Weekly Readings #134 (08/26/24-09/01/24)

every end is a beginning

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I posted “I Will Live Then from the Devil,” an episode of The Invisible College, free in its entirety, on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Invisible College is my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, and the Emerson episode begins our fall study of American literature, to continue next week with Emerson’s Transcendentalist colleagues Henry David Thoreau¹ and Margaret Fuller and eventually encompassing everyone from Poe to Faulkner, with a full reading of Moby-Dick along the way. Many thanks to all my paid subscribers! If you have not yet matriculated, during this back-to-school season, in The Invisible College, please offer a paid subscription so you, too, can enjoy not only the upcoming episodes but also the growing archive, which now includes 19 episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett,² eight episodes on the work of James Joyce, including Ulysses, and four episodes on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. To gamify your participation, I am seven paid subscribers away from 100. What if you were the 100th?³

I also remind you that my novel Major Arcana is forthcoming in a beautiful new edition from Belt Publishing in April 2025. Please pre-order this saga of art, love, and magic here to encourage other publishers large and small to take a chance on independent fiction written outside the narrow aesthetic and ideological strictures of the mainstream. Please think of it this way: the future of American literature itself rides on the success of Major Arcana. Paid subscribers to this Substack can also access the original serial of the novel, complete with my audio rendition, if you can’t wait to read it until next year.

For today, some thoughts on Sheila Heti, the New Age Bible, Marianne Williamson, the CIA, Marxism, and more, with footnotes on Emerson and American religion and latest Grand Hotel Abyss favorite Bruce Wagner on Red Scare and more.

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In the Name of Love: Keep Your Eyes on Her Horizon

Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits (1849)

A reader kindly asked me to comment on Sheila Heti’s long essay in Harper’s on A Course in Miracles, given the potential resonance of this “New Age Bible” with my recent work. My correspondent wrote in, remarkably, before the latest Invisible College episode, though A Course in Miracles also resonates intensely with Emerson’s essays, akin to Emerson’s own resonance⁴ with many precursors in the mystical and esoteric traditions, most of whom I know only by reputation, like Iamblichus, the Neoplatonic favorite of my non-ancestral ancestor, the fascist priest and philologist Ermenegildo Pistelli.⁵

I’ve never read anything by Heti before. This essay’s strenuously performed ingenuousness is either endearing or infuriating, I’m not sure which (I say ingenuously). In the name of authenticity, I’m sure, our Canadian autofictioneer leaves in what I am always telling students to cut out: a tedious narrative of her own process of discovering the essay’s subject matter. But the performance of self works well enough that I feel needlessly unpleasant when I say that I (reared as I was on Vidal and Hitchens and Sontag and Bloom and Paglia) prefer a tougher and more knowing critical prose. Her wide-eyed earnestness, akin to Tao Lin’s, does suggest a sense of wonder in the presence of mysterious and awesome forces that perhaps a more self-possessed literary persona wouldn’t convey, as in somebody or other’s observation that Tolstoy and God were “two bears in one den.”

The story Heti narrates: her discovery, when trying to head off a mid-life crisis, of the famous self-help New Age Bible. A Course in Miracles, Heti recounts, was dictated by the self-styled voice of Jesus to a research psychologist named Helen Schulman in the 1960s, and then spread by word-of-mouth through the New Age community in the 1980s and ’90s. Researching the book’s history, Heti runs eventually into the CIA’s deep interest in all manner of kindred esoterica, avant-garde art, and vanguardist psychology. She reports likewise that Schulman’s professional supervisor, William Thetford, a gay man she was deeply in love with, and who encouraged her and helped her with A Course’s preparation, was himself a suspicious character tied to the CIA and its experiments in mind control.

Does A Course in Miracles provide genuine spiritual wisdom, then, or is it the cracked product of a repressed and unrequited midcentury love, or is it a psyop meant to dissuade the public from political action by telling them to focus on the spiritual realm? Third Testament? Diary of a sexually frustrated woman? Or MK-Ultra assault upon the public mind? Heti reasonably concludes that A Course in Miracles is all three, with an allusion to an earlier anecdote about how the voice of Jesus would help Schulman to shop⁶:

[I]t now appeared that life at its creative heights, or at its most spy-thrillery, was made of the very same stuff as life at its most uninspired. It was just this free and frustrating intermingling of everything all at once—poetry and politics, the real gods and the fake ones, all our most loving actions and all our most deceitful ones. It was all mixed up, like a pile of clothes in the corner of the room. The clothes that Jesus helped us pick out, and the ones we bought on our own.

Though I’m a bit younger than Heti, I vividly remember watching Marianne Williamson⁷ introduce Oprah Winfrey to A Course in Miracles sometime in the early 1990s, when I would have been about 11 or 12. (She was promoting A Return to Love.) This might in retrospect have been my conscious initiation into the idea of magic as intentional act, as ideal decision with material consequence. “I say to poverty, to war, to AIDS, to cancer: ‘in the name of love, get out!’” Williamson preached to Oprah and her audience.⁸ I reported this later that day to my skeptical father, and he said, “I tried that—it didn’t work.” I suppose everyone has tried it at one point or another, in the depths of the usual despair. Obviously, however, I have been unwilling to let the idea go entirely, as readers of Major Arcana know.

I have not read A Course in Miracles and don’t intend to. It seems like an indifferently written compendium of immemorial wisdom available elsewhere in more palatable form. I am not a spiritual elitist—“there may gods turn up anywhere,” as Saul Bellow said—but I am a literary elitist.

The CIA undoubtedly preferred a demobilized public in the 1960s—as opposed to today, when they use the “color revolution” model to bring the public out into the street chanting the Agency’s preferred slogans as if the public had thought of them itself—but I also suspect its midcentury agents were also genuinely interested in the various countercultural ideas they pursued, usually in the rear guard, not the vanguard, of artists and other explorers. (This is how I portrayed the subject in Major Arcana, anyway.) The CIA didn’t invent Neoplatonism or gnosticism or abstract art or jazz music or non-didactic novels or liberal politics or psychedelic drugs, and it’s doubtful they could ever really control the effects on the world of such a diverse array of ungovernable forces.

As for the supposedly inherent conservatism of an active and engaged idealism—an idealism aimed at changing the world—this is just a superannuated prejudice of Marxism, a 19th-century ideology that can’t see beyond the smokestacks and sooty skies amid which its resentful and disappointed Prometheus conceived it. He wanted to bring magic down to earth, and he well knew it:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

[…]

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

This is not quite the same as wanting to banish magic from our thinking. I have elsewhere characterized Marxism as a type of magic for materialists, the Revolution as alchemical wedding. But can we have a magic for materialists? The repressed always returns, as a later materialist mythographer warned. The final wisdom on this subject, however, belongs not to Marx or Freud but to Emerson. I will repeat a passage from “Self-Reliance” cited in the latest Invisible College.

Prayer that craves a particular commodity,—anything less than all good,—is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.

Commanding the forces that harry us through this life “in the name of love, get out” doesn’t always rid us of them in the most literal sense—though I suspect it can, from time to time: sometimes the money really does come in, the disease really does enter remission, the beloved really does return, the publisher really does pick up our book—but it keeps our eyes on the horizon, no matter the ruin or blank we think we see in nature.⁹

1. Paywalled episodes tend to explore more controversial topics. Accordingly, I will soon regale you with reminiscences of studying Thoreau as an undergraduate with one of the only openly conservative professors I ever encountered in an English department, one who wished to confiscate all the major writers of the American Renaissance, but especially Thoreau, from the political left. To repeat my analogy, he understood Walden as a 19th-century Bronze Age Mindset, an interpretation with more in its favor than you might think.

2. The most relevant of those on this fateful date is “Find the Mortal World Enough,” two and a half hours on W. H. Auden, including a reading of his great poem, “September 1, 1939.” As Auden wrote, revised, and finally canceled: “We must love one another and/or die.”

3. A listener wrote in to ask me to reflect on my work on The Invisible College:

Is it fun doing the invisible college? I would love it if you talked about how you’re finding the process (perhaps a moment of reflection to mark the start of the American Lit series, an Emersonian tribute to your own experience and growth through action?)

(Also, and I’ve been wondering this for a while: was the IC some kind of magical or manifestational act on your part, trying to bring into being the taste, the views, by which you wish to be read? Like when Crowley said writing a book is basically a magical act since you’re using will to bring about change in the world?)

I answered on my super-secret Tumblr, but I repost the answer here: Sure, it’s fun. I was putting too much pressure on myself at first, trying to make it too academic, feverishly researching things. It didn’t help that I started with works I barely ever taught, as opposed to Emerson, whom I taught pretty regularly for almost a decade. Then I remembered something Dasha once said (don’t laugh), which is that not only doesn’t she research anything before she records, she tries to clear her mind entirely. Then you start talking and find you have plenty to say. I also used to lecture to large halls full of students, halls darkened so they could see the slideshow, like at the beginning of a horror movie (though in horror movies all anybody seems to study in college is parapsychology and demonology), and that was basically the same as recording a podcast, because you’re more imagining than looking at the audience. Is it a magical act? Not deliberately, only in the very general sense you quote from Crowley. From that perspective there’s no difference between a magical act and an intentional act. Thanks for asking!

4. Emerson describes his dizzying vision of life as a series of ever-widening circles in his essay of that name, among his most beautiful. He would not be surprised to find himself surpassing Iamblichus in influence and being surpassed in turn by A Course in Miracles, though, in a less optimistic mood than Emerson (“Our moods do not believe in each other”), we might regret the loss in eloquence:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Please note that our American scholar is still living from the devil even in this passage: his last clause is a quotation from Paradise Lost, reconceiving Satan’s self-lament as a blessing:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

5. Also the author of Le pistole d’Omero, apparently an epistolary pedagogical text. The title, Homer’s Pistols, puns on our violent surname. It’s an uncommon enough surname—I believe I am related to everyone who shares it in the New World, though I’m not entirely certain about the Brazilian DJ Fernanda Pistelli—that Fr. Pistelli and I must be biological if not spiritual kin: “The priest departs, the divine literatus comes,” as our democratic bard, our American Homer, asserted. To tweak a line from an Irish bard, “I’ve no gun to follow men like them.”

6. Despite footnote seven below, shopping is probably the real American religion.

7. Heti notes the Williamson-Oprah connection, though she has no memories of watching TV in the 1990s to share. (Maybe TV hadn’t reached Canada yet. Videodrome was science fiction, after all.) She uses this connection to explain Williamson’s marshaling of the spirit of love against Trump in her 2020 presidential campaign. A devotee of Norman Vincent Peale and New Thought, however, Trump shares roughly the same metaphysic as Williamson (as Tara Isabella Burton has observed) and himself often speaks—though the relentlessly hostile legacy media understandably fails to emphasize this—of “tremendous love.” Cutting across ideological lines, this is the American religion.

8. The absence of a public archive of The Oprah Winfrey Show is a loss to our understanding of America’s inner history—and my own. I tried to suggest something of the impact of the talk show on the late-20th-century child’s bildung—I had both Oprah and the late Phil Donahue in mind—in Chapter Three of Part Two of Major Arcana, which you can read for free here.

9. Did you notice I manifested screenwriter and novelist Bruce Wagner’s appearance on Red Scare? He likes to quote his teacher Carlos Castaneda, and he quoted him thusly to Anna and Dasha: all paths lead nowhere, so we might as well take the path of the heart. This cheeringly ultimate nihilism, indistinct from a belief in the plenitude of love, as opposites always reconcile on the highest level, is the only solution I know to the problem friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre identifies, that magic is manipulation. Wagner was one of the best Red Scare guests ever, especially after their run of right-wing social-media autists. He candidly described the way, at his age, that “the road is narrowing,” but nonetheless projected more vitality than most self-styled vitalists. I especially enjoyed his eponymous running joke about the comments section (“He’s no Philip Roth!” “Antonoff would have been so much better than that dying Zionist!”). His description of the ambitious activities of Arcade Publishing will interest readers of Grand Hotel Abyss curious about literary news and trends. My favorite part of the episode, though, is when Anna and Dasha began experiencing apophenia, synchronicities, and déjà vu (“My eye’s twitching!”) apparently incited by the emergence of Kick Kennedy while Wagner sits in silence. American magic and dread roll on.