The New Shamanism

Not some network, some organization, principles formed of committee, a light and fluffy healing, as if we were running a marshmallow spa, not some ISO spirituality or social-scientific temperament quiz or hallucinogenic or pleasurable tent, but those pioneers of the modern techno-spirit, who disdain society to love it, have unalterably eternal and tumultuous and sometimes deadly affairs with art and whatever, who throw everything away with regularity and hard sorrow, who sleep on bleak beds, who believe madness is health and health is madness, who know everything is alive (subways, falafels, notebooks, dishwashing detergent, ideas) and dialogue with everything alive and know the voices of subways, who see the burning darkness at the center of things as you see your dentist, who don’t particularly distinguish between them and you, who care for money as you might care for a bedbug, who are genetically incapable of working in any manner you might normally call work and yet are equally genetically incapable of indolence in any manner you might normally call indolence, who are their own gods and yet know no gods yet know all gods, who fear nothing but mediocrity, who eat fear like chocolate chip cookies, who howl at anything if the mood is right and the mood is not unoften right, who drink whatever they must drink, who have strobes for hearts and hearts for eyes and eyes for strobes, who know there are two kinds of laws, two kinds of education, and two kinds of love and in the second myriad kinds and in the first only one, and there is a law the masses and their masters build around them like a suburb and one the others use to traverse the wasteland of themselves, who might be anything, who conjure curses as you might make fast food appear and think both more and less of it than you, who must obey silence, those of legion and maybe spinach, of that horrible and only true certitude at the center of doubt, of ice and zen, dice and then, shapes in dark skies, vision in sewers, desire in death, sweetness in betrayal, of the this is that before the this is that, who does not know the difference between a cat and a court, who eructates on demand… no no no no no no:  not some new nude new age lickspittle nor some unctuous psychobabbler with a Fulsome Scholarship nor some mummified academic nor some lobotomized lobotomizer nor some one-track vegan anarchist but those …

Is it progress, really, that we have eradicated the one who sits in its situation—temporally atemporal, gnostically agnostic, sanely insane, in a mudhut or mudpenthouse, to whom the schlock and wealthy go with their whatevers, and—put in its place possibly—tweets and genomes?  I—or my god, apparently—am hardly one to throw out genomes, but we both—we’re one on this, it seems—think, like Freddy Mercury[1], why can’t we have it all:  tweets and shamans?  Why must we be so tiny as to think darkness is ever dead, that we’ve slain it with something as wimpy as electricity? Where did electricity come from, Chimps?  Darkness.  And its infinite eyes of fire streaming from the hydrants.

The New Shamanism is not some institution, some professional association, some list of accreditations, some piety or anything growing from a natural tradition (herbs and wails and totems), but a twisted metal hybrid, a construction dump, still perhaps without a name, manufactured—not begotten—in the data center of the urban present (the best name may not be shamanism but some other bastard name—something capricious, bold, obnoxious, heretical, necessary … something ecstatic, sad and true and new too, too new …), … and its practitioners …

… whose eyes verb and never noun, whose bodies roam the grave and who never leave the grave, who build bridges from the pain of themselves between madness and society, who spell dervish any way they want, who are snakes to snakes and lemmings to lemmings and ducks to ducks and for this divine flexibility they are sometimes shammed!, for the new shaman is a new Noah’s Ark bouncing on the flood of the global psyche—Noah! his wife! his drunken daughters! the sinful memories! all the crazy animals mating like there’s no yesterday! the boat itself! the rain! the stupid hope! rainbows! that bossy god! the whole fucking hopeless soggy mess—, who has forgotten the taste for land, this voyage out, through the unknown, the sky and sea black as your mortgage, our hearts drowning in the abyss, drinking poison as if it were mango juice from deliquescent tits, some oracle to oracles yet always somehow oracled, who really don’t see the difference between a mushroom and a caterpillar, made half of maggots, half of pomegranate dreams, and half of other things:

we are the new shamans and yes we’re stealing because that’s what good ideas are for and we’re stealing everything we like from everybody and everything but it’s not ours just like it wasn’t theirs just like it’s not yours because the earth’s the earth and factories are factories and these are what we’re made of and, like them, a shaman is whatever I want it to be:  warped, garbled, incompetent, corrupt, possessed, ennui’d, pure, curious, rigorous, amoral, contradictory, impossible, a little screw in a dirty cubicle, virtuous, productive, ecstatic as the stars, rarely clear, a liar in a lair some say, a miasma of melancholy, whimsical, indolent, a little granola with your tea? a schlump, an imposter, a thorny horny corny whiny porny wornout sage, a barometer of nothing and a stroll down Madison what is it? yeah yeah you’re one too and so am I and so’s my god amen.

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[1] ([{Who are some modern shamans?  You want names, you who love to acquire names, who stack them like money, thinking this will give good account of your souls?  I’ll give you names.  Artaud, Weil, Nietzsche, Whitman, Bozulich, Baudelaire, a poet or inmate here and there (no shaman will call itself a shaman), all nameless naming ones, of the cry in the dishwasher, of titillating night}])

A My-god-sanctioned Funeral

My god, being a companion of death, like all gods, twisted into transience, whispers its fantasies to me in the wormy glory of night.  (What language does my god speak?  English? Sanskrit? Godic? Silence? Brik?  Only my god knows.  I only know I understand.)  One such recent fantasy suggested a perfect aesthetic-physical union, joining eros (art in its purity) and thanatos (flesh in its purity) on the social-historical stage.  (My god excels at such metaphysical copulations, being my god.)  The fantasy spectacularly consummated Jerusalem and Athens, time and eternity, in an orgy of calm and seasoned histrionics, the archetypal Artaudian[1] Théâtre de la Cruauté, the dream of every civilized human if humans were civilized, which they aren’t, civilization simply being to be in love with one’s god and, yet, when we look around, so many aren’t in love and this is the only thing to mourn.

The fantasy was this.

When I’m ready to die[2] I hold a great feast—13 grand courses, which I prepare myself, outrageously aged and expensive wines researched and paired for each course, the entire enterprise being decades envisioning, years planning, months executing, and weeks in kitchen chaos … indeed, we could say that my entire life would be devoted solely to its meticulous enactment.  I invite 100 people to it:  the 100 people who have been most important in my life—not determined primarily by recent influence, by time, but by the deep algorithms of the soul.

Five minutes into the feast and every five minutes thereafter one of the guests leaves:  beginning with the least important to me of the 100, and so on, until only my four children remain.  While I objected that the selection (and, most particularly, the order) would cause friction (both in myself and the guests), my god just shrugged—What, I heard, is fiction,[3] other than a seal on the desk of the divine?

The meal goes on through all of this:  hours and hours and quaff and quaff while the driff and hours and droff depart and the quaff lingers like an opaque and circuitous joke.  Then, finally, bliss and gorge united, at the end of the twelfth course, I kill myself in an innovative and comic way (my god leaves no detailed prescriptions as to method), my children prepare my body in a suitable manner and eat me as the thirteenth course.  A fulfillment and parody of Christ, of Athens, London, a live parody play of the play and parody and life … and, so, art and religion, art and death, art and everything, everything and everything, are consummated.

My god!  What impossible perfection! What seductive fantasy! What smooth and edible ends!

Yet, should you respond less than positively to this plan, should you be enticed and bubbly by the happy victuals but less so, quite less so, by the hierarchies and blood (yet were there not hierarchies and blood in so many of the courses, in the genealogies of wine?), might you be tempted to interpret your responses as a sign of your virtue?  But might your temptation (like so many temptations) be a comfortable invitation into a cushioned corner in a closet of the mind, away from the searing bonfires of flesh?  Might this not be a sign of our cultural pathos about pathos?  Might it be cowardice wearing an expensive coat of intelligence?

Our funerals are pathetic, kinspeople in death!  Funerals should be orgies of doors, searing portals of imagination, the raw truth of the body stuck between our teeth, vaudeville and leaping … they should go on for years.

We are a people who do not celebrate death; is this not because we fear, in the absence of God and the overweening presence of pharmaceuticals, the lack of any semblance of solid hope … that is, we fear ourselves, whom we must know, if we know at all, are hardly any avatars of dependability or certainty, but, if anything, vague gusts in a mottled and eternal dusk or dawn (we don’t know which or what!)?  Death is what we are, kin-coffins and sockets of vision.  Homo homo thanatoi.  What pansies are we not to paint pirouetting colors on our verdant mortality, on that substance of substances, on our fear?

Perhaps we have swallowed—yet not adequately digested and shat out—the Christian god’s teleology and think (most perversely!) that we now live on the golden bricks that pave the path to Heaven or Oz (or Redmond … what does it matter?).  Can we play a ruse on time (this our trust and gamble), using technology (that god’s firstborn son), encoding ourselves in worms and algorithms and satellites (where does it matter? it matters! everywhere!) so that we shall play endlessly—mirrors of math, morphing amoebas of art, encapsulated cold divinities—to the gasping stars?

Ah, my cool and cooling rationalists, who shall celebrate the sparkling doubt of molecules on the banquet table of their body?  Who shall climb the ladder of the stars?

I have listened to a fantasy my god whispered to me in the wormy glory of night and when I am ready to die I will prepare a feast and invite 100 guests and be eaten by my children.

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[1] See Dr. Foof β. Spätlese’s article, “Correspondences of Artaud, With a Notable Absence of References to B*********” in Non-Baudelairean Correspondences (LXII:18), in which Dr. Spätlese examines the dialectic of art and toad in Artaud and its relationship to a proposed Tanzanian literature on suffering intimated in Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles.

[2] A certain indicator of our lack of civilization is that we don’t know when we’re ready to die, but think that we must cling to life with whatever savings plans and vials we can muster.  The elder monk in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is the noble and stark antithesis of our decadence:  he knows his god—his body-spirit unity—and thus knows equally when his god is ready to seek a new home.  What arrogance! What humility! What union of eyes! What evolutionary bliss!

[3] It’s true—I heard fiction … but what’s an ar or an or between heaven and earth?

The Nature of My God

My god is virtual.  As virtual as a website, digital time, playlists and participles, nightmares, Blairism, gamma rays, memories, smog, desire, sublimation, and you.  My god is virtual not because it cannot deposition but because it will not; it is my god for its refusal to condense and freeze, instead allowing solids to be solids, infusing them with itself under conditions that still remain—despite our reputed advances—largely inexplicable.  If my god were a solid—or even all solids in sum—it would not be a god but simply a dump of solids.  And my god is no dump but a fart.

My god is a fart and lives no longer than a fart.  It smells like a fart, is as unpredictable as a fart, dissipates and eternally recurs like a fart, and is as joyous and iconoclastic as a fart.  My god rhymes with heart and art but does not rhyme with news or business or money or marriage or time.

If it offends you that my god is a fart—maybe even the sum of all farts—we (my god and I) might very well politely suggest that you leave the room and visit your local museum, perhaps renting those special guided-audio-tour headphones and muttering, in that particular way, hmm-hmmm from time to time.

Being the sum of all farts, my god everywhere always exists—in potentia, in formaldia, in speedia, in purposia—and this is what theologians mean when they refer to the omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternal nature of God.  But my god is slipperier than the theologians’ cheap and easy god.  I dare the tome-laden smirkless god (or no-god) of Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Tillich and Van Buren to meet my god (or no-god) on Mount Caramel in a cow-lighting competition.  Oh … my giggly farty god would win.

You might say, if you wish to use the old language, that my god is spirit, but any competent philologist knows that spirit is booze and spirit is wind and spirit has 33 entries in the OED.  The Internet is spirit and the Internet grew from spirit and spawns spirit, but spirit­—in the corporation of words—is a major global subsidiary reporting to the Fart Division.  That my corporation has no CEO, that its divisions have no stable leaders, that my god is but one element of one division in it … shouldn’t surprise you.  Farts are tricky.  This, at least, you know.

But we don’t wish to use the old language, do we?  My god doesn’t want to use it, I don’t want to use it, and you don’t want to use it unless you’re a schmockity-schmuck.  We all—all three of us:  I, my god, and you (which covers all the bases, truly)—can use it if we want to, but we don’t often want to, do we, being, as we are, members of the nouveau flatia of language, leaving the ossuariacical functions to the zombies who comprise society?

My god is a servant of language and language is a servant of flatulence and flatulence is a servant of my god and if you accuse me of circularity, I say to you—my god is a circle or maybe my god is an egg or a cloud or a game, who, being in the form of farts, doesn’t think it’s unjustified to become a fart which, seeming to be of no reputation, no name, little duration, being found in the fashion of the mammal, exalts itself, and puffs itself up like a puffin, and gives itself an aim which is above every aim, that at the aim of itself, presidents should bow and starlets should swoon and every lung confess that my god is my god, until the last star melts and the last bear pirouettes.

To speak of the nature of fart may seem to some to be unnatural.  To break wind with my god, to divine with my wind, may seem to some to break faith with faith.  To shift the paradigm from lip to sphincter, from word to turd, from art to fart, from ego to eggo, from Jeez to cheese, from God to bod, may seem to some a transmogrification not worthy of somber traditional theological pursuits.  To take the faux pas and elevate it to the true dance may seem to some gauche.  To transform the transgression, the mutation, the offense, into sacrament, aesthetics, relief, may seem to some uncalled for.  But a call is a call and one who misses the call an ox and a moron but one who catches it an oxymoron and a pleonasm and a retronym.  My god doesn’t care and this is why it is my god.

My god rises above the petty concerns of pants and skirts, de-naturing nature, de-divining the divine, de-deing de-.

Discussing nature in an age (in an egg?) when nature no longer exists is to align ourselves with the nature (with the fowl?) of our god, which exists in an egg when chickens no longer exist.  This is why my god is born in and lives in and dies in air—the media of pantheons and progress and nothing.

Have you not smelled?  Have you not heard?  How you dream of the hard human harrowing, that underwear descent, sweet sonatas of the golden ass, the nanogod?  How you dream, when you dream, of all society isn’t, all your life and life has not become? 

The only ground is dream, my god my only dream.  My god turns farts to dreams and dreams to farts and this is why it is my god.

That the one who loves my god doesn’t distinguish between the breaking of bread and the breaking of reality is an argument for, for the discerning, my god.  The flatulogical argument.  (Ontology, like God, is dead.)

Does my god have a nature if its only nature is gas, vague electrons streaming from the universe’s silent bulgy buttocks?  What nature is this that has been denaturized?  What god is this that has been degodded?  It is my god and I see it as plainly as I see the night.

Energy and the Object: Energy

Forgione continues his warped Spinozean geometric ontology with shards from the sphincters of his philosophical imagination.

3.      Energy

3.1.   Energy is the present and future name for desire.

3.1.1.      Renaming of core concepts indicates a regrinding of the lenses of human vision.

3.1.1.1.            It is not as if what there is to see changes, but that we are compelled to see what there always is through different words.

3.1.1.1.1.      These different words mean for us that things change.

3.1.1.1.2.      What compels us?  The seduction of words, the weariness of words.

3.1.1.1.2.1.            Words not the Word compel us.

3.1.1.1.2.2.            This shift from the definite to indefinite indicates energy’s omnipresence.

3.1.1.2.            Lens regrinding is the poetic task.

3.1.1.2.1.      The poet regrinds according to the dictates of his profession.

3.1.1.2.2.      The other professions fulfill the direction of his words, unpacking them into structures we inhabit until, again according to his profession’s dictates, the structures collapse and we move around the board again.

3.1.2.      Desire was too fleshy, primal, unevolved; energy is the chic metal jacket fashioned on desire’s rawness.

3.1.3.      By this renaming, desire becomes democratic and neutralized.  It becomes available for purchase (by anyone with money), mobile (as a virtual commodity), tradable (on the world’s exchanges), transmutable (into any currency or object) … the one value-free entity.

3.1.3.1.            This value-freeness is what gives energy its value.

3.1.3.2.            Once energy is transformed, it assumes specific value.

3.1.3.2.1.      This transformation itself is energy.

3.1.3.2.2.      Most human dilemmas and horrors are related to the transformation of energy into specific value and specific value into energy¾which way to go, when, and the monstrous horror:  why.

3.1.3.3.            The fact that energy can be owned¾and the fact that the ownership is a fact is itself a sign of energy’s ascendancy¾spins God into the human orbit.  This re-cosmologization is akin to discovering the earth spun around the sun.

3.1.3.3.1.      As the revised relationship between earth and sun indicated the decline of theology and the rise of science, so the revised relationship between God and man (a function simply of shifting energy, not fact, though we call it fact from energy’s necessity) indicates the decline of science and the rise of energy.

3.1.3.3.2.      Science still hobbles on the crutches of nature, even as theology hobbled on God’s crutches.  But energy dances to the tingling tunes of atoms.

3.1.3.3.3.      Let us watch crumbling science in its geriatric droolings.  Let us feed it soft gruel and pat it on its back.  It has served us as well as any generation and we would not commit a patricide but lead it gently to the grave in certified and standard halls.

3.1.3.3.4.      But let us make love to energy; it is science’s wide-eyed wonder child, vulnerable and hard, a maelstrom of non sequiturs.  Let us coax from it taxonomies.  Let us chisel professions in the reflections of its eyes.   Energy is the great grand goddess gone, the grave undone.  It is our mantra and vision.  It is the self we never see.

3.1.4.      The renaming of desire, its subjugation to energy, indicates the body’s obeisance to technology.  Taxonomies are shifting, new terms are negotiated, flesh’s weariness begins to show.  A new master arises.  It is energy.  It reveals the body for what it is:  impersonal, nameless, commoditized, commoditizable, extendable, mutable, transmutable, masked, conducive, conduitive, dreamlike at its zenith, solidly sluggish at its nadir, as cold and hot as a wire, as valued as a NYSE listing.

3.1.4.1.            Whereas blood and skin were nature’s flesh (and so desire’s), technology is energy’s flesh.  Hence our fascination with it; it is as if we were able to crawl into energy’s body.  And perhaps we are.

3.1.4.2.            Technology is the male womb into which all enter and lose their gender in collective rebirth.  Not one by one, but our species whole and wholly is born again.  We have assumed Christ’s vision and made it our own, for his was only his and for that he died.

3.1.4.2.1.      For our collective vision, we too may die, for what is vision other than a cessation of life to see life, a subjugation of activity for observation.

3.1.4.2.2.      By inhabiting the regime of energy, however, we do not name observation death and so bypass death through the subterfuge of words.

3.1.4.3.            Our flesh sighs in geriatric pilled relief.  New skin.  These nylon gloves¾tell me how to get them on.

3.1.4.4.            In the semantics of desire, the body is crucified on the cross of fate and resurrected in illusion; in energy, it is neither killed nor reborn¾no hope or despair is permitted in technology’s kingdom; it cannot be described with the traditional adjectives of life¾but electric, impulsed, constantly changing, tediously the same.  Hope and despair are ironic ions, binary code, pulsing meaninglessly across waves of nothingness.

3.1.4.4.1.      Are you a supplier, transmitter, consumer?  Where are you on the grid?  These are the questions of the once and future evangelist.

3.1.4.4.2.      You are part of the great electric body, which shakes and tries to sing.  You are produced, you move, you are consumed.

3.2.   Mysticism ceases to be the exploration of the God behind God and begins to be the description of the choreography of the atomic dance, its codification in letters, the activity of translating movement into words, or rather, one form of movement into another¾an establishment of a parallel stage.

3.2.1.      Kabbalah becomes not esoteric art, but all language arts.

3.2.2.      Imagination assumes its rightful place as queen of the sciences, and words are her servants and lovers.

3.2.3.      We pile interpretations on interpretations and develop airy schematics of convoluted proofs.   We do this to honor energy and imitate what we wish were her mind.

3.3.   Energy still needs to do what desire did, but it no longer believes either its actions or desire.  Yet it remains compelled and this compulsion maintains movement on the network.

3.3.1.      Energy retains the motions of passion without passion’s environment.  This may be the first time in the universe this has happened.  Is our species alive in such conditions, or dead?  We are not alive according to classical definitions, yet we aren’t dead according to modern ones.  We require a new category.  Prosthetized?  This categoryless state is the root of all our confusion.  We wish to resolve it, but must wait for desire’s legacy to be recorded¾itself an interminable process.

3.3.1.1.            We emulate the memory of passion, which technology facilitates.

3.3.1.2.            Soon art may be not passion’s divine sigh, but memory’s scribe.  Already much of art is this.

3.3.2.      By virtue of energy, belief becomes a value-added service energy’s customers are offered on their monthly statements.

3.4.   The laws of the emerging kingdom of energy may very well permit the participant and the observer to access each other’s wardrobe without ever feeling a taboo is being broken.

3.4.1.      Energy takes a taboo, sticks an adapter in it, and calls it freedom.

3.4.2.      Taboos in energy’s kingdom are like adultery before Protestantism¾so expected and institutionalized they rise above names.

3.5.   We are told by the consultants of nomenclature that we are living in the age of knowledge, but what is knowledge other than the name they give to a particular configuration of energy, or rather a particular feeling they have about particular configurations of energy?

3.5.1.      Knowledge is feeling, but energy is fact¾this is the future’s law.

3.5.2.      Energy spawns all and subsumes all.  Energy is Shiva stripped of his anthropomorphizations.  Energy is godless God.  Energy should be it, but we feel that anything both divine and devoid of divinity must be female.  If this gender-play with energy be a convenience and projection, it is also an inconvenience and an autism; this is what the gender dogmatists miss.

3.6.   Energy forms an alliance with power, its brawny social sibling.  Whereas power is hierarchical, transient and passionate, energy is disrespectful, eternal and indifferent.

3.6.1.      This is not to say that all things are equally infused with energy; in some, energy is weak; in others, diffused or fragmented; in still others, concentrated.

3.6.2.      Power is the mask humans hang on energy to allow themselves to participate in energy; without it, their participation would be too cold; they require heat.

3.7.   Balance is advocated by certain humans in relation to energy, but energy is balanced only in a way that these same humans would call imbalanced.

3.7.1.      Energy’s balance is inclusive¾from shimmer to seeming deadness to explosion; the human’s balance is the average of all energy; this average to energy is simply one of its manifestations.

3.7.1.1.            Energy’s average is non-existent; the average is invented by the human and there are as many averages as there are those afraid of energy.

3.7.1.2.            Energy’s average is non-existent because, while energy is the source of mathematics, it is not the manifestation; averages only deal with manifestations.

3.7.2.      The human who loves energy wants all of its manifestations, but inevitably seeks energy’s concentrations; while these concentrations seem more real to him than averages, they are to energy equally present and so legitimate forms of itself.  Value is not given more to some manifestations than others; value is the human word for a particular passion about a particular manifestation of energy.

3.7.2.1.            Due to mortality, the human who loves energy can love it only by plugging into a portion of the network and describing his experience.  While this feels at times to him like energy’s totality¾and these times are what he lives for¾he mostly knows that his experience is but one particular aspect of the network at one particular moment.  However, quality frequently overwhelms quantity.

3.7.2.2.            Only the network itself is energy in its totality, and humans, while they may be the strongest carriers of current, still are minor players on a minor stage.

3.8.   What I say doesn’t matter, nor does how I say it.  The only factor relevant to energy is that I say it.  Words encourage movement.  If I offend some through my manner of speech, if I should destroy others’ reputations or my own, if I do not conform to an important social code, what is this to energy?  I have spoken, and all words pulse across the grid in the indifferent ecstasy of space.

3.8.1.      As energy has become ascendant among the currencies of the universe, so words’ content has been emptied and words stand alone, empty circulating sets in cold space, pointing to nothing.

3.8.2.      We use more words more often to feel energy more often; though feelings are a tenuous guarantee, they serve to sufficiently validate existence for most, a necessary validation as existence has never been more tenuous.