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.

The author is a doppelganger. Even better on the screen, lit up, big-time circulating word-wide, worldwide, s-i-m-u-l-t-a-n-e-o-u-s-l-y m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-i-n-g. Illusion of coherence, this: neat and tidy on the screen, a well reasoned argument.

I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world, and I remember Nadja.

Nadja, four-times removed: 1. Somebody—which is to say, some body, allegedly—female in Paris, purportedly mad, institutionalized, the object of Surrealist André Breton’s obsession; 2. the main character in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, and by that fact immortalized, big-time circulating, simultaneously manifesting; 3. the ghost that haunted (in bodily time) or haunts (in doppelganger time) André Breton—either in Paris, or in the novel, or both—after he breaks off their 10-day rendezvous because Breton can not live with the thought of her as some body; 4. an introductory trope to this reflection (on automatic writing) that took on a life of its own the moment I began to yawp over the roofs of the world.

Qui suis-je?

Who am I?

Who wrote that?

Breton—transfixed by Nadja’s stream-of-consciousness, allegedly irrational, thought-words/thought-worlds—as the opening sentence of Nadja—and now “I”, coming to here underneath this blinking cursor that no longer exists as you read about it now on the big screen lit up (once upon a time, which is to say before time as we now experience it, I could have written on the page—which is to say, on the way to nowhere in particular, or everywhere in general, but here we are now, whatever this might mean, exactly.)

Good question, this qui suis-je. And might we not add as well, où? Where are we, exactly, now, anyway, tossed about, swaying side-to-side, undulating in the midst of this chaotic sea of words, electronic information, simultaneously glowing gigabytes, white hot, magic discourse, published or perished or polished or not?

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.

But where was I? Breton likened his own fascination with Nadja to Dr. Theodore Flournoy’s infatuation with Hélène Smith (née Catherine-Elise Muller), that automatic writer (and Surrealist darling, and Spiritualist medium, and later Christian visionary) who left her body in flights to Mars, bringing back the Martian language to Earth, speaking to Flournoy in Martian, writing down the alphabet of Mars for scholars to ponder.

Advertisement from the August 1925 Popular Mechanics.

And who wrote that?

The psychologist Flournoy wrote about Smith and her Martian travels in his Des Indes à la Planete Mars—“From India to the Planet Mars”—published in 1900. No automatic writer he, Flournoy shielded us all from Smith’s madness by explaining the visions—i-n-f-a-n-t-i-l-e r-e-g-r-e-s-s-i-o-n—mercifully providing an illusion of coherence, which is to say a reason, for all of the babble. Thanks to Smith’s own magic, the wily Flournoy entered into the stream-of-printed-consciousness as a rational doppelganger-subject.

Cease now the endless flow of motion!

But it is far too late for that. The automatic writing has been mushrooming, fragmenting, overwhelming, and recombining for a very long time now. I remember John Ballou Newbrough, who in 1880 saw a strange light envelop his hands as he held them over a manual typewriter. The next thing he knew, a manuscript began to write itself. It was Oahspe: a New Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Embassadors [sic]. (A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens of the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years, together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovah to Man of the present Day. With Revelations from the Second Resurrection, Formed in Words in the Thirty Third Year of the Kosmon Era.) I remember Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1845 lapsed into mesmeric trance at the hands of his operator S.S. Lyons. Two years later, the paradigmatic made-in-America metaphysical text appeared in print, “by and through” Davis. It was entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (In Three Parts. Part First. Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed, or institution, that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error. Part Second. Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge. Part Third. When distributive justice pervades the social world, virtue and morality will bloom with an immortal beauty: while the Sun of Righteousness will arise in the horizon of universal industry, and shed its genial rays over all the fields of peace, plenty, and HUMAN HAPPINESS!) I remember the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the pre-1492 oikoumene cosmic-world-map before it exploded, supernova-like, into a multitude of worlds. I remember Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and the Word before it erupted, Vesuvius-like, into a googolplex of words.

I write, “I.” Scribo ergo sum: the only way to be, coherently, worldwide, amid this raging molten meltdown.

Advertisement from the September 1926 The Rotarian.

You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you you winds;
You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
embedded rocks…

Neat and tidy on the screen, some semblance of form still remains, which is to say this glowing white rectangle, this body of yours slouched in a chair, my body nowhere to be found in this doppelganger-ether-ghost, automatic-Martian-author-voice, simultaneously-manifesting, which is to say, now is as good as any time to break from the stream, the other doppelgangers notwithstanding, and may automatic writing be praised forevermore.

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.

Picture yourself on a train in a station,
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties.
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile,
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967)

When I was 17 I dropped my first tab of acid. A friend and I excused ourselves from school, drove to Chatsworth Park in the San Fernando Valley, and tripped for about seven hours. The experience was breathtaking, to say the least: the blue sky and clouds took on geometric shapes and impossible proportions; when I waved my hand in front of my face it left multicolored trails and incandescent traces that confounded my sense of bodily space; I was overcome with a strange and powerful love for all of humanity that seemed to be personally exhilarating and cosmically liberating at the same time; and an indescribable awareness of inner light and profound insight overwhelmed my consciousness that was as mystical as it was psychologically illuminating.

The year was 1979, way beyond the psychedelic and tumultuous decade of the 1960s often associated with drug experimentation and mind-expanding possibilities with altered states of consciousness. But it is a fitting anecdote to begin this essay for one specific reason: it was through the ingestion of LSD that I came to understand the utility and value of the word “spirituality.” Previous to this experience the only thing I knew about religion was based entirely on the many years of Sunday school and endless hours of Hebrew school at my reform Jewish temple in preparation for my Bar Mitzvah several years earlier. What I experienced under the influence was nothing like religion as I knew it, and while I had heard the word “spirituality” used occasionally over the years, I had no idea what it referred to until my psychedelic trip in Chatsworth Park. After that day the meaning of the word spirituality became crystal clear to me and I began to use it more frequently in my own speech and imagination to identify perspectives and experiences that were decidedly not about religion, and most assuredly about sacred insights, expansive consciousness, transcendence of the body, and inner knowledge.

The point I would like to make here—and in an effort now to shift the narrative from personal confessional to cultural analysis—is that LSD contributed to a society-wide awareness of spirituality as a viable and meaningful alternative to institutional religion. LSD was itself a trip through categorical space, a tab that transitioned a tripping public from one idea of experience to another, from an idea of religion to one of spirituality. Even with the obvious dangers and bad trips associated with LSD, use of this drug and the public commentary about it provided Americans with a vocabulary to describe personal religious experiences utterly disconnected from conventional language used to identify the sacred, and not quite tethered to but not completely separated from the deep-rooted histories of spirituality provided by Leigh Schmidt in Restless Souls and Catherine Albanese in A Republic of Mind and Spirit.

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, LSD was, for many, a potent manufactured sacrament that unlocked the doors of perception in an American culture imprisoned by theological conformity, blew open the boundaries of religious experience hemmed in by doctrine and narrow ideas about social propriety, and legitimated popular cultural transformations that idealized notions of inner truth, self-seeking personal illumination, and consciousness expansion. In other words, experiences with LSD and the publicity surrounding them gave shape and content to modern understandings of spirituality.

The long and tortured history of LSD has been well chronicled in books like Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (2010), Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus (2008), and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1995). The point I would like to make in this essay is speculation based on some preliminary reflections on spirituality (and not, in case anyone is wondering, based on nostalgic flashbacks). Lysergic acid diethylamide is intimately linked to the history of spirituality in modern American culture and became a popular touchstone in new religious cultures—countercultural at first, but within decades it became quite mainstream. Although the drug would always be on the margins of practiced experience, its interpretive effects lasted well after the 1960s.

Note: I should also say right off the bat that I am not advocating drug use or making any claims about LSD’s value in the endeavor to discover the authentic self or inner spiritual truth. I am saying though that contemporary discussions about spirituality are linked—via experiences, via language, via music, via writing—to the popularity of LSD and its promoters during the 1960s and early 1970s, even with, or in spite of, the very public early awareness of bad trips, illegal activities, and dangerous effects. How can the highly personal, ethereally immaterial, soulfully profound New Age spiritual revelations of the last four decades be connected to the undeniably material effects of twenty atoms of carbon, twenty-five atoms of hydrogen, three atoms of nitrogen, and one atom of oxygen? Hopefully you won’t have to turn on to see the point.

Lysergic acid diethylamide has been on the American scene since the 1950s, after the chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 and then experimented with it and realized its mind altering potential in 1943. From that point of origin the history of LSD in America gets complicated, with early excitement about the potential useful benefits of the drug in the newly created Central Intelligence Agency in the later 1940s and in the burgeoning field of psychotherapy, which no longer limited itself to psychoanalytic theories restricted to the talking cure. Indeed in its earliest appearance on the American landscape it was labeled a psychotomimetic that could induce forms of psychosis. For the CIA and military, it was seen as a drug that could possibly lead to mind control and be weaponized; for psychiatrists and therapists, it was seen as a drug that could possibly lead to better mental health and more creativity. Early on a great deal of scientific research interest and energy emanating from discipline-centered institutions like the military and universities focused on researching the effects of LSD on the mind and psychological well being.

The religious history of the drug and its impact on American spirituality, however, is driven less by specific institutional initiatives and more by undisciplined individual practitioners and advocates who understood the promise of LSD in cosmic rather than instrumental terms.

To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

This famous couplet, written by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, though a product of his relationship with Aldous Huxley, brought a new word into existence, psychedelic, that could be applied to certain drugs which might induce hallucinations like psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, and produced a more complex set of experiences than simply an imitation of psychosis. After taking mescaline in his Hollywood Hills, California, home, Huxley and visitor Osmond understood the conceptual limitations of the word psychotomimetic to capture their time under the influence and set about finding something more accurate, less pathological, and certainly open to what they especially wanted to emphasize about this new perspective: the powerfully mystical dimensions of their experiences. Out of this experiment with mescaline, of course, Huxley also wrote the influential book, The Doors of Perception. The linguistic and culturally liberating shift from pscyhotomimetic to psychedelic in the second half of the 1950s, however, is a significant and pivotal moment in the popular understandings of the power and purposes of LSD.

Osmond and other proponents of LSD, including Alfred Hubbard, the infamous “Captain Trips” who was a key proselytizer and distributor of the drug in the 1950s, and Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Oscar Janiger, who helped organize more recreational uses of LSD and other psychedelics with scientists and artists in southern California, contributed to the growing awareness of the drug as both therapeutic agent and gateway to mind-blowing revelations. As the good news about LSD spread from early disciples to an increasingly wide ranging network of users, various media outlets such as magazines like Time and Good Housekeeping began to bring even more publicity to the drug. In research labs and therapy sessions, dinner parties and individual experiments, LSD started to appeal to and be consumed by patients and doctors, as well as ordinary Americans and world famous celebrities. Cary Grant, for one, publicly praised the drug for transforming his life. Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, learned of Osmond’s success using LSD as treatment for alcoholics and eventually took it himself, becoming enthusiastic after his trip about its potential to foster transcendence of the ego and a direct religious experience with a higher power.

Osmond’s research, which was done primarily at Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in the early 1950s, also came to the attention of another alcoholic in this story, undoubtedly the key figure who popularized the mash up of LSD, spirituality, therapy, and consciousness expansion in the early 1960s: Timothy Leary. Having experimented with psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1960 that led to what he described as an eventful religious experience, Leary was convinced about the power of psychedelic drugs and returned after this trip to his temporary Harvard position as a lecturer in the Psychology department. He established the “Harvard Psilocybin Project,” soon to be changed to the “Harvard Psychedelic Project,” and began experimenting with Richard Alpert, an assistant professor of education and psychology, with psilocybin and mescaline to treat and rehabilitate criminals. Others came into this scene, including beat poet Allen Ginsberg and future scholar of comparative religion Huston Smith, and soon recreational use of these drugs outside of experimental and therapeutic environments grew in theory and practice. The religious implications of these recreational activities with psychedelics overtook, or at least seamlessly intersected with the psychological ruminations about the potential for criminal rehabilitation, psychiatric interventions, or behavior altering promise.

LSD entered the public picture in the mid 1960s and, as the saying goes, “the world would never be the same.” Leary and Alpert got thrown out of Harvard for a variety of reasons, including animosity among many faculty members and a damning exposé about drug use written by Andrew Weil, a young Harvard student rejected from the psychedelic “club” who would go on to earn his MD, experiment on his own with illegal substances, and eventually secure a future as an alternative health and spiritual guru success story. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert set up shop in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and began more robust research with LSD that brought new spiritual breakthroughs to the community of people living with the two on the beach. Within a short time, the press learned about the experimentation in living taking place on this exotic beach in Mexico, increasing Leary’s notoriety especially, but also leading to his and Alpert’s removal from the country. From here the two eventually end up in Milbrook, New York, in 1963 and, with the patronage of some very wealthy fans, set up a new lab—really an enormous Gothic mansion with multiple buildings and beautiful, sprawling grounds—to conduct their research, which meant ingesting and sharing unimaginable amounts of acid.

The high life at Millbrook likewise began to crumble before long, with Alpert breaking from Leary and leaving in 1965, and Leary himself getting entangled in numerous legal difficulties, including an arrest and conviction for possession of pot in 1965, and two subsequent raids at the mansion that contributed to Leary’s departure and ultimately the end of the Millbrook experiment in 1967. Indeed, by this time not only Leary but also LSD had become increasingly dangerous to American cultural, political, and social authorities who only a few years earlier were either unaware of its appearance on the scene, indifferent to the drug, or open to its potential psychiatric value, but who very quickly perceived a serious threat to social stability. Leary’s catchy motto, “Tune in, turn on, drop out” signaled apathy, anarchy, and atheism to the culture warriors reacting to the emergence of youth culture, drug culture, and musical culture overtaking the American marketplace.

The center of gravity in this very brief though consequential history of acid in the mid 1960s—illustrious to some, infamous to others—shifts from upstate New York to the Bay Area, thanks to the connections and popularity of Alpert and Leary’s lectures/performances in the area; the improbable allure of Ken Kesey’s “Acid Tests” orchestrated with the Merry Pranksters and including strobe lights, dancing, music, often featuring future lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, and lots and lots of acid; and such gala LSD fueled events like the three-day Trips Festival, the Love Pageant Rally, and the Human Be-In.

The San Francisco neighborhood known as Haight Ashbury became ground zero for the west coast cultural explosion associated with LSD, a “small psychedelic city state” that spawned not only hippie culture as America came to understand it, but also more religiously ritualistic uses of acid for cosmic and personal spiritual awakening and transformation as described, for example in the local publication know as The Oracle. Yet despite the optimism associated with the strange brew of political activism, self-exploration, communal experimentation, mystical transportation, and social liberation, the cold, hard realities of the conflicted era—which included police enforcement to uphold laws, human degradation and exploitation, and serious political contestations—abruptly contained the boundaries of hippie culture and dampened the heat from the Summer of Love in 1967. LSD was declared illegal in 1966, congressional hearings emphasized the dangers of drugs, Leary was soon in jail and, after escaping from prison, in exile by the early 1970s, and Richard Nixon called for a war on drugs.

This might seem like a story about LSD that crashes and burns within a very short time frame, but the real story here is instead the tremendous and long lasting impact this drug and its advocates had on American religious culture. LSD provided many with the descriptive language and cosmic orientation to talk openly about spiritual realities available to individuals discontent with traditional, familiar religions on the American landscape (varieties of Christianity and Judaism primarily at the time). These were realities designated by their expositors as outside the institutional and communal structures of their parents’ communities, structures that could no longer contain a deep rooted spiritual sensibility in American religious history that seeks mystical union over church teachings; consciousness expansion instead of a focus on a personal God; inner truth that leads to personal enlightenment rather than conformity with communal authorities. The messengers who experienced the new realities awakened by LSD contributed to the cultural legitimacy of a free floating but inner-directed spirituality as an alternative religious culture driven by personal strivings for cosmic illuminations and mystical revelation

Of course, some of these messengers may have been participating in antics and practices of self-promotion that could be taken as parody or prophecy. Alpert, whose own spiritual journey brought him to India, where he assumed the new identity of Ram Dass and contributed to the increasing popular interest in “eastern” religions; Weil, whose early rejection from the club did not stop him from experimentation with, and support of, various drugs and who ultimately became a leading figure in alternative, integrative medicine as much about the spirit as the body. Some messengers brought the gospel of LSD through music, including the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, to name only a few. And some, at least for a short time, very easily moved from LSD to the increasingly popular Human Potential Movement, a seminal cultural phenomenon associated with the birth of New Age spirituality and centrally located at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

And even though acid was criminalized, even though bad trips were publicized, even though psychiatry rejected LSD as a viable therapeutic treatment, and even though the promise of countercultural revolution petered out by the end of the decade, public representations and propaganda about acid trips legitimated a certain kind of new, and until that point marginalized, spiritual language for American consumers and seekers. The personal, mystical, consciousness expanding, ecstatic experiences associated with LSD contributed, in short, to a new brand of spirituality that struck a chord and reverberated in culture far beyond those relatively small numbers dropping acid and having first hand spiritual encounters.

LSD is one of many catalysts—or better, for some, sacraments—that transmute these latent spiritual tendencies and dispositions into viable, popular, and consumable religious cultures increasingly associated with the New Age spirituality flowering in the wake of 1960s. Within a very short time, and coincident with a variety of other social, cultural, and political forces transforming American society in that decade, a spiritualized view of psychedelics generally and LSD specifically as gateways to cosmic illumination and personal religious awakening, gained traction in and made an impact on the popular religious imagination like nothing before or since. Thanks in large part to LSD, it became possible, in other words, for large numbers of people to utter the phrase “spiritual, not religious” in public, and to have some personal phenomology for what, precisely, that means.

I am an anthropologist (and sometimes a psychologist) and what I do is figure out how people learn to experience what they have to imagine as real. Many years ago, as a young ethnographer beginning my dissertation research, I set out to study people who practiced magic in present-day Britain. Most of the people that I interviewed thought of themselves as worshiping an ancient goddess under the full and pendulous moon. For them the earth was alive, and they sought to feel its power pulsing beneath their feet. They thought of themselves as shamans, druids, witches, and warlocks, responsive to the subtle rhythms of the earth. Meanwhile, these magicians lived in the very modern city of London. They held modern jobs and had modern lives. But they imagined themselves into a time that they understood as not modern, with practices they sourced in ancient wisdom. To understand how they came to believe in magic, I joined their groups. I read their books and novels. I practiced their techniques and I participated in their rituals.

For the most part, the rituals depended on techniques of the imagination. You shut your eyes, and saw with your mind’s eye the story told by the leader of the group.

In the late afternoons, I practiced these techniques following the instructions I was given. Here is an example from one of my early lessons (with credit to one of my early teachers, Marian Greene), which I did, in some form, for thirty minutes a day for nine months:

Work through these exercises, practicing one of them for a few minutes each day, either before or after your meditation session.

1. Stand up and examine the room in which you are working. Turn a full circle, scanning the room. Now sit down, close the eyes and build the room in the imagination. Note where the memory or visualizing power fails. At the end of the exercise briefly re-examine the room and check your accuracy. Note the results in your diary.

2. Carefully visualize yourself leaving the room in which you are working, going for a short walk you know well, and returning to your room. Note clarity, breaks in concentration, etc, as you did before.

3. Go for an imaginary walk. An imaginary companion, human or animal, can accompany you. Always start and finish the walk in the room that you use for the exercises. Note the results, etc, as before.

4. Build up in your imagination a journey from your current physical plane home to your ideal room. Start the journey in real surrounds then gradually make the transition to the imaginary journey by any means you wish. Make the journey to and from the room until it is entirely familiar.

What startled me, as a young ethnographer, was that this training worked. At least, it seemed to shift something in the way I used my senses and my internal sensory awareness. After about a year of this kind of training, spending thirty minutes a day in an inner world structured in part by external instructions, my mental imagery did seem to become clearer. I thought that my images had sharper borders, greater solidity and more endurance. They had more detail. I felt that my senses were more alive, more alert. I began to feel that my states of concentration were deeper and more sharply different from those of my everyday experience. One morning, I woke early after an evening in which I had read a book by a magician. The book was about Arthurian Britain and the early Celtic isles. Reading late into the night, I had allowed myself to get deeply involved with the story, reading not the way I read a textbook but the way I read books like The Secret Garden as a child. I gave way to the story and allowed it to grip my feelings and to fill my mind. As I woke that next morning I saw six druids standing against the window, above the stirring London street below my window. I saw them and they beckoned to me.

I stared for a moment of stunned astonishment, and then I shot up out of bed. Before I could capture the moment again, they were gone. Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not. But my memory of the experience is still very clear. I do not remember that I had imagined them, or that I had wanted to see them, or that I had pretended to see them. I remember that I saw them as clearly and distinctly and as external to me as I saw the notebook in which I recorded the moment, my sentences underlined and marked by exclamation points. I remember it so clearly because it was so singular. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

But other people in the magical world had experiences like that. They practiced the exercises and read the books and participated in the rituals and then, out of the blue, they had seen something. They saw the Goddess, or a flash of light, or a shining vision of another world. They saw these as things in the world, not phantoms in the mind, although because the image vanished almost immediately, they knew that what they had seen was not ordinary. They said that their mental imagery had become sharper. They thought that their inner sense had become more alive.

That’s what the training does. It shifts attention from the external to the internal, and blurs the line we draw between the mind and the world. And, as I have argued in my scholarship and teaching, this shift alters the lines we draw. The mind bleeds into the world. Not predictably, and not on demand, and for some more than others, but when it happens, the senses experience what is not materially present.

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts.

F.T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto.” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909.

Anselm defined God as a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is never the case for the ultimate demitasse of espresso, known as the godshot. Occasionally a godshot is reported, a triumph of technique, technology, and nature. But mostly godshot suggests deferral, a perfection yet to come. Prospects of better gear, superior beans, purer metals, and more advanced knowledge fire the imagination of finer versions, an espresso to produce still more intense experiences of taste and stimulation, a truer sense of terroir and origins. It is just over there, and we can taste it. Espresso mediates, and is used to transform, the relation between subjective experience and the external world. The most valuable coffee bean ground for espresso, Kopi Luwak, is collected after being ingested and excreted by Indonesian civets. Now that’s a spiritual food, beans chock-full of inner life, and the potential of its expression.

Though the nomenclature of the godshot may be said to be mere semantics, semantics are rarely merely mere. The recent expansion of third-wave coffee conoisseurship and technologies, producing myriad new and reformed public shops and cafés (McCafé in the Golden Arched Holy of Holies), and ever more accoutrements for the home, is dramatic. In this short flight, I explore spirituality through espresso, as a history of exchanges between people and machines that brokered, adjusted and defined the relation between outer and inner, between external “things” and inner experience.

Coffee beans are, of course, the produce of a plant, not precisely a thing. They are even actors of a sort—enliveners, vivifiers, catalytic converters. Their origin legend tells of an Ethiopian goatherder boy named Kaldi who, in the tenth century (or eighth, or fourth, or seventh) first observed the excited behavior of his goats as they gnawed wild berries, and decided to try the same. The stimulating force of coffee was always a major part of its appeal, albeit in diverse ways, from its emergence in Ethiopia to its systematic plantation in Yemen to its global transport via the expansion of Islam and then the Ottoman Empire, to the arrival in Europe via Turkey in the hands of Venetian traders, to the first coffeehouses of Europe by the mid-1600s. Those seventeenth-century “penny universities” arrived just in time to help produce the public sphere, and to construct diagnoses of the secular that poured from the chatter over cups. Etymology presents a similarly global arc—English coffee from Turkish kahve, from Arabic gahwa, abbreviated from gahwat al-bun, “wine of the bean.”

The nominative tether to that more famously spiritual food, wine, is suggestive. Wine has a long pedigree as a thoroughly religious sort of drink, from Dionysian to Christian rites, and in metaphysics from the Symposium to the theory of transubstantiation. Roland Barthes called wine the totem-drink of France. Wine not only represented France the nation, it also converted its subjects into citizens. As a converting substance, wine miraculously extracts opposites from its object: youthfulness from the aged (as Socrates says), and boldness from the shy. Wine is of the earth, producing not only the bacchanal but also dreams and reverie, a theme addressed in depth by Bachelard. For some, wine’s spirituality has to do with its indigeneity, the inseparability of its identity from particular lands, as terroir. Other writers, like Michel Leiris, found in it the dread of the alloy, the blend, the complete interpenetration of one thing by another. Wine and water, like coffee and milk, can completely fuse, connoting the horror of the total breaching of boundaries and loss of identity, an unavoidable risk of conversion.

Other familiar ingestibles that modulate interior human experience in relation to the material world have been addressed in spiritual terms too. Fernando Ortiz’ masterpiece, Cuban Counterpoint, juxtaposed sugar and tobacco:

Food and poison, waking and drowsing, energy and dream, delight of the flesh and delight of the spirit, sensuality and thought, the satisfaction of an appetite and the contemplation of a moment’s illusion, calories of nourishment and puffs of fantasy, undifferentiated and commonplace anonymity from the cradle and aristocratic individuality recognized wherever it goes, medicine and magic, reality and deception, virtue and vice. Sugar is she; tobacco is he. Sugar cane was the gift of the gods, tobacco of the devils; she is the daughter of Apollo, he is the offspring of Persephone.

Ortiz insisted on the spiritual dimension of these ingestible things by pointing to their resemblance to religion proper: “The smoke that rises heavenward has a spiritual evocation … like a fumigatory purification. The fine, dirty ash to which it turns is a funereal suggestion of belated repentance.”

Those religious resemblances are less intriguing to me than Ortiz’s approach to spirituality through material, edible things, his poetic exploration of the techne (in Heidegger’s sense of technique plus poiesis: methods of causing to emerge) that people apply to building correspondences between inner and outer worlds, however construed. “Spirituality” refers to the practices and things used to find and make more or less direct ties between subjective experience and the shared empirical world. For Kant or Durkheim, spirituality is strictly impossible—and quixotic—since the world is irremediably mediated, refracted and translated via symbols. Spiritual practices, contrariwise, enact the possibility of a real and direct fusion of the self and the world. It was in this sense that Henri Bergson, Durkheim’s schoolmate and peer, was called a spiritualist, sometimes derisively, since he posited the direct experience of the world through what he called Intuition.

Spirituality from this perspective is but tangentially related to “religion.” It can take more or less religious forms, in the sense of mapping correspondences between subjective experience and the external influence of gods, but it need not be religious in that restricted sense at all. In spirituality’s most intense expressions of direct internal-external, subjective-objective mappings, it can verge into something like shamanic magic, the use of private visions to exert even causal power on the outside world; raising the sun, say, or healing another’s body. In its softer, more secular and more consumerist forms, spiritual practices seem to produce a more or less barometric idea of interiority, in which inner states are felt and presented as meaningfully indexed to the outside world—the melancholy that mirrors, and even takes part in, the rainy day. Bergson the “spiritualist” used the example of the feeling of impatience he felt as he waited for sugar to dissolve in water he wanted to sweeten. The fact that he must wait is, he wrote, “big with meaning.” As the sugar’s time to dissolve and his impatience are merged, the sugar-water is conjoined with a piece of his own life’s duration, producing a fullness of time that we only artificially parse out into segments. This fullness is the Whole. Later he called it the Duration.

It is surely not incidental that Bergson was terrifically concerned to remind readers of the Whole and the Duration at just the fin de siècle moment when machines that transformed and transmitted nature at ever-accelerating speeds were also increasingly mediating peoples’ relations to each other, to the world, and to the experience of self. Espresso machines were one of many innovations that came from harnessing the power of steam—steamships, steam locomotives, steam coffee. The earliest contraptions forcing water through tightly packed coffee grounds using the force of steam were built in France in the early 1800s, employing a rough technique that remains in use today in almost all Italian homes in the stovetop moka pot. The espresso machine referred not only to the new technique of making coffee at pressured speed—the same word was applied to fast-traveling trains, for example—but also to individually prepared servings made expressly for one customer. The early machine-builder and entrepreneur, Victoria Arduino, joined the images of the speeding train and the steaming new coffee served for the on-the-go solo customer, in a striking 1922 advertisement drawn by Leonetto Cappiello:

The first brass pressure machine was Italian, made by Luigi Bezzera and Desidorio Pavoni between 1901 and 1903, and it was mostly Italian machines that filled the art nouveau cafés of Europe’s belle époque. Bezzera probably built the basic machine, but it was Pavoni who first marketed the name, “espressso,” and also Pavoni who first attached the wand that released surplus steam and later allowed for the theatrical fashioning, and then the fashion, of foamed milk drinks like cappuccinos. Early lever-pump machines were also Italian, built by Giovanni Achille Gaggia in 1945, using a spring-piston design to increase the pressure brought to bear on more finely ground coffee. The pressure generated by Gaggia’s machine created the crema that became the signal feature of correctly made espresso. These Gaggia-made espressos with crema and foamed milk were the drink that sated the post-war boom in the cafés of Europe, filled to bursting as rations on coffee were lifted and public life revived. Many of the art nouveau and deco cafés, at least in Paris, look much the same today as they did in Bezzera and Pavoni’s time. The solid, dazzling espresso machines of polished copper, brass and steel are still manufactured as a retro-look today, and they afford a sense of the aesthetic effects they must have made on patrons a century ago: Sleek, angular metal set against lush velvet in elegant cafés, industry tamed and polished, steam-locomotion civilized in the salon, piston progress welded to fashion and desire. After the Second War, espresso became totemic, sharing with wine, tobacco, and sugar the status of what Barthes called “converting substances.” They were bio-technes to cultivate desired relations of interior states with the external world, or even occasionally blurring them, as in the unmediated Whole of the godshot.

Still, what could be “spiritual” about the espresso brewing process itself? At first glance, this looks like the opposite of the spiritual, more like a story of industry, speed, efficiency, of workers’ schedules that required 25-second rather than minutes-long extractions for their quickening, of standing at counters rather than sitting at table, of white European masters pressing still more energy from brown tropics, of power, and Italian nationalism; in short, about control. Maybe even, kind of, about fascism, the brass and steel, eagle-topped machines that yoked the totemic drink to striding national aspirations? F.T. Marinetti, the early bard of Italian fascism, included in his 1932 Futurist Cookbook dishes made with espresso, like “The Excited Pig”: A whole salami, skinned, then cooked in strong espresso coffee and flavored with eau-de-cologne. Surely this sort of techno-industrial orgy was the opposite of the spirituality of wine or tobacco, of conviviality or reverie or dreams or intuition or the Duration.

Yes, yes, yes… and yet. This is “spirituality” too, pipes and ducts traversing interiority and exteriority using metals and steam and technique, not to mention, of course, the giant southern storehouse of beans yanked suddenly much nearer through the power of steam, the steam of ships, rail, and coffee. As the flipside of romantic spirituality, here was a precursor of the cybernetic spiritual, the holy machined human as a fusible sequence of evercharging parts. Marinetti wrote in yet another manifesto, “The Futurist Sensibility” (1919): “Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables, and minerals (an outmoded system) we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material.” Animalize, electrify, liquefy: espresso was a steam-arm prosthetic with which Kaldi the Ethiopian goatherder boy of the mythic origins of coffee, after a thousand years of imitation and approximation, finally became the ecstatic goat, dancing in the Duration.

The ecstasy of the electrified and liquefied individual soul is not the only conversion espresso achieves. Parisian cafés, for example, offer an alternative to mediating the self with spiritualities of speed or solipsistic reverie. Here, inner experience is mediated by espresso in hyper-social style, and Durkheim smiles from the cemetery of Montparnasse. Café tables are filled three-rows deep before you can even get inside. The chic and the hoi polloi alike are gathered to gab, look around, and peer over their standard-issue espresso at other people. The bentwood and rattan chairs are always faced out toward the big stage of the street. None are turned inward. Espresso is supremely public and visual, a prop for seeing and being seen.

To the taste of Italian traditionalists and third-wave American and Australian coffee geeks, it is also often careless: Robusta rather than Arabica beans, dosed to fill the order but probably ground awhile ago, and not enough of them, and barely leveled or tamped anyway, and the shot inattentively pulled during a chat with another customer. But not only that! Cigarettes and wine are being consumed alongside espresso, whether at 10:00 am or 10:00 pm. This is quite unlike the rational segmentation of converting substances, time schedules, and kinds of socialization or reverie operative in U.S. public and private houses (caffeine, only until noon; liquor, only after five; cigarettes, I think I saw one in Mad Men once.) The easygoing style of French espresso preparation, and the promiscuous Parisian mingling of espresso, wine and tobacco, ruffles coffee geeks’ view of the solemn focus called for in approaching the elixir. The French barmen are sure to mishandle the proper roast and temperature, the purity of the water, and the microfoam texture of respectable crema. French consumers are likely to overlook the citrus tones or nutty notes, and to misrecognize the overall mouthfeel. Critical connoisseurs arriving from the U.S. or Australia find the beautiful old espresso machines of Paris wasted in flip sociality. For these coffee geeks, tending their spiritual discipline, there is nothing so insouciantly social about espresso. Theirs is more of a Shaker ethos, built on the love of process and craft and tools, and an indivisible sympathy with and through espresso, like Bergson’s intuition of the Whole as he watched sugar dissolve in his water.

Like Bergson, they’ve had a revelation that inspires reform. Walk into Café Coutume in Paris, on Rue de Babylone in the conservative 7th arrondisement, for example. The owners are an international group of third-wave missionaries—Portuguese, Australian, American, and a lonely Frenchman—embarked on the quest to redeem the loose Parisian cafés. They describe them as lost in their old traditions, whereas they take part in the “new coffee culture.” No rattan chairs out front to watch the world go by here. Instead, hanging naked bulbs and lots of luscious metal gear decorate the interior—vacuum siphons, a drip system of beakers, grinders, roasters and, very prominently, a fine red and chrome Italian La Marzocco GB/5 three-group espresso machine. The Strada, the ultimate espresso machine, is “coming soon,” and will be the first in France. (The godshot is near, the Duration is imminent). The gleaming machine is right up front, on display rather than buried behind the bar as in most bistrots and brasseries. Antoine Netien, creator of the café, explained, “The French are more accustomed to things that are more hidden. Our open motif is very American. You can see everything happening.” But it’s also visually focused on the gear needed for the perfect, expressly individual experience, despite the owners’ hope that the new café will be the hub of the promised new culture. Solitary drinkers are common. They are not here to talk, unless it is to ask about the equipment, or to demand intricate espresso drinks of precise individual formulae. Their orders require even an experienced barista’s fixed attention. It’s a good thing they recruited Kevin, from Iowa City, for the job.

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.

Comparatively speaking, 1998 was a rather dead time to be alive. In the three quarters of a century that American youth has lived its life through the soundtrack of popular music and masqueraded in the styles that go with it, never has a subculture had so little affect as indie rock. Neither dramatically decadent nor morbid, indie rockers were, by and large, simply muted and flat, unmovable. There was resistance in this reticence, a savvy After-Adorno suspicion of the saccharine earnestness of stadium rock and the illusory sentiment conjured in stagecraft’s glare. That is to say that like all identities, indie rock was an identity of opposition. And yet, its resentment suffered sorely from the lack of a suitable object. These were white kids, disproportionately. Reagan was gone, the Cold War was over, and the economy was strong. Without anything to get too worked up over, indie rockers adopted the posture of satisfied bemusement, and the conviction, above all else, to not be fooled again. Read in its own terms (which were essentially those of historical materialism) the languid understatement of indie rock makes all sorts of sense. And yet, the oddity must be stressed: here was a musical subculture whose music knew no dance.

Indie rock had its zealots: earnest makers of sound and taste who circulated in back-to-culture networks of artistic production and appreciation. Based in Denver with a satellite on the hallowed ground of Athens, Georgia, the Elephant 6 collective was one such clique. Contrary to the dominant mood, these people were in no way cool. Perhaps none was less so than Neutral Milk Hotel’s romantic genius of a front man, Jeff Mangum. For those who knew him—and only too soon, those who didn’t—Mangum was a tamer of inspiration, a channeler of visions, an oracle.

A tentative sidebar on the spiritual: even and especially for those hungry American souls that can remember a time before when, rifling one day through the attic, they stumbled upon the faded telegraph report bearing the unfortunate news that God was dead, the irruption that Mircea Eliade dubbed hierophany retains an antecedence in experience. In nature, in love, and perhaps most frequently, in the intimate solitude of recorded music, a moment in time has the capacity to explode with exuberance, devastation, or in a wash of meaningfulness without name. And as the silly theory goes, in the wake of such explosions, grooves of significance are cut in the score of time. And so, for periods of days or weeks of even years before repetition goes stale and our attention is pulled in the direction of further novelty, a path through the woods becomes a discipline, pillow talk becomes a catechism, and an album becomes a liturgy to be hollered at the top of our lungs as the interstate flies by.

So it has been for many with the revelation pressed in plastic as Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That those first undone by the album were predominantly disaffected ironists calls to mind midrashic meditations over the characterization in Genesis of Noah as a righteous man in his generation. What work, the rabbis ask, does the temporal qualifier—in his generation—perform? Does it accentuate or mitigate the degree of Noah’s righteousness? The same might be asked of Aeroplane. It might well be the case that 1969 saw the release of ten records with such savage spirituality and that my testimony is merely the travelogue of a rationalist blinded by only the dim light of the cave’s mouth. Or, perhaps, the fact that this force of an album emerged from such a wasteland is precisely what makes it a reasonable bet that the children of my children’s children will know it to some degree.

Here, where I strain to describe the album so as to make it available to the uninitiated reader is where things can only go awry. Nevertheless, let me try and fail to share with you something awesome.

In sound, the album is a circus: punk gives way to folk, which dissolves into a sonic mess and congeals back into rock ‘n roll. Slowed down, the title track’s simple GCDG chord progression could well be reinterpreted as doo-wop. At the core of the album’s instrumentation one can surely pinpoint a rock band, but these elements are wholly enmeshed in a melee of organ, banjo, saws, assorted white noise makers, and a Salvation Army Christmas band horn section, all of which warble collectively from frenzy to dirge. Time and again, the arrangement dissipates and we find ourselves with only Mangum’s voice, rough and raw if not unpretty, alone save for a guitar and a four-track recorder.

The album sets its scene in an American landscape replete with broken families, surreptitious couplings and, presumably, the sorts of winged phonographs one finds aloft over an industrial cityscape on the back of the liner notes and as printed on the CD itself. Its tone is part Chitty Chitty Bang Bang surrealism and part Walker Evans photojournalism, at once jubilantly surreal and brutally ethnographic. As is true of our own world, the world where the album takes place is one of intense wonder and horror. Going on a decade ago I tried to graph the incidence of the album’s recurring tropes. A partial list of that effort reads as follows: death, trailer trash, suicide, I-thou love, domestic violence, incest, the miraculous, music, ghosts, sex, nature, destruction, eyes, mouths, Jesus Christ, abandonment, fetuses, birth, third-person love, shared hatred, carnivals, life as seen from the outside, semen and other bodily discharges, nostalgia, myself, flesh, sister, angels, wings, spines, faces, dreams and speakers.

As a fragment in the genealogy of spirituality, special attention is due to the recurring theme of the two-headed boy. Unmasked on the album’s fourth track as an undead laboratory curiosity, the two-headed boy is the exception that proves the existential rule that, as Aristophanes dubiously reports it in the Symposium, we are, each of us, the divided half of a broken human union. It is the myth that has inspired a thousand movies, a million pop songs and, at one time or another, everyone I know. Aeroplane’s version of this myth goes like this: before we are born, when we are in utero with our unborn twins, we are whole. After we are dead, when we meet on a cloud and laugh out loud with everyone we see, we are together again. In between, for the duration that we are thrown into the world, we fumble toward one another like adolescent lovers who have not yet mastered their body parts. Not always, however, is our differentiation unbridgeable. By making beautiful things—love, children, music—we may find fullness even as we live, united with one another and with God.

Yes, believe it or not: God. Bursting forth from an atmosphere of unformed reverb between the album’s first and second tracks, Mangum’s plaintive voice offers the most unanticipated praise:

I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you,
Yes I do

The voice repeats what it recognizes to be a truly shocking declaration. Whatever can this mean? In the unbroken block of prose of the liner notes, where the lyrics at times yield to second order reflection, an explanation is proffered.

…and now a song for jesus christ and since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more on the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal…

A disavowal in no sense, to an audience that can only assume he must be joking, Mangum makes clear that as crazy at it may sound, he means what he says. And yet, as he translates for the godless, his love is meant without a shred of exclusivity. Not based in any one religion, Jesus Christ here is a metonymy for the endless endless, the seemingly eternal white light that animates all things. Mangum’s God is one that even a secularist can abide, just so long as she knows what it’s like to be a body in a state of unwilled differentiation. In the album’s penultimate stanza, where the two-headed boy bids sad farewell to his soon to be broken-off half, just as Mangum, himself, prepares to say goodbye to the beloved that he will soon bequeath to us, the listeners, this God is further fleshed out:

And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

In my early years with the album, when I was still very much under Nietzsche’s spell, I made poor sense of Mangum’s faith by shoehorning into the first pair of these lines the intimation of the dissimulative character of the divine presence. God as a place where some holy spectacle lies: this would be something along the lines of God and not-God in an extra-theological sense. More recently, however, as my will to demystify has courted its other half, it has been the latter lyric in which I have found disclosed the fullness of the album’s theology, which is also to say, its anthropology. For in the play between “God is the place you will wait for / the rest of your life” and “God is the place you will wait / for the rest of your life,” we find a God at once transcendent and immanent, both achingly wanting and radically present. It is a God that presides over and resides in a world saturated in the beauty and horror of the sublime, which, even at its cruelest, always merits wonder. As the title track concludes in a declaration that comes as close as the album gets to prescription: “can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”

Ignoring for a moment this gentle model of righteous giddiness, I will conclude on a petty note, though one again germane to the genealogy at hand. For these very texts—the potently spiritual ones that inspire in us the impulse to proselytize—breed covetousness, a resentment in this case directed toward those over-readers who would restrict the bounteous spirit of this doctrine-less Word. From my jealous perspective, the emergent standard read of this cult album is just such a travesty. “An Anne Frank concept album,” is how one undergraduate characterized it for me to my dismay. “But,” I wanted to say, “Don’t you see? The album is about…everything!” Which I truly take it to be.

Fault for the Anne Frank reduction may be pinned on Mangum himself, who in an interview with a fleetingly influential magazine at the time of the album’s release identified the famous martyr as his muse and conversation partner. Shortly thereafter, the band broke up and Mangum vanished from the public view, not yet to reemerge. Because the prophet was now in occlusion, the interview—along with similar comments made by Mangum at the time—became the key for unlocking the album. This is to say that these texts became the key for defacing it. Beyond irresistible allusion, I won’t regale you with accounts of rock operas inspired by the album featuring high school children dressed as concentration camp inmates. The internet could provide that, if you like. Suffice it to say, the attempted sacrifice of Aeroplane to the Holocaust affirms a longstanding irritation of mine with the sundry transcendental signifiers of the secular, which dwell in its inner sanctum: the spiritual. As poisonous and stupid as God may have been for discourse—and He can well be—not by killing Him alone do we forego the analytic capabilities to violate the glories of creation.