The single-page list of possible terms circulated to contributors to the Frequencies project on a genealogy of spirituality has the clean feeling that comes courtesy of the alphanumeric. All those capital Hs in a row; all that happy cacophony, from Horatio Alger to LSD to the White Dog Café (Philadelphia, PA), contained by the stuttering letter. Jarena John John John Johnny Jonathan Joseph. One is enjoined widely—“what comes to mind when you think of spirituality”—while sensing that one’s flights of association will be easily contained. You left out (speaking of them) John-John.

One could say that this is what spirituality itself does. It is elastic, while expressing common rules of order. It contains everything, while conforming to strict limits. As the curators note in their invitation, with some understatement: “Few incidents or characters in the history of spirituality can be contained within national borders.” But do we—yet—know what contains spirituality? Do we yet know if anything does, and thus whether there can be history (or genealogy) here, rather than simply classification?

These questions are not intended to threaten the project. One would be hard pressed, I suspect, to advance a preemptive critique of a history of spirituality—of the very idea of such a thing—that was not already considered in the Frequencies conference room. Of course such a history is impossible. That is why it must now be attempted.

I would like to contribute to this attempt, if not a preemptive critique, then something like the question of whether or how one could be disobedient to its terms—the question of the project’s concept. Like the question to spirituality itself, one asks: is there really anything that could not go on the list? This might seem a playful or obnoxious intervention. It is playful in tracking the spirit of the call while taking its investigative thrust to potentially absurd lengths; it is obnoxious in pretending serious engagement while revealing the project itself to be absurd. I mean the question in neither sense.

In elucidating what I do mean, it is instructive to bring to mind the late metaphysical work of spirituality connoisseur William James. James spent the better part of his career as psychologist and philosopher attempting to debunk metaphysics of its spiritualist pretensions, while also, not incidentally, carrying on with theosophists and occultists. After achieving notice for his essays on religion, pluralism, and belief, and at the same time as he was honing his pragmatic theory of truth, James developed his own metaphysical theory, which he called radical empiricism. Fascinating as a historical document, radical empiricism is distinguished mainly by the claim that the world is composed—not of mind and body, or temporality and eternity, or indeed any of the other famous dualisms in the metaphysical water, then and now. Radical empiricism was to be a monism, whose basic unit is experience.

James’s theory has the advantage of cohering with his pragmatist commitment to make truth something we can see, feel, taste, practice, do. His rejection of standard (in his view, “Hegelian”) metaphysics was that it posited a world (“Spirit”) subject to none of these things, a world therefore useless in providing a framework for the investigation of what really does exist and matter, among which James’s empiricism stressed the relations between things as much as things themselves. It is also worth noting that the “incident or character” of James’s philosophy always toyed with, and was consistently received in the light of, a fairly explicit nationalism. America would be the land of a properly grounded, empirically contained, pragmatic philosophy, cutting itself loose from the decadence of an ethereal European spirit forever spilling out into tyrannical and sloppily conceived social and political projects. James’s solution, a radical empiricism, makes such a spirit subject to the containment of American knowhow: experiment, revisability, and an overall temper of constructive, this-worldly optimism. Dams and railroads would be built; souls and their sicknesses studied, diagnosed, and allayed, if not cured.

I call James to the task of considering the nature of a history of spirituality since he was himself so aggressively interested in the spiritual—in both fertilizing and disciplining it. But I also call on him for the scope of his philosophical ambition. James’s metaphysical system, unlike those of the Idealists he loved to lampoon, has as one of its features that, as with our list of terms concerning spirituality, everything, presumably, can be contained within it. It is a theory of everything.

Is this a problem? First to the task of what it means. A thinker like Spinoza has often been called a monist. By this, readers mean that he sews up all of life’s particularities into one, single, existing substance. This reading can still afford to acknowledge that Spinoza understood substance to be infinitely modified. For the point, so it goes, is that its modifications are nevertheless, finally, of this one thing. James was against such pictures of the universe. His appeal to experience was precisely meant to give us the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of life—the smell of a dog’s nose, the angle of a roof as it is about to collapse, the agony of guilt over a failed connection with someone, the moments of longing for death. Finally, American readers have always felt, in turning to James after a spell in the archives of the Germans and the French: someone to give us the sense and taste of the damned gorgeous springtime in Cambridge MA, and not merely, as Schleiermacher vaguely promised, the sense and taste of the infinite.

And yet. Does James really get around the problem of how to have, while also theorizing what it is to have, experience? Does James really give us a theory of everything that marks what that everything shall smell and taste like? To do this question justice would take us deep into the bowels of modern philosophy—into, at the very least, the curious logic of an apriori worldview centered elsewhere than in the mind. Kant thinks, for example, that we meet up with the world of blooming experience with a mind that already orders it; James thinks we meet up with singular objects in the world with a self that is already experiencing, or better, a self that already is experience. There is a critical difference in the shape of the two positions. For Kant, we are limited to experience, and the work is to make this limitation and its structure as pellucid as possible. What it leaves out. What it leaves in. For James, we are limited by nothing, whose name (the thing, the nothing) is experience. It is noteworthy, then, that James’s theory of experience, in leaving nothing out, has a harder time than Kant’s at specifying what is left in—what it is, in short, that we are having an experience of.

It is enough in this context to suggest something like the following about James, concluding with some questions to a history of spirituality. What James was evidently after with his concept of a radical empiricism was a way to resolve the call of spirituality. As a sick-souled, genealogically-stressed denizen of the Cantabrigian beau monde at the turn of the twentieth century, James was fascinated by the more colorful of spirit’s possibilities. But in his philosophical commitments, he was a critic of spirit, Hegelian, Bradleyian, Blavatskian, and otherwise. James wanted to give us the real, and he felt sure that this real was both empirical and absolute—that the empirical was not simply the place of experiment and Baconian habit, but was also mind. This might seem a surprising claim in the light of James’s insistence that the turn to the empirical saves us from all forms of rationalism. But it is one that makes sense both of his various personal commitments and of his inheritance of a Kantian seriousness with respect to the integration of the person. James, like Kant, felt it important to admit that there were cracks in existence. He simply thought he knew how they could be philosophically, which for him meant empirically, resolved. That this resolution in a thinker like James comes couched in the language of open-endedness only serves to underscore the maddening sleight of the apparently decisive thing that nevertheless has no borders.

So again: is this a problem? The problem I want to draw attention to is that James comes up with a theory of the way things are that—by virtue of the decision to resolve dualisms before they arise—gives us no insight into its logic of inclusion. This would be as if a moral philosophy or psychology proposed a theory of what to do or how to live without reckoning with the obstacles (psychical, social, intellectual, animal) to doing so. James’s theory of radical empiricism cools our desperation over being split—mind from body, higher from lower, Jew from Greek or male from female, if you want to go that route. In doing so, however, it abandons us to a different problem. Put simply, everything can count as experience. But what is the concept of everything? The problem is not that everything can count. The problem is: what is an everything? What do I have when I have it? What are the grounds of distinction within it, or between it and itself, if not some other? How might everything (or anything) fail (to be everything)? What is or what could be failure? I scramble for the simplest of images here: a queue for a roller coaster, say, in which the gate keeper is checking that the prospects meet a list of qualifications, a list of qualifications that everyone happens to meet. Who is that gate keeper? And: must she keep checking?

The list supplied for the genealogy of spirituality has this quality of an itemization that requires continued checking even as everything could be included in it. This is not to say its curators imagine themselves gate keepers. Just the opposite. The call makes clear that the charge is to roam as far and wide as possible. Still, those possibles would—I suggest—be exceedingly unlikely to fail inclusion on the list. Let me amend. They could not do so. Like James’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, the list excludes only what it does not desire (what does not exist); of things desirable, all are present. Everything is—however implicitly—present. And yet there is no account of what this everything tears itself loose from. Experience—or spirituality—as opposed to what? In this silence, James ironically mirrors the logic of his own bête noir, an otherworldly spirit struggling to make the world fit reason (the monistic Spinoza, the benighted Bradley), while evading the logic of his ostensible quarry, an immanence of spirit, which is present, pace James, in the dialectical Spinoza, who locates spirit in creaturely life, in the pragmatic Hegel, who culls reality redolent with smells, in the mechanic Kant, who knows the difference between an engine we make and our fantasy of one. James confuses the universal (all) with finite inclusion (everything), failing both spirit and its histories, both what spirit is and what it isn’t. With a universal, one could say, the gate keeper is the position that founds the all on a primary exclusion (choice); with an everything, the gate keeper is simply the delirious confusion of not having to choose—the confusion of redundancy. Although James’s radical empiricism promises to subordinate spirit to experience, it yields what looks like nothing so much as spirit augmenting itself infinitely through the undifferentiated logic of its suppression.

Is the Frequencies list a sign that its call is caught in this same confusion?

I pose the following final questions:

What is the relationship between the call to consider spirit and the provision of a list of spirit’s projects, the implication being that this list, like the alphabet, could come to an end while being, in its inner nature, expansive to infinity (JJJJJJ…)?

What has this gambit already decided about spirit in imagining its projects alphanumerically, and not in substance and subject?

What is a history of the alphanumeric if history is already (is it not?) the alphabet’s undoing—the decision (expository, creative, poetic) to count Jarena and not John-John? What is the nature of such a decision in this project? Would it, like the list itself, get its own line on the list?

The project of Frequencies hints—against conventional wisdom—that spirituality can be contained by its manifold histories; by a history of the manifold. Might there also be a value in ascertaining whether spirituality is not already contained, a list of lists, a theory of when and where its own decisions make distinctions, apriori, as it were—before we assimilate it to the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA? Might there not be something in spirit itself—and not simply in our alphabets—that finds it(self) everywhere? Might this not be spirit’s own creative history of us?

What does it mean to say that finance is the spirit of the age? Not pennies, but a quadrillion dollars seemed to fall from heaven in the derivatives markets. These sprite-like financial products were everywhere, leaving long shadows of risk, inviting untoward volatility, forever coming undone and flying away from the underlying values to which they were once attached. But if they appeared to exist in their own spectral world, derivatives visited all manner of attachment and interdependence on hitherto far flung and disassociated items of credit and debt. Mortgages and interest rates, currency exchange and commodity prices where haunted by all manner of claims to wealth whose bodies lay elsewhere. The ascent of these markets was assured by models so perfect, that they required no regulation. Markets moved to divine algorithms whose proof lay in their very capacities of self-expansion. The acme of materialism had morphed into an effervescent tonic, an elixir to be universally imbibed, a remedy for all that once proved poisonous. This new regime of credit did not even need to be seen to be believed. It was faith-based.

But soon, those once exalted as masters of the universe fell like so many corpses of angels. High priests of the financial order like Alan Greenspan, whose every breath (the etymology of spirit) was said to move markets, confessed that he had “detected a flaw” in the animating ideas that had kept the herds a-grazing. Suddenly prophets appeared as devils in disguise among the innocents. Those evil few overtaken by excessive greed would need to be expelled from the flock. These men of confidence were leagues away from the specialists without spirit that Max Weber worried would become prisoners taken by the spread of a calculating attitude. The earlier spirit of capitalism was retrospective in that it relied upon a backward glance to account for a life well lived. Instead, those individuals possessed by financial reason would be oriented by a speculative gaze by which the future could be made actionable in the present. Rather than deferring gratification for judgment day, the measure of a person’s worth would be made a day at a time. The older pieties of a worldly asceticism by which pleasure would be saved for some final investment would be traded for portfolios constantly fondled to yield their greatest returns. The stalwart conviction that deferred gratification will assure a proper end is exchanged for a gratification in deferral by which financial gains are realized. The financial drive has all the thrills of an extreme sport. After the crash the wreckage was spirited away so the race might resume.

What was recently declared a crisis of finance has scarcely yielded its day of reckoning. While some firms are no more, millions have lost homes and employment and all are being asked to sacrifice their futures. The pursuit of blame has etherized responsibility. Accountability is reserved as a downward pressure on mass aspirations and expectations that mandates greater productivity. Public interest has been defined in terms of restoring private trusts. Finance has recovered to once again scale its dizzying heights but now with a sense of generalized disenchantment. This once occult world has been exposed, but without illumination. For all the havoc it has wrought, finance remains oddly de-materialized. It still stands apart from something designated as real in the economy. It is ethereal, incomprehensible, wasteful. It was as if the opacities of political economy could be rectified by a moral economy—the very move from which industry itself sprang. The age-old desire to sort the truly useful stuff of life from the effluvia that people can surely live without.

Moreover, the apocalyptic narratives of the financial meltdown have their mirrored image in all manner of natural and engineering disasters. Each, it is said, precipitated by an over-reliance on the very models of risk management and assessment meant to tame and master the unproductive uncertainties of nature and industry. Pre-emption is the time and the policy of financial logic, to act on opportunities so as to render their anticipation an act of making them so. But a thousand ships so launched will make for very dangerous waters indeed. As one notorious avatar of danger triumphantly proclaimed from the prow of his pre-emptive vessel, “bring it on.”

Yet if finance is the spirit of the age, this may disclose as much about what counts as spirit as it suggests what matters in finance. For what is said in tones of righteous dismissal regarding finance; namely, that it is unreal and ephemeral yes, but also that it engenders a mutuality of debt to which there is no final account, applies to many realms that are also currently being devalued, dismissed, disinvested. Is not the same thing, for example, said about the humanities, or the arts, or higher education itself for that matter? Might it not be more useful to inquire into what other kinds of debt might be derived from circumstances that flash abundance before our eyes only to say that it is not for us; that advertise the pleasures of risks for which so few are authorized to reap the benefits; or that bring so many strangers into contact so that they might proclaim what future they would value most?

Spirit as verb and noun: to carry away, to intoxicate, to breathe, to make active—might be brought to an end or realized under the sign of a finance that augurs winding up differently than where it began. The solids have been made molten, vaporized, and what was profaned can now be re-animated according to collectively-sustainable principles of motion. This sudden materialization of a spirit of association that brings the far near and the future present is a medium by which a transformative spirituality might itself be financed.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. As the member of our department of religious studies who teaches contemporary religion, (New Age, popular culture, Asian religion in America, that sort of thing…) I should be a spirituality expert, ready to use the word as a clever retort for my cynical family members, as a piece of sage advice for my sincere, confused graduating majors, or as a contextualizing quote for the religion writer from our local paper.

In other words, I feel I should have a handle on this whole spirituality thing, but I really don’t. When I think about spirituality, I ask myself, throat tightening: what do I need to know? What conversations about it should I be injecting myself into? Who’s writing about it? Whose brilliant new definition of it is so broad, or so narrow, or so unexpected, or so obvious, or so self-conscious, or so un-self-conscious, that we academics can no longer talk meaningfully about spirituality without nodding metaphorically or literally in the direction of this exciting scholar?

I can toss off an article on a particular religious group in contemporary America, or put together a chapter about how some artifact of pop culture is, in fact, religious. But if I want the security of a tenured position at the best possible institution, and the prestige of having written a serious work of scholarship, I need to write a book whose title uses big words and that does not evoke any particular time or place.

I need to write an academic book about spirituality.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. Sometimes as I work on my laptop (or pretend to) late at night, my wife will ask what I am writing. An article or an entry or a book review, I’ll tell her.

“What are you doing that for?” she’ll ask.

“Well it’s part of my job.”

“So are you getting paid for it?”

“No, but I get to keep the book.” Or: “They should send me a copy of the encyclopedia when it comes out, plus $60!” That fails to impress, as does my monthly paycheck.

“You’re a good writer and you know a lot about religion. Write a book that will sell,” she says, “Make us some money. Get famous.”

Why not? If professors of economics serve as consultants to the very banks they study and professors of medicine are paid by the companies whose drugs they test, why can’t professors of religious studies financially exploit the subjects of our investigations? What is wrong with a little money and publicity? Why can’t we cash in too?

I need to write a popular book about spirituality.

The thought of writing a book about spirituality, whether academic or popular, fills me with anxiety. Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves?

In the academic book I’d like to write, a smooth and vague language, full of whispered half-promises, conjures the free-floating theorizing that can only happen when the discipline of religious studies merges with postmodern theology and cultural studies. The popular book I’d like to write could be found in any of a dozen sections of the local bookstore: New Age, Self-Help, Eastern Religions, Psychology, Fitness, Humor. Or better yet: next to the cash register.

Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves? Maybe not, but the titles can. And that’s a start.

So Louis, the Webmaster, and Laura, the Instructional Technologist, helped me create an automatic, random title generator, which has inside of it over one and a half million possible book titles about spirituality. At last I am no longer anxious about spirituality; I might even feel a little bit spiritual myself, for the first time. Because I have harnessed the power of randomness and automation, which are unthinking, productive, and modern, like spirituality itself.

I created this generator for myself. In using it, I have noticed that in all these potential book titles, the word “spirituality” stands like the eye of the hurricane, the vacant signifier, the placeholder, the empty vessel…

And now I invite everyone to partake.

http://sieglere.people.cofc.edu/title.php

THE TJURUNGA

begins as a digging stick, first thing the Aranda child picks up.

When he cries, he is said to be crying for

the tjurunga he lost

when he migrated into his mother.

Male elders later replace the mother with sub-incision.

The shaft of his penis slit, the boy incorporates his mother.

I had to create a totemic cluster in which imagination

could replace Indianapolis, to incorporate ancestor beings

who could give me the agility

—across the tjurunga spider’s web—

to pick my way to her perilous center.

(So transformationally did she quiver,

adorned with hearts and hands,

cruciform, monumental,
Coatlicue

understrapping fusion)

Theseus, a tiny male spider, enters a tri-level construction:

look down through the poem, you can see the labyrinth.

Look down through the labyrinth, you can see the web:

Coatlicue

sub-incision

Bud Powell

César Vallejo

the bird-headed man

Like a mobile, this tjurunga shifts in the breeze,

beaming at the tossing

foreskin dinghies in which poets travel.

These nouns are also nodes in a constellation called

Clayton’s Tjurunga. The struts are threads

in a web. There is a life blood flowing through

these threads. Coatlicue flows into Bud Powell,

César Vallejo into sub-incision. The bird-headed man

floats right below

the pregnant spider

centered in the Tjurunga.

Psyche may have occurred, struck off

—as in flint-knapping—

an undifferentiated mental core.

My only weapon is a digging stick

the Aranda call papa. To think of father as a digging stick

strikes me as a good translation.

The bird-headed man

is slanted under a disemboweled bison.

His erection tells me he’s in flight. He drops

his bird-headed stick as he penetrates

bison paradise.

The red sandstone hand lamp

abandoned below this proto-shaman

is engraved with vulvate chevrons—did it once flame

from a primal sub-incision?

This is the oldest aspect of this tjurunga, its grip.

Recalculating.

When I was six, my mother placed my hands on the keys.

At sixteen, I watched Bud Powell sweep my keys

into a small pile, then ignite them with “Tea for Two.”

The dumb little armature of that tune

engulfed in improvisational glory

roared through my Presbyterian stasis.

“Cherokee”

“Un Poco Loco”

sank a depth charge into

my soul-to-be.

This is a tjurunga positioning system.

We are now at the intersection of Coatlicue

and César Vallejo.

Squatting over the Kyoto benjo, 1963,

wanting to write, having to shit.

I discovered that I was in the position of Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

But out of her crotch, a baby corn god pawed.

Recalculating.

Cave of

Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

The shame of coming into being.

As if, while self-birthing,

I must eat filth.

I was crunched into a cul-de-sac I could destroy

only by destroying the self

that would not allow the poem to emerge.

Wearing my venom helmet, I dropped, as a ronin, to the pebbles,

and faced the porch of Vallejo’s feudal estate.

The Spectre of Vallejo appeared, snake-headed, in a black robe.

With his fan he drew a target on my gut.

Who was it who sliced into the layers of wrath-

enwebbed memory in which the poem was trussed?

Exactly who unchained Yorunomado

from the Christian altar in Clayton’s solar plexus?

The transformation of an ego strong enough to die

by an ego strong enough to live.

The undifferentiated is the great Yes

in which all eats all

and my spider wears a serpent skirt.
 

That altar. How old is it?

Might it cathect with the urn in which

the pregnant unwed girl Coatlicue was cut up and stuffed?

Out of that urn twin rattlesnakes ascend and freeze.

Their facing heads become the mask of masks.

Coatlicue: Aztec caduceus.

The phallic mother in the soul’s crescendo.

But my wandering foreskin, will it ever reach shore?

Foreskin wandered out of Indianapolis. Saw a keyboard, cooked it in B

Minor.

Bud walked out of a dream. Bud and Foreskin found a waterhole,

swam.

Took out their teeth, made camp. Then left that place, came to

Tenochtitlan.

After defecating, they made themselves headgear out of some hearts

and lopped-off hands.

They noticed that their penises were dragging on the ground,

performed sub-incision, lost lots of blood.

Bud cut Foreskin who then cut Bud.

They came to a river, across from which Kyoto sparkled in the night

sky.

They wanted to cross, so constructed a vine bridge.

While they were crossing, the bridge became a thread in a vast web.

At its distant center, an immense red gonad, the Matriarch crouched,

sending out saffron rays.

“I’ll play Theseus,” Bud said, “this will turn the Matriarch into a

Minotaur.”

“And I’ll play Vallejo,” Foreskin responded, “he’s good at bleeding

himself and turning into a dingo.

Together let’s back on, farting flames.”

The wily Minotaur, seeing a sputtering enigma approaching, pulled a

lever, shifting the tracks.

Foreskin and Bud found themselves in a roundhouse between

conception and absence.

They noticed that their headgear was hanging on a Guardian Ghost

boulder engraved with breasts snake-knotted across a pubis.

“A formidable barricade,” said Bud. “To reach paradise, we must learn

how to dance this design.”

The pubis part disappeared. Fingering his sub-incision, Bud played

“Dance of the Infidels.”

Foreskin joined in, twirling his penis making bullroarer sounds.

The Guardian Ghost boulder roared: “WHO ARE YOU TWO THE

SURROGATES OF?”

Bud looked at Foreskin. Foreskin looked at Bud.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” they said in unison.

Then they heard the Guardian Ghost laughing. “Life is a joyous thing,”

she chuckled, “with maggots at the center.”

⁂

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I was first alerted to the tjurunga (or churinga, as it is also spelled) by Robert Duncan in his essay “Rites of Participation” (from The H.D. Book), which appeared in Caterpillar #1, 1967. Duncan quoted Geza Róheim (“The tjurunga, which symbolizes both the male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion… represents both the path and the goal”), and then commented: “This tjurunga we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Róheim… the simple tjurunga now appears to be no longer simple but the complex mobile that S. Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command saw as most embodying our contemporary experience: ‘the whole construction is aerial and hovering as the nest of an insect’—a suspended system, so contrived that ‘a draft of air or push of a hand will change the state of equilibrium and the interrelations of suspended elements… forming unpredictable, ever-changing constellations and so imparting to them the aspect of space-time.’”

Reading Barry Hill’s Broken Song / T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession brought back and refocused Duncan’s words. In Vol. 13 of The Collected Works, Jung writes: “Churingas may be boulders, or oblong stones artificially shaped and decorated, or oblong, flattened pieces of wood ornamented in the same way. They are used as cult instruments. The Australians and the Melanesians maintain that churingas come from the totem ancestor, that they are relics of his body or his activity, and are full of arunquiltha or mana. They are united with the ancestor’s soul and with the spirits of all those who afterwards possess them…In order to ‘charge’ them, they are buried among the graves so that they can soak up the mana of the dead.”

In my poem “The Tjurunga,” I propose a kind of complex mobile made up of the authors, mythological figures and acts, whose shifting combinations undermined and reoriented my life during my poetic apprenticeship in Kyoto in the early 1960s. At a remove now of some 45 years I see these forces also as a kind of GPS (global positioning system) constantly “recalculating” as they closed and opened door after door.

In the thick of breakthroughs often interpreted by my confused mind as obstructions in Kyoto, I was able to complete only one poem that struck me as true to my situation and destiny as a poet: “The Book of Yorunomado.” Thus I opened the poetry section of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader with this poem and closed this section with “The Tjurunga.”

With bookends in mind, I see these two poems as the “soulend” supports holding the rest of my poetry in place. Thinking back to Vallejo pointing at my gut in 1963 and indicating that I was to commit seppuku, I was struck by the following quotation from James Hillman’s Animal Presences: “The theological message of the Siva-Ganesha, father-son pattern can be summarized in this way: submit that you may be saved, be destroyed that you may be made whole. The sacrificial violence is not the tragic conclusion but the necessary beginning of a passage into a new order… the God who breaks you makes you; destruction and creating ultimately spring from the same source.”

In the work of Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, heteronyms proliferate. Heteronyms are not merely pseudonyms. They are fictional characters who have independent lives, fully realized identities, opinions, tastes, horoscope charts, business cards, signatures, and literary styles. Of the seventy-two fictionalized personae that are known, Pessoa’s most important heteronyms were: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Pessoa-himself (the latter being an orthonym, the alterity that is utterly intimate).

The heteronym Álvaro de Campos “is Walt Whitman with a Greek poet inside.” In “Triumphal Ode” (March 1914), “Maritime Ode” (1914), “Salutations to Walt Whitman” (June 11,1915) and “Passing of the Hours” (May 5, 1916), Campos’s desire for ecstatic oneness with Walt Whitman, plays out Pessoa’s wish to reformulate an idea of possession, both spiritually and erotically.

It is, perhaps, not surprising to note that Pessoa’s most important heteronyms “appeared” to him around the time that he was practicing mediumistic writing, between 1912 and 1916. This period includes the time when Pessoa lived with his aunt Anica in Lisbon. Anica was a Spiritualist and adept at automatic writing. And she frequently organized family séances at her home.

Reflecting the precipitous rise of transatlantic Spiritualist movements in the later part of the nineteenth century (in France, England, the United States and Brazil), Pessoa developed an intense practice of communication with dead and fictional spirits. There were heteronyms contemporary to Pessoa, like Ricardo Reis or Álvaro de Campos, and there were also those who spoke to Pessoa from another time, including the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Henry More and the eighteenth-century voodoo spirit Joseph Bálsamo. Spoken primarily in English, though occasionally also in Portuguese, French and even Latin, these séances combined Pessoa’s aptitudes as a writer with more practical matters of life.

Literary ambitions tend towards the logic of the séance and Pessoa’s ambitions found common cause, perhaps even erotic charge, in the practice of mediumship. Pessoa’s long-standing bachelorhood and, in particular, his obsession with masturbation, were often the source of spiritual attention, even ridicule. In a 1916 séance, the spirit Henri More “exhorted him to lose his virginity,” reproaching him as “a masturbator! … a self-swallower’s barren touch of time.” Later, in a moment of stoic determination, the spirit went so far as to recommend:

You must take my wife, reborn as mistress
She is the great masturbator, your charts
Will flow, kindle her balsamic moon
Here’s her horoscope—note Libra rising
Sapient lust will empty you both into day.

On still another occasion that year, the spirits raged at him: “You man without a man’s prick! You man with a clitoris instead of a prick,” and warned him that “he was not cut out for a monastic existence” and that “chastity would be ultimately prejudicial to his literary ambitions.” Rather than convince, the force of these spirit injunctions allowed Pessoa to see his masturbation as beneficial if not absolutely integral to his art of heteronomia. As he declared at some point, “the multiplication of the I is a frequent phenomenon in cases of masturbation.” But “how,” the spirit would ask in verse, “can an onanist engender, truly inhere the identities of all your bloodless ticking selves?”

Fernando Pessoa was fascinated with disintegration of the idea of the self under the force of heteronomy—dissolutions of possessive individualism that had been in vogue during the Romantic period. Like Whitman before him, Pessoa figured the will as a paradigmatic case of heteronomy. For Pessoa, as for Whitman, the fragmentation of the self was intimately and perhaps inevitably associated with technological conditions and imaginings of empire. But there was a strange inversion here, an odd-angled reflection of spirituality in the American grain.

Whitman sang of the machines and the “great cathedral sacred industry” that was flourishing around him. But whereas Whitman conflated the reproducible possibilities of printing with his divisible self, Pessoa (who like Whitman, worked as a printer) refrained from publishing his work (or, indeed, that of his heteronyms). Whereas the “American bard” spoke, or better, sang from the perspective of a rising new empire, Pessoa witnessed a disintegrating one. Pessoa’s challenge to authorship was born not of plenitude of self but with its lack. Indeed, Pessoa sang all the higher and more extravagantly about the machinery and industry that his agrarian provincial country did not own, and of which it could not even dream.

The desire “to be large and contain multitudes” emanated from Whitman’s engagement with an ever-expanding physical world. Pessoa’s desire “to feel everything in every way,” however, was both a strategy and poetic of virtuality, of not being there.

Pessoa’s vicariousness has all to do with his relation to the death of the Portuguese Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Issued on August 30, 1890, just a few months before the birth of Pessoa, the British Ultimatum demanded that the Portuguese give up the inner lands between Angola and Mozambique—what is currently Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi—in order to allow the British to build a major north-south railway linking Cairo to Cape Town. In the years immediately following this concession to the British, Portugal was shaken by a massive wave of protests. These protests would lead to years of political anarchy and socioeconomic turmoil marked by regicide and the outbreak of the Republican Revolution.

But while the nation mourned the loss of the Empire, there goes Pessoa walking triumphantly and overjoyed down Lisbon’s Rua do Ouro, the poetic equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge. Indeed, for Pessoa, the death of the empire presaged the much anticipated dawning of greater literature. Unlike his compatriots, he interpreted the conflict over the Ultimatum as the final retreat of the diachronic concept of history and the rise of providential, messianic time. The withdrawal of a territorial empire transposed to a newborn spiritual empire, the Fifth Empire: a timeless linguistic empire formed by poets and grammarians which, as he legendarily puts it, “only a small nation could fulfill.”

For Pessoa, the British Ultimatum stands for the reawakening of a primary loss, one that goes back to the infamous year of 1578, and the disappearance of the body of King Sebastian in the tragic battle of El-Ksar-el-Kebir in northern Morocco.

At just twenty-four years of age, Don Sebastian, a radical bachelor (not unlike Pessoa) had been the darling of the Portuguese nobility whose messianic crusading missions to North Africa proved disastrous. Despite warnings from his closest allies, the young king could not be swayed from invading Moorish territories. The result was an enormous loss of human life, a severe economic crisis, and, as the king left no successor, the loss of political autonomy to the Spanish court.

According to legend, King Sebastian will return one foggy morning to rescue his country and fulfill its glorious destiny. When impostors and pseudo-Sebastians rose repeatedly to claim the identity of the missing monarch, however, they were one by one, sent off to the galleys. The return was repeatedly promised but ever postponed. Over time, the missing body of the king evolved into a site of articulation of a general longing—as framed by the Portuguese phenomenon of saudade (deep nostalgic longing for someone or something that was much loved and is now lost)—sustained by the very poetics of deferral of the body-territory that undergirds the legend of Sebastian.

It is in this traumatic space of deferral that Pessoa will envision the demiurgic moment of the Fifth Empire, an empire of literature composed not by chapters but by people.

Pessoa’s pantheon of heteronyms is nothing else than the spectral reappearing of Sebastian. The sleeping king distributed in, and interconnecting, time and space. Pessoa’s famous cohort of heteronyms talk about and between themselves, about and indeed to “Pessoa-himself,” the most false of all heteronyms. Unlike Whitman’s announcement of “a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,” Pessoa’s heteronyms announce the nothingness that simmers below the “great individual.” Pessoa, after all, is the Portuguese word for person.

“I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist,” Philip K. Dick wrote in 1981. “My novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth.” These words, written a few months before his death in 1982, sum up a quarter-century of writing about the shaky foundations of the universe—foundations which were eventually undermined, not only in his fiction, but in his life.

“Roog” (1953) was Dick’s first professional sale. It is a story told from the point of view of a dog barking at a garbage truck, because he sees—correctly, as his complacent human owners do not—that the garbage men are aliens preparing for an invasion. The early novel Eye in the Sky is a tour through the private kosmoi of a group of everyday people caught in a bizarre accident in a science lab. Their individual neuroses—from anti-communist paranoia to religious conservatism to neo-Victorian prudishness—produce a parade of universes that is at turns both hilarious and nightmarish. By the late ‘60s, the philosophical groundwork of his novels was becoming more sophisticated. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick explored a sophisticated ethical system, contrasting the detached emotional flatness of the android (and its human counterpart, the sociopath) with the authentic, definitive quality of humanity: compassion. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a parable of evil told through the lens of psychedelic substances and the doctrine of transubstantiation. Most of Ubik takes place in a hallucinatory “half-life” universe that is gradually deteriorating, succumbing to the forces of entropy.

Dick’s stories serve to undermine the readers’ faith in ontology—he is poking the universe with a pin to see if it pops.

And, in 1974, it did—for Dick himself, at least. In February, he had surgery to remove two impacted wisdom teeth. A few days later, in intense pain, he called the pharmacy to have some pain medication delivered. When it arrived, he noticed that the delivery girl was wearing a necklace in the shape of a fish. (Tessa Dick, his wife at the time, theorizes he was using the necklace as an excuse to look down her blouse.) Touching the necklace, the girl explained that it was a symbol used by the early Christians. At this moment, Dick explains, he was hit by a sudden epiphany, almost like a recovered memory. Over the course of the next several months, Dick had a variety of strange experiences. He saw the buildings around him replaced with Roman architecture. He had a vision of abstract graphics, like expressionist paintings, that lasted an entire night. He had dreams in which he heard snatches of ancient languages—Greek and Sanskrit—and was shown enormous books that contained mysterious truths. He felt as if he were being taken over, invaded by another personality—a benevolent one, that wished to fix what was broken, both in his own life and in the universe as a whole.

Dick developed many theories about the identity of this personality: it may have been an early Christian from the period of the book of Acts; it may have been his late friend, the excommunicated Episcopalian Bishop James Pike; it may have been the Philip K. Dick of a parallel universe; it may have been the Holy Spirit itself.

Dick’s experiences in 1974 (which he later referred to as “2-3-74,” referring to their commencement in February and March 1974) formed the basis for his final novels, most notably VALIS. This novel offers a fictionally-skewed account of those experiences, with Dick himself split into two characters: the relatively logical and skeptical Phil Dick and the eccentric mystic Horselover Fat. But the lion’s share of Dick’s post-1974 writing was not fiction at all: for the final eight years of his life, Dick wrote over 8,000 pages of notes on his experiences, mostly by hand, in what he came to call The Exegesis. In this philosophical journal, Dick proposed, explored, and tested one theory after another to explain what had happened to him, from the grand (the return of the Holy Spirit) to the paranoid (Soviet scientists experimenting with telepathy and time manipulation) to the soberly mundane (maybe it was just psychosis, after all). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to categorize these theories—this one metaphysical, this mystical, that political—because these categories overlap and coexist. The theories feed one another, growing and expanding exponentially.

Though no theory proved permanent, the Exegesis’ recurring themes show Dick to be deeply concerned with oppression and liberation, both spiritual and literal. Throughout the journal he proposes the notion of an ancient, secret, revolutionary Christian underground, pitted against the Roman Empire, symbolized as the Black Iron Prison—a metaphysical category encompassing every form of repression, imprisonment, and tyranny. This concept of a radical, secret church puts Dick within arm’s reach of Christian anarchist ideas, akin to the early Quakers and their fellow travelers. (Dick himself claimed to have been raised Quaker, though the evidence supporting this is spotty).

Though our political and economic systems put the strong before the weak, coasting along with the status quo still seems the logical thing to do. And it’s not just our human institutions that are unjust: Dick finds fault with the very laws of causality, which enable innocent beings to suffer. But the tyrannical logic of the Black Iron Prison convinces us that nothing is wrong, hiding its injustice beneath the level of perception. Only in perceiving this wrongness, “balking” in the face of this covert injustice, can we be saved. The idea of divine secrecy—that God is camouflaged within everyday reality—runs throughout the Exegesis, and Dick frequently speaks of the deus absconditus, the hidden god, which enters our reality not from the clouds, in glory, but at the level of “the trash of the gutter.” This theology of obscurity explains why God would choose a lowly science fiction writer to receive a mystical revelation, and it led Dick to seek covert truths in his published fiction.

But Dick presents all of this as theory, and never as fact—or rather, he presents it as fact, and then promptly pulls the rug out from underneath each explanation. Throughout the Exegesis, Dick declares that, “at last,” he has found the ultimate explanation—but, within a page or two, he second-guesses every eureka. Thus the theology of the Exegesis is speculative: it proposes much but asserts nothing. It is, ultimately, not about the answers, but about the myriad possibilities that the questions themselves imply. It is a theology built on doubt—indeed, it throws the very division of faith and doubt into question.

Dick was never tempted to forge his ideas into a dogma, to declare himself a prophet, or to form a church based on his revelations. His interests were not ecclesiastical, but personal, analytical—and ultimately practical. The Exegesis is, for all its surface eccentricity, a rational exercise, a systematic attempt to arrive at a satisfying explanation for what happened to Dick in 1974.

It is the effort to fit all of the facts of his experiences into a single closed system that drives Dick’s entire philosophical exercise. Though the mysticism of 2-3-74 might seem to push Philip K. Dick beyond the edges of the cool, rational field of science fiction, his religious thought is in fact deeply rooted in the genre he called home. It is a speculative theology from a writer of speculative fiction, a theology that pushes beyond the boundaries of what has been imagined before. The Exegesis was the analytical laboratory in which he played with the facts of his experience. In this sense, Dick’s writing melds science fiction and religion into a unique form of spirituality, a rational mysticism that refuses to let religious questions find a creedal resolution. The core of his writing was truth—but a truth that is, and must remain, speculative. All facts in the Exegesis are contingent, and all conclusions inconclusive.

This inconclusiveness itself came to be grist for Dick’s theological mill, most notably on November 17, 1980, when he had another profound experience. He imagined that God manifested to him—not the contingent maybe-God of 2-3-74, but the unitary, absolute deity, the creator of every cosmos, “the God of my fathers.” God challenged Dick to think up as many lines of reasoning as he could to explain his experiences, and each explanation led to an infinity of sub-theories: and, God said, “where infinity is, there I am.” God lay hidden, not in any one theory, but in their infinite multitude.

The process of writing and thinking about 2-3-74 was itself a religious experience, an ongoing revelation. What Dick called the “11-17-80 theophany” made the inconclusiveness of the Exegesis into its own divinity. The parameters of his spirituality’s object shifted constantly, indefinable by definition.

The point of 11-17-80 was that there can be no last work, that it is in the endless pondering of reality’s meaning that its meaning is to be found. Just over a year before his death, Dick commented on his theologizing in a letter: “As to my exegesis, I wrote THE END on it,” he says—“and then kept right on writing.”

But what bothers me about most of these metaphors is they’re terribly out of date, out of style. They fit, today, like a lifeless frock. Or, perhaps, they’re like whale-boned corsets that leave no room for movement. More to the point, spirits tend only to move like textiles, to work like textiles. And they reject the crude, brute weave of even the finest silk as something too literal, too objective, too much of this world. An actual cut of fabric is too much a thing, itself. It is not an object relevant to the world of spiritual things. Spirituality travels above, outside of, the industrious textile. Fabric, itself, is spiritually irrelevant.

Some examples, perhaps, are in order.

There is, of course, the famous New Testament passage from Romans 13. The Apostle Paul puts forth the challenge to don the spiritual armor of light—to make a garment of the lord Jesus Christ. He does not mean, of course, that Christ is a thing you can pick up and put down, zip up or unbutton. Instead he means only to utilize the language of costume to make this spirited force more approximately tangible. The cloak that is Christ is better (more powerful, more eternal) than your favorite pair of jeans. As an application of this model, I gesture toward the life narrative of 4^th century Saint Syncletica. We, readers, are meant to admire this rich girl who had the discipline to turn her eyes, entirely, from the sumptuous weave of multicolored garments all around her and clothe herself, instead, in nothing but her own humility.

Feminist theorists Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ have, in a more contemporary register, deployed the metaphorics of fabric production to illuminate something about feminist spirituality as cultural work. Together women alter the social fabric of ancient intellectual and religious disciplines. Plaskow and Christ use the figure of weaving to describe this women’s work—toying with the old stereotype that it is the network of women who weave (or hem, or mend) the garments that shroud us. But this remains, too, a metaphor that speaks to specific social struggles and configurations. And, by and large, the intellectual work of 20^th century feminist spirituality has little to do with the social production and distribution of actual textiles, fabrics, or garments.

This is, I think, a shame. For it is right through the weave of fabric that the most pressing spiritual questions we face today are passing.

If, in another era, the most pious option was to be as indifferent as possible to the act of daily costuming, the same ethic no longer applies. We are today zipped up and tucked into garments marked with the labor of fingers that met this fabric in a sweatshop. Fingers that, most likely, were undercompensated for their work, allowing us the privilege of paying next to nothing to hide our nudity. And we are, increasingly, aware of this. Our hems and seams are backstitched with human pain. How can any vision of a good life refuse to take this weight that sits on our shoulders (or wraps around our thighs) seriously? It is too easy, now, to toss a garment off, to throw our fabric away. Which is, perhaps, why it makes less sense—ethically—to do so. The Trans-American Trading Company, which operates out of Clifton, New Jersey, reportedly processes 70,000 pounds of used clothing in its factory every single day. Each year, the company claims to ship 17 million tons of American textile refuse overseas. The life cycle of some of these garments will be extended, through further human adventure and creative re-use. But most will end up in landfills, destined to spend centuries in the expenditure and decomposition of their synthetic fibers.

The life cycle of garments, of fabric, is not spiritually irrelevant. Our garments are witnesses to, testimonies of, destructive waste and injustice. I won’t deny that there’s something sensible, something inspiring, about the antimatter of a spiritual veil that turns against the rich seductions of glamour. I have a penchant to flitter toward anything shiny and pretty, like a moth around a bald light bulb. It is helpful, I suppose, to tell myself that these attractions are all meaningless, transient, unnecessary… all just passing away. But the life cycle of a garment is not meaningless. It is, rather, a site where meanings—which tailor our spiritual lives—are produced. The era in which we simply fabricated spirituality is, I think, over. We look now, in moments of contemplation, into the folds of the fabric that hides us.