All pulled from “WRITING THE INVISIBLE: ARIANA REINES’S OCCULT POETICS” by David Ehmcke:

“Poetry’s not made of words”
—Ariana Reines, Mercury

“Something is saying itself through me”
—Ariana Reines

“That which is not of the body is not of the universe”
—Tantric maxim

When asked about A Sand Book, Reines explained, “Sand is the most obvious metaphor for time that we have—it’s so obvious that it’s invisible.…But it’s also a book about desertification and climate change and acquiring experiences of the divine through things we buy.”

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“In my late teens and twenties I felt so brutalized by the ‘you’ of advertising and politics,” Reines said in an interview with SSENSE. She continues, “I am not the ‘you’ you think I am…I am not the ‘you’ you’re looking for.”

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In “The Global Occult,” Niles Green writes, “The occult…emerged at the auspicious conjunction of colonialism, technology, consumerism, and globalization.” The entrance of religions designated occult— along with their practices, texts, and knowledges—into Western commerce and culture was “predicated on the movement and exchange of books and bodies, ideas and practices, all made possible by the steam travel, telegraphy, and world postal system that their impresarios would put to such effective use.”

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As metaphors of sand recur in A Sand Book, it becomes clear that poetry allows Reines to make connections that exist constantly in the “background of everything,” connections that are otherwise occluded amid the “noise”…that overwhelms digital platforms of communication…It is then that the reader can realize that as they continue their passive consumption on new media platforms, they participate in a desertification of language while the literal desertification of Earth’s land mass progresses too.

Poetry, for Reines, offers the possibility for occluded metaphors, connections, and forces that otherwise exist constantly in the “background of everything” to suddenly come to the foreground by way of Reines’s poetic staging of them. Her staging of what is occluded then stands as a criticism to understandings of and attitudes toward the world that otherwise occupy the foreground of consciousness in non-poetic thought. The stagings and connections that emerge from Reines’s poetic practice provide for her what she has identified as an “ecstasy of meaning,” which re-imbues language and the world with the meaning she had previously found ground to “sediment.”

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“I think so-called progressives and innovators need to think carefully about how their ideologies of experimentation, innovation, newness, progress, and improvement remap or offer support to these ideologies of capitalist, corporate, historical, patrilinear time.” It is important to consider in both McSweeney’s and Reines’s work how atemporality or cross-historicity figure as responses to linear “capitalist” time.

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Devin Johnston writes in Precipitations, “[O]ccultism can assist poetry in defamiliarizing the modern world and thus critiquing its pretensions to rational systemization.”

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Weber asserts that the organizing principle of rationalism is the belief that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces…one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” He concludes, “This means that the world is disenchanted.”…Later in “Science as a Vocation,” Weber asks, “Who…still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?”

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“Another trick that can be found in every religious tradition—it’s a trick, but it’s a good trick: every single thing that happens to you, that befalls you, is a treasure. A jewel in your hand.”

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Reines, too, has been critical of the disembodying effects of new media. She suggests, “I think the Internet as we now experience it very much reflects the people who built it, their concerns, their ideas about what the person is. Even if you go back to some of the founders of the Internet…these men were very exhilarated by the idea of getting rid of the body.” Indeed, one of these very founders, John Perry Barlow, wrote in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”