Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
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One can hardly ask for a better introduction to the present project on the psychical and the paranormal. Hence my opening Eliade epigraph from the very last lines of the same Freudian lecture. Whether or not Eliade was “merely asking the question” about the religious meaning of science fiction and the occult dimensions of popular culture (I doubt this very much), I am certainly trying to offer his question a series of possible answers in the pages that follow. And it is certainly my intention—or at least my impossible wish—to take up phenomena judged by many of my peers to be pure nonsense and establish both their theoretical coherence and their psychological interest.
Eliade founded a certain intellectual lineage at the University of Chicago, a lineage in which I was trained in the 1980s and early ’90s under his successor, Wendy Doniger, herself more than adept at negotiating mind-boggling metaphysical terrain.41 This same lineage, as diverse and as contentious as any healthy intellectual community, has occasionally displayed a quite serious engagement with the paranormal. Nowhere is this more apparent and obvious than in Eliade’s fellow Romanian and Chicago colleague Ioan Couliano. Couliano’s lifelong interest in magical and gnostic matters was reflected in a rich personal occult life.42 Together at Chicago in the early ’80s, the two men studied what they were calling “cultural fashions” (their code for what I am calling the paranormal in popular culture), and particularly the mysticism of science literature that turned to quantum physics for a theoretical base for a new modern mysticism. Couliano was inspired by this bold comparative literature and by like-minded elite intellectuals, like the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, who was a fan of Couliano’s and who has written openly about his own gnostic experiences of a transcendent Self separate from the ego and beyond the reach of the orthodox religions. Couliano was clearly moving toward a fusion of quantum physics and the history of religions before he was murdered in a toilet stall one sad spring day in 1991.43
Such an attempted fusion of the sciences and the humanities is particularly apparent in Couliano’s study of gnosticism, that strange and largely ignored book, The Tree of Gnosis. In the introduction to this text, Couliano asks the following crucial question: If we are now living in an Einsteinian space-time continuum determined by three extended dimensions and a fourth of time, the intimate participation of consciousness in the material world, and the metaphysical identity of energy and matter, themselves likely continuously created by utterly bizarre quantum processes that more or less destroy any stable notions of linear causality, time, locality, and independent existence, why are we still writing history as if we only inhabited a simple three-dimensional cosmos, lived in a neat linear time, and existed as so many disconnected billiard balls in a world of Newtonian causality, collisions, and reactions? If the world is so utterly bizarre, why do we pretend it is so simple? And if we now know that the universe is most certainly not a three-dimensional box or two-dimensional pool table, why do we keep writing history as if it were? Why, in other words, cannot we reimagine history (and hence ourselves) “outside the box” and “off the page” of what Max Weber so powerfully called the iron cage of modern rationalism, order, and routinization?
Good questions. Couliano tried to bring us up to speed through his historical method of morphodynamics. I will not go into the details here, mostly because I don’t understand them (apparently I’m still in the box), but it is worth noting that Couliano’s morphodynamic history writing is essentially about taking seriously the possibilities that religious systems function as archetypal forms (morpho-) that exist in a dimension outside the four of space-time, and that these can and do interact (dynamic) historically within the four dimensions of our perceived world in ways that appear strange and random but in fact are structurally organized and essentially meaningful.44
To explain such altered states of history, Couliano turned to Edwin Abbot (1838–1926), that imaginative British theologian whom Albert Einstein had previously invoked in order to explain his own theory of general relativity and its mind-blowing image of the universe as the hypersurface of a hypersphere (don’t ask; I don’t get it either). In his Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1883), written and illustrated under the humorous penname of “A Square,” Abbot introduced the idea of the Flatlanders, two-dimensional beings who can only experience the intervention of a third dimension as hopelessly confusing or inexplicable, that is, as “miraculous.” Couliano invokes the same Flatland to describe how the history of religions can be imagined as “a sequential interaction of multiple systems of thought.” He explains:
Let us suppose a two-dimensional world, like an infinitely thin sheet of paper, in which completely flat beings live. Imagine further that this film would let a solid object pass through it without the film breaking. Now let us indeed move a solid object through it, for instance a fork. What would a two dimensional inhabitant of Flatland see? S/he would see a disparate set of phenomena: first four rounding lines, recognized as being circles, without connection between them, corresponding to the four prongs of the fork; then a line whose size varies incessantly, corresponding to the base and handle of the fork; eventually the line will disappear from sight. Obviously, the fork would appear to the Flatlander as a sequence of disparate phenomena in time. One more dimension is needed in order to perceive it as a single solid.45
So too with systems of thought, which exist in their own logical dimension: “They interact with history at every moment, and the chronological sequence they form is a sort of sequential puzzle, like the four prongs of the fork viewed from the perspective of the Flatlander.” What Couliano proposes, then, is that we begin to study history as a similar interaction, that we “study systems of thought in their own dimension” and “recognize the fork for what it is: an object coming from outside and crossing our space in an apparently disconnected way, in which there is a hidden logic which we can only reveal if we are able to move out of our space.”46 In other words, we cannot properly interpret religious systems and their appearance in time because we assume that the three (or four) dimensions we routinely experience exhaust the possible, when in fact we live in a universe of multiple dimensions to whose astonishing complexity and “strangeness” the history of religions, and particularly the history of gnosticism and mysticism, gives abundant witness.
Not surprisingly, Ioan Couliano was ignored. The implications of what he was trying to say are simply too deep and disturbing to the neat rational lines of modernity and the normally linear modes of writing history. He shattered our little box. He wrote “off the page,” outside our Flatland.
I do not claim to know whether Ioan’s particular model of a gnostic history of religions is an accurate or even a plausible one. That is not my point here. What I do know—and this is my point—is that any ordinary history of religions that relies exclusively on textual-critical, social-scientific, or political analyses (from Foucauldian constructionism and postcolonial theory to philology and materialist cognitive science) is woefully inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting the paranormal, particularly when we get to ideas and experiences, as we will soon enough, surrounding the hyperdimensionality of UFOs and the possibility that these are fundamentally religious phenomena, “fishermen,” if you will, from another dimension baiting and occasionally hooking us from above the four-dimensional waters of space-time.
An author like Ioan Couliano may be correct about the general solution to the metaphysical conundrums that this history of religions presents us. He might also be wrong. But at least he recognized the problem of the paranormal as something that will have to be central to any future and truly adequate history of religions. At least he was willing to think outside the iron cage and off the two-dimensional page of our present Flatland rationalisms.47
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal as Meaning
Authors of the Impossible is an attempted recovery of precisely this kind of thinking “off the page.” Such a project is based on the wager that new theory lies hidden in the anomalou
s, that the paranormal appears in order to mock and shock us out of our present normal thinking. Seen in this way, psychical and paranormal phenomena become the still unacknowledged, unassimilated Other of modern thought, the still unrealized future of theory, the fleeting signs of a consciousness not yet become a culture.
This is hardly an easy claim to advance within our present order of knowledge and the possibilities it dictates for us. Paranormal phenomena, after all, dramatically violate those firm epistemological boundaries that, since Descartes, have increasingly divided up our university departments (and our social reality) into things pertaining to matter and objective reality (the sciences) and things pertaining to human experience and subjective reality (the humanities). Our scientific worldview has progressed, moreover, with the assumption more or less intact that it is the former objective reality that is really real, not the latter subjective . . . well, whatever that is.
Paranormal phenomena, however, bring the subjective component back in, and with a vengeance—the return of the repressed in all its fury. Whatever they are, it is clear that such events cannot be understood without reference to consciousness and the material world: Wolfgang is in town and the laboratory instruments fizzle and fry; the physical location of Elizabeth’s harp is pegged by a mind over a thousand miles away; my analyst colleague feels a sharp stabbing physical pain in relationship to an emotional story she has not yet heard; and so on. Such events are thus not just casually, occasionally, or anecdotally anomalous. They are structurally and cognitively anomalous.
The Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack put the matter as eloquently as anyone in an interview with Nova when he commented on how the physical phenomena of abduction reports violate our present epistemology and worldview: “we have a kind of either/or mentality. It’s either literally physical, or it’s in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.” Mack concluded what many thoughtful observers of such ufological matters have concluded, namely, that, taken alone, the framework of modern science is simply insufficient here. Rather, “multidisciplinary studies combing physics with comparative religion and spirituality are needed to further consider how the interdimensional bridging properties of the abduction phenomenon might work.”48
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 eff
ect 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.