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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. 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Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. 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A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. 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By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. 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Jeffrey Kripal and the secret body.
A Fortnightly Review of
Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
by Jeffrey J. Kripal
University of Chicago Press 2017 | 448pp | $45.00 £34.50
By JAMES GALLANT.
Kripal regards experiences like Jung’s in England as having been the sources of the gods and spirits that throng world mythology.
Kripal regards experiences like Jung’s in England as having been the sources of the gods and spirits that throng world mythology. Accounts of such experiences abound in Kripal’s books, and he is candid about the significance for his life and scholarship of an uncanny personal experience in his youth. As a student in India, he awoke one morning in Calcutta, where a festival of the goddess Kali was in progress, to an “immensely pleasurable and terrifyingly powerful” personal out-of-body experience.
The current “physicalist” orthodoxy notwithstanding, “other dimensions” prove irrepressible, and crop out in “visions, zappings, and apparent entities [phantasms], no matter how baroque or zany they appear to our rational egos and conventional materialisms,” Kripal writes. “Indeed, in a sense, the more bizarre the better. That’s their point.” I.e., the zanier they are, the more likely they are to arouse suspicion about the limits of our usual explanatory procedures–expressions of an ideology that needs to be “historicized, questioned, and deconstructed like any other ideology.”
Kripal proposes in Secret Body a revolutionary historiography of religion, “the future of the past,” in which arcane experiences today suggesting the intersection of “other dimensions” with our common world would have hermeneutic value in studying religious experience of the past. As a contribution to this new historiography, he proposes at the end of Secret Body a study of paranormal experiences in North America over the past two centuries, “a three-volume work of historical scholarship that would read like an immense science fiction novel.” He is presently at work on this project.
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“I have become increasingly aware,” Kripal writes at his website, “of how deeply my thought is indebted to ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato’s two erotic dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus….”— representing sexual energies, refined and sublimated — “as the sources of ‘mystical knowledge.'” The relation between eros and the spirit, variously filtered East and West, has been a subject of abiding interest for him. In his early Kali’s Child, Kripal noted the agreement of Freud and Tantra on the central significance of sexuality in the psychic life, with the difference that, where Freud was preoccupied with psychopathology’s origins in repressed sexuality, Tantra focused on techniques for arousing and sublimating sexuality as a way of generating shakti, “real superconscious energy.”
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THE TEMPTATION NEVER to fail mentioning all that one has learned is a hazard of scholarly writing unlikely to benefit one’s prose. Esoterica of various description, past and present, pile atop another in Kripal’s prose that is at times overburdened with learned allusions and comparisons that interrupt the flow of the writing and there is some awkwardness in his prose that patient revision or the attention of a careful editor would have eliminated.
That said, it is hard to imagine Kripal finding time to fuss much with his prose style, given all that engages his apparently boundless energies. In addition to teaching in the graduate school at Rice, where he was once a department chairman, he has traveled widely and lectured throughout the world. He is a co-director of the California-based Esalen Center for Theory and Research with its “human potential movement” and its “religion of no religion.” He serves as an advisor to film-makers with projects akin to his interests. Films seem to him “an especially appropriate and effective medium for communicating gnostic themes, paranormal events, and magical or ‘super’ powers so evident in the history of religions.”
What rescues Kripal’s books…is that his personal voice and commitments are so steadily audible in the background of his vatic scholarship.
What I think rescues Kripal’s books from their literary infelicities is that his personal voice and commitments are so steadily audible in the background of his vatic scholarship. The books carry one along in a manner that calls to mind the motto of the University of Alabama’s unstoppable football team, “Roll Tide!”—at least up to the point at which one begins to experience a feeling akin to having eaten too many sweets. Kripal has heard reports of people experiencing “invisible presences, erotic encounters with a disincarnate saint, profound moments of sexual-spiritual healing, poltergeist activity, synchronicities around UFO phenomena, and states of hyper-awareness….” while reading his books; and what he has to say has seemed especially appealing to “individuals of various ethnicities, sexualities, and religious backgrounds traumatically transformed by some life event or genetic differences, and rejected or persecuted by their families and cultures.”
However, there have also been readers of Kripal’s books, and people at his lectures, who have asked what exactly is to be done with his evocations of the “impossible.” Toward the end of Secret Body, Kripal confesses he is not sure what he is doing, or what might be done with what he has been “suffering, intuiting, and imagining my way into.” He is aware that his approach troubles people affiliated with religious institutions, and he confesses apprehensions about conceivably malign “social consequences of what this Stranger in me is saying and thinking, out loud no less.”
“It is as if someone in me is inhabiting a mind in space that understands these things and considers them both natural and normal.” Crazy people say things like that, of course. Kripal is not crazy, and what the “someone” is saying seems to him preferable to the gloom and doom that pervade the humanities these days, and threaten, he thinks, their very existence.
There is, though, something a bit disingenuous perhaps about his pooh-poohing the “physicalist” metaphysic and methodologies of the modern secular university, and embracing (or being embraced by) a gnosis with potentially dangerous social implications—while being in possession, meanwhile, of the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice, and presumably a comfortable income with “benefits.”
The lives of gnostics, ancient and modern, are no doubt various, but Kripal’s situation is not something an ancient gnostic could have imagined for herself! (Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion catalogues imageries and themes common in ancient gnostic texts: the alien, the stranger, the wanderer, dread, homesickness, etc.) Then again, the old gnostics were commonly amoralists of one stripe or another who, had a career like Kripal’s been in the offing, might have pounced on it.
Along with work on his three-volume study of North American esoterica, Kripal is currently involved with the new “GEM” program of studies (gnosticism, esotericism, and mysticism) offered graduate students by Rice University’s Department of Religious Studies. Although studies in the humanities have never had any very definite connection with making a living, there was a time when they did not seem likely to preclude the possibility of making one. One can only wonder how a student who has grooved on GEM studies might fare beyond academy–or within it, for that matter, in an era of dwindling opportunities. (It was discovered a while back that part-time adjunct faculty doing most undergraduate teaching at a major university in California were living in homeless shelters.) There have been times and places in which householders understood that the dusty, disheveled figure with the empty bowl in hand who knocked at their doors might be something other than a mental case—but those were the good old days.
♦
KRIPAL’S EROS-BASED gnosticism exemplifies the type of spirituality decried in Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1930-1936).
For Nygren, agape and eros were alternative spiritualities that should not be conflated, although (as his elaborate survey of the history of ideas revealed, they had been often enough). His sharp dichotomy of the two was a response to a situation in Swedish Lutheran theology in the early twentieth century when liberal theologians in Sweden wanted to blend insights from modern anthropology, psychology, and philosophy with theology. That would have meant conflating reason and eros with faith and agape. Nygren and Gustav Aulen, his colleague at the University of Lund, believed this could only induce confusion in the faithful. Hence their insistence on sharp distinction between the two forms of spirituality.
Nothing in Agape and Eros suggests cultural circumstances might strongly influence the choice of one form of spirituality rather than the other.
Nothing in Agape and Eros suggests cultural circumstances might strongly influence the choice of one form of spirituality rather than the other. But famously, or infamously, the spirit blows where it lists, and a choice between the one form of religious expression and the other may not be entirely free. Eliade in his studies of the history of religions always insisted hierophanies and kratophanies were situational—“filtered” by local conditions of life and mentality, as Kripal has it. A primitive Christian enclave in the Roman empire, a close-knit rural village in Sweden or Norway, a convent or monastery, or an American Shaker or Amish community, would be inherently a more congenial setting for agape spirituality than a fragmented, open modern society, like ours, which tends to leave people both practically and spiritually to their own devices, sink or swim. Apropos, George P. Hansen’s voluminous The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001) argues that paranormal influences of the kind Kripal describes as “impossible” are most likely to surface in social circumstances like ours characterized by “destructuring, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries”–circumstances “more fluid than rigid, more fluctuating than steady, more random than ordered.”
♦
AMERICAN POET AND CRITIC Kenneth Rexroth, in a mid-twentieth century essay, “The Hasidism of Martin Buber” (1958), criticized what he called “Romantic Traditionalism,” a type of religiosity bearing a certain resemblance to what Kripal espouses. Commonly associated with the psychology of Jung at the time Rexroth wrote, Romantic Traditionalism urged the contemplation of archaic religious symbols and myths as a source of “greater spiritual insight into reality, better interpersonal relations, and…true realization of the self.” As far as Rexroth could see there was no evidence that Romantic Traditionalism actually achieved such effects. It seemed to be simply “compulsive poetry” born of “desperation in a time of human self-alienation and social disintegration” (One thinks of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s remark that “we [today] live with images as much as facts, and the images seem to impart more life than facts precisely because they are so capable of…transcendence.”)
Rexroth assumed, though, that Romantic Transcendentalism was just a manipulation of mood-generating imageries unrelated to objective extra-psychological realities, and that is precisely what Kripal is denying as a result not only of his own experiences, but his reading of the historical record.
♦
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 1 May 2018, at 09:49.
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