting up. The moment she thinks of turning, stepping, there is someone there, blocking the way with an open door, or carrying a big bag or parcel. Thinking to go round a pair of slow-moving older people she nearly collides with a baby carriage thrust out suddenly from between two parked vans. Turning back, there’s a small boy where she just was, walking along obliviously in his knit cap. She opens her mouth to say something and a car horn blasts, holding the note until a siren takes over, drowning out her words before she can say them. It’s as if her visitor were reading her mind and balking her every impulse by moving people and things to check her like chess pieces” (327).

This feeling of claustrophobic paranoia closes in on the economists throughout the first half of the book. As Professor Long is pursued and waylaid, another is abducted, but manages to escape thanks to Smilebot (his robot sidekick and perhaps the best character in the novel (until, of course, Smilebot creates his own robot sidekick)), while a third winds up dead, supposedly via suicide, but that seems unlikely.

Around the halfway point of the book, the four remaining professors accept help from benevolent forces of equally mysterious origin. They are allowed to pass through a door “to safety”. This door seems to lead them, Slothrop-like, outside of the narrative. They wind up as these vast figures in the sky who are able to watch things unfold below. With their exit, the thrust of the novel moves away from the economists and their theorizing, and settles into praxis, the chaos of the ground, beyond the paving stone and into the scrum underneath.

“We have to move away from that dead end of godly oversight to find a worldly solution” (640).

Worldly Solution

Theorizing can get you only so far. The release of animal money punctures the stones of what-was-taken-for reality and reminds us that what gets called the system is actually a structure. We here at Gnostic Pulp have taken to referring to this structure as the Black Iron Prison, but the image Cisco provides of a brick and mortar labyrinth standing out in the rain “through which humans sluice forever” works as well.

“But that brick jail is no stronger than the opinions that keep its doors closed and locked” (654).

The release of animal money blasts open a door and the blinding light of the possible comes pouring in. As with lab chimps seeing the sun for the first time, freedom is not immediately recognizable, and is actually quite overwhelming. The capitalist system has, to get all Deleuzian again, coded our desires in such a way that we willingly function as slaves to capital. The revolution must happen inside first, otherwise we are doomed to remain among “the deadly conformity of the misled” (361).

Blasting the roof off the Black Iron Prison causes great confusion, and the second half of the book becomes exceedingly difficult to parse as, to cite a cliche, the old world dies and a new one struggles to be born. Cisco ramps up the narrative acrobatics, moving nimbly between voices, and introducing an ever wider range of interweaving plots that extend the story across the universe, widening the aperture on the infinite field of Pure Immanence. While we cannot live in that field, this in-between period is a rare opportunity in which all its fruits are available to us, but there is not time to simply go shopping. As in Klossowski’s vision of Soul, there are various forces working on multiple sides vying for dominance.

Following the economists’ disappearance, the primary protagonists of the novel become a pizza delivery guy/workplace organizer called SuperAesop, and a genius physicist named Assiyeh who the economists might have “made up” and who may or may not be exactly “real”7, and whose experiments with absolute rest allow for the raising of the dead as well as faster-than-light travel, turning humanity into an intergalactic species.

Cisco takes us to several planets, but the most memorable is a planet of lichen populated by rock beings. The rocks are pancake-shaped and they exude an enzyme that breaks down the lichen so that they can absorb its nutrients. Once a rock has consumed all the lichen underneath, it flips over and begins the process anew in the space directly adjacent. Likewise, the paving stones of self and society must sometimes be flipped to receive fresh nutrients.

In stark juxtaposition to Assiyeh’s fantastical inventions and travels across the stars is SuperAesop who plods along in his shitty hatchback, working tirelessly to hold together a coalition here on Earth. In the novel’s formulation, money either flows towards you or away from you, and the direction is largely dependent on the situation into which you are born. It is through SuperAesop that Cisco most clearly articulates the experience of being someone from whom money flows away.

SuperAesop is a pizza delivery driver who lives in his car. He cannot catch a break. Through some combination of circumstances, he has broken free from the demiurge’s spell, achieved class consciousness, and has spent his life trying to organize his various workplaces. Because he has achieved the smallest of victories, he has become a target. He sees through the paving stone and into the beach underneath, but for all his resistance can hardly do anything to effect change. This powerlessness has turned him into "a living anger sculpture” (192).

Still, They are not afraid of him. They aren’t afraid of me or you either, but, corny as it is to say, “under the smooth sneering finish they are afraid of us” (502).

Until that is a true coalition, until the atomized individuals of the market world knit themselves into a new social fabric of mutual indebtedness, and that social fabric reinforces the Soul, and the Soul reinforces the social fabric, etc., They will have nothing to fear. The demiurge will rule and there will be no chance of restructuring anything. The paving stone will remain too heavy for a handful of SuperAesops to lift on their own. The economy will eat the world underneath, and our global pancake-rock system will eventually starve as we ask, simultaneously, but individually:

“Isn’t there anywhere in life for my anger to go? Why do I have to burn it off in a game or in some bullshit?” (403-404).

[Exit Music]

“At some point, you... need to resign yourself to the fact that you may never know exactly what it is, but, if you’re very fortunate, you’ll get the poetry of it.“ - Allen Greenfield

“Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation.” - Thomas Pynchon

There’s something of a tradition on Substack to make a post acknowledging your newsletter’s anniversary. It’s a little cheesy, sure, but I find it rather endearing, so here we go: it’s Gnostic Pulp’s first birthday! Grab a drink, have some cake, make yourself at home. Somehow there are almost twelve hundred of you reading these now (or at least receiving the emails). This makes thirty-six posts. At around 3-4000 words each, that’s a sizable novel’s worth of words. So what is it we’ve been so busily doing on here for the last year?

Writing about books, mostly, or, as I said in the bio a year ago:

Gnostic Pulp is written by Jacob Austin. Posts drop every other Thursday. These will largely consist of essays on what I have deemed Gnostic Pulp, a genre which refers to that particular vein of literature and art that mashes together deep investigations into the nature of reality with dime novel tropes, general buffoonery, and other pulpy low-browisms.

While I will probably update it for the project’s second year, I do believe this has remained a pretty fair description.

A year on, a few recurring themes have begun to emerge, but, if I had to choose a single major motif, it would be the Black Iron Prison. For the uninitiated, this is a Phildickian1 term for the world in which the Roman Empire never ended. In the glossary of his Exegesis, it is defined as: “the prison world of political tyranny and determinism…He later wrote that upon perceiving it, he realized that he had been living in it and writing about it his whole life” (919), as are we all, for the Black Iron Prison has metastasized into our hegemonic lifeworld in which the demiurge of profit extraction is worshiped devoutly. Like one of Lovecraft’s Old Ones, this false god’s reach is ever-growing, its hunger bottomless, and its logic cracks the minds of humanity.

We have focused much effort on tracing the contours of the Black Iron Prison using the work of literature’s weird luminaries. Their texts have served as prisms through which we might search for ways to punch through BIP’s limits and think our way outside of its walls. A fool’s task, perhaps: akin to a fish dreaming about dry land, for whatever lies outside of BIP is a reality beyond the senses. Touching it would require a vast range of tools. And that is exactly why we have veered, sometimes wildly, between literature, parapolitics, religion, and the occult. Each serves its role in these journeys into the chthonic and in-between places these essays have taken us.

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Investigation

As I have stressed in the past, Gnostic Pulp is not in the business of writing reviews nor literary criticism, both of which I am unqualified for and besides which there are plenty of people on here doing that better than I ever could. Instead, I have named these forays ~investigations~.

The literary investigation is an approach I first cribbed from the poet Dan Beachy-Quick, whose brilliant A Whaler’s Dictionary I have referenced in each of my four Moby-Dick pieces2. Less often referenced, though often on my mind, is his collection, Wonderful Investigations, in which he writes about the works of Thoreau, Emerson, Plato, and Proust, among other things.

When asked about why a poet should be writing criticism, DB-Q had this to say:

“I’m not sure I’d exactly consider the essays in ‘Wonderful Investigations’ criticism, at least not in the typical sense of the word. I find myself, the more I think about a given text, less and less able to judge it, as if the work of writing critically undermines its own intentions, and some other quality emerges—not definition or claim, but a sense of wonder, a suspicion that entering into a work requires the mind to enter the heart’s labyrinth, or the heart to step into the mind’s maze.”

This is quite dreamily put, but I like that idea of entering into a work, especially with a sense of wonder (or, when it’s called for, paranoia). It’s a good reminder that an investigation is not merely the work of the police. There are cases to be solved, and then there are Mysteries to be explored. It is in that spirit we here at Gnostic Pulp enter into these books, to think with the ideas that flow out of their pages. We aren’t so much interested in analyzing their literary merit as we are in dwelling within their created moods, and seeing where we might end up if we were to plod far enough down one of their roads.

More like plodding up your your own ass, I imagine a detractor saying, and to them I might respond that there’s a universe up there, too, buddy. Come on, take a look, I’ll show you.

This entering into is often done blindly, like stepping carefully into murky water, feeling our way forward, unsure of what is underfoot. On rare occasions, however, I do receive a form of gnosis, a ring on the divine tip line by which I get an idea about how best to approach a given work. Moby-Dick is About UFOs came to me in this way. The hypothesis hit like a sudden bolt, so that all I had to do was test it out. The same happened with my suspicion that The Star is the skeleton key to Against the Day and again with the idea that Thomas Pynchon ghost wrote Dumb & Dumber (1994).

All of this received knowledge led me down rabbit holes more rewarding and interwoven than I could have hoped. The synchronicities revealed in the research had me buzzing. A similar feeling has sometimes overtaken me when working on a piece of fiction, especially something long form. It is a tricky feeling to explain, but it is as if, through the act of extended concentration, everything else becomes drawn to the work, like the world itself is conspiring to feed this project: random podcast episodes become deeply relevant, a stranger will say something off hand that leads to a breakthrough, or something seen on a walk will provide the next piece of the puzzle, etc. The project becomes this nexus that draws out all these latent connections that otherwise might have never been noticed. It’s enough to bring on an ecstatic religious feeling. It is in the midst of one of these synchronicity storms that art takes on the feel of a true spiritual practice.

But far more often than this rush of ideas and ecstasy, is the grind. I receive a ticket and hit the pavement with no lead whatsoever3. In such cases, I just have to start poking at things to see what happens. This tends to lead to essays held together by tangents rather than theses, but through the process of investigation a connective tissue is born. Still, some pieces have proven exceedingly grating. It’s like I keep throwing clay onto the wheel, but it refuses to cohere into a pot. There’s a Gene Wolfe essay been sitting in my drafts for a long time now. All the pieces are there, but I just can’t seem to figure out how they go together.

Perhaps in 2026.

Metaphysical Detectives

Thomas Pynchon has become the most cited author on Gnostic Pulp, in no small part because he has long used the investigation as a central device in his writing. It offers the perfect structure for the kind of drilling down into something very specific that creates this corresponding spiraling out overhead at which he so excels. As the hole deepens, the spiral expands, drawing out that world of hidden connections. The danger lies in digging too deep, causing the spiral to grow so large that those connections become meaningless. At some point, everything being connected becomes effectively the same as nothing being connected.

Across his oeuvre, Pynchon has used about every discipline imaginable to investigate the Black Iron Prison in all of its guises. He writes as confidentially about physics as he does the Tarot, making him the ideal candidate for his role as the foundational author of this project. While investigations of one sort or another can be found across his work, the detective novel streamlines this method, and it is this mode he has settled on in his late career. His most recent three novels could be categorized as a detective trilogy. Each centers around a private investigator of one type or another who are put onto rather straight forward-sounding tickets that inevitably spiral out of control. This, of course, is a trope of the genre, but Pynchon uses it masterfully.

As in the classic noir story, the detective must descend into the underworld though they, themself, are not a creature of the underworld; the detective is an amendable dayworld creature who must learn to adapt to its surroundings, and pass as needed or else risk being drawn ever deeper into the interconnecting alleyways, the exit twisting shut behind as phantom clues propel them into a lair of utter hopelessness from which they will never emerge.

In this way, an investigation always leads the detective into Chapel Perilous, an idea which we explored back in our Robert Anton Wilson essay:

“In the High Weirdness chapter devotes to Wilson, he calls the Chapel Perilous “a weigh-station of paranormal possibility” (219). It can also be thought of as the anti-structural phase of an initiation ritual, the testing ground an initiate must pass through, or the dangerous enclosures in which a knight-errant must prove themself. In more psychological terms, it is the test of a mind that has been presented with something extraordinary. Does it deny or repress the extraordinary event in order to retain the pre-existing reality tunnel, as Wilson calls our mental formulations of the possible, or does it accept the extraordinary, thereby reshaping its own framework?”

Pynchon first sends in Doc Sportello4, the permastoned gumshoe hero of Inherent Vice whose search for his ex-girlfriend’s missing boyfriend reveals the outline of a vast conspiracy involving heroin trafficking, a dental cartel, and the secret inner workings of the cop underworld.

Following next is Bleeding Edge and the fraud investigator, Maxine Tarnow, certainly the most savvy of the bunch. Simply by looking into a crooked tech company, she brushes up against the nascent surveillance state, the undead, and 9/11. Both she and Sportello fail to solve anything in the traditional sense, but their brushing up against these dark forces irreparably changes each of them.

Most recently, there has been Hicks McTaggart of this year’s Shadow Ticket, a former strike breaker turned private eye who is sent abroad to bring home a missing cheese heiress. His almost complete lack of agency helps illustrate that Chapel Perilous is not something to be trifled with. While Doc and Maxine get drawn deeper and deeper into their Mysteries through their own persistence, they are at least somewhat prepared to combat its effects. Hicks, meanwhile, is sucked in totally unwillingly, and fares far worse than his counterparts.

While Chapel Perilous more often opens to those who go out looking for it, consciously or not, it is also possible to simply fall into its pit, and woe be to those who do, for it is Mystery incarnate, and Mystery is fertile ground for Trickster.

In order to counter the Trickster, one must become its foil, the Magician. According to RAW, The Magician, and by extension the detective, must equip themself with the sword of reason, the cup of sympathy, the wand of intuition, and, the pentacle of valor.

Whereas the police detective may well be armed with the sword of reason and even, sometimes, the wand of intuition, as a foot soldier for the Black Iron Prison itself, they lack sympathy and valor. The gumshoe, meanwhile, has sympathy in spades, often working cases pro bono. In fact, sympathy is often what propels the investigation onward. By recognizing the humanity of people the police overlook (maids, the homeless, sex workers, etc.) the gumshoe is often rewarded with a clue that the police could never receive. From there, it is up to that pentacle of valor to carry them along.

If we were to do a quick Wizard of Oz thing here, I’d have to say Doc’s problem is that he is missing the sword of reason, or maybe that it has been whittled down to a dagger of reason by his overindulgence. Maxine has the wand of intuition in her possession, but she often chooses to ignore its ringing. Hicks, meanwhile, dropped his pentacle of valor back in Milwaukee and floats around central Europe like a thanatoid—

But you know what, I’ve already spent a lot of ink this year writing about Pynchon5. It’s the last day of class before break. We’ve been talking books all year long. Let’s do something fun. Roll out the television cart; I’ve got a few shows on my mind.

He’s At His Limit

The Chair Company is a show about a man who is at his limit. Ron Trosper is a project manager for a property development firm called Fisher Robay. At the onset of the show, he has recently received this promotion, and is heading his first big job: overseeing the construction of a shopping mall in Canton, Ohio, but when his chair breaks on stage at a conference and he falls on his ass in front of a room full of important people, he begins obsessing over it. To Ron’s credit, he does try to make a joke out of it. If the room had humored him with a laugh, the tension might have eased and the show could have ended then and there. As it is, no one laughs, and the tension only ratchets up, sending Ron down the rabbit hole and directly into Chapel Perilous.

Initially, he wants only what every disgruntled American consumer wants, to complain to the company that wronged him and get an apology, or at the very least an opportunity to air his grievances to a human being. In short, he longs to be seen, to have his hardships recognized by one of these faceless, lumbering brontosauruses with which we must share our living space, but of course he cannot get even that.

hits on something true when he bucks the trend of calling the show Pynchonesque. While it does owe no small debt to The Crying of Lot 496, I think Barnes’ Kafkaesque label is equally useful. Pynchon’s conspiracies reveal the vast, secret power structures controlling our world while Kafka’s nightmares are more expressionistic portrayals of how it feels for an individual living under these conditions:

“All the products you buy shit out in a matter of months. The chairs are falling apart, and you can’t get someone on the phone to listen to your pleas. Or they direct you to the Artificial Intelligence-powered chat bots whose only directive is to send you through feedback loops of questions without any answers. There is nobody who wants to listen to you complain and even if they did there is nothing they could do about it anyway because their boss is a robot or is afraid they will be replaced by a robot... This company owns this company and this company and that company and nobody really works there anyway. There is no there, there. Capitalism has created this Kafkaesque system via vertical integration and now they have been given full reign to obscure any meaningful path to soothing your consumer-product interface when it becomes wounded. Declining profits mean that somebody, somewhere has to pay and that person is you.”

Tecca is bureaucracy par excellence. The maker of the chairs is a subsidiary of a subsidiary. Email addresses dump into the abyss. Phone calls circle back around and kick you in your own ass. They are as unreachable as God. This frustrates Ron to no end, so that, by the end of the first episode, Tecca has become the Moby Dick to Ron Trosper’s Ahab. His descent into Chapel Perilous is all-encompassing. He is prepared to chase this chair company around the world until it spouts black blood and rolls fin out. Despite having, by all appearances, a rather cushy and well-paying job, a loving wife, and two grown children who adore their father, Ron feels empty. As the series progresses, it becomes obvious that the only source from which he can derive any meaning in his life is this investigation into the nefarious chair company.

To be fair, the further he investigates the more nefarious the chair company grows, but it’s unlikely the conspiracy reaches anything like the levels of power that Pynchon tends to deal with. These are small beans. By the end of season one, it is not entirely clear if any of what he has found is even actually connected by anything more than his own paranoia. As the Trillbillies are fond of saying, nothing in this country is what it pretends to be: air travel is a credit card scam, fast food is a real estate scheme, university is a way to funnel federal loans to faux luxury apartment magnates, etc. Everyone is running whatever schemes they can get away with, so it is entirely possible that, simply by shining a light, Ron is revealing a dozen disconnected scams. It’s not like he is an especially gifted investigator, after all. Let’s take a quick peak inside Ron’s tool bag: Uh oh! Looks like he has forgotten not only his sword of reason, but also his cup of sympathy, and pentacle of valor!

Oh, Ron. Does he really think he can navigate Chapel Perilous with the wand of intuition alone?

Therein lies the genius of The Chair Company. We are a nation of Ron Trospers. Practically everyone is doing their best to navigate their day-to-day in such a way. No reason, no sympathy, no valor, just vibes. There is a widespread practice of what we might call vibesmancy at play, and Trickster is having a field day with its unwitting practitioners.

Q-Anon remains perhaps the most egregious example of this so far, but it is an issue far more embedded in the everyday than that. The internet is its breeding ground. Truth is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, as evident by the MAHA movement: doctors can’t be trusted, but somehow influencers can be? The internet is a manifestation of everything-is-connected, with an infinite string of hyperlink tying it all together. All one must do is chisel off the personally disagreeable bits and keep what remains. No need to apply reason, brave any friction whatsoever, or ever extend an ounce of sympathy to anyone who is at all different from yourself.

But Ron cannot be entirely to blame for his emptiness. He is a citizen of the Black Iron Prison, after all. The demiurge of profit extraction has fed on the meaning once contained within so many things, swapping out the thing-in-itself for the monetized value of the thing. Its hunger has drained the world leaving it with little more upon which to satiate itself. It is now tearing open boxes, flipping bags inside out to suck off the crumbs, as evident by the Kalshi CEO broadcasting their plan to monetize differences in opinion. Ron can feel this emptying out intuitively, as we all can, even if we cannot articulate it, but until he equips himself with his missing three tools, Trickster will simply lead him around by the nose.

Goblin Mode; or Investigation as Spiritual Practice

There is a very different show I’d like to talk about now, one whose third season we here at Gnostic Pulp have been eagerly anticipating for years. I am talking about the paranormal investigation series, Hellier. It represents what a journey into Chapel Perilous might yield for those who are actually prepared for it. These are Detectives as The Magician.

The show centers around Greg and Dana Newkirk and their small team of paranormal investigators. It starts off with Greg receiving a series of strange emails from a man in rural Kentucky who claims his family’s home is being overrun by goblins. Greg, wary of Trickster’s cunning, does not bite right away, but after further correspondence they eventually do decide to take a trip out to eastern Kentucky to see what they can kick up.

The team, Greg and Dana + a couple friends, arrives in Hellier, an old coal town of about 2000 people, with almost nothing to go on. Whoever was behind the emails has ceased responding, so they don’t even know for sure where the farm in question is. When they arrive in town, they simply drive around for a while before settling in to hang out at a gas station and Hey Man, so… Goblins? people in the parking lot. To be fair, it’s an approach not dissimilar to that taken by hero of the genre, John Keel, in The Mothman Prophecies, and it actually does yield some results. As will happen with almost anyone when you ask if they’ve had any “weird experiences”, many of the passersby initially shake them off, but then come back around and share their weird stories, which abound in Appalachia.

The Newkirks are exemplars of The Magician’s four tools. They are led equally by the wand of intuition, pentacle of valor, and cup of sympathy, and they are always sure to retreat to the equally important sword of reason with which they can cut away the bullshit. In this fashion, one step forward, two steps back, their physical investigation gradually transforms into a kind of magical thinking.

The Weird Studies Boys recently appeared on an episode of Against Everyone With Conner Habib in order to discuss the question What is horror? Since it was their show that originally introduced me to Hellier many years ago, it feels appropriate to bring them in here.

had this to say:

“I think that the question the weird always asks of us is the courage to let go.”

Hellier brilliantly captures the feeling of being inside one of those synchronicity storms charged with a feeling of religious ecstasy, similar to that which can be brought on by artistic creation as I described above. It is a feeling that cannot be jumped directly into, but which must be invoked appropriately, by following steps that may have to be intuited, and then surrendering to the process. This act of surrender, of course, should begin with a thorough pat down from the sword of reason, but it always ends with a leap of faith. Once taken, control is relinquished and a liminal space opens up.

Victor Turner, an anthropologist who studied rites of passage, noted a similar occurrence within the ritual process. Once the ritual has been set and its participants have been severed from workaday society, they enter a middle stage consisting of something he called communitas. Communitas is the social bond that forms when all of the typical social signifiers drop away. It is something like the opposite of alienation, a temporary return to the lost heaven of the collective. The ego just drops away and one comes out the other end transformed.

Communitas is at work in The Chair Company when Ron calls Mike his brother. These are men of very different social standings. Ron is embarrassed to be associated with him outside of the context of the investigation, but when they enter that liminal space together they become united by the deepest bonds.

A similar connection forms within Hellier’s mystery gang as they surrender to the investigation. As with a rite of passage, it is a totally transformative experience. By the end of the second season (spoiler alert), the gang is traveling deep into a cave in order to play a series of three looping notes while performing a magical invocation to awaken Pan. That’s quite a jump from investigating backyard goblins, and it’s something that might look like nonsense from the outside. In fact, a popular joke amongst fans is the citing of a review that reads “One Star. No goblins”, reference to the fact that no monsters are shown, that all the weirdness occurring is happening within the heads of those on screen, but the series is filmed in such a way that even those watching at home can get a taste of this transformative feeling. It is as if through the investigation, the gang creates a pocket lifeworld, one imbued with communitas, that is able to take shape within the Black Iron Prison.

Phil Dick called the hypothetical, redeemed lifeworld that lay on the other side of the Black Iron Prison the Palm Tree Garden. Watching Hellier, one feels as if they are witnessing a bubble version of that. It does not simply lie somewhere out there waiting to be found. No, it must be created, invoked like Pan, charged by its inhabitants, and imbued with meaning from within.

Gnostic Pulp’s wager is that the investigation, when practiced correctly, is a genuine means of achieving this.

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Endnote:

I would like to extend a sincere thank you all for reading. This past year has been the most rewarding of my ~writing career~ and it’s all due to readers like you. I’ve been writing essays like these for years, and for years almost no one would publish them—a quick shout out to Pop Matters for taking a couple, and to my boy Sam who not only published but illustrated Two Dicks and toured it around the zine fests of New Zealand, and also Bruiser Mag who republished it earlier this year—I’m very happy to have gone the Substack route. For the first time, it feels like more than sending stuff out into the void.

Gnostic Pulp will be taking a couple weeks off to enjoy the Christmas season. I’m sure I’ll still be shitposting in notes, but to those of you who aren’t mired in The Scroll, I hope you have a happy and safe holiday and I’ll see you in January (hopefully with a fresh essay on Michael Cisco’s Animal Money which is currently blowing my mind).

Merry Christmas,

Jacob Austin

[Exit Music]

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Dragging my Bukowski soul
through the flowers, saying to it
Look at these! look at these!

-from a bit of my own juvenilia

The first time I ever heard about the Gulf War was when I fell in love with my friend’s shovel. I still remember the effect it had on me when he broke it out. His family’s land had access to this really incredible creek: pebble-bottomed, spring-fed, relatively cool and somewhat clear water that would flow even through the summer months. A real rarity in North Texas, and access to such a place even rarer, as most rivers and streams around here are almost completely surrounded by huge swaths of private ranch land, as, I suppose, was this one, but I had an in with these ranchers. Their kid liked me. I’d been invited onto their land, so that meant they couldn’t shoot me, and I got to enjoy countless weekends down in that creek throughout my elementary years.

We were down there, doing what we always did (swimming, catching crawdaddies, building dams, throwing rocks at sticks floating downstream) when he broke out the shovel. It was a thing of beauty. With a twist, the handle could fold down so that the whole thing reduced to the size of its blade. Small enough that he had been hiding it in his backpack up until then. Then he popped it open as cooly as a switchblade and set to work on a pebble bank, collapsing it quickly, and marveling at the earth slide in miniature.

Pretty cool, but I had eyes for only one thing.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

We had shovels at home, of course. My dad had a nice new one, but it was huge. A long metal pole that stood taller than I did, rendering it totally unwieldy. He bought it after snapping his old wooden one clear in half. Afterwards, he’d sanded that one down, wrapped some duct tape around the end to serve as a new handle, and let me have it, but, with its sun-bleached wood and rusty blade, it was nothing like this. No, this shovel was matte black, and it folded.

“It’s my dad’s. From the war.”

“Your dad was in Vietnam?” I asked in confusion. It was the late nineties. Vietnam was ancient history. His dad surely wasn’t old enough to have been involved in all that, but what other war was there?

“No. Iraq. You know, Desert Storm.”

“Oh. Right,” I lied.

And we carried on with our creek business.

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Life in the Imperial Core

Mr. Crabby You Have Died is a collection of interconnected short stories written by Gulf War veteran, Jeremy Kitchen, and published by the Indiana Micropress, First to Knock. These are nasty little stories, Bukowskian in their straight forward squalor, but, unlike those of that unsavory mailman, these stories orbit around the Gulf War—though that is not to say this is a war book, exactly.

As goes the introduction:

“There is, in fact, almost no real combat referenced in these pages…As opposed to Jeremy Kitchen giving us a memoir of his division (the 3rd Squadron 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment) or the pivotal Battle of 73 Easting (in which he participated), he sketches the war’s shadow (and foreshadow). Mr. Crabby You Have Died is a book about how a single individual finds himself getting into a war and how he tries to find his way out of its memory” (11).

North America is a haunted land. Gary Snyder says “The American Indian is the vengeful ghost lurking in the back of the troubled American mind. Which is why we lash out with such ferocity and passion, so muddied a heart, at the black-haired young peasants and soldiers who are the ‘Viet Cong’” (112). The same could be said of the black-haired young peasants and soldiers in Iraq, or indeed in practically any of our empirical forays into the Middle East, South and Central America, Africa, the Pacific, or Asia.

Our foundation consists of two of the most immense acts of evil man has ever wrought against fellow man. Our failure to fully face that fact has driven us culturally insane. No amount of correctional myth will save us now. Unable to look within, we seem only capable of striking out.

These are the conditions in which Jeremy Kitchen came of age. In Detroit in the 1980s, no less. Reagan’s America. The drying up of the New Deal and the dawn of the neoliberal regime. The automobile industry had moved their factories, once the backbone of the city, to right-to-work states where unions would have less power, or out of the country entirely. High gas prices and increased foreign competition further hurt the Detroit auto industry. It was during this decade when Michigan’s unemployment rate peaked at 15.5%. Detroit itself had lost a third of its population since the fifties, shrinking from 1.8 million at the 1950 census to 1.2 million by 1980, a number that would be cut in half by 2020.

While many of the collection’s stories take place after the war, when Kitchen is living in either 90s Chicago or is stationed in Germany, the titular story takes place early in Kitchen’s life, here in 80s Detroit. As a kid, he becomes obsessed with hermit crabs, in particular his class pet, Mr. Crabby, who he has the privilege of taking home and caring for over Christmas break. He feels a deep connection with this hermit crab because they are “both alone in the world” (79).

As the title portends, the crab outgrows its shell during the break and ends up dying. Hermit crabs will do that if they cannot find a new shell in time. They dry out. It is a common occurrence. Only, no one warned him about that. A culture’s job should be to ensoul its people, to present a boundaried lifeworld that is nonetheless fulfilling and complete, with the tools needed to face life’s mysteries and tragedies with some degree of dignity. Our own has pretty much failed to do that. As we will explore later on, the United States is less a culture and more a financial apparatus for determining the exchange rate between child death and profit extraction.

So Young Kitchen has no framework for actual mortality. Like the auto industry, it has been off-shored, or else abstracted and obscured. He is told all sorts of contradictory things depending on who he asks. First, he is given a Disney World version and, later, a nihilistic one. There is no cohesion, and certainly no closure. In the end, he is exposed to another dead pet, a beloved dog’s wormy head poking out of the ground, smelly and disfigured, and the only lesson he takes away from it all is that “everyone is a liar” (84).

The imperial drive is expansion. Those living in its core must only be kept appeased enough to prevent internal collapse. Ours is a system that recreates itself at every level, populated by denizens with hollow centers and minds set only on outwards expansion. This can be countered at the micro level in a few ways, including via family, community, or religion, but those abandoned to the ambient cultural radiation are in for a rough ride.

Luckily, by the collection’s closer, Ouija, young Kitchen has fallen in with a crew:

“We all had weird, fucked up families, either dysfunctional, divorced, or checked out. We made our own family by constantly getting into trouble, going to punk shows in the city, and getting fucked up on whatever we could get our hands on” (121-122).

With sobriquets like Bam-Bam, Bubba, Dildo, the Swede, Skippy, and Bucksnort, Jeremy “Jerms” Kitchen and his crew manages to find access to what Gary Snyder calls

“the Great Subculture which runs underground all through history. This is the tradition that runs without break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting; through megaliths and Mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, alchemists and Albigensians; gnostics and vagantes, right down to Golden Gate Park” (115)1.

When the culture fails to instill any kind of meaning or purpose in its people, this Great Subculture can fill the vacuum. In this view, it is as if soul isn’t so much something we have or are exactly. That maybe it is too large, much too large, for any one of us to carry, so really it is more like something we have to build collectively. And when a culture fails to provide the scaffolding for such soul-building, alternatives must be sought out. It is something we are drawn to because we feel its innate rightness. Something we can each contribute to, build together and then live in together, and finally pass down. Like soul is what survives in the world after death, what gives shape and shelter to the next generation. It may too often be rather powerless in terms of capacity to challenge state power, but it can certainly provide life-saving shelter on the individual level, even if access is only possible in tiny glimpses, stolen by the handful right from the empire’s hoarded riches.

By Kitchen’s time, Snyder’s sixties movement had died back and punk had replaced it as the Great Subculture’s latest outcropping. While the punk scene did continue that ancient tradition of transmitting a community style of life, and its own particular brand of an ecstatically positive vision of spiritual and physical love, Kitchen makes no attempt to sugarcoat it. His is a vision blurred by 40s of Mickeys, and, later on, other drugs that will make these parking lot beers seem kiddie and innocent:

“We pushed our way up front and GBH ripped into ‘Diplomatic Immunity’—the place went fucking bananas.

I got knocked to the floor and some skin kid yanked me up. Booker went skanking across the stage. He leapt into the crowd and landed stomach first on some fat punk’s head and then he puked. Not just any kind of puke, a projectile vomit that sprayed the slam pit. It was like someone shot a hose full of chewed up Church’s and Mickey’s across the floor. People started slipping. Another girl barfed, like throwing up into a slow-moving blender of berserk young punks” (124-125).

This story ends with a graveyard prank involving a ouija board going awry, and Kitchen abandoned by his crew, caught hanging from a high fence in a park that features an overgrown landing strip built to run supplies to the National Guard during the Detroit Uprising of 1967, an insurrection that was the culmination of decades of institutional racism, police brutality, and segregation. Kitchen is left hanging here, over this physical manifestation of state violence and control, until a couple of homeless guys come over and help him down. He buys them beers then has a brief vision of a beautiful future which he promptly forgets as the cops arrive and start asking questions.

This bright future takes a massive detour through Iraq after Kitchen joins the army: “a bad [life choice]. I know this now”, he writes, but one can only suspect it was taken in an effort to find some semblance of belonging. This is not the experience he has. Instead, he is shipped off to Iraq where he suffers through the usual months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror.

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-from “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” by Sylvia Plath

One has to entertain the notion of some kind of outside intervention taking place at Berkeley High School in the late 1940s. Philip K. Dick graduated from there in 1947 and Ursula K. Le Guin followed just one grade behind. This was the same year the the CIA was taking shape out of its OSSified pupa, so we can probably rule out any MKUltra fuckery simply based on the timeline1, but if we rule out the CIA, then what does that leave? We are just meant to believe that a single California public school produced two of the most influential writers of their generation in back-to-back classes? Either the school had one hell of an English teacher, or it must have been constructed on a ley line. Otherwise, it seems quite the coincidence. The school just does that: produces sci-fi mystics of various traditions2?

If Phil Dick is Berkeley High’s Gnostic mystic, then Le Guin is its Taoist one, and somewhere out there in the moth-eaten slush piles of extinct pulp publishers, or forgotten upon the shelves of California’s second hand bookstores, are the works of Berkeley’s other sci-fi mystics, one working in the tradition of Kabbalah, another a Sufi, others Tantric or Yogic, and so on.

But we are focused here upon the Tao of Ursula. She wore her influence quite openly, going so far as to publish her own interpretation of the most famous Taoist text out there, the Tao Te Ching. In the introduction, she shares that it was a book that she grew up venerating. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas, kept an 1898 Paul Carus edition, “bound in yellow cloth stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters”, which he consulted often. Le Guin inherited the book after her father passed, and treasured it. Her work is steeped deeply in this Taoist influence, and her 1971 homage to schoolmate, Philip K. Dick, The Lathe of Heaven, is no exception.

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A Little Bit of Exposition

The novel begins with a quote from Chuang Tse, more commonly spelt these days as Zhuang Zhou, probably the most influential Taoist after Lao Tzu, having authored the tradition’s second foundational text, Zhuangzi.

“Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.”

This quote marks the first chapter. Each subsequent chapter is begun with its own quote, most of them pertaining to dreams in one way or another. While Tse is the source cited most often, Lao Tzu receives his fair share, as do a range of others, including HG Wells and Victor Hugo, who also offer insight on the topic of dreams, which is, of course, the focus of the book.

“We are like the dreamer who dreams then lives inside of the dreams” as Monica Bellucci says to Twin Peaks’ Gordon Cole, “but who is the dreamer?”

In the case of The Lathe of Heaven, the dreamer is George Orr.

Orr gets busted when he nearly overdoses on barbiturates and Dexedrine, which he was taking precisely to avoid dreaming. When the medic arrives to look him over, it is discovered his stash exceeds his personal allotment and that he had been borrowing pharmacy cards from others in order to get his hands on such a supply. In a great pastiche of a Dick world-building scene, Orr is given a choice: either spill the names of those whose cards he borrowed and be let off with some Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment, or refuse to do so and be stuck in the much scarier sounding Obligatory Therapy.

When Orr still refuses to give a name, Mannie, the elevator guard who’d found him and called up the medic, takes the fall, saying he’d lent Orr his pharm card, thereby lightening Orr’s punishment. Rather than being institutionalized, he is sent to Dr. William Haber through whom we learn why Orr is so afraid of dreaming.

At the risk of sounding insane, Orr confides in his self-professed oneirologist that he has had dreams that changed the non-dream world. It takes a while for Haber to understand what he means. It is not that his dreams are prophetic, but that they actually alter reality, and do so in a way that retroactively alters history. Say Orr were to have one of these dreams about the sky being green. He would not wake to a world where the population is freaking out over a suddenly changed sky. No, the world to which he awoke would have always had a green sky. No one would think a thing about it. Orr would be alone in remembering Old Blue.

We cannot say that his dreams transport Orr to a parallel universe rather than change this one because people can be made to remember the pre-dream reality, especially those who are present as Orr dreams, which is how Dr. Haber begins to believe his patient. He then quickly sets about putting these dreams to his own use.

Haber is not portrayed as an outright evil man. He does, of course, use Orr’s power to better his own station, but there is a lack of the dreadful Master of Reality type manipulation that is exhibited in something like Dick’s own The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is in part, perhaps, because Le Guin is simply not noided in the same vein as Dick, but also because Haber never actually becomes a master of reality. Dreams are much too slippery for that. While he slowly gains more and more control over Orr’s dreaming, he is never able to master the mechanism. Whatever changes he tries to implement upon the world manifest like a genie granting a wish:

“But he’s not a mad scientist…he’s a pretty sane one, or he was. It’s the chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part, and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he’s using even his science as a means, not an end. . . But his ends are good, aren’t they? He wants to improve life for humanity. Is that wrong?” (75).

These attempts at doing so go wrong in cheeky ways: When Haber tries to improve living conditions for the crowded and starving masses in the ecologically exhausted world, he ends up reducing the population by billions. When he attempts to end racism, everyone is turned grey. And when he tries to produce peace on Earth, aliens appear and war moves to space.

One can easily imagine Trickster grinning in the corner throughout the novel. If there is a universal mind, who says it has to be sane, indeed.

No King in Dream

Herein lies the crux of the novel: humanity as masters of the world vs. humanity as a part of the world. It is a theme Le Guin often returned to throughout her work, which always contained ecological concerns:

“We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be” (140).

Now, perhaps such words could be twisted into some sort of defense of laissez faire capitalism, but such a reading could not be done in good faith. Despite laissez faire’s translation into let it happen, it is not at all a natural progression, for it requires a disqualifying prerequisite: the conversion of the world into a standing reserve. This flies totally in the face of Le Guin who constantly writes of the world as populated by non-human peoples, almost in an animistic way. Everything dreams, she writes. That is how the world renews itself:

“The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes” (167).

These rock dreams may be unconscious3, but it is nonetheless the process that shaped the universe. Some matter dreamt of coalescing into a burning ball of gas, and the first star was born. Its gravity well, in turn, dreamt up planets whose tectonics dreamt of volcanos who beget islands, so that out of the sea land was born, and a fish to dream about living on that land, and so on until monkey dreams man.

When humanity came along, and a fully conscious mind began to dream, the game forever changed. As with Orr’s effective dreaming, the totally abstract could be conceptualized and acted upon in ways never before seen, like the famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the black monolith appears and the world’s first weapon is materialized out of Dream. Thus begins a chain reaction leading directly to space travel.

As Chapter 42 in the Tao Te Ching says,

“The Way bears one.
The one bears two.
The two bear three.
The three bear the ten thousand things.”

Dream created one out of zero, and shortly thereafter the world’s total web of interconnection had formed a system beyond quantification. The cacophony of pre-human dreams did not result in perfect harmony, but rather allowed for endless adjustments and counter adjustments, a vast cybernetics that kept things more or less operational for a numberless array of beings.

Humanity has proven to be the stick in the gear that has gummed up the celestial machine. A millennia of conscious dreaming for our own benefit has left the world in ecological ruin. Humanity has been attempting to live as if outside the world, treating the planet as a vast stockroom rather than a home, something that can be totally controlled and traded for our own enrichment, somehow forgetting it is the one inhabitable bubble in an infinite vacuum upon which we are totally and desperately reliant.

Haber aims to fix our situation from the same position that caused it, the outside. Before Haber took control of Orr’s dreaming, they were a rare event. It wasn’t every dream that changed reality, but only “effective dreams”. These occurred largely in times of great stress, such as in response to an abusive family member or a near death experience. It was a subconscious defense mechanism that guaranteed Orr’s survival, but through Haber’s use of technology effective dreaming becomes a miracle tool for reshaping the world to his own liking.

As opposed to adjusting ourselves to the available niche in the great mosaic, we are determined to sit atop everything else, dreamcasting ourselves into total control. The problem is the insidious idea that the world is raw material waiting to be improved and profited upon. There is no reverence for the Taoist ideal of uncut wood in itself, but only for the use it can be put towards, and the ends it can yield.

This brings us back to the question of who is the dreamer. When it is one part of the world’s vast mosaic who is forcing its dreams upon every other part, Progress spells disaster. The ancient dreaming of the landscape worked so well for so long because it was a collective dream. There were natural mechanisms that put limits on any one part’s ability to effect overwhelming change.

Human consciousness has meant the ability to short-circuit such limitations. It has meant that humanity’s dreams can overrule the dreams of everything else. We have forgotten the mosaic. We have forgotten, as Le Guin writes, that

“things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

Wu Wei

The aliens who are manifested out of Orr’s dreams are said to be of the dream time. It takes a few disastrous attempts, one or two destroyed worlds, before Haber-directed Orr is able to dream up a peaceful scenario, but eventually he does and the aliens come down to Earth. They seem to know about their origins. In this new reality, of course, they have a deep history, but in the meta-reality they are recent creations borne from Orr’s mind and for that reason they are naturally drawn to him.

Orr learns they, too, are effective dreamers, but they refer to it as iahklu. He asks an alien named Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe to explain this to him. Ennbe, who hilariously enters the antique trade immediately after getting settled on Earth, struggles to put anything else about it into language. Instead, he offers Orr a copy of The Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends. This would seem to communicate a depth of appreciation for interdependence, and advise against changing the world according to the whims of one man (or one species), but rather to seek to align oneself with the world’s own rhythms.

This is reminiscent of the Taoist concept of wu wei. Wu wei is something like the way of water. It is sometimes translated as ‘non-action’, but might be more easily understood as ‘effortless action’. Think of water flowing down a creek bed. It goes where it may, moving through crevices, filling the low places, going around what it must, and pooling patiently when it cannot continue.

What might this mean for those of us who are not a stream?

Wu wei is not some esoteric art accessible only by Taoist monks. We each exhibit its qualities from day to day, most often when so immersed in an activity that we are not even thinking about it, like walking down the sidewalk. It is the most natural thing in the world until one starts to think about it. Then, how quickly we become self-conscious and prone to stumbling. Breathing, too. It just happens, as long as we don’t overthink it.

In this way, wu wei is the embodiment of an activity, performed without distraction or self-consciousness. As Ron Swanson says, “Don’t half ass two things. Whole ass one thing.” Take each thing as it comes while accepting it for what it is. Don’t try to make it otherwise. Lucky for us, our modern world gives us significant opportunity to Practice acceptance of our total inability to affect a given situation. Try to remember that next time you are stuck in traffic.

How else might wu wei manifest? In agriculture, this might mean planting according to conditions, like don’t grow kale in the summer or plant water-intensive cash crops in place of staple necessities, or force golf courses and green lawns out of the desert. Cut with the grain. Ride the current. Gardening becomes a hell of a lot less difficult when one plants natives. The benefits of doing so extend beyond the gardener, bleeding over to the entire mosaic by providing food and shelter for local fauna, by using an area-appropriate amount of water, and requiring less soil additives as these are plants attuned to the available conditions.

Le Guin embodies wu wei in the opening paragraphs by writing about a jellyfish moving through the water. She is not one who often hits the nas with her prose, electing, instead, to weave a subtle, enticing spell capable of working a hypnotic effect that is on special display here:

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways, pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will” (1).

This jellyfish is likened to the dreaming mind. By the end of the third paragraph it has been cast onto dry sand, as we all are upon waking, in order to face the ready-made creation/Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets4. This waking mind and the dreaming mind are juxtaposed throughout the novel as the industrious attempt at total control, and the Taoist ideal of wu wei.

“You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits,” (167) Orr tells Haber after his exchange with Ennbe Ennbe. The world cannot be saved through a miracle act of sheer will, but only by retreating to our natural position. This does not mean sacrificing mind, but it does call for a change in perspective. We must come in from outside the world and rejoin our place within it. Unconscious mind of rock inherently knows the way, but humanity’s restless mind must remember it.

There is wisdom in the stones as there is in the ancient texts, but neither can be plainly spoken. Lao Tzu is quite explicit in writing that The Way cannot simply be told. Ennbe Ennbe, too, found himself at a loss for words, and instead offered a piece of art. I will follow the alien’s lead. The 51st chapter in Le Guin’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching might serve quite well in closing us out here:

“Nature, nurture

The Way bears them;
power nurtures them;
their own being shapes them;
their own energy completes them.
And not one of the ten thousand things
fails to hold the Way sacred
or to obey its power.

Their reverence for the Way
and obedience for its power
are unforced and always natural.
For the Way gives them life;
its power nourishes them,
mothers and feeds them,
completes and matures them,
looks after them, protects them.

To have without possessing,
do without claiming,
lead without controlling:
this is mysterious power.”

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[Exit Music]

Take it away, boys—

Do not bemoan, for this is a liberating revelation!

For a long time, I kept books on my shelf that I told myself I was working my way up to. These were difficult books, especially works of philosophy and psychology. I used to do the same with literature, but then one day I just started reading them. You can do that, you know. Still, reading notoriously difficult novels, such as Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses, felt a far cry from broaching something like Anti-Oedipus. I have been reading fiction all my life, but I have very little background in philosophy or psychology. I should do it right and start with the Greeks and work my way forward, eventually get a firm understanding of Freud, I would tell myself, but that was just a way of avoiding the challenge altogether. I will never be sufficiently ready on an academic level as I’m not an academic. I’m a barista. But maybe I could approach them as a kind of literature. After all, if no Absolute Truth can be spoken about Reality, then every utterance is a kind of thought experiment, including the rational languages of philosophy and science, and the most sober-minded social realism, just a type of Weird Fiction which asks:

What if this was how things really were?

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Malleable Reality

The contemporary anarchist philosopher, Federico Campagna, has made a career out of revealing the malleability of so-called reality. In his recent book, Otherworlds, Campagna writes:

“Since the infinite chaos of reality will always exceed the limits of any conceptual system, we should recognize that all our attempts at reducing it to a meaningful cosmos are merely ‘likely stories’” (10).

These stories make life livable. While they do require a certain amount of buy-in in order to activate their powers, they should not be mistaken for Reality itself. What we call reality is really only a game we play. It is a projection, a network of symbols and stories. While it may well be vast beyond any individual imagining, it is nonetheless only a tiny etching of Reality itself. Call it a lifeworld, a reality tunnel, or nomos, it is a system of meaning which allows for the possibility of something like dwelling comfortably in an ultimately unknowable universe.

Such systems largely emanate from the sensory apparati available to their given inhabitants. A praying mantis experiences reality quite differently from an oak tree, or a stone, for instance. The inputs they receive are not even compatible with one another’s “hardware”, so to speak.

With humanity, there is a bit more hybridization. Our lifeworlds, like those previously listed, take into account our shared anatomies, as well as the material conditions of time and place, but then there is the added influence of that horribly amorphous entity known as culture. Culture is the accumulation of all the ways we describe the world to ourselves through our own Weird Fictions. These fictions are most prized not for their Absolute Truth, but for their use-value. In that way, religious, philosophical, and scientific answers may all satisfy the same need in their own way, and to that end they will become inscribed into the Weird Fiction of their respective culture.

As with the names Europeans attributed to the various Peoples living in the Americas largely translating to “The People” in their own languages, lifeworlds don’t tend to have proper names. It is hard to see outside of them. They are often taken for reality itself by their inhabitants. That is the meaning of the famous quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In that sense, capitalism is operating as our lifeworld, and a lifeworld is viewed, by the uninitiated, as inmutable reality, so it might as well read as: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of reality. However, as the work of Campagna shows, countless reality-systems have existed before ours. Hell, many exist alongside ours now despite its insistence on hegemony. They will all one day fall and new ones will rise. All the while, Reality itself will scarcely be touched.

Okay, but What is Weird Fiction?

Turns out, that’s a difficult question to answer.

Decades before the coining of the term, there were writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, producing work that would be retroactively and uncontroversially ushered into the Weird Canon, but it was not until H.P. Lovecraft came around and penned his essay Notes on Writing Weird Fiction that the chimera took on a name. From there, a pole was raised and a rather large tent came to shelter many artists. In the early days, most of these writers could be found in the table of contents of literary journals such as Weird Tales and the like, including mainstays Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and, of course, Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft’s great achievement was not the outlandishness of his Weird Tales, but the sense of reality which imbues them. The glimpses we get of the Necronomicon, the grimoire referenced across Lovecraft’s work, give the sense of something much larger that he is pulling from, some lost religion, or holy text out of whose material he has created the Cthulhu mythos. That is, it feels as if it is outside and beyond his stories rather than embedded within.

Robert Chambers pulls off a similar maneuver with The King in Yellow, a fictional play that appears across four short stories in his collection of the same name. One reads such works and easily forgets it is a fiction within a fiction. The outside and inside become confused. At the very least, one starts to believe it is a real work of nonfiction being referenced within a work of fiction.

It is a signature move of Weird Fiction to blur the lines between reality and irreality, interiority and exteriority, but what else can be said of this slippery genre?

As the twentieth century proceeded, newer inductees would weird the collective further, taxing it beyond the limits of what can even be called genre, for what connective tropes could be traced between the works of Lovecraft’s tentacle-filled nightmares and the far subtler stories of someone like Robert Aickman? What exactly is holding this concept together, and just how flexible is it? Does Philip K. Dick get a ticket in, or is he merely a weird science fiction writer? How about Kafka? Leonora Carrington? Or is it Magical Realism if it comes from south of the Rio Grande, Weird Fiction if it’s from the northside, and only bonafide ~literature with weird characteristics~ if it’s from Europe?

Even New Weird royalty, China Miéville and the VanderMeers, struggle to give a good concise definition in their respective overviews, Weird Fiction and The Weird. Both end up stepping aside and allowing Lovecraft to define it for them, which means they land in a similar place.

Miéville: “[The] obsession with numinosity under the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction.”

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer: “It represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane.”

This sounds an awful lot like what we around here would refer to as Gnosis, that spiritual knowing that is beyond knowing, and, as such, also beyond words. Words and study and devotion might get you most of the way there, but there remains an impassable gap of separation. Here I am reminded of a rather mediocre 2005 romcom featuring Will Smith as a matchmaker and Kevin James as his hapless client. In teaching him how to properly enact a first kiss, Smith tells James to go 90% of the way and stop. Let his partner close the gap.

Gnosis works in a similar way. It cannot be reached through sheer will. Something else must reach out to close the circuit. That is the pursuit of the writer of Weird Fiction. Whether they are after the pure knowledge of the scholar or the scientist, or the aesthetic knowledge of the of the artist, reciprocity is far from guaranteed. I’d wager the majority of Weird Fiction consists of kisses left hanging like unanswered prayers, but there is still a weirdness in the praying. Casting off towards that hard break and reaching for something beyond grasp requires some kind of foreknowledge that attainment is at least possible. Otherwise, who would bother? The question, then, is where does such foreknowledge come from?

Infinite Longing

One of Substack’s resident scholars of Weird Fiction, , investigates this foreknowledge in a brilliant, short essay titled “Fantasy, Horror, and Infinite Longing”. He begins by describing that October feeling of sweet melancholic upwelling that is perhaps common to us all, and traces it eventually to C.S. Lewis’ first novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress, in which the author appropriates the German word sehnsucht, commonly translated as yearning, which Lewis likens to

“an intense longing [for] that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan1, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

Such sehnsucht2, Cardin writes, also drives the heart of Weird Fiction, but what is one to do with such a vague and insatiable longing? The type that is evoked by the sunlight falling on a tree, or an unbroken view from a high vista? Going to that place seen on the horizon will satisfy nothing. The desire is not to be there, but to somehow, impossibly merge with it. To close that gap between our pursuit for gnosis and its attainment.

For Lewis, such a merging could be brokered through his Catholic faith, but for someone like Lovecraft, or his modern inheritor, Thomas Ligotti, such a longing is nothing more than a cruel trick of consciousness, and there is nothing behind the summons. As Lovecraft writes in the oft quoted opening to his seminal work, The Call of Cthulhu:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Cthulhu, with all his disparate parts and near infinite adjectives, might be thought to represent this dread vision of science’s eventual revelation which Lovecraft foresaw: the “blind, meaningless, and ultimately unfathomable fluctuations of a purely material cosmos” (Cardin 280).

This, however, is merely another layer of Weird Fiction, another story about how the universe might be, as told by a particularly bleak denomination of scientism, no different in kind from the religious gospels such a vision hopes to displace. Both are true, in their way. Both are reality tunnels that can be entered into, capable of shaping the lived experience of the limits of perceived reality of those who partake, but neither approximates anything like the total picture.

There is another Cthulhu. It is the one that pierces the reality system from beyond rather than from within. Whenever it is thought that the territory has been totally mapped over, it is the great eye of The World that suddenly peers through the paper ceiling. The UFO in the night sky, the blurry bigfoot in the woods, the photons that can be a wave or a particle depending on experimental circumstances. This Cthulhu has been haunting the pages of Weird Fiction since Biblical times, and even earlier. It is the grappling with that which cannot be known, just as God’s face cannot be looked upon. This Cthulhu has breached the waters of literature countless times before the arrival of Howard Philips Lovecraft, from Leviathan to Moby Dick.

The Whiteness of the Whale

Okay, so I know the whole thesis of this piece is that Everything is Weird Fiction, but Moby Dick is really and truly Weird Fiction. Not only is it a masterwork of the type, but it also offers something of a cypher for understanding this idea of infinite longing and its relation to reality-making.

We must return once again to the scene of young Pip going over board:

“Carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

When he returns to the ship, Pip no longer speaks. Like any number of Lovecraft’s protagonists, his exposure to the Ultimate has fried his brain. If the novel is narrated by Ishmael, how is it he got the details of this encounter? It’s because it’s not actually Pip’s experience we hear, but Ishmael’s. The novel ends (spoiler alert) with the destruction of the Pequod at the hands (fins) of Moby Dick. The entire crew perishes except for Ishmael who survives by floating on Queequeg’s coffin until he is eventually picked up by the Rachel.

This means Ishmael had the same experience as Pip. His reality-system (the ship) has been shattered, and he has been made to float alone, surrounded by such dismally endless waters (nakedly exposed to the Absolute) without hope of rescue. The description of Pip’s time in the water is Ishmael’s own experience. It was he who saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent coral insects3, meaning the entire telling of the novel is Ishmael’s attempt to make some sense of this encounter. It is a task he agonizes over, and the best way he can do it is as a story.

As Campagna writes in his introduction to Otherworlds,

“Unless it stands as a story that can be experienced from within, like a game of role-play or a theatre piece, it fails to provide a convincing illusion of meaning and thus it is not accepted as a viable human ‘world’.”

Ishmael completes his task not by honing in on a single obsession like Ahab, but rather by pulling back and luxuriating in the plurality of creation. According to Hubert Dreyfus’ interpretation, he becomes a polytheist. He has encountered the Absolute, his lifeworld has been shattered, but that has left him free to move between lifeworlds, acting as a devout at every altar.

The novel offers the color white as the ur-symbol for God or Reality or the Absolute. Like white light, it contains everything, but it cannot be observed nakedly. Instead, it must be shone through a prism which breaks the pure light into its constituent colors. In that sense, the white light is in these colors as much as these colors are in the white light, but when broken apart there is no longer a mother light with which to merge, only its memory held within the disparate rainbow. Therein lies the unquenchable longing of sehnsucht. It is the desire of the divine shard within each of us to reunite with The Divine itself, but The Divine has shattered in the act of creation.

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