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Let It Come Down

2/23/2023

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My Nura Learning course on Shakespeare’s Macbeth starts on March 14th and runs for six weeks. This is an essay I wrote in response to a Weird Studies listener wondering why I picked that text. To know more about the course and enroll, click here.
​Samuel Johnson opens his “Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth” (1745) by insisting that no work of literature should be judged without first considering the historical context of its emergence. “In order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merits of a writer,” he says, “it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age, and the opinions of his contemporaries.” He continues:
​A poet who should now make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment, and produce the chief events by the assistance of supernatural agents, would be censured as transgressing the bounds of probability; he would be banished from the theatre to the nursery, and condemned to write fairy tales instead of tragedies; but a survey of the notions that prevailed at the time when this play was written, will prove that Shakespeare was in no danger of such censures, since he only turned the system that was then universally admitted to his advantage, and was far from overburdening the credulity of his audience.
I would contend that Dr. Johnson’s historicism is perfectly valid when our object of critique is a mid-eighteenth-century pamphlet on Shakespeare. But with something like Macbeth, historical distanciation may be as likely to blind us to the work as it is to illuminate it. In this pamphlet, Johnson takes it upon himself to defend the play against charges of metaphysical blasphemy, charges which the prevailing minds of his time—his own included—were quick to level at the tragedy’s author. The best he can come up with is a kind of insanity plea. For all his genius, Johnson says, William Shakespeare was the child of a benighted age, as prone as any of his contemporaries to find “awful and affecting” power in “scenes of enchantment.” The risen sun of Reason having yet to reach its meridian at that time, it should not surprise us that the “goblins of witchcraft still hovered in the twilight” of Shakespeare’s imagination. While the playwright’s faith in phantasms is a sin, it is one for which we must not judge him too harshly.
 
Reading Johnson, one gets the impression that pre-Enlightenment people were incapable of distinguishing reality from the products of their minds. But even a cursory read of Macbeth shows this to be false. We cannot accuse the characters in the play of being unaware that the mind can cause a phantasmic experience. That’s what the famous dagger scene is all about. Watching a ghostly blade hover before him, Macbeth does not hesitate to proffer the hypothesis that it may be “a dagger of the mind, a false creation / Proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain.” If Johnson’s ancestors were metaphysical blasphemers, it wasn’t because they didn’t realize that a person might simply hallucinate a goblin; it was because they refused to accept the contention that all goblins were hallucinatory by virtue of their being goblins.
 
To his credit, we should note that Johnson lived at the tail end of a centuries-long, pan-European madness concerning the supernatural. Between the first decades of the fifteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth, tens of thousands of people, most of them innocent women, were tortured and killed after being found guilty of practicing witchcraft. King James I, who likely commissioned Macbeth, was himself an expert on witches and demonology. For Johnson, this mass hysteria was a vestige of the dark age from which science and reason were finally delivering us. Today, however, most scholars agree that the witch craze of Early Modernity was not so much a holdover from the past as a bitter fruit of modernity itself, witch burnings having been exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages. As Victoria Nelson argues in The Secret Life of Puppets, the Protestant Reformation didn’t put an end to supernatural belief; it just forced it out of conscious light, removing whatever rails had once hemmed it in and turning it into a whirlwind of demons that assailed Europe for three and a half centuries—a mad, endless Walpurgis Night. The decision that the supernatural is inherently irrational makes any experience of it an experience of madness. In a world where the supernatural is real, that’s a recipe for disaster.
 
As Johnson himself admits, “the brightest gleams of knowledge” has never, at any time, managed to eradicate belief in the supernatural. Yet even he might have been surprised to learn that, in 2018, a Pew Research Center poll would find that 62% of Americans held at least one “New Age” belief, be it astrology, reincarnation, the existence of psychic powers, or the idea that “spiritual energy can be located in physical things.” Though we have never had more reasons to think that the supernatural is bunk, one out of five avowed atheists holds one of the beliefs I just enumerated. Another poll from 2007 showed that 68% of Americans agree that angels and demons are “active in the world” and that only 14% “completely disagree.” The terms “angel” and “demon” being loaded with religious connotations, I can only imagine that the numbers would have been even more startling if the pollsters had widened their net to include belief in aliens, fairies, spirits, and ghosts. Incidentally, a 2015 survey found that 18% of Americans have actually seen a ghost. Probably not far off from the number of people who’ve seen a black bear.
 
It is worth noting that the Pew Research Centre invariably publicizes such “spooky” findings around Halloween, when it is customary to entertain the quaint notion of the supernatural, if only for a day or two. The article on the 2007 survey was titled, “Goblins and Ghosts and Things that Go Bump in the Night.” It reminds me of the tone adopted by news anchors (a supernatural species unto themselves) when reporting on UFO sightings. The trick is to acknowledge a reality even as you dismiss it. In Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, the course I gave at Nura Learning last year, I put down this bizarre shell game to collective “blindsight,” a neurological disorder where a person experiences blindness even as they clearly see what is placed in front of them.
 
William James said you only need one white crow to disprove the “law” stating that all crows are black. Likewise, you only need one of the countless ghost sightings in history to have been what it seemed to be for ghosts to exist. Add to that the fact that reports of supernatural experience did not abate with the so-called disenchantment of the world, and you may start wondering on which side reasonableness, if not reason itself, really lies. What’s more likely: that everyone is crazy, or that you’re wrong?
 
Jason Josephson-Storm has compellingly argued that disenchantment is itself a form of myth, giving off enchanting fumes all its own. It isn’t that we ceased to believe in God in the modern era; it’s that, for a time, we were able to believe that we were God. But we couldn’t be God if there were other beings around that might lay claim to the title, nor could we allow insoluble mysteries to compromise the edifice of our certainty. I say “we” when in fact I am talking about a subset of educated moderns who thought it a noble thing to monopolize the conversation about reality for a very long time. Now that global weirding is upon us, however, their voices have become hoarse and less assured, and other voices can be heard. A world that felt small (albeit safe) is starting to feel big (albeit dangerous) again. As we’ve said on the show, radical mystery cannot in good faith be called a hypothesis or belief; the Weird is a plain fact. We don’t know what is going on. It turns out that lots of crows are white.
 
What I am saying is that certain blinders have been removed. Getting back to Johnson and Macbeth, it’s become possible today to state that, when it comes to supernatural agency, we stand with Shakespeare, not Johnson. We are contemporaries of the Bard. The only difference is that we are less beset by those metaphysical hang-ups that would compel us to see every angel as a demon and every demon as a disease. The imaginal Scotland of the Weird Sisters is simply our world seen under the aspect of the Weird. It is infinitely more “realistic” than the tawdry anthropomorphic stage-set that Dr. Johnson saw as the whole of reality. To draw on Nelson again, it was the forceful denial of the supernatural, and not belief in the supernatural per se, that led to the violent hysteria of the witch hunts and religious wars. Every attempt to reduce supernatural agency to error, disease, or metaphor is a clarion call to the witch-hunters and fanatics of this world. We must learn to make our homes in the Weird. We must be good neighbours to the goblins and treat them reasonably, foremost by allowing them back into the ambit of what can be reasonably thought.
 
That’s what Macbeth is about. The play was written for us, and now is the time to read it. It is a prophecy and a warning. It is an education in magic realism—the true kind, not the kind that might spice up an otherwise dull chapter with a flying granny or two. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, none is more drenched in the vapours of strangeness, none more willing to brave the vertiginous depths of the Possible, than this one. The above passages from Samuel Johnson come from a section of his pamphlet devoted to the opening stage directions of the play: “Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches.” Macbeth does not give an inch to your unbelief. Right from the start, it is shot through with wonder. It is a sustained experiment in poetic sorcery that gives the lie to all the assurances of a rationalized cosmos. It presents a world where causality itself is a kind of aesthetic flourish, to be used when it feels right—and never straightforwardly. Do the prodigies that Macbeth encounters exist only in his mind, or are they roaming the earth? Who cares, since the “earth hath bubbles, as the water has.” The earth is as fluid as the mind; the mind, as solid as the earth. Reality is a liquid, a storm-tossed ocean of quicksilver. Macbeth testifies to the infinity of the possible, the Real’s power to engender wonder upon wonder, for good and for ill, in a clamour of sound and fury signifying everything.
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News and Updates

5/23/2018

 
For years now, I've held out hope that one day I'd turn into a regular blogger. Alas, it never happened, nor do I think it is likely to happen at this point. I'm a slow writer. It takes me months, sometimes years, to write even a brief essay, and the spontaneity required for steady blogging is just not part of my programming. When I finally have a solid piece of writing, I tend to look for an established channel in fear it may be the last thing I ever write. Such is life.

This site still gets a lot of traffic, though, so I thought I'd post a quick update on what's going on these days in Martel Land. The Weird Studies podcast, which Phil Ford and I launched in February, is doing quite well. Apparently there was a niche, and those who dwell therein seem to really dig what we are doing. We just put out a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Previous episodes include a long discussion on the weird with Erik Davis; dialogues on the work of Philip K. Dick, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, David Lynch, Rodney Ascher and Lisa Ruddick; explorations of such cultural phenomena as blood sports and Dungeons & Dragons; and a lot of other things. Upcoming episodes will take on Zen Master Dogen's classic fascicle Genjokoan, William James' wonderful essay, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" (it doesn't), and that curious phenomenon Erik Davis once referred to as the "alchemy of trash." We also have some great guests lined up, including Joshua Ramey and Lionel Snell (a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes).

Last fall, the great Michael Garfield (another guest in the wings) kindly invited me to reappear on his podcast Future Fossils, and the episode, which deals with Bladerunner 2049 and Stranger Things 2, was released just a couple of weeks ago.  More recently, I had the pleasure of taking part in a group discussion on Darren Aronofsky's film mother! with the bright folks at Cosmos Co-Op, headed by co-conspirator Marco Morelli. That should be available soon; I'll provide a link when it is.

The very same Marco Morelli was awesome enough to edit and publish my extensive correspondence with philosopher Christopher Yates (yet another future WS guest) in the web journal, Metapsychosis. This is something we're very proud of: an in-depth exploration of how movies (and other forms of art) open up new worlds even as they connect us to the one world that binds them all. It's a #longread, but one which many readers have found rewarding.

At the end of last year, I wrote a piece on Thomas Ligotti for an anthology that writer and artist Jamie Curcio of Mythos Media is editing (and writing an awesome introduction for). The book is titled Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice. We're hoping it will come out some time next year. My current writing projects include a long-form (i.e., book-length) essay on the concept of the Real as well as monographs on Decadent aesthetics and the figure of the nerd. I'm also starting to research an essay on brutalism which will combine modern architectural theory with the theological ideas of Tertullian and the work of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. That should be cool.

Finally, I deleted my Facebook account earlier this spring and have no intention of revisiting that bright abyss any time soon. You can, however, find me on Twitter most days.

Weird Studies Exists

2/7/2018

 
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Art by Matt Melanson.
Hello friends. Long time no see.

Weird Studies, a new art and philosophy podcast I've been developing with professor of musicology Phil Ford, is now live. New episodes will appear every other Wednesday. Eventually, we may crank it up to one a week. 
​
Here's the "About the Show" copy:
"Weird Studies" is a scholarly field that doesn't and can't exist. 

The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny. 
​
The Weird is easiest to define as whatever lies on the further side of a line between what we can easily accept from our world and what we cannot. And it defines an attitude towards whatever lies on that side of the line: a willingness to remain suspended between explanations and abide in strangeness.
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A filmmaker and a professor talk art and philosophy at the limits of the thinkable. (Design by Joseph Cook)
Phil and I have been recording material for the show since September. We decided to launch the show with two episodes, a short "Introduction to Weird Studies" where we discuss the concept of the weird outlined above, and a longer, crazier one titled "Garmonbozia," which intersects Twin Peaks: The Return with the creation of the atom bomb to say something about the underlying mood of the present age.

Our modus operandi is to discuss whatever topic strikes our fancy in the hope that others will dig them as well. Upcoming themes include Arthur Machen's terrific novella The White People, the occult power of Dungeons & Dragons, the spectre of nihilism haunting contemporary academia, bloodsports, and lots of others. Over the last couple of years, Phil and I have indulged in a correspondence that passed the 100,000-word mark a while ago. This is our way of taking the conversation online to see what happens. 

Some serious acknowledgements are in order here. Joseph Cook did an amazing job designing our logo, and Matt Melanson gave us an awesome illustration that conveys the weird mood. My brother Pierre-Yves Martel wrote the theme music and the transitions between segments, and my wife Lesley Halferty recorded the intro and outro. Big thanks to all four for freely lending their formidable talents and skills to the project.

Still Alive

8/9/2017

 
First post in way too long. I thought I'd revive the blog with a quick update on what's happening.

New Doc Series

It's been a busy year in TV land. For one, I am in postproduction on the last of three episodes I wrote and directed for a new television series entitled Skindigenous. The show explores ancient Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world. My episodes focused on Polynesia, and I had the pleasure and high honour of spending time with some of the great masters of the art in that part of the world: the Sulu'ape family of Samoa, Gordon Toi of New Zealand, and Keone Nunes of Hawaii. They taught me tons, and I'll be forever grateful to Jason Brennan, Nish Media, my co-directors, our excellent crew and the beautiful people of the South Pacific for a rich and humbling experience. I'll write more about Skindigenous as we ramp up for broadcast on APTN in early 2018.

Spanish Edition of Reclaiming Art

In February, Ediciones Atalanta released a Spanish edition of Reclaiming Art under the title Vindicación del arte en la era del artificio. By all accounts, Fernando Amansa Salomó did an excellent job with the translation. Jacobo Siruela's publishing house is pretty much my dream publisher, so uncannily do their offerings seem specifically tailored to my personal obsessions. Having my work appear in their catalogue therefore qualifies as what David Lynch would call a "beautiful thing." So far, Vindicación has gotten a surprising amount of mainstream attention (here's one example for Spanish readers), and the book seems to  be finding a good number of interested readers, many of whom have taken time to write and share their enthusiasm about the book. That too is a beautiful thing.

The Weird Studies Podcast

Musicologist  Phil Ford and I are in the process of creating a new podcast, Weird Studies, wherein we will discuss art, philosophy and the occult in a contemporary context. Phil and I both have a strange attraction to the weird and value the affordances it grants those who choose to look at the world through its lens. In our prep work, we've been tossing around such potential conversation pieces as the discovery of electricity, the Tunguska Event, hermaphroditism, Hiroshima, the new Twin Peaks series, and the I Ching.

Among many other things, Phil is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture, a brilliant and erudite work on the concept of hipness in music and the arts which I couldn't more heartily recommend you acquire and ravenously consume.  You can also get a taste of Phil's singular intelligence and wit at Dial M for Musicology. Personally, I think it's high time that something like this podcast sees the light of day; Phil and I have been engaged in an energetic correspondence since 2015, and we need an outlet for our insights.

New Work on Ligotti

Finally, I'm immersing myself once more in the fiction of the great Thomas Ligotti, for an essay to appear in an upcoming anthology edited by James Curcio and Jack Marsh, PhD. Bearing the tantalizing title Masks: Bowie and the Artists and Artifice, the book gathers up the results of some deep delves into the mystique of artistic persona as it relates to creative work. Last fall, James and I had a long conversation on the nature of art at Modern Mythology. Check it out if you've a mind for some shop talk from inside the mask-n'-mannequin factory that is the aesthetic enterprise. Philosopher Jack Marsh and I are also working on a new project, but I'll wait until things have developed a bit more to talk about that.

There's more, but I'll stop there. Consider this post an assurance that this site and its author are both alive and kicking.

Notes on Wallace Stevens and Animism

8/10/2016

 
Picture"The Old Hall: Fairies by Moonlight," by John Anster Fitzgerald, circa 1875
Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” is a beautiful meditation on matter and memory. It brings to mind the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The poem suggests the existence of memory in inanimate objects. Or more precisely, it proposes a conception of memory that has nothing to do with "information" stored in the mind. Memory must rather be imagined as expansive, extended, material, atmospheric. It is memory that contains us, not we who contain memories. The past is a presence. The past is real.



​The poem's narrator is reflecting on the mansion in which he lives and plans to die:

We knew for long the mansion's look   
And what we said of it became 
A part of what it is ...


In the future, the narrator muses, the house as an entity will include all he has said and thought about it. Which is to say that the experiences through which an object manifests to us are constitutive of the object itself as an autonomous entity. Objects take shape in experience (human experience being just one variety), but they do not exist “within” our experience, “within” us as subjects; rather, each experience of an object expands that object, allows it to express its being, objectively. 

All of the elements that make up the mansion exist on their own, experienced or not: Stevens is no idealist. But the elements can only constellate as a mansion — a homely one for the narrator, a haunted one for the children of the future — through encounters with human beings who are themselves similarly constituted. 

In other words, all things substantiate themselves in encounters, in meetings, as Martin Buber wrote. It is through human experience that a house learns to be a house, that it learns to be homely or haunted as the case may be, just as it is through the strange sentience of the house that we become home-dwellers, which is to say human beings. A person coming upon a house is an encounter, but it is an encounter between equals at the primal level.

A new house feels cold and dead because, as an object, it hasn’t yet learned to be a house. It is a house in form only, which is to say a design, an intellectual ideal, the concept of a house given material consistency. When we say that a house feels lived-in or homely, we are saying something about the house itself, not just about our impression of it. The house has come to life as a house; it knows itself as a house. It has a genius loci, a spirit of place, indistinguishable from it.

Later, having been abandoned and then occupied anew, the mansion in the poem will hold as part of its being all of the memories formed in conjunction with it. My guess is that nine times out of ten, this is what we mean when we speak of ghosts. "Children," Stevens writes, "[will] speak our speech and never know,"

Will say of the mansion that it seems   
As if he that lived there left behind   
A spirit storming in blank walls ...


The mansion confronts the children with all of its past that is real and, in a sense, ever-present. Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining reveals this with a force equal to Stevens' poem in the form of the Overlook Hotel. 

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"Orders from the House, Mr. Torrence."
Upshot: there is no interiority. Belief in interiority, in private unextended subjectivity, is a modern conceit. It is a human attempt to reclaim the centre that humanity once imagine it occupied. In fact every private feeling, every “mental impression,” is an objective material event. Matter is spiritual. Matter is a thinking substance through and through. Everything is alive. "All things shining."

*** 
​
ADDENDUM -- Some readers have expressed confusion at my statement that Stevens' poem suggests the absence of interiority.

I don't mean that thought, feeling and imagination do not exist. What I mean in these notes is that our "interior world," what appears to we modern people as a private realm that is closed off from the world of objects, is not actually closed. Our thoughts are already out there in the world, objects among objects or forces among forces.

The idea is that mind is an aspect of the universe, not the exclusive property of private subjects (Descartes). The universe includes psyche; it doesn't oppose it, nor does it exist in a separate order from psyche. In the poem, the narrator's thoughts about the house do not belong only to him: they belong also to the house, which preserves those thoughts as part of its own being. And they belong to the children of the future who will inhabit the house. After all, if those children "will speak our speech and never know," it follows that the narrator himself speaks the speech of other beings without knowing it. "There is no interiority" means that there is no disentangling subject from object.
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