Longer notes from current books
The Occult
I think I bought this book when I was 15. Like a lot of kids, I was fascinated by everything this book takes as its subject matter: the supernatural, magic/magick, esp, the unexplained, etc… It took me 30 years to finally crack it open and read it from cover to cover, largely because I finally felt it necessary to justify having carried it around.
From a purely formal standpoint, this is a kind of book that doesn’t really get written anymore; a survey of a subject not by an expert but by an educated enthusiast. Wilson (most famous for “The Outsider”, a popular book in the wandering 60s) doesn’t claim to be a practictioner of the occult. He’s known primarily as a philosopher and novelist, and his interest in this subject stems from the same enthusiasm I felt when I was younger, though obviously with much more purpose and deliberation. The prose is matter-of-fact, and the references draw from literature, anthropology, history, psychology, and a wide range of other sources. But this wide-ranging, kitchen sink approach means that the book is VERY long, and often trades insight or deep analysis for lengthy biographical sketches and recounting of the lives of historical “occultists”.
Wilson describes all occult phenomena as emerging from what he calls “Faculty X” or “the power that all human beings possess to reach beyond the present.” (p. 59) He argues that this capacity is present in all human beings, though for rather mundane and ill-theorized evolutionary reasons, that capacity is currently stunted and under-utilized in most of us. He lines up poets, musicians, and artists as people who are attuned to the sensations induced by faculty X, and in that sense, what he is proposing is a kind of romanticist phenomenology. He asserts that all documented or contemplated experiences of “the occult” (ghosts, ESP ability, supernatural powers, magic, etc…) are just expressions of human beings activations of or input from faculty X, and a kind of hardening of this broad, rich experience into something contained that we can experience with our other senses.
There were some interesting parts of this book. I liked the discussions of divination, the I ching, Tarot and the Kabbalah in Chapter 3. And Chapter 7 on “the Realm of Spirits”, though VERY long, is full of interesting and bonkers ideas about the connections between human perception, the flatness of linear time, and UFO phenomena. But the chapter on human evolution and the origins of faculty X in the distant past is ham-fisted and uneven, and the chapter on Witchcraft and Lycanthropy is sexist and gross in a way that I would kind of expect from a mid-century English man. The rest of the chapters are laden with mundane biographical phenomena of historical occult practictioners and their methods, and with a lot of judgemental hand-waving by Wilson about their abilities and deficits. Wilson clearly believes in occult phenomena, but on his terms, and other historical figures who practiced abilities designed to reach beyond the present are important or worthwhile only insofar as they conform to his interpretation.
I honestly almost put the book away half a dozen times. It doesn’t have the lyricism or mystification of someone like Elias Levi, and there are (there must be!) works with more systematic expertise. The bibliography at the end seems the most useful thing to me of the whole experience.
Joy 100 poems
I’m still getting used to reading poetry again, and so am always wondering whether my feelings about a poem are due to a genuine evaluation or a lack of sophisticated reading. In any case, it’s hard to summarize or think through a collection like this, especially one about a subject as nebulous and ethereal as joy. So I will just list some poems I liked and maybe why:
- “You’re” by Sylvia Plath – A delightful and funny accounting of one’s child, made doubly delightful by the dour image I have of Plath.
- “Summer Kitchen” by Donald Hall – A rich and sumptuous description of a mundane, everyday moment between two people.
- “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert –A politically ambiguous but hopeful poem about measuring life through delight, and against the horror and injustice of the “ruthless furnace of the world.”
- “Big Finish” by Kimberly Johnson –An ode to night time light and starshine, with an apocalyptic final couplet that made me giggle.
- “Slim in Atlanta” by Sterling A. Brown –Calling it ‘satire’ cheapens the richness of the Black-accented voice and the menacing violence that spills over as the poem unfolds.
- “Pentecost” by Michael Donaghy –A poem about sex and love, and non-verbal vocalization as a manifestation of both.
- “King David Dances” by John Berryman –Dancing against empire, within it, beyond it.
- “Manifesto: THe Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry –I have a soft spot for Berry, for his love of land and the people who live on it and with it. This is a funny, madcap stroll through a countryside-Luther’s theses. “Practice resurrection.”
Every Heart a Doorway
A messy, confusing portal fantasy that loves its concept more than its characters, who are mostly just collections of traits and static identities, and act in nonsensical ways. The author describes them with phrases like “her traitorous body betrayed her.” I have no idea why this won awards.
Pacific Edge
A post-revolutionary eco-utopia set in Southern California, but focused on the everyday lives and relationships of its inhabitants.
Kevin lives in El Modena, working as a carpenter, serving on the town’s council, and breaking records for the local softball team. The two forces of drama in his life are attemps by the town’s mayor, Alfredo, to develop a local hillside against the wishes of some of the people, and his pining for Ramona, a teacher and Alfredo’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. These forces play out in Kevin’s life in overlapping and competing ways, as he learns more about Alfredo’s motivations for developing the hill as well and as his relationship with Ramona waxes and wanes. Interspersed in the story are chapters from some at-first unnamed character, describing their time in a prison camp somewhere on the east coast, and how they became radicalized and focused on transforming the world.
Overall, the book is mostly a mundane exploration of interpersonal and community dynamics, but playing out on the backdrop of a world made new after a period of political and ecological disaster. The development politics of El Modena inject a notion of complexity and dynamism into this melodrama, pondering whether the forces of modernity and capitalism will disappear completely in some better possible future.
Elite Capture
A call for a constructive politics that recognizes difference but sees it as a means to build, rather than a means to divide. Taiwo juxtaposes such a position against what he calls a politics of deference, which foregrounds the experience of difference and privleges it as a stopping point in politics. Taiwo uses a number of metaphors to get at this difference, particularly the idea of a room as a created context of our actions and interactions. Under his reading, deference politics locates why difference exists in the room, and centers or priveleges the most marginalized and oppressed people within it. Conversely, a constructive politics seeks to mobilze across lines of difference, towards the goal of building a new room. Taiwo argues that the former is particularly succeptible to “Elite Capture”, meaning the takeover of resources, processes, and even language by the powerful (in effect, constructing and controlling a house that supports their interests).
His primary concern with deference politics is that it tends to use somewhat facile notions of difference that are then rhetorically amplified with the goal of centering the marginalized. To quote Taiwo, such centering “has usually meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression–regardless of what they have or have not eactually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand.” This means, for Taiwo, that the conversation “stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside.” His examples of this largely come from American politics, where candidates who share phenotypic characteristics with populations that have been marginalized for those characteristics are treated with deference and allowance, even if their actual political goals will cause harm to those same populations. Even the lofty and idealistic vision of deference politics, in which we ask people who have some experience with marginalization to speak about it, falls flat for Taiwo, because in its quest to equalize attention and authority within a narrow social space, it leaves the overall structure that created the categories of marginalization in place. In Taiwo’s words, “The facts that explain who ends up in what room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it inside.” Such squabbles are, for Taiwo, essentially performative, easily captured by elite interests as a means of derailing activism, and provide little potential to change or move the world towards equity and justice.
This book is a call to action, and laced with fascinating histories from colonial African and South American uprisings and decolonization efforts to lend support to the need to build coalitions across lines of difference, construct new alternatives, and re-think older assumptions. These are the models that Taiwo draws to counterpose constructive and deferential politics. At the same time, I found myself wanting to understand how to make sense of that difference at the level of interpersonal relationships. How does one negotiate the interactions of competing lived experiences in a way that promotes curiousity, creativity, and decisive action towards equity and justice? In other words, how do I know, if I’m in a room with people who are marked as different from me in some historically structural way, whether I am lazily ceding attention and authority to them, allowing elite capture to take place, or just being a decent person and trying to build conversational space for planning and action? It feels easy to say that there are two kinds of politics (constructive and deferential) and we should do the good kind and not do the bad kind, but I don’t have a good sense of how to know the difference in any given situation, and I don’t feel like this book helped me think through that except in a very abstract way.
Martian Sands
A kind of Jewish Dickian mind-melt, in which time-travel allows Jews to avert the holocaust and create a new Israel on Mars. Featuring androids of Golda Meir, blurred lines between pulp fiction and reality, and splitting personalities. I found it kind of bewildering and hard to follow, but the concepts were cool.
