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erik davis' book, six months later....
Dec. 3rd, 2006 03:09 pma non-review in time for holiday giving: Erik Davis’ The Visionary State
Back in graduate school, a friend who later went on to Oxford to write a dissertation on Masonic history was waxing eloquent about the Craft’s keystone symbolism when an earthier friend interrupted with, “You mean a bunch of ancient Greek engineers figured out how to make a building that won’t fall down on your head, and all this time later, you guys are still turned on about it!”
Having been in various amateur constructions where thin plywood floors sagged threateningly and load-bearing walls seemed to have been erected with no concern for the principles of physics, I am a big fan of buildings that won’t fall down on your head. And the desire to survive seems a perfectly understandable impetus from which to construct a metaphysic around the metaphor.
The architecture profession, perhaps for that very reason, seems to attract more than its share of arrogant visionaries. (See the latest of an infinitude of biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed in last week’s New York Times book review…a citation upon which I will not elaborate, because I wouldn’t recommend this particular book, just the review of it). And a good many architects, in sharp contradistinction to engineers who have prosier ways to keep the roof from falling in, vastly overvalue their less than original poetic and aesthetic insights. (As Barbara Schreiber, the immensely practical working artist who was a fellow copy editor at Art Papers, put it regarding one egregious young twit: “I hate being patronized by someone who is my intellectual inferior.”)
But there have been a number of architectural traditions that combined stylistic grace and numeric competence with genuine spiritual insight. And subsequent generations that possessed neither grace nor competence have created singularly uninsightful reams of rubbish regarding the wisdom of the masters in question, as anyone who spent their youth perusing the esoterica sections of bookstores can attest. Egyptomania, anyone? (Incidentally, I hope I’ve previously cited Scott Trafton’s wonderful Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth Century American Egyptomania regarding the less occultist ramifications of that enduring obsession.)
All the more reason to be fascinated, then, by the spiritual architecture documented in Erik Davis’ wondrous book The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. The belief systems from which these buildings sprang may have ranged from deeply subtle to agreeably loony, but what the structures have in common is that they embody states of vision in ways that hold our attention. Michael Rauner’s marvelous color photographs, a fit companion for Davis’ exquisite prose, make me want to undertake a tour, in spite of knowing how disappointing it can be to see the world’s wonders in their physical context, or how jarring. (In 1969, I sought out St. Giles Cripplegate in the City for literary reasons, and found it more or less adjacent to a Pizza Hut.)
Davis is a sympathetic, but never sappy, observer, and his book combines useful history with sharp provocations to our imaginations. California has long been famed as the locale to which everything in civilization rolls that isn’t firmly anchored. And it is astonishing to learn how many temples of alternate opinions have been constructed there over the decades, and how many of them are still standing, reasonably intact. (I say this as an admirer of vernacular architecture, as a winningly modest member of the profession once termed it. Buildings by folk creators frequently seem to survive only because, as the American idiom has it, all the termites are holding hands.)
We didn’t realize we needed Davis’ book, because we tend to know only the least interesting examples of the California sublime. There are astonishingly lovely structures out there that were built to house actions of the spirit that range from equally lovely to borderline repellent (bearing in mind in that department that, in the words of that metaphor sprung from apartment living, one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling).
This is the point in most reviewers’ practice at which they stop knuckle-cracking and buckle down to writing about the book. I, however, have realized I will never have time to select those excellently cogent quotations, those piquantly selected concrete examples, and those pithy observations that make the review reader want to rush out and buy the book. That is why it has taken me six months or more to reach the point of writing this unintended parody of George Steiner, who, one friend said, would someday write a New Yorker review in which he would get around in the final paragraph to mention the book he was supposedly reviewing.
But there is far more visually and anecdotally fascinating spiritual architecture in California than AMORC and Esalen, and if I weren’t writing off the top of my head at four in the morning I would tell you what it was. As it is, the website is uncommonly fine for giving you the idea: www.visionarystate.com.
In the meantime, Davis has written a wonderful long profile of singer Joanna Newsom, the visionarish fave of all our interns and indeed a strange, amazing performer whose lyrics I hope to find time to listen to (perhaps while buckling down to looking systematically at Davis’ book again). Read his essay at www.techgnosis.com. And get on his occasional e-mail list.
While you’re at it, buy his book for yourself and your friends. I assume all of you have already pre-ordered John Crowley’s Endless Things so I shall not repeat myself on that score.
Back in graduate school, a friend who later went on to Oxford to write a dissertation on Masonic history was waxing eloquent about the Craft’s keystone symbolism when an earthier friend interrupted with, “You mean a bunch of ancient Greek engineers figured out how to make a building that won’t fall down on your head, and all this time later, you guys are still turned on about it!”
Having been in various amateur constructions where thin plywood floors sagged threateningly and load-bearing walls seemed to have been erected with no concern for the principles of physics, I am a big fan of buildings that won’t fall down on your head. And the desire to survive seems a perfectly understandable impetus from which to construct a metaphysic around the metaphor.
The architecture profession, perhaps for that very reason, seems to attract more than its share of arrogant visionaries. (See the latest of an infinitude of biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed in last week’s New York Times book review…a citation upon which I will not elaborate, because I wouldn’t recommend this particular book, just the review of it). And a good many architects, in sharp contradistinction to engineers who have prosier ways to keep the roof from falling in, vastly overvalue their less than original poetic and aesthetic insights. (As Barbara Schreiber, the immensely practical working artist who was a fellow copy editor at Art Papers, put it regarding one egregious young twit: “I hate being patronized by someone who is my intellectual inferior.”)
But there have been a number of architectural traditions that combined stylistic grace and numeric competence with genuine spiritual insight. And subsequent generations that possessed neither grace nor competence have created singularly uninsightful reams of rubbish regarding the wisdom of the masters in question, as anyone who spent their youth perusing the esoterica sections of bookstores can attest. Egyptomania, anyone? (Incidentally, I hope I’ve previously cited Scott Trafton’s wonderful Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth Century American Egyptomania regarding the less occultist ramifications of that enduring obsession.)
All the more reason to be fascinated, then, by the spiritual architecture documented in Erik Davis’ wondrous book The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. The belief systems from which these buildings sprang may have ranged from deeply subtle to agreeably loony, but what the structures have in common is that they embody states of vision in ways that hold our attention. Michael Rauner’s marvelous color photographs, a fit companion for Davis’ exquisite prose, make me want to undertake a tour, in spite of knowing how disappointing it can be to see the world’s wonders in their physical context, or how jarring. (In 1969, I sought out St. Giles Cripplegate in the City for literary reasons, and found it more or less adjacent to a Pizza Hut.)
Davis is a sympathetic, but never sappy, observer, and his book combines useful history with sharp provocations to our imaginations. California has long been famed as the locale to which everything in civilization rolls that isn’t firmly anchored. And it is astonishing to learn how many temples of alternate opinions have been constructed there over the decades, and how many of them are still standing, reasonably intact. (I say this as an admirer of vernacular architecture, as a winningly modest member of the profession once termed it. Buildings by folk creators frequently seem to survive only because, as the American idiom has it, all the termites are holding hands.)
We didn’t realize we needed Davis’ book, because we tend to know only the least interesting examples of the California sublime. There are astonishingly lovely structures out there that were built to house actions of the spirit that range from equally lovely to borderline repellent (bearing in mind in that department that, in the words of that metaphor sprung from apartment living, one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling).
This is the point in most reviewers’ practice at which they stop knuckle-cracking and buckle down to writing about the book. I, however, have realized I will never have time to select those excellently cogent quotations, those piquantly selected concrete examples, and those pithy observations that make the review reader want to rush out and buy the book. That is why it has taken me six months or more to reach the point of writing this unintended parody of George Steiner, who, one friend said, would someday write a New Yorker review in which he would get around in the final paragraph to mention the book he was supposedly reviewing.
But there is far more visually and anecdotally fascinating spiritual architecture in California than AMORC and Esalen, and if I weren’t writing off the top of my head at four in the morning I would tell you what it was. As it is, the website is uncommonly fine for giving you the idea: www.visionarystate.com.
In the meantime, Davis has written a wonderful long profile of singer Joanna Newsom, the visionarish fave of all our interns and indeed a strange, amazing performer whose lyrics I hope to find time to listen to (perhaps while buckling down to looking systematically at Davis’ book again). Read his essay at www.techgnosis.com. And get on his occasional e-mail list.
While you’re at it, buy his book for yourself and your friends. I assume all of you have already pre-ordered John Crowley’s Endless Things so I shall not repeat myself on that score.
