Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)

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Hauntology and the New Poetics of Magick* / Alan Clinton

Tarot Cards by Douglas Martin

* Originally delivered as a lecture for the Berkeley Art Museum’s “Hauntology” exhibit on Nov.  21, 2010.

<1> Thank you very much to Karen Bennett, Larry Rinder, Sherry Goodman, and the rest of the staff at the Berkeley Art Museum for helping make this event happen, which is designed to introduce you to the issue of 2nd Avenue Poetry (2ndavepoetry.com). I recently edited an issue of poetry---not only a poetry issue but also full of multimedia including visual art, music, cinema, and numerous hybrids---whose theme I like to refer to as the "New Poetics of Magick."

<2> Berkeley is the perfect place to hold this event, of course, because of the rich history of magick [1] poetic practices in the Bay Area, particularly those of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan of the “San Francisco Renaissance” which was first and rightly christened “the Berkeley Renaissance” due to the fact that Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Robert Duncan began their collaborations in the context of Berkeley’s intellectual scene and eventually ended up teaching poetry classes at Berkeley.  Duncan was undoubtedly Spicer’s mentor in the ways of magick, but it was Spicer who reminded us that in the contemporary era the true adepts would be those poets who could receive messages like a radio—from the beyond, from Lorca, from the radio, from the internet.

<3> On a very practical level, editing the “Occult” issue of 2nd Avenue Poetry was like being a radio, a “counterpunching radio” as Spicer would have it. [2] The brilliant poet Paolo Javier, having read my book Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics,[3] approached me about doing the issue, and from there we had to develop a concept for it and figure out who might be willing to send us messages.  We both agreed that participation in the issue would not require a belief of any kind, perhaps only a willingness to believe in the act of sending, which is kind of a belief without belief.  That would be a sort of negative theology which, as Derrida believes, is (among other things), a question of “address and destination,”[4] as everything is.  But the fact that every address (both a speech act and a place where one resides) can fail to arrive at its destination is, for Derrida, not an accident, but constitutive of sending and receiving.  Surely Rusty Morrison’s 2008 volume the true keeps calm abiding its story, based as it is on the form of telegraphic communication, alternating between the “stop” of a telegraphic line and the “please” of a desired destination, reflects the kind of negative theology of message sending as prayer which takes on its emotive power from the knowledge that it will not be answered in a definitive way.[5] Indeed, such “destinerring,”[6] as Derrida calls it, informed our invitation to the poets and artists included in the issue:

We also believe that the results of divinatory practices are more often than not merely a new topography of the unknown rather than a definitive revelation. The interest for the spiritual adept as well as the avant-garde artist lies in the uncanny parallels, the wrong turns, the polyglot or inscrutable marks, the visual and aural blurs and scratches, the cracks in the shell produced by the divinatory event.

“All revelations are poorly staged” I write in my contribution to the issue,[7] a phrase which I now take to suggest that divination is always more about performance than product.  Its virtue lies in its ability to surprise, to paraphrase Apollinaire’s estimation of the value of the avant-garde.[8] The goal of the issue was to create an ensemble of divinatory poetics (indeed, many poets provided “process notes” describing their means of production), thereby moving more towards post-Husserlian phenomenology, or perhaps hauntology, than ontology.

<4> Yet belief, however transitory, must always haunt a poetics that is devoted to magick.  At a recent conference in Chicago, I referred to this sort of belief as “occult abandonment.”[9]  This abandonment involves a certain willed naivete that is necessary for discovery to occur, whatever the arena of inquiry.  Mediums especially, in their willingness to become the receptacle or “radio receiver” of outside messages, have things to teach us in this regard.  One enters a séance, if indeed one enters, with the expectation of an event that is absolutely singular, even meteoric in nature.  This is the Lucretian swerve that Derrida references in his discussions of the relationship between psychoanalysis and its doppelgangers, superstition and chance.  The only absolute rule for this occult abandonment is that what we give ourselves up to is somewhat foreign to us.  If abandonment can be imagined as a bodily activity, it would be a fall (the direction of the fall does not matter, falling has no direction), a fall whose destination we cannot predict.  As CA Conrad puts it regarding the genesis of his Astral Projection poems, “It’s something I didn’t even believe in at first, then DID finally realize that it IS in fact true.  But then I couldn’t do it.  Then I started projecting spontaneously after a long trial of crystal infused dream therapy I had developed.  Anyway, I’d awake from the projections and hammer out a block of text.”[10]  For me, once, it involved putting my faith in the conjuring power of words themselves, attempting (for the first time) to enact magick in the real world.  I entered an all night trance to try and conjure a particular woman from the hospital, which required looking “in two directions, out of the twin bug eyes of my apartment towards the hospital and onto the floor of the hospital’s map—which consisted of literal diagrams of the space this woman was haunting, traditional divinatory devices, keepsakes of her including photos and writings, and the written map I spent from night time until well in the morning producing.”[11]

<5> This issue of 2nd Avenue is dedicated to Leslie Scalapino, whose relation to divination connects, interestingly enough, to the influences of both of today’s readers, Rusty Morrison and Tsering Wangmo Dhompa.  Of the poems, actually chapters, she submitted for the issue, Scalapino had the following to say: 

Scalapino’s note is instructive because it presents a method of writing (we placed her work under the sign of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing) which leads to a discovery yet, being a Buddhist, a discovery of something she should already know.  But in Buddhism the quest/question is not one of knowledge but attunement.  Indeed, word blindness would seem ideal for attunement as it demands use of the ear, so that one can be struck like a bell, even as the condition of forgetting/not seeing words turns the dictionary into a mechanism of alchemical oscillation, where unknown words are remembered before they were ever forgotten, so that the first time we see them they seem forgotten.  The resulting temporal disjunction, so important in all of Scalapino’s work, is, for Derrida, the founding fracture of hauntology: “Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time.”[15]  Alexia is a reading and a not reading, just as Gazelle-Dihedrals, according to Scalapino, are “humanlike creatures with structures opened to show their organs and muscles who inhabit the emerald dark apparently either cyber or real space ... their organs-musculature-skeletons are simultaneously displayed to be literally outside and inside at once. These creatures are either protective or threatening, akin to Tantric Buddhist figures.”[16]  Indeed, in describing her book Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom Scalapino resorts more than once to the word “apparently.”  How could she not when her alexic method writes itself as it writes her, appearing in unreal time as an apparition, a Tantric twilight language for which there is no master or code: “Nightshift released do walk at the end of their shift.  That’s how she got there.”[17]

<6> In her sequence submitted to 2nd Ave entitled “After Urgency,”[18] Rusty Morrison also uses a method of writing that produces both meditation and apparition:

Of course, with some of the sentences, I’ve traveled farther than with others. No practice is uniform, at least for me. Interestingly, even some of the shorter sentences have surprised me with their affinities, and so I try not to judge results with a limited set of preconceived expectations.[19]

In following a form, traveling after sentences, Morrison also is chasing apparitions, or as she calls them, adherences, after Michel Serres’ announcement that “every form is draped in an affinity of adherences,” a phrase Morrison uses as a meditation tool when writing.  Interestingly, Serres’ actual statement, from The Birth of Physics, an apology for a reevaluation of Lucretius, the atomist so dear to Derrida’s sense of the hauntological event as well, is “every form is draped in an infinity of adherences”[20]  But this represents nothing other than Morrison’s own Lucretian swerve, for Lucretius often likens atoms to individual letters of the alphabet, Morrison hearing or reading affinity even as she is willing to follow these affinities infinitely where an adherence, as with Scalapino, is both veil and revelation at the same time.  

<7> “After Urgency,” fittingly, begins in a light rain, a revelation that is both atomistic and fluid, as it was for Lucretius where “fluidity is not a particular and rare case of the general condition of solids, but rather the model from which all physics [or poetry] begins.”[21] Nor are fluid atoms a new departure for Morrison, whose first book Whethering[22]is not only a pun on these things, but contains a series of poems entitled “Climate Conditional” even as the verb “to whether” places us in the cognitive equivalent of the swerving atom.  If whethering is an undecidable state, after urgency is a hauntological one placing us both in the past and on the hunt for more urgency.  Morrison follows, falling and following, the sentence to an “aroused sentience,” to a sentence no longer linear but at “cross-purposes,” “in profile,” no longer flowing smoothly but in “rough-textured” fluidity, no longer possessing a telos but a “not now,” and I am stealing some of her phrases in saying this even as I tell you her physics of writing has a metaphysics, one she might call “none of those realities, and erased from this one.”  Morrison is sentinel to the sentence which can’t be guarded.  Are there certain sentences that, precisely due to the adherences they undo, may leave the subject feeling abandoned, to euphoria or despair?

<8> Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan woman poet to be published in English, submitted a group of poems to 2nd Ave from her sequence called “Catabolism,”[23] a word that, like so many other words that fascinated Derrida (pharmakon of course comes to mind), seems to have opposing meanings.  In the Greek, catabolism literally means “to throw downward,” taking us right back to Lucretius and the other atomists who envisioned the formation of the universe as a falling of atoms which, through supplementary swerves “‘at an indeterminate moment’ and ‘in indeterminate places,’” created the “concentration of material ... thus giving birth to the worlds and things they contain.”[24]  Falling, which we must associate with cadavers (via the Latin cadere meaning “to fall”), here transforms to a resurrection, as if for the first time, thanks to the sudden swerving of atoms.  Likewise, catabolism refers to the breakdown of molecules in the body which, however, release energy for the purposes of anabolism, the building up of molecules into bodily tissues.  Dhompa, however, says these poems are “built around the theme of Buddhist notions of self and perception.”[25]  So the question Dhompa presents to us is what do Buddhism, catabolism, and atomism have to do with one another, or hauntology?

<9> When Dhompa submitted the “Catabolism” poems to 2nd Ave, I commented to Paolo, “the poems are interesting in their uneasy relationship to Buddhism—the lines move in and out of enlightenment.”  I wasn’t thinking of Lucretius when I said that.  At a later date, Paolo asked me if I wanted include Dhompa’s poems—what did I think of them.  I apologized to him for being unclear, that my statement meant that I loved the poems.  Because there can never be an easy relationship to enlightenment, I felt “Catabolism” echoed my own understanding of Buddhism, which at the time was (and still is) highly influenced by Myonghyo’s “Treatise on the Ocean Seal Samhadi,” which has been translated by my colleague Walter K. Lew:

Samsara and nirvana are in the same place, or perhaps can’t be conceived in terms of place, yet they are close to one another.  Like Derrida’s specter, these things do not lend themselves to knowledge in any traditional sense, for ontology, as opposed to hauntology, “is a matter of identifying the bodily remains and ... localizing the dead.”[26]  If spatiality is here turned on its head, or its side, then reading Dhompa’s lines is a moving back and forth that simulates, moving in and out of enlightenment which is very hard to see, the falling of atoms whose swerves construct the universe.  Indeed, Lucretius does not differentiate between up and down in illustrating the swerve, using as one example “the lightning path obliquely crossing the rainfall ... now on this side, now on that.”[27]  So I will not take it as a coincidence that  Myonghyo’s description of the Buddha-realm’s non-Euclidean spatiality also resorts to the atomistic example: “One dust particle enfolds the kingdoms of all ten directions; / Within every particle it is always so.”  Nor will I take it as a coincidence if Dhompa’s first book Rules of the House,[28] which Anne Waldman describes as “vocaliz[ing] the humanness and adversities of the Tibetan diaspora,” is a quite unruly account of her migrations from Nepal to India to the twin coasts of the United States (which measured in sheer drops in altitude, could be likened to a falling atom), unruly inasmuch as the poems follow the law of memory rather than temporality because memory, always scripted and reinscripted, does not does not help us regain time, as Proust would have it, but rather obliterates temporality.

<10> “Catabolism”[29] is full of things falling and being thrown down, “fallen limbs and thistles,” structures collapsing, detritus disseminating, papayas falling with raindrops, form and rare matter whorling and whirling, yet Dhompa claims, “If I bend far enough I can avoid a fall.”  Yet can she?  It is impossible to tell as the poem’s lines shift between first person active voice and a third person passive voice coming from, where?  “A father spends his last penny / praying for his dead son to have a kinder birth,” someone says.  Is this money well spent, will the prayer be heard, does it represent the proper attunement?  Antigone burying her brother despite everything or Esau giving up his birthright.  There is no way to choose, as the particles move back and forth, as they must, according to both Lucretius and Dhompa, in the void.  Thus, there is neither being nor nonbeing, there is only the specter, and as Derrida notes, “It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence.”[30]  So what is a Buddhist poet to do?  She must haunt, “return to the same questions,” as Dhompa states.  She must recite koans like Morrison’s “every form is draped in an affinity of adherences,” haunting a sentence/sentience that runs just ahead of her, every indistinguishable unit of a poem a koan in a poetics of magick, a word-blindness that, contra Scalapino, arises as nervous disorder, a nervous order.

Conclusion:

<11> By way of conclusion, it seems important to note that Derrida’s most important example for poets was his ongoing commitment to move away from traditional exegesis to a poetics of simulation, learning a text or object of study by performing its moves in another medium (the double meanings here are important), haunting the original object in the form of a ghostly double.  This is Derrida’s “double science,” his “double session” which in French, we might note, is “la double séance.”  Psychic tracing becomes psychic writing becomes psychic sculpture writing, as in Derrida’s “Cartouches,” where he simulates Titus-Carmel’s 127 drawings of his “Pocket-Sized Tlingit Coffin” by “composing as if in a journal, with dated entries, each entry constituting a variation on a theme”[31] not necessarily “about” Titus-Carmel’s work.  In this sense, we can say that Derrida’s work has always been hauntological avant la lettre, before he invented the neologism.  Because what the discourse of representation, as opposed to simulation, preserves “is precisely the ontological: the presumed possibility of a discourse about what is”[32] as opposed to the hauntological, which is characterized by “a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event ... can exceed, at each moment ... the telos of any history.”[33]  A specter not only haunts us, but falls on us like atomic shade.

<12> Likewise, a poetics of magick must simulate the magick that is desired.  This I believe Scalapino, Morrison, and Dhompa have each done in their own way, according to their own magick, as through Scalapino’s refusal of distinction between inside and outside in her invocation of dihedral angles which corresponds to, via Buddhist thoughts, Dhompa’s figure of catabolism which deconstructs being and nonbeing.  Morrison’s “Of Angle, More Than Matter,” which is organized in squares that can’t be sequenced because “Angles are never the same angle inside the box as out,” cites Archimedes whose discussions of “the angle of a curve” are the mathematical confirmation of what “Lucretius knew, all the specifics we abstract flow right past the transparent absolutes of a true physics.”[34]  Mathematically confirming the impossibility of an absolute physics, the swerving accumulation of forms whose Buddhist counterpart might imagine those forms swerving away back to new transparent particles, that is about as good a place (where exactly?) to begin thinking a new poetics of magick as I can think of ... for the next moment, even though, as Scalapino is constantly reminding us, “that doesn’t exist anyway.”[35]

Works Cited

Notes

[1]  In using the term “magick” I am following in the tradition of Aleister Crowley who wishes to differentiate from the term “magic” which he associates with an escape from reality.  Magick, as envisioned by Crowley, thus becomes provocative in its connections to Surrealism and other historical avant-garde movements who sought to penetrate and transform everyday life.

[2]  Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, ed. by
Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 374 .

[3]  Alan Clinton, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

[4]  Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), 45.

[5]  Rusty Morrison, the true keeps calm abiding its story (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2008).

[6]  Jacques Derrida, “My Chances, Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed.  Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988), 7.

[7]  Alan Clinton, “Dybbuk Plus or Minus Inpatient Miami,” in 2nd Ave Poetry, 3 (2010).

[8]  Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” in The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971), 233.

[9]  Alan Clinton, “Occult Abandonment in Modernist Epistemology,” Modernist Studies Association 7 (Chicago, 2005).

[10]  CA Conrad, “Private Correspondence,” 2009.

[11]  Alan Clinton, “Process Statement,” in 2nd Ave Poetry, 3 (2010).

[12]  Leslie Scalapino, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2010).

[13]  Leslie Scalapino, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (Sausalito: Post-Apollo Press,
2010).

[14]  Leslie Scalapino, “Private Correspondence,” 2009.

[15]  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

[16]  Leslie Scalapino, “On The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrons Zoom.” www.postapollopress.com/dihedrons.html

[17]  The Dihedrons, 39.

[18]  Rusty Morrison, “After Urgency,” in 2nd Ave Poetry, 3 (2010).

[19]  Rusty Morrison, “Private Correspondence,” 2009.

[20]  Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 126.

[21]  David Webb, “Introduction,” in The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), xi.

[22]  Rusty Morrison, Whethering (Fort Collins: Center for Literary Publishing, 2004).

[23]  Tsering Dhompa, “Catabolism,” Unpublished Manuscript.

[24]  qtd. in “My Chances,” 7.

[25]  Tsering Dhompa, “Private Correspondence.”

[26]  Specters of Marx, 9.

[27]  Serres, 5.

[28]  Tsering Dhompa, Rules of the House (Berkeley: Apogee Press, 2002).

[29]  Tsering Dhompa, “Catabolism,” unpublished manuscript.

[30]  Specters of Marx, 6.

[31]  Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster ( New York: New Press, 1998), 106.

[32]  Jacques Derrida,  “The Double Session,” in Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 177.

[33]  Specters of Marx, 37.

[34]  Whethering, 31-32.

[35]  The Dihedrons, 31.

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