Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  The imprint to rebel against authority and to be optimally free in mind and body was there already from the start. Music became the initial door opener for the young Bowles, and the 1920s in general was filled with a “Gershwinian” attitude of experimentation, mixing classical structures with jazz and other experimental approaches. It’s no wonder that Bowles was attracted to this new wave of music: cosmopolitan, urban, free-spirited, open-minded, and playful. Clashing or contrasting elements temporarily set aside normal conventions and apprehensions, which in turn opened up the mind even more.

  Although Bowles was never a literary experimentalist in the same way as he was with music, the themes and environments bring out the same elements. There’s the known and unknown, the right and the wrong, the expected and the unexpected, always in dynamic relationship. But the prose is most often clear and concise and decidedly unemotional. Is that perhaps why it works so well in regard to describing the protagonists’ often quite irrational behavior?

  Paul Bowles was an expat magician not only in the sense of being an American in a different world. He also used elements of contrasting mind frames: Western/Eastern, Christian/Muslim, male/female, sober/stoned, and so on. And these were often placed in environments where you either have to adapt or perish, no matter how confusing the experience. He further tricked his own rational mind and its entrapments by being more or less constantly stoned on cannabis. Never zonked out of his mind but just enough to allow for a creative authorship to take charge of stifling “paternal” rationalism. So in many ways he sought out a creative liberation in mind and body, and this was also allowed to leak into his writings thematically and in terms of settings.

  I have been touching upon “expat magic” as a process, a euphemism of sorts for a writer’s need to displace him- or herself in the physical, outer world. But there’s also something very much more tangible in Bowles’s case, and that is his interest in the rituals and customs of the North African tribes, so different both in comparison with “dark” Africa and Arab culture. The Maghrebi culture was (and perhaps still is) steeped in magic, curses, spells, rituals, talismans. Bowles first arrived at a time when the postcolonial attitudes among the locals tried their best to erase all magic. No such luck.

  Bowles wrote about this everyday magic in many of his stories, and his ambitious project in 1959 of traveling around in Morocco to record tribal music and rituals is well documented and extremely fascinating.*4

  Always without formulating the concept, I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I would probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind.4

  One important function of art is creating a sense of “displacement”: the more apart and displacing, the greater the effect. A negative reaction to, for instance, abstract art simply means fear of one’s own personal displacement in general. To be a part of expat magic one needs to immerse oneself in something else, something different, the other, the unexpected. Just being in that state of mind creates synchronistically conducive effects.

  Placing a fictional story in a different environment than one the reader knows creates a displacement, a suspension both of belief and disbelief, a setting free of the reader’s mind. Placing yourself in a different environment while creating a work of fiction or art amplifies that process and feeds back. This is especially valid or potent when you blur or disintegrate the boundaries between the concepts of tourist and traveler (something Bowles wrote about and defined several times). The tourist takes in but returns. Everything will return to the casual balance of home. But the traveler goes on and never allows that return. This creates a more or less constant mind frame of displacement, one that can bring out entirely new ideas and emotions in the creative process, regardless of whether the ideas or emotions have to do with the specific geographical place or not. “The tourist accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.”5 A wise platitude often expressed among travelers is the one where it’s “good to have a goal but essentially it doesn’t matter because in the end it’s the journey itself that matters.” It’s not the dreamed of or dreamed up Holy Grail that will reveal the magical secrets but rather the determined quest to find it.

  Of course this is not a prerequisite to make great art, or great magic. But there’s something to be said of the willingness to expose oneself to the outer world, firsthand. The magician’s magician of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley, traveled extensively throughout his life, to learn about religions, philosophies, and magical practices firsthand. His output would not have been the same had he been stuck at his desk in Cambridge or London. He was a de facto expat meta-magician.

  Both Crowley and Bowles had an uncanny ability to be at the most exciting right places at the right time, in terms of meeting interesting people. They were both in Berlin in 1931, for instance, Bowles to study musical composition with Aaron Copland and others, and Crowley to try to reboot Mandrake Press and exhibit his paintings. Bowles found Berlin to be mostly a “gigantic slum, a monstruous agglomeration of uninhabitable buildings,”6 and also filled with swastikas. His most rewarding experience there was the friendship he had struck up with English author and fellow expat magician Christopher Isherwood.

  At a dinner in London in 1949, Bowles met another British expat, Somerset Maugham. He was by far the most successful international author on the scene (meaning: gay, internationally inclined, and very productive/successful). Although Bowles, in his 1972 autobiography, Without Stopping, focuses mostly on the fact that Maugham had very small feet, he also mentions that he helped map out a five-week Moroccan trip for the mighty Maugham. Considering how distinct and well-known Maugham was in his role or character, and how successfully so, he must have made an impact on the literarily budding Bowles.

  In 1938, Maugham published a slim volume called Summing Up, filled with thoughts about writers and writing:

  It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man. Conversation is only possible when men’s minds are free from pressing anxieties. Their lives must be reasonably secure and they must have no grave concern about their souls. They must attach importance to the refinements of civilization. They must value courtesy, they must pay attention to their persons (and have we not also been told that good prose should be like the clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive?), they must fear to bore, they must be neither flippant nor solemn, but always apt; and they must look upon “enthusiasm” with a critical glance.7

  If this doesn’t sound like a perfect modus operandi or program for Paul Bowles as an author, I don’t know what would. And there are other sections in Maugham’s little gem of a book that could perfectly sum up Bowles “after the fact,” almost prophetically:

  The solipsist believes only in himself and his experience. He creates the world as a theatre of his activity, and the world he creates consists of himself and his thoughts and feelings; and beyond that nothing has being. . . . Life is a dream in which he creates the objects that come before him, a coherent and consistent dream, and when he ceases to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow and unimaginable variety, ceases to be.8

  Well, Maugham would know. He was a prime example of an expat magician, allowing the Asian South Seas to drag him along into very deep recesses of the human mind and its social Darwinist twists and turns, and not unlike yet another expat (British-Polish) before him, Joseph Conrad. I can see a distinct heritage from both Maugham and Conrad in Bowles’s work and general attitude.

  In 1950 Bowles and Brion Gysin went together to Tangier. Bowles was now suddenly an international star because of the success of The Sheltering Sky, but Gysin was depressed and confused
at the time. He had tried writing about Morocco in similar ways but never managed to have anything published. Gysin: “Much as Malaysia belongs to Maugham, Bowles’s Morocco is his own. I went back to painting.”9

  The Sheltering Sky in many ways set the stage for the coming phase of Bowles’s life. Although the American protagonist in the novel actually dies in Morocco (whereupon his wife seeks solace and comfort in other arms and other limbs), a fitting description of or term for Mr. and Mrs. Bowles’s life in Morocco would be succumbing. They succumbed to the culture, music, kif, lovers (men for Paul, women for Jane) but only so far as they could retain the diametrical energy. If you don’t, according to my own analysis of Bowlesian logic, you succumb until you simply die and perish. You need to retain the charge by maintaining both poles.

  Another aspect of this lies in Bowles’s portrayal of Moroccan and also Arab culture. Today, it is a complete faux pas to describe different cultures from a point of view that contains your own value judgments—especially when derogatory. Paul Bowles couldn’t care less—perhaps a sign of the times. In his classic travel writings anthologized in Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963) there are remarkable stories and descriptions that are not politically correct by today’s standards but they are incredibly vibrant with life, humor, and spirit. Perhaps it’s necessary to be somewhat personal to describe something in a convincing manner? Is there even such a thing as objective history writing? I suspect that Paul Bowles’s description of environments and characters are actually more telling and revealing than any kind of social-anthropological study based in statistics-filtered objectivity. His writings truly take you there, wherever there is.

  Bowles’s quite conservative appearance and fear of dirt must also have been instrumental in augmenting this dynamic of in-betweenness and tension. Why else would this experienced traveler almost always choose destinations so diametrically unlike himself? “I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison is running its course; souls are being dispossessed of parasitic pseudo-consciousness that lurk in the unguarded recess of the mind.”10

  Relevant to this phenomenon is the short story “The Wind at Beni Midar,” originally published in 1962. The protagonist is a young soldier who actively dislikes the rituals and trance dances of the djinn-possessed local people, in which ecstatic bloodletting occurs. One day, while out looking for small game to shoot, he’s so high on kif that he misplaces the gun he’s borrowed and returns with a bad conscience. The owner of the gun actually finds it in the countryside but decides to pull a prank on his guilt-ridden friend. He hides the gun in his room, and then insists the kif-smoking protagonist ask a djinn to return the gun. Reluctantly he succumbs to this scheme and the gun is “miraculously” found in the room. There is a double humiliation in that he is mocked after this, for not understanding it was all a joke. The anger he feels makes him go to a local witch, who prepares a poison. The humiliating soldier dies, and the protagonist feels some kind of justice has been done.

  The story is permeated by this kind of highly ambivalent attitude toward magic and folk customs, most of which predate Islam. In a way it’s symptomatic of Bowles’s own attitude but also in general of Morocco’s, post colonialism. A pragmatic use of magic occurs whether one likes it or not. No matter how rational and “modern” one is, there is always the underlying fear that someone might actually have cursed you!

  One could also extend the Moroccan view of the djinn to the way Bowles constructed his stories. The dramatis personae are like spirits he evokes to move destiny onward, each with his or her own function but seldom endowed with any deeper aspects of will or emotion.

  I’m not interested in characters when writing books. The characters—the actions I want were decided for them before they existed. For a given situation I need characters who will react the way I want them to react in that situation. . . . A character is what he does. I never have any idea what the character looks like, if he is tall or short, fat or thin. A character speaks and acts. That is the person. Apart from that he doesn’t exist.11

  Later on in his life, Bowles had seemingly become more rigid in his attitudes. Perhaps the gradual Westernization of Tangier and Morocco in general had affected his younger years’ open-minded amazement and made him more prone to rational analysis. In the final documentary film about his life, Let It Come Down, he says things like “It’s absurd that there should be supernatural powers, it’s a rather mad concept”; and “Being in love is extremely abnormal”; and “The meaning of life is inevitable death.”12 This sounds more like crude existentialism than someone caught in an exotic and creative in-betweenness. Perhaps the maps of the outer world that he was so fascinated by as a youth gradually faded, and the travels that had broadened his mind for decades were now but memories to be sorted out? What seemed left was only the stripped and quite often problematic relationships between human individuals, albeit situated in exotic locations.

  For all his colorful expat magic and his desire to stay detached, Bowles did return home eventually, literally and symbolically. Not only in the form of his ashes coming back to the family plot in the United States, but also in a more rational and intellectual approach to what he had once sought out. He was a privileged and esteemed artist, neither beatnik nor bestseller, whose integrity was perhaps too solidly based in his detached stance vis-à-vis American morals with regard to, for instance, homosexuality and the use of drugs. Paradoxically (or not) his active detachment contained an equally active attachment to his formative years as a boy: a boy who wasn’t allowed to play with other children, who could read and write at age four, who loved maps, wrote violent stories, hated his father, and couldn’t wait to get away. He succeeded in great style on all accounts, so perhaps it was only natural that the final resting place would be exactly where the journey began. A full circle. A full stop.

  8

  Tangible Evanescence

  Originally published in the anthology

  Booklore—A Passion for Books

  (edited by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel & Jonas Ploeger, Düsseldorf, Zagava, 2016).

  It is a remarkable thing when books call out your name from the shelf. If you’ve read a book once, shouldn’t that be enough? The experience is already there in your mind, evoking specific stories, characters, styles, and so on. But some works of literature keep on beckoning and calling, and you return to them to be amazed yet again. This is, I guess, what constitutes the character of a favorite book: one you simply have to return to, over and over again, without really consciously knowing why.

  I have several of these titles on my shelves. But two volumes that always beckon loudly and to which I do occasionally return are Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs and Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel. They are both slim volumes, yet tight and packed with both content and styles that are uniquely those of the authors. Between them, they contain so many similarities that I simply have to look at them in this particular context as one. Perhaps not as one book, but certainly as one experience. And so we begin by asking the question: Why?

  Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs is a short tale about unrest and turmoil between opposing forces: one being traditional, rural, nature-inspired, and life-affirming, and the other being oppressive, violent, power soaked, and vaguely political. The protagonist, a former soldier, leads an almost monastic life in the service of a poetic approach to the natural sciences. The outer circumstances, with an approaching war and upheaval of order, seep into this harmony where he and his companion enthusiastically analyze and catalog the flora of the region:

  Soon we felt our energies increasing, and a new sureness possessed us. The word is both king and magician. Our high example we found in Linnæus, who went out into the unruly world of plants and animals with the word as his sceptre of state. And more wonderful than any sword-won empire, his power extends
over the flowering fields and nameless insect hosts.1

  Mishima’s Sun and Steel is not a novel at all but rather a coherent anthology of pensées concerning the relationship between word and body. The author meanders intellectually about his own history and how he felt pressured to find a better balance between his intellectual side and his bodily one. This is basically filtered through a highly romanticized death wish stemming from early erotic imprints radiating from images of the pierced Saint Sebastian:

  Nothing gives the armed forces so much attraction as the fact that even the most trivial duty is ultimately an emanation of something far loftier and more glorious, and is linked, somewhere, with the idea of death. The man of letters, on the other hand, must scratch together his own glory from the rubbish within himself, already overfamiliar in every detail, and refurbish it for the public eye.2

  The similarities thematically are obvious. There is, in both books, an awareness of temporal finality that is accepted as a fundament of existence. In Jünger’s case, his attitude as a historian of sorts makes his characters go through the motions of resistance (although seemingly futile) simply because that’s the way life works, and the only redeeming possibility is one of noble and elevated behavior. This in no way indicates moralism or religious fervor, though. It’s simply a way of helping ideas and ideals to survive beyond the cataclysms that are already apparent and approaching.