A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy.A Hu-Li is a Buddhist with Taoist inclinations. In previous Pelevin novels (Buddha’s Little Finger, obviously among others) religion has played an important role, even to the extent of becoming a character but in The Sacred Book we get a close up look at a Pelevin messiah, and she’s working hard to convert us, often by quoting ancient Buddhist scripture. Her yearning for enlightenment, her desire to enter the “Rainbow River,” tempers the animal magic of her tail, the tool of her predatory trade. This yearning is not what makes her human; Pelevin presses her foxy difference. Instead, A Hu-Li’s yearning is the mark that signs us all as beings seeking the levels of our souls. Here she is talking to Alexander, a general in love with her, about his choice of reading material:

Speaking in very simple terms, I can say this. Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself. Wasting time on detective novels is… it’s like giving an illiterate prostitute a ride for the sake of a blowjob.”

A Hu-Li dissembles, feigns, passes as human. Unlike her lover Alexander, it’s not her web of human contacts that make her who she is. She’s a were-fox, a mistress of deception. Furthermore, she doesn’t give blowjobs. Foxes have a secret weapon: they have telepathic tails, instruments productive of supreme human sexual bliss. But to learn how that works, you’ll need to read the novel.

Ikkyu, the great Japanese poet and Zen master of the 15th century, said: If you want me, look for me in the whorehouse. Soul searching, in other words, is classless—or should be, according to a fox’s sense of judgment:

It is usually assumed that were-creatures are not concerned about spiritual problems. People think you turn into a fox or a wolf, howl at the moon, tear someone’s throat out, and all the great questions of life are instantly answered, and it’s clear who you are, what you’re doing in this world, where you came from and where you’re going… But that’s not the way it is at all. We are far more tormented by the riddles of existence than modern humans. But the cinema continues to depict us as complacent, earth-bound gluttons, nonentities who are indistinguishable from each other, cruel and squalid consumers of the blood of others.”

It’s true: vampires get all the good press. With the were-fox A Hu-Li, what we get is a 40,000-year-old cynic philosopher, one who remembers inscriptions and conversations across thousands of years of human history, a philosopher dancing madly across all barriers of sociopolitical correctness, and one who takes her Buddhism pretty damn seriously. A Hu-Li is a babe, a bodhisattva, she’s a cruel mirror, and she’s very, very funny. This fox has bite.

review by Brian Charles Clark

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House, 2006

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive?

Indeed, when I taught the history of the three dominant monotheisms, my students were quite surprised to learn that Judaism, Christianity and Islam in fact share a common origin. We are, it seems, even ignorant of Christianity’s origins. This makes books like Aslan’s all the more crucial. “One could argue,” he states—and this is a fine example of his graceful sidestepping of our ignorance in favor of displaying humanist generosity—“that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it rejects not only all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.” “Religion,” he continues by way of pointing out the importance of myth, “is not faith. Religion is the story of faith… that provides a common language with which a community of [believers] can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.”

“It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are true. What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings”—in other words, about our cultural millieux. This is a crucial point for Aslan, especially in conjunction with the idea that religion is a “story,” a narrative of faith. For as he relates the long history of Islam, and especially its early years, Aslan argues that contemporary Islam doesn’t have to be the way it is: Muslims could change the story of their religion. By implication, this is true of all three monotheisms—Christians don’t have to suppress women or murder homosexuals. This, though, is only an implication in Aslan’s book: the subtitle claims it’s about the “future of Islam,” but he doesn’t waste too much time prognosticating. What Aslan does claim (though with almost no comparative analysis) is that Islam, at 1,500 years old, is in approximately the same stage Christianity was when Martin Luther and others instigated the Reformation. This is a fascinating idea, but I suspect it may be wishful thinking on Aslan’s part.What I especially treasure about this book is Aslan’s discussion of the first generation of Islam, which is well researched and beautifully articulate. As with all textually based religions (meaning, again, the religions of “the Book,” the three monotheisms that trace their descent from Abraham) there is a dirty little secret at the heart of the matter, namely, that the authors of the texts had political agendas. ‘Twas ever thus with stories but, when there are a billion or more people basing their lives and everyday actions on a text, it’s important to consider the sources. Muhammad and his Companions worked out a communal way of life in Medina but, for the most part, the Prophet’s revelations and laws were not written down until after his death. (Though not, as Aslan argues, because Muhammad was illiterate; how could that be when he was a successful businessman with records to keep and orders to place?) All three monotheisms are deeply misogynistic but that doesn’t necessarily implicate Jesus or Muhammad: “when the Quran warned believers not to ‘pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha)…’ the early Quranic commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s warning on the subject, that ‘the sufaha are women and children… and both of them must be excluded from inheritance’.” Again, the parallels to the early history of Christianity are worth keeping in mind. When Paul wrote “Let your women keep silence in the churches” in Corinthians and again in Timothy, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” we may be looking at Paul’s misogyny or that of one of his later editor’s. The point I take away from Aslan is that we must wrestle interrogatively with these texts and we must also always remember that we can change the stories we tell about them.

No god but God is not without its biases and flaws. Aslan holds an MFA from the famous Workshop at the University of Iowa, and he makes an embarrassing English major’s math mistake in his discussion of the community at Medina. Muhammad and his Companions, driven out of Mecca, found refuge in Medina where there were already both traditional Arabian polytheists as well as a large community of Jews, of whom, Aslan says at one point, the Jews “may have totaled in the thousands.” Some thirty pages later he discusses the massacre of Jews (an infamous sore point between the two religions) by the first generation of Muslims, stating that “the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source)” while “the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs.” Whether we take the original population of Jews in Medina as 7,000 (which is in line with Aslan’s first statement of “thousands”) or even 70,000, that adds up to either ten percent or one percent “of the total population”—not “a tiny fraction.” What Aslan fails to acknowledge, as so many apologists for monotheism fail to do, is that monomythic religions are necessarily competitive for both resources and believers—and that competition inevitably results in some sort of violence. His discussion of contemporary militant Islam is likewise hampered by a strange elision: he begins with Pakistan and promises to come full circle but never returns to the situation there.

If Aslan hedges his bets as regards the violence inherent in monotheism, he is elegant and (especially in our contemporary climate of monotheistic textual fundamentalism) courageous in insisting on a historical understanding of Islam. His explanation of the split between Sunni and Shi’a is the clearest I’ve yet read, and his discussion of Islam’s beautiful mysticism—the Sufis—is a pleasure to read. For those wanting to understand the history of Islam, Aslan is ideal on all but the last one hundred or so years. If his portrayal of the violence of Islam is flawed, his hope that that narrative can be overcome is admirable.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Reza Aslan
Random House, 2005

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to the Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive?

Indeed, when I taught the history of the three dominant monotheisms, my students were quite surprised to learn that Judaism, Christianity and Islam in fact share a common origin. We are, it seems, even ignorant of Christianity’s origins. This makes books like Aslan’s all the more crucial. “One could argue,” he states—and this is a fine example of his graceful sidestepping of our ignorance in favor of displaying humanist generosity—“that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it rejects not only all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.” “Religion,” he continues by way of pointing out the importance of myth, “is not faith. Religion is the story of faith… that provides a common language with which a community of [believers] can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.”

“It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are true. What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings”—in other words, about our cultural millieux. This is a crucial point for Aslan, especially in conjunction with the idea that religion is a “story,” a narrative of faith. For as he relates the long history of Islam, and especially its early years, Aslan argues that contemporary Islam doesn’t have to be the way it is: Muslims could change the story of their religion. By implication, this is true of all three monotheisms—Christians don’t have to suppress women or murder homosexuals. This, though, is only an implication in Aslan’s book: the subtitle claims it’s about the “future of Islam,” but he doesn’t waste too much time prognosticating. What Aslan does claim (though with almost no comparative analysis) is that Islam, at 1,500 years old, is in approximately the same stage Christianity was when Martin Luther and others instigated the Reformation. This is a fascinating idea, but I suspect it may be wishful thinking on Aslan’s part.

What I especially treasure about this book is Aslan’s discussion of the first generation of Islam, which is well researched and beautifully articulate. As with all textually based religions (meaning, again, the religions of “the Book,” the three monotheisms that trace their descent from Abraham) there is a dirty little secret at the heart of the matter, namely, that the authors of the texts had political agendas. ‘Twas ever thus with stories but, when there are a billion or more people basing their lives and everyday actions on a text, it’s important to consider the sources. Muhammad and his Companions worked out a communal way of life in Medina but, for the most part, the Prophet’s revelations and laws were not written down until after his death. (Though not, as Aslan argues, because Muhammad was illiterate; how could that be when he was a successful businessman with records to keep and orders to place?) All three monotheisms are deeply misogynistic but that doesn’t necessarily implicate Jesus or Muhammad: “when the Quran warned believers not to ‘pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha)…’ the early Quranic commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s warning on the subject, that ‘the sufaha are women and children… and both of them must be excluded from inheritance’.” Again, the parallels to the early history of Christianity are worth keeping in mind. When Paul wrote “Let your women keep silence in the churches” in Corinthians and again in Timothy, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” we may be looking at Paul’s misogyny or that of one of his later editor’s. The point I take away from Aslan is that we must wrestle interrogatively with these texts and we must also always remember that we can change the stories we tell about them.

No god but God is not without its biases and flaws. Aslan holds an MFA from the famous Workshop at the University of Iowa, and he makes an embarrassing English major’s math mistake in his discussion of the community at Medina. Muhammad and his Companions, driven out of Mecca, found refuge in Medina where there were already both traditional Arabian polytheists as well as a large community of Jews, of whom, Aslan says at one point, the Jews “may have totaled in the thousands.” Some thirty pages later he discusses the massacre of Jews (an infamous sore point between the two religions) by the first generation of Muslims, stating that “the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source)” while “the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs.” Whether we take the original population of Jews in Medina as 7,000 (which is in line with Aslan’s first statement of “thousands”) or even 70,000, that adds up to either ten percent or one percent “of the total population”—not “a tiny fraction.” What Aslan fails to acknowledge, as so many apologists for monotheism fail to do, is that monomythic religions are necessarily competitive for both resources and believers—and that competition inevitably results in some sort of violence. His discussion of contemporary militant Islam is likewise hampered by a strange elision: he begins with Pakistan and promises to come full circle but never returns to the situation there.

If Aslan hedges his bets as regards the violence inherent in monotheism, he is elegant and (especially in our contemporary climate of monotheistic textual fundamentalism) courageous in insisting on a historical understanding of Islam. His explanation of the split between Sunni and Shi’a is the clearest I’ve yet read, and his discussion of Islam’s beautiful mysticism—the Sufis—is a pleasure to read. For those wanting to understand the history of Islam, Aslan is ideal on all but the last one hundred or so years. If his portrayal of the violence of Islam is flawed, his hope that that narrative can be overcome is admirable.

Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book

The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative
by Thomas King
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005

In The Truth about Stories, Thomas King, a Native novelist and professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, explores creation stories, Native history, racism, and the image of the “Indian.” King is upfront with his opinion about narrative: “The truth about stories,” he claims, “is that that’s all we are” (2 and passim). We tell stories, he says, to inform ourselves about where we’re from, where we’re going, and who we are along the way. In this series of essays, originally delivered as the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, King is funny, eclectic, smart, searching, straightforward and, I’m convinced, right: we are our stories.

However, readers looking for evidence in support of King’s claim that we narrate our lives will have to look elsewhere. The Truth about Stories is highly subjective and anecdotal, and full of bold claims like this one: “‘You can’t understand the world without telling a story,’ the Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. ‘There isn’t any center to the world but a story’” (32). But one only has to look just outside of literary studies (where narrative theory is weak, bound, as it is, to an antiquated misconception of identity between “plot,” “story,” and “narrative”) to find powerful support for King’s claim. Narrative, Ochs and Capps write in an interdisciplinary review of the literature on the centrality and importance of story, “is born out of experience and gives shape to experience. In this sense, narrative and self are inseparable. Self is here broadly understood to be an unfolding reflective awareness of being-in-the-world, including a sense of one’s past and future…. We come to know ourselves as we use narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others” (Annual Review of Anthropology 1996:20-21).

It’s precisely King’s subjectivity that makes The Truth about Stories so fascinating and worthwhile. The book is, in fact, composed entirely of stories, making it not only a primer on narrative concerns within the Native community but also a more general meta-commentary on the socio-political workings of narrative. Take, for example, the story of a character King names “Charm”: she’s a sort of subatomic particle, a quark, if you will, who cooperates in the process of the creation of Earth. Charm starts off on another planet. She’s a very curious woman and one day, while looking for something new and different to eat, she pokes her head into a “hole so she could get a better view” of what might be available there (13). But, of course, she falls through the hole, and down she goes “into the sky. Uh-oh, Charm thought to herself. That wasn’t to smart” (13). She falls toward the blue-green marble that is Earth: a planet covered entirely with water. Students of Native stories will instantly recognize this story as a version of the Mud Diver creation story. For once Charm splashes down on the watery Earth, all the animals—who really love living in the water—help Charm to find some mud upon which to stand.

This creation story, King points out, stands in stark contrast to the one found in Genesis:

A theologian might argue that these two creation stories are essentially the same. Each tells about the creation of the world and the appearance of human beings. But a storyteller would tell you that these two stories are quite different, for… the elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies… that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations… that celebrate equality and balance. (23-24)

Charm “falls” to Earth, but this creation of Earth as we know it is not the “Fall” as it is in Genesis. These are both stories, and as stories they inform our way of knowing: story is all we are not only ontologically (as Ochs and Capps imply in the passage cited above) but epistemologically as well. King avoids the obvious follow-on to this insight—which world would you rather live in?—because he doesn’t want to be “Thomas King the duck-billed platitude” (27). Neither does he claim that he’s stumbled on something new and original here. The onto-epistemological centrality of narrative, he suggests throughout, is ancient news to Natives. But it may be news to Western culture, since scholars in the Western tradition (such as “cranky old Jacque Derrida” [25]) have made a big pile of hay out of it in recent decades.

Of course, narrative can also be deceptive. Wars are started by telling lies, a pernicious genre of story that maims and kills. Knowledge, after all, is power, and narrative is epistemological. The history of North America is awash in a sea of narrative blood—but also real blood, the blood of Natives murdered and then buried under the shifting sands of white man’s lies. In The Truth about Stories King, himself half Native and half European, is particularly concerned with “the Indian… in mind” (chapter 2). It was a painful realization, he says, to grow up not looking Native (and in California, no less, where virtually all traces of Native culture have been assimilated by the image-machine of Western culture). The image-machine mows down everything in its path and “In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imagination. But for those of us who are Indians, this disjunction between reality and imagination is akin to life and death” (54). The semiotics of identity, then, “form[s] a kind of authenticity test, a racial-realty game that contemporary Native people are forced to play” (55). King, here, isn’t in the business of proffering solutions; he’s telling us what he knows about the world by telling us his stories. For anybody who has ever wondered and struggled with cultural identity (which far too few of us have), it’s easy to step into King’s shoes and keep the story going.

Another story he tells is one that cuts right through all real and imagined cultural boundaries, and it’s one he sums up in a single fragment: “Sanctioned Addictive Drugs and Banned Addictive Drugs” (157). Why, I wonder along with this deeply thoughtful writer, is the use of alcohol—by anybody’s measure clearly a toxin—merely sanctioned (that is, for use by those over 21 except while operating heavy machinery, such as cars) while cannabis—an ancient medicine—is banned? Why does Western culture continue to tell itself so many lies? Why, to return to the contrast between Charm’s cooperative mud divers and the Book of Genesis, are we stuck with brutal, hierarchical Yahweh when we could have gentle, neighbor-loving Jesus? It would be best to weep over these questions, I think, and to taste the salt of experience before rushing forth with policy decisions in lieu of considered answers. It would be best, I think, to read along with King as he suggest that “The magic of Native literature—as with other literatures—is not in the themes of the stories—identity, isolation, loss, ceremony, community, maturation, home—it is in the way meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms” (112).

Thomas King, I read you loud and clear. I hope others will take up this little book and meditate on its various implications. I hope we’ll take King’s stories and do with them what we will, but not say “in the years to come that [we] would have lived [our] lives differently if only [we] had heard [his] stories” sooner (passim). We’ve heard them now.

[Originally published in Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts]

The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery
by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards
Publisher: Regnery, 2004

In 1899, Rudyard Kipling, the great apologist of British imperialism, wrote:

Take up the White Man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

This poem is often cited as the link between racism and imperialism, but without ever defining either term. We typically define racism as prejudice based on race, color, creed or religion. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, for example, defines racism as “Any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment, or exercise, on equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, or any other field of public life.” Dr. Helan Enoch Page, a noted anthropologist of race, writes that “Racism is an ideological, structural and historic stratification process…used for enforcing differential resource allocation decisions that contribute to decisive changes in relative racial standing in ways most favoring the populations designated as ‘white.’”

However, if we listen to what racists actually say and write, we discover that race, religion and the rest are only proximal explanations of racism. Ethnicity and religion are markers of difference, yes, but the ultimate explanation is something more pernicious: epistemological disenfranchisement, we could call it, or, more simply, the privileging of one way of knowing the world over all others. During a war, the standard operating procedure of propagandists is to portray the enemy as a savage, devilish beast, lacking the moral intelligence to either fight fair or, better, to simply surrender to the good cause being propagandized.

What we call “sexism,” in this view, is really racism: women are stupid, women have different ways of knowing the world, and therefore must be kept in line. Likewise, the “darker” races are “ignorant beasts,” and their inability to care for themselves justifies their being conquered and made, if not in fact, de facto slaves. To the Nazis, Jews were a contaminating “race” because their culture threatened the pure intelligence of the “Aryans”. This epistemological disenfranchisement extends to all areas of life: Andrew P. Connors, a blogging pundit, writes that “liberals are the stupid ones.” Perhaps most famously in recent history, Hernstein and Murray’s controversial book, The Bell Curve (1994), argued that African-Americans are less intelligent than whites because of innate biological differences.

Which brings us to Guillermo Gonzalez (an astronomer) and Jay W. Richards (a theologian), and their book, The Privileged Planet. The central thesis of this book is that the planet Earth is in a privileged position in the Universe—and that it is so because it is “intelligently designed.” How do they know this? They don’t, but claim they do by what amounts to the insistent repetition of that old real estate mantra, Location, location, location. But endlessly saying something is true doesn’t make it so, and neither does draping the mantra with endless reams of wooden scientific prose.

An ingrained anthropocentrism and a lack of imagination deeply flaw The Privileged Planet. Because of Earth’s position in space, they claim, “Mankind is unusually well positioned to decipher the cosmos” and that “the conditions allowing for intelligent life on Earth also make our planet strangely well suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.” In other words, our place on Earth gives us the ability to judge the rest of the Universe, and Gonzales and Richards find it lacking in the conditions they deem necessary for intelligent life. If there is intelligent out there, they argue, it’ll be just like us: “it will… enjoy a clear vantage point for searching the cosmos, and maybe even for finding us.” Why this assumption that intelligent life will necessarily be looking outwards? Is human intelligence really the only possible measure of intelligence in the Universe? Isn’t it possible that other forms of intelligence could exist out there?

This lack of imagination, and its correlative anthropocentrism, is similar to the idea that pervades histories of science and philosophy in general: forget the ancient Chinese, the ancient Indians, the ancient cultures of the Pacific and the Americas: science and philosophy started with the Greeks. Why? Because their science and philosophy are like “ours”. Gonzalez and Richards betray this bias when they write, “a planet in a giant molecular cloud in a spiral arm might be a good place to learn about star formation and interstellar chemistry, but observers there would find the distant universe to be hidden from view. In contrast, Earth offers surprisingly good views of the distant and nearby universe while providing an effective platform for discovering the laws of physics.” No doubt “the laws of physics” are important, but is the discovery of such laws the only criteria for intelligence? A race of beings in a spiral arm might not be scientists at all: they might be poets, endlessly inspired by the spiraling clouds of gas that lit their skies.

This isn’t just a lack of imagination, though: it’s also racism. For if the criteria of “intelligent life” is, as they claim, knowing the laws of physics and being able to make scientific discoveries, then what are we to say about the many cultures here on Earth which have never trod the path of science? Consider the few remaining speakers of Mura, a language family of the rainforest peoples of Amazonia. Consisting of only a few phonemes (a handful of consonants and only three vowels), these indigenes know nothing of “our” physics. Are they not, then, intelligent life forms? By the criteria set forth in The Privileged Planet, the answer has to be no. Yet the indigenes of Amazonia know more about rainforest botany than anyone on Earth. Botanists and pharmacologists from all over the world have gone to great lengths to learn what the Mura know before they are wiped off the face of the planet.

Most of the stars astronomers have observed, Gonzalez and Richards correctly point out, are red dwarfs, cold and inhospitable to life, while the Sun, with its relatively stable light output, is in fact rare, not, as commonly believed, small and average. True enough, but this neglects the fact that most red dwarfs passed through what astronomers call the Main Sequence on their way to their present condition. In other words, at some point in the past, red-dwarf stars would have been, for a period of billions of years, similar to our Sun. The argument of The Privileged Planet hinges on the idea that life in the Universe must all be co-temporal; if it doesn’t exist in the conditions present in the Universe now, then it doesn’t exist.

The hubris of Gonzalez and Richards is in assuming that their minds can wrap around all that is possible. But their minds can’t even wrap around the possibility of the different kinds of intelligence right here on Earth. They don’t mention biology, having left the problem of evolution to other shock troops of the “intelligent design” army (William Dembski’s The Design Inference is the general of that bunch). So how can they be trusted to inform us of “intelligent design” in the Universe?

They can’t. The Privileged Planet is a thinly disguised racist tract. It’s only possible value is to provide ammunition for those who would oppress and exterminate cultures here on Earth with different life ways, different intelligences, and, especially, different ways of knowing the world (such as the Enlightened, scientific way). As such, it’s part of a “Trojan horse” (as Barbara Forrest calls it) movement called “creation science.” Many scientists, including Forrest, have critiques the new creationism on the grounds that it simply isn’t science. True enough, and fine as far as that goes. But such critiques don’t go nearly far enough: it’s time to call the new creationism what it is: racism of a most pernicious sort.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

I. Liquid Manifesto

Like a sacrificial virgin balanced on a ziggurat in an earthquake, Jean Genet step-dances in fits and trances, and in his resolute Fall disavows the validity of received notions of ontological and epistemological positioning. Genet’s narrators are Schroedinger’s cats: undecidably both dead and alive. Genet’s narrators are also liquid. These narrators, as for example Jean in Funeral Rites, rise to the level of their surroundings in a dialogical environmentalism (in the sense that the mental is enturned: en-vir–always already turning again) that has them “communicating” (in the sense that a dance is a communion) with “the other” (a prescriptive term about to be overturned) outside of the space-time continuum of Newtonian physics and Cartesian ontology, but still within the purview of persistent and visionary rhythms.

Liquid narrators are a better description that quantum uncertainty, for the very notion of certainty is prescriptive, capitalistic, and hegemonic. (Like an atheist is certain there is no god but is always engaged with the notion of god, so perpetrators of Heseinbergian uncertainty are certain of an uncertain universe.) Orphan, waif, scoundrel, betrayer, thief and fag, Genet is an othersider. In Pompes Funèbres (1953; Funeral Rites, 1969), Genet contradicts what Cixous will say some twenty years later in La Rire de la Méduse (1975; note 2; cf. the article on Kesey and Genet in Ralph): men have said something about their sexuality, and we have said things both profound and profoundly out of control. By the time feminists uncaged their inner animals and discovered their liquid selves, Genet was dead, leaving only his contraptions for ego inflation, these novels, these surrealist machines.

Genet’s novels are like semen stains on school clothes–not “pornographic,” but rather telling. Clothes stained with semen, unlike, say, the Mark of the Beast or the pink triangle of the concentration camps, are merely telling: these sign mark no value upon the wearer. Funeral Rites tells of othering, and its telling is made through the ear of a self that does not exist yet persists in attending to the rhythms that permeate our world (rhythms, as both gap and syndect [see below for a discussion of the gap]), focus attention, or better, inspire [for breathing is a rhythm] attendance). The desired and desiring “Eye of Gabès” (the wetted and winking asshole; see translator’s note, page19), the semen, the spit, like the vaginal fluids in Wittig’s Les Guerrieres or Bronner’s A Weave of Women, are the bearers of difference. And in the hydraulic fluids that do the work of carrying, we see already a narrative strategy that syndectically embraces good and evil, male and female, goddess (Mary Magdalene) and demon (Hitler). Genet says these narrativities “are my gobs of spit” (67) (By “narrative” I do not restrict myself to the traditional meaning of story. Rather, I postulate narrativity as an activity in which all living systems engage as they confront the gap.).

Here are the manifestations of Genet:

1. The Self is a prescriptive deception perpetuated by hegemonic powers that are at once homophobic, misogynistic and (Mary Daly’s term) mazing. Rather than a-mazing, “making clear a path,” prescriptive Self is mazing in that we are always left behind searching for the Self that is yet to become. No! The Self, contra Heidegger, is not “becoming” but rather othering. The “conscious” Self is not Dasein but in-sane. Insane: “outside of sanitation,” the sanity here being the prescriptive ghettoes of psychological “health” (“individuation”).

2. The Other does not exist. Every previous point of the manifesto must be disavowed, as the cartographer must disavow the coastline she has just drawn in favor of the rhythms of depositing and erosion. (Nothing holds, especially not the Center.) If not Dasein but othering, then not othering but something much more physiological: we are centerless chaosmotic percolators. (I steal this word from Guattari, whose last book is entitled Chaosmosis. Guattari’s concern was always for the particular and physiological, and he uses the word chaosmosis as a near-synonym for dialogical.)

3. Genet does not exist, except as a centerless chaosmotic percolator.

4. Liquids exist as centerless chaosmotic percolators. Liquids dis-solve the “problems” of theory (cf. the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus).

5. Goddesses exist: Psyche, Sophia, Ocean, Quantum Wave-Point: Genet is a Goddess, a Liquid.

We cannot help but build systems, and in Genet’s system these are the six visible facets of his crystal, the six ratchets of his surrealistic machine. (Any escape from prescribed system (e.g., Derrida) becomes for some other a system (Derridean thought). Any disenchantment from power (Foucault) becomes a co-opted and cooperative narrativizing (New Historicism). The point here is that it is only ever the practitioner (Genet) and never the theorist (Satre) who is able to “overthrow the System,” as the students of the late 1960s said.) At every turn (page versus page, thought versus thought, living self versus dead other), with every drop of spit, semen and shit, a fecund revolution gives birth to itself. Every previous point must be disavowed (waved away).

“Keep your laws off my body!” This is Genet’s battle cry and it points, like a wizard leaning on a staff at a crossroads, straight to his physiognosis. “My fingers… moved… over the cock, which was as hard as wood, but alive. The contact thrilled me. In the state of ecstasy there is also an element of fear with respect to the divinity of his angels” (155). Genet knows the male body, and he recognizes and plays with its animativeness. From here, a sixth point:

6. Psyche is animation.

It is a danger, with Genet, to ascribe a metaphysic to the body. The hegemonic reading finds, because it insists on finding, the singularity of Self and its dwelling-place, the Body. But if we lose these bonds of prescription, we discover that our bodies, as is Genet’s, are liquid. Genet, in this respect, is pre-Cartesian, presocratic. Listen to this latter-day Milesian’s self-historicizing disavowal of Self:

[Our] years deposit within us a mud in which bubbles form. Each bubble, which is inhabited by an individual will to be, develops and changes, alone and in accordance with the other bubbles, and becomes part of an iridescent, violent whole that manifests a will issuing from the mud.

In my fatigue between waking and sleeping, between pain and what combats it (a kind of will to peace, I think), I am visited by all the characters of whom I have spoken and other too who are not clear to me. (226-7)

Instead of genres, let us speak of lyrics and epics, of liquids and solids. No man, and I believe no woman, can feel a genre, but the rhythms and timbres of emotion and the persistence of volume (in space, in amplitude of emotion and energy) are the mud of the ground on which we stand, desperately embracing for what might be the last time. This relationship of bubble to mud, of lover to lover, of writer to reader, can never be dramatic enough:

7. Death, like life, does not exist. But even Genet temporizes, so let me say: Death, like life, is only temporary.

Our systems of binaries are only temporary–dirty, yellowed bandages on psychic wounds–and must be disavowed. In this insistence, Genet is difficult: “In my fatigue…” because it is the stress of liminality that reveals the wounded nature of the beast that systematizes. The stressed animal attains to a heightened attentiveness before the gap. In the passage cited above, the liminal gap is agonistic–“pain and what combats it”–but, as we shall see, this gap is not always so, for we must transform the gnomic “fight, freeze, or flight” to the aphoristic and ironizing “fight, flight, freeze, or fornicate.”

II. The Gap

“Jean’s body was a Venetian flask” (62).

Consider the presocratic aether—why does this Fifth Element return periodically to our tables of philosophy like an undeniable element? Perhaps this question, in the other words of other times, is the one that led Genet to write Funeral Rites. The aether fills the gap; the aether is the stuff that makes more stuff; the aether is the medium that allows vessels to communicate, that allows the alchemical work of psychical transformation to proceed. The aether is the phorein, “the ‘to bear’” that we name with the over-determined Anglo-Saxon word, work. (“I am visited by all the characters…”: the bearded Teuton Karl Marx looms and leers, waving his Manifesto.)

Genet, aether-dwelling, and with the aether, a bridge-builder, anarchist, disavows his own systematizing for the self-inscribing “will to be”: the aether is psyche. (Heidegger, always Heidegger. See Poetry, Thought, and Language. We have spent 2,500 years elaborating what the Milesian philosophers finished before they started (only because, though, a story must be told, or better, we must persist in our tellings. What we are taught is always overturned by what we experience: this is always the narrator’s dilemma, as we shall see). Genet’s Madonna—the other Mary, la Madonna Noire—is at home in Heaven as in Hell, in the Body as in the Spirit. She-Who is aethereal.) Psyche is, to borrow from Rider Haggard, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Unlike Haggard, whose goddess (or at least transcendentally goddess-like) Aeysha is condemned by the narrator, Genet rarely protests against the necessity (Greek goddess Ananke) of either Psyche or the psychological. It is hardly fair to compare the Victorian Haggard (a starched shirt stuffed with dry toast?) to the liquid effluvia of the Hadean Genet, except that they both explore the same physis, the same physical stuff we erroneously and prescriptively label “the metaphysical.” There is no “proving” the “materiality” of “psyche”: there is only the constant re-perceiving, the continual re-demonstration of the experience of the psychic. In Haggard, Enlightened cynicism splits body from spirit (mind); in Genet, spit and shit give a ground to, and reveal the footprints left by, psyche.

The aether lubricates. This simplest of English sentences is already “in-sane”: it dwells in, and gives bridge to, the danger of contamination. Dwells in danger? Ontology, as in Heidegger’s dwelling-bridging, is said in adjectives. Barthes’ concern about music (that it can only be described in retrospect, and that therefore any critical theory of music flounders in its first steps before falling into useless systematizing) parallels the problem of Genet’s liquid poetics: such a poetics may be described, but theory can never penetrate what can only ever be experienced. (But again, let us disavow the “genre(s)” of “theory,” and immediately disavow that disavowal by saying that in the lyric essay one may at least imitate the spiny, punctuated rhythms of religious experience that occur when I read Genet. The aether divides but does not separate: Jean feels the “same rivers of love” for Riton while “not a drop” is “withdrawn from Jean” D. “I was preserving both youngsters under the double ray of my tenderness” (57).

Inspiration is lubrication: Genet enters me through my Eye of Gabès. I do not literally mean that I have anal intercourse with this particular copy of an English translation of the famous French novel. Nevertheless, chaosmosis does transpire and I am percolating. The petit mort of Nirvana or orgasm or prayer—by this very manifesto that is the result of my “relations” with Genet, I may not ask “who” are the participants in my relations with the text, but only embrace my disavowal of said participants. And here we arrive at The Gap.

No Self, but individuals. Nodes we are in information theory, or desiring machines to Deleuze and Guattari, shifting, wandering, perturbed in a landscape that is at once all a part of itself and no whole. For the animal, the gap between death and life looms large; one Jean lives on while the other is dead “And I weep if I do not bind Jean to this world in which beauty lives” (Rites, 168). For the Gap is (alas! I will wear the gears down on my adjective machine…) betweenness. The Gap is the certainty of Being and the uncertainty of Living, a phoretic binder that bears difference as a liquid carries particulate matter. The gap (for it has long since “settled down,” lost any sense of capitalization [though it remains a tool (pace Marx) of capital], and become as quotidianly plain as gravity) is the energia of narrativity, the source of cognitive turning. It is quite likely that I am speaking of what my philosophical inheritance names difference. (I say “likely” because it may also be the case that I am eager to create a link where in fact no difference but a befuddlement of vocabulary exists.) However that may be, I prefer here to speak of Genet in terms that he himself calls for: rhythms and images, music and poetry. The gap, then, is the silent part of the beat, for which English has no name. We may ponder the answer to the question about the sound of one hand clapping, but what is the name for the gap that falls between two claps, of one or of many hands?

We are confronted with this silent part of the beat all the time. We wonder what the othering individual is thinking, we contemplate the consequences of our othering actions, we stand at a crossroads and ask, Left or right? Right or wrong? Today or tomorrow? It would be too easy, and too dangerous, to reduce the gap to a phenomenology of linguistics (the Derridean “system”). Danger is attractive; still, we must be aware that many such phenomenologies privilege (overtly or otherwise) the human. Difference is not binary and humans are animals subject to the (other) worldly rhythms of body and soul that fill the world-gap. (We are not subjects, per se, but subject to the aether: I am Genet’s subject, not he mine.) The danger of systematizing the gap into a philosophy of language is that we run the risk of imbibing so much text that we black out and forget our rhythms, like alcoholics. (But nonetheless we must “Drink,” as Rumi, Rabelais, and Genet insist.) But this is a danger with any liquid, and to use, not abuse, is the gnomic rule of thumb to guide us here. The danger is attractive because, once we shed our pretentious and precious humanocentrism, we begin to see the gap as an energy source utilized in all living “systems.” For the gap begs perception so that it might be acknowledged and played, bridged, gone around, or filled.

The first of the dwelling-bridging sense to evolve was smell. Primal molecular gnosis, after the permeable membrane, the archetype of all physical (and therefore linguistic) systems, this first true orifice was a stop-gapper, a gap-bridger. The nose knows: the molecular perturbation of filia by dust, these couplings are the footprints of the endlessly moving gaps that continually confront the living organism. By these footprints the organism is able to detect a rhythm, the phenomenon of motion. For what is rhythm but the alternating presence and absence in perception of some othering thing that persists? In that othering thing which persists we might find food, danger, or mate; but first we must either query or answer: friend, foe, or fuckmate? The single-celled individual knows by its “nose.”

In his lust for danger (Genet displays “risk-taking behavior,” one could pop-psychologize) and for that which is the same thing, religious experience (more dangerous than any drug I know), Genet’s sense of smell is Heraclitan. “In Hades,” Heraclitus is thought to have said, “psyche proceeds by sense of smell alone.” Hades is an archetypal zone of liminality (rather than the Hell of teleoscopic Christianity), and the dwelling place of Jean-in-mourning is liminal as well. Corpses litter Genet’s Paris the way flies litter a corpse: like stink of shit. Jean stands contemplating the door that marks the gap between him and the corpse in the other room:

Death had shut the door. Though I questioned myself and questioned death with all kinds of precautions in my voice, that giant and yet ideal door was keeping a secret and allowing to escape only a very light but sickening smell over which the corpse drifted [sic], a smell of astonishing delicacy which again made me wonder what games are played in the chambers of the dead. (173; note too the fart of Jean D.’s mother on page 172)

Genet’s, and Jean the narrator’s, sense of smell is a synecdoche for the web of perception that alchemicalizes Funeral Rites. Jean is hyper-perceptive, a practitioner of a self-inflicted (he feels guilt, he mourns) surrealist psychology: he is a synesthesic. As he lays beside the sleeping German soldier Erik in a safe-house apartment, Jean’s desire becomes magma, a very hot and dangerous liquid indeed. This melting and melding liquid (igneous bears the sense of “melded all together”) displays or signifies itself as a “mass of cries of fear rising from my belly.…” Jean’s “strong, clenched teeth… on the alert” stifle the cries. “Finding no outlets, those cries punctured my neck, which suddenly let flow the twenty white streams of my fear through twenty purple ulcers in the shape of roses and carnations” (154). Jean touches Erik’s cock and is “astounded to feel the Fritz’s cock swell… and quickly fill my hand” (154). To touch “the angel’s weapon” is to risk experiencing “ecstasy” (155), to risk the “danger” of embodiment across the gap, the “danger of giving him body within my body” (62).

The “musical value” of a cry such as “‘I love you, oh’” is given that value by the sensual relationship of sex and death given body by music, for “the supreme song” is “to death itself” (55). Music at once presents the gap (the unknown, because silent, parts of the rhythm) and bridges it with drones and melodies, and so is perhaps our only way of expressing in an act both the gap and the syndect. Jean bears the musical staff that is penis (verge), orchard (verger) with its blooms (see note page 18), as well as the portée of the penis and the orchard, their “offspring” or “brood” which is also the place of the music-text. The “staff” in Genet becomes a divine devising rod that gives structure and form to divine narratives infused with the liquid Goddess.

III. The Manifestation of Liquid Music

The Magdalene, as discoverer of Christ’s transformation across the gap of death, acts as the aetherializing agent of Genet’s narrative. She is never revealed directly, only alluded to, but acts as the engine of othering, for she is the place where sex and death “come together,” as it were, as dwelling-bridges. To see her presence in Funeral Rites, we must understand something of the Magdalene’s reception in southern France.

In The Movement of the Free Spirit (1994), Raoul Veneigem demonstrates that the Cathar “movement” was an economic threat to the Church. The pursuit of “perfection” entailed a movement away from economic engagement with material culture beyond that which could be produced in the Catholic religious community. As the Cathar “community” became a de facto kingdom, its subjects became heretics. This threat resulted in the genocide called the Albegensian Crusade, while giving the French a mythology of martyrdom and diffident individualism. (This is not the only source; Joan of Arc, who also plays a part in Funeral Rites, is another.) The Cathars were Magdalene worshippers, possibly believing her to have been the wife of Christ, and the mother of their magical child. That this is likely nonsense (or maybe it isn’t!) makes not a whit of difference to human myth-making. The point is, the Magdalene is very attractive to a thief, for she is the trickster who makes a lie out of the Church’s story: she is a bridge to an other sort of economic individualism. And it was the Church that stole the archetypal images of individualities and autonomous communities and recorporated them into the monolithic body of Christ as a formal dogma of the One, the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Stripped of the possibility of individual religious experience in the same way a watershed might be dam(n)ed into a single flow, this edifice, for Genet, becomes not a target for destruction or even critique, but simply another lock to pick.

Through the Magdalene, Genet steals back the story of his body and his individualism. In his individuality he finds a storm (a riot, a war, an orgy) of personages, the othering images that fill and bridge the gaps of living. This Madonna might spit in your food (174-5), but only as an ego-deflating trick. And trick she is, the trick of Genet’s othering. In two intensely religious and Magdalenian passages, Jean the narrator reveals to us the sticky web of dwelling-bridging enabled by the Magdalene. In the Magdalene, Genet finds through his narrator Jean the multifaceted possibilities of the formalism the Church presents as dogma. Again, the Derridean idea of an “open text” is easily grasped here, but that is only part of the story, for it is Jean’s open body that is chaosmotically porous to her possibilities. (I use the word body here, but am tempted, in cognizance of our inheritance of the so-called “mind/body split” to say spirit-body, but this too leads to further semantophilosophical problems that I will leave for now unresolved.)

“Punk, ridiculous little fellow that I was,” Jean narrates,

I emitted upon the world a power extracted from the pure, sheer beauty of athletes and hoodlums. For only beauty could have occasioned such an impulse of love as that which, every day for seven years, caused the death of strong and fierce young creatures. Beauty alone warrants such improper things as hearing the music of the spheres, raising the dead, understanding the unhappiness of stones. (133)

This short passage indexes the major concerns of this essay. To understand it, we must first disavow our inherited disavowals of nature. Dismissed conceptually as essentialist and vague, nature should in fact be prized as a concept that at once positions us outside (“in the wild”) of the prescriptive Self and points back at the individual as chaosmotic animal. It is the nature of the animal, of any living system, to perceive the gap that confronts it and answer it with an emotional-aesthetic response. (See the “underground stream” of holistic and ecological philosophies of such as G. Bateson and Deleuze and Guattari. See also Masson and McCarthy, When Elephants Weep, 1995, especially their remarks on altruism.) Flight, fight, freeze, or fornication: the patriotic love of men (and, I assume, of women, but that is beyond my purview here) for their country and their willingness to die for that beauty is precisely the narrative confrontation of individual with crossroads. “To be or not to be” is exactly the sort of (seemingly) binary question that enables the individual animal to attend to its own story. To die “for God and country” reveals the liquid power of “faith,” as some would say, but more the energia or persistence of an experiential rhythm.

This rhythm is personified in the body of the Magdalene, a body that is visible as an image but that is undecidably othering as a force. The improperness of “hearing the music of the spheres” is then a theft from the monolithic structure of prescriptive culture, a giving-back of unmediated, natural, animal experience “to the loveliest armies in the world” (133). This dangerous, threatening tremendum of beauty, as raw and wet as a “spunk-filled mouth” (133), allowed the wife of Christ to stand before his tomb and perceive “the unhappiness of [the] stones” that had so recently blocked his crypt. (In The Psychology of Religious Experience (1965), Goodenough writes that the tremendum is “a Latin word… which has, as I use it, its simple original meaning of ‘that which must be feared’ or ‘the source of terror’” (6). The liminality of She-who-must-be-obeyed is terrifying. The Indo-European root of terror is *tres, “to tremble.” Trembling, from cold, fear or desire, is a primal experience of rhythm.) It would be easy to become sidetracked here, searching for the implications of the crypt itself; but throughout Funeral Rites Genet has insisted that death is a stop-gap: there is no crypt. As a dead brother, comrade-in-arms, or lover lives on in the living, so Beauty, Christ, and the Magdalene persist as rhythmic reminders, not of the transcendent, but of the quotidian path-finding of aetherializing psyche. The “unrevealed” of the mouth, the anus, and the vagina is not a tomb, but rather a revealing gap, a navigational crossroads that confronts an individual as the experience of the tremendum. The “unhappiness of stones” is felt by the Magdalene, and those that attend to her (“an attention to a kind of constant desire” [133]), as the emotion of the stones themselves. Stones, here, indeed have “scruple[s]” (Derrida), as stones, too, must be counted among those who experience the rhythms of life, and to block the tomb of the Savior is indeed a cause for some unhappiness. But to open the tomb, the mouth, the anus, is to let the fluids flow, one to the other.

The Magdalene-as-personage who dwells within Jean is the ambiguous reminder “of a terrible muffled grief that was rumbling in the profoundest depths of my misery and that awaited only a lapse of my attention to burst into sobs and despair” (216). Attention here is the “key to the magnetic fields” (Breton) in which the vibratory terror of the tremendum (grief bears its own terror) gives movement to narrative focus. The Magdalene imbues Jean’s multiplicious consciousness with all the characters he has known, those he has not known, with that of the mythos, the direct experience of the vibratory spoken word.

The mythos of the Last Supper, for example, is given as the Edenic and cannibalistic “fête” (216) of Jean attending (listening and scenting) his dead lover, Jean D:

What bread the feast brings me! In my memory, his prick, which used to discharge so calmly, assumes the proportions and at times the serene appearance of a flowering apple tree in April. (217)

As Jean attempts to deposit Jean D.’s remains “in the garbage can” that is “full of a heap of rubbish,” the Magdalene is positioned as the stop-gap between the “violent disorder of withered chrysanthemums” and the “one [flower]…which… adorned [the garbage can] with a sumptuous order” (217). The Magdalene, appearing through the image of dead Jean, is the “thorny branch which tears my gaze” such that “Today I dare not touch you. Your very immobility claws the void” (217). The anointing flower of spit, semen, of shit left in the road or wiped on a pant leg, is a vibrating signifier of the tremendum, of the uncontrollable, undecidable but nonetheless perceivable gap.

The Magdalene—and I’ll dare to add: like any wife—is “the holly” (217), the crown of thorns that at once pricks and is pricked. For Jean, the crypt (“you’ll be more comfortable in the refrigerator” [216]) is not a starting point of interpretation, but a verer, a “turning” point on the Way. There is a “rejection” here “of the world by the world” which “can produce humility or pride, can oblige one to seek new rules of conduct” and “that… enables one to see the other world” (218-19). The persistently othering world is revealed through “torn… veils” (218) and is “recognize[d]” as “a recurrence” of a “childhood love of tunnels” (220). Dark passages from which sprout the rhythms of “the angel’s weapon” and invite us, in answer to the perennial question of fight, flight, freeze, or fuck to “bugger the world” (220). Our holes are wholes.