Re-Enchantment
Along the way of my working on The Killing Joke - especially in consideration of the book as a spiritual-archetypal, tittering, lament amidst what have been consistently threatening and chaotic times - I began gradually to feel for myself the stickiness of a philosophical suggestion I’d come across in the past: the need for a re-enchantment of the world.
Even in the past year, I considered that phrase and notion for this Substack’s tagline, prompted by the space given for quick description on my welcome page. If you’ve been here with me from the beginning, you might remember I had: Poetry, Thought, Word Magick is Works and Workings in Joy and Despair for Love of the World. The tagline (or subtitle) has evolved since then.
“Despair” is an intense word to use as a descriptor. Its rawness bares a bruised and gashed chest. Beyond the scope of any intended divulgence, rip of admission strips away cover-up. Crusted bloody bandages twist as they come off. I also embraced a related word right at the beginning of the pandemic and its looming shutdowns; early into my research on The Killing Joke, I gave a seminar, THE DESPERATE POETIC CONCEPT OF THE KILLING JOKE; OR, HOW TO MANAGE ANXIETY WHEN THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN… Now that title is a poem in the book. Scars can be ugly/beautiful, but oozing lacerations wound the viewer.
The endeavor of this Substack has been separate solace from The Killing Joke work. Likewise, laughter in the dark is a different challenge than re-enchantment’s Disney sprinkling of sparkly light-dust on barren earth so that everything once again comes to life. Through such juxtaposition, there can be crossover in resolve (in readership as well, mind you - do stay curious for the book!); there has already been dialectic.
Disparate threads of artistic impulse, principles, and disposition - rambunctious interplay of themes and intentions in opposition - resolved themselves last spring in the “fundamentals” coming of development of this Substack's logo; and so, instead of towards the Re-Enchantment of the World, what has emerged (for continued freedom of evolution into this second year) is an emphasis on discipline and its underpinnings. Thus, this project is Poetry, Thought, Word Magick towards Old-New Mastery of the Creative Path.
Of course, every path is supposed to have its destination (although as already noted last entry, Heraclitus says, “the road up-down is one and the same”): re-enchantment remains for me that sticky suggestion of what is needful. At the same time, as much as it can or should be an aim, my own means-searching for its achievement reveals it to be just as much a practice, one compatible with any creative discipline, and certainly one at one with my poetics overall, at least in process: not towards specified forms, but in care of original inspirational force.
Re-enchantment starts at home, for sure, but extends into community, and country, and world. My world, your world, yes the world as we know it and as our knowing it intermingles and affects its turning.
These past couple of weeks I’ve been celebrating the completion of my manuscript of The Killing Joke - it took me longer than anticipated. I was really in it and under it, impinged upon by the ending of a project begun in early 2019. At last I was able to send it to its publisher. Part of my lingering over the book’s finality: it was necessary to take into account what happened at the midterms, in mind of some of the political and topical aspects of the work relative to when it comes out next year. I finished Friday a week ago, before we knew the outcome in Georgia.
So yes, taking into account: the return of facts! - for the satisfaction of all us shitshow witnesses and dumbfuckery forensic analysts!
Election deniers lost the midterms. Maybe democracy is safer than it was a few months ago1. It seems at least we’re approaching some sort of herd immunity to the reality warp of Big Lies repetition, deranged propaganda, and delusional or willful ignoring of proof.
So what’s next, for shoring up, rebuilding, readying for the unexpected? For regaining that old magic - personally and to purpose?
Putting into action the practice of Re-Enchantment.
Decision, first - for a new beginning. Commitment follows. From core, coeur, to wingspan extension. And beyond: rings of atmospheric expansion through society. Intimately for love and with loved-ones, within a family and between lovers; publicly for justice and civic virtue; and for integrity through and through; renewed devotions move outward and abroad from their inner axis as ethereal, operative quality-forms.
For Love, for Justice, for Peace, ideals become real through dedication - and recurrent re-dedication. Each ideal has its own measure and shape of force. Each, on its own terms, appropriate to its distinctive character, has its own effective radiance.
Such is the magick of Word Magick: Love and Justice and Integrity are not mere terms. They are words of power. They don’t work on their own; their meanings must be put into practice. Every word is a field of potentiality. Each has its own virtue - unique, tricky, and multilayered. A person can stand in relation to words’ potencies and potential, protective against their reduction to mere text or empty sound or use, even while relishing in their textuality and aural contours. Poetry is all about that. One can choose to attune oneself to incantatory rhythms, enchantment of imaginings. To wield these powers consciously in action is to live your words - or eat them.
Through unleashing thus the magick of words in life and in the conduct of life - especially some of these “big words” - you partake in a paradoxical demonstration of their reality. It’s doubtful a new global Myth could be created or an old one recreated in the face of science or to face down technology’s inhuman, unrelenting advance; belief won’t stick. Still, truth exists. The Good, the True, the Poetic are real. Love is real, Quality is real, the Quality of Greatness is real. Grace, Integrity are real, and giving oneself devotionally once and again to what is real - to what you once knew was real - opens the gates to re-enchantment.
There’s an avowal here aligned with a criticism of Nietzsche which, despite its unsophistication (I forget who it was, but it had the tone of opinion page indignation, no pretension to anything beyond journalistic ephemera), continues to tell on me through the years: that it is false to reduce Love - and other such words as I’ve invoked here - to Will-to-Power dynamics. Undeniably, power mechanisms and dynamics are at work in every relationship and behind every cause, but something absolute and qualitative is lost in relegating the contents of what we care about to mere foreground, façade. Our Love has substance. Goodness and Truth have their own integrity, are transformative, their powers qualitatively different from raw force. Quality itself has the reality of its radiance, different in kind than quanta of power, as resident and suffusive as solar heat and light.
“When one is doing something to do with quality, even a lifetime doesn’t seem enough.” - Lucien Freud
Re-enchantment allows, wondrously, what is love, what is being just, what is integrity - in defiance of reductivism of any kind - to expand each in their own self-workings and efficacy… and feel, and quality. Maybe the first time around when you loved, when you went for your art, or fought for your cause, you were naive, innocent, and your dedication was all inspiration. If you want to find it in yourself to go a second time around, or a third, or more, your dedication has to be devotional, clear-eyed, experienced, and willed.
I entered into re-enchantment as a socioeconomic directive by way of Bernard Stiegler (who came to my attention by way of The Ister, a stunning film on Heidegger on Hölderlin, also featuring Jean-Luc Nancy my teacher on Beckett at UCSD in the ‘80s); Stiegler has a book manifesto entitled, The Re-Enchantment of the World: the Value of Spirit against Industrial Populism. He comes by the jargon of continental philosophy honestly, which to many tastes - including my own - makes for intriguing reading, but difficult conveyance without said jargon: this is all “organization and production of desire” stuff oriented within “the libidinal economy.” Stiegler quotes Max Weber as an earlier source for diagnosing the disenchantment of the world under capitalism, under the rationalization of modernity, in the midst of our bureaucratic, secular, consumerist society. In short, with all admitted distortion, Stiegler’s exhortation - individually and collectively - is for us not to let the soulless systems we live in crush our spirits.
Less boggy with philosophical terminology, in everyday language, Thomas Moore offers his The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life as a return to appreciation of whatever wonders can be encountered in the mundane course of our wanderings through nature and culture. Of course, with such a title, I can’t help but make a sort of jigging, dancing leap once again (after deep entanglement with it for my Free Spirit work in the middle of the Twenty-Teens) to one of my favorite books of all time, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, relevant here for Situationist verve in uncompromising emancipation even from the emancipators: all activism is worthless without the capacity for enjoying life - enchanté, let’s leave this protest and go to the beach!
Plenty of other books on the subject provide a sense of its spiritual-political locus on the contemporary plane. Joshua Landy’s The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Gordon Graham’s The Re-Enchantment of the Word: Art versus Religion, Silvia Federici’s Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons for three. There are more.
Beyond Max Weber’s noticing the condition of disenchantment in modernity, C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength from his space trilogy details the alarming machinery of moral slide, with mention of how lust disenchants the world. Love re-enchants.
Lewis speaks of dark allurements, the feeding of a shrouded unfathomable desire that “has nothing to do with the body”… but “like lust, it disenchants the whole universe.”
Disenchantment as a product, a symptom, an indication of the state of sin. Lust isn’t here the primary focus; greed or envy or wrath could as easily substitute as a simile for the ruinous effects of a more primal evil. Yet, I’ll focus on lust for a second before going into an insight of Lewis’ that points to how this whole issue operates.
I won’t dishonor lust, for honor of eroticism - love and lust and its varieties and spice of separations and interminglings. (How can I after celebrating someone like Pietro Aretino in Top 10 Real People Who Died Laughing?) Here it does have to do with the body, carnality, a refusal to denigrate eroticism. Religion has always been a factor in the repression and denunciation of the force of sexuality; at the same time, because of that fact, religion functions in mainstream society as the sole source of (as with Lewis) warning and awareness of what’s at stake with sexuality in the deeper spiritual sense. This is where magic, particularly modern Western Magick, comes in. Sex - as love and lust however mixed - partakes in various levels of magick. So too many applications of egoistic desire and force. Magic in general is a third category to break up the binary of science and religion in society (part of what Chris Gosden in Magic: A History dubs "a triple helix" in which “their mutual tension is creative”). Unlike religion, magick permits sex its own plane of power - for enchantment or disenchantment. Sacred or profane libidinous interplay. Magick also offers cautions upon its own premises. Sex can be casual and recreational (as well as, in this context, ceremonial and ritualistic), but is inescapably consequential due to the charge between participants; a link forms however strong, more or less bonded, with some lasting strand of soul memory and responsibility whether acknowledged or not.2 Sex always includes a magickal element that can only be ignored at your or your partner's (or partners') peril. Similar cautions apply to all natural and human drives willfully embraced in their enactment, best to be appreciated by anyone empowered enough to accept and utilize whatever forces are at hand - twined together as they are in the religious, secular, and magickal trinity - towards an accomplishment of purpose.
Conclusively, with regard to the workings of Re-Enchantment as a process: in That Hideous Strength, and overall and elsewhere in Lewis’ work, Good and Evil and all their attributes and habits of thinking, perceiving, and acting, their respective virtues and vices, their accompanying sinful state or state of grace (and again perhaps in Nietzschean terms magick takes on these forces in a nonbinary way, beyond good and evil, non-judgy for ultimates but wise to consequences, karma) move inexorably in one direction or the other, differentiating and crystallizing, becoming more and more definite - more and more exactly what they are. Thus, progessive disenchantment or progressive enchantment (or, if positive movement is starting from an unworthy or unhappy place, re-enchantment). Always, as Spiritual Law, the slope is slippery and unidirectional, unless you make a turn.
I’m still worried about Moore v. Harper. SCOTUS heard oral argument in the case last Wednesday, 12/7. According to expert tea-leaves readings, a 3-3-3 court will likely deny or postpone a wholesale embrace of the treacherous Independent State Legislature doctrine.
In memory and missing of the poet Doug Lang (1941-2022), who passed on November 22nd, I think of an apropos line he wrote in his book of ten years ago, Dérangé (a line I’m honored to be associated with in the poem): “sex is the transmission of precious knowledge from one body to another” - a thought itself which is Yeats’ Leda reminiscent.
What a declaration! Mind-bending, affirming and labyrinthine as usual; the layers and doors within your words and thesis are always alluring and open with enormous gravity. And thanks for that exquisite mention of “Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life” - I must read it. Peace!