A Leak In The Safe

A Mused (Part Four)

If, as I pointed out in Part Three of this essay, it’s true that the supernatural needs humanity, it’s equally true that humanity needs the supernatural, something our contemporary age seems to have forgotten. Sure, it’s the case that, despite all their mewling about being persecuted by secular society, Christians have more power, both socially and politically, than they’ve had for a long time, but is modern Christianity about the supernatural anymore? Flip through the channels some Sunday morning and you’ll see the message these days doesn’t have much to do with a numinous or awe inspiring God, or even hellfire and damnation. For the king of the evangelicals, George Bush, God is just an enabler, an encounter with whom, rather than being humbling, has filled our worst president with fatal hubris and allowed him to sleep soundly at night. The entity presented by popular preachers is not an "other," but a sort of familiar, a pal, a kind of fuzzy Dr. Phil Jesus home boy.

The relationship with the supernatural is now conducted entirely on the material plane, with God presented on T.V. as a sort of superior stockbroker – just invest a few bucks in the ministry of his close associate the preacher and you’ll get a fantastic return of health, wealth and prosperity. There’s a Tibetan Buddhist guru in my town, the brother of a now deceased, even more famous Tibetan guru, who in the middle of a benefit for his local operation that featured Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg got up to tout Buddhism as primarily a great way to lose weight and stop smoking. In reality, whatever its supernatural origins, religion has become thoroughly housebroken, just another tentacle of the materialistic/statist/capitalist octopus. Even Islam, the only religion people still seem willing to die for, has been manipulated for geo-political ends rather than mystical ones.

Not that I’m lobbying for organized religion by any means – I wish that all the superstructures that obscure man from the numinous could be ripped away, but the apparatus serves too many interests and makes too much money for that to happen. I think it was partly a reaction against the ossification of religion that caused the Romantics to elevate art as a substitute in the first place, and I guess I still believe, along with all those ancient cave painters, classical sculptors and weird nineteenth century symbolists, that art is the best vehicle for reaching the supernatural. To me Modernism was just a redefinition of Romanticism, and Post-Modernism a further variation, but now the dictionary’s been closed and we live in a deeply anti-Romantic age. When I was young my ambition was to join a modern art movement like the Fauves, Futurists or Surrealists, but today there are no viable art movements, only inviolable art professors. The Situationalists of the sixties and the Punks of the seventies, who were in their own way Romantics, were increasingly despairing and nihilistic reactions against consumer society, all the more poignant because they knew that they themselves were doomed to be consumed. No future, indeed.

An example of the current deeply anti-Romantic spirit can be found in an essay that has haunted and nauseated me by that master of the Zeitgeist, Stephen King. In La Belle Dame sans Merci Barbara Fass equates the profound feelings of helpless attraction and deep fear engendered by the titular lady in the Romantics to their conception of their own muses, beings of supernatural allure who inspired but could also lead them into madness and meaninglessness. King doesn’t see his own muse in quite the same way – to him it is "…one small animal, sometimes quite vicious, that makes its home in the bushes. It’s a scruffy little thing with fleas and often smells of whatever nasty mess it’s been rolling in." This whole A Mused train of thought began for me with the images of Klimt’s muses, the implacable, otherworldly goddesses, the naked truth he struggled to portray. One need only place one of these magnificent visions next to King’s flea bitten mutt to see how debased our age has become.

It’s a new kind of Classicism, guilty of exactly what Fass quotes Robert Graves as saying was the defect of the mode:

King doesn’t even grant his muse a human form, but presents her as a semi-domesticated beast who comes if not impeded by muse repellent, and then apologizes for being "too lyrical."

The old Classical template demanded that art serve society by being "morally uplifting," and that’s still in effect in academic circles both left and right, but what’s been added to the equation, as it has been added everywhere, is money. Except for politically motivated ones, money is now our only yardstick, our only value. Art is no longer about aesthetics – believe me I know, there’s a contemporary art gallery next to me run by a college professor in the strictest highbrow style and how the "pieces" look is considered the least important thing about them, and in fact the works themselves are nothing next to the conceptual/political concepts that "inspired" them and their hoped for collectability. Whatever King’s virtues, they don’t extend to his work’s most basic component, his awful, cliche ridden prose, as evidenced by his risible advice to would be writers to forget about le mot juste and just slap down the first word they think of and forget about it.

That would be fine if King, after years of lobbying the literary establishment, wasn’t finally getting serious critical plaudits. Since all other critical values are bankrupt, the fact that he’s sold so many books over such a long time has forced the book world to take him seriously. That the latest pissing of his mangy muse was declared a notable book of the year by the New York Times Sunday Book Review is more testimony to the cluelessness of the literati than to any sudden flowering of his talent. Just has commercial success has made King artistically notable, the forces that cause The Color Purple to be declared the greatest novel of our time have more to do with politics than art.

We’re a culture driven entirely by money and power, on a headlong course away from the Romantic conceptions of the inspired artist, art for art’s sake, and beauty being truth and truth beauty. One of the reasons for this flight can be found in another disturbing essay called "A Youthful Intoxication" in which Cynthia Ozick dismisses her early infatuation with the Romantics and mysticism. Fortunately, she says, she was cured by reading one Rabbi Baeck, who introduced her to "the classical, ethical idea of history." It’s perhaps a little catty of me to say that the accompanying photo of Ozick reveals a woman who has little consideration for the aesthetic, a wearer or sensible shoes if there ever was one, but the real reasons for her terror lie deeper. There is a real irrationality about Romanticism, one that, as Fass points out, the Romantics both feared and sought. Though Ozick is too classically circumspect to say it, the subtext of her aversion to the Dionysian is the blind, atavistic violence that can emerge from the ecstasy, a violence she unspokenly equates to the detestable sacrifice of eight million of her fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

I’ve written before about the troubling connections between Modernism and Fascism, and the similarity of their anti-moralist stance and aesthetic preoccupations, but to blame the Romantics for the Nazis is crude reductionism, which is probably why Ozick hesitated to ink in her dotted line connecting the two. Her motivations for running screaming to her Rabbi when first confronted by the wild face of the muse must remain obscure, but no doubt help account for the mediocrity of her literary career.

The contemporary reaction against Romanticism is tied to its alleged complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century, but it’s also useful to ask whose interests a specific line of thought serves. The ideals of Promethean rebellion, uncontrollable ecstacy and allegiance to an otherworldly muse are just as threatening now to institutional power as they were when the Romantics first took up arms against Classicism. Does it serve the powers that be more to have artists see their muses as implacable goddesses or mangy mutts? Of course Ozick’s Rabbi Baeck would disparage a concept that would so diminish his own power as mediator between God and man. But that’s the thing about the goddess, as the Tannhauser myth shows, she can be exiled but never really restrained. Despite the evident bankruptcy of a culture that would have Stephen King as one of its leading literary lights, you’ve just got to hope that this is just one of those periods of transition when nothing much is happening artistically. Eventually the goddess will speak again and shoo all those mangy dogs away.

A Mused (Part Three)

It was interesting to me to realize that the following quote from La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism by Barbara Fass, a volume of literary criticism, could just as easily have come from Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind by Graham Hancock, a book classified by my book distributor as "new age" or, even more intriguingly, "controversial knowledge."

In Supernatural Hancock draws a parallel between the folklore of fairy contact with humans, the shamanistic journey through the aether toward cosmic powers and contemporary alien abduction experiences. He fittingly finds the inspiration for the first known artists, the prehistoric cave painters, to come from the quest for knowledge in other dimensions, in much the same way that Fass presents the Romantic poets seeking inspiration in otherworldly muses.

But clearly, as both writers point out, there are problems in the alien sphere of Venusberg. Be they extraterrestrials or exiled gods, the denizens of this immaculate land of perfection, of pure sensation and no contradiction, where the laws of physics have no sway and time has been defeated, seem to need us. They want our stuff, the stuff that makes us human, our meat, our emotions, our sweat and jizz and even our very souls. As both Fass and Hancock note, the supernaturals seem to want us for amatory or breeding purposes, to combine with us in some sort of germinative effort. But somehow this effort cannot bear fruit in the other realm – for all its glories, it is sterile, incapable of generating, or perhaps sustaining, new life. So the fairies switch their babies with ours when the goblin spawn prove misshapen and moonstruck, and the aliens implant earth women when the fetuses in the incubators on the mother ship never turn out quite right.

(For me an analogy for this "other" realm, which may very well be one of the multiple dimensions that physicists now believe surround our own, would be the virtual world. Everything’s under control in video games, which seem "realer" every year, and within time and death exist in a radically different way, and it’s all about pleasure. The women are all beautiful and stacked, and you can be whatever you desire, a sports star, a knight, a super hero, and score, kill, consume and kiss indefinitely if you know the right moves. But you can never really grow, never create anything that isn’t in the game already, and in the end it’s a universe of no tangible consequence, one that an vanish instantly without a trace if, say, your son saves over your save file. There’s an essay in one of the Apocalypse Culture books that postulates that the traditional folkloric entities are trying to manifest themselves within video games and the internet, and I tell you, playing some of these games late at night and "inspired" I’ve felt that that might just be the case.)

Similarly, the Romantic artists seeks to produce poetry by escaping nominal reality and rising above, like a shaman, to fuse with the eternal. But, as pleasant as the higher realms are, he must return to earth to set his vision down. I had a roommate in college who had a mental breakdown senior year. Naturally, he talked a lot of nonsense, but he did have one rap that’s always stayed with me. He desperately wanted to be a writer, but realized that his mental problems were preventing him despite the inspiration he felt. He explained his dilemma this way – the ink you need to create with is in the freezer and you have to go inside to get it, but within the freezer the ink is frozen and useless. It’s not until you’ve gotten yourself back out of the freezer and given the ink a chance to thaw that you can actually write with it. This guy could never quite get himself out of the freezer, and the poetry he wrote that seemed to him to be so profound was just gibberish to everybody else. (The Army, however, was later able to find a place for him pruning trees along the DMZ in Korea, the perfect job for a crazy man if there ever was one.) Fass cites Nerval in her book as the rare writer who was able to make the trip to the fairyland of madness and return to our world with something comprehensible, although the contradiction between the two worlds ultimately proved enough to kill him.

Similarly Yeat’s Tannhauser figure, Oisin, has his harp broken in fairyland and, as Fass says, "in fairyland, the warrior is inactive; and more important, the poet is silenced." The supernatural, then, lacks something, something that makes it reach out to the human world, and in fact, in honor of the season, can’t it be said that God needed Mary in order to produce Jesus as much as Mary needed him?

A Mused (Part Two)

The principle subject of La Belle Dame sans Merci by Barbara Fass is an examination of the titular figure, who must be, like the Femme Fatale, both seductive and dangerous, but, even more, to be unambiguously supernatural and to reside in a supernatural place. As I got into the book I realized how it unexpectedly dovetailed with another book I’ve written about, Graham Hancock’s Supernatural, whose middle section is about the same fairy lore that inspired the Romantic writers Fass treats. Obviously Keats’s poem La Belle Dame sans Merci is a touchstone reference, but so is the Tannhauser legend so beloved of the German Romantics.

With the defeat of paganism at the hands of Christianity, the old gods were driven out and demonized, exiled to another realm, one that reflects the Hellenistic ideals of sybaritism and epicureanism, a place where the strict commandments and judgements of the Judeo/Christian world have no sway. In the Tannhauser myth Venus is the mistress of this dimension, a voluptuary who lives only for sensual pleasure, and who presents such an image of supernatural loveliness that no mere mortal can resist her. (Interestingly, the Barbara Aho net screed I referred to in part one of this essay is haunted by the same scenario which she typically interprets as seduction by Satan).

But there’s a flaw in this sphere – even unrelieved pleasure and beauty can lose their meaning without the bracing contrast of pain and ugliness. Inevitably the smitten hero longs for the contradictory, ended joy of our own world, but the problem is that once he returns to it he finds that neither he nor the world is the same. As we know from the story of Rip Van Winkle, time is experienced differently in Venusberg, and what seems to be an instant there can prove to be decades here. Even though the hero does not feel at home in the unearthly real, once he’s been there he can never feel entirely at home in the earthly realm either.

Thus the knight of Keats’s poem describes his seduction by the belle dame:

Then his own subsequent alienation from the world:

Fass sees the Romantic fascination with the belle dame as reflecting their own contradictory feelings about their artistic vocation, their muse. On one hand, the Romantic nature is drawn to beauty, but it is also drawn to freedom, and poets like Shelley, Keats, and even the later Swinburne felt the pull of the neo-classical idea that literature should be for the moral improvement of mankind, and feared their muse was drawing them into airy, inconsequential realms and away from the crucial political and social conflicts that rocked that age of revolution and democratic awakening.

Although the Romantics were sympathetic to the rising masses, the corresponding decline of royal and aristocratic patronage endangered their livelihood, and the very egalitarianism that they supported seemed to threaten their place in society. As Fass Points out, the imaginative journey to Venusberg was both a pilgrimage to beauty and a flight from an increasingly banal, utilitarian world.

As she says: What artists felt was not so much a longing for the social realm as a rejection by it.