A Fire Ceremony for the New Year: Brightest Wishes for 2022!

A sneak peek of “Your Mercy” from THE FIRE CEREMONY - a brand new project from Joshua & Kathryn

Friends,

I hope this finds you thriving on this third day of the (Gregorian calendar) new year – may the days ahead be filled with spirit, inspiration & all good things!

Avertissement au lecteur: the passages below, written on new year’s day, contain speculative thought - feel free to skip to the subheadings below if you’d rather just hear about the music (Lux Interna + our newest project, The Fire Ceremony)! ; )

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NEW YEARS DAY, 2022

12/31/21. JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA

As I’m writing this, a bleach-white sun hangs lazily in a Mojave blue sky and Ella Fitzgerald plays on vinyl in the background. About ten feet away from me, a small troupe of desert quail wander back and forth across the sand in mad, spiraling patterns, compelled by forces beyond my understanding.

In this moment it’s easy to forget how turbulent the last few years have been. 

But last night as Kathryn & I talked about life since the advent of the pandemic, sitting by an open fire, beneath Orion’s eternally fastened belt and the chains of Pleiades, I was haunted by a peculiar thought – it seemed to me that this ritual turn of the year was happening after the end of the world. Or more precisely, after the collapse of multiple intersecting worlds – a timeless time in which entire constellations of possibilities, temporal traditions and ideas about history, future and past, quietly dissolved into shadow while we were too busy to notice. 

A strange and disquieting thought for sure. But also an exciting one. After all, ends are also beginnings. And hidden in the ungroundedness of this moment is, I think, the possibility of a new experience of presence – a present no longer measured by the cyclicality of calendars, the narrow lines of neat narratives, or the taciturn and unlovely ticking of clocks.

Beneath the thick scarred skin of the world, a perpetual “not-yet-ness” pointing to a possibility that things can be radically otherwise. We can begin again.

In this sense, my hope for the new year is that it will be new, not simply in the sense of a fresh unit of time that we will gradually experience, but in concert with some of the older meanings of this word, e.g., “not habituated, unfamiliar, unaccustomed” – the dissolution of the merely habitual & an opening up of wild creative & collective possibilities beyond what we’ve become accustomed to.

So, in light (& dark) of this turn, both after and beyond the end of time, I’d like to offer some words from the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski that have kept Kathryn and I company during the last few years in the hope that they may bring you some brightness, too. To my mind, Zagajewski points us toward a “mystical realism,” a (paradoxical?) vision of an immanent transcendence rooted in a radical embrace of reality:

“Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feathers a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.” 

Silence, but not stasis.

07/14/21. MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

An egregiously long amount of time has passed since our last transmission – mea culpa. In the new year, we plan to keep this space alive and populated. Although we’ve been quiet over the last year or so to the point of committing social (media) suicide, we have indeed been busy finishing up some big projects. (As Americans are prone to making everything into a lifestyle brand these days, Kathryn has suggested we start a #ConsciouslyReclusive movement; I think she might be on to something.) 

This is already becoming a tome, so I’ll focus on the musical side of things here; in the next transmission, I’ll dig into some of the written work that has been produced over the last year.

The Inner Light shines again.

The forthcoming Lux Interna album, “New Wilderness Gospel” is officially recorded, mixed, and mastered. That’s right folks: it’s actually done! To say that we’re excited to bring this project to fruition is an understatement. It’s been a long – and at times arduous – struggle to realize this particular musical vision. But with the help of a brilliant group of musicians, I think that we’ve created a work that justifies the wait. We will be over the moon to begin sharing more with you – the trailer & further information on the project will be released in our next transmission on 2/01/22. Please stayed tuned!

07/08/21. MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE. Communing with the ghosts of James Carr, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Isaac Hayes & Elvis. etc. Whew.

No more water, but fire this time.

For many, the shutdown inspired the creation of ambient and drone albums. But perhaps because we’re so dark and drone-y already ; ), Kathryn and I decided to venture into stranger territories and do our best to dance our way through the dystopia of failed empire & imploded imperium. Armed with a few synthesizers, bass, guitar, a renewed fondness for an idealized 80s that neither of us actually experienced, and a bevy of chorus and flanger pedals, we holed up in the Mojave during the summer of 2020 and began experimenting with material for a new project.

06/21/20. 29 PALMS, CALIFORNIA. The desert is often thought of as merciless, but it’s been quite kind to us.

After a coast-to-coast road trip last summer and a series of recording sessions in rural Western New York with the always-brilliant Doug White at Watchmen Studios, Kathryn and I are over the moon to announce that we are (just about) done with our newest (& first non-Lux Interna related) musical collaboration: The Fire Ceremony.

07/28/21. LOCKPORT, NEW YORK. Rockin’ out in a hot vax summer? ; /

Damaged devotional disco? The imaginary soundtrack to the John Hughes/David Lynch collaboration that we always wished had happened? Apophatic dance pop? Pneumatic Post Punk? We’re not exactly sure what to call it; but making this music has truly been a fire ceremony for both for us – a slow burning away of dead skins & expired identities as well as a journey toward something paradoxically both new and familiar. (A beginning again.) We hope that many of you who enjoy Lux Interna’s work will also find something to connect with here.

We’re still mastering the recordings, but if you didn’t catch it at the top of this post, here’s a sneak peek of the track “Your Mercy” from the inaugural Fire Ceremony EP.

More on this soon. For the time being, please don’t be a stranger.

Love & Luminosity,

Joshua & Kathryn

In a Dark Time: Winter Solstice 2020

Dear friends,

Heartfelt wishes of renewal and renaissance as we approach the end of a very strange year! As the poet Theodore Roethke would have it, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see." On this darkest of days, I'd like to offer some thoughts on the metaphorics and metaphysics of tenebrosity (as well as a modest defense of creative vocations), via brief a reflection on his poem, "In a Dark Time" (1960).

 A much more in depth reflection on this poem can be found in Joshua L.I. Gentzke, "Viral Visions & Dark Dreams: Ecological Darkness and Enmeshment in the Time of COVID-19," in Pandemic, Ecology and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, ed. Alexander J. B Hampton (London: Routledge), 2020.

Roethke’s full poem can be read here.

Into the Dark, Kathryn Ian, 35mm Slide (2016)

 Theodore Roethke’s haunting poem begins with the evocative stanzas:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.[i]

Here, the poet encounters a natural environment become strange; the resonance of his own doubled self calls back from within a shifting landscape. As signal and echo blur into confusion, the poet is granted a paradoxical mode of sight, rooted in darkness rather than light—a vision more visceral than visual. While composing the poem Roethke was, by his own admission, “in deep therapy…really scraping bedrock.”[ii] Yet “the deepening shade” is a harbinger of more than depression; the dark time is also the time of the “echoing wood,” a distended moment that shelters a “night flowing with birds, a ragged moon.”[iii]

If we take the poet at his word, this haunted, echoic vision of nature should not be read in a purely figurative manner; its mode of reality is ontologically unstable, metaxic: “both literal and symbolic.”[iv] Read ecologically, Roethke underscores the consubstantiality of the human and other-than-human world(s) by underscoring at once the material nature of the imagination, and the nonphenomenalizable dimension of the natural world; paradoxically then, here the imagination names the fluidity between the human and other-than-human worlds, rather than the poet’s ability to fix the world within images.

True to the perspective of the porous subject that arises in the dark time, the poet speaks from within the other-than-human world in a manner geometric metaphors cannot map - his state of "being within" is not akin to, say, an ice cube in a glass; rather, he is enmeshed and entangled with his environment. Likewise, the tree that receives his tears is not merely an object to be grasped by a subject; it too has a temporal openness that prevents it from being conceptually cordoned.

Roethke's tree is “a growing thing” he can “touch and feel.”[v]

More radically, the aerial and chthonic creatures that inhabit the poem’s latter stanzas are loosed from the weight of symbology as they interpenetrate the poet’s very being: “I partake of them all-heron and wren, beast and serpent. They surround me; they protect me; they are my nearest and dearest neighbors.”[vi]

In the final lines, another type of darkness looms. Rather than searching for a light within or beyond the darkness, the poet takes the darkness as a light, a sensual knowledge bound up with shadowy erôs:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.[vii]

The poem closes with an evocation of mystical union:

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.[viii]

This is the divine darkness of apophatic or via negativa mysticism, a tradition seeded in the Platonic notion of “beyond being” (epekeina tes ousias),[ix] galvanized by Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. fifth/sixth C.E), and reimagined by Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Böhme, among others.[x] Like Roethke’s shadowy epiphany, apophaticism eschews the luminous language of positivism in its devotion to darkness; it speaks paradoxically of the ineffability of its subject and fosters a unique constellation of ontological and epistemological positions.

Pseudo-Dionysius’ work theopoeticized the absolute as divine darkness: the traceless trace of a Godhead too wild to be caged by intellection or sensation. The mode of un/knowing proper to Dionysian apophaticism is not luminous certainty, but the gloom of agnosia—an experiential revelation of shadow rather than a detached vision of light.[xi] The initiate moves from the worlds of sensual and intellectual intelligibility into “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”[xii]

Roethke’s poem however does not transcend the sensual realm; even in its confrontation with the divine darkness, the poem winds back in echoic reflection toward a haunted, living nature, before coiling into the poet’s own desire. Within this dark dream, the contour of an existential darkness emerges that reverberates with an “ecological darkness”: a blurring of the divide between human and other-than-human worlds. This ecological darkness opens up to the transcendental darkness of an existence beyond the reach of concept or category.

Yet, neither poet nor nature disappears in this triangulation; rather, a shifting place opens that shelters an “ecological subject,” a sense of self, shot through with otherness, enmeshed with the elemental and the animal. The way I read it, Roethke is dramatizing a sort of subtle "darkness body," i.e., a flesh that is doubled, allowing for the interpenetration and reversibility of world and body-self. In doing so, he suggests an eco-erotic poetics, a language capable of expressing an awareness of self and world prior to the threshold of detached reflection; a state of embodiment that both shelters and affirms the "visceral vision" proper to darkness.

Like Roethke, we too find ourselves in a dark time, confronted by a crisis so massive it exceeds our powers of conception and appears only epiphenomenally. Within this darkness, we are haunted by the threat of a double blindness, at once ethical and epistemological. The pandemic has demanded novel forms of technocratic protection and control to be implemented. But this is not enough. In the wake of COVID-19, it has become impossible to ignore the extreme injustices that have resulted from the ways that we have curated and imagined our hyper-networked world. If the sociocultural changes we make are to be more than technocratically enforced fortifications, it is crucial, alongside employing Enlightenment-based forms of thought, to confront the shadow side of the situation. It is not sufficient to only effect change, but we must also learn how to be affected in new ways that respond to the reality of our radical enmeshment.

Part of the task of forging a new eco-ethics that honors human and other-than-human interdependence and reflects our shared precarity is imagining new modes of embodiment, individually and socially.

As Jane Bennett points out, “affect is central to politics and ethics.”[xiii] If, in the face of the sociopolitical, economic, and existential regimes that have moved us toward a state of ecological crisis, we are to catalyze lasting transformation, new practices of imagining and becoming otherwise will have to be developed. And it is in fashioning a new “counter culture of perceiving,” able to adjust its eyes to these dark times, that many of the vocations devalued under the aegis of neoliberalism—artists, philosophers, theologians, and poets—have crucial roles to play.[xiv] Here, outside of institutionalism, perhaps a decentered, patchwork conversation has the chance to be seeded. If we accustom our eyes to the present darkness and stay with it long enough to dream otherwise, we may, to borrow the words of Wendell Berry, “find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.”[xv]

[i] Theodore Roethke, Selected Poems (Library of America; First Edition: no city given, 2005), 116, lines 1–4.

[ii] Theodore Roethke, Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 218.

[iii] Roethke, Selected Poems, line 14.

[iv] Anthony Ostroff, ed., The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1964), 50. Italics mine.

[v] Ralph J. Mills, Jr., ed., Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 218.

[vi] Ibid. 50.

[vii] Roethke, Selected Poems, 116, line 19.

[viii] Ibid. lines 23–24.

[ix] Plato, Republic, 509b, 6.590b.

[x] “Apophatic” stems from apophanai, “to speak off or away from,” implying the paradox of speaking the unspeakable. See: Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[xi] Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1.3 1001A; CD II 144.10–15.

[xii] Ibid. 997AB.

[xiii] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xxi.

[xiv] Ibid. xiv.

[xv] Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 68.

New Wilderness Gospel/The Messenger - November 2020

The Messenger by Kathryn Ian, 35mm slide projection on glass panel

Dear friends,

I hope you all are well, despite the continuing trials and tribulations of life in post-everything 2020! 

In the present post, I'd like to share some details about a project we’re really excited about, which has been in the works for quite some time now: New Wilderness Gospel, an experimental serial novel that will be released in connection with the forthcoming Lux Interna album of the same name. While we're still working out the details, we plan to release the first of two volumes, both electronically and physically, in 2021. A multimedia project at heart, the text will be illuminated by a series of prints made by Kathryn, which make use of an alternative photographic process from the 1800s.

A bit of background.

The seeds of inspiration for NWG were sown during a summer I spent working alone in an archive in Wrocław, Poland gathering research for my dissertation on the early modern mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). That August was so dark, cold, and rain-soaked that it could have passed for a harsh February pretty much anywhere that nature had a shred of affection left for humankind. It was a wonderful, but somewhat lonely time. Spending my days in the company of sixteenth and seventeenth century visionary texts, and my nights scribbling down notes in cafes and bars over a few Polish beers, odd “scenes” began to pop into my head. I suppose you could call them vignettes: situations and characters that arose out of nowhere and then disappeared, each apparently unconnected to the other.

As time went on and I found myself living in California, where one really shouldn’t ever complain about the weather unless it’s in reference to a terrifyingly high AQI number or those days when the sky turns a pale shade of “Blade Runner orange,” I returned to my notebooks. The scenes and the characters kept coming. And what was more, a plot began to form around them—first a thought of water. Then a mirage. And finally, a real river began to flow. I realized that some of the core ideas that I’d been wrestling with in my research were simply demanding to be given more supple bodies than academic prose could offer them. That’s how it all started.

Fast Forward to the shitshow of 2020. 

Although the book was started long before the pandemic laid bare the extreme precarity and outright dysfunctionality of what passes for "business as usual" in the late capitalist west, the intensity of our historical moment has made me even more invested in the themes the work treats. In a nutshell, NWG explores time, loss, and the ever-elusive possibility of redemption against the backdrop of a world defined by an increasingly fragmented sense of reality. By employing a nonlinear approach to narrative and engaging with the wreckage of western philosophical and theological history, the work explores a tangled ecology of characters that move toward a point of convergence with ontological implications.

But don’t worry, it's not all melancholy & metaphysics—there's also music, a backwards walking shadow that speaks German, liquor store robberies, time-traveling saints born from hexatonic scales, and sentient radios! So, at the very least, it’s got that going for it...

A message from the messenger.

Since NWG shifts between drastically different narrative voices and styles, I had a difficult time deciding on an excerpt to share. In future posts, perhaps I'll share passages from more "narrative-driven" scenes; for now I've decided to share the brief monologue that opens the book. Gabriel, whose voice you hear below, appears from time to time throughout NWG to offer a sort of “meta-commentary” on the narrative and the world of the text. These interjections are referred to as "transmissions." Without giving too much away, Gabriel is a “messenger,” connected in strange ways to both the natural radio waves emitted by lightning and astronomical objects, and the ancient Greek concept of angelos ("messenger, envoy, one that announces”), which resurfaces in the New Testament and takes on another significance when it’s used to translate the Hebrew mal'akh. But, as they say, things are not entirely as they seem.

Gabriel often feels a bit misaligned with the times and worries that he comes off as somewhat grandiose. But I’ve assured him time and time again that his tone just makes him unique and interesting. 

At any rate, it’s still a working draft, so changes may eventually be made; but for now, I hope you enjoy the excerpt! And as always, we love to hear from you— so drop us a line and don’t be a stranger. 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

TRANSMISSION #1.

The hour is, as they say, getting late. A thick blue darkness creeps across the cartographic scar of the western hemisphere. It fills up the eyes and lungs of a billion sleeping bodies. Petals of black fire fall over the shapes of distant mountains and the birch in the valley shine white as teeth. 

Or perhaps it’s early. Dusk and dawn, like dogs and wolves, are hard to tell apart in the twilight. Well, whether late or early, inter canem et lupum, in times like these we should pray that we’re visited by the latter rather than the former: right now we need force and fire more than the false friendship of feeble familiarity! But best to leave behind these polarizing metaphors and moralizing metaphysics altogether. No more pitting light against dark, dog against wolf; these dualities are only the phantasmal flickers of a grand and dangerous illusion that has taken up residence within us. There is no more time for such talk. Not when something so inconceivably precious is on the verge of disappearing forever from our world. 

Now, certainly not all disappearances need be mourned. Many things deserve a quicker death than they get. And I’m not one for nostalgia. No, not in the least. Backwards-facing sentiments are utterly lost on me. My life is not divided into soft-shaded pasts and distracted presents and fleeting futures. I simply don’t inhabit time that way. There is only a bottomless now that is everything at once. But however differently you and I may map time, it is indeed high time that you worried about this disappearance; franky, you should be terrified. If it's completed, a part of you will vanish completely. And in that moment a thousand threads will be cut. You see, there’s a secret language that weaves you into the world and the world into you; and this language will be lost beyond recall. Believe me—even though you might not feel anything when it happens, that very loss of feeling will be the sign and seal of a loss beyond comprehension. 

Look, there are forms of violence so deep, so pernicious and pervasive, that you don't even sense the pain of the blow or the cut of the claw. Acts of destruction that numb rather than sting. Brutalities that breed silences instead of cries. And here's the thing: what we used to call reality is weakening right now, decomposing more each day. But it's not, as those old Germans thought, that everything solid is suddenly melting into air—it's more that the air, the breath, is being taken out of the solidity of the world. 

You see, an imperium has been underway for some time now. Invisible though it may be, its roots snake deep down into the soil and feed off the dead. But it’s happening inside you too. And through you. An imaginal imprisonment, a calculated cruelty that transforms captivity into complicity. 

Yes, Rome is still building her roads. And these roads will run straight through your heart! So many will be sacrificed. So many already have. But you might never even suspect what's going on. In the wake of countless rituals of subjection, dehumanization, and conquest, and in the pornographic glow of a thousand shiny new technologies of displacement, a numbness has sunk deep into the heart of this land, leaching away the light. Long ago, history came like a hunter to these shores. And now it grows, gnarled and obscene, a tangled thicket slickened with blood and wrapped in threads of gold. But many of its branches fork out into dead ends. What you used to call the future, for example, is a lifeless limb that will be cut away and tossed onto the fire that is to come.

And in this very moment, even as each of my words ring out, we are entering into the late stages—the last stages perhaps—of a dire sickness. But the fevered fires that flash like lightning through the flesh of the world are signs that the condition is not yet terminal. And this is why we must fight what is ultimately a spiritual fight. Yes, yes...I know, I know. A ridiculous word! But please, hear me out. I’m not trying to wriggle free of this world and sneak off into some boundless beyond; I have no interest in slipping away from the haunt of history and the scandalous softness of skin and the wet dark scent of the soil to leave it all behind me in the dust like a cast off snakeskin. And I certainly don’t mean to invoke that warm-bellied abstraction so many of you late moderns like to toss around in your calmer moments. No, not at all; the last thing we need is to lose what vision we have left by staring directly into the pure white light of an abstraction. 

I mean only to say that this fight has everything to do with life, with breath and movement...with spiritus. Moreover, it’s a strange sort of fight. One that calls more for openness than armament. Because this crisis transcends us all. It cuts across your divisions of human and animal, animate and inanimate, subject and object, and so on. In fact, those of us who want to resist this infectious imperium, must refuse to replicate the violence encoded within these categorical regimes. We must turn away from the seductive paths that lead slyly from name to noun to number. We must learn to flourish, as the old English seer had it, in the barren climes and rage in the wild where lions roam.

Yes, the poets have often found ways of using language to lead us toward liberation. But even if we are tempted to discount their eccentricities, we should reflect equally on the profound mistrust that many mystics have had for language. And we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the seriousness of their private struggles with its structures. For as all colonizers know, language also has the power to circle around things, to divide this from that, them from us. And it is often those who wield the weight of the word alongside the threat of the sword that are arbiters of both place and presence within the orders of things. Yet although these orders may appear to be designated by providence, nature, or some other metaphor that’s hardened into a lazy metaphysics, they are indeed never natural. My dear reader, we must never forget how powerful a weapon language is in the struggle for the soul of a world; but silence too is pregnant with potency and potential—at least for those who learn to listen to its secrets!

But now my thoughts are getting away from me. We should stay with the threat at hand. Now if this conquest—this imperium—is fully realized, everything that cannot be contained and controlled by the prisons of number, quantity, and definition will face extinction. There will be no knock at your door at midnight. No heavy tread of boots in the streets. It will simply all cease to be. Yes, yes...again...I know. It all sounds absurdly dramatic. And these days we have little patience for tales that strike us as too poetic. Too romantic. Too grand and metaphysical! This is after all an age that values bathos more than pathos—yet another symptom of the very affliction that I’m describing. 

Yes, I do fear that you'll dismiss all this as the product of an embarrassingly overwrought mind. The melodrama of a second-rate poet. Or perhaps the ramblings of that most maligned of creatures: the feebleminded religious fanatic. But please, listen with an open mind. I can't think of any other way to put it to you. And let me be clear: this is no exhortation to return to some imagined Eden of the past. No, this type of thinking places redemption in the hands of Cronus—an unwise move! There is no going back and no back to go to; only into the storm and into the dark and into what is beyond all vision. But go on we must. Should the reality of the imperium finally ossify, all that will be left of the world—and of that small portion of the world that you refer to as your self—will be what is easily categorizable. That which is entirely reliant on its relation to endless sequences of reference for a sense of its own meaning. To use a word that is in danger of being irreversibly domesticated in these late or early  hours, we will lose all that is wild.

So, roll your eyes if you must. But we should really be quiet for a moment: America is slipping into a dream within the thick blue darkness...

Dark Dreams/Viral Visions - Autumn Equinox 2020

Nebraska Night, August 1, 2020.

Dear friends,

I hope this finds all of you well despite all the vitriol and volatility that 2020 keeps throwing at us!

We had planned on making these posts in a more regular rhythm, but a host of unexpected events—not least of all a road trip from California to New York and back again… more on that later—temporarily stymied these good intentions. But now we're back; and for better or worse, updates will be made on a much more regular basis.

There's been a lot of movement in the various and sundry projects that we are involved with: music, scholarship, visual art, and outreach, etc. For the moment, in this forum, I'd like to turn to one of the main themes that Kathryn and I have been driven to engage with over the summer months as we navigate the strange new territory of an (even more) unmoored manifestation of America.

In the wake of the dark times of the pandemic, we've been reflecting quite a bit on darkness—a term brimming with metaphorical, metaphysical, and moral meanings. Yesterday, we found ourselves at the Autumn Equinox. (Belated wishes to all for a creatively charged change of season; may it bring renewal!) The term "equinox" stems from the Medieval Latin equinoxium, which implies a sense of equality between the dark and the light, day and night. Yet, at least in mainstream western culture, darkness has rarely been treated nearly as favorably as its luminous counterpart.

From the separation of light and darkness in Genesis 1:4, to Plato’s promise of enlightenment from a world of shadows, the binary of light/dark animates many of the West’s sacred stories. Moreover, these metaphorics conceal an implicit metaphysics. Light signifies knowledge, morality, productivity, and other commodities; darkness is sinister, light’s other. Thus, this translation of natural phenomena into the cultural currency of metaphorical and metaphysical narratives conceals a subtle politicization of nature and naturalization of political ideologies. Understood through this filter, as a recent Reuters column has it, “the coronavirus is the dark side of a highly productive, urbanized, interconnected and increasingly prosperous world.”[i]

A primal image of chaos that collapses the distance between metaphor and metaphysics within a historically nyctophobic culture—and as Catherine Keller argues, “tehomophobic”—darkness speaks to the radical blurring of the existential and ecological that the current crisis portends.[ii] The language of darkness militates against teleological notions of reaching the light at the end of the tunnel as quickly as possible. It also rejects the triumphalist rhetoric that frames the experience of the pandemic in terms of waging, as the White House would have it, “total war on [an] invisible enemy” who will be “conquered” by “innovation and sheer willpower,”[iii] as well as the quasi-holistic (and necropolitical) logic of sacrifice for a greater good, as in Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick’s contention that Americans should be ready to give their lives for the sake of the economy, in order to keep “the America that all America loves for [our] children and grandchildren.”[iv]

To my mind, it is in these tenebrous times that darkness should finally be given its due. After all, in such dark times, there can be no “business as usual.”

Because of the fact that the virus exploits the efficiency of the neoliberal world order, short-term responses have focused on fighting the crisis by containment and armament. And naturally the situation demands protective withdrawal on personal levels as well. Paradoxically, however, if long-term changes are to be made, the ecological reality revealed by the pandemic—the interdependence of all life laid bare—calls for new practices of imagining openness, of learning how to be affected while trying to avoid being infected. What then might be gained by employing darkness as a lens? Might there be historical resources for staying with this present darkness long enough to adjust our eyes to a different ecological vision?

I tackle some of these questions in a recently completed chapter, "Viral Visions & Dark Dreams: Ecological Darkness and Enmeshment in the Time of COVID-19,” for the forthcoming Routledge volume titled Pandemic, Ecology, and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, edited by Alexander J.B. Hampton, which focuses on the multivalence of darkness and its significance to the current cultural moment. To quote the concisely worded press release, this volume addresses "the collective sense that the pandemic is more than a problem to manage our way out of ... [r]ather, it is a moment to consider our broken relationship with the natural world, and our alienation from a deeper sense of purpose and meaning."

I'm extremely honored to be part of the this timely project, as it touches on multiple themes that I'm passionate about and places me in the company of some truly remarkable scholars, many of whose work I've long admired. For more on the book as well as the other contributors, please click here.

In dialogue with my chapter, Kathryn, as part of the Bay Area artist collective, Collective Genus, produced a short interpretative film, which takes a line from the poet Wendell Berry as it title, "The Dark too Blooms and Sings." Alongside work from the members of her collective, the piece was projected large-scale onto various locations throughout San Francisco over Labor Day Weekend, September 4th-7th. The goal of this city-wide exhibition, given the context of the global pandemic, was to realize the safety and accessibility of an online exhibition, while maintaining the elements of space and place of a more traditional in-person format. For more information on Collective Genus and the exhibition, please click here.

An excerpt of Kathryn's film.

A short excerpt from a film made in dialogue with "Viral Visions and Dark Dreams: Ecological Enmeshment in the Age of COVID-19", a chapter written by Dr. Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke that focuses on the multivalence of darkness and it's significance to the current cultural moment. The chapter will be published in the forthcoming book, Pandemic, Ecology, and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, on Routledge Press in November 2020.

Stay safe out there! And don’t be a stranger.

[i] John Kemp, “Column: Coronavirus Is Dark Side of an Urban Interconnected World,” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-energy-kemp/column-coronavirus-is-dark-side-of-an-urban-interconnected-world-kemp-idUSKBN22Y17I.

[ii] The term references the Hebrew word “tehom” in Genesis 1:2, “abyss.” Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23–32.

[iii] Form letter from the White House regarding the economic impact payment, May 8, 2020.

[iv] The statement occurred on Fox News on March 23 as Patrick was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. For an introduction to “necropolitics,” see J.A. Mbembé and Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15(1) (Winter 2003): 11–40.

Enmeshment in the Age of Social Distancing: Contemplating Contemplative Connection

Early morning, Kings Mountain, CA. Shelter in Place: Day 1: March 17, 2020

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To say that the dire nature of the current COVID-19 situation calls for immediate action is putting things lightly. But given the shelter-in-place order and containment measures being put forward to combat the spread of the virus, confronting the pandemic also calls for a measure of inaction: a purposeful pause that might foster a moment of (collective?) reflection. Today, gazing out at an eerily still landscape from my desk in Northern California, it seems clear to me that the radically interconnected and ecologically enmeshed nature of our precarious existence pushes in upon us all and demands reflection.

Reflection is often understandably enough interpreted as a purely intellectual endeavor—the word stems from reflectere, which connotes bending back, turning inside, and ultimately, turning away. Yet, as our lives are now unfolding within a radically transformed context, perhaps reflection has the chance to blossom into contemplation, a paradoxical act of attentive inaction through which our awareness is dragged outside of the small circle of day-to-day concerns that normally transfix us, and opened up to a larger reality.

Here the past comes into focus within the strange horizon of the present. The concept of contemplation is rooted in both Greek philosophy and religious practice; historically contemplatio was used to designate various practices that cultivated inner visions and communions with the otherwise invisible and transcendent presence of the divinity. Once more the notion of inwardness crops up, which might seem opposed to the idea of connection. But contemplatio in this context is fundamentally a relational practice: it describes an attempt to open oneself up to what is fundamentally other. In its original Christian context this would point to the capital O Other of God. However, for the time being, I'd like to bracket the precise theological significance of the term and employ it in a looser, less rigorous sense.  In doing so, I want to suggest that, in a time when reality for many people is in itself becoming radically other, contemplation may be a fitting first step in responding and relating to the collective call to active inaction.

Contemplative questioning, if so actualized within this fissure of inactivity may contain within it the possibility of conceiving and enacting new modes of adopting and adapting to the reality of interconnectivity. The virus, itself both microbial and what might be described as a hyper-organism,[2] is a herald of this interconnectedness; and yet on multiple levels its virulence impels us to fear the very linkages it brings to light:

Our connections to our environment.

(Wait—is this a closed system! Why haven't our metaphysics moved us beyond the reach of physics? All this technology, and we're still subservient to our bodies—even in Silicon Valley? Is mother earth trying to kill us?)

Our connections to other species.

(Transmission of viral pathogens between species! Should I pet that dog? Do bats hate us?)

Our connections to each other.

(Wait, did that person just walk closer than he should have? Where can I buy a quick guide to the ins and outs of social distance shaming? Do viruses have nationalities?)

And viruses such as COVID-19 "go viral" as well; they not only permeate our biologically shared reality, but they also saturate the sphere of the social imaginary. There in the dynamic realm of the virtual, merged with the projections of our hopes, fears, hatreds, and loves, viral outbreaks live on in a host of simulacra, which both mirror and distort their terrestrial existences. (No links given; for this, I don’t wish to be a conduit. Explore at your own risk, but beware: hic sunt dracones!)

"Nature" again disturbs our collective social dreaming and the imaginal ecology in which we move and have our being shifts once more.

On the levels of both culture and nature—two categories that the theorists of the anthropocene tell us can no longer be thought separately from one other—pandemics bring to light both the strength and the fragility of our enmeshed reality. As the etymology suggests, they create a shared reality of their own because they are a dark revelation of interconnection between all (pan) people (dēmos).

If we imaginally zoom either up to afford a cosmic vantage point, or in to adopt a microscopic vision, this interconnected state is what the ecocritic (for lack of a more concise term) Timothy Morton calls "the mesh." He writes:

Life-forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept—unthinkable as such. This is not just because the mesh is too “large” but also because it is also infinitesimally small. Differentiation goes down to the genomic level. There is no human-flavored DNA, no daffodil-flavored DNA.

This is a thought that is both all too easy and all too difficult to grasp. The idea that “everything is connected” has become so commonplace that it sounds trite, an example of philosophy displayed between the taillights of a Tesla. But most of us don’t live as though this was obvious; at any rate, by and large, our society is certainly not wired to reflect this reality. How do we dust off this pat image to see the radical vision beneath the words? How can we really ask the question of who we are collectively within a wildly shifted horizon?

As California was rudely—and slowly—waking up to the magnitude of the current crisis, I happened to be reading the Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani (西谷 啓治) in preparation for a lecture. Given the context in which I was reflecting upon his Religion and Nothingness (originally: Shūkyō to wa Nanika), the following passage lit up as I read it: "in order for [something] to become a real question, one that is asked with the whole self, body and mind, it must be returned to reality itself. The question that asks about reality must itself become something that belongs to reality.”[1]

Nishitani writes of a contemplative experience he refers to as "the self-realization of reality," a moment where we "step back to come to the self." This step of stepping back is however not solipsistically self-centered; rather it is an act of shining light upon "what is directly underfoot" while undergoing a "conversion from the self-centered mode of being, which always asks what use things have for us [...], to an attitude that asks for what purpose we ourselves [...] exist." This form of contemplation affords a reconnection with the real that re-centers by de-centering; it does not lead us back inward toward the safe quarantine of a buffered subjectivity, rather it throws us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, into the dazzling light.

Nishitani envisions breaking down the illusion that we are simply isolated subjects peering out from within "the citadel of the self" at a world of objects, in order to realize that we are not in any meaningful way separate from that reality. Otherwise he opines, we sit with Plato's prisoners and simply watch "shadows pass to and fro on [a cave's] walls." This "self-realization of reality" entails being aware of and acting in accordance with our radically interconnected reality, both culturally and physically. And yet it does not unreflectively embrace the mythology of triumphalism that is arguably complicit in birthing the very attitudes of ecological domination and economical disparity that both fosters and feeds pandemics. As Plato himself was aware, it is not enough to bathe in the pure light of contemplating the ideal, one must enter back into the shadowy cave of the real where viruses ravage flesh and blood bodies, where violent divisions between buffered identities gape, and where the state with the largest economy in America ponders what to do when the sickness spreads amongst its 150,000 + homeless inhabitants.

A call to contemplating radical enmeshment must not deny the beauty of our fragile interconnectedness, but neither can it lapse into a misty vision of weightless white light pop mysticism; too much light can blind us. Our state of enmeshment is fundamentally ambiguous. But in times like these that can be so divisive and isolating, the words of Simone Weil, a fearless explorer of the shared territory between contemplation and revolutionary action, might serve as a point of departure for contemplating a shift in attitude that balances both the hope and horror of our quarantined present:

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.”

[1] Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983). All quotations excerpted and adapted from pages 5-6.

[2] Here I am playing on both superorganism (a term used to describe a unit of eusocial animals) and Timothy Morton's notion of hyperobjects (which denotes n-dimensional non-local entities). Truth be told, I'm not entirely convinced that we need yet another term; but here's my argument in nuce: although viruses exist somewhere in a gray area between living and nonliving, they are referred to with as microbes (which hides bios under it hood) and infectious agents; furthermore, once they enter into the cultural imaginary and are perceived a phenomenon that has some sort of semi-unified existence, they can be thought of as hyper-organisms, which is to say, non-local organisms, in so far as they both act upon the "world stage."