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}])

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.