The Voice of the Turtle: Reverential Notes Towards a Definitive John Fahey Discography, or, A Lenten Meditation at the Atlanta Botanical Garden

For J, again


Rain smashes the petals of a reluctant Spring:
the weather, as usual, provides endless parallels
to psychological processes. You pays
your money, and you picks your metaphor.
Random walks in between mundane errands
do more to clarify one’s personal absurdity
than hours of deliberate introspection.
This has given rise to my idiosyncratic habit
of visits to organized Nature in those rare places
where clouds and rain give rise to reflection
instead of, say, to hours of brooding or
pointless addiction to crossword puzzles
or games of Scrabble. All of which are,
in many houses I have known, venerable
family traditions. I prefer to walk.

“And now, we’ve seen it all.” So one vivacious retiree,
and later, to a less ambulatory companion,
“Well, you simply have to keep going, just because
there is no other way to get you out.”
What are supposed to be the lessons of age
are so often instead only literalizations
of Samuel Beckett’s wry, bleak visions
of ultimate immobility. This is how it is.
We remain utterly laughable.
We age. We decay. We can’t
go on. We fall, or fall in love.

They are blowing up the great stone Buddhas
of Bamiyan province, a few miles west
of Kabul. Revolutionary Afghanistan
is drowning in self-devouring rancor.
Iconoclasm thrives because stone statuary
is decidedly the oldest surviving manifestation
of the birth of human imagination, twenty or so
thousand years ago. The Ice Age sculptors
already scratched marks on stone, but not just
any rock. What they hacked and scratched fit the hand
as snugly as any useful object ever did,
and the so-called Venus of Dolni Vestonice
was formed in fired clay as a finely proportioned
object that also begged to be cradled or clutched
as though our earliest ancestors already lived
in symbols cast far beyond the merely functional.
All men and women are born servants of the True Way,
and only later turn to their own perverse opinions.
The human heart, John Calvin said, is a factory of idols,
a psychological observation perhaps more piercing
than the anti-aesthetic of other cultures of the Word.

In general, the pain and pathetic repetition
of desire and destruction continue.
Babies die of starvation, small children die of cold
on the endless road of flight to Herat. Philippe
de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum
begs for the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
It is spring, sort of, and all types and conditions
are entrapped in their usual, predictable fashion.
The petals fly in the wind like ridiculous symbols
left over from a previous century of emotional excess.

John Fahey is newly dead, who recorded American roots
decades before the Coen Brothers reinvented
the music of the nineteen-thirties. Years ago in California,
in love with young women three thousand miles away,
I listened to Fahey’s re-creations of old blues classics
and longed for a South that I knew was already lost;
not the Lost Cause, but the fragile chords of family memory
kept by some widowed aunt in Tennessee or Miami.
The downfall of the Adelphi rolling grist mill, or
the transfiguration of Blind Joe Death; Fahey’s
personal mythological transmutations
made sense of a South that had long since lost itself
in downscale auto racing and crappy imitations
of Nashville’s overpriced Grand Old Opry.

A tale from Townes Van Zandt, also gone early:
“The other day I heard my aunt singing ‘The Rivers
of Texas.’ Figuring
that here was a chance to learn the truth at last
about the methods of Folk Transmission,
I asked her, did she remember where she learned that.
She said, ‘Well, Townes, I heard Uncle George sing it.’
So I asked Uncle George, and he learned it from Cousin
Scott, and Cousin Scott learned it from his brother Jim,
and his brother Jim learned it from me.”

This is how, after enough passage of time,
shrines are born, and legends of sainthood.

The Japanese garden at Golden Gate and the
one at Atlanta’s botanical garden
are both echoes of an absent original,
like faint, flickering, barely cast shadows
that may for that reason be better teachers of
an elusive, yet ineluctable realization :
life is literally fleeting, and in some vague way
stone and water and twisted evergreens
reflect its essence. Whether we go out
through the bamboo gate or the moon gate’s exit
all is tangled in desire, even if only “le
dur desir de durer.”
“Non omnis moriar;” but, regrettably, survival
exists only as random tags and scraps
written once by…God alone knows who,
after a sufficient number of generations.
I shall not wholly die? I shall not wholly live, either.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan, like the Central Asian frescoes
destroyed in the bombing of Berlin’s museums, exemplify
their master’s teaching: even monuments of stone
are subject to transience, suffering, and brutal death.
The iron laws of history are as hard on poems
as they are on statues and paintings. Nothing endures.
How often love, as Schopenhauer pessimistically noted
decades before Charles Darwin, has rested on such accidents
as the fortunate arrangement of subcutaneous fat.
Women have been drawn more to well-defined muscles.
The shape of Cleopatra’s nose, Blaise Pascal observed,
was probably responsible for the deaths of entire armies.

The later Romans, curiously,
didn't think this sort of lunacy could happen.
When Saint Augustine, creator
of the new, grim cultural paradigm,
cited an old-fart elderly landowner
who ran away with a slave girl,
they scoffed and called him
“novus medicus,”
an upstart theologian contradicting
the considered opinions of the era's
most distinguished physicians.

The fallen petals of the Japanese magnolia
are squashed to slippery mush on the concrete sidewalk.
It is the old battle between Winter and Spring,
and this year, winter is winning most of the rounds.
The spring wind screams like the shouts of deluded souls
who think that anything can be gained or lost for good
in the endless ocean or garden of becoming,
whichever metaphor suits your illusion.
Midnight in the garden of good and evil,
or, more likely, twilight in the ill-kept yard of neither.


February 26-March 12, 2001



“How it is” is the title of a Samuel Beckett novel, and “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is a line from another Beckett text. The story of the destruction of the world’s largest statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, is available from many sources, as is the plea for their preservation by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice was briefly on display in Atlanta, where a Czech curator hauled the two pieces of the statuette out of a padded box to show me how it was apparently designed to explode in the kiln (how they know this, given the ways of ceramics and ceramists to this day, is beyond me). The line about servants of the True Way is a universalization of the Muslim belief that all babies are born Muslim and only later educated into religious errors. Where John Calvin said that the human heart is a factory of idols, I cannot say, though the theologian Gabriel Vahanian may have provided a footnote in the book in which I read it, either The Death of God or Wait Without Idols. The Coen Brothers re-invigorated “old-timey music” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? “The Anti-Aesthetic” was the title of a mid-80s Hal Foster anthology published in Britain as Postmodern Culture. “The Downfall of the Adelphi Grist Rolling Mill” and “The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death” are, of course, titles of John Fahey compositions. The Townes Van Zandt story may be recorded on the two-LP set of live performances, but I heard it first from the man himself. The moon gate and bamboo gate sound tremendously symbolic, but in fact are only the two alternate gates of the Japanese garden in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, with, as far as I have been able to learn, no symbolic meaning. “All is tangled in desire”: the Bhagavad Gita. The passage is cited in longer form in “the ego and the body in northern Georgia.” “le dur desir de durer,” “the hard desire to last,” is the title of a book of poems by Paul Eluard. Horace’s “non omnis moriar,” “I shall not wholly die,” was once learned by every schoolboy (not necessarily every schoolchild) in the English-speaking world. The Buddhist frescoes from western China were destroyed by aerial bombardment in Berlin’s New Museum because they had been cemented into the wall, considered immovable in spite of having once been sawed out of the solid rock on which they were painted; cf. Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. I don’t know where Schopenhauer made his remark because I encountered reliable versions of it in a New York Times Magazine story designed to depress romantics on Valentine’s Day. Blaise Pascal made his wisecrack in the Pensées. The original, which I have expanded poetically, reads, “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.” The Saint Augustine story is presumably told by Peter Brown in The Body and Society, since the book covers the same territory as the lecture in which I heard it. The Battle Between Winter and Spring can be found in any number of books on ritual performances and folklore. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is, of course, the title of John Berendt’s bestselling book on Savannah, which should not be taken to have anything to do with this poem. As with many another reference, it is the resonance of the words, not the contents of the book, that brought the phrase to mind.


Sleepwalking to Kandahar: An Elegy in Time of War for the Remembering of Howard Finster

Humphrey Bogart: Sam, it’s December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it
in New York?

Dooley Wilson: Uhh…My watch done stopped.

Bogart: I bet they’re asleep in New York.I bet
they're asleep all over America.
—dialogue from Casablanca (1943)

We are all asleep in the outward man.
—Jakob Boehme, German mystical writer
during the Thirty Years’ War

Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?
—the Prophet Muhammad (oral tradition)

i. 2001

First sharp rain of the cold fall; more than enough to flatten
the tiny, defiant Stars and Stripes on Johnson Road
that droop and more or less forlornly wrap
tight round their cheap sticks. This is all going to last a lot longer
than most folks ever would have figured.

Americans don’t like interminable epics. We like quick sequels
or else fresh edits: Apocalypse Now Returns
or Gulf War 2, featuring previously unreleased
scenes greatly improved in the director’s cut.
Colin Powell flies off to Central Asian conferences
in a reprise of his most popular starring role.
The flags flutter gallantly as the rain subsides
and wind gusts suggest brutal shifts in the seasonal
average daytime temperature.

Autumn asters surround the box where the morning paper
announces the death of Howard Finster. Nation shall rise against nation,
Howard wrote on his wooden angels last winter. These are the final days.
“The Last Days of Mankind” was Karl Kraus’ sarcastic title
for his bitter satire of patriotism, profiteering, and self-delusion
in Vienna in the First World War. Twenty years or so later
he wrote, wearily, “I can’t think of anything at all to say
about Adolf Hitler.” The second act
is not, as Marx implied, always farce. Sometimes
the first act was just the set-up for the tragic finale.

Bombs fall on Afghanistan. The supermarket
bags groceries in plastic bearing the United States flag
and the noisy slogan “Proud to be American!”

We are all asleep in the outward man. Cold air
comes as a surprise each winter in these warm latitudes.
Howard made cutouts of the ant and the grasshopper
which were happily collected by fledgling entrepreneurs
secure in a slew of dot-com stock options.

Special op boys from Kansas or Fort Benning, Georgia
comb the caves of the north in quest of Al-Qaida.
Central Asia was once the place where yesterday’s occultists
parked their favorite fantasy Masters of Wisdom.
Monasteries somewhere in the middle of Nuristan province
were almost as good as Shangri-La or forbidden Lhasa.
Now exile Tibet has a text and textile outlet
on a small cul-de-sac on Atlanta’s northside,
and Afghanistan, also sold locally, is an easy first runner-up
for the title of Most Thoroughly Demolished Asian Culture,
after Cambodia managed at last to give up the top spot.

Afghanistan and Appalachia:
Mountain cultures enjoy hard simplicities
like hunting rifles and folk religion.
They also, in the right extraordinary circumstances
spawn not prophets, but meetings with remarkable men
who dream dreams, as in the Book of Joel, and see visions.
I, who grew up in a place about ten feet above sea level,
took a much longer route to the foothills of Mount Analogue.

The post office box reveals that our national colors
are very popular for autumn fashion. Sale catalogues
scramble to update their holiday covers. Cocooning
and cozy Americana are in vogue. When we hunker down
we tend to do it in unison, celebrating the home front virtues
while the air war creeps through Herat and Kandahar,
hitting the same Red Cross storehouse twice despite best intentions
because someone simply forgot to take it off the target list.

We mean well. Afghan opposition soldiers
note that this measured response looks really wimpy.
The Russians, they say, plastered everything in sight.
These are, as Howard wrote, the beginning of sorrows.

Someday all this will end, just because it always does.
Changes, as Heraclitus noted some little while ago,
happen whether or not you want or expect them.
Nothing will ever be the same again,
but only—and not simply—because it never was.

The history of terror or the terror of history; in Santa Barbara,
while bomb-laden bicyclists destroyed Saigon cafes, we read Eliade
on the fate of small, poor nations, and how it was that history
was a thing that was feared by peasant populations
located on major rivers or mountain passes.
We didn’t understand a word of it;
some wanted power to the people, and
all we are saying is
give peace a chance.

When 13 year old Jawad awoke as the only
surviving member of his Afghan peasant family,
Muhammad Razi lied compassionately, “All is well.
You were walking in your sleep,
and you fell down the well next to your house,
and I rescued you.” The last few words were true.

Regrettably, real life all too frequently imitates
the stereotyped tragedies of the supermarket tabloids.
On the side of farce, a reported prototype of urban legend
woke up at ten on a September eleventh workday,
long blocks away from his job at the World Trade Center,
and thought, for a while, that he was in serious trouble.

The terror of history or the history of terror.
As Howard most likely quoted on some vision of other worlds,
Beloved, it is high time to awaken out of sleep.

For now is our salvation nearer than we believed?
Howard believed it. We who, as they say, are left behind
stretch to read the signs of things to come
less confident in our gifts of interpretation.

To be continued.



The epigraphs are all quoted from memory, and I have no guaranteed source for the sentence from Boehme, which was used as an epigraph by Robert Bly in Silence in the Snowy Fields, his first book and certainly one of his best. The identification of Boehme with the Thirty Years War, though factual, derives from a short poem by Kenneth Rexroth. The hadith is often cited by Sufis and occultists but I have never troubled to find out if it actually exists. “always farce”: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again; “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Since this poem is being written year by year (to be continued, as the published version of this was, for a while), I had no idea that there really would be a Gulf War 2, though there was reason to believe it would happen. Nuristan: See Peter Brook’s version of Meetings with Remarkable Men and O. M. Burke’s Among the Dervishes, re a region that obviously can hold more than secret monasteries. The Tibetan text and textile outlet subsequently moved elsewhere. “The terror of history” is Eliade’s best-known phrase from Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. The stories reported as fact in the New York Times may, of course, have been fabricated. The lines from St. Paul about waking out of sleep are quoted from memory and are not quite accurate.

These poems are excerpted from the copyrighted volume Unfinished Ventures: Selected Poems 1977-2005 and the standard courtesies of copyright are requested, even though in the age of digital reproduction such niceties have become increasingly fluid and open to fruitless query.

I hope to spend the next year completing projects that have fallen by the wayside as the world sinks into a crisis more comprehensive than anyone expected to commence as early as the year 2020. If this goal remains utterly unfulfilled, I feel that at least the inchoate beginnings of these perhaps intrinsically unfinishable ventures can be found in the fragments I have shored against my ruins in this successor to my LiveJournal of the same name (and overlapping contents up to the point at which I abandoned it). Unfortunately, the errors and wrecks that lie about me are also incorporated into this exploration of all the ways i once thought were ways out and ways I never fully understood that, for that reason if for no other, also proved to be dead ends.

In one of those coincidences without further meaning, just before reading recently about the death of the noted translator of Japanese literature Donald Keene, I rediscovered Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, which I had bookmarked to a page regarding the difficulty Japan’s nationalists had in overturning the popularly supported globalist perspective of 1931 that led to Tokyo’s being awarded the 1940 Olympic Games in conjunction with an accompanying World’s Fair. Both were cancelled in 1937 when the nationalists, who had by then dominated the government, asserted that the two projects required too much of the raw materials needed to conduct the newly launched war with China. We know the rest of the history.

Donald Keene had read Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji as a university freshman shortly before Pearl Harbor and become enamored of the “beautiful and distant world” (his words) reflected in its pages. So it is less surprising than it otherwise might be that he volunteered to study Japanese to act as a wartime interrogator, and between the direct experience and study of a box of bloodstained personal diaries recovered from the battlefield, emerged from the war with such an empathy for Japan and its people that he became the foremost postwar American translator of Japanese literature.

Philip Kapleau, who became the Zen roshi of a number of my college friends, gained his empathy for Japanese culture while serving as translator at postwar trials of some of the nationalists who had squelched Japan’s prewar manifestations of multinationalist outreach.

Tooze’s book has the distinction of offering a vertiginously global version of the dozen years following World War I; just opening the book at random again, I encountered a description of Argentine disorder as indicative of the wave of far-left activism of 1919-1921 that resulted in the counter-rise of fascism in a few countries and a “return to order” in the rest as a result of what Tooze terms “the Great Deflation” creating a few years of economic stability that lasted until the Great Depression. I recall having bought the book in 2014 with the feeling that it would completely alter my vague impressions of the world between the wars and its relevance for today, but now I feel like I really need to read it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/obituaries/donald-keene-dead-at-96.html

A feature story in the January 13, 2019 New York Times Magazine deals with the questions in evolution posed by beauty, or what a book of a few years ago called The Survival of the Beautiful. The elements of what many of us humans call the beautiful in nature are not only in excess of what ought to be required to attract a mate, they are frequently maladaptive to the point of dysfunction (i.e., they diminish the likelihood of the individual’s physical survival long enough to reproduce). So: why beauty? Why superfluous excess of one sort or another when utility dictates something less complicated?

Of course some of the reproductive attractors in nature are what many humans would call grotesque, just as the full range of human sexuality is such that anyone perusing its history will find it impossible to identify with all the possibilities that human beings have evolved for successive mate attraction or simple sexual arousal (and in fact, the conditions for the latter in many individuals have often militated against success in the former). But given the assumption that evolution proceeds by random mutational accident, that some trait emerges and survives purely because its payoff in terms of reproductive success outweighs its dysfunctional qualities diminishing survival, why is there so much of the sheer excess? Granted, in sheer numbers and overall body weight, self-evidently functional mutations in swarms of unnoticed insects probably predominate on the planet, but each genus and species is working autonomously, so that the sheer size of one species’ plain-vanilla successful approach to reproductive strategies has no relevance to the extravagance of the wide variety of species that go to spectacular, seemingly superfluous lengths to accomplish the same goal. (That’s the problem: on some level, this type of superfluous accident at least doesn’t do enough damage to be selected out of existence, and seems to recur again and again and again. Beauty, or superfluous complexity, gets selected for rather than against a lot more often than we would expect if random survival were really just a brutally efficient mechanism for picking the least complicated winners. It is, at the least, a brutally inefficient mechanism.)

Also to the point, why do we have aesthetic responses of pleasure and/or disgust when we encounter what we call beautiful or grotesque aspects of nature? Even if it is what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, an accidental feature of a functional evolutionary stratagem, it is a very strange spandrel. Working with Gould’s metaphor, many spandrels are just left blank. A few are filled with paintings done in a shape with which most artists would not choose to work, given an isolated canvas. Why do we try, and what varieties of things do we choose to put on our spandrels, having evolved them as an architectural feature?

All of this implies a multidisciplinary book, and if I ever find time to work through all the books about “beauty” that appeared a couple of decades ago, I am sure I’ll find passages discussing all these topics. These are just the ones I made up off the top of my head, based on past reading of sources I have totally forgotten.

As usual in meditations of this sort in my weblogs, the real point at which I am getting is not the problem of the beautiful but the problem of the New York Times article. At the moment at which I expected it to be getting down to the real issues, it ended, having made no more than one or two points about why evolution is more complex than we have thought, and there is lots of research and debate left to be conducted.

I am constantly being reminded of the diminished attention span of readers who have an immense number of things to skim through. As they say in abbreviations, tl; dr. (“Too long; didn’t read,” for the benefit of those who will read this post from the time when that abbreviation is no longer in use, which, given past internet practice, should be no more than six or seven months from now.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/behind-the-cover-beauty-and-the-beasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

I suppose that the folks whom I have christened the New Agnostics take seriously the antique maxim, “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that no one is plotting against you.” The cognitive value of hallucinatory states may be close to zero, but if such states sometimes yield verifiable perceptions that should not be possible, there is a set of data that these people deem worthy of investigation. The fact that the investigatory field is already clogged with cranks, charlatans and self-deluded innocents does not preclude the possibility of developing a methodology that will stand up to critique from all directions, like any other analytical method.

The Paul Nash exhibition just concluded at Tate Britain is a visual summation of some of the great traumas and struggles of the twentieth century: the fundamental disruption created by the First World War, obviously, followed by the exploration of what Gerard Manley Hopkins had already called the “cliffs of fall” in the human psyche that made possible not only the deluded self-destruction of 1914-18 but the even more delusional destructiveness that led to the same thing, only worse, in 1939-45.

Nash turned all this into landscape considered as psychic projection, from his paintings of the eerily devastated forests of his paintings immediately following the First World War to his dead ocean of wrecked warplanes in Totes Meer. His photographs, which initially he thought of as visual notes for details of paintings, today seem like some of his most profound work: the Monster Field series of distorted-looking fallen trees, when juxtaposed with his studies of uncanny aspects of the built environment, suggest that human beings continuously find themselves in an interpreted world in which they are not very securely at home (to paraphrase Rilke’s line from the Duino Elegies).

The insecurity of interpretation is something that Friedrich Nietzsche made much of in the nineteenth century, but so did the Society for Psychical Research. I’ve been paging through Alen Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, years after I first acquired it, and am reminded that while theosophists were off making visionary astral journeys to distant planets, F. W. H. Myers and the Society he co-founded were engaged in anything but what today’s skeptics like to call “woo”—they simply assumed that there was a reality at the margins of normal consciousness that we do not understand, and took it as their responsibility to approach that marginal experience with all the empirical rigor they could muster. (Whether they could muster enough is in dispute, as noted below). Accordingly, they undertook, among many other investigations, a Census of Hallucinations. Myers made assumptions about the structure of reality that semiotic philosopher C. S. Peirce, for one, regarded as based on embarrassingly insufficient evidence, but Myers was using what he regarded as empirically available data to construct his models of the several possible selves and the invisible interconnection of selves with other selves. He was not depending, like Madame Blavatsky, on inwardly perceived revelations from Tibetan mahatmas, however dubiously metaphysical his own conclusions may seem to us today.

The publication in 1899 of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was the inaugural salvo in an assault on what Freud called “the black mud of occultism,” an assault in which, nevertheless, Freud refused to exclude the possibility of telepathy, and indeed worked it into his theories about the nature of the Primal Horde at the beginnings of civilization. In subsequent decades, while Freudians battled it out with behavioralists about the nature of the body in which consciousness might or might not be an accidental epiphenomenon, Myers’ speculations based on collections of data ran up against a singular difficulty: that the marginal experiences under investigation proved as difficult to replicate under laboratory conditions as, say, moments of innovation in the writing of poetry (not to mention ballet, mountain climbing, or gymnastics). Moments of creative insight, of course, can be considered heightened examples of thoroughly mundane processes; the thesis of Myers’ successors was that the so-called paranormal is likewise a heightened instance of mundane lesser processes, processes to which we do not pay attention because we believe that they cannot exist.

Myers felt obligated to create hypotheses to explain “genius” as much as to explain telepathy and precognition, a reminder that the 1890s represented the efflorescence of many strands of thought that the intellectual mainstream thought of the twentieth century would dismiss as intrinsically unworthy of serious consideration. Most of the decade’s cultural manifestations were irrational in and of themselves; the efforts to analyze and explain phenomena perhaps wrongly associated with irrationality tend to be forgotten.

Written towards the end of his life, Oliver Sacks’ recent book on hallucinations cites a few cases that go beyond his glancing reminder that we are prone to impose meaning where there is none. Sacks doesn’t censor these cases; neither does he offer hypotheses, in contradistinction from his accounts of neurological disorders in which the categories that our perceptions and our language construct become hopelessly muddled.

Owen’s book on occultism and modernism also examines Aleister Crowley’s empiricist approach to appropriating magical practice, another case of a skeptical intellect determined to discern the factual basis underlying imaginatively constructed ancient interpretations, and, if possible, to make use of their practices. Crowley’s theatricality makes it difficult to decide just how much he shared with the S.P.R. researchers the knowledge that the consciousness of the practitioner creates a scrim of illusion that makes perception of the reality being encountered particularly difficult.

The twentieth century became so aware of the scrim of illusion that by the twenty-first century the predominant assumption was that the notion that there were any invisible connections among individual selves was as absurd as the assumptions underlying magical practice., not least because there was no self and no perceiving embodied consciousness that could not be reduced to uploadable algorithms. For those who took note of the embodied nature of consciousness, making it not reducible to mathematically based algorithms, the very nature of embodiment meant that there could be no invisible communication between bodies other than the physically limited effect of ordinarily imperceptible materials such as pheromones.

Those inclined to believe otherwise have to accept the fact that they are in the position of a Galileo asserting that “eppur si muove” without having something parallel to Galileo’s theory to explain why it moves. Their only comfort is that Joseph Campbell’s assertion seventy years ago that “[humanity itself] is now the crucial mystery” has proven more true than he ever believed, as nearly all theories have been called sufficiently into question that the only way to construct a comprehensive theory of human existence is to truncate large parts of it by declaring it out of bounds. It would be possible, for example, to explicate the roots of large parts of Paul Nash’s oeuvre in terms of the origins and cultural shaping of the emotions projected into his visual structures, but the transhumanist movement would ask why anyone would want to waste their time on something like that, and quite a few other bodies of theory can present reasons why this is not a line of investigation worth pursuing, or even a valid line of investigation at all.

For reasons too complicated to bother to explain, I have had to import my LiveJournal blog entries into my Dreamwidth account, thus creating something of a hash.

The advantage is that everything worth saving is now in one secure location. The disadvantage is that a great deal of incidental dross has come with it.

Apologies to anyone who has been following the few Dreamwidth entries, which were originally supposed to provide a clearer path through the labyrinth. I no longer care much whether I find my own way out of the labyrinth and thus cannot claim to be providing much of a way out for anyone else, either. There are ways out, but I cannot follow most of them or teach others how to follow them.

Yesterday was the Feast of Saint Thomas the Empiricist (a.k.a. Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic), although many church traditions have moved his feast day to a season less bound up with the Incarnation.

Which is unfortunate, since the foundation story of Thomas has to do with the nature of the resurrection body, and thereby with the body itself, and thereby with consciousness. You know, Michael Murphy Esalen Institute kind of stuff.

Every year I find myself returning at this season to a 1976 book by Geoffrey Ashe titled The Virgin and finding myself astonished by the questions one can ask if one simply suggests that the texts reflect some actual happening on which people have hung their best guesses as to what it was that happened. Ashe insists that oddly disturbing questions arise if we start from the empirical evidence of what was said about the Virgin Mary in successive generations, much more so than if we start from the easy supposition that someone made up something out of no evidence whatsoever for anything. He eventually argues that forces within the Church were constantly going against the Church’s express logic to the point that it took quite a while to bring these disruptive energies into line, but that isn’t where he starts; he starts with the question of whether we can know anything about the historical Mary by taking seriously the idea that mainline scholars would dismiss out of hand, the notion that the most mythic-sounding elements of the Gospels reflect different fragmentary strands of reports of real events that happened to real people in real places.

Ashe’s just-so story to make sense of this hypothesis, which he never claims to be more than his own must-have-been narrative to put alongside the must-have-been narratives that later gave rise to Marian doctrine, makes an interesting moiré pattern when overlaid on a just-so story like James Tabor’s over-the-top opposing hypothesis in The Jesus Dynasty (Tabor has quite a lot of fun with his discovery of the existence of a Roman soldier named Pantera who served in the province of Syria at the right time to be the Pantera whom Jewish polemicists identified in the fourth century as the real father of Jesus, while Ashe finds it curious that it took four centuries for a calumny to come to light that should have put paid to the birth narratives straightaway—but both writers hang their opposing hypotheses on the prospect that there was some peculiar sense of expectation surrounding Jesus’ family lineage that makes sense of why a peculiarly well-versed intellectual from a nowhere mountain village would have been taken seriously in some quarters, even though as the Gospels themselves assert, others scoffed that nothing good ever came out of a dusty little burg like Nazareth and still others of Jesus’ close associates thought he was completely insane.)

In the end, Ashe and Tabor have to be placed as opposite outliers in the competition to establish the historical Jesus (and thereby the historical Mary), but it is intriguing that Bart Ehrman, skeptic among skeptics, is slowly coming round to the notion that something strange must have sparked the conviction of the bodily resurrection, so that the story of Christianity is from the beginning a story of disruptions in ordinary consciousness, albeit also involving competing interpretations of those disruptions.

This seems to be a rising hypothesis in religious studies at present, and it is good to see scholars puzzling over the possibility that there are real experiences encoded even in those present-day new religions that were expressly made up by their founders to bamboozle the credulous. (But those religions tend to be litigious about such assertions by outsiders, whereas the ones I find most intriguing are the ones that assert the reality of the experiences and that the credulous need to learn to be less naively credulous.)

Charles Williams, about whose foundational flaws we have learned a great deal more in recent decades, wrote that such poorly explored realms of altered consciousness were quite real, and prone to misinterpretation by those who encountered them and came back “windy with a graph or a gospel,” and also that the Church ought to find room within its boundaries for a Society of Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic.

The society seems to have formed on the ill-defined meeting ground of neuroscience and the humanities rather than in the heart of a Church ever less inclined to intellectual speculation, but it seems appropriate to remember this long-ago declaration by a singularly speculating Anglican layman, even if I post it on the birthday of Kenneth Rexroth rather than the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle.

T. M. Luhrmann has an extraordinary capacity for redefining issues about which folks have been muddled for generations, if not centuries. “Faith Vs. Facts,” in the April 19, 2015 New York Times ( see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?ref=international&_r=0 ) clarifies fifty years of muddle by redefining religious behavior versus religious content; once we suspect that holding beliefs religiously is not the same thing as believing in a divinity of any description, then of course Communism and atheism and vegetarianism and environmentalism and free-market economics are religions. Ordinary language already knew this; we do things “religiously.”

So if in fact “sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives,” and “sacred values may even have different neural signatures in the brain,” as Scott Atran and his colleagues* would argue, then the mysteries of mysticism are suddenly clarified; why mystics are so often at odds with their religions, to the point of having no interest in dogmatic tenets and traditional practice alike. They are taking a completely different approach to relating to the forces that govern their lives (never mind what those forces really are) because they are not religious. They often aren’t “spiritual,” either; they frequently take something like what I have been calling a (w)hol(l)y agnostic stance, operating empirically and rationally within their definitions of reason. (“Mysticism” being one of those cluttered categories in which we park everything that doesn’t fit into some other category, rather like “genre fiction,” there are of course mystics who are totally emotional and anti-verbal as well as ones who are so concerned with the limits of language that they might as well be Ludwig Wittgenstein,, who seems to have understood in the Tractatus what mysticism really is.)

But this means that we need to discard the concept of mysticism even as we apply the term “religion” to any set of beliefs in which total identification with particular god-terms (see, we’ve had the concepts for two generations, we just haven’t known how literally correct they were) is more important than fidelity to demonstrable fact—a position that is easily defensible, since ‘fact” is so often mediated by social position and psychological predisposition. We’ve known for a very long time that being a rationalist is frequently the opposite from being rational, but now we have better grounds on which to argue that. As with so many false binaries, the opposite does not apply; being an irrationalist is not the opposite from being irrational, although there have been ample numbers of writers who have devoted considerable rational analysis to demonstrating why abstract reason just doesn’t cut it when it comes down to cases.

Getting back to those folks who don’t have much truck with god-terms and a great deal of truck with what some people call God but those particular folks often don’t—we have no terms with which to distinguish belief-inclined agnostics who both think and believe that there is something out there but we don’t quite know what (one species of mystic) from emotion-based believers who, however, don’t have much use for religion as opposed to direct experience. As good ol’ Ludwig would say, “Don’t say they must have something in common or they would not both be called ‘mystics.’ Don’t think, but look!” How do they behave, and why do they behave that way? What is their relationship to that imperceptible thing we like to call reality? (College dorm exchanges of conceptual nonsense really do have a grasp on fundamental problems; the more we look at everyday reality, the less real it appears to be. We survive because we don’t ask ourselves how we navigate through this mess of physical circumstances that our self-aware primate species has been handed.)

Is there a bumper sticker that says “Anyone who has a firm grasp on reality is delusional”? I seem to recall something similar from the ‘60s, when nobody had a firm grasp on much of anything, but everyone of all political stripes believed passionately that they did. (We can thank the transgender activists for forcing grammarians to declare that “everyone” can now be construed as plural rather than awkwardly singular, by the way.)


*Luhrmann, who is a professor of anthropology at Stanford, doesn’t bother to identify the anthropologist Scott Atran, and as so often in web searches, an effort to learn more turned up something else, an astonishing book of essays from Edge edited by John Brockman, titled This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works—wherein a variety of academic professionals answer the question posed to them by Steven Pinker, “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/22/this-explains-everything-brockman-edge-question/ But as always, you don’t have to fill up your bookshelves to read the 192 answers, all of which are published online: http://edge.org/annual-question/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation

As so often in such matters, Dr. Atran’s explication of his ideas makes me feel more uncertain of their validity rather than more convinced, illustrating how much one’s choice of rhetoric determines the plausibility of one’s opinions.

Workpoints towards “Tipping Points in the Anthropocene Era, Part Four”

There are no workpoints yet for Part Three, about human interaction and human creative practice. The problems are almost impossible to phrase correctly, never mind keep in mind simultaneously. Despite the common pressures imposed by globalized economies, human beings differ in background, environmental situation, and a multitude of other factors. It is easy to point out how minimum-wage discount-store employees in a Midwestern American city might have some financial stresses in common with corporation-employed copra dryers in a Pacific coral-atoll culture, but difficult to explicate the anxiety-provoking similarities and equally crucial differences between landlord-owned housing threatened by high rents and worker-owned housing threatened by rising sea levels literally lapping at the foundations. A particular minority-religion group in parts of Central Asia is being assisted into modernity by a global foundation, while members of the same minority group a few hundred miles to the south are threatened with physical extermination. Members of relatively disempowered ethnicities in advanced industrial societies are currently pointing out that the same structures of privilege operate throughout the social order: historically oppressed ethnicities receive only adequate rewards for doing the same work for which historically dominant ethnicities receive disproportionately great rewards, for example—even though all of them receive compensation that the less well employed of all ethnicities can only envy. There are disputes as to whether these ethnic disproportions deserve more recognition than gender-based disproportions, which are also a matter of historically disenfranchised and historically dominant categories of human beings. It is very difficult to talk about all these things at the same moment, while keeping in mind that environmentally caused cancers and lung diseases also affect different parts of the social order in different degrees, just as rising sea levels have a more immediate impact on those who live by the water—who on some coastlines are very rich, and on others, extremely poor. Discussion of these variables is rendered even more difficult by the inevitability of emotional turmoil over perceived offense, and even the workpoints for later discussions become unwieldy. So we are going direct to workpoints for Part Four, that part that is intended to address some of the problems discussed in Parts One through Three.

No one of the phenomena described in these twelve workpoints plays out in isolation, as is implied by the contortions of Parts One and Two as previously posted and the probable contortions of the as yet unwritten Part Three. It is useful to separate them out, however, for the simple purpose of achieving a bit of transient clarity before plunging back into the fatal muddle that is the labyrinth of the world. There are many permutations that could turn into further workpoints, but that would land us back in the middle of the labyrinth instead of in the—well, not quite the paradise of the heart, but hopefully something of which Comenius might approve. —Jerry Cullum, still asserting some version of Creative Commons right of ascription of authorship in this text’s subsequent uses


1) Under ordinary circumstances, we are not adequately equipped by our bodies’ biological wiring to consider concurrently all the tipping points in the anthropocene era, and how they interact with, alter, reinforce or diminish the impact of one another.

2) Even if we can learn how to expand both the length of our attention span and number of topics we can keep in mind simultaneously, we still run up against the problem of the fields of knowledge in which we simply aren’t any good. All of these fields need to be deployed together merely to understand the interacting tipping points—never mind do something about them that doesn’t suffer fatally from the law of unintended consequences.

3) So we need to figure out how to coordinate our collective information in a way to which our ordinary condition does not predispose us. If we entrust the task to machines, we need to know the consequences of how the information was presented to the machines, which at this point is determined by the human beings writing the algorithms that input and analyze the data. As we know from the websites that recommend books and merchandise and vacation sites to us, algorithms and programmers do err. (That’s a joking reference to Martin Luther’s “popes and councils do err,” by the way; which piece of information illustrates a subsequent tipping point of communally shared knowledge that must be dealt with.)

4) Machines can understand the world, but the point is to change it. (Can a machine be altruistic? Can a human being? Points for debate currently.)

5) The cultures within which we operate are not particularly capable of changing it in the ways it needs to be changed not just to maximize human happiness, but to ensure human survival.

6) The cultures within which we operate are currently under stress from the increasingly random collisions—for many different reasons—of populations with no more than semi-compatible value systems. While hybridity seems possible because it has been the way of the earth for millennia, right now in many situations a sophisticated hybridity is the exception, and uncomfortable accommodation the rule when there is not outright mutual rejection. This is a simple empirically verifiable reality regardless of what we wish were the case. What to do about it is the question that must be answered if we are to maintain societies in which most human beings would want to live—and there is a wide variety of opinion as to what sorts of societies particular human beings would prefer to inhabit, once we get beyond a few very widespread preferences.

7) A tiny minority of humanity is engaged in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs that are unsettling habits formed over millennia even more thoroughly than the technological breakthroughs of the previous hundred and fifty years put together. Yet the system within which these technologies are being deployed randomly and uncontrollably is governed by economic maxims developed a century and a quarter ago and applied as though they were immutable universal truths. The tension between the two forces is creating a level of social and economic insecurity among the vast majority of humankind that is giving rise to demodernizing movements, xenophobic mythologies, and other pathologies that occur when human beings are pushed to their limit culturally, financially, and environmentally, and mostly all at the same moment.

8) The stresses of global industrial society, including industrialized agriculture and resource extraction, are leading to mass extinctions of species, intensifying already existing cycles of climate variation and thus creating destructive alterations in food production and survival of natural systems (a.k.a. ecological networks), and also creating urban environments that perpetuate personal stress among an already socially and financially beleaguered global citizenry. This is so whether the governmental entity within which the stresses are being generated calls itself capitalist or socialist, whether the form of global capitalism being practiced is corporate or state-controlled and regardless of the philosophical background of the putatively socialist economy.

9) The vast majority of human beings are too busy with other matters to absorb even a stripped-down understanding of these problems, and even if they did absorb such an understanding, many would be inclined to reject solutions that are anathema to the crumbling cultures in which they were brought to adulthood.

10) The rapidity of change increases the level of incomprehension not only between cultures and generations, but between individuals. Fewer starting points than ever are available from which to analyze and choose among the possible outcomes of global difficulties.

11) Specialized subgroups of professionals whose collective body of knowledge comes as close as we can get at this point to solving the planet-wide crisis of our epoch hold each other in mutual contempt most of the time, and misunderstand each other’s points when they overcome their contempt long enough to attempt collaboration.

12) What is to be done?