A clarification for John Crowley

The world’s more exploratory spiritual guides are annoying in the extreme; like Rumi, only more so, they mix teasing and sometimes downright illogical allegory with piercingly commonsensical and hard-nosed advice that approaches cynicism, then they throw in incomprehensible quotes from other people, and, if we are lucky, they insert a dirty joke before going on to more irritatingly elusive analysis.

I haven’t been able to read most of them for that very reason, and it doesn’t help that virtually all of them seem to be leading to dead ends, anyway, if they didn’t start at a point one already knows to be a dead end.

Some, in particular, turn out to be rogues and charlatans.

The problem is that the worst rogues and charlatans, the cleverest albeit inconsistently self-concealing, seem to have picked up something genuine amid their absolute and unremitting shucking and jiving. At the very least, they jibe with what we already know from the sociology of knowledge. (Regarding which, I started with Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality many years ago, but one could try Umberto Eco’s reflections on how we think we know when in fact we know at most what we have been led to know by the structure of our language and the presuppositions drummed into us from our proverbial mother’s knee on through the design of magazine ads and, latterly, websites.)

Everything comes to us already cluttered with cultural constructs. The best traditional spiritual manuals say, in their own culturally constructed terms, “Sorry, but I’m coming to you cluttered with cultural constructs. I’m going to keep skittering off in perverse directions till you start to get the point, but I’m going to do it in terms warped by my own biography and my own culture’s way of saying things.” None of them, of course, put it that way; that is our myth of beginnings, not theirs.

The problem is that at a certain point they seem to be recording phenomena that are parallel to ones encountered by guides who start from other paths altogether. Western Hemisphere shamans and thinkers from the politically sensitive countries along the route of the old Silk Road recount external events that echo one another. This is setting to one side the whole business of internal visions, active imagination, what have you. That way madness lies; no more o’ that. “Visions are a measure of the defect of vision,” Kenneth Rexroth liked to quote from St. John of the Cross. Rexroth was a rogue but not a charlatan, and his version of what he called religious empiricism didn’t pretend to have a guru component or even a supernatural one. He was rather nasty about some schools of thought that I take rather more seriously, but one strategy for maintaining some modest degree of sanity is to assume the lunacy of that to which you feel the strongest emotional pull. People are drawn in these directions from emotional insufficiency, and the problem, as one thinker on these questions said, is that almost everyone who wants to set out on a traditional path lacks the internal stability to do it in the first place.

So the first job is finding a way to hold one’s craziness at bay long enough to learn anything at all. Most people do not do that, but the strange thing is that, once again, objectively weird things seem to happen to them en route regardless.

That is, in fact, an unproductive point from which to start, although it is a productive point to keep in mind. Is it possible, even starting out with no goal in mind, to replicate some of the odd clusters of coincidence, improbable encounters and precognitive intuitions that seem to characterize any sufficiently intensive enterprise that relates to this sort of investigation? Everyone overinterprets pattern recognition once they notice it at all. Even rationalistic researchers seem to attract statistically improbable sets of phenomena, usually without noticing it. These are not omens, since most of them seem meaningless even when most symbolically charged. Sometimes they are unnervingly meaningful in a practical way, however, and just as often, what John Crowley recently termed “weird synchronicity,” One or two are not statistically significant; when it hits ten or fifteen you begin to think we have used up the law of large numbers’ quota for the rest of the history of the universe. As fans of a novel I recently cited know (sorry, John, I can’t help it), a set of random events forms a reliable distribution, even though we can’t predict where the next event of that sort will occur. It’s how insurance companies can set up mortality charts. When something causes an extraordinary cluster around one point or the other, we look to see what is throwing the numbers out of whack.

In this case, however, nobody is doing it because (a) if anything at all is happening, it is denied by the current rational model and of no interest to the irrational ones. Everyone has a different agenda. If someone is interested, we have the problem that (b) they don’t have the mathematical smarts to detect whether any of this really does violate the law of large numbers, and (c) they’re usually crazy as hell or at least slightly spacy, so anything they say about it is unlikely to be of use anyway.

And this seems to have been the case throughout history. One sits up and takes notice only on the rare occasions when one meets someone who seems actually to have gotten some undefined benefit out of their particular path of practice, and one looks for writers who seem to share their qualities. But they are committed to a particular way of viewing the world, and while they may engage in dialogue with physicists and experimental psychologists, they aren’t really interested in the sociological variables.

So: we’ve got seeming statistical improbabilities connected to a variety of diverse and even contradictory beliefs and practices. We’ve got the knowledge that any such practice comes loaded with the self-delusion intrinsic to our culturally constructed world (which Rainer Maria Rilke more poetically called “our interpreted world” in The Duino Elegies). And after such knowledge, what forgiveness? We can’t really buy unreservedly into any of the traditions, even when we suspect something about them may be right.

Actually, we suspect that more than one of them may be right, and that’s part of the problem. As in the old joke about the fool who by mischance was made a judge (fill in your political wisecrack of choice here). The plaintiff explains why he deserves to win the case and the judge says, “You’re right.” He is reminded that he has to hear both sides of the case, so he listens to the defendant explain what happened and says, “You’re right.” And the bailiff exclaims, “Your honor, they contradict one another on key points of the situation. They cannot both be right.” And the fool immediately says, “You’re right.”

And a further complicating factor is that very few people started with the goal in mind of finding out which side is right, or whether neither side is, which is just as often the situation.

A good many people started from a condition of emotional insufficiency, a flawed way of living in the world plus a yearning not satisfied by the standard plug-ins that are designed to address human desires. Such folks have ample amounts of unsatisfied ordinary desires, obviously, plus a surplus yearning that is addressed or embodied, when at all, in certain works of imaginative literature.

If they are very unlucky, they stumble across someone who tells them that while their beloved fantasies are not true, something else is, and the “something else” addresses those very same incapacities and desires.

Unlucky, because in the era of fundamental skepticism, there is only one way to find out if this assertion hedged about with nonsense (and it is always hedged about with something resembling idiocy) has any empirical validity. That is to start trudging away, hacking through the conceptual underbrush and testing bits of tradition to see whether something in this farrago of advice and anecdote might actually work.

Too much of it does. Fragments of the seemingly valid come attached to stories that can’t possibly be true, if only because they contradict flat-out competing stories that claim to be true, and those stories can’t possibly be true, either. (“What is truth?” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, and did not wash his hands. But don’t go chasing after Toulmin and Janacek’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna in quest of these topics, unless you count as the topic the greater question of whether a truth exists that might be resistant to ordinary modes of expression.)

It is much easier to begin from a more stringent position of skepticism than one is inclined to possess, and go from there, but that is almost impossible, given the emotional insufficiencies from which one started.

The only way to know would be to attain the inward and outward condition promised by all the stories, without believing wholeheartedly in any of them.

And despite the claims of some to have done it, I am not sure if that is possible. I have encountered, at most, the best representatives of individual traditions, and that seems to be the case with other writers as well.

That indefatigable scholar of new religions and old hallucinations Jacob Needleman tried to skirt the problem of rogues and charlatans by making up a purportedly existing figure, Father Sylvan, in his 1982 book Lost Christianity. (A reviewer in that now-long-gone magazine of remarkably irreverent mystical quest, Gnosis, nailed him by analyzing the inconsistent chronology of his narrative.)

The rogues and charlatans also make up the figures they wish existed, and present them in narratives that purport to be non-fiction. But the best of these wished-for figures are still to be found only in allegorical novels based on a real core of experience.

That would lead us off into the history of the twentieth century, and while I have devoted previous posts to the topic one way or another, it is still another story.

Steven Wasserstrom’s Religion After Religion recounts the biographical details of Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, and Gershom Scholem as three scholars who were not their sought-for light and did not necessarily even bear witness to that light. But they saw the necessity, in an era in which no narrative can be believed wholeheartedly, of figuring out where all the good stuff came from that still spills out of the narratives we no longer believe. (“What do you mean, we?” most of the literalizing world would say, as in the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but you know who I mean, don’t you?) And it is good to follow the paths of scholarly research, if only for the sake of defining the walls up against which we run. Not necessarily those specific paths any longer, however.

I recommend highly the new issue of the New York Review of Books for its essays by Tony Judt and Ian Buruma, but for me to say what on earth that has to do with what I’ve been talking about --- hey, cut me some slack, will ya?