I am a sick man. I am a jealous man. Endowed with a certain Mediterranean vigor I am spiteful, sickened to death by Tom Brokaw’s shit-eating grin, disgusted with my family and former friends, fearful of aloof dot-commers in a Biblical way, their SUV’s, their palm pilots, their material stink swarming around me. But I will be honest with you. I harbor such strange opinions because I have fallen into the literary life. A noble calling, you might say. But I did not choose this hell, this torture that even the most vile of Chinese sadists couldn’t stomach. I have yet to find my own voice. I have yet to be original in any sense of the term. I am a garden-variety critic, a poetaster with no skill, only taste. I am a scab, aware at all times, night and day, that I am derivative, the new and improved version of what already came before. I want to be an artist, a sayer of truth. But I am blocked. Hindered and haunted by the words of another. To make a long story short, I am obsessed with Don DeLillo.

A confession, gentle reader, of what lies behind.

I have been in contact with others who share my obsession, chat room buddies, friends of friends who pick up used copies of White Noise to give away at parties, and last but not least, The Don DeLillo Society, an academic clique of which I was once a proud member. Founded in 1999, we organize and sponsor panels on DeLillo at various literary conferences. We are the gauntlet of DeLillo criticism. If you want to say something about DeLillo you must first go through us. We are in the know. Nothing that DeLillo writes, says, or does eludes our grasp. We understand how DeLillo relates to contemporary issues of race, gender, and class. We have come to realize the subtle workings of his mind and how they relate to our own.

I was recently forced to resign from the DeLillo Society after a colleague suggested that we write a book together about DeLillo’s depictions of media violence. I had thought of this already! So I punched him in the nose. I was soon fired from my University post and he is suing me. I am suing the University for wrongful termination. The Chronicle of Higher Education has gotten involved (too involved if you ask me!), milking the story for its salacious metacommentary.

I am now unemployed, a stay-at-home dad with no prospect of gainful employment. But in order to maintain appearances, I will let you in on my imaginary—where I am coming from and what I take for granted when I speak of things DeLillo. I have never been to prison. I was born in Akron, Ohio but tell people I’m from Cleveland. I love cats. When I was twenty-two I applied to law school but was rejected by every goddamn one, a sign, I believe, of things to come. I am quick to anger. A victim, plain and simple.

My life can be summarized by my cultural obsessions beginning with my mother’s soap operas in the summers between second and third grades—Days of Our Lives and Another World— intrigue, murder, and sex whose narrative was jointed and deferred. I quickly moved onto KISS—KISS tapes, KISS jacket, KISS dolls, KISS cards and the prized #18, a solitary Ace Frehley on guitar, a sparkling, spacey vision of silver and white. Only my friend Brett Beadow had been blessed with #18, at that time a point of contention and awkward jealousy. I then spent five years thinking about nothing but baseball cards, arranging and rearranging them in plastic pockets, stealing packs from the drug store, memorizing statistics and perfect mint prices, going to card shows and collecting every Pete Rose card there was, every year, all mint, all Charlie Hustle, from the 1963 rookie card to the 1984 Fleer update. After the cardboard heroes lost their luster, I moved onto more sophisticated fare. Before DeLillo there was Galaga, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Bon Jovi, Civil War battle reenactments, Laurie Anderson, semiotics, and Moby-Dick to name only a few.

I fell into the words of Don DeLillo on November 16, 1997 (now a family holiday). That was the day I first began reading Underworld. It took eight days of slow, methodical turns, one page at a time, copious notes, tears, and illumination. I would read sections over and over again. I would spend hours on a single paragraph. The first line a coded message, a direct challenge to the reader, hanging there, waiting for me to decipher it.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

Since then I have read everything by DeLillo at least three times, collected all the first editions, written fan letters to DeLillo on a weekly basis (Don DeLillo, c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020), lurked around chat rooms dedicated to his work under a myriad of user names, sometimes picking fights with myself in order to assure victory. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “If You Love Don DeLillo You’re Too Close.” I have used Americana (DeLillo’s first novel) as a bedtime story for my sons. I hope to pass on something special to them through DeLillo’s linguistic code. My orange tabby, Barbara, is named after DeLillo’s wife.

It seems as though I was born to be a critic, zeroing in on different chinks in the cultural armor, deconstructing them, looking for an opening, always searching for a way out. I am a tragic and pathetic figure, an angry young man who resents giving you, dear reader, the literary facts of the day:

Born on November 20, 1936, Don DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, attended Catholic high school and later Fordham University. Like Salman Rushdie, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather before moving onto fiction. Unlike Rushdie, however, DeLillo has never been the target of an Islamic fatwa. He has never been buddy-buddy with Bono or undergone cosmetic surgery. DeLillo usually passes on such pomp and circumstance for a reason. Great writers and their work, he says, are “too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” In keeping with his professed outsider status, DeLillo rarely grants interviews. He does not appear on Charlie Rose. He doesn’t write book reviews or participate in writing workshops or the academic life.

Last summer my DeLillo mania grew progressively worse. I experienced unexplained blackouts, alternating episodes of depression and euphoria. In July I made a DeLillo kachina doll out of old New York Times and scraps of cloth, perfectly proportioned to his thin, 145 pound frame. I began to experiment with DeLillo scratch-n-sniffs, a different smell for each of his books. In August I set up a small lab in my basement, complete with beakers and Bunsen burners. I have yet to complete my chemistry project but I imagine a gamut of literary aromas, each sticker in its own way a summation of plot, characters, and denouement. Here is what Ratner’s Star smells like. Go ahead. Scratch your screen:

I know this smell.

You know this smell.

Because we have slipped into the stream of DeLillo’s sensorium—the writer who once described himself as a literary terrorist; the writer who does not ruminate over subtle emotional shifts or the minor grievances of domestic life; the writer who does not deal “painfully and honestly” with the latest political crisis.

But as DeLillo prophecies, the culture that contains us eludes our desire to mark it, to use its content to remind us of our formal freedom. We are ever haunted by visions of a more complete self, an identity fully realized—a kinder, gentler, more articulate version—someone who volunteers, who makes a difference, who sinks the three-pointer at the buzzer, who publishes brilliant tomes, who captures the zeitgeist, who is loved unconditionally and bravely chooses a fate. This is the “naked shitmost self” that we believe, desperately, tragically, is there, somewhere. “Even when you self-destruct,” cautions a DeLillo character, “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

I know exactly what he is talking about. Because I am a humble apprentice. Because I have absorbed and digested Don DeLillo. Because I am the fungus that lurks between his toes.

This is my demonic side, the part that goes without saying, the part that is controlled from without, the part that we, dear reader, don’t like to admit to ourselves because we can’t. Like Livia Majeski from Valparaiso, “We feel things. We become addicted to things because life, itself, is habit forming. We start things and can’t stop.”

We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.

This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.

But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.

This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”

I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.

A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.

“Always have a deep sense of connection to the past, a subversive memory that constitutes wind at your back. You are who you are because somebody loved you, somebody cared for you, somebody attended to you. Make sure that love flows through you, that’s what it means to keep love on the one.”
– Cornel West and Bootsy Collins, “Freedumb,” The Funk Capital of the World (2011)

Sometime in 1886 a woman named Myrtle Fillmore attended a lecture by the Christian Science practitioner Eugene B. Weeks. Myrtle suffered from numerous physical infirmities, including tuberculosis and incessant hemorrhoids, and it was in part these maladies that brought her to Weeks’ lecture. Her husband Charles, a Kansas City real estate man, left the event unimpressed, but Myrtle was inspired by this affirmation: “I am a child of God and so I do not inherit illness.” After several months of prayer and repetition of that affirmation, Myrtle believed that she had healed herself of her afflictions. She used a new form of knowledge to recreate her relationship with the divine and, consequentially, to recreate her relationship with her body. Scholars of American religion now usually call that knowledge “New Thought.”

Eventually Myrtle convinced Charles of what she had learned. He would then use the techniques to heal himself of the long-term effects of a childhood hip and leg injury. Together with Myrtle, he would begin a healing practice, treating people in the Kansas City area with their New Thought techniques. By 1890, Charles’ real estate business had begun to decline, and their healing practice had experienced some success. They decided to publish a magazine, first titled Modern Thought but soon becoming Unity Magazine, and with that act of print culture they inaugurated what would soon be known as the Unity School of Christianity. Unity claimed, at least in its early years, that individuals possessed spiritual union with the divine if and when they possessed physical well-being in the material world. It became Myrtle and Charles Fillmore’s mission to create and propagate a community focused on such a union. And their mission worked, as prayer groups begat churches, which begat associations, which begat the denominational structure that Unity operates by today.

The Fillmores were also especially able to align their emerging Protestant community with market forces, and to that end they quickly institutionalized their healing experiences in order to have the widest reach possible. The magazine started as a sort of Reader’s Digest of the New Thought movement. In their thought the Fillmores incorporated many early-twentieth century Protestant practices and norms, including prayer meetings, educational facilities, and a focus on the Bible as a source of religious authority. As the movement continued to develop, other people involved with Unity created a ministers’ association to authorize ministerial licensure and standardize the movement’s teachings. Other early bodily practices, such as vegetarianism and (briefly and obliquely) sexual abstinence, focused practitioners on recreating the material body as a spiritual body. While Unity was not unique in any of its recommendations, its fusion of metaphysical ideas and Protestant practices was. Myrtle and Charles Fillmore were American spiritual seekers who recognized and appreciated their past, their culture, and the role of community in authenticating experience.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James insisted that the individual’s feelings were the root of religion and that the tenets, rituals, and institutions of religion were but later additions that could only echo the true experience. For James, the real religious experience is ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive, all characteristics that could only be verified by the individual claiming the experience. What is fascinating about Unity is the way that it connected individual rituals with community contexts, how it conjoined the priesthood of all believers with a highly individuated metaphysics. In some sense, Unity sought to institutionalize the kinds of experiences so celebrated in James’ diagnosis of the healthy-minded.

The making of community is to me a fascinating and complicated element of any description of spirituality. Do contemporary American spiritual seekers enact spirituality by forming communities? I think one can make a convincing argument that the various new paradigm communities foster a contemporary American spirituality not unlike the Fillmores. Unitarian Universalists and liberal Mennonites qualify as spiritual seekers who are concerned with their communities and their relationships with the surrounding culture. In fact, I suspect that many of the members of more conventional religious groups would insist upon the very spiritual nature of their religious lives. Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals (2010) demonstrates how even those seekers who most disavow institutional life do so on the premise of previous institutional conceptions and organizational structures.

The popular understanding of American spirituality is the claim that the authentic discovery of one’s relationship with the larger world is a project entirely undertaken by an autonomous individual who freely chooses any philosophy or practice that seems to fit their particular life journey. For many spiritual seekers—those religious “nones” who confuse sociological survey—community itself is anathema to authentic religious experience. One need only observe the continuing use of the extremely problematic concept of “brainwashing” in reference to religious communities with which a person disagrees to understand the extent to which Americans believe that authentic religious experience can only be had or adjudicated by an individual independent of social pressure or community ritual. Spirituality is a proxy for our vision of who we wish to be, and today autonomy seems to be the superior ambition. Yet even as this is so, communities do perpetuate themselves, on terms not merely religious but also spiritual.

Today, Unity churches might house Protestant-style Sunday services, complete with choirs and sermons, Buddhist meditation groups, self-help practices, youth groups, community service initiatives, singles’ nights, and ad hoc discussion groups on any number of spiritual topics, frequently all under the same roof and under the auspices of a trained and licensed Unity minister. A sophisticated web site allows individuals to explore Unity on their own, while also presenting opportunities for community interactions. For most Unity adherents, the spiritual life is one of seeking and exploration, but one done under the aegis of a community of faith.

I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

“This is not really a mosque, it is a community center”

The “Park 51 controversy”—erupting over the construction of a mosque/community center in the vicinity of “Ground Zero” in New York—highlighted an irresolvable contradiction at the heart of the American project: the very diversity and pluralism that forms the identity of the liberal state also threatens the stability of that identity. The liberal state strives to secure the promise of freedom and autonomy for all its citizens. This promise, perhaps, lies at the root of the relatively recent embrace of spirituality as marker of one’s own freedom and autonomy. This embrace, moreover, is accompanied by the perceived threats of pluralism and difference, the latest being the physical attacks against Muslims and Sikhs mistaken for Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, or the spectacle of Islamophobia that captivated public discourse during the Park 51 saga. Each of these moments reflected a crisis in which the fictitious harmony of liberal pluralism was exposed, precipitating all manner of reminders to United States citizens about the virtue of tolerance.

The appeal for tolerating minority ‘others’ is integral to certain registers of spirituality—a language that secures the secular promise of respect and equality for all citizens.

Tolerance serves as the soothing balm that promises relief from both the threat to liberal freedoms and the threat of impending violence. Such promises, however, are never fulfilled.

If anything, such promises work to exacerbate the initial contradictions. A politics of tolerance that demands respect and understanding for the threatened minority ‘others’ accomplishes little more than further inscribing the distinctions of majority/minority, citizen/alien, identity/difference and so forth. Such a dynamic of tolerance was at work during the Park 51 debate, if one may call it that. Rather than offering another critique of the outright racist characterizations of Islam and Muslims that populated various media during this episode, I want to instead think about a statement that was frequently aired by both Muslim and non-Muslim supporters of this project: “This is not really a mosque, it is a community center.”

It may well have been a community center. But what must demand our attention is the kind of politics that authorizes and sustains the desire to replace, substitute, and moderate the specter of a ‘mosque’ as a community center. The plea to remind hostile citizens that what they think is a mosque is not really a mosque but something else participates, perhaps unwittingly, in a politics that strives to humanize, moderate, and civilize—shall we say spiritualize—religion so as to make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. This kind of critique demands its object to separate from itself, to differ from itself while keeping its name; a community center that is also a mosque. This secular demand for the name to retain itself while also differing from itself resonates with the categorical use of spirituality and illuminates a central contradiction.

The affirmative denial “I am not religious but I am spiritual” that has achieved ubiquitous purchase in recent years crystallizes this logic of difference. The spiritual here refers to something ineffable that is not really religion but that owes its recognition precisely in relation to religion. Spirituality takes the form of secularized religion unencumbered from institutional, doctrinal, and ritual demands. The rebirth of religion as spirituality is made possible by the power of the secular imaginary within which religion represents something out there, always available for critique, moderation, and humanization. It is precisely such a secular notion of the spiritual that sustains the liberal demand for religious moderation, a demand that is made most frequently on Islam and Muslims today. For a crude yet illuminating example of this demand, consider the language of a petition advanced this year by the group “Concerned American Citizens” entitled “separating Islamic Law, Shariah, from the spiritual side of Islam.” The first few sentences of this petition read as follows: “It is time to expose the moderate Muslim. Will the Moderate Muslim be willing to eliminate egregious seventh century Islamic Law “Shariah” from the spiritual side of Islam? It is also time to take a role call on this subject and hold all moderate Muslims accountable. If these moderates wish to practice only the spiritual side of Islam and desire to assimilate into the American culture, reform is mandatory, let it begin!!!”1 Leaving aside the theatrical provocations of these statements, they capture quite well the liberal equation of spirituality and moderation. In this view, the labor of moderation requires the embrace of spirituality as the only authentic, tolerable, and respectable expression of religion. Moreover, to moderate religion is to separate its “spiritual side” from the non-spiritual. This exercise of separation stands authorized through the secular assumption that religion is a category of life readily available to be separated, moderated, purified, and humanized.

A concept like ‘moderate Islam,’ that became centrally visible during the Park 51 debate, also owes its life to such a secular politics of spirituality that assumes the universal availability of religion. The defenders of the project rushed to remind skeptic opponents that their fears were misplaced. This was only a benign community center and not a mosque. Moreover, its spiritual leader, Feisal Rauf, was a ‘moderate Muslim’ who followed the peaceful brand of ‘Sufi Islam’ and who was not to be confused with the variety of Muslims prone to violence and intolerance. These were the kinds of apologist reminders that populated public discourse during this episode.

What these protagonists of moderate Islam have not sufficiently thought about is the racist colonial history that sustains the category of ‘moderate Islam’. The process of moderating Islam intimately depends on the modern colonial inheritance of religion as an object of critique that is readily available to be moderated, rationalized, and purified. Such an inheritance becomes possible through a sovereign decision on what counts as religion worthy of toleration. The moment of tolerating religion also represents the moment of defining the limits of religion. For religion to demand toleration and respect, it must first be baptized in the holy water of moderation. Moreover, the conceit of moderate religion is animated by the same desire that seeks to separate the spiritual from the religious. Life, according to this logic, is readily available for division, definition, and translation such that the proper domains of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’, the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ might be established.

Armed with the sovereign authority to choose the limits of life, one can now choose to be spiritual but not religious, embrace moderation over extremism. But the promise of this choice remains unfulfilled. It remains deferred to an unspecified future. This is so because any sovereign attempt to moderate religion, or to separate it from spirituality, can never resolve the irresolvable contradiction of seeking to retain the name while also deferring it from itself, of wanting to have religion that is not really religion.

The reminder “this is not really a mosque but a community center” is also detained in this contradictory logic of difference. This statement labors to moderate, pacify, and substitute the apparently threatening specter of a mosque by gifting it a new metaphorical life as a community center. However, this gift can never be gifted; it will always be suspended and deferred. The exhortation to correct the misrecognition of a community center as a mosque strives to repudiate the prejudice and ignorance of those who refuse to make that correction. But ironically, the desire to ensure that a community center is not mistaken for a mosque perpetuates the very politics of secular critique that takes religion, indeed life, as something out there, as something readily available, to be moderated and rendered less extreme. Far from combating the racist assumptions that underlie various stripes of Islamophobia, this seemingly pacifying gesture further confirms those assumptions. Ultimately, this kind of politics, ensconced in the secular inheritance of religion as a substitutable object of critique, can achieve nothing new. It can only perpetuate the irresolvable contradiction of a liberal logic of tolerance that seeks to moderate religion through the language of spirituality.

Counted among my pantheon of personal heroes while growing up in California’s East Bay area were Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. I was a strange kid. I still sometimes mimic Cheech’s purposefully exaggerated Chicano accent, American English with a Spanish rhythm and Aztec intonation, also known as Calo or Mexican American “Spanglish.” Its a sound distinct to the borderlands experience; the echo of Aztlan: the Chicana/o mythical homeland; a sanctuary; a pipe dream. When I speak like Cheech to my close friend and academic colleague, who I affectionately call Chong, we deploy a linguistic code decipherable sometimes only by us, and perhaps a few other confidantes. Referring to four twenty, I often say “los santos,” or just santos, which translates loosely as “the saints.” We conspire in our devotion to them. Like the Rastafarians, the practice becomes a sacred ritual. For us, praying to the saints, our muertos, is an attempt to connect to the divine; a gestural offering in hopes of elevating our spirits to Elysium; the mythical land of the triumphantly dead, or physically displaced, the heavenly space where the souls of heroes dwell. Aztlan by another name. This, I believe, is how my Chicano hero, Cheech Marin, understands his devotion to los santos.

It’s appropriate that Cheech, a Mexican American, would open the artistic space for the popularization and promotion of marijuana into the soul of American popular culture. The word, la palabra, derives from a distinctly Mexican Spanish, with a folk etymology leading to original usage by a legendary diva, señora Maria Juana. The name resonates. Consider the thinly veiled celebration by the late funk sensation Rick James:

I love you Mary Jane, you’re my main thing,
you make me feel alright, you make my heart sing.
And when I’m feeling low, you come as no surprise,
fill me up with your love, take me to paradise.

But there are many names for marijuana; some call it “the Buddha,” others “Ganja,” “mojo,” “ju ju,” and other nomenclature signifying its spiritual import. And yet, its potential to induce a mystical experience has largely escaped the scholarly gaze of religious studies. The term marijuana came into American usage in 1873, plotted into one of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s racist manifestos, Native Races of the Pacific States. There he impugned Mexicans by attributing to them what he deemed barbaric rituals, including the smoking of herbs and roots for purposes of conjuring hallucinations and states of ecstasy. Bancroft was blinded by his racialized vision of civilization.

On the other hand, in 1910 William James claimed that any activity or substance that distracted a person’s fixed attention could open up the psychic terrain wherein mystical experiences unfold. Counted among the catalysts were alcohol and psychotropic drugs, which acted as portals to a spiritual place of fresh revelation. In 1932 Walter Benjamin wrote about his experiments with hashish, a concentrated form of marijuana. In his “Hashish in Marseilles,” he describes the sensations of watching himself from outside of his body: ecstasis. When walking the streets his senses are heightened; he is penetrated by the aromas, the sonic vibrations, the aesthetic assault of a hot day in a pleasantly crowded French city. “It was not far from the first café of the evening,” he proclaims, “in which, suddenly, the amorous joy dispensed by the contemplation of some fringes blown by the wind had convinced me that the hashish had begun to work.” Remarkably he and James (both Rick and William) agree: “And when I recall this state,” Benjamin concludes, “I should like to believe that the hashish persuades nature to permit us—for less egoistic purposes—that squandering of our existence that we know in love.”

The act of smoking cannabis is an erotic spirituality, a praxis initiated by intense sucking, with the goal of capturing the maximum amount of smoke, of inhaling deeply, pulling and holding the breath; testing the limit; spirit. And then there is the release; the small death, that rapturous moment marking the satisfaction and joy of surrender. That is the pivotal movement when the lungs and the heart rock, when pleasure breaches the limen between the sacred and the profane.

Exhaling, some can shape the billowy plume of smoke with their mouths into an ethereal art form.

Indeed, marijuana is a gateway drug. Temporal borders seem to collapse as the act recalls the ancient sages who deemed the smoke sacred in its own right. Like the burning of copal, the cloud signals another state of consciousness, a liminal place where the psyche is permeable to fresh revelation. There, thoughts are intensified, scrambled, and reassembled into fragmented narratives that disrupt mundane cognition. Identity is questioned, challenged, opened, expanded. Though somewhat intellectual, that is the spiritual work.

So marijuana is medicine, at once traditional and modern. Today, sixteen states and our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, have recognized its medicinal value and legalized medical marijuana. Hence, in states like my own, California and Colorado, pot production and consumption have created an epic artistic and spiritual awakening. The shift from an underground culture to a mainstream movement is transforming American society and architecture. A neighborhood in Oakland has been renamed “Oaksterdam” and is the site of the first American Cannabis college. Recently thousands jammed into the Colorado Events Center for the 2011 Cannabis Cup competition and expo. All across America dispensaries are sites of spirituality. New strains of marijuana (Purple Haze, Train Wreck, AK47, Blue Skies, Yellow Kush), new forms of distribution, and new information all contribute to the emergence of artistic and ritualistic communities. Dispensaries frequently hold events and those in California can offer areas to medicate, free food, television and movies, internet access, and games, providing a platform to experience shared rites and community—the communitas.

The dispensary is a liminal space wherein the spirituality of cannabis can implode and explode. Each time I experience the warm embrace of my dispensary, I bask in the light emanating from the freedom of religion we as Americans so pompously celebrate. This is my church. There I connect to a community of likeminded believers and practitioners. There I am confronted by the awe-inspiring miracle of marijuana cultivation and presentation, the dozens of strains each distinct in color, shape, texture, odor, and effect. I am dazzled by the narrative of mixed strains, and by the array of precise medicinal properties each boasts. How can my provider be so knowledgeable of this one sacred plant? And how can there be so much to know? He, my “caretaker,” is truly my priest, a master of the botanical arts, a holy alchemist of spiritual ecstasy. My offering seems the lesser of our ritual exchange; money is eclipsed by the weight of his gifts.

¡Viva la Revolución!

Spirituality appears in the queerest of places. Since the fall of 2009 I have been spending time with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. For more than thirty years the members of this international, religiously unaffiliated organization have been serving as nuns to their communities: originally mostly gay men but increasingly also including bisexuals of all genders, lesbians, transgender people, and queer folk. In their capacity as (in their words) “twenty-first century nuns,” the Sisters fundraise, educate, advocate for, support, and care for their constituents. All this they do with a sex-positive twist, however; the Sisters, in fact, were among the first to produce sex-positive safer-sex materials after the identification of AIDS among gay male populations, and they continue to concern themselves with both the fun and the health and safety of sex.

Though AIDS is not the Sisters’ sole concern—they fundraise and advocate for causes ranging from sex workers’ rights to gay retirement homes–it is one of their earliest and most central areas of advocacy. As a result, they often take part in events such as AIDS walks and rides, and they are generally out in force on World AIDS Day. On December 1, 2009, I joined members of the Order of Benevolent Bliss in Portland, Oregon for a “walking vigil”: an event that was part bar crawl, part awareness-raising, part ritual, and part, well, pure Sisters.

It was a slow Tuesday night when we arrived at the first bar; the eleven members of the order who were present, along with myself and a handful of friends, dominated the room. The Sisters were decked out in their customary habits: bowl-shaped coronets and colorful veils above whiteface and glam makeup, fancy dresses, and footwear ranging from sneakers to platform boots. Ruth Les’Bitch wore the gray hood and white lips of a postulant, and Novice Guard Justice Once was accompanying the Sisters in order to assist and support them. Several Sisters wore the white veils and formal habits of a novice. But tonight it was not only the novice Sisters who wore white. Two of the fully professed Sisters, usually found in black or colored veils, wore white veils as well. Sister Krissy Fiction explained to me that she was wearing the “Veil of Remembrance”; Sister Maya Poonani was wearing the “Veil of Shame.”

The Veil of Remembrance, worn by Sister Krissy Fiction, honors those lost to AIDS

For several years, the Order of Benevolent Bliss has conducted a walking vigil on World AIDS Day, and each year two of the fully professed Sisters, or FP’s, have worn these white veils. Carrying a black permanent marker, the Sister wearing each veil approaches people during the vigil and invites them to write on her veil. On the Veil of Remembrance go the names of those who have died of AIDS whom the bar patrons wish to remember; the Veil of Shame bears epithets they wish to forget.

The Veil of Shame bears epithets directed at many different groups

As we walked from bar to bar—five in all this evening—I watched the Sisters interact with those around them. They talked about World AIDS Day and about the two veils, greeted people in the bars and on the street, even sang a little karaoke in one establishment. They were greeted with a mix of delight and confusion, depending on their familiarity to the bar and its individual patrons. At one point, Sister Ohna Fuckin’ Tirade pulled me aside to tell me that she had been approached by a woman curious about who the Sisters were and what they were doing that evening. Upon learning of their vigil, she confided to Sister Ohna that her father had died of AIDS years before, but no one in the family knew except herself and her mother. Sister Ohna was clearly moved by this incident, and told me that it is not unusual for strangers to spontaneously share intimate stories with the Sisters. Repeatedly, Sisters have told me that members of their communities will confide to a Sister what they would never confide to her “secular [often male-identified] self.” Though they use the term “secular” to refer to their lives outside of the Order, the Sisters are being simultaneously parodic and serious when they make such categorical distinctions.

Over the course of the evening, Sister Maya’s veil became covered with familiar epithets for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as well as for Jews and people of color, while on Sister Krissy’s veil the names of the dead multiplied. Ultimately, the fate of the Veil of Remembrance was to be preserved in the order’s archives; the Veil of Shame, however, was the focus of a ritual that ended the evening.

We had arrived at C.C. Slaughter’s, a popular bar populated largely by gay men. Though it was relatively empty on a Tuesday, the Sisters still found plenty of people to talk with. After some time, Sister Maya disappeared, returning with the Veil of Shame in her hands and a clean veil on her head. The Sisters and a handful of others went outside, where a bartender had brought a metal tub and an open bottle of beer. One Sister placed the veil in the tub, and the bartender poured the beer over it. Sister Krissy Fiction, an ordained UCC minister in her life beyond the Sisters, led the gathered crowd in a chant to banish the epithets on the veil, and after some searching for a small lighter, Sister Polly Amorous set the cloth aflame.

Sister Polly Amorous lights the Veil of Shame while Postulant Ruth Les’Bitch looks on

A number of the Portland Sisters, and Sisters in other cities as well, have told me that the work they do in whiteface is an important part—and sometimes the central part—of what they call their spiritual lives. Like many people in the U.S., the Sisters describe their spirituality as an individual connection to the sacred that can be, but is not necessarily, connected to the beliefs and practices of organized religious groups. Some Sisters have what they term a “spirituality” beyond the Sisters themselves, characterized by everything from Christianity to an eclectic mix of practices to agnostic beliefs with no particular form of practice. Other Sisters describe their involvement with the movement itself as their form of spirituality or even of religion.

Left to right: Sister Polly Amorous, Postulant Ruth Les’Bitch, and Sister Krissy Fiction look on as the veil burns.

World AIDS Day is a particularly evident example of the very queer spirituality that is present in the Sisters. Elsewhere that evening, and earlier, the Sisters had offered a blessing to open a more traditional AIDS vigil at Portland’s mostly-LGBT Metropolitan Community Church. But for the Order of Benevolent Bliss–characterized by one member in an interview with me as the least spiritual order of Sisters in existence–offering blessings and gathering in a church are unusual activities. Raising awareness, however, honoring people’s grief, and serving their communities, are weekly and sometimes daily occurrences for these “queer nuns.” The ritual may not invoke deities, the organization may not be officially religious, and the order may be “the least spiritual” of them all, but among the Sisters spirituality is often everywhere.

James Jesse Strang was crowned king of a Mormon community in Beaver Island, Michigan on July 8, 1850. In attendance were an estimated 200 members of Strang’s church, who had joined at different times, for different reasons. Some enlisted in 1844 when Strang claimed to have received a letter appointing him Joseph Smith’s successor; others in 1845, after Strang discovered buried plates confirming the designation of Voree, Wisconsin for Mormon settlement; and still others in 1846, when Strang launched an extensive recruitment campaign. By 1847 the church boasted some 1000 members nationally, one quarter of whom had settled in Voree. Some Strangites moved to Beaver Island in 1849 in pursuit of greater economic, social, and ecclesiastical stability, and many of these participated in the coronation.

The Beinecke Library at Yale houses the original letter of Strang’s ecclesiastical appointment, signed by Joseph Smith. One of my favorite archival encounters occurred when consulting it. A fellow researcher asked me what I was viewing. I replied that the letter declared Strang to be a leader and prophet of Mormonism, but that its origin and validity were disputed. My colleague explained that she, being clairvoyant, could tell that the letter had “caused pain, even death” in the world. It was assuredly a forgery, she said.

Save for the psychic part, the reaction is not unusual. Most scholarship, whether through textual criticism, handwriting analysis, character study, or inference from subsequent events, has concluded similarly: the letter is the fraudulent product of an inauthentic, self-made prophet, likely written with hopes of duping a listless and leaderless mass.

I don’t know if Strang wrote his own letter, nor do I think it necessary to care. Declarations of authenticity and determinations of forgery lead to more evaluative eddies than interpretive clarities. Even proponents of the charlatanry thesis disagree about the application of that term, and it is an ongoing debate among them whether Strang was a corrupted prophet, a thoroughgoing fake, or an opportunist-turned-believer. Making a decision between such options seems a fairly small-minded end to intellectual conversation about matters religious.

If we take religion to entail the recasting of historically contingent social conditions as intellectual heuristics and community blueprints, then people do “genuine” religious work whenever they help others situate themselves as humans relative to super- and sub-humans in place and time. More simply and necessarily, and somewhat differently, we do well to recognize that the underlying motivations for religious work need not determine the modes and extent of its reception, nor vice versa. This is not to say that the latter are uninfluenced by the institutional and symbolic creations of those in power, but rather that religious systems are created in the spaces between construction, reception, expression, and utilization. It is also to say that such systems are historically dialectical in creation, and arguably measurable in effect.

As a first step towards better metrics and longer conversations, we might usefully reconsider the inaugural epistle (here, the Letter of Appointment) as a religious genre. The proposition is simply this: that introductory letters start conversations along several fronts, in several meters. In the case of Strang’s letter of appointment, one of these did center on matters of epistolary autograph and provenance: on the curvature of the handwriting, the location of the postage stamp, and the possibility that someone had slipped supplementary material within the outermost stamped and signed sheet. But others entailed different questions and concerns of authenticity. To think about James Strang’s leadership potential or Wisconsin’s communal opportunities, for instance, relative to Brigham Young’s and Utah’s, was to think also in terms of authentic possibility and chances for cooperative religious work. It was to think in terms of heuristic worth, utility as humanistic geography, and capacity for social implementation. Strang used his first letter to induce reconsideration of Mormon social and geographical possibilities, and his accomplishments are best traced in terms of evolving dialogical exchanges around these topics than in terms of his supposed charlatanry.

Thankfully the Beinecke Library houses hundreds of letters written to, from, and around Strang—letters written between ecclesiastical leaders, among potential converts, and to other interested parties. The 1844 Letter of Appointment was part of that epistolary history and exchange, but it was only just that: an inaugural moment, a conversation starter rather than stopper. So should it be for us.

Their titles were always momentous: The Next, The Ultimate, The Last. I was a literalist as a child, and I believed that the Whole Earth Catalogs contained the Whole Earth. They didn’t really seem like catalogs though, in the way the L. L. Bean and Johnny’s Selected Seed catalogs were in my parents’ house in rural Maine. The Catalogs were the tallest black spines on the white-painted bookshelf by the window in the living room, the Reference Shelf. My father would occasionally leap up from dinner and snatch the Oxford English Dictionary (condensed) or the Encyclopedia Britannica from this shelf. He would nudge his gold Lennon glasses further down on his nose, and intone triumphantly the wisdom contained there on the tissue-thin pages. These books contained authoritative answers; though they might occasionally be cross-referenced one to the other, the connections among them didn’t expand past the reference shelf.

But the Whole Earth Catalog was different. Though it resided on the same shelf, the sprawling, messy, self-deprecating celebration of accidental discovery was perhaps less related to the condensed Oxford English Dictionary than it was to the inhabitants of my parents’ other bookshelves: Helen and Scott Nearing’s homesteading chronicles, and M. Scott Peck’s nontraditional parenting guides. As in: they were all blueprints my parents had tried to follow, imperfectly. The Whole Earth Catalog represented the adventure and freedom of San Francisco, flowers-in-the-hair hippie-dom to my father, hardscrabble WASP Protestant by birth whose own spiritual sense was closer to New England transcendentalism, with its abstract, cold-weather visions of solitary fortitude. Having chosen to separate themselves, geographically, from family and friends, in favor of living a principled life in eastern Maine, they still hungered for the sunny, chaotic, Merry Prankster-style life.

The Catalog wasn’t the sort of thing you could flip through to find the answer to a specific question. I tried, and always ended up being infinitely side-tracked into an alternative universe of compost-able sleeping bags, houses built of old milk containers, the latest works of R. Crumb. Each entry seemed to be a prophecy of another world, an item that would only be useful in one single situation far removed from my ordinary life. The Catalog made it possible to imagine such situations, which was both exciting and terrifying. Each page looked different, some enclosed in a black border, handwritten and typeset words wandered among line drawings, diagrams, pentagrams, names and addresses to write away to. That was the thing: the Catalogs didn’t really exist, couldn’t really exist, in isolation. Their pages spoke directly to you, implored you to take action, to connect.

Once in his pot-smoking youth, my father was flipping through a Whole Earth Catalog when he had a semi-mystical experience: the book was calling to him. In a note by Ken Kesey, spiritual brethren of the Catalogs’ creator Stewart Brand, my father thought he saw his name “Henry.” This prompted him to find Kesey’s phone number and give him a call. As he and Kesey pored over the Catalog from their two ends of the country in Maine and Oregon, my father realized sheepishly that the word he’d thought said “Henry,” actually said “learn.” Kesey told my father: “Don’t worry, the same thing happened once with me and William Burroughs.” He left Henry with some parting wisdom, passed down to me as “keep on keeping on.” His message might just as well have been “Only connect.” Though you may feel yourself to be a solitary principled person, you are in fact part of a long, messy lineage of spiritual seekers. And that act of reaching out is never a mistake, because it connects you to a wider world; you don’t have to go it alone.

I always thought the most amazing part of this story was that my father could find Kesey’s number and that Kesey took his call—that was back in the seventies, before the Internet. How did you know where to find anybody? The Catalog, much more so than the Yellow Book, had magical powers of connectivity. Maybe that was why we kept them so long the biodegradable pages started to yellow and the glue in their perfect-binding started to erode. Years later, I learned that Stewart Brand had gotten off Ken Kesey’s bus and become one of the early inventors of the Internet; I can’t say I was surprised. I only hope he endowed it with the same impish spirit of merry mayhem that animated the Whole Earth Catalog.

Every summer, tens of thousands of experience seekers from around the world descend upon a desolate and otherwise obscure corner of northwestern Nevada known as the Black Rock Desert. This utterly empty expanse of dried alkali clay—known as the playa—is transformed into a pulsating cultural laboratory in which participants—known as Burners—deliberately experiment with art, symbol, ritual, and community.

Burning Man presents a restive nexus of complex spiritual narratives. Participants in this extravagant and kaleidoscopic festival have created a theater in the barren desert in which to play reflexively with culture. This pageant of artistry and ritual performance presents a captivating paradox of decadence and ostentation that is simultaneously a studied testament to impermanence and flux. Participant narratives highlight themes of self-expression, personal transformation, communal bonding, and cultural renewal, and many describe Burning Man as providing a sense of “spirituality,” while explicitly disclaiming that the event is “religious.” For their part, the event’s founders and organizers likewise hope that the event will “produce positive spiritual change in the world,” even while they also stop short of characterizing the event as a “religion.” But Burning Man is perhaps less about spirituality—intangible and ineffable—and more about the immediacy of ritual. The hybrid ritualism of Burning Man challenges normative assumptions about the location of lived religious practice and spiritual expression, and points to challenging questions about the tensions between these constructs.

Burning Man started as a small impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986 who would eventually move the event to the desert in 1990 where it grew steadily into a globally renowned phenomenon drawing around 50,000 participants annually. Dubbed “Black Rock City,” this encampment temporarily becomes Nevada’s fifth largest metropolis, complete with roads, street signs, peacekeepers, medical services, and a downtown coffee house. However, the infrastructure remains minimal and requires that all attendees bring everything they need to survive—including all food, water, and shelter—in an extremely dry and harsh physical environment. Daily temperatures can range from the low 40s overnight to well over 100 degrees, and winds can exceed 75 miles per hour, occasionally fomenting intense dust storms and white-out conditions.

At the center of Black Rock City stands the towering wooden icon of the Burning Man. Crisply lit with multicolored shafts of neon and ultimately packed with fireworks and other incendiaries, this ostensibly genderless sculpture stands over the city at once helpless and defiant against the dusty night sky, awaiting its climactic detonation. Arrayed around this axial and enigmatic effigy are hundreds of other works of art created by festival participants. Often constructed on colossal scales, these artists—both professional and amateur—go to great length and expense to create and transport these works to the desert. And at the festival’s conclusion, the entire city is completely dismantled and removed until the following year, such that within a month’s time no trace of the event remains on the playa’s surface.

Temple built on the playa by Burning Man participants

Detail image of the temple

This hyper-spectacle generates an energetic and continuous flow between chaos and order. Concepts and symbols originating within diverse cultural and religious traditions are playfully and creatively converged, forging ritualistic pathways towards catharsis, ecstasy, and insight. In addition to the definitive ritual bonfire, numerous other rites—both sincere and satirical—have transpired here: massive ephemeral temples dedicated to memory and mourning; anti-consumerist parodies of Christian evangelism; operatic performances invoking Vodou lwas; Shabbat services conducted in the skeleton of a gothic cathedral; reiki attunement sessions; labyrinths; yoga, meditation and kabballah classes—the list could go on and on. At Burning Man, the random flotsam of human history and global cultures washes up on the shores of the Black Rock playa for one week, and then washes back out as participants return to what they call the “default world,” having shared in an experience that often leaves residual traces on their sense of self and notions of culture. Burning Man renders the native hybridity and plasticity of cultures transparent, revealing the extent to which religions are not static, historically bound institutions, but rather lived, fluid constructions. Syncretism and bricolage are nothing new in the history of religions as the defining and transgressing of boundaries seems definitional to community. While conservative traditionalists tend to see such mongrel developments rather unfavorably, history shows that whenever diverse cultures and religions come into contact they inevitably adopt ideas, symbols, and performative modes from one another, while also retaining or rejecting other core elements—a process of retrenchment that is itself a dynamic response to change.

An installation at Burning Man

At Burning Man, embodiment and experience are emphasized over doctrine or ideology. For example, Burning Man’s founder and ongoing chief visionary, Larry Harvey, speaks of “immediacy” as akin to a sacred power, writing that through immediate experience “We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.” In the beauty and essential simplicity of the Black Rock Desert—as well as in the visceral experience of its arid and demanding environment—Burners often report a transformative sense of the numinous. The desert evokes a potent mix of limitlessness and mystery, as well as time-honored themes of hardship and sacrifice that are deeply embedded in the Western cultural psyche. This juxtaposition between the vast, vacant landscape and human, artistic abundance fosters unique perceptions of space and time, both embodied and imaginal. Participants also frequently speak of community, self-expression, and self-reliance—echoing a set of ethical principles articulated by the event’s organizers—as interrelated themes. These dynamic encounters between self and other—in tandem with embodied experiences of the desert—coalesce to generate critical transformations for many participants, leading some to ascribe spiritual significance to this event.

For Burners, spirituality is fundamentally experiential (based on the primacy of personal experience and personal authority in framing those experiences), reflexive (inspiring reflections on self, self/other, self/nature, and self/culture), and heterodoxic (constituted by multiply-layered, fluid, and non-centralized constructions of meaning). But troubling any simplistic conclusions, many other participants state most emphatically that Burning Man does not entail any sense of spirituality—even while some of these same individuals also engage in expressive, ritualized quests for self-discovery through the event, but which they elect not to cloak in mystical terms. Furthermore, some observers and participants alike deny that this festival has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, seeing it as merely an excuse for debauchery and a license for transgressive behavior that is disconnected from any overt spirituality. Yet while the event is undeniably rife with opportunities for hedonistic indulgence, it would be mistaken to understand hedonism as anti-religious. Dismissals of Burners as pleasure-seekers reveal the deep and lasting imprint of America’s ascetic Protestantism. Furthermore, religious traditions that are utterly bereft of some opportunity for joyous, and occasionally excessive, celebration as part of the package deal are comparatively rare.

Installation piece at Burning Man

Competing perspectives are the engine that drives Burning Man, as it is through an ongoing and idiosyncratic process of argument and dissent that participants define, refine, and perform their collective notions of what this event is all about. Burning Man sits at the vanguard of contemporary anxieties around meaning, identity and experience that resist easy classification. People increasingly seek after eclectic, hybrid, dynamic, and reflexive spiritualities that whisper of deep and direct connections to an elusive “more,” while conceptually positioning these quests outside the rubrics of what they understand to be “religion.” But to say that Burning Man is “spiritual” or “spiritual but not religious,” only goes so far. Burning Man speaks to the persistence and importance of ritual as a vehicle through which humans connect with one another and as well as with that mysterious “more”—an ineffable sense of something larger than ourselves—while also showing us how these expressions seep beyond the comfortable bounds of both academic and popular concepts of either “religion” or “spirituality.”

Having been intrigued by William Blake’s celebration of imagination as the wellspring of poetry and prophecy since my introduction to his Songs of Innocence and Experience in high school, I was elated when in the final term of my senior year in college I had the opportunity to take a course completely devoted to Blake’s work pass-fail. Midway through the term, our professor made an announcement that he had received notification of a kind of pageant based on the work of Blake that was to be held in the hills outside the not-too-distant college town of Athens, Ohio. I decided to attend, and convinced a friend to come along.

The event had the cryptic title “Hail the Depth of the Skin.” It took me many seasons to conclude that this was a contrarian response to the old saw “beauty is only skin deep.” The pageant was being staged by a group called “The Church of William Blake,” which proved to be not only a church but also an artists’ colony, organized under the charismatic leadership of Æthelred Eldridge (whose day job is as an art professor at Ohio University). It was located on Eldridge’s property near Mount Nebo, which is the highest elevation in Athens County and is endowed with a particularly dense spiritual history. It is reputed to have been sacred to the Shawnee, renowned as a center of Spiritualist activity in the mid-1800s, widely understood to be haunted by a diversity of spirits, and possibly, situated at the intersection of magnetic lay-lines. Eldridge calls the place Golgonooza, which is Blake’s name for what we might call a city of humanly rather than heavenly imagination, a city of creativity and ebullience, a contrarian version of what more conventional and conservative cults might refer to as a New Jerusalem.

Given our mood of anticipation, finding Golgonooza in the hills outside Athens was an adventure in itself, but it was evident when we arrived that we were in the right place. Slightly off the road, nestled in a pasture among the verdant hills, a large log stage with a podium—more properly a pulpit—had been constructed, evidently just for the performance of “Hail the Depth of the Skin.” It appeared as though the woods had been crawling with hippie artists, all of whom had emerged from the foliage to converge on the pasture. Figures carrying large cardboard cutouts of the sense organs—eye, nose ear, tongue, lips, and genitals—moved all over the stage and throughout the audience as they took turns making prophetic pronouncements. All the while Æthelred Eldridge was declaiming from a pulpit in the style of an eighteenth-century Methodist minister, but rather than ascetic restraint from the Bible he preached imaginative excess and saturation of the senses from Blake’s epic Milton. When the pageant was over the hippie artists vanished again, leaving us to our dark drive home with afterimages of the event dancing in our heads…

The Ancient of Days by William Blake

Blake was a visual artist—quite literally a visionary—as well as a poet. His engravings are as bold, powerful, and colorful as are his lyrical and prophetic works, and in those works in which the action of the text is accompanied by images of his mythic/heroic characters one can almost see an foreshadowing of Marvel Comics. The religious impulse in Blake is rooted in a celebration of imagination, bodies, and senses, as well as equality of the sexes matched in passion and creativity. He derided established religion as anti-imaginative, a position which for me has always been epitomized in the following passage from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing the forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the Human breast.

Blake’s theory is one of poetic and corporal bringing-to-life made possible by the “enlarged and numerous senses” of the restored prelapsarian moment. For Blake the biblical myth of the Fall is a flight from concreteness to abstraction and the slavery of mystification. Forgetting that all deities reside in the human breast is for Blake equivalent to saying that the “binding” achieved by religion is the binding off of human imagination. Blake’s manifesto is thick with meaning, one strand having to do with the already braided historical-existential origin of religion, another having to do with the apparent “interiority” implied by the residence of deities in the human breast, and yet another having to do with the humanism in the poet’s—and the scholar’s—skeptical stance toward religion.

Jacob's Ladder by William Blake

In the university course I was taking on Blake I learned that a number of people had undertaken to set various of Blake’s works to music. These included our own professor, Tom Mitchell, and before him Allen Ginsberg and Benjamin Britten. Sometime during the term I decided to do the same. The idea became a project of the kind that takes on a life of its own. So, having composed about a dozen melodies it became obvious that it made sense to perform them. Having decided to perform them it seemed that something more was needed, so I added a dramatic presentation of Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveler” as an opening. Having become the Mental Traveler, I required the appropriate garb, and so acquired a heavy cape and a walking staff.

There was still one more phase ahead in this imaginative transformation, however. All the performances I gave in the following years were in the role of “actor and musician” except for one, arranged when I contacted Æthelred Eldridge and offered to visit the Church of William Blake as “guest preacher.” Eldridge accepted my offer and we agreed that I would come to Ohio on a Sunday in February.

It was cold and snowy, the narrow, winding roads around Mt. Nebo were slippery, and I was late. When I arrived I heard Eldridge’s voice from within the one room log church. They had begun without me, not knowing whether the stranger from elsewhere would actually appear. It was the one time in my life when I calculatedly made an Entrance. In character and outfitted as The Mental Traveler, I knocked on the wooden door with my staff, and it became silent inside. Ætheldred Eldridge opened the door and questioningly said my name: “Tom?” I did not speak but strode past him, put down my guitar case and launched into the opening monologue. My intent was to produce the actual effect of a visitation by an unfamiliar Mental Traveler who talked about his journey through “A land of men, and women, too” in which the sexes both thrive and suffer on one another’s account as the generations revolve from youth to age. The performance went well.

The role of visiting preacher suited me well. The Church of William Blake was a real church within a colony of artists whose members were “playing church,” where play and creativity were taken quite simultaneously with great seriousness and with tongue in cheek. The Sunday services were organized around texts read aloud from Blake’s collected works. In addition to the church, the main buildings in Golgonooza were a substantial log house and a printery/book bindery. Some inhabitants of Golgonooza lived in partially refurbished log cabins built by settlers in the early nineteenth century. Eldridge, as leader of the church and contemporary avatar of the spirit which has reputedly animated Milton, Blake, and Ginsberg, has produced both visual and verbal art. His works include paintings which are as visually compelling as are those of Blake. His poetic manifesto is entitled Albion Awake, where Albion is Blake’s term not only for Britain but for the slumbering creative potential of humanity as a whole. It’s a vision worth celebrating.