Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (6 page)

Combining physics and comparative religion, of course, is exactly what Ioan Couliano attempted in his critique of the Flatland of the field. But how should we now proceed? How at least to begin to address this seeming “interdimensional bridging”?

As a humble way of beginning, we might say that the psychical and the paranormal appear in that space where the humanities and the sciences meet beyond both, where mind and matter, subjectivity and objectivity merge in ways that can only violate and offend our present order of knowledge and possibility. Accordingly, to approach such phenomena as subjective things, as “anecdotes” or “coincidences,” as interesting internal states that have no real connection to the external physical world of objects and events is to seriously misunderstand them. Similarly, however, to approach such phenomena as objective, quantifiable, replicable things “out there” is inevitably to miss them, or to just barely see them.

This, I would suggest, is why the necessarily objectifying nature of the scientific method can pick up the slightest examples of something like psi in the controlled laboratory, but must miss all the most robust paranormal ones in the real world of human experience. I have heard contemporary parapsychologists joke about what J. B. Rhine really accomplished at Duke University by operationalizing psychical research and insisting on controlled laboratory conditions and statistical approaches: he figured out how to suppress psi and finally make it go away. Bored sophomores staring at abstract shapes on playing cards is no way to elicit psychical phenomena.

But love and trauma are. Consider what we will encounter below as the classic case of telepathic dreams announcing the death of a loved one. Such dreams are not objects behaving properly in an ordered mechanistic way for the sake of a laboratory experiment. They are
communications
transmitting
meaning
to
subjects
for the sake of some sort of profound
emotional need
. They are not about data; they are about love. Obviously, though, when the object becomes a subject and brain matter begins to express meaning, we are no longer in the realm of the natural sciences. We are in the realm of the humanities and hermeneutics, that is, we are in the realm of
meaning
and the Hermes-like or Hermetic art of
interpretation
.

My goal in the pages that follow is not to demean or deride the sciences (quite the contrary, I will end with them), nor to arrive at some false sense
of
rational or religious certainty—I possess neither—but to expand the imaginative possibilities of contemporary theory through a certain authorization of the Impossible. I am not asking us to know more. I am asking us to imagine more. This ability to imagine more is precisely what defines an “author of the impossible” for me. I intend this key title-expression in at least three senses.

In the first and simplest sense, I intend to state the obvious, namely, that these are authors who write about seemingly impossible things: think telepathy, teleportation, precognition, and UFOs. In the second sense, I intend to suggest that these are authors who make these impossible things possible through their writing practices. They do not simply write about the impossible. They give us plausible reasons to consider the impossible possible. They thus both author and author-ize it. In truth, they are authors of the (im)possible. Finally, in the third and deepest sense, I intend to suggest that the writing practices of authors of the impossible are intimately related to the paranormal itself, and this to the extent that paranormal phenomena are, in the end, like the act of interpretive writing itself, primarily semiotic or textual processes.

This is why “automatic
writing
” played such an important role in the history of psychical phenomena and why we still speak of “psychical
readings
.” That is, after all, exactly what they are. There is another way to say this. Although paranormal phenomena certainly involve material processes, they are finally organized around
signs
and
meaning
. To use the technical terms, they are semiotic and hermeneutical phenomena. Which is to say that they seem to function as representations or signs to decipher and interpret, not just movements of matter to measure and quantify. This is my central point to which I will return again and again:
paranormal phenomena are semiotic or hermeneutical phenomena in the sense that they signal, symbolize, or speak across a “gap” between the conscious, socialized ego and an unconscious or superconscious field
. It is this gap between two orders of consciousness (what I will call the “fantastic structure of the Mind-brain” in my conclusion) that demands interpretation and makes any attempt to interpret such events literally look foolish and silly. We thus ignore this gap and the call to interpret signs across different orders of consciousness at great peril.

We might also say that such paranormal phenomena are not dualistic or intentional experiences at all, that is, they are not about a stable “subject” experiencing a definite “object.” They are about the irruption of meaning in the physical world via the radical collapse of the subject-object structure itself. They are not simply physical events. They are also
meaning events
.
⁴⁹
Jung's category of synchronicity, for example, is all about what we could
easily
and accurately call meaning events, that is, a moment in space and time where and when the physical world becomes a text to be read out and interpreted, where and when the event is structured not by causal networks of matter but by symbolic references producing meaning. If, however, paranormal phenomena are meaning events that work and look a great deal like texts, then it follows that texts can also work and look a great deal like paranormal phenomena. Writing and reading, that is, can replicate and realize paranormal processes, just as paranormal processes can replicate and realize textual processes.
This
is what I finally mean by the phrase “authors of the impossible.” It is also what I am trying to effect with
this
text.

So look out.

Two more warnings before we begin. First, do not misread me here. I do not “believe” all the tales I will tell you in the pages that follow, however convinced I may sound in this or that passage. Indeed, as a professional scholar of religion, I consider it my job
not
to believe, and I take that professional commitment very seriously. Which is not to say, at all, that I discount these stories as unimportant, as simply fabricated or completely false. I do not. What I am trying to do is recreate for the reader what the field researcher calls “unbounded paranormal conditions,” that is, a place in space and time, in this case a text recreated and realized in your mind, where—to speak very precisely now—really, really weird shit happens.

Second, I hope it goes without saying that I offer my hermeneutical model of the paranormal only as a contribution to the larger project of studying such phenomena, certainly not as any final or complete solution to these anomalous events. I am as baffled as anyone by this material, and I offer no rational or religious certainties here, only intuitive hunches and possible directions. The simple truth is that we simply don't know what is going on here. I would go further. With our present rules of engagement, that is, with our present reigning materialist methodologies, faith commitments, objectivist scientisms, and absolute cultural relativisms, we
cannot
know. So I suppose I am also after those rules of engagement. I want a new game.

The
Fantastic Narrative of Western Occulture: The Paranormal as Story

Central to my attempted revival and re-theorization of the psychical and the paranormal is the notion that both categories are often wrapped up with profound narrative dimensions, that psychical and paranormal events are, on some level at least, very much about
story
. One might say that paranormal phenomena possess
mythical
dimensions. One might also say that
they
display dramatic
literary
features, as long as one defines that literary nature in a precise and careful way. But if paranormal events sometimes appear as if they were part of a larger living literature, just what kind of literature is it? If we are being written, in just what kind of story do we find ourselves? My own answer to this question is crystallized in a single phrase:
the fantastic narrative of Western occulture
. A bit of explanation is in order here.

I adopt the notion of a
fantastic narrative
from the Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. My specific employment of the category of
occulture
draws its inspiration from the work of the American historian of British occultism Alex Owen, the British historian of contemporary alternative religion Christopher Partridge, and the American literary critic and writer Victoria Nelson. The theoretical background of such an experiment goes like this.

Occultism, from the Latin
occultus
for “hidden” or “secret,” is a broad umbrella term that scholars use to discuss a wide variety of ideas, beliefs, and practices—everything from alchemical speculations, astrology, and tarot reading, to crystal gazing, magical practices, and various psychical and spiritualist phenomena. Things are not quite as random as they seem, however. Owen points out that this otherwise confusing diversity is underpinned and organized by a single overarching idea, namely, “that reality as we are taught to understand it accounts for only a fraction of the ultimate reality which lies just beyond our immediate senses.”
⁵⁰
Historically speaking, the term also carried connotations of “a secret spiritual tradition that could be accessed only by an initiated elite,” that “there is a hidden body of revelatory knowledge, part of a secret tradition that has been preserved and transmitted over the ages by an enlightened illuminati.” Early modern occultists, moreover, also tended to believe that, “they were living in momentous times, witnessing the demise of the old world and the beginning of the new,” that they were working toward “the establishment of a spiritually enlightened new age.”
⁵¹

On one level at least, they were quite right about this, as they inhabited a historical space that witnessed the birth of modernity. Occultism, in other words, is an eminently modern movement that arose into cultural prominence at the very end of the nineteenth century and was deeply engaged with the cutting-edge intellectual movements of the time, from the French decadent movement to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychical research, and surrealism. Owen convincingly demonstrates that there was a particularly “close connection between occultism and innovative approaches to the study of the mind.”
⁵²
Indeed, she places occultism and its double engagement with both secular science and individual mystical and magical
experience
at the very heart of contemporary debates about the nature, scope, and possibilities of consciousness itself. It is
precisely
this doubleness, at once rational and mystical, logical and mythical, that defines the occult for Owen. In her own words: “it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.'
”
⁵³
This is why, in Gauri Viswanathan's reading now, “occult knowledge is built on storytelling, which occult practices treat as a form of revelatory experience.” What we have, then, is essentially “a shift in register from belief to imagination,” which in turn played a major role in initiating the secularizing processes that created modern culture.
⁵⁴
The point here is a quite radical one, namely, that, far from being an irrational escape or a collection of nonsensical superstitions, the occult “was itself intrinsic to the making of the modern at the turn of the century.”
⁵⁵

Owen focused her work on the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In his two-volume study,
The Re-Enchantment of the West
, Partridge makes a similar argument with respect to the final decades of the twentieth century, that is, the decades just behind us now. More specifically, he introduces the category of occulture in order to study the interface between popular Western culture and alternative religious movements and, more specifically, to name that reservoir of “often
hidden
,
rejected
and
oppositional
beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism, and a range of other subcultural beliefs and practices.”
⁵⁶
Occulture for Partridge, then, is that dark, nocturnal, fertile side of Western culture without which the public elite culture cannot be fully understood and out of which any number of popular cultural movements have sprung, usually in direct or indirect opposition to the reigning public and elite orthodoxies.

Particularly important here is what we might call the comparative practices of popular culture, which, it turns out, are often just as radical—indeed, often more so—than those of elite scholars, whose disciplined intellectual practices often end up disciplining them right back into the established order of things, where they can get and keep a job. Popular comparative practices work differently. They often appear exaggerated or outrageous. They are. This is how they escape the various social, political, and intellectual censors of their own social surround—by being serious by not being serious. Essentially, popular culture “flies low,” well under the radar.

It is also worth underlining the fact that Partridge's central notion of re-enchantment requires for both its logic and energy an earlier and equally
profound
disenchantment. Occulture is not a matter of naive belief, much less of orthodox faith. It is only possible after a robust and radical criticism of “religion.” Like Owen's occultism, then, Partridge's occulture is a very modern phenomenon that has already incorporated the secular and the scientific. Which is not to say that occulture is entirely secular. Far from it. The category of occulture implies that there is a sacred dimension to secularization, that Western culture is not becoming less religious, but
differently
religious. Occulture, then, represents a dialectic, a “confluence of secularization and sacralization,” not a final victory of one process over the other.
⁵⁷