Witness the wonders of Allan Chumak, the white-haired media phenom of the late-Soviet age, who promised to heal from a distance using only his hands, and the television broadcast. The large amber-shaded glasses. The unbroken gaze. Here he is, sitting inside the television box, which is now inside youtube inside your computer, inside your very own home.

To watch Chumak—and I mean really watch him, without interruption or preconception and until the end—is to enter into his world. You have to believe, lest you be left outside—a belief whose compensation is a pleasant sensation, the twilight feeling of sleepy-awakeness, a combination of TV-initiated alpha-waves and gentle hypnosis.

Chumak began appearing on Soviet state television during the late-1980s—the time of “Gorby,” perestroika, socialism with a human face. He was allotted a small, though by no means nondescript, corner of the morning program 120 minutes, at 7:15 am, when people all across the Soviet Union would tune in for some distance healing. Describing the source of his powers, Chumak would describe a magical moment when, at the age of 42, a torrent of energy pummeled his body like a waterfall and the world was revealed to him as a “fantastic diversity of energo-informational interaction.” Since that time, Chumak has been able to focus this “energy” through his hands for the purpose of healing.

Watch it again.

There is a certain reliable regularity at work in his programs. First there is the greeting and a brief explanation of the malady du jour—in this case allergy and respiratory disorders. Then there is a discussion of etiology—always for Chumak a disruption of “the harmony of every process in the organism.” Then the proposed resolution, a recalibration through his reiki-like hand movements. The cure takes place right then and there. A sympathetic current of sorts, perhaps aided, back then, by the static electricity gathering on the convex curve of the screen. There is an excess of force, too, though, and viewers are invited, with a mysterious half-smile, to place jars of water or cream (“whatever you like”) next to the television to be “charged” (zariazhennyi; also loaded) (:30). Finally, the recommended pose: “You ought to be free and comfortable…. Place your hands on your lap, arms down, and close your eyes. Only pay attention to those feelings that appear during the session.”

This posture of blindness and relaxation is the posture of faithful submission. It is an embodiment of vulnerability and trust, of innocence and expectation—a posture from which it would be extremely difficult to mount a defense were someone to punch you in the gut.

So much of what we might imagine about time and place—the late Empire moment—has been conjured from out of the smoke and mirrors of capitalist triumph. At the risk of falling prey to a post-Cold War imaginary, twenty-five years hence I imagine all those Soviet bodies in their apartments, stilled before the television. Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many found themselves in this position while living in the twilight of empire. It was the 1980s, after all, and the smell of the end of history was there like a dying animal. Or so it has become: imaginings must be taken, like a shot of bad tequila, with many grains of salt. Others, of course, experienced it very differently—as a chaotic and hopeful time in the Soviet Union. A time of exciting revelation that followed decades of so-called “stagnation” under Brezhnev. Gorbachev had introduced reforms to both the media environment, known as glasnost (literally transparency; openness), and to Soviet institutions (perestroika). People were again able to read more widely; opinions critical of Soviet life became more widely circulated. These new openings brought what anthropologists have documented, retrospectively, as sudden “break of consciousness” (perelom soznaniia) and “strong shock” (sil’neishii shok). Many new cultural forms emerged at this time, but among the most curious was the rise in mass-mediated “extrasensory” healers sent out live via the state broadcasting channel to the entire Soviet Union. Chumak is not alone. There is also Kashpirovsky’s televised hypnotism.

Watch it again.

Chumak was inside your home long before you clicked the link above. Consider, for instance, a resonance with a viral strain of American spirituality wrought of the fascination with national collectivity, media technologies, and gods. There is a dream here, utterly familiar. A voice that can only imagine itself in terms of everything or nothing, with little in between. Think, for example, of Whitman penning the following lines in 1855, five years prior to the Civil War:

I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

These and other alignments of spiritual uptick and political-economy suggest that Chumak speaks to a history redolent with spirit, technology, and empire, a history shared by Cold War adversaries, a history of mutual collapse.

I cannot help but watch Chumak. His wordlessness. The opening and closing of his jaw. The motion of his head, moving side-to-side, nodding, but bent on being still. He is intentional about not making sound, and so there are sounds of silence—lip smacking, throat clearing, the just-detectable sound of breathing. A knocking in the studio and a door closes—the lifting of the veil for a moment, reminding us the there are others there in studio, behind camera—a whole crew, perhaps, involved in this production.

The viewer is not a viewer. In asking us to close our eyes, Chumak has asked us to shuffle the sensorium. He has turned the clock back on modernity’s forward march of the gaze. TV is here meant to be experienced through the ears, on the skin, by the nose, and finally in the viscera. As I close my eyes now, I can recollect hearing my own 1980s television—its sound that is no sound: that high-pitched squeal of household appliances that only reach the ear from another room. I can feel the dancing dust on the screen under my fingers and the hair standing up on my arm. I cringe with anticipation at the crackling that gathers under the finger until the electrical shock! And I can smell it—that distinctive combination of household particle and arcing electricity. Don’t stand so close to the television!—not just an admonishment to protect the eyes, but also, perhaps, a warning born of suspicion of the industrial everyday. The TV was to deadly electrification as the microwave was to nuclear warhead.

Watch it again.

A typology of Chumak’s hand movements:

1. Fine-tuning: Tweaking the miniscule mechanics. Smaller movements are required.

2. Stroking: While holding one hand still, the other moves outward, as if petting a cat.

3. Gathering up and drawing out: An invisible sphere is constituted with both hands. Once constituted, one hand periodically pulls some threads out of it.

4. Tending to the sphere: The hands pack and repack the sphere.

5. The sign of the cross: Reminiscent of the Christian rite, the right hand draws a plus sign (usually several times vertical followed by several times horizontal).

6. Straightening up: Again, smoothing that which has been conjured.

7. Equalization and balance: The hands move as the hands of a scale, seeking equilibrium.

8. Silence: The hands punctuate action with inaction. Resting in midair, the hands await further instruction.

There has always been an interesting convergence between faith, media and power. Yet here it is not just very much like, but in fact asserted, the mundane gesture, captured by electricity and projected through a TV tube can carry with it an unseen “energy”—an energy with a power to cure from afar, bypassing the gaze. A metaphysics of morning television. An energy that is not an effort. An energy that doesn’t make a sound. An energy that comes as much, if not more so, from within as without. In this way, Chumak becomes the channel for your soul—your soul channel.

Watch it once more. When I turn the youtube transmission up, I hear two tracks now—the hiss of television, and what could be the bleeping of digital information.

Can I still place a jar of cream next to my computer monitor to charge it up? Was the TV the necessary medium for distance healing? Or does it have to do with the experience of late Empire and the failure of our language to articulate the decline? Or maybe it was some combination of naïve fascination with the television, only just making its way into the households of the world as an everyday object? We can’t know, and the ingredients of spiritual experience of this type seem scattered like electrons in search of a screen.

On youtube, a certain “achalkov” keys in his own riposte to Chumak’s session: “Awesome! After this session my mobile telephone was charged!”

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

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

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

I need to write an academic book about spirituality.

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

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

“Well it’s part of my job.”

“So are you getting paid for it?”

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

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

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

I need to write a popular book about spirituality.

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

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

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

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

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

And now I invite everyone to partake.

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

Let me be perfectly frank: I’ve loved each one of the Walkmans that I’ve owned. I even loved my discman and my MiniDisc player, and I’ve loved each of my iPods and now, I love the fact that my cellphone can play music. The invention of mobile music has probably been the most important technological advancement of my lifetime, and it has undoubtedly added a complex layer of mediation between me and the worlds I inhabit.

There are days when I can’t wait to get my headphones in, and other days when everything I choose to hear seems painfully out of tune. There are days when “shuffle” seems cruelly calibrated to chafe against my hearing, and other days when it seems smarter than I am.

Occasionally, I use mobile music as armature, guarding me against a social world I don’t want to get too close to. Often, I use it as accompaniment, to embellish a familiar walk or repetitive task. But always, mobile music is something that’s going to get in between me and wherever I am. Sometimes, it blocks out what’s out there, and sometimes it can invite in what is out there by opening up new ways of hearing spaces, places, and pieces of music that I thought I knew.

I well understand the irony here: my sense of the world around me rests on my ability to import a soundtrack of my own choosing and exert my sonic will on it. There is always another option: to forego my own desires and tune into whatever serendipitous sounds that circumstances generate. In the former, you can hear overtones of ids, egos and control freaks run wild. In the latter, strains of zen-like acceptance of one’s aural environment.

To be sure, an alternative reading of this kind of listening is possible: portable, personalized music echoes with a desire to not hear what everyone else is hearing, to build a sonic buffer from the sensory assault on contemporary landscapes. “If I’m listening to my musical choices,” goes the logic, “then, for a moment, I won’t overhear the overly-loud conversation of my neighbor, or the market-tested, consumer-calibrated, ‘coffee shop’ radio station on the piped-in sound system.” By that logic, not jamming ear buds in your ears is tantamount to sheepishly knuckling under to a world that is almost always under an aural assault (passing cars, car stereos, neighbors fighting, and other sounds you might rather not hear).

To critics, this is nothing but anti-social behavior. Cultural critic Allan Bloom wrote that the Walkman was little more than a distraction from the “great tradition.” Historian of religion Mark Noll described it as “one more competitor to the voice of God.”

Each of these authors uses the aural as a register, but really, they are upset by the broader, social context of the “personal stereo.” Concerns about the Walkman sound like they’re about music, but really, they’re about the culture of listening. The anxiety that the Walkman elicits is that people do not seem to be listening, or that they’re listening to one thing while they ought to be listening to something else. But most importantly, by listening to their headphones, they’re opting out of listening in a more social context.

Ironically, the first generation Walkman was supposed to be social. The very first generation of the Walkman had two headphone jacks, and early advertisements featured fit-looking young couples skating and skydiving together, while listening simultaneously, too. The dual headphone jacks represented an engineering response to the possibly apocryphal story of the president of Sony taking an early prototype for an informal test while golfing with friends one day. They all loved the technology but they found it isolating and antisocial.

It’s a strange technical solution to a social problem. If listening seems isolating, let more people wear headphones and listen to the same music simultaneously but separately. The dual headphone jacks were gone by the second generation of Walkman, but debates over the meaning of the Walkman were not.

Recently, in the New York Times, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh blamed iPods for keeping Americans from rising up in protest about America’s recent economic turmoil. “In public spaces,” he wrote, “serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants.”

We can again hear strains that the Walkman (or its more robust technological offspring) inhibits social interaction, impedes participation in civic life, and otherwise distracts people from paying attention to something more important than their favorite song. Cultural Studies scholar Rey Chow has written that this kind of “distracted listening” represents a political statement, of sorts, a refusal to participate in mainstream sonic-social discourse.

I disagree. Chow misses the fact that both the music and the technology on which it relies are embedded in other circuits of capital and power, thus making it impossible to be fully distracted—you are always “hearing” the technology as noise in the cultural circuit. If the technology itself were mute, then listening to a Walkman would be the same as listening to anything else (a portable stereo, a transistor radio, a loudspeaker).

It’s not. Listening to a Walkman is a particular kind of listening, and listening to an iPod is yet another. It is perfectly postmodern, insofar as this kind of listening always calls attention to the material condition of the act of listening itself (this is why Apple’s white earbuds were such a brilliant advertising move). Similarly, the Walkman is a beautiful artifact of late liberal culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and fulfillment; with my Walkman, I only need to hear what I want to hear, provided I’ve paid for it.

Yet, the beauty of the Walkman, further elaborated by the iPod, is that it is often mobilized as a refusal of those same cultural contexts. Every act of listening performs tensions between what one hears and how one hears it, between where one is and what one is attending to, between what one wants to hear (my music) and what one hears (the technology), between connecting with my environment and being distanced from it, with little or no hope for reconciliation.

Nevertheless, I keep listening, and perhaps those tensions keep me listening, so that I might hear a little better the spaces between the notes, the pauses between the words, the gaps between what I hear and how I hear it.

I run in Nike Free, divinely inspired running shoes. In them I am, I am able to be, spiritual.

Nike (Νικη) names an ancient Greek goddess or spirit, a divine courier who delivers Zeus victoriously via his chariot. She is a winged intermediary, moving and transporting through the air between here and there, between mortal and divine. The daughter of a titan and a river, she is a force of nature, a numinous being, a kind of angel, who bears deep bonds to Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Nike, wisdom is related to movement, transit, and to air.

Nike moves unencumbered—which is to say, freely. In many ways, then, Nike Free is redundant, particularly when Free suggests not, or not only, an enlightened free agent who is “free to” but a bareness that is “free from” unnecessary embellishment. In running shoes, such freedom often translates into a modern fetishization of technology, of progress (new = better) and excess (more = better). Nike Free running shoes, however, resist this fetish, opting for a different equation: new = less, and that less = better. These shoes promise freedom by using technology to strip away as much encumbering technics as possible. Introduced in 2005, Nike Free got back to basics and hence to the elements, coming two steps away from being barefoot (thanks to their extremely thin and flexible sole). Running in them, unlike running in almost any other kind of running shoes, my feet feel the ground’s contours, its textures and striae.

Running in them, I become more bodily, more aware of my bodily movements, since I can feel those kinetic effects in my feet as they contact a solid surface and then lift themselves into air: contact, release, contact, release; earth, air, earth, air. Unlike nearly all other running shoes, Nike Free do not overcushion and overcorrect. They do not permit bad technique or incorrect form. Instead, they insist on corporeal sensitivity, reconnecting my bodily parts to one another by reminding me of action-reaction relations. They silently suggest kinesthetic corrections, modifications in motion. They, like other spiritual exercises, are praxial rather than simply practical: they are transformative, perhaps even transfiguring.

Running in them, I am my most bodily, hyperaware of my bending knees and elbows, of my foot stride and impact, of the angles of my head and chest, of my heart and lungs as they invigoratingly move air, resuscitating—almost resurrecting—my sense of my corporeality. Running in them, I move and move through air. Thus I am, in a seeming paradox, simultaneously my most spiritual and my most bodily, most spiritual because most bodily. This seeming paradox exposes itself as illusory as I re-member spirit: a matter of breath, of air. Spirit—as ruach, as psuchē or pneuma, as anima or spiritus—names breath, wind, air with movement. It is elemental, sensible, mobile, dynamic, animating, vital and vitalizing. It is divine, as Nike’s domain or as ruach elohim (a Hebrew name of god), as well as human, even fundamentally so in tripartite anthropologies, including Stoic and Pauline, that conceive of humanity as body, soul, and spirit. Spirit, as a matter of breath—as the (literal or figurative, biological or religious) breath of life—is humanly necessary, and that necessity ties spirituality to corporeality, bound together by air. My body cannot live for long without air, without respiring.

Running makes me acutely aware of that need; it makes me intensely sensitive to my breathing—that is, my relationship with air. Running is all about breath, air, spirit, since it involves respiration, perspiration, and, for me, inspiration. When I run, and my body is continually in motion, moving and moving me from here to there like Nike in transit, I am most receptive to inspiration, to thoughts and perceptions that I take in like air. I am, body and soul (however those words signify), my most porous, and I do my best thinking and my best contemplating while running. I, like my stripped-down shoes, feel less encumbered, more flexible, most free. Respiration and inspiration meld as body and spirit mingle.

I breathe in air rhythmically, and with it comes…well, that depends. Sometimes while running I work through intellectual puzzles. Sometimes I ponder personal predicaments. Occasionally I stumble upon wisdom (recalling Nike’s relation to Athena). Sometimes I experience an airy stream of conscious perception. Sometimes I am simply free, free from distracting concerns or laborious thoughts or conscious monologue—free, that is, from a certain reflexive self, in an experiential zone (sometimes dubbed simply “the zone”) to which many spiritual or religious praxes aspire. Running can inspire or even be what others label meditation, moksha, prayer, contemplation, communion, ecstasy, enlightenment.

My Nike Free are akin to an athletic sajjāda or tallith or prayer beads (whether japamala or rosary or otherwise): they become the medium, the apparatus, the tool or supplement, that enable my running, which engenders what I experience as and am calling spirituality. If I am spiritual, I am so while running, sensitively breathing in the world.

I went to Antarctica a little while ago to look at melting ice and to make music about it.

My previous multimedia piece was about identity—I had secured the rights to DW Griffith’s 1915 film “classic” Birth of a Nation and applied the “dialectical logic” of sampling to the cinematic update of the “minstrel show.” Griffith had left his estate to Harvard and The Museum of Modern Art, and I found it intriguing to think of the eerie resonance that his film had with Bush’s election and Obama’s rise to power. I think of Birth of a Nation as the DNA of our crazy Hollywood tradition and our strange racial politics—a cinematic prism of propaganda in the same tradition as Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 The Battleship Potemkin, Abel Gance’s 1927 film Napoleon and Lenin Riefenstahl’s 1934 Triumph of the Will, but without the saving grace of having been consigned to the dustbin of history. The contours of the American imagination that Birth of a Nation shaped and molded are still with us today–the “minstrel” robots in Transformers or the “black” voices of characters in films like Men in Blackor Star Wars. That kind of thing is still going on.

William S. Burroughs wrote a novel called Nova Express. The Subliminal Kid was a major character and I “sampled” the name from Burroughs’s imagination. The “Spooky” part comes from a philosophical attachment to Sigmund Freud’s concept of unheimlich, the “uncanny.”

That’s what the original film evokes. A strange and ethereal recognition.

Sample: Cut + Paste

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. I have since been influenced by the Dada Movement, Fluxus, artists like Jean Cocteau, and composers like Wagner (who coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work”). If you look at Scriabin or John Cage or Burroughs, that’s where my music comes from: the haunting contours of cut-up tradition.

Sample: Cut + Paste

It’s always about dialogue, to be in a position to work with a variety of people and to explore how they put their work together. My work on Antarctica, The Book of Ice, was done with the quantum physics scientist, Brian Greene (author of the much discussed The Elegant Universe).

Antarctica is a huge, complex, and stunningly remote place. So I asked Brain to write about the physics of ice!

The Book of Ice is a graphic design project that combines music, art, and science. It explores how climate change will affect science. As a link in a chain of connection, The Book of Ice becomes a causal force. In it I wanted to figure out a lyrical side of topology and complexity.

As with Rebirth of a Nation I wanted to figure out a way to link some of the issues that we inhabit today in our information economy where reality itself can be remixed.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Nam Jun Paik once said “Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.” I agree.

Sampling, layering, collage.

And I keep thinking about Marshall McLuhan:

We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man’s mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the Media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned…

Is this MEDIA FAST really possible? Turning off Birth of a Nation, your computer, or the news means pulling out of the media economy. Is this possible at all anymore?

This is a question that I keep asking myself.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Film is a tool that’s an extension of economic and political processes. With the definition of “race” in the US comes a lot disturbing baggage—all of us are “mixed” in the United States—black, white, Asian, Latino. We all have places we have left, and we arrive in this place called The New World. The question of origins has become a matter of doubt.

Yet what happened with democracy in the United States was that it could not let go of its origins. It needed order and taxonomy, a sure way to trace the progress from past to present. The politics of the early America also hinged upon other suspect moves and motives.

Black people were not considered human.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Film: We invent tools, then they reinvent us.

Sample: Cut + Paste

McLuhan probed how sometimes the real learning happens outside the academic setting. We intend the building designated for learning to nurture, but sometimes it stifles.

Every tool has services and disservices. With suspended judgment, we can uncover the hidden effects of our tools, and get a better view of the environments that they create. With comprehensive awareness, we can better cope with their hidden effects. But, why do we ignore these hidden environments?

My remix of DW Griffith asks and responds to the following question: how can film shape, mold, and influence perception? That’s what art is about.

Sample: Cut + Paste

My first impression of Antarctica was the vastness, openness, and weirdly enough—the fact that the light of the day never went away. It changed my dreams—my sleep patterns got scrambled by the permanent afternoon light of Antarctic summer.

Dreams. It’s all about dreams…

I went to Antarctica for about 6 weeks, and I think of it as a life changing experience. But to make music compositions from the process, and then, be able to set up a gallery show with Gwangju Bienniale—these are experiences of influence. They resonate outward, extensions of my ongoing concern with human rights and their relationship to media, technology, and a rapidly changing world.

I love my iPhone. I hate my iPhone. My iPhone has saved my life. My iPhone is stealing my soul.

The attractions are so clear. The loathing so ready.

It is stealing my soul: whole swaths of my life are in that cosmos of a machine. Names, addresses, phone numbers, messages of friends and frenemies and others are secreted away in it. It’s connected to a “cloud” and would make Jung blanch at any claims to synchronicity. After all, how could he have dreamt (yes, dream) of connections rendered with such ease, such style, such ceaseless seduction?

Ease, style, and seduction are surely part of the package. The sleek form lets us forget that with every tap someone is watching us, following us, tracking us. With each update, our frustrations with technology evaporate until the next glitch, until the next excruciatingly slow download. The delight at the sight of that silvery once-bitten apple makes the mind go blank to the very worldly reality of the hands that put the little machine together, and the corporate interests that want us wanting more. We get to leave our pathetic “dull” phone selves behind when we secure the services of the wondrous iPhone.

Sure my iPhone will give me the false confidence that I can do anything. It’s supposed to give me superpowers – or at least apps that make me feel like I have superpowers. Look: I can read your mind (or at least Google info about you)! Look: I can see the future (or at least tell you what the weather will be like for the next few days). Look: I hear voices! (sure, it’s the iPod or a voice memo, but still….). I am lost, and now I am found (well, I’m still waiting for Google Maps to load…). It’s not the stuff of gospel songs, but it is surely amazingly graceful.

My iPhone is magical, it connects me to a cosmos. And yet, of course, it constantly frustrates my desires to connect. For every wish I make to and through it, it reminds me of my all-too-human longings to be somewhere other than where I am at the present moment, to be with folks that are not the ones right by me, at my side. I am looking at a screen not quite 5 inches tall and less than 3 inches wide for hope, for possibility, for a little info on salvation. How can I not help but feel that it takes a little piece of me, of my soul, of my spirit with each gaze into its bright, shiny glare.

What to do with this magical device that makes me ask questions I didn’t know I had or needed to ask? Why keep touching that screen of desire, that pad of delights?

What will it give me? What will it keep taking from me? Too much, I’m afraid. I hate my iPhone. I love my iPhone. I kinda want my life back.

⁂

We lost Steve Jobs last week. When I wrote these ruminations a few months back, I couldn’t have anticipated the passing of this master innovator. I suspect that Jobs was very much aware of the mixed emotions around the array of technologies of enchantment that he introduced to us over the last decades. In the wake of his death, many of us will ask how long Apple will be able to keep this stream of wonder going without the pitch of that Steve of the uncanny savoir faire. Where did he learn to enchant like that? As it turns out, we have now come to find out that Jobs was a seeker himself, looking for, and sometimes finding clues and paths in Buddhism and other traditions of enlightenment. Did Zen give Jobs the way to entice us to see the future in those marvelous designs, those portals of digitized wisdom? After all, we are now legion who find ourselves stuck in the cycle of birth, death, and renewal that the master marketer Jobs so convincingly led us to believe was not only necessary but actually unavoidable. We who call ourselves lovers of all-things Mac have found ourselves enduring through the obsolescence of what we have in hand (“yeah, it’s an iPhone 3…”), suffering the increasing futility that is the “OS X” or the “iOS” performing the charms we come to rely on, and waiting for the end of our yearning in the form of the little death that comes with “the next release”–the new version that will free us from the all-too-worldly and usher in a new material nirvana, priced just so, glistening just right. It’s hard to think of a wizard of capitalism that was more effective than Jobs in beguiling so many in thinking that consuming new products with such regularity meant that we were on the path to the good, and not just mere fools for the cunning of the market. And yet the market is cunning, and it has lost one of its masters, not quite Zen yet extraordinary nonetheless.

So, let us be decent, let us be good and give Steve Jobs his due, his praise, and our thanks.

D. K. K. (a rather ambivalent owner of an iPad 2…)

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.”