A Leak In The Safe

Certainty about Graves’s "disintegration" – by which he meant "disintegration of my post-war personality" – began to crystallize rapidly in his mind as soon as he had got to know Laura Riding, whose personality – however anyone may wish to assess it – was, although unhymned except by him, both explosively freakish and characterized by acute though not learned intelligence.

– Martin Seymour-Smith

But there was the Devil himself. Having accepted her invitation to sit down and warm himself, he was obviously waiting for her to say something. So she said "Now what do you want?" "My dear," he answered with a confidential slant of his head, "I want nothing but your happiness." "Humph!" she snapped at him, "you can’t have it."

– Laura Riding

Alas for obstinate doubt: the dread

Of error in supposing my heart freed,

All care for her stone dead!

Ineffably will shine the hills and radiant coast

Of early mornings when she is gone indeed,

Her divine elements disbanded, disembodied

And through the misty orchards in love spread –

When she is gone indeed –

But still among them moves her restless ghost.

– Robert Graves

The vast worldwide audience of RADIOFREEUBU is not doubt weary of my constant touting of these great Dedalus books, but I can’t help it – they just keep blowing me away! My latest fantastic find is Valery Bruisov’s 1908 work The Fiery Angel. It’s a historical novel set in the sixteenth century, the putative confessions of Rupprecht, a drifter who has just returned to Germany, flush from his adventures in the New World. One night while staying at an inn he hears a commotion in the room next door and rushes in to find the fascinating Renata, who at that moment is writing on the floor, the victim of demonic possession. Rupprecht is in turn possessed by Renata, who draws him into her compulsive, occult search for her lost love Count Heinrich, who may or may not be the embodiment of Madiel, the angel who has been appearing to her since childhood.

Although I was enthralled with Fiery Angel from the start, it’s so unusual that it took me a while to see it for what it is – a Decadent novel that is both representative and atypical. The seeds of the flower of evil that was the historical aesthetic movement known as Decadence blew all over the world and developed different growths depending on prevailing conditions and the native soil. Russian literature has, from the beginning, been spiritual and very serious (even in its humor), cynical and satiric, but never ironic, and Bruisov, as the leader of Russian Decadence, brought a decidedly Russian flavor to his version of it. Fiery Angel displays many of the core elements of Decadence such as an enigmatic, doomed femme fatale who sadistically manipulates her willing victim and an preoccupation with Satanism and the occult, but it also has an energy and earnestness that’s the farthest thing from typical fin de siecle ennui. Flaubert’s Salammbo and Louys’s Aphrodite, the paradigmatic Decadent historicals, are set in a glittering pagan world and told in a fragmentary, impressionist manner, while Bruisov’s work takes place in the earthy Reformation, and his strange story unfolds with deliberate conventionality and concreteness.

And what a story – while the French strived for brief perfection and unity, Fiery Angel is impressive in it’s variety and completeness – it’s got (among other things) a witches’s Sabbath, a magical ceremony of invocation, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus and Mephistophilis, and ends in a convent full of possessed nuns who are soon to be put to the rack. It’s a bravura performance, and the author’s sure hand and encyclopedic knowledge result in an extraordinary, one of a kind work.

Here’s a few passages that I particularly dug, mostly in the femme fatale line:

I felt already that I lacked the strength to leave Renata, that I either had been charmed to her by some magic power, or borne naturally into gentle bondage by the Mother of Love – the Cyprian.

It’s funny how the things you read can relate to each other. Here’s some passages from the fantastic occult/historical novel The Fiery Angel by the Russian Decadent/Symbolist Valery Bruisov that really seem to speak to the musings about god I gave vent to in the first part of this essay:

And are you not as guilty in giving in to my temptation as I in yielding to yours? Or rather, is not God the guilty one, in that he created human beings a prey to weakness, and did not endow them with the strength to combat sin?

And here’s a quote from Erik Davis’s TechGnosis that I should have used when first discussing Gnosticism which captures its appeal:

And another that illustrates what I see as the necessarily terrestrial quality of spirituality and which no doubt also illuminates (so to speak) Stella’s comment about part one:

Once the Buddha opened his deep-space dharma eye, he did not climb mountaintops to gaze longingly into the heavens; he touched the earth in the shadow of a tree. The drama of phenomenal existence, with its quasars, frogs, and fibre-optic cables is impossible to separate from transcendent reality.

Which brings me to Paganism, the spiritual discipline I believe Davis has the most sympathy for, however hard he tries to remain neutral:

And I have to say I sort of bend the Pagan way myself – after all it’s the way that’s literally in my blood. There are problems with Paganism too, of course. Though devotees don’t really want to admit it, the fact of the matter is that nobody really knows exactly what many of the original Pagans did or believed. Even the ones we know the most about, the followers of the Greek and Roman religions, still have many crucial secrets from us, such as the workings of the Oracle of Delphi or the mysterious initiation at Eleusis. Despite modern claims to the contrary, we have no real idea of what "witches" really did or even if they actually existed. Details about the Druids are similarly murky – it’s especially difficult to unravel the practices of people who didn’t build temples, make statues or write sacred books. If nothing else the Christians proved good exterminators – they managed to break the chain of Paganism that had been forged for thousands of years.

I also say that, maybe because it’s so rooted in the earth, Paganism can seem quite banal at times, or even silly, a lot of nonsense words spoken by people in ridiculous clothes, often to accomplish mundane, non-spiritual things such as finding lost objects or enticing hot dates.

But the fact that Paganism has no overwhelming tradition can be liberating. As in alchemy, the spiritual quest becomes experimental and creative, the practitioner aware of the practices of others and embracing the elements that call to him and rejecting those that feel foreign.

But, like Schopenhauer, I believe that the only truly transcendent experiences are aesthetic. Another great magus, Rimbaud, coined the phrase, The Alchemy of the Word, and to me the creation of art and the pursuit of the spiritual quest are insoluble, both being in a way the byproduct of the other, the way that, for an alchemist, the creation of gold and the perfection of the soul were essentially the same endeavor.

One of the many great things about Loren D. Estleman is that he’s not afraid to write a flat out private eye novel, and it’s his unapologetic embrace of genre that paradoxically allows his books to transcend genre. But as his latest book, Gas City, proves he’s equally capable of writing a flat out novel. And take it from me, even though Gas City has crime, murder, mob bosses and even a serial killer, it’s more than a crime book, it’s a great novel, the kind that novelists these days have forgotten how to write.

This is a work that the author has been thinking about a long time and it shows. Gas City is about power and honesty and how hard it is for the two to coexist in the modern world. It reminds me of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key or the very best of John O’Hara in that it expertly dramatizes characters from many layers of society, all the way from streetwalker to mayor and every social level in between. The plot begins with the death of Marty Russell, the wife of Police Chief Francis Russell, a loss that causes the Chief to stop caring about consequences and to start actually doing his job, upsetting a careful arrangement that gives the mob free reign over part of the city, containing vice in one lawless area and lining the pockets of many public officials.

His decision sends shock waves through all of Gas City, and Estleman shows the effects on Palmer, the washed up ex-cop hotel dick, Zeno the mob boss, Dungannon the priest of a death spiraling parish and a host of others, all of them fully fleshed. But not only are the characters expertly illuminated, but Estleman turns his deep focus on all the different places and things of Gas City as well. The resulting picture is so real that even the ice in the drinks is characterized:

Flakes floated on top, the ice made from Gas City’s hard water was laced with iron and white lime, and Russell’s had melted long since.

Only the dialogue may at times be a little too snappy for total verisimilitude, but who can complain about snappy dialogue? Add a serial killer, dubbed "Beaver Cleaver" by the press, and you’ve got a book that both compels you forward and makes you want to linger to savor the richness of the composition. The denouement is suitably clever and shocking, but also subtle and understated, as if to emphasize the delicate mastery of the whole.

One of the reasons Loren Estleman is underappreciated by some is that he makes everything look so easy, and the conventional surface of his series books sometimes obscures the profundities within. Hopefully even the most obtuse reader can see his gifts now – Gas City is a self-evident masterpiece and among the many, many good books Loren has written I believe it will stand among the very best.

TechGnosis by Erik Davis is quite a read. It’s the kind of book that seems like the product of a lifetime of reading and research, extremely thought provoking if only because it’s so crammed full of thought and opinion. As I read it several people asked me what it was about and with great difficulty I finally formulated a short answer – it’s about how spirituality has affected technology and how technology has affected spirituality. Since TechGnosis was written in the late nineties it focuses on the astonishing emergence of computers and the internet, reflecting, as we can now see in retrospect, that era’s sometimes shameless optimism and vitality – but Bill Clinton is looking pretty good around now, isn’t he?

Anyway, with the book’s close examination of the many varieties of religion, one of the thoughts it provoked in me was what exactly do I believe? Or even what do I want to believe? As Davis took his tour through world religion I followed, trying to nail down the elements that appealed to me the most.

First of all, let me say that of all the spiritual possibilities the most dominant at the moment, Christianity, is to me the least credible. One look at the newspaper is enough to thoroughly disprove Christianity’s bedrock assertion that there’s a creator god who is both omnipotent and benevolent. If there is such a god why does he let people suffer so? Why is evil allowed to exist and why did he create it? Why a god of love really be so hell bent on eventually consigning most of the earth’s population to eternal torment? Job asked similar questions in the bible, but today we wouldn’t be satisfied by a special effects extravaganza the way he was.

Of course most contemporary "Christians" don’t really follow orthodox Christianity, anyway, many, like George W. Bush, preferring a sort of self-help Manichaeism that empowers them to be awful and that would have gotten them burnt as heretics in the Middle Ages. I realize that people turn to this stuff because they don’t realize there’s anything else or to handle an overwhelming grief or need, but I’ll pass. Christians can believe whatever they want to but they seem to have an ever increasing need (fueled by fear and uncertainty?) to impose their beliefs on everybody else. There was a time when Christianity ruled the roost and the bible was the only book needed – we call it The Dark Ages.

Like many other contemporary thinkers, Davis makes much of the influence of Gnosticism on modern culture, and I’ve certainly been attracted to it. I like the idea of salvation through knowledge rather than surrender, and to me Simon Magus and Helen make a more attractive couple than Jesus and his Magdalene and/or Mom. The concept that this world is run by an Archon, a crackpot being who thinks he’s god also seems more in line with what’s in front of my face than the usual pieties. And haven’t all of us, particularly those in the modern world, felt like we’re alienated, fallen souls trapped in a prison of matter, only occasionally catching sight of the glittering divine through the bars?

The problem with Gnosticism, as Davis points out, is that it’s essentially a Christian heresy with Platonic overtones. Both the Pentecostal and the Gnostic demand that we reject on scant evidence the phenomenological world in favor of an invisible, higher, more "real" realm, and this kind of rejection leads to a disrespect for this sweet old world and the occasionally sweet inhabitants thereof. I really believe that the Christian conservative right’s heinous attitude toward the environment is informed by fundamentalist delusions about the imminent end time and the sinfulness of the natural world. Similarly if George W. Bush believes that all non-Christians are going to be punished in hell it makes it a lot easier for him to order them sent there.

I could never embrace either the complete hedonism or strict asceticism which are the logical behavioral outcomes of the belief that we live in a fallen, debased realm – the world is all we have and all we can even slightly know, even though I believe there’s far more to it than a strict mechanistic reductionist would allow. As Davis says:

Spiritual reality does not descend from on high; it is something we discover and make for ourselves, through our symbols and rituals and communicative interaction.

Another alternative, Buddhism, which, because it lacks the big daddy god of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, seems to be the most logical and philosophical of the religions, but the problem is that I don’t want to eliminate desire or even pain – they are life and a salvation that leads to nothingness, the end of individuality and a merging with the godhead doesn’t really attract me. Another thing I like about Gnosticism is that the elect don’t dissolve and become one with god but become gods themselves. Sign me up!