We live in a demon-haunted world

Asmodeus, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal

It’s the day before Halloween as I type these words, and here’s a reading suggestion to celebrate or otherwise acknowledge, enjoy, or honor the special flavor, ambience, and purpose of the season if you’re so inclined: “Defining the Demonic” by Ed Simon, from The Public Domain Review, October 25, 2017.

The subhead explains:

Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult.

Actually, the essay is well worth reading any time of year if you’re someone who’s drawn to insightful renderings of the way esoteric matters from the past can deeply inform crucial aspects of the present, as in the following brilliant passages:

While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself….

[B]oth magic and reason have a motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is what is important….

With their words listed like demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work), dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-haunted world.

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.

An old song for a new apocalyptic age

This morning I found my thoughts turning to an old song by Sting, “Love Is the Seventh Wave,” along with Sting’s rather profound comments on it. Both his comments and the song’s lyrics strike me as resurgently relevant to our current state of global conflict and crisis, and I was rather moved when I looked up the lyrics and reread them after all these years.

Sting wrote the song during the culminating years of the Cold War, when a sense of doom hung over everything (as I well remember, because I was 15 when the song came out). In an interview for the NME, he explained the song’s central metaphor and shared his intent when writing it:

In popular myth, if you count the waves on a sea shore, the seventh wave is supposed to be the strongest, the most profound. And I felt that at present the world is undergoing a wave of evil, if you like. The world’s never been as polluted. We’ve never had as many missiles pointing across the borders, or as many armies in waiting. We seem to be in the grip of this growing sense of doom. And the song is uncharacteristically hopeful, saying that behind this wave there’s a much more profound one. It’s love, beyond selfishness. And I think if there isn’t this wave, then we are finished. So it’s singing about something and hoping that by singing about it you’ll create it. The alternative, thinking that in five years’ time the world will end, isn’t that helpful. It might sell records, but it doesn’t help the people listening.

Here are the lyrics, which, as I said, come off as at least as relevant to our current global cultural moment of crisis and collective sense of impending doom as they were to the original context in which Sting wrote them:

In the empire of the senses
You’re the queen of all you survey
All the cities, all the nations
Everything that falls your way, I say

There is a deeper world than this
That you don’t understand
There is a deeper world than this
Tugging at your hand

Every ripple on the ocean
Every leaf on every tree
Every sand dune in the desert
Every power we never see

There is a deeper wave than this
Smiling in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

Feel it rising in the cities
Feel it sweeping over land
Over borders, over frontiers
Nothing will its power withstand, I say

There is no deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is no deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

All the bloodshed, all the anger
All the weapons, all the greed
All the armies, all the missiles
All the symbols of our fear

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

At the still point of destruction
At the center of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us, can’t you see?

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand

I say love is the seventh wave

Every breath you take with me
Every breath you take, every move you make
Every cake you bake, every leg you break

The monk, the apocalypse, and the demon muse

I’m currently tending an idea for a new book. It has arisen in connection with the following two thoughts, which in turn follow on from my reflections a couple of weeks ago on Ray Bradbury’s “book people” and Morris Berman’s “monastic option.”

First, for the past decade-plus I have felt/suspected that America’s collective adoration of apocalyptic fictions and fantasies is not unconnected to the now patent emergence of some truly catastrophic trends and scenarios in real life. This predates, by the way, Demon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s savvy exploration of the same idea in Disney’s Tomorrowland movie (which I heartily recommend even though it’s flawed).

Second, in The Twilight of American Culture—a book that I can hardly believe is now 23 years old—Berman mounted a devastating analysis, both academic and polemical, of America as a country and culture that is definitively past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse.

Berman expanded his critique into a trilogy consisting of Twilight plus two additional books with similarly winsome titles, Dark Ages America and Why America Failed. In the latter he explicitly explained one of his guiding principles in writing it, which actually articulated an approach that had guided the previous two as well: He deliberately did not include what one reviewer referred to as a “happy chapter. Too many books, said Berman, mount a compelling, even an unanswerable, argument that some current situation is grave, dire, a clanging emergency—and then conclude with a single glib, fatuous chapter that lays out a plan to “fix it.” “[B]ooks of this sort,” he said in Why America Failed, “or any book about the United States, is required to conclude on a positive note, showing how things can be fixed, how they will be different in the future if only ‘we’ (which is who, exactly?) take matters into our own hands and create a different outcome. But this is fantasy. History doesn’t work that way, and I am not going to join the legion of authors out there who out of naïveté or a desperate kind of hope (or maybe just a desire for sales) attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour. There is no rabbit, and the hat is coming apart at the seams.” In Twilight and the other books in the series, Berman said his view is that 1) history clearly shows a cycle of maturation and decline playing out in every culture and civilization, 2) this never, ever varies or reverses itself, and 3) the U.S. is clearly living out its own decline stage right now. As Agent Smith said to Neo, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”

I find this view quite persuasive. So I guess I’m saying that I think we currently have both things happening at the same time. On the one hand, our collective addiction to apocalyptic fantasies is both spawning and reflecting a proliferation of real catastrophes. On the other hand, this trend or tendency is wrapped within a real and irreversible trajectory of decline and collapse.

As I mentioned two posts ago, Berman’s suggested action during such a time is to adopt what he termed “the monastic option”: Follow the lead of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a blueprint for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seek a way to preserve and transmit this to a new culture that will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate and flesh out the point, Berman explicitly makes reference not just to the witness of history, and not just to what he takes to be “new monastic” efforts that are currently underway (such as the Clemente Course in the Humanities), but to various manifestations of this theme of cultural preservation through a post-collapse dark age in apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, including, as mentioned, Ray Bradbury’s “book people” in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize and effectively become books during an age when reading is banned, so that one day, when things have changed, their knowledge can be written down once again.

You might infer from my recent focus on these things that such ideas have been occupying my attention. You would be right. As I said at the top of this post, I’m currently, and speculatively, incubating an idea for a new book that will fuse these ideas with my A Course in Demonic Creativity. In other words, a book about the discipline of the demon muse, the discipline of divining and aligning with your inner creative genius, as a way of identifying and cultivating your own monastic option, your own unique “great work,” in the face of the apocalypse.

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