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!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After her death by her own hand in October 1902, Craddock lived on as mystical madwoman more than lionized liberal, and that reckoning had everything to do with the career trajectory of one of America’s leading civil-liberties lawyers, Theodore Schroeder. He came to know of Craddock’s case through the Free Speech League, an important precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union, but his attraction to her had much more to do with sex (and religion) than with the First Amendment. One of America’s most devoted (if not most subtle) Freudians, Schroeder turned Ida C into his own Anna O. “I am poet of the Body and I am poet of the Soul,” Walt Whitman had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass, “The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me.” Craddock, as much as anyone of her era, lived amid those doubled pains and pleasures—as yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, thwarted scholar, ecstatic mystic, and denounced madwoman. Playing Psyche to an angelic lover’s Eros, she channeled a densely erotic and embodied spirituality, but one that remained hemmed in by many of the taboos of the period, including deep fears of masturbation and homosexuality. If far from an unambiguous precursor of today’s spiritualized sex, she nonetheless represented a combustible mix of fascinations in Comstock’s America.