I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly to identify my religion, particularly by authorities with badges and guns, I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision and to poetic and metaphorical truth, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and truth allow us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for his primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes this mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning and universal principles of being. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered by my senior year of high school on my failure to learn Kabbalah, as it is written not in accessible Hebrew for whom teachers and conversational partners can be found, but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and very much still processing the trauma of my summer of resistance to police terror in Brazil, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his daughters desire, madness, and death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Here follows some things I have written for Mad Hatter Day, which I celebrate as a three day Orphic vision quest which begins the month of Halloween.
October 6 2024 Love as a Divine Madness: a Celebration of Mad Hatter Day
We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Part One References
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Jefferson Airplane – Go ask Alice
The hatter recites the jabberwocky poem
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1-2) by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed, by David Day.
The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland, by Peter Hunt
October 13 2024 Festival of the Mad Hatter Week Two: Madness as Transgression, Resistance, and Liberation From Authorized Identities, the Boundaries of the Forbidden, and the Tyranny of Other People’s Ideas of Virtue
In this liminal time of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of questioning human being, meaning, and value, and of its praxis as revolutionary struggle during these Mad Hatter Days, I celebrate madness as a force of redemption and liberation in its three primary forms as love, transgression, and vision.
With Renfield in Dracula we may say of ourselves; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.” Madness in literature and history has always been a metaphor of resistance and revolutionary struggle against authority and systems of unequal power, as with Lewis Carroll’s magnificent and truly strange allegories and his figure of the Rebel, the Mad Hatter.
Today I perform sacred acts of violation of normalities, reversals of authorized identities, transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden, and changing the rules of the games by which we live. This I do to free myself from the legacies of my history and disrupt my own ideas, expectations, and routines; but we must all do the same as seizures of power from authority and liberation from systemic inequalities on a national and civilizational scale as well. As Max Stirner wrote; Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.
Let us frighten the horses; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2022, How Does My Happiness Hurt You? On Transgender Day of Visibility; The frightening of the horses; it is a phrase I use often to describe the performance of identity as a form of theatre, and public spectacle as protest and challenge against authority, force, and control. Herein I reference a quote by George Bernard Shaw’s muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who played Eliza Doolittle, with which she replied in 1910 to someone who thought the display of affection between two male actors was indecent; “”My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Here is a quote from one of George Bernard Shaw’s letters to her, which celebrates and defines love as freedom, inchoate wildness, transformation, reimagination, liberation, rapture, and exaltation; “I want my dark lady. I want my angel. I want my tempter, I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality. I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star.”
To see and be seen, to hear and be heard; this is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. When we see and hear others we empower and validate their process of becoming human, and they do the same for us.
Our processes of becoming human operate by three principles; we must each reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through others. We choose our friends, partners, and sometimes our families from among those who can help us become who we wish to be, a process which occurs in tension with the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden, and from this primary struggle to create ourselves emerges human being, meaning, and value.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
And as George Bernard Shaw and his muse Mrs. Patrick Campbell taught us, there is a force of liberation written in our flesh with which we can free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; that of love.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I wrote in my post of February 15, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confer authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For a brilliant interrogation of madness as a means of social control and repression of dissent I turn to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which parallels many of the themes of Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization as well as Orwell’s 1984. As I wrote in my post of October 8 2021, The Uses of Madness as Repression of Dissent and Authorization of Normality and a Consensus Model of What is Real and True; Madness as joyous transgression and seizure of power and madness as an instrument of social control, repression of dissent, the authorization of identities, enforcement of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden; Sides of a coin of power bearing Janus-like faces of tyranny and liberty, madness and sanity are a ground of struggle. Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for autonomy and the ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer a simple test by which to disambiguate madness from sanity; whose truth is this? Who defines, owns, and controls this reality?
For all who own and live their truth are sane, and all who are falsified and subjugated by authority are mad.
Who possesses and controls himself is sane; who is possessed and controlled by others is mad.
Our passions are useful servants and terrible masters. There is nothing wrong with anything you may feel, even negative emotions such as rage or despair; but you must be their master.
As I wrote in my post of June 31 2020, Paradigms of Madness as Thought Control and Class Struggle; “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” So wrote the visionary George Orwell in the great novel which prophecies the terminus of the arc of history of the American Empire as it has unfolded since the end of World War Two, 1984.
As the final arbiters of what is real and what is not, psychiatrists are the apex predators of our society and its most privileged class; no other persons hold the power to abduct and imprison others by authority of a signature, nor to conduct treatments, research, or experiments which may be considered torture or theft of memory, identity, and the soul such as surgical or electroshock personality interventions, or confinement in isolation and in secret without right of redress.
Media moguls may shape our ideas of self and other and overwhelm the truth with propaganda and lies, politicians may fatten themselves on the miseries of others and spin illusions for the benefit of their paymasters, plutocrats and oligarchs may control their workers well being and quality of life and fund the subversion and corruption of democracy, and our police and security services may hunt and kill us with impunity to enforce the power asymmetries of elite wealth, race, and gender which divide us in the service of tyranny, patriarchy, and white supremacy so long as they have concealment and immunity of judicial and political collaborators, but only the modern priesthood of medical professionals of the mind are answerable to none but their peers and are masters of them all.
With this absolute and secret power pervasive throughout the carceral state in both our prisons and educational systems acting as a success filter and authoring force of identity and repression of dissent, our mental healthcare system reinforces the power asymmetries of the status quo. The differences between our system and those of the Nazi health courts and the psychiatric institutions of the historical Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party today are those not of kind, but of degree. Just compare them to the torture and interrogation program designed by Spokane’s own Mengele for use in Guantanamo Bay and the secret political prisons operated by our intelligence services throughout the world.
Guantanamo is important because it provides a glimpse into our future, a future in which the state can imprison people without charging them with a crime for 18 years, enact crimes against humanity while the torturers go bowling next door after work, a tyranny of force and control and a fascism of blood, faith, and soil. Here dwell monsters, and they are not behind bars.
As reported in the Spokesman Review by Thomas Clouse; “Two Spokane psychologists who devised the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a federal judge later said constituted torture,” “James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen” whose “company was paid about $81 million by the CIA for providing and sometimes carrying out the interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, during the early days of the post 9/11 war on terror.”
“Both Mitchell and Jessen were deposed but were never forced to testify as part of a civil suit filed in 2015 in Spokane by the ACLU on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud.
According to court records, Rahman was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison in isolation, subjected to darkness and extreme cold water, and eventually died of hypothermia. The other two men are now free.
The U.S. government settled that civil suit in August 2017 just weeks before it was scheduled for trial in Spokane before U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.
That suit was based on a 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that found ample evidence that Mitchell and Jessen provided the CIA with torture methods, including prolonged sleep deprivation, confinement in small, enclosed spaces and waterboarding that were used on dozens of detainees yet produced no useful intelligence.”
“Mitchell no longer lives in the Spokane area, but Jessen is believed to still reside in the area. They got their start at Fairchild Air Force base as survival trainers who formed a company to help train military personnel to resist interrogations. They reverse-engineered their training and devised a program drawn from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.”
Sometimes it is not the prisoner, but the state which is mad.
As I wrote in my post of March 8 2022, International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle; What is a woman or a man, and how are such identities constructed?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drags serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
“And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
Part Two References
All the best people are
The Mad Hatter’s Revolution; a montage in two parts
Rewrite the Stars; song by Zendaya and Zac Efron, with montage of Alice and the Mad Hatter
Mad Hatter – A Case Study in Borderline Personality Disorder
Renfield in Bram Stoker´s Dracula
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest film
https://archive.org/details/56820A6B0666D968673BF62DA3F2FD54891860053A535026C9D0DA72AE917CF1
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
Michel Foucault
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, Dorian Lynskey
Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay, T. Fleischmann
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12964215-syzygy-beauty
Idealizations of Feminine Beauty in Performance of Identity: Ru Paul’s Drag Race: LaGanja’s Let’s Get Physical
Subversions of Idealizations of Masculinity and Femininity: The Boulet Brothers Dragula, Season 4 trailer
One of Us; solidarity in the great film Freaks
Kat Shook’s essays on Genderfuck, and the cinema of John Waters in the Surrealist site Babu691
October 20 2024 Day Three of the Mad Hatter Festival: Madness As a Faith of Poetic Vision
As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.
This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth. Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, what do I mean when I use the word faith?
My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.
A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”
I am a scholar of Islam and a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism, a former Buddhist monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order in Kathmandu Nepal, and grew up from the age of nine with ten years of formal study in Zen Buddhism.
Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the Truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi and the most radical definition of faith I know of, which makes Islam the most revolutionary of faiths, especially compared to Christianity and its centuries long burning of books in repression to dissent and subjugation to authority claiming to speak for the Infinite. Only six copies of Plato’s books survived the Dark Ages, courtesy of the Islamic scholars who preserved them.
So for myself, faith is a process of questioning, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats
My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.
I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.
Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.
If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.
This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.
Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.
Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky
Il Postino film
Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,
by Susan J. Wolfson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254935-a-greeting-of-the-spirit
The Essential Rumi – New Expanded Edition 2020: Translations By Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Jalal Al-Din Rumi
Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos As Unifying Principle, by Mary Ann Perkins
The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung
Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite,
Rudy Rucker
Surrealist topologies of the Unknown dreamlands, a reading list for journeys beyond the gates of death
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft
The Western Lands, by William S. Burroughs
Psicomagia, by Alejandro Jodorowsky
primary texts of The Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208135.The_Tibetan_Book_of_the_Dead
Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208126.Luminous_Emptiness
Other Notes and References:
The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
Hayden White
Torch of Liberty 