For more than a year now I’ve been reading and forgetting to read Richard Zenith’s biography of Fernando Pessoa, an enormous book with spurts of interest and spurts of extreme dullness that make me put it down for months (for a poet with a “factless autobiography,” as Zenith acknowledges, there’s not much life to write about). I finally got to the part about his interest in the occult and friendship with Alaister Crowley (with whom Pessoa once staged a hoax suicide, an event based on which Pessoa also apparently wrote an unfinished and awful thriller novel). Reading about these exciting hijinks led me to Pessoa’s digitized online library, where you can read all the occult texts he assembled over his lifetime (there are 1317 readable volumes!)
While it’s fascinating for me as a Pessoa-head to see the weird idiosyncratic shit he was reading, and to try to riddle out how his practices of astrological readings and divinations might relate to the heteronymic project in which he dramatized and added to his own contradictions, there’s an unavoidable connection between the occult and the dark side of Pessoa — his more nationalist, backward-looking interests, like his mythical project of Sebastianism, which projected a messianic figure who’d bring Portugul back to the center of world affairs (though Zenith of course does a good job contextualizing these and making Fernando seem at least like more of liberal humanist than you’d think). In the mold of a Yeats though, there’s a worrisome use of mythology and magic to shore up certain authoritarian, imperial, or at least nationalist sentiment. Yes, he was just a recluse with a trunk full of writings, but still, what to make of his flirtation with The Great Beast?
Adorno famously wrote in his Theses Against Occultism that “the tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness” and called astrology fascist (in general, his favorite bit). I mean, yeah, in that aestheticized occult “vibes” are just another flavor of narcissist consumer spectacle now. And I see how credulity, of any sort, scales upward dangerously. But isn’t that credulity also, potentially, the seed of whatever still isn’t alienated?
For a while now I’ve had an affinity (to borrow a term Maddie wrote about in her recent Substack) for the counter-term to Adorno’s skepticism. Could utopian politics, in its seesaw between enormous hope and crushing defeat, be refreshed by some re-enchantment, whatever form that takes? What would a radical occultism look like, expressed in poetics? Can the vibes also lead us somewhere, together?
In Magdalena Zurawski’s pamphlet “Being Human is an Occult Practice” (Ugly Duckling Presse) she gives an account of literature itself as an induction into a secret order, a set of human values and feelings suppressed by neoliberalism (an idea of spiritual austerity policies that perhaps parallels Bifo Berardi’s conception of “semiotic debt”). Zurawski illustrates this argument with an anecdote from Robert Duncan’s HD Book, in which one of his high school teachers interrupts their class on a hot day to share a poem by H.D., “Heat.”
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters…
A simple poem, lightly incantatory. And yet, for Duncan, this act is framed as a violation of her official capacities in training the young in managerial-class cultural capital, inviting students almost surreptitiously into a deeper, more human “community of feeling” (the quotes in this section are from the pamphlet mentioned above). The poem, like all literature, seeks out affinities between people who have felt this too, and constitutes a new community purely on this basis. One which might not have much use, per se, not to mention cultural capital.
Zurawki generalizes this anecdote to claim all literary instruction contains (or potentially contains) a double purpose – its official purpose by which it can remain institutionalized, and its hidden, piratical (to use Moten & Harney’s term) subversion of that purpose:
What is revealed through a poem like H.D.’s is secret knowledge and thus cannot be announced. The richness of the universally human is an occult wisdom, a truth that underscores the privation of our common ways of being. Miss Keough as the messenger of such knowledge is an initiate of a secret community: ‘the whole confidence and tone of her speaking was of an other order when she came to these works that she took as revelations of a life back of culture or society, a life she wanted us to find.’ That only a life outside of the dominant order facilitates acknowledgement and understanding of human kinship through a shared affective life is, in essence, the problem of modernity as a whole: the alienation of each of us from one another and from ourselves. As an agent of the state, Miss Keough is tasked with perpetuating such alienation through teaching literature in order to cultivate the social comportment expected in members of the middle class. Officially she is meant to bestow upon Duncan and his classmates the accoutrements of the bourgeoisie, a common vocabulary of cultural references for cocktail and dinner parties where business deals are sealed. But the literary has a secret escape hatch, a cellar door into a fuller form of life that Miss Keough cannot officially espouse but towards which she nevertheless signals, seemingly from a vital need within herself. (Zurawski 13)
Duncan, says Zurawski, was interested more generally in poetry as a kind of occult, hermetic practice, “a life back of culture,” into which one is initiated (Miss Keough being the paradigmatic messenger of this secret order). Where religious hermeticism, however, tended to express a longing for a past, lost order (as per Yeats & Pessoa), Duncan’s hermeticism was, according to Zurawski, more of a way of “reenchanting” the present, of enriching the present with archetypal symbols from “arcane cultural practices long lost… human forces tamed and repressed… by monotheism and capitalism.” The aim is not a return but to inhabit the earth more humanly: Duncan turned to the medieval fairy tale and romance for “an opulent vocabulary of mythic paradigms that facilitate self-understanding, and, in doing so, invigorate human experience while serving as a mode of critique for modernity’s depleted imaginative landscape.”
The story of Miss Keough, in addition to making me feel a lot better about teaching (which always feels like a failure on many levels, something alive within something that’s very dead), reminds me of my own introductions to literature, music, movies. There was always a Miss Keough (Miss Keough has as many avatars as there are high schoolers), there was always a sense of some secret world that a book or an album opened up, gestured toward – that reference toward the other world, almost glimpsed, was almost more important than the content. Writing about it now, it’s hard to describe without cliché – but perhaps that’s just the harm abstraction does – what I meant to describe was the way it felt, on a summer day in 2007, to listen to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch for the first time in the back of a friend’s Jetta, behind the tennis courts, stoned, with sunshowers and overhanging shadows from the oaks in my periphery pitching things up to the transcendent, the hierophanic version of the place I’d driven countless times before. Earthly City, Heavenly City. Still a cliché, but who could truly hate the clichés of adolescence? Only people who’ve forgotten how to feel.
To un-cringe at the occult gestures of adolescence — perhaps this is finally how I can understand Duncan’s poem:
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow…
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
While Duncan’s gesture towards the secret and occulted points to poetic wellsprings and nourishments, is this really something wholly other than the modernist poetics of the occult? To be honest, I’m basing a lot here on Zurawski’s presentation (I still need to read the H.D. book myself), so I may be missing something, but I’m wondering if, Duncan’s stated anarchic and anti-war politics aside, there is an intrinsic connection between his research into hidden religions and this kind of politics other than, at most, the constitution of a coterie, which may be necessary for a certain kind of cultural opposition and the survival of an oppositional way of life and sentiment. What’s to prevent this turn away, though, from leading to something materially similar (in a larger political sense)? I’m reminded of the problem of “dropping out,” a preservation of purity at the expense of effecting change. There are too many examples of supposed “post-war” (ie, class war) poetics devoid of any real structural understanding of themselves as reinforcing their own class situation… and examples of esotericism as a new kind of cultural capital, as exclusionary as academic structures that pull the ladder up behind oneself.
Maybe an answer to some of these questions and hesitations can be found with Diane Di Prima, a friend and fellow traveler of Duncan’s, who viewed poetry as an occult calling just as much as, like Miss Keough, she invited others into it. For Di Prima, though, it was less about the move away from a depleted bourgeois standardization of feeling (which she did, too, in a big way), than it was about a move towards something else — a radical unity of knowledge, writing, and political community.
I recently read the new book Wild Intelligence: Poet’s Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America by M.C. Kinniburgh (UMass Press), and even though its main interventions & attention seem to be that of an archival researcher and specialist, I still learned a lot about the wide scope of Di Prima’s extra-literary activities, both as a compiler of occult materials and as a publisher, teacher, and book-maker (all the cataloguing behind the book sounds very sick, too). According to Kinniburgh, Di Prima clearly demarcated a large section of her personal library as an “occult library,” a collection that contained an eclectic and intuitive range of subjects “bringing Paracelsus, crystals, Crowley, early mythology, Buddhist traditions, Julian of Norwich, and other esoteric practice into a singular array.” (quotes in this section are from the aforementioned book)
Every area of her life seems to have radiated outward from this library, from her teaching life to her politics (she taught a class on using magic to “take power back into our own hands”), to her writing, in a holistic interrelation connected to the idea of “wholeness as a spiritual and mystical state.” Kinniburgh relates a revealing conversation between Duncan and Di Prima, in which the former claimed to only want to know about his own small piece of the “whole picture” in order to work on it. To this Di Prima said, “I want to know, I want to know it all, even if I never pick up a pen again.”
Influenced by the Hermetic philosopher Paracelsus, who sought an alchemical unity of all knowledge, Di Prima pursued this experience of wholeness, and this interest in the occulted materials of the past, in an intuitive, haphazard way, using the metaphor of “clumps” in which “one might say that each clump is the center of a node from which excursions radiate in various asymmetrical directions.” In her non-dogmatic and experimental approach, historical forms and approaches, such as the Tarot, could even be “evolved” through research: “the old religion and the old forms that we’re all studying with such total devoutness – they have a lot of information and they have a lot of the means, but where we’re all going they haven’t mapped yet. We’re mapping it now – or it’s mapping us.”
Di Prima’s insistent simultaneous gaze backward & forward reminds me of her poem to her grandfather in the Revolutionary Letters: “how you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom / at us, would thunder Dante, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men / bent to your ends.” Citing her grandfather who “bent” these mystical and religious cosmologies to his own political ends gives her own occult research a political dimension – the place we “haven’t mapped yet” could be revolution, could be an unmapped utopian desire, framed in the terms of magic, of prophecy.
More than anything, though, the investigations of the occult library seemed to nourish her poetry:
Look, the more you read and fill up your head with cadences, with rhythms and vowel patterns of other poets, the more of a repertory you have to draw on, conscious and unconscious, when you’re writing. A lot of what you do is variations on riffs you’ve already heard. In this sense, poetry, like jazz, is a kind of dialogue that extends through time… The more you’ve refined the instrument, the more gradations of tonality you program into it, the more information—history, myth, biology—you program into it, and the more you increase your capacity for carrying energy—literally carrying current—then the more you’ll have available when the poem seeks to move through you. (Kinniburgh 91)
One of the most interesting aspects of Kinniburgh’s description of the occult library is the amount of materials that aren’t quite books, like “items that are handwritten, photocopied, scrapbooked, and otherwise bespoke.” I was moved by a story Di Prima tells of visiting, of all people, Ezra Pound:
Ezra told us of copying Vivaldi scores in the library of the Dresden Museum, copying them for Olga Rudge, his love. When the Museum was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden, they were the only copies of those scores that remained… Stories like this made a deep impression on me. They made me realize that what is saved, the shards we call civilization, is saved by a few. By people photographing, or copying by hand. Today as I sit here writing at my computer, I think of the library I’ve put together since then, the alchemy books old and new I’ve xeroxed for students. Stuff I’ve copied by hand. How much of that came out of the Vivaldi story. (Kinniburgh 87)
That Di Prima preserved texts in such materially simple forms, in spite of what Kinniburgh describes as an exacting sense of style and the book as object when it came to her publishing efforts, speaks to the urgency of this archive for her as a preservation of knowledge. Di Prima’s archive — the archive not only of xeroxed and hand-copied texts but of myths and occult “energy” that circulated through her poetry and teaching — was all motivated by this attempt to preserve these “shards” in the service of an elusive Paracelsian wholeness.
I’ve been moved by the romantic monkish notion of copying texts by hand (I’ve tried it a few times, always giving up after a few pages…) ever since I read Benjamin’s note in One Way Street where he describes reading as flying over a landscape in an airplane, and copying by hand as strolling along the countryside, over its hills. There’s at least an embodied relation to the text implied in this metaphor that seems to resonate with Di Prima’s: slowly, a landscape leaves its marks on the walker’s body, the same way that, over time, you can store a text’s energy inside of you, can become a vessel for the past. Not merely to preserve the past, like the backward-looking Pound (and Yeats & Pessoa), but to “evolve” it, to bring it, alchemically, into a new unity.
Di Prima and her library give us a provisional answer to the question of a radical occult poetics: a sense of how that energy can return in poetry, as in her oracular book Loba, AND through collective actions that push the past forward, as in her Revolutionary Letters:
…we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca,
for Sacco and Vanzetti, without knowing
it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley
Oscar Wilde (all street lights shall be purple), do it
for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb
Kropotkin
Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for
the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.