A Plea for Indigenous-Inflected Iconoclysms: or, A Little Ludic Blasphemy Never Hurt Nobody
Performing Borgesian readings of inherited texts, towards a philosophy of upgrade.
Note: I didn’t necessarily want to bang straight into philosophising after my previous post, but this is the piece that wants to come together right now. And it actually serves as a groundwork-able prologue to forthcoming posts on a little judicious courting of the Devil and, in a different key, reflections on ‘speaking to the fire’ in Cherokee praxis.
Preface: Two provisos: 1) I don’t think familiarity with R. A. Lafferty is necessary to understanding my main points below. Possibly you could insert your own preferred literary touchstone instead. 2) I really am trying to write as clearly as I can. I don’t enjoy obfuscation in others and try to avoid it in my own writing. Yet, a) the perennial trickiness that all philosophers (and their scarecrows) experience is the notorious difficulty of writing lucidly about what has not yet achieved lucidity—you work it out as best you can with what language you’ve currently got. And, perversely and conversely, b) a dash of strategic opacity makes the soup taste better. A theory trying to realise itself can’t be blamed for being a little coquettish, even in a particularly dark and sorcerous manner. Style matters here. It is substance reaching for actualisation. We write the way we write because frisson and jouissance (and other emotions for which the French no doubt have terms to borrow) should play complementary roles to the rational in a fledgling theory’s explication. Which is all to say, please bear with me. I really do think I’m onto something helpful, if rough. The following at least has the virtue of being relatively brief.
Here It Is
It may seem to some to go without saying, but say it we will, and press into its stranger ramifications: we must update or upgrade our texts, those handed down to us, bequeathed to us and bestowed on us through birth—those which we tacitly endorse as we develop, but which are not sacrosanct. How could they be if justice is in any way real rather than purely constructed? No individual or community, come of age, should be totally bound to that which formed it. Such slavery and oppression is metaphysically unconscionable. Breakages must occur, out of an ontology that is already wounded, porous. There are openings all over the world. Things are broken and bleeding everywhere. That’s as it should be. Unbreakable ossification is the (unthinkable) alternative.
To be clear, however, let us think of ‘update’ or ‘upgrade’ not in a capitalist or techno-soteriological sense, but instead imagine an indigenous upgrade. Without appropriation, coloniser cultures must, after due repentance and reparations, learn from the suppressed colonised, even as the latter have already infected the colonial apparatus from within by the joyous creativity of Native presence and sovereignty (what first peoples term ‘survivance’). With such earthen1 software we may become ‘contemporary’ with times other than our own—not only the past, but the future; not only ancestors, but descendants; and, for that matter, not only ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ but sideways into modal, possible times or alternate realities.2 (This world must never be the only one conceivable. Again, that way lies ontic ossification rather than the bloody real.) With continuous indigenous upgrades we are always becoming planetary, carrying with us the planet’s long struggles and dalliances and partnerships with consciousnesses and agencies of all sorts. And in this sense it is permissible, even imperative, that individuals and communities update and upgrade their inherited texts—that is, that they perform fresh, radical, playful, creative readings. (Inclusive of all texts, human and nonhuman, and all readers, human and nonhuman.) We do so not to make texts fit with the ‘now’, but with the before-now-after that continuously loops around itself. We are always upgrading into these multilayered geostories, not some late capitalism moment that is allegedly better than all that came before it and which has a hard time keeping an eye on what’s coming after it.
This imperative means that we may read our bequeathed texts as we will. Yet a good will is implied, in keeping with a metaphysical realism about ‘justice’ or ‘virtue’ or ‘love’, etc. Each does what one can in regard to this goodwilled reading. Note that I do not say the ‘best’ they can. Some of us are not even capable of this. We simply do what we can, our best or otherwise. For some, due to circumstances and formations, have more capacity for ‘good’ readings. Those who don’t, however, are not barred from the reading, nor is any reading they perform devalued or discounted. We need all the readings. Even the ones that don’t get verbally expressed. For they are expressed through lives in any case. (Lives of all sorts, human and nonhuman, biotic and abiotic.) Nothing is really lost in that sense. All are always contributing to the ongoing upgrade(s). (I set aside discussion of ‘bad’ readings here as I consider these definitionally incapable of performing upgrades—they are merely ‘clastic’ rather than ‘clysmic’; see below.)
In this manner, then, I propose to read R. A. Lafferty. I want to take him seriously as he understood himself and his own projects, so as to best make my own radical, playful (re)interpretations. As I salvage tools and gems and nourishments from his body of work that serve my interest in a ‘left-wing’ ethos, for example, it is only in full acknowledgment of his own self-understanding of his literary projects. Indeed, I can only identify and recover the former by thorough acquiescence to the latter. (Lafferty himself, it must be noted, explicitly problematised the terminology of left, right, liberal, conservative—though few would contest that he was some form of conservative, and on occasion he identified as such.) A warning here: goodwilled readings are not necessarily tranquil, graceful, or even respectful (in a certain sense). They may be downright dirty, ornery, and disrespectful (in a certain sense).
Let us attempt to furnish a radical example. In a crucial moment of polity in Lafferty’s novel Past Master (1968), Thomas More, the author of Utopia, brought from the past to presidentially critique the utopian colony planet Astrobe in the far future, refuses to sign a bill outlawing all vestiges of religion on the planet. More (in a slightly fusty register) states:
‘Whether there be Things Beyond I do not know. Ye’d forbid the mind to consider them. I forbid the forbidding.’
Playing, for a moment, with Alain Badiou’s speculative desacralisation of Pauline thought in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997), we may read Lafferty here as suggesting a forbidding of any form of foreclosure on ‘Things Beyond’, which would include the enclosure of theology within its ‘religious confinement’, as Badiou says. As I read (into) it, that which interprets theology from ‘beyond’ theology must not be forbidden any more than theology itself. Lafferty’s authorial aim in the larger structure of his novel seems to be to liberate religion from those who would domesticate (and thereby ultimately annihilate) it, particularly those who do so by befriending religion and retooling it toward ‘secular’, ultimately atheistic, construals and ends (such as Badiou, Zizek, Eagleton, and others perform). But for those who have been mastered by religion (we are legion), it is the opposite that is needed: liberation from religion—as well as liberation of religion from itself, or from its own innate toxicities. Some walk away to never return, but others circle back and experimentally re-inhabit theology ‘so that we can tear the lexicon of grace and encounter away from its religious confinement’ (Badiou 2003/1997: 66). Or at least explore the rip-work of such post-theological décollage. In this sense, atheists, non-Christians of any sort, sincere seekers or thinkers of all varieties, must be welcome at the table of Things Beyond, welcomed into the ways out of reductions and enclosures of all sorts, including the religious. From this angle, then, the likes of Badiou, Zizek, and Eagleton are on the right track!
So in this example, I continue to grapple with Lafferty’s own understanding of his project—and value it as such—while offering myself as porous to its unread/unactualised potentials: that is, all that exceeds Lafferty’s intentions, such as further vectors of liberation for all. To compound (or even inflame) such a reading, that is why I also see the scene of the blasphemous, coin-operated, puppet-show Catholic Mass earlier in the novel as a needed and laudable form of carnival and monstro-ludic resistance from those historically oppressed by that same liturgy; even while acknowledging the satirical poignance of Lafferty’s palpable sense of a liturgical abject when describing this iconoclysm. It is iconoclysm rather than iconoclasm because it disrupts and re-forms—Lafferty would say de-forms, and those doing the deforming would not disagree—the figures and sensations of the Mass into a fruitfully hideous and sardonic tableau rather than smashing it altogether. This iconoclysmic reading pushes past mere smashing of weaponised iconography:
Till the dirty-holy roller feels
The obscene breeding the unseen.
-Derek Walcott, Pocomania
Indeed, anyone who has read the scene will feel how Lafferty’s joy of invention, even as applied to what he would likely have considered the ultimate horror, exceeds his authorial grasp and becomes unintentionally delightful in its creative, amusing, punk defiance of his own cherished beliefs. It is one of the singular scenes of the novel, and for more reasons than might appear on the surface of a slavishly authorial interpretation.
Despite Thomas More’s disgusted declaration that the blasphemass (if we may so call it) is a ‘dirty little burlesque, a dreary bit of devil worship’, it is really anything but. Its ‘hermaphroditic’ priest smoking ‘weedjy-weed’ and jerking mechanically like a ‘zombie’, the ‘unclean puppets’ that ‘danced up orgasmically and used the old vein-needle’ before ingesting the host in the form of ‘ancient-style hot-dog rolls’ and drinking the ‘Grailo Grape-Ape’ brand of ‘Bogus Wines’, its Christ as a ‘snake on a stick’ and Virgin as a ‘leering whore holding the deformed monkey’, and (salt in the wound) its replacement of a homily with a news broadcast ‘so that one should not be out of contact with the world for the entire fifteen minutes’ (74-76, LoA edition)—all of this can’t help but incite some of us to inhabit these religious abjections as ludic, raunchy resistance to all the problematics inhering in the authorial view of gender, sexuality, nonhumans, sex work, and chemical alterations of consciousness. Later in the novel it says that when children ‘play monsters’ in the feral regions of the planet, those monsters may take pungent bodily form and eat them up. Can you blame us monsters for being hungry for the flesh of our creators?
Let me add that I say this from a heartfelt and contemplative place. This creative reading of Past Master has been dawning on me for several years now. In re-readings of the novel I have been struck with the parallels of this ‘dirty burlesque’ Mass with so many playfully ‘blasphemous’ artworks, memes, musics, and literatures I have witnessed in various underground communities, made by beautifully virtuous people sincerely resisting what has oppressed them. These are valid performances of survivance.3
So here I have downloaded and run a concise and makeshift upgrade of a cherished text (cherished, admittedly, only by a cult following). Past Master is an already weird text that becomes much weirder in the upgrade. Fruitfully so, if we consider an ever widening spread of liberation to be desirable. I certainly do. But please note: due to its inherent and irresolvable provisionality, more upgrades will follow. Be sure to turn on your notifications. Everywhere. In everything.
(Clue: there’s a sneak peak of the next upgrade in the epilogue below.)
Cheat Code
As a postscriptural epilogue, let me offer a cheat code: my hermeneutics here is essentially that of Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. As with Cervantes and Menard in Borges’s story, the instance outlined above asks: what if, say, Alain Badiou wrote Past Master, word for word, no changes, in the late 1990s? In addition to the fact that Lafferty has already done so. The original is not in any way supplanted. There is not a letter of difference between the texts by Lafferty and by Badiou, but the spirit has shifted, drifted, doubled back to haunt (and yes, taunt). This doubled Past Master is a ghostly object. Both meanings obtain. In terms from the novel itself, it has become a ‘revenant with the double sign on it’. Further: I’m yearning toward yet another reading. Matt from Bookpilled made the hilarious remark that Past Master is like Cordwainer Smith, Gene Wolfe, and Franz Kafka teamed up to write a sequel to Bill and Ted. My next ‘upgrade’ aims for a parallel, yet weirder, vector. Imagine Past Master this way: what if Kierkegaard and Zizek teamed up to write it as a prequel to Jodorowsky’s Dune? (With Laruelle as editor.) Again, with not a whit of difference or deviation in the wording of Past Master. Yet, here again, there is a spirit-drift, or spirits-drift, an unhygienic infestation of poltergeists in the upgraded text, with one paratextual difference allowed: the newly doubled novel is to be stabled with a goat so that it won’t be lonely. (This last remark is a deep-cut joke, referring to an obscure novel by Lafferty, East of Laughter. Don’t worry about it.)
Thus, in the three moves (Lafferty’s original, Badiou’s word-for-word ‘rewrite’, and the Zizek-Kierkegaard word-for-word ‘rewrite’) we would shift from sardonic critique of blasphemy to carnival affirmation of blasphemy to transfiguration of blasphemy into renewed spirituality (albeit, a spirituality in agonistes, torn between the material and immaterial). For in this third upgrade (because of Jodorowsky’s reworked metaphysical plot and theme for Dune) the ‘dirty’ Mass becomes a means of cosmic alchemy to transform the planet Astrobe into a Messiah-Planet (thus arguably circling back to something adjacent to Lafferty’s own intention, though by affirming—only with his own words—the very things he refused to affirm and counted only as refuse). And not one of these versions is supplanted or replaced. It is a simultaneity of meanings.4
Try it for yourself at home with your favourite books, kids!
More reports to follow.
I use the term ‘earthen’ here cautiously, hoping to avoid making Native Americans into ‘elves’ as Stephen Graham Jones warns against (see point number 2 in his advice to Indian writers). For a corrective to this tendency (placing indigenous peoples as living human contemporaries and not mythical beings of a faded past) see Christopher Teuton’s Cherokee Earth Dwellers: Stories and Teachings of the Natural World (2023), which has resonances, I think, with Donna Haraway’s call for us all to be ‘chthonic ones’ or ‘terrans’ or ‘the Earthbound’ in Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). This is what I have in mind when I speak of an ‘earthen software’ by which to upgrade our texts.
See Haraway’s ‘thick’ polytemporal kainos time in Staying With the Trouble (p. 2 and passim.) as well as Timothy Morton’s ‘weird’, ‘twisted’, ‘looping’ time in Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016: p. 6 and passim.). For my remark on moving temporally ‘sideways’, I’m particularly inspired by R. A. Lafferty’s ‘topos of space-time’ as outlined by professor Gregorio Montejo’s essay on Lafferty’s ‘Thomistic philosophy of time’ in Feast of Laughter: An Appreciation of R. A. Lafferty (2014).
It strikes even closer to home, for in my own past I have been a purveyor of monstrous othering and now welcome its resistance through ludically inhabiting the ambivalences of the monsters I made. Like Lafferty, my joy in making them exceeded certain implicit toxic intentions and created, I hope, the possibility of their further transmogrifications into entities I now affirm and celebrate and in whose playful monstrosity I participate. Together, as a liminal alien character says in Lafferty’s novel, ‘We take the place of the monsters they have lost’ (73).
Ideally I would here perform the same absolutely laugh-out-loud move that Borges does and furnish a chunk of text from Past Master as written by Lafferty, and then furnish it again as written by Zizek-Kierkegaard and comment on how different they are in meaning, despite being the exact same text printed twice. But that will have to come as a sequel, for it will take some more work to pull off right.
First off I am sure that the magic here is in inverse proportion to the noise of its reception. It burns but not in the way that makes one cry back right away.
I am spending some time with the Borges business. I suspect I have some bits of it yet to get through the thick of the skull. In the world of the pearl-diver there is some relation in just how we sound out are favorite finds, those once-were-eyes of our fathers that we love so much we leave them untouched, Word spoken as found but as-if just now born as is but altered as our own. Just this morning I wrote Celan's Isleward exactly as Felstiner gave it. For this game maybe overlook what ever translation might or might not mean.
Islandward
Islandward, nearby the dead ones
wed to a forest dugout,
their arms bound with skyflown vultures,
their souls with Saturnian rings:
the strange one and the free ones are rowing,
the masters of ice and of stone:
are toled at by foundering buoys,
bayed at by the shark-blue sea.
They're rowing, they're rowing, they're rowing---:
You dead ones, you swimmers, lead on!
These also caged in by the bownet!
Tomorrow our ocean gone dry!
On the shore of this morning this message in a bottle arrived today, as if for the first time despite other readings, Today I wrote it from scratch--in Menardian ink--maybe...I dunno??? Ideas, Benjamin said are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. Is to freshly Quixote out from your middle, long after Cervantes put the pen down, to have an idea in the Night of the Work? Works of art, he also said, are models of nature neither theater of history nor dwelling place of mankind. I think it best if you be harsh here and underline where I seek to slip past the actual Menardian task into my own schtick as I pretend that to read out this piece, in Jackdaw and post-apocalypse, is do write it in the dark of the redeemed Night that waits no day, Judgement or other but creatures out on all fours, eyes on the earth as heaven. I wish I could bring something more in unison that in longing after but this is as close as my mind, a bit light from the bends of my surfacing for air, can come so far. Tell me about Midrash in your camp under the stairs, Biter.
I, of course, welcome comment on this post: arguing with it, building on it, veering from it. All is permissible. I know one thing I'm wondering about is if the 'rewrites' could be done with female authors in mind. Can we imagine an upgrade of Past Master as written by, say, Donna Haraway or Louise Erdrich? (Erdrich has done something not a little Laffertian with her 2017 apocalyptic-evolutionary novel Future Home of the Living God after all.) I'm not sure it would work. The upgraded text would certainly drip with bafflement and deep satire in regard to the largely unmitigated masculinity of the novel, perhaps seeing its sole female character, Evita, as a polymorphic hologram of male gaze and patriarchal pattern-seeking. The novel would be kind of delightful in this way, but perhaps also tedious by the end? (There is at least one other, unnamed, woman who shows up for a moment in a beautiful little sentence of material conditions and this would shine out like a sunblushed thorn in the rewrite.)
The cosmos itself is figured as womb in the novel (as in several of Lafferty's other works). Would this be the patriarchal hologram projected onto the universe or the universe cutting holes in the patriarchy or a bit of both in uncertain distributive balance? (And would any female author have the patience to 'rewrite' a text with only one key female character?) Probably inherited texts can only be upgraded toward certain trajectories, and not others, due to their own limitations. Still, the upgrades contribute to more widespread recontextualisation and justice.