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A rather belated posting of a December 2010 interview with Erik Davis, since my would-be review of Nomad Codes is turning out to be almost as dilatory as my never-written review of The Visionary State, a book that should be owned by students of vernacular architecture as well as fans of styles of visionary construction anywhere on earth (even if that book is devoted to "California's spiritual landscape").
The diverse essays of Nomad Codes constitute, as Reality Sandwich interviewer Antonio Lopez puts it, "a vast, rhizomatic net of high weirdness," which means I have never found world enough and time to summarize anything about it. It is probably too much to hope that today's reference will constitute for some reader or another one of those moments when "just the reference you need comes through an email or a random page search or an open book."
If someone claimed that it did, I would have no way of knowing whether or not they were lying, a conundrum about which I have written often.
Anyway, this is the first installment in a series on those who try "to look at the mysteries from both ends"—or dialectically, one might say, viewing both ends with skeptical sympathy. As Davis suggests, "it's important to look at, say, the contemporary ayahuasca scene as a scene, with dress codes and slang and rock stars, not as a sacred separate realm. ... At the same time I think it is important (or at least more rewarding) to look at our often junky world of late capitalist culture as a place where the seeds of insight and vision might be found."
Where else you gonna find it? Lots of places, actually, but for nearly thirty years folks have been quoting Philip K. Dick's assertion that "the symbols of the divine show up initially in our world at the trash stratum." Which is a wonderful assertion whether or not it has any basis in statistically observable reality rather than interpretation...assuming, of course, that it is possible to establish what a "symbol of the divine" would be when defined as independent of the individual observer who found it to be a symbol of the divine. (One could establish historically defined parameters for collectively agreed-upon symbols of the divine cross-culturally, and then describe annual numbers of reports of the appearances of parallel symbols, I suppose.)
http://www.realitysandwich.com/conversation_erik_davis
The diverse essays of Nomad Codes constitute, as Reality Sandwich interviewer Antonio Lopez puts it, "a vast, rhizomatic net of high weirdness," which means I have never found world enough and time to summarize anything about it. It is probably too much to hope that today's reference will constitute for some reader or another one of those moments when "just the reference you need comes through an email or a random page search or an open book."
If someone claimed that it did, I would have no way of knowing whether or not they were lying, a conundrum about which I have written often.
Anyway, this is the first installment in a series on those who try "to look at the mysteries from both ends"—or dialectically, one might say, viewing both ends with skeptical sympathy. As Davis suggests, "it's important to look at, say, the contemporary ayahuasca scene as a scene, with dress codes and slang and rock stars, not as a sacred separate realm. ... At the same time I think it is important (or at least more rewarding) to look at our often junky world of late capitalist culture as a place where the seeds of insight and vision might be found."
Where else you gonna find it? Lots of places, actually, but for nearly thirty years folks have been quoting Philip K. Dick's assertion that "the symbols of the divine show up initially in our world at the trash stratum." Which is a wonderful assertion whether or not it has any basis in statistically observable reality rather than interpretation...assuming, of course, that it is possible to establish what a "symbol of the divine" would be when defined as independent of the individual observer who found it to be a symbol of the divine. (One could establish historically defined parameters for collectively agreed-upon symbols of the divine cross-culturally, and then describe annual numbers of reports of the appearances of parallel symbols, I suppose.)
http://www.realitysandwich.com/conversation_erik_davis
