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.”
Serpent Instrument
Sculpt away at undercarriage for breathing room
So when the air rushes to fill the empty spaces –
Woven I will see for variations sake transition.
I
Like glacial slabs, go the weeks wasted in worry.
Like historic flooding, my tears loose themselves.
Like fire on the horizon, I can not stop lingering.
Will this be anything but a temporary hollow?
Some new small cave to bore into?
And still, the hole shall be opened
so that it shall be all openings.
And the mountains shall be moved off
so that they shall remain a mere semblance.
Where the worm never dies,
the fire never quenches.
Stop and listen and –
bloody tears fall free.
I’m in Rain City –
I pray for the keys to
unlock your gate.
Your container will be filled
from the source of all water.
In your Valley of Hinnom –
the limits of worldly desire.
I wish to dwell in the shadows of your Earth,
called Volva by the inhabitants of Levania.
Because Volva goes through the same phases as the actual Moon.
Let me think you too can be a light in the darkness.
II
I still look for you
– in those open woods
– in those places free from brush
– or alongside a body of water
Heart field with wounds.
Those soft and violent, misty fields.
From way down in that thicker grove,
you can hear the ringing of a bell
never stopping.
Are we animated and freed by each other’s living, heavenly fire?
As when the angels with their fiery rods run,
and no man might mistake his son or daughter their desire.
So will I walk after the lust of my soul
and afterward, I hope, return to this good earth.
From now on my Gehenna,
sacrifice will have to be practiced outside the walls of the city.
Because they have made this an alien place
and have built upon the high places where we went to burn.
Some of the most devout still try
to proffer themselves as burnt offerings to
“always, therefore, behold, more days are coming”.
And I can’t yet really argue with that.
Colonial Manuscript
(Found in a safety deposit box)
by David Berman
Orbit One—Far above my life, one trillion storeys up, above the silver judgement wheels, is a clear civilization, along the sidereal coast, a perpetual glide, where the rapid hearts sleep, where armrest factories puff, “we invite the nervous,” for warm firm handshakes immemorial.
Orbit Two—On the table is a glass of red soda, a traffic ticket, and a sketch of a telephone. Out the screen door I can hear two men arguing about a shed. The screen makes the whole tableau into a grid. I’m surprised when a cardinal lands on the window sill. I’ve only seen them on placemats.
Orbit Three—It was a revelation on a sled that brought him in from the cold white hills. To ask his wife, if in a city in the afterlife, she would recognize him on the street.
Imagination, memory in drag, called up a picture of an endless plane covered in sidewalks.
Orbit Four-In the painting, sky and ground run parallel. There is a palm tree and a jet. A forest stands in the corner, a set of antlers lies in the grass.
Off to the left there is a river, but you can’t see it, it’s outside the frame. The river is full of old wheels and chain, but they don’t make it go.
Off in the distance, it’s very faint, there’s a hill. A man sold everything he owned to buy that hill. The agent said he would be able to see the future from up there, and that it would be the same future every time.
Orbit Five—Several thousand years ago there was a man who wanted to kill a very powerful man. In his own room he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall to find out whether his hand could carry through. By some chance the powerful man was standing on the other side of the wall and was thus slain.
And that is how I live out every one of my days.
“We want you to believe in us, but not too much.”
– UFO occupant to patrolman Herbert Schirmer; Ashland, Nebraska USA, December 3, 1967
Excerpted from Retrospect by Æ
That being from a distant country who took possession of the house began to speak in a language difficult to translate. I was tormented by limitations of understanding. Somewhere about me I knew there were comrades who were speaking to me, but I could not know what they said. As I walked in the evening down the lanes scented by the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of some unveiling about to take place, I felt that beings were looking in upon me out of the true home of man. They seemed to be saying to each other of us, ‘Soon they will awaken; soon they will come to us again’, and for a moment I almost seemed to mix with their eternity. The tinted air glowed before me with intelligible significance like a face, a voice. The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would but raise for an instant I knew I would be in Paradise. Every form on that tapestry appeared to be the work of gods. Every flower was a word, a thought. The grass was speech; the trees were speech; the waters were speech; the winds were speech. They were the Army of the Voice marching on to conquest and dominion over the spirit; and I listened with my whole being, and then these apparitions would fade away and I would be the mean and miserable boy once more. So might one have felt who had been servant of the prophet, and had seen him go up in the fiery chariot, and the world had no more light or certitude in it with that passing.