David Need
Folding Time: On the “Gnostic” Effects of Irruption and Loss in the Work of H.D.,
Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg and Alice Notley
An opening is a beginning, but it is also a hole. --Jeffrey Kripal[i]
In his 2010 study Authors of the Impossible, religious historian Jeffrey Kripal offers studies of four late nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who thematized and championed the concept of the “paranormal”—the British classicist Frederick Myers who founded the London Society for Psychical research in 1882, the early twentieth century American Charles Fort whose researches into “anomalous phenomena” were published in four volumes, and two still living authors influenced by the French UFologist, Aimé Michel, the astronomer and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, whom Kripal speaks of as a sociologist of the impossible. Kripal’s study of the this work is part of a larger project which traces such discourse—and its elaboration in science fiction and the figure of the superman—as a form of mytho-religious thought proper to the constraints of post-Enlightenment secular culture.
The link between religious discourse and the study of the paranormal is, for Kripal, the problem presented by anomalous events—interpreted in terms of religious motif on the one hand and in terms of para-scientific language on the other. The point is made in nuanced ways but culminates when, having established a rough index of phenomena associated with reports of anomalous events, he reads what he finds to be closely comparable witness accounts of the 1917 Marian apparition at Fatima, not so much to reduce the religious to the paranormal or to reassert the authority of the religious, but rather to identify the kinds of phenomena human beings may have been trying to speak of, one way or the other, through available or dominant languages.
***
I like to tell the students in my religion classes that there are two problems human ingenuity has done little to solve—the problem of social violence, and that of even a basic understanding of what, since as early as we have words, we have been calling sometimes mind, sometimes spirit, sometimes psyche or soul—this thing that is more, a supplement or extra-envelope if you will, that seems to be about us.
In work on the RgVedic poets, I’ve suggested we can see thought about both issues in the way a given hymn weaves together three distinct, imaged topoi—a purely imaginative topos associated with the figures of the devas and their mythemes, a topos imaged by way of a shared and apparently “natural” reference to the visible “out there” of the dawn, and the interior topos of the ritual ground—the space around the fire where the ritual is woven and said.[ii]
A Keatsian weaving of an imagined mythic past and a perceived present is not so different, and the Eliot of the Quartets is not so much further either.
This last is a big gesture—something like the bone thrown up that sails off starship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Kubrick, I might be making it to suggest that, in thinking these things through, we often miss something, a question or a problem that remains unthematized—the fox jumping again and again for the grapes that hang, reflected, above him. And so, in the context of these panels which, however humorously, rethematize the Gnostic languages of light and spirit, I want to pose a question that, I think, bears on the problem of thinking of words (signs, sigles, asterisms)—especially the imagined and imaged words of poetry—as figures in which matter might be transmuted to some absence and light. And the question is this: do we imagine this to happen as a product that our imagination/psyche works up or carves (even if distributed by inter-texuality in ways that mask or shuffle agency) or are we after an encounter in which a speaking back from somewhere else—some lady, or God, or Mars—occurs.
To get at this, I want to quickly consider three somewhat disparate twentieth century writers—H.D., Philip K. Dick, and Allen Ginsberg, each of whom 1) had an extraordinary anomalous experience, 2) obsessively wrote over and/or otherwise attempted to restage this experience, and 3) arguably produced, in their work, influential mythic narratives that critique idealist-inflected ideas of history. I’ll conclude by comparing these cases to that of Alice Notley.
***
The anomalous experiences I refer to here are the following: 1) for H.D, the post WWI 1920 encounter with a person she later calls “The Man on the Boat” at twilight on the deck of a boat off the coast of Portugal, and the experience of seeing a series of images and writing appear on a hotel wall in Corfu, 2) for Ginsberg, the audition in 1948 of a voice reciting Blake’s “O Sunflower”, and, for Dick, a series of visionary experiences that begin in Feb. 1974 when he took a home delivery of pain-relievers from a young woman whose fish-shaped necklace emanated a pink-colored beam that sent him into a trance lasting several days.
It would be easy enough to explain each of these experiences as hallucinatory and/or otherwise related to physiological and psychic stress or drug use. The end of WWI had delivered a series of traumatic losses and near-death illness to H.D. from which she was just recovering. Dick used drugs, including LSD, extensively, had prior psychiatric hospitalizations and was recovering from surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth. Ginsberg’s case is less clearly tied to manifest trauma, but a case could be made that this event was the manifestation of trauma related to his mother’s mental illness and his own coming-of-age crises. However—and this is an issue that comes up again and again in Religious Studies, from a critical perspective, any such interpretation would really be a matter of deciding which of several explanatory vocabularies to use—in this case a rational-materialist, medical language rather than a mythic or religious language.
This is a basic problem with respect to what we think of as religious and/or anomalous experiences—by their very nature they cannot be explained without first deciding which vocabulary is to be authoritative—there is something that exceeds our sense of the real that we have to struggle to say.
I am less interested here in deciding which vocabulary is the really authoritative vocabulary than to identify several other commonalities. First, all three cases were experienced to be intrusive and included apparitional signs—letters and hieroglyphs, a beam that carried geometrical and symbolic patterns in it, and spoken words—that spontaneously occurred to the senses. Something other broke into ordinary experience, was given to sense. Second, we could say that the experiences wounded or, to use a different vocabulary, charged or obsessed the individual. The experience was reported as crisis or, alternately, understood as conferring mission.
Finally, for a variety of reasons—in H.D.’s case, psychiatry was fairly primitive, in the case of Ginsberg and Dick, both had some paranoia about submitting themselves to normalization therapies—these three writers all either initially or eventually turned to what they trusted most—an ability to write, their creative imaginations—to make sense of the experiences and/or heal. H.D. would essentially write and rewrite versions of the 1920 experiences (and the later reoccurrence of this crisis in 1944-45) for the rest of her life; when not explicitly doing this—as in the Trilogy and Helen of Egypt—the work was structured by an understanding of topos, inter-textuality and time that she had come to in trying to make sense of the visions. Dick would write an 8,000 page journal—recently edited and published—in which he attempted to elaborate a metaphysics best realized in his late novels Valis and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Ginsberg would, for years attempt to recreate the experience and would carry Blake with him as an alter-ego into old age. In each case, doing so meant being loyal to the content of the senses—even if hallucinatory—and to the tools they were given to work aesthetically with sense— that is, even though still rational in imagining systems or correlations, each ultimately prioritized an aesthetic mode of explication.
Although each writer would finally use a different vocabulary—H.D. a theosophical language with echoes of Alice Bailey’s White Lodge, Dick, a science-fiction language, and Ginsberg, a Tibetan-Buddhist language of spontaneous mind—each would make sense of the intrusion as an indication of what I call a “fold” that allows apparently different times or worlds to leak into each other. H.D. would elaborate an extensive ripple by which the fall of Athens or Troy lay palimpsest to war-time London, Dick, a fold that connected 1st century Palestine to the 1970s, and Ginsberg a fold that he first understood as folding Blake into the 20th century and later as tying his future self, singing Blake, to his younger self.
It is possible to focus on thinking through a metaphysics that would support such a fold, wondering with Eliot about the existence of a still point, for instance, or Olson’s sense of projection, underlining what the early twentieth century Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov’s called an “immanent” in contrast to a cosmological, linear unfolding of being (which Bulgakov posited less as a theoretically necessary albeit hidden ground than because of its irruption as a doubling of topos given to sense). But the key to me here is that the fold happens in the writing, or, in Ginsberg’s case, in the performance. It’s there that, like the Rgvedic ritual song, a work is done that weaves a break or rupture in the logic of the world back into something like a scar, where both worlds are superimposed through a referentiality made possible despite and yet still in the materiality of language.
I want to conclude by drawing a contrast between this kind of experience/mytho-poesis and that found in the work of Alice Notley. I am indebted to Joe Donahue for pointing out Notley’s brother’s death and its initial figuration in “White Phosphorous” as a turning point or threshold to her work over the last two decades.[iii] Notley’s work during this latter period admits what I would call the inflection of the other, an inflection marked by interruption—stylized in Alette by the use of quotation-mark—plural-vocality and grammatical elision. There is a similar doubling or folding of time or topos—the dead speak, the past haunts and speaks. In the case of Alma, the overlays are multiple, the possible times and touches many.
In correspondence with me over the last year, Alice explained how the word "trance" became attached to the work of accessing the voices that populate her poems. She said she had begun to use an imaginative "trance" process when working on poems from Mysteries of Small Houses. Then, "I told people about this process when I was first reading the poems aloud, and sometimes I would teach the process in workshops. It got a little notoriety. The word “trance” stuck, and I can’t seem to shake it, though it doesn’t always apply."[iv] She went on: "Sometimes it seems to me that people want to talk about trance, automatic writing, stream-of-consciousness, because they don’t want to allow me my actual poetry skills. Or they just have to hang poetry on some idea. I do think people write poetry in a version of the trance state, and it is partly a state of concentration and also a state of grace; if you go too deeply into it though you’ll stop being able to write."
This reminds us that, despite the varied vocabularies—echoes of theosophical ideas in H.D. so amplified by Duncan in the H.D. Book, Ginsberg's Spenglarian lineages or Dick's sci-fi notions—what matters might be less the dazzling ideas than the writing, the work of the hands in words.
One could, I think, write another paper alongside this one that started from different wounds—the trauma of sibling loss, for instance (Kerouac, Ashbury, Notley, Rilke all leap immediately to mind) or the wound of anima projection—the idealization of the Lady in Dante, Nervel, or Blok. In the end, I suspect the invocation of gnostic here, in these panels, would want, by that term, to get at this larger set of writers. Because gnostic has a religious or spiritualist inflection, it seemed useful to me to consider a set of writers whose writing life was marked by an explicit anomalous/religious experience, i.e., marked by the kinds of mytho-poetics the word gnostic might initially invoke. By teasing out the significance of writing/performing in these cases and linking this to ritual action, I hope to point us away from the spectacles and music of the mythic, not because these are too baroque or because I prefer the austere, but to make it clear that what makes a difference here is a practice, an everyday practice of stitching and folding--as in Dickinson's two sunsets and several stars.[v]
I want to end with yet another aside, this time to Catherine Albanese’s wonderful study of American metaphysical religion A Republic of Mind and Spirit.[vi] If there is a single thread Albanese traces from European spiritualism to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century forms of religion in America such as Christian Science, New Thought, and New Age Religion, it’s an emphasis on self-perfectionism made possible by an instrumentalization of spirit. To the extent that Gnostic thought more generally is self-perfectionist, one might want to consider the cases of H.D., Dick, and Ginsberg as counter-examples that prove a different purpose. This leads me to wonder if a poetics concerned with translation to light might not also be contrasted to or remembered as a poetics that admits what I’d call shape-shift, a doubling that becomes immanent in or as flesh, whose purpose is different than self-perfection or mastery, but is, rather, to give otherwise impossible “place” to an other. What I like to imagine might be a real affordance, Rilke’s human place, between river and rock.[vii]
[i] Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 3.
[ii] See David Need, “Singing at Dawn/Weaving the World: reading the Rgveda” in Talisman #33-33 (Summer/Fall 2006), pp. 235-238 and “A Man Made of Words”, Talisman 35 (Fall 2007), pp. 105-114.
[iii] Joseph Donahue, “Conference Paper” given at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February, 2011.
[iv] Alice Notley, personal correspondence,
[v] Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, (New York, NY: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co., 1961), pp. 145, 157.
[vi] Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[vii] The reference is to the last stanza of the Second of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchel, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995), p. 343: "If only we too could discover a pure contained, / human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil / between river and rock."
Folding Time: On the “Gnostic” Effects of Irruption and Loss in the Work of H.D.,
Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg and Alice Notley
An opening is a beginning, but it is also a hole. --Jeffrey Kripal[i]
In his 2010 study Authors of the Impossible, religious historian Jeffrey Kripal offers studies of four late nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who thematized and championed the concept of the “paranormal”—the British classicist Frederick Myers who founded the London Society for Psychical research in 1882, the early twentieth century American Charles Fort whose researches into “anomalous phenomena” were published in four volumes, and two still living authors influenced by the French UFologist, Aimé Michel, the astronomer and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, whom Kripal speaks of as a sociologist of the impossible. Kripal’s study of the this work is part of a larger project which traces such discourse—and its elaboration in science fiction and the figure of the superman—as a form of mytho-religious thought proper to the constraints of post-Enlightenment secular culture.
The link between religious discourse and the study of the paranormal is, for Kripal, the problem presented by anomalous events—interpreted in terms of religious motif on the one hand and in terms of para-scientific language on the other. The point is made in nuanced ways but culminates when, having established a rough index of phenomena associated with reports of anomalous events, he reads what he finds to be closely comparable witness accounts of the 1917 Marian apparition at Fatima, not so much to reduce the religious to the paranormal or to reassert the authority of the religious, but rather to identify the kinds of phenomena human beings may have been trying to speak of, one way or the other, through available or dominant languages.
***
I like to tell the students in my religion classes that there are two problems human ingenuity has done little to solve—the problem of social violence, and that of even a basic understanding of what, since as early as we have words, we have been calling sometimes mind, sometimes spirit, sometimes psyche or soul—this thing that is more, a supplement or extra-envelope if you will, that seems to be about us.
In work on the RgVedic poets, I’ve suggested we can see thought about both issues in the way a given hymn weaves together three distinct, imaged topoi—a purely imaginative topos associated with the figures of the devas and their mythemes, a topos imaged by way of a shared and apparently “natural” reference to the visible “out there” of the dawn, and the interior topos of the ritual ground—the space around the fire where the ritual is woven and said.[ii]
A Keatsian weaving of an imagined mythic past and a perceived present is not so different, and the Eliot of the Quartets is not so much further either.
This last is a big gesture—something like the bone thrown up that sails off starship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Kubrick, I might be making it to suggest that, in thinking these things through, we often miss something, a question or a problem that remains unthematized—the fox jumping again and again for the grapes that hang, reflected, above him. And so, in the context of these panels which, however humorously, rethematize the Gnostic languages of light and spirit, I want to pose a question that, I think, bears on the problem of thinking of words (signs, sigles, asterisms)—especially the imagined and imaged words of poetry—as figures in which matter might be transmuted to some absence and light. And the question is this: do we imagine this to happen as a product that our imagination/psyche works up or carves (even if distributed by inter-texuality in ways that mask or shuffle agency) or are we after an encounter in which a speaking back from somewhere else—some lady, or God, or Mars—occurs.
To get at this, I want to quickly consider three somewhat disparate twentieth century writers—H.D., Philip K. Dick, and Allen Ginsberg, each of whom 1) had an extraordinary anomalous experience, 2) obsessively wrote over and/or otherwise attempted to restage this experience, and 3) arguably produced, in their work, influential mythic narratives that critique idealist-inflected ideas of history. I’ll conclude by comparing these cases to that of Alice Notley.
***
The anomalous experiences I refer to here are the following: 1) for H.D, the post WWI 1920 encounter with a person she later calls “The Man on the Boat” at twilight on the deck of a boat off the coast of Portugal, and the experience of seeing a series of images and writing appear on a hotel wall in Corfu, 2) for Ginsberg, the audition in 1948 of a voice reciting Blake’s “O Sunflower”, and, for Dick, a series of visionary experiences that begin in Feb. 1974 when he took a home delivery of pain-relievers from a young woman whose fish-shaped necklace emanated a pink-colored beam that sent him into a trance lasting several days.
It would be easy enough to explain each of these experiences as hallucinatory and/or otherwise related to physiological and psychic stress or drug use. The end of WWI had delivered a series of traumatic losses and near-death illness to H.D. from which she was just recovering. Dick used drugs, including LSD, extensively, had prior psychiatric hospitalizations and was recovering from surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth. Ginsberg’s case is less clearly tied to manifest trauma, but a case could be made that this event was the manifestation of trauma related to his mother’s mental illness and his own coming-of-age crises. However—and this is an issue that comes up again and again in Religious Studies, from a critical perspective, any such interpretation would really be a matter of deciding which of several explanatory vocabularies to use—in this case a rational-materialist, medical language rather than a mythic or religious language.
This is a basic problem with respect to what we think of as religious and/or anomalous experiences—by their very nature they cannot be explained without first deciding which vocabulary is to be authoritative—there is something that exceeds our sense of the real that we have to struggle to say.
I am less interested here in deciding which vocabulary is the really authoritative vocabulary than to identify several other commonalities. First, all three cases were experienced to be intrusive and included apparitional signs—letters and hieroglyphs, a beam that carried geometrical and symbolic patterns in it, and spoken words—that spontaneously occurred to the senses. Something other broke into ordinary experience, was given to sense. Second, we could say that the experiences wounded or, to use a different vocabulary, charged or obsessed the individual. The experience was reported as crisis or, alternately, understood as conferring mission.
Finally, for a variety of reasons—in H.D.’s case, psychiatry was fairly primitive, in the case of Ginsberg and Dick, both had some paranoia about submitting themselves to normalization therapies—these three writers all either initially or eventually turned to what they trusted most—an ability to write, their creative imaginations—to make sense of the experiences and/or heal. H.D. would essentially write and rewrite versions of the 1920 experiences (and the later reoccurrence of this crisis in 1944-45) for the rest of her life; when not explicitly doing this—as in the Trilogy and Helen of Egypt—the work was structured by an understanding of topos, inter-textuality and time that she had come to in trying to make sense of the visions. Dick would write an 8,000 page journal—recently edited and published—in which he attempted to elaborate a metaphysics best realized in his late novels Valis and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Ginsberg would, for years attempt to recreate the experience and would carry Blake with him as an alter-ego into old age. In each case, doing so meant being loyal to the content of the senses—even if hallucinatory—and to the tools they were given to work aesthetically with sense— that is, even though still rational in imagining systems or correlations, each ultimately prioritized an aesthetic mode of explication.
Although each writer would finally use a different vocabulary—H.D. a theosophical language with echoes of Alice Bailey’s White Lodge, Dick, a science-fiction language, and Ginsberg, a Tibetan-Buddhist language of spontaneous mind—each would make sense of the intrusion as an indication of what I call a “fold” that allows apparently different times or worlds to leak into each other. H.D. would elaborate an extensive ripple by which the fall of Athens or Troy lay palimpsest to war-time London, Dick, a fold that connected 1st century Palestine to the 1970s, and Ginsberg a fold that he first understood as folding Blake into the 20th century and later as tying his future self, singing Blake, to his younger self.
It is possible to focus on thinking through a metaphysics that would support such a fold, wondering with Eliot about the existence of a still point, for instance, or Olson’s sense of projection, underlining what the early twentieth century Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov’s called an “immanent” in contrast to a cosmological, linear unfolding of being (which Bulgakov posited less as a theoretically necessary albeit hidden ground than because of its irruption as a doubling of topos given to sense). But the key to me here is that the fold happens in the writing, or, in Ginsberg’s case, in the performance. It’s there that, like the Rgvedic ritual song, a work is done that weaves a break or rupture in the logic of the world back into something like a scar, where both worlds are superimposed through a referentiality made possible despite and yet still in the materiality of language.
I want to conclude by drawing a contrast between this kind of experience/mytho-poesis and that found in the work of Alice Notley. I am indebted to Joe Donahue for pointing out Notley’s brother’s death and its initial figuration in “White Phosphorous” as a turning point or threshold to her work over the last two decades.[iii] Notley’s work during this latter period admits what I would call the inflection of the other, an inflection marked by interruption—stylized in Alette by the use of quotation-mark—plural-vocality and grammatical elision. There is a similar doubling or folding of time or topos—the dead speak, the past haunts and speaks. In the case of Alma, the overlays are multiple, the possible times and touches many.
In correspondence with me over the last year, Alice explained how the word "trance" became attached to the work of accessing the voices that populate her poems. She said she had begun to use an imaginative "trance" process when working on poems from Mysteries of Small Houses. Then, "I told people about this process when I was first reading the poems aloud, and sometimes I would teach the process in workshops. It got a little notoriety. The word “trance” stuck, and I can’t seem to shake it, though it doesn’t always apply."[iv] She went on: "Sometimes it seems to me that people want to talk about trance, automatic writing, stream-of-consciousness, because they don’t want to allow me my actual poetry skills. Or they just have to hang poetry on some idea. I do think people write poetry in a version of the trance state, and it is partly a state of concentration and also a state of grace; if you go too deeply into it though you’ll stop being able to write."
This reminds us that, despite the varied vocabularies—echoes of theosophical ideas in H.D. so amplified by Duncan in the H.D. Book, Ginsberg's Spenglarian lineages or Dick's sci-fi notions—what matters might be less the dazzling ideas than the writing, the work of the hands in words.
One could, I think, write another paper alongside this one that started from different wounds—the trauma of sibling loss, for instance (Kerouac, Ashbury, Notley, Rilke all leap immediately to mind) or the wound of anima projection—the idealization of the Lady in Dante, Nervel, or Blok. In the end, I suspect the invocation of gnostic here, in these panels, would want, by that term, to get at this larger set of writers. Because gnostic has a religious or spiritualist inflection, it seemed useful to me to consider a set of writers whose writing life was marked by an explicit anomalous/religious experience, i.e., marked by the kinds of mytho-poetics the word gnostic might initially invoke. By teasing out the significance of writing/performing in these cases and linking this to ritual action, I hope to point us away from the spectacles and music of the mythic, not because these are too baroque or because I prefer the austere, but to make it clear that what makes a difference here is a practice, an everyday practice of stitching and folding--as in Dickinson's two sunsets and several stars.[v]
I want to end with yet another aside, this time to Catherine Albanese’s wonderful study of American metaphysical religion A Republic of Mind and Spirit.[vi] If there is a single thread Albanese traces from European spiritualism to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century forms of religion in America such as Christian Science, New Thought, and New Age Religion, it’s an emphasis on self-perfectionism made possible by an instrumentalization of spirit. To the extent that Gnostic thought more generally is self-perfectionist, one might want to consider the cases of H.D., Dick, and Ginsberg as counter-examples that prove a different purpose. This leads me to wonder if a poetics concerned with translation to light might not also be contrasted to or remembered as a poetics that admits what I’d call shape-shift, a doubling that becomes immanent in or as flesh, whose purpose is different than self-perfection or mastery, but is, rather, to give otherwise impossible “place” to an other. What I like to imagine might be a real affordance, Rilke’s human place, between river and rock.[vii]
[i] Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 3.
[ii] See David Need, “Singing at Dawn/Weaving the World: reading the Rgveda” in Talisman #33-33 (Summer/Fall 2006), pp. 235-238 and “A Man Made of Words”, Talisman 35 (Fall 2007), pp. 105-114.
[iii] Joseph Donahue, “Conference Paper” given at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February, 2011.
[iv] Alice Notley, personal correspondence,
[v] Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, (New York, NY: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co., 1961), pp. 145, 157.
[vi] Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[vii] The reference is to the last stanza of the Second of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchel, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995), p. 343: "If only we too could discover a pure contained, / human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil / between river and rock."