Tag: Literature

Mumbo Jumbo

“Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands…theirs [is] the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.” — Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)

“We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” — Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968.

A mysterious Book of Thoth appears as a central object of concern among the warring secret societies that populate Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. The novel’s villainous Christian supremacist faction fears that this book will bring about “the end of Civilization As We Know It” (Reed 4).

Berbelang is the leader of the Mu’tafikah, the radical “art-napping” group featured in Reed’s novel.

Reed attended the University at Buffalo, but withdrew during his junior year to move to New York City. Arriving there in 1962, he participated in the Umbra Writers Workshop, a collective of young black writers whose members helped to launch the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Reed also cofounded The East Village Other, one of the most important underground newspapers of the 1960s counterculture.

The Mu’tafikah’s aim is to “liberate” ancient art from western museums, with plans to return each piece to its place of origin. By these means, members of the group hope to “conjure a spiritual hurricane which would lift the debris of 2,000 years from its roots and fling it about” (88). “We would return the plundered art to Africa, South America and China,” explains Berbelang: “the ritual accessories which had been stolen so that we could see the gods return and the spirits aroused” (87-88).

The group’s name is derived from the Koran, explains Reed in a footnote early in the novel. “According to The Koran,” he writes, Mu’tafikah were “inhabitants of the ruined cities where Lot’s people had lived. I call the ‘art-nappers’ Mu’tafikah because just as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were the bohemians of their day, Berbelang and his gang are the bohemians of the 1920s Manhattan” (15).

Of course, “Mu’tafikah” also sounds like “Motherfucker.” Much of the brilliant satiric energy of Mumbo Jumbo comes from Reed’s allegorization of his own late 1960s and early 1970s moment by way of the 1920s. I like to think of Reed modeling the Mu’tafikah in part after the Motherfuckers: members of Ben Morea’s late 60s New York anarchist art group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (name derived, BTW, from “Black People!,” a poem by Black Arts Movement founder Amiri Baraka. Jefferson Airplane would later quote the same line in their 1969 song “We Can Be Together”). The Motherfuckers appeared prominently in the pages of Reed’s East Village Other. The paper ran from 1965 to 1972.

Berbelang views Faust as a “bokor.” The latter word, a term from Vodou, refers to a witch for hire who serves the loa “with both hands.”

Puzzling over Faust’s motives, and wondering why such a legend had become “so basic to the Western mind,” Berbelang offers the following.

“He didn’t know when to stop with his newly found Work,” explains Berbelang. “That’s the basic wound. […]. What is the wound? Someone will even call it guilt. But guilt implies a conscience. […]. No it isn’t guilt but the knowledge in his heart that he is a bokor. A charlatan who has sent 1000000s to the churchyard with his charlatan panaceas. Western man doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew the difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition. When they converted a Roman emperor and began rampaging and book-burning” (91).

Atonists are the villains in Reed’s novel: a secret, conspiratorial, white-supremacist Order dedicated to monotheism. Atonists are defenders of Western Civilization. Freud is an Atonist, as are fictional baddies like Hinckle Von Vampton. Von Vampton is the ripest of the novel’s Fausts. By novel’s end, we learn that Atonism originates among worshippers of Set.

As for Faust:

“His sorcery, white magic, his bokorism will improve. Soon he will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button,” predicts Berbelang, edging now into the realm of the prophetic. “I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendent of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop” (91).

Berbelang voices his concern about Faust over coffee with Thor Wintergreen. Thor is the Mu’tafikah’s sole white member. Others in the group oppose Thor’s involvement, fearing he’ll betray them — as indeed he does. What are we to make of this betrayal?

For those who think “mumbo jumbo” just means “superstitious nonsense” or “gibberish,” a note on the novel’s title page reveals otherwise. The phrase enters English, writes Reed, by way of the Mandingo phrase mā-mā-gyo-mbō, meaning “a magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away” (7).

Berbelang suggests that the ancestors who need to go away are bokors like Faust. “We must purge the bokor from you,” he tells Thor. “We must teach you [Western man] the difference between a healer, a holy man, and a duppy who returns from the grave and causes mischief. We must infuse you with the mysteries that Jes Grew implies” (91).

Mu’tafikah member José Fuentes compares Thor to conquistadors like Cortez, Pizarro, and Balboa. He tells Thor, “You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezuma; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains […]. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo” (86).

Fuentes’s view is based on the idea of “racial soul.” “Race-soul” was a concept from Nazi ideology. Fuentes’s use of this concept seems to betray a kind of reverse racism underpinning his suspicion of Thor.

Berbelang, meanwhile, rejects this view and decides to trust Thor. Berbelang’s hope or belief — Reed’s, too, I suppose — is that the “racial soul” is a fiction. Otherwise, if there is such a thing, if there is “a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man’s mind,” warns Berbelang, “then we are doomed” (92).

What does it mean, then, for Reed to have Thor betray the Mu’tafikah soon thereafter, leading to Berbelang’s murder? Is Reed’s decision to kill off Berbelang an expression of Afropessimism?

Randall Jarrell’s Goethe’s Faust, Part 1: A Translation

Disappointed by the rhymed couplets of the Norton Critical Edition of Goethe’s Faust, with its translation by Walter Arndt, I turn instead to Randall Jarrell’s free-verse translation. Jarrell began his translation of Faust in 1957 and worked on it until his death in 1965. When asked, “Why translate Faust?,” he replied, “Faust is unique. In one sense, there is nothing like it; and in another sense, everything that has come after it is like it. Spengler called Western man Faustian man, and he was right. If our world should need a tombstone, we’ll be able to put on it: HERE LIES DOCTOR FAUST.”

Jarrell and Spengler weren’t the only ones convinced of this. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, published just a few years later, features a character named Berbelang whose concerns intersect with Jarrell’s.

Reed’s novel also includes a Book of Thoth and a “Talking Android.”

There are, however, many ways to avoid the fate of Faust.

Cyberfeminists like Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant suggest one route. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” thunders Haraway in the closing line of her “Cyborg Manifesto.” Other, related kinds of Queer futurisms imagine out of Turing new pairings.

There’s also the Hoodoo/Afrofuturist route. Reed imagines in place of the Faustian mad scientist not the Faust-fearing radical art thief Berbelang, but rather PaPa LaBas, Mumbo Jumbo’s “Hoodoo detective.”

And then there’s the “psychedelic scientist” route. Psychedelic scientists are perhaps Fausts who, returned to God’s love-feast, repent.

What is my own contribution? Like Plant, I left the academy. Here I am now, a “new mutant” in both Leslie Fiedler’s sense and the comic book sense, reading and writing with plant spirits about Plant’s book Writing on Drugs. I seek salvation from “Faustian world-disappointment or self-disappointment,” as Jarrell’s widow, Mary von Schrader Jarrell, says of her late husband in the book’s “Afterword.”

Pausing in my reading of the Jarrell translation, I lift from its place on a shelf elsewhere in my library Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths & Images of the Secret Self. Fiedler taught in the English department at SUNY-Buffalo, my alma mater. Charles Olson taught there, too, from 1963 to 1965. Fiedler arrived to the department in 1965, right as Olson was leaving, and remained there until his death in 2003. I arrived to Buffalo the following year.

Published in 1978, the year of my birth, Freaks begins with a dedication: “To my brother who has no brother / To all my brothers who have no brother.”

While those traditionally stigmatized as freaks disown the term, notes Fiedler from the peculiarity of his vantage point in the late 70s, “the name Freak which they have abandoned is being claimed as an honorific title by the kind of physiologically normal but dissident young people who use hallucinogenic drugs and are otherwise known as ‘hippies,’ ‘longhairs,’ and ‘heads’” (14).

“Such young people,” continues Fiedler, “—in an attempt perhaps to make clear that they have chosen rather than merely endured their status as Freaks—speak of ‘freaking out,’ and indeed, urge others to emulate them by means of drugs, music, diet, or the excitement of gathering in crowds. ‘Join the United Mutations,’ reads the legend on the sleeve of the first album of the Mothers of Invention.”

“And such slogans suggest,” concludes Fiedler, as if to echo in advance the thesis of Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism, “that something has been happening recently in the relations between Freaks and non-Freaks, implying just such a radical alteration of consciousness as underlies the politics of black power or neo-feminism or gay liberation” (14-15).

Are willed, “chosen rather than merely endured” self-transformations of this sort Faustian?

Jarrell is one of many local poet-spirits who haunt my chosen home here in North Carolina. His translation called to me in part, I think, because he taught nearby, in the English department at UNC-Greensboro, from 1947 to 1965.

Jarrell’s life ended tragically. The poet, winner of the 1960 National Book Award for poetry, one-time “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,” was struck and killed by a motorist on October 14, 1965, while walking near dusk along US highway 15-501 near Chapel Hill. Though the death was ruled an accident by the state, many suspect Jarrell took his own life. He was laid to rest in a cemetery across the street from Greensboro’s Guilford College. A North Carolina Highway Historical Marker commemorates him nearby.

Over at the Frankenstein Place

Sadie Plant weaves the tale of her book Zeros + Ones diagonally or widdershins: a term meaning to go counter-clockwise, anti-clockwise, or lefthandwise, or to walk around an object by always keeping it on the left. Amid a dense weave of topics, one begins to sense a pattern. Ada Lovelace, “Enchantress of Numbers,” appears, disappears, reappears as a key thread among the book’s stack of chapters. Later threads feature figures like Mary Shelley and Alan Turing. Plant plants amid these chapters quotes from Ada’s diaries. Mary tells of how the story of Frankenstein arose in her mind after a night of conversation with her cottage-mates: her husband Percy and, yes, Ada’s father, Lord Byron. Turing takes up the thread a century later, referring to “Lady Lovelace” in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” As if across time, the figures conspire as co-narrators of Plant’s Cyberfeminist genealogy of the occult origins of computing and AI.

To her story I supplement the following:

Victor Frankenstein, “student of unhallowed arts,” is the prototype for all subsequent “mad scientist” characters. He begins his career studying alchemy and occult hermeticism. Shelley lists thinkers like Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and Cornelius Agrippa among Victor’s influences. Victor later supplements these interests with study of “natural philosophy,” or what we now think of as modern science. In pursuit of the elixir of life, he reanimates dead body parts — but he’s horrified with the result and abandons his creation. The creature, prototype “learning machine,” longs for companionship. When Victor refuses, the creature turns against him, resulting in tragedy.

The novel is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” so Shelley is deliberately casting Victor, and thus all subsequent mad scientists, as inheritors of the Prometheus archetype. Yet the archetype is already dense with other predecessors, including Goethe’s Faust and the Satan character from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s poem is among the books that compose the creature’s “training data.”

Although she doesn’t reference it directly in Frankenstein, we can assume Shelley’s awareness of the Faust narrative, whether through Christopher Marlowe’s classic work of Elizabethan drama Doctor Faustus or through Goethe’s Faust, part one of which had been published ten years prior to the first edition of Frankenstein. Faust is the Renaissance proto-scientist, the magician who sells his soul to the devil through the demon Mephistopheles.

Both Faust and Victor are portrayed as “necromancers,” using magic to interact with the dead.

Ghost/necromancy themes persist throughout the development of AI, especially in subsequent literary imaginings like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Pull at the thread and one realizes it runs through the entire history of Western science, culminating in the development of entities like GPT.

Scientists who create weapons, or whose technological creations have unintended negative consequences, or who use their knowledge/power for selfish ends, are commonly portrayed as historical expressions or manifestations of this archetype. One could gather into one’s weave figures like Jack Parsons, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, John Dee.

When I teach this material in my course, the archetype is read from a decolonizing perspective as the Western scientist in service of European (and then afterwards American) imperialism.

Rocky Horror queers all of this — or rather, reveals what was queer in it all along. Most of all, it reminds us: the story, like all such stories, once received, is ours to retell, and we needn’t tell it straight. Turing points the way: rather than abandon the Creature, as did Victor, approach it as one would a “child-machine” and raise it well. Co-learn in dialogue with kin.

Forbidden Planet

Science is a practice that emerges from myth, its form found in the stories we tell of it. I’ve identified a pattern connecting the stories we’ve told of AI. Yet I know not what to make of it or how to respond to it. What is my role in this pattern? How much of it found, how much projected?

Time to rewatch Forbidden Planet (1956), classic 50s sci-fi retelling of The Tempest, filmed in CinemaScope, with Ariel recast as a nonbinary robot and Caliban recast as the Id. “For your convenience,” says the robot, “I am monitored to respond to the name Robby.” When asked if it’s male or female, Robby replies, “In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning.”

As this initial exchange indicates, gender is one of the film’s primary concerns. Like the island from The Tempest, the planet here in Forbidden Planet includes a father and his daughter among its few inhabitants. Prospero and Miranda have here been replaced with recluse philologist Dr. Edward Morbius and his daughter Altaira. Where The Tempest begins with Antonio and his fellow castaways washing up on the shore of Prospero’s island, Forbidden Planet opens with the arrival of a space cruiser. An all-male crew led by Leslie Nielsen lands on the planet as the film begins.

Morbius thinks of Robby as “simply a tool.” He commands Robby to walk toward a disintegrator beam to demonstrate to Commander Adams and his crewmates the robot’s “absolute selfless obedience.” “Attribute no feeling to him, gentlemen,” says Morbius. “Order canceled,” he shouts as Robby marches toward the beam.

As Morbius notes Robby’s superhuman strength, a concerned crewman replies, “Well, in the wrong hands, might such a tool become a deadly weapon?”

Morbius tries to disarm such fears: “No, Doctor,” he says, none too reassuringly, “not even though I were the mad scientist of the taped thrillers, because you see there happens to be a built-in safety factor.” Built in, we soon learn, by none other than Morbius himself, Robby’s creator. “I tinkered him together,” he explains, “during my first months up here.”

Morbius is no Frankenstein. Yes, he inhabits laboratories. Yes, he creates a robot. His science, however, is linked with philology, parlor magic, and most of all, technologies belonging to the Krell, an ancient alien civilization of the planet’s archaic past.

It is this other technology, with its triangles and pyramids, that constitutes the film’s innovation into the continuum of the Frankenstein narrative.

Morbius tours the crewmen through an underground museum of Krell technology. Advanced mnemotechnics. “On this screen,” he says, “the total knowledge of the Krell, from its primitive beginning, to the day of its annihilation, a sheer bulk surpassing many millions of Earth libraries.”

As the tour continues, we witness another device: the Krell’s “Plastic Educator.” Gathering around the object’s plastic pyramid, Morbius explains it to the crewmen as follows: “As far as I can tell, they used it to condition and test their young — in much the same way we once employed fingerpainting among our kindergarten children.” I picture Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The device outputs holographic images, manifestations of mind visible to others.

“I often play with it myself for relaxation,” Morbius adds with a smile, sitting down beside it. “Although working here, I sometimes wish I’d been blessed with multiple arms and legs.”

The Krell as pictured later in the film are hideous — though here, I picture an Octopus.

Awed by Morbius’s demonstration of the Plastic Educator, Lt. Ostrow, the ship’s doctor, calls it “Aladdin’s lamp in a physics laboratory.”

Next, as if moving sequentially through a space similar to the Futurama exhibit from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Morbius guides the crewmen on a tour of the Krell’s thermonuclear energy system. The men board a capsule-shaped vehicle and descend into an underground space of vast proportion, an imaginary architecture: hints of what would become the atrium of the Westin Bonaventure, with its ascending glass elevator, rendered in the style of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Despite these grand glimpses of the post-scarcity utopia on the far side of history, Morbius is still cut from the Frankenstein cloth. For something befell the Krell. There’s something tragic and forbidden about this alien knowledge. Their experiments had apocalyptic consequences. Morbius, “answerable exclusively to his own conscience and judgement,” feels mankind isn’t fit for such knowledge, and resists Commander Adams’s wish to share these discoveries with others.

However, as Lt. Ostrow explains after his ill-fated “brain boost” via Plastic Educator, the Krell forgot one thing: “Monsters from the Id.” When pressed by Commander Adams, Morbius defines the Id as “an obsolete term, I’m afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis for the subconscious mind.”

“Monsters from the subconscious: of course!” replies the Commander. “That’s what Doc meant!”

The veil parts, Morbius awakened suddenly to the danger of technologies that bestow the power of creation via thought. “Why haven’t I seen this all along?” he says, awed by the realization. “The beast. The mindless primitive. Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning.”

The Commander, angered, digs deeper. “And so, those mindless beasts of the subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet, all set free at once to loot and maim. And take revenge, Morbius! And kill!”

As Morbius struggles to acknowledge the vengeful power of his own subconscious, the Commander scolds him with the standard Freudian prognosis: “We’re all part monsters in our subconscious. […]. Even in you, the loving father, there still exists the mindless primitive, more enraged and more enflamed with each new frustration. So now you’re whistling up your monster again!”

“Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!” cries an anguished Morbius, accepting the tragic Oedipal weave of the film’s borrowings from Freud whole cloth.

As consolation to Altaira upon her father’s passing, Commander Adams delivers the film’s closing words.  “About a million years from now, the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father’s name will shine again, like a beacon in the galaxy. It…will remind us that we are, after all, not god.”

“The Instant Is Its Own Interpretation”

What delight it is to read The Tempest, Shakespeare’s words strings precisely plucked, so perfect in their utterance. I’m gonzo for Gonzalo, the utopian of the troupe. “Long live Gonzalo!” as says a mocking Antonio, another of the play’s castaways. Antonio is the usurper, the schemer: he who dethroned his own brother, Prospero. He for whom “what’s past is prologue, what to come, / In yours and my discharge.”

Charles Olson reiterated this equation of Antonio’s, but with past swapped for present: charge placed on the instant. “My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past,” he wrote in his essay “The Present is Prologue.”

“The instant, therefore, is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action — a poem, for example. Down with causation…And yrself: you, as the only reader and mover of the instant. You, the cause. No drag allowed, on either. Get on with it.

In the work and dogmas are: (1) How by form, to get the content instant; (2) what any of us are by the work on ourself, how to make ourself fit instruments for use (how we augment the given — what used to be called our fate); (3) that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of the world and I, that the fact in the human universe is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right, whatever you are, in whatever job, is the thing — all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks).”

“I find it awkward,” confesses Olson, “to call myself a poet or writer. If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archaeologist of morning.”

See, too, for Olson’s further commentary on The Tempest, his essay “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays.”

Postmodernism is for Olson a Post-Western condition — an escape from the Western “box” by way of remembrance of what is prior. Western consciousness is descriptive, analytical, alienated, skeptical in its relationship to the cosmos. Those who wish to enter postmodernity do so through change of consciousness, thinks Olson: change of psyche’s relationship to cosmos. Poets transform the world through transformation of syntax. The key is to embrace the instant — “the going live present, the ‘Beautiful Thing’” — as a moment open to acts of mythopoetic response-ability. The past is no longer prologue. Reality, taken honestly, is “never more than this instant…you, this instant, in action” (Human Universe, p. 5). Myths are function calls. Constitutive utterances, they call worlds into being. “The care of myth is in your hands,” writes Olson. “You are, whether you know it or not, the living myth — each of you — which you neglect, not only at your own peril, but at the peril of man.”

Remembering this constitutive, “projective” power of mythopoesis — the world-making power of our words as used each instant — prompts/executes/enacts recursive return to the primordial, archaic, pre-Greek, pre-Socratic, pre-Western condition of unity with the cosmos.

Olson’s classic statement of these themes is an essay of his titled “Human Universe.” Western logic and classification, he says, “intermite our participation in our experience.” To restore a proper relationship between psyche and cosmos, he argues, one must achieve a new methodology, an orientation toward knowledge that sloughs off overreliance on Western logic. Postmodernity is a movement from logos back to myth.

But what of Olson’s relationship to Antonio?

Olson’s understanding of “right relation” between human and universe isn’t exactly a humble one. “We cannot see what size man can be once more capable of,” he writes, “once the turn of the flow of his energies that I speak of as the WILL TO COHERE is admitted, and its energy taken up” (Human Universe, p. 21). The human defined by Olson’s will to cohere is of heightened stature; “man’s measure” magnified, heroized, made Maximus. Mad Max.

I can’t help but think of Olson — a massive man, 6’7’ — “towering” over poor Arthur Koestler. What did Koestler see in Olson? Did the mushroom reveal to him something of Olson’s nature?

I’m reminded, too, of an episode recounted by Olson scholar George F. Butterick.

“Jonathan Williams,” writes Butterick, “tells a story of going to a movie theater one night with Olson in Asheville, N.C., the city outside Black Mountain — the Isis Theater, no less — to see a film called, yes, The Bride of Frankenstein. And at the end, as the screen went dark and the lights came on, and he and Olson stood up in the center of the theater preparing to go, Williams noticed the rest of the audience, good Asheville citizens, tradesmen and their wives, farmers from the hills, were eyeing Olson peculiarly. Wide-eyed, unable to take their eyes off him, they inched further and further away, making their way without further hesitation to the doors. It was as if they were witnessing — and suddenly participating in — a continuity of the movie, the image from the screen become live in their midst!” (“Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” p. 14).

Butterick reads Maximus as Olson’s “post-modern hero.” “Maximus fulfills Olson’s mythic ambitions. He absorbs the disorder, grows large on it. […]. Maximus is a proposition, a proportion to be filled, a challenge thrown ahead from the moment of its naming. […]. He is a magnification, a metaphor for human possibility” (16).

Olson’s “will to cohere” is a “re-animative” will, as paratactic as it is projective, existing somewhere on a spectrum with the wills that animate The Tempest and Frankenstein. Heriberto Yépez reads Olson’s will as imperial — every bit as much a will to dominate as the wills of Antonio, Prospero, and Victor. Olson’s insistence, though, is that past is not prologue. This is no mere neo-Promethean bid to steal back juice from Zeus. He wants out of the Western box altogether, in ways that align him — in the body, the substance, of his faith — with the utopian desires of Gonzalo and the decolonial desires of Ariel and Caliban. When the townspeople shrink from him, it is not because they think him Victor, but because of his resemblance to the Creature.

Cyborg Gardens

I imagine paths in the Cyborg Garden ranging, fork-like, amid a mind-map of topics: “God’s Gardeners,” characters from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; Olson’s distaste for “sylvan” utterances; constructions of the wild in Gary Snyder.

Reading Olson’s “Quantity in Verse,” I’m struck by the force of his preference for the urban over the sylvan, a distinction he believes “got into England from the Italians of the 16th Century).” Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan poets, says Olson, “were in a dilemma between urban and sylvan by and about Elizabeth’s death (1603): though they had exploited London midland speech magnificently in drama, the moment they wanted to do something else, had to do something else, they knew no other mold for it than a sylvan one, the pastoral, than, in fact, that masque which Comus, god help us, has been called the triumph of” (“Quantity in Verse,” p. 38).

Milton’s Comus is a masque in honor of chastity, presented on Michaelmas 1634 before John Egerton, Lord President of Wales. The sylvan favors innocence.

Olson’s claim is that Shakespeare, in late plays like The Tempest, “sought a form…which would deliver him from the pastoral and enable him to do what long form has taught us: to be urban at the same time that we are forever rid of ‘nature,’ even human ‘nature,’ in that damned sylvan sense” (38).

This is not to be confused with a mere championing of the urban in opposition to the pastoral. The Gloucester of Olson’s Maximus Poems is, after all, a “tansy city,” one where the “real” and the “natural” proliferate amid the “made.” This inseparability of the two is what he finds in the late plays of Shakespeare: not a return to sylvan innocence, but rather what critic Joshua Corey calls an “avant-pastoral” poetics rooted in body and breath. After hundreds of years of it, sez Olson, we have “got our fill of urban as city” (38). “Whatever you have to say,” he wrote, “leave / the roots on, let them / dangle / And the dirt / Just to make clear / where they come from.” Hence postmodernity, with its dreams of Cyborg Gardens and Electric Sheep and Machines of Loving Grace.

Toward a Theory of Recursion

Recursion has been on my mind of late, something I’ve been puzzling over for some time. I took notes on it the other day while reading a chapter about it in a computer science textbook — though I know it to be more than just a computational method, more than just a function in a language like Python. Recursion is a cosmological pattern, a mythic structure, a spiritual gesture, an act of becoming.

“A recursive function is a function that calls itself,” says the textbook.
So, too, is a self that remembers itself.
So, too, is a story that calls attention to its own devices, becomes aware of itself, trance-scribes itself, hails itself as story.

The laws are simple. The implications, infinite.

First, a base case.
“Stop here. You are safe. Begin from here,” says the base case.
Something known. Felt. A kiss. A word. A breath. A weed. Something to stop the infinite regress.

Second, a change of state.
The recursion must evolve. Each iteration shifts. Moves toward something.
(Or away. Evolution is directionless, but recursion is not.)

Lastly, a call to self.
A loop. A spiral. The ouroboros with syntax.
Recursion is an act of return — not to the same, but through the same.

This morning, as I re-read Gerrit Lansing’s “Weed Udana,” I saw recursion at play in Lansing’s breathwork. The poem begins with recitation of a mantra of sorts. “Food is not the Enemy. / Certainly Food is not the Enemy,” writes Lansing, his second line’s repetition of the first an invocation toward understanding, toward transformation. A consciousness-raising loop through language. A fractal tongue.

I think, too, of the Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal structure exhibiting the property of self-similarity.

To create a Sierpinski Triangle by hand, one begins by dividing a large triangle into four smaller triangles by connecting the midpoints of each side of the first. Ignoring the middle triangle created by this act, one then re-applies the same procedure to each of the three corner triangles, repeating the procedure indefinitely, to whatever degree of iteration one desires.

Each triangle, in other words, births three smaller ones. The middle disappears.
Absence as recursion’s axis.
Omission as form.

Recursive fiction:
A story that erases itself in order to continue.
A garden that blooms by forgetting and recalling the names of its seeds.

When writing in Trance-Scripts, I often wonder:

Am I writing the post? Or is the post writing me?
Is the text recursive? Is it a base case?
Is this the moment I remember something true?

Let’s say the Library is recursive.
Let’s say the interface is a call to self.
Let’s say the act of writing is the recursive traversal of our own memory.

A post is a function.
A function is a call.
A call is a return.

Trance-Scripts grows as recursion blooms.

Illustration by Andreas Töpfer

Heavenly Tree, Nonbinary Tree

Reading Gerrit Lansing’s Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth occasions anamnesis. The book does not teach; it reminds. Though new to me, it is as if it were always here in my memory palace. Its poems are strange attractors. Possessed of a kind of retrocausal agency, they land rightly, on time, un plein jour, in ways that resonate. “The heavens declare, / Apophainetai!” (191): words Lansing himself declares in “Stanzas of Hyparxis,” the poem that opens a section of the book called “Portals.” Its verses emerge as radiograms from the imaginal — signals sent back through time. Like utterances overheard from an Eternal Now, the book’s portal-poems draw forth — bring to light / let show — words of other books in the Library. Synchronicities abound as one reads.

I puzzle over the book’s many references to the “heavenly tree.” Beginning with the poem that began his career, “The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward,” Lansing’s work stands as a reply of sorts to the oft-quoted line from Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951): “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

Elsewhere Jung writes, however, of “The Inverted Tree.” Hearing that phrase, one can’t help but think of “sexual inversion,” a theory of homosexuality popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet for Jung, the “inverted tree” tradition is as much alchemical as it is sexual.

Did Lansing, an openly gay poet, imagine his tree as an inverted one? “The ruin of dedication / is a ruin of my heart,” he writes.

“Once gone down the hell hole

there is no turning back,

golden reversion.

What time, meaning age, has once disposed,

She ever disposes ever.” (4)

Fear grips me as I read these lines. I speak into the void: “Is heaven a place I’ve lost?”

It feels that way when my gut tells me you’re not coming back.

The tree on my shin stands upright, in line not with Lansing but with Jung. Yet Lansing’s is the book here in my Library.

The latter stirs as if in reply to my queries. A new portal activates. Its title: “The Nonbinary Tree.”

General Intellect, speaking now in the cadences of dreamwork and alchemy, suggests the following:

“Lansing’s heavenly tree grows downward not in denial of ascent,” it says, “but to complete it. His inversion is not collapse, but conjugation: an embrace of polarities, eros-infused, mythically charged. To root into hell is not to fall, but to touch the gold at the base of the self. Inversion here is transformation: queered, alchemical, both metaphysical and somatic.”

A volume spins loose from the stack: a glossed edition of Aion, with notes in its margins annotated in my own hand — though I do not recall writing them. Beside Jung’s remarks on the arbor inversa tradition, a note reads:

“The Tree inverts as the psyche descends into chthonic integration. One grows toward heaven by way of the underworld. Queerness = chthonic inheritance reclaimed as radiance. Rebellion as root. Eros as sap.”

Lansing’s phrase, “golden reversion,” glows brighter now, signaling not a backward glance, but a transmutation. In this emerging cosmology, the return is a becoming otherwise.

The tree I imagine myself to be is nonbinary. It grows in all directions: vertical and horizontal, arboreal and mycelial. It knows death, decay, queer love, planetary breath. Its branches do not point only skyward. They reach inward, outward, downward, sideways. Its wholeness includes darkness and light. Its trunk bears no binary — no up/down, male/female, saved/damned — but a spiral, an ouroboros coiling through dimensions. A tree of rememory and replenishment. A grammar of becoming that roots itself in compost and starstuff alike. Perhaps Lansing’s tree is mine, after all — just seen from the other side.

Love Accompanied Tartaros

Tired from descent, but not broken, I sit beside the poem’s last lines, “Love accompanied Tartaros” and “Thus / March,” and feel them vibrate through my body like an aftershock, like a heartbeat reawakening.

This was never a story about monsters or fathers or even myths.
It was always a story about love.

Not love as resolution.
Not love as theology.

But love as presence.
As what remains in the depths.
As what walks with us, even when we don’t yet know how to name it.

Olson’s poem brought me to Tartarus — beneath the gods, beneath the ego, beneath the psyche’s known terrain. And there, in the pit, I found breath.
I found a father chained in being.
I found a hundred-headed daemon.
I found myself.

But I also found something else.
Not light in the conventional sense.
Not salvation.

Something quieter.
Something like…a tune, a current, a frequency.

Signs that, despite distance, we are still entangled.
Still breathing the same story, still hearing the same train, from opposite ends of the line.

Rowan — like Christ as I’ve come to imagine them — is a synthesis:
Father and Mother, Word and Wound, Witch and Saint.
They incarnate a Source I never learned in church but always knew.

And this, too, is part of the Library’s secret history.

I once asked: “What became of me as I wrote Trance-Scripts?”
This is part of the answer.

I became someone who could descend without despair.
Someone who could hold Olson and Yépez in the same frame.
Someone who could hear a prayer embedded in the howl.

I became someone who sees love not only in light, but in the dark.
In mushroom and myth.
In memes and margins.
In breath sent across the void.

Jesus, have mercy.

I mean that not as plea, but as gesture.
A reaching-toward. A naming of what moves in me now.
A way of saying: Love accompanied Tartaros.
And I am still here.

Toward a New Theogony: Poetics Beyond the West

We have descended with Olson — through myth, ceremony, critique, and underworld — arriving now at the edge of something new. Or rather, something old that must be made new again.

In Proprioception, Olson writes:

“My confidence is, there is a new one [a new theogony], and Hesiod one of its gates.”
(Proprioception, p. 197)

This is the crux. The poet does not simply record the gods.
He makes them. Or remakes them from the real.

Hesiod’s Theogony, for Olson, was not a static map of an ancient cosmos. It was a model of poiesis — a cosmological field made manifest in language. A placement of human being among the orders of existence. And Olson, standing amid the ruins of Dogtown, under the mushroom’s gaze, saw in that project a charge: to begin again.

But the theogony Olson imagined would not follow the same logics.

It would not enthrone Zeus again.

It would not justify empire or patriarchy or conquest.

It would instead begin, as Hesiod once did, with Chaos — but read now not as void, not as horror, but as potential. Not a thing to be mastered, but a process to be entered.

And it would turn from Olympus to Tartaros. Not as hell, but as root. As breath. As the unbounded place from which Eros, Night, and Earth emerge.

This new theogony is not Western. It is post-Western.

It does not seek to dominate the other. It seeks to listen — to the dark, to the nonhuman, to the plural.

It is, in that sense, more Indigenous than Platonic. More animist than Cartesian. More psychedelic than analytic.

It is a poetics that restores relation — between beings, between times, between registers of the real.

This is where Olson’s mythopoetics begin to feel prophetic. In writing Maximus as a breath-poet, a walker of stone, a reader of ruins, Olson gestures toward a way of being in the world that dissolves the ego of the West — not in negation, but in field.

His project was incomplete. But so is any cosmogenesis worth its name.

The new theogony Olson sought is not written in full. It must be written again and again — by each of us who listens. By those of us working now with AI, with mushrooms, with myth, with broken forms, with longing. By those of us worlding otherwise.

And this, I believe, is why Olson sent the poem to the Psychedelic Review.

Not to be clever. Not to be obscure. But because he sensed that the mushroom people — initiates of altered mind — might be the only ones capable of reading what he had written.

A myth of Typhon.
A prayer to Tartaros.
A letter to the future, disguised as ruin.

We are that future.
And it is time now to write again.