Act Quickly, Make Your God Happy

Over the last year my artistic practice has involved inserting myself into various artistic and institutional settings, performing the role of a therapist by taking participants to a separate room and asking them to describe the sensations they experience in their body. The question is simple enough, and when repeated and answered thoughtfully both the person asking and answering the question can enter quickly into a trance-like state. The activity is derived from a therapeutic practice called Self Regulation Therapy (SRT), a technique used in the treatment of anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I made many attempts to render the activity visible, to exhibit it. In my various efforts I encountered a number of sub-texts, which for an activity primarily concerned with language’s effects on the body, makes a great deal of sense both linguistically and practically. I am continually surprised by the degree of overlap between linguistic, physical and emotional experience, things that are generally thought to function independently of one another.

Initially I thought it would be important to attempt exhibition of the activity through a text like this one. However, I have encountered the same difficulty in doing so, and thus will retain the activity’s essential obscurity rather than violently dragging it out into view, changing it in the process. Instead I will use this text as a tool to think through the problematics encountered in my activity, namely the violence generated by the split I was pre-supposing to exist between language and body, and the various degrees of authority or influence I generated by assuming the role of the therapist, which I will liken to performing the ‘voice of God.’

Before I begin it seems like a good idea to clarify what I mean when I say the ‘voice of God.’ From the field of consciousness studies, a branch of psychology, there is an idea first put forward by Julian Jaynes of a pre-linguistic mode of consciousness, a form of rhetorical relation that produces immediate physical affect and effect in response to linguistic stimulus. The location of the origin of this stimulus is said to occur in the bicameral brain.¹ [1]

At first glance, it may seem like this idea proposes an ‘outside’ of meaning and experience to language, which would not come as a surprise to linguists or post-structuralists. However, what Jaynes brings to the discussion is the notion that rather than an inside and outside, a process of origin-less, continuous filtering generates a field of linguistic activity. As experience and meaning are filtered through language, something that is always, already present, words can be used in a way to either generate a sensation of, or point to a space impossible to articulate, an affectual space supposedly regulated by the bicameral brain. Jaynes argues that once filtered through language, an experience of this space is usually interpreted as a message from a god and produces immediate physical response.

An example of this would be the way people respond to text believed to be prophetic, examples of which I will provide further on. Chanting would fall into a similar linguistic category although move in a different direction; in using repetition to short-circuit language a sense of plentitude can be generated, rather than starting from an experience of plentitude and expressing that linguistically.

This process is steeped in a long tradition of specific power relations, and engaging in this sort of activity brings one very quickly up against certain limits, boundaries and a latent violence that can be understood as being intrinsically indivisible from language,² [2] the details of which I will now attempt to outline.

For an example of what might be meant by this process, I recommend watching a particular segment from Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (1974). I will outline here why I think it functions in the way I’m trying to articulate, but for the example to function you will have to watch it; the affect produced by the expressions on the character’s faces are integral components for understanding. Various characters receive divine messages throughout the narrative and Pasolini goes to great lengths to portray with exacting detail the affective process each character undergoes while the god, curse or demon is speaking.

The story begins with an old man emerging from the sea. He gives his robe and his hat to a fisherman, instructing him to pass on these items to a man who will ask for them, a man who has come from an island. The scene cuts to the son of a King who is considered by everyone in the town to be a child and a fool. One day the fool is struck by what is deemed to be a message from a god and informed he must go on a voyage. The ship is taken by a strange wind and crashes on the rocks of a cursed island. The scene cuts to the fool near the point of death, lying naked on the summit of a rock face. There is a hut looming over him, housing a suit of armor with a written tablet fastened to its chest. This indicates the armor is demonic, a trope set up throughout the film where demons are indentified by scripts that are tied to their bodies. The fool receives a second divine instruction, finds a bow and arrow ready to hand and shoots the arrow into the text worn by the demon. This kills it, causing the island to sink and disappear. The fool finds himself back in the ocean, swimming towards a second island. Here he finds a young boy being hidden in an underground bunker of sorts, the father attempting to protect his son from a prophecy which declared his son was cursed and would die that evening. The fool swears to be the boy’s brother and protect him. During the night the fool animates while remaining asleep. He becomes an instrument of the curse, finding a dagger that has been placed on an alter in the room and uses it to kill the young boy. When he wakes he realizes what he has done and is filled with dismay. The fool’s father is waiting in a ship on the edge of the island to bring him home, where there is great celebration about the fool’s return. During the processional walk towards the palace the fool sees the fisherman from the beginning of the story, who without speaking knows to give this man the bundle of clothing from the old man who emerged from the sea. The fool puts on the clothes of the prophet, assuming a position of poverty. His father asks “Que causa disso que?” (What is making you do this?). The fool answers, “Dieu, padre.” (God) and walks into the desert.

It is not clear whether the fool was responding to messages from a god, a demon, or a curse throughout. The ambivalence could imply a certain ambivalence on the part of the gods, or perhaps it is a lack of discernment on the part of the fool. What is interesting is that text is understood to be the vehicle which facilitates the divine (god, curse, demon) message to move physical bodies, both human and non human. The curse places the knife in the boy’s room on the alter. When the text on the suit of armor is shot with an arrow the demon is destroyed.

This understanding of a certain relationship to text is pre-modern. Perhaps the best way to try and understand it is by looking at its existence in the earliest form we would be able to recognize it, just before the word was only the word, when the word was flesh also. This point in the history of understanding can be found with St. Augustine who uses rhetoric to subjugate this function of language by re-purposing pagan practices and knowledges to increase the influence of the Catholic Church.

In his Confessions Augustine describes a life dissatisfied by learning and reading, wondering why he cannot find a system of thought that allows him to end what he considers endless sophistry and hypocrisy, a system that is more powerful than any other, an end to all philosophical argument. A lesser-known fact contributing to the formation of this reading of the Confessions goes as follows: When Augustine was appointed the position of Bishop in Algeria the church was worried no one would accept him as an authority on morality because of his reputation for depraved and debaucherous behaviour throughout most of the Roman Empire. The Confessions can be seen as being born from necessity - a prudent and public demonstration of repentance and supposed transformation, an ascendant conquering of his incompetent classmates.

The Confessions become interesting when looked at as a text that produce the ‘God is speaking to me’ or ‘truth’ effect. This effect operates in the following way: In his early explorations of the emerging Christian movement Augustine encounters a story about St. Andrew who experiences a violent and dramatic conversion. At the time Augustine is not moved, however the possibility of conversion enters into his consciousness and begins to overtake his thinking. He becomes increasingly fascinated by the possibility of the annihilation of his will, which at long last he finally experiences.

The manner in which it occurs is what is important to the notion of textuality I am outlining. Augustine’s mother experiences a series of what she calls prophetic dreams. In the terms of the analysis I have been setting up, this means Augustine, believing in prophecy, will expect any subsequent encounters with various forms of textuality (speech, reading etc) to bear messages from, in his terms, a divine, in our terms, an outside source. In either language, the ground is set for Augustine to have an encounter with radical exteriority, ‘otherness’; the total annihilation of his personal will and sense of a perceiving ‘I’, the ‘I’ of reported speech.

When this moment occurs Augustine is reminded of St. Andrew, a text which had been written, although Augustine encountered it from the stories of his friends. St. Andrew’s text provided the model for Augustine’s conversion, a script. Augustine remembers that in Andrew’s moment of conversion Andrew consulted a text that was considered to contain ‘direct messages’ from God. Through the transmission of this story Augustine latently knows that for conversion to happen he must consult a Bible, which happens to be nearby (much like the fool’s bow and arrow) and sure enough he experiences the phenomena of apophenia, where one selects a passage from a book at random and finds it pertains directly to the enquiry being made (also known as the practice of bibliomancy). Augustine extrapolates this set of contingencies as the design, or will of something outside of himself, in this case God. In terms of SRT, this sense of an encounter with radical exteriority is related to a specific function of the nervous system which releases tension and opens all receptors to external stimuli. This can be likened to a sensation of extra-sensory knowledge, like an encounter with a ghost or an experience of ESP or déjà-vu. In this altered state, Augustine interprets the passages he finds in his Bible as direct messages from God and feels entirely subjugated by the text, his will annihilated.

To extend the example, currently my father is working on writing what Christians like to call a testimony, his story of conversion. My father, never having read Augustine, believes his conversion experience to be spectacular and unique; he would be disappointed to discover the similarities. Rather than under a fig tree he was in a bathtub at the time. After a series of what might be akin to psychedelic hallucinations he opened his Bible (ready to hand on the bathroom counter) only to find relevant verses popping supernaturally off the page at him. Being raised with this story as an absolute and singular truth it never occurred to me that there might be a historical precedent for this kind of experience.

Christian conversion being written and produced multiple times throughout history set the ground for my father’s conversion which he then experienced as absolutely singular, in the same way that Augustine experienced his conversion as absolutely singular and ‘true’. In their altered state, both Augustine and my father were simultaneously remembering and forgetting key influential texts that they would have encountered in one of the various mutations that characterize oral and written history. I’m sure, should my father realize his dream of having his testimony published, it will go on to infect further generations ad infinitum.³ [3] This text can also serve towards generating that effect, but then, I have already been infected and perhaps my only means of wrestling with the disease are to try and understand it, expose it to the cold blade of the scalpel of understanding.

At this point, being a learned and rational sort of reader, you may find my argument somewhat difficult to digest. If this is the case I call in the aid of Des Esseintes, Huysmans’ anti-hero in Against Nature. Des Esseintes would be able to sympathize with your concerns, being driven to indigestion himself from too much reading, too much learning. His over-indulgence in the world of ideas and aesthetics renders him a bundle of nerves and anxieties, his body wasting away to almost nothing. At the peak of his neurotic reverie, however, he is interrupted in his feast of modern thought by a terrible fear:

“What is more, [the Jesuits] had implanted in him a certain taste for things supernatural which had slowly and imperceptibly taken root in his soul, was now blossoming out in these secluded conditions, and was inevitably having an effect on his silent mind, tied to the treadmill of certain fixed ideas.

By dint of examining his thought-processes, of trying to join together the threads of his ideas and trace them back to their sources, he came to the conclusion that his activities in the course of his social life had all originated in the education he had received. Thus his penchant for artificiality and his love of eccentricity could surely be explained as the results of sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties, semi-theological speculations; fundamentally, they were ardent aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.

He pulled himself up short, and broke this chain of reflections.

‘Come now,’ he told himself angrily. ‘I’ve got it worse than I thought: Here I am arguing with myself like a casuist.’

He remained pensive, troubled by a nagging fear. Obviously, if Lacordaire’s theory was correct, he had nothing to worry about, seeing that the magic of conversion was not worked at a single stroke; to produce the explosion the ground had to be patiently and thoroughly mined. But if the novelists talked about love at first sight, there were also a number of theologians who spoke of conversion as of something equally sudden and overwhelming. Supposing they were right, it followed that nobody could be sure he would never succumb. There was no longer any point in practicing self-analysis, paying attention to presentiments or taking preventative measures: the psychology of mysticism was non-existent. Things happened because they happened, and that was the end of it.

‘Dammit, I’m going crazy,’ Des Esseintes said to himself.

‘My dread of the disease will bring on the disease itself if I keep this up.’⁴ [4]

 

Oddly enough, in a similar fashion to Augustine, after spending most of his adult life elaborately detailing every possible minutae of vice, Huysmans inserts a preface into a re-print of Against Nature declaring his conversion to Christianity. Das Essientes and Augustine are not so different from one another; both glutted with books and ideas, obsessed by the body and subject to its whims, trying to subjugate it with a totalizing system of thought. Both display an ambivalence to the written word, performing a simultaneous forgetfulness and demonstration of its power.

Although I am greatly enjoying comparing Huysmans to Augustine, I have forgotten an important element of the example from Arabian Nights which I must use this opportunity to elaborate. The fool, lacking discernment, strategy or guile, in following what he interprets as the voice of God, runs into continual trouble. He is unable to anticipate rules, limits and the potential malice of others. In his blind, immediate response, (as the Sumerians say, “Act quickly, make your god happy,”) succumbing to an immediate response, like the first card in the Rider Waite Tarot deck the fool falls off the cliff, gets eaten by the wolf. In the case of Arabian Nights the fool succumbs to a curse rather than a god, used as an instrument to result in the murder of the young boy. Spoken by a prophet in the form of an imperative, the curse cannot be shot with an arrow, the arrow of allegory, it must come to pass. In allowing himself to be influenced the fool finds himself up against a limit, the sharp blade of a knife, exile in the desert.

We are far from the task at hand, however, which is to describe what was at stake when I took on the role of a therapist for the sake of art. By positioning myself as an authority, as the therapist, I became the limit, placed the knife on the altar, hung the sign around the Demon’s neck, emerged from the sea and announced what will come to pass. I was the prophet, the instrument and channel for ideology.

I want to direct your attention away again temporarily to another example in film, this time the only documentary attempted by Susan Sontag, Promised Lands. General consensus in reviews seems to be uncertain if it functions as a documentary, a film, a piece of fiction or a critical essay. It concerns Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The documentary employs a new-wave strategy of filming scenes from daily life, market places, funerals and desert landscapes all underscored by the constant static of the radio. The only time sounds of the war become audible is in the final scene, which unfolds as follows:

We find ourselves in a Jewish psychiatric hospital. A doctor is explaining to us that many Israeli soldiers are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He explains dispassionately the method used to treat the syndrome. It involves drugging a patient, making them hyper-sensitive to suggestion and unable to distinguish between what is happening in real time and what is a memory. The therapist bangs tables, shouts, shakes the bed and causes the patient to relieve experiences from the battlefield, moaning, writhing, suffering, trapped in a drug-induced hell. A cure is said to be achieved when the soldier is able to resume his role as a productive participant in the State, a father, a worker, a functioning member of public society.

Even if I had known about this particular subtext of my activity at the time I would have told you I was not aiming to torture for the sake of the state despite performing in a public institution, part of a conference with pedagogic intent. I was amassing a group of materials with the intent to un-do a structure and generate an experience of pleasure. Perhaps it could be called an aesthetic experience. Perhaps it could be called art. The materials themselves came with contingent sub-texts, embedded scripts, which were only able to be read through an encounter, through close looking. The pre-texts and subtexts themselves are a material. I called my experiment The Idiotic Pleasure Of The Present. I am the fool, jumping off the cliff, looking into the mouth of the wolf.

 

I approach this activity with an attitude of willingness and curiosity

I easily release any resistance to this activity

I easily find words to describe the sensations I experience in my body

The words I speak do not matter

Every word I say is the right word

Sit comfortably in a way that supports your weight evenly. Pull your breath out of the ground, into your feet, up through your legs, around your kneecaps, into your thighs, up into your hips. Pull your breath into your abdomen, filling your core with the breath coming out of the ground, up through your feet, legs and hips. Your breath continues upwards into your digestive organs and you hear a rumble as the intestines and stomach begin to become conscious of your consciousness of them. Pull your breath from the ground, through your feet, legs, abdomen, up into your diaphragm and into your lungs. Your chest fills with breath as it spills down your arms, around your elbows and fore-arms, wrists, phalanges. Your breath goes into your fingernails. Your breath comes up out of the ground filling your entire body, rising to your throat filling its cavity, brimming up to your jaw and the bottom of your ears. Your breath fills you up to your nose, to your eyes, to the middle of your forehead. Your breath comes out of the ground, rushing up your legs and trunk, filling every fold and crease in your body, seeps into your head and spills out the top with a blast. The breath rushes out of the ground and throttles you in its hurry to leap through your mass and erupts out the top.

Feel your toes. Don’t wiggle them, sense where they are. Now feel your elbows. Feel how the muscles and ligaments attach themselves to the rest of your arm. Feel your earlobes, sense where they sit next to your neck. Feel your hair, the follicles, where the hair brushes against your forehead.

Now find and describe the most prominent sensation in your body to me.

Tell me where it is.

 

 

Case Study 1

23.56 min

 

I feel, oh, I feel delicious. Mmm, yes, simply wonderful. Hm, what’s that? Ahhhhh. Everything is warm and dark. I feel like a limp noodle. Is that silly? I feel like, I know I’m not supposed to admit this, there’s always been this little girl inside of me, I know, it’s terrible for a man to admit that, I’m such a cliché… there’s a little girl sitting in my throat in a pink dress. Oooooh, in my knees! I want to wiggle my knees like the little girl, she’s such a coquette. Hee hee hee. Look at me wiggling my knees, I can’t help it, they feel so flirtatious. My knees are giddy! Can I say that? Like bubbles, it feels like there are bubbles moving through my legs, ooooh, up into my belly. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

…

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oh, sorry, was I drooling just a little there? My jaw is so relaxed, it’s just welling up inside of my mouth, it’s so wet, just like that. Now my eyes are watering. I don’t feel sad, just the bubbles in my knees…

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Sorry, I’m sorry, where was I? Where am I? I’m in a dark void, it’s expanding out in front of me. I feel, I feel warm, invisible, vacant, empty. How big am I? I’m the size of the universe. I am an emotion. I am boredom. I am boredom, the size of the universe, no, larger than the universe. I am boredom and envy and I pervade all things. Hoo hoo hoo hoo! Of course I would find that in my body! Whoah, it’s so immense, the boredom is so immense. It’s making me sad. The little girl is sad, she’s not wiggling her knees anymore, she has someone’s hands around her neck. My neck is tight, there is a knot in it, oh, the envy, oh! I’m choking! Cakh cakh nggggggh.

 

Case Study 2

32:02 min

 

Um, it’s difficult to say…

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in my leg…

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a warmth, like electricity….

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still my leg, still warm…

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now my ankle…

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kind of fuzzy..

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no, still the same…

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still the same…

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oh, well, it’s not my body, but there is a dark sphere in front of me.

No, it’s not mine.

I don’t know who it belongs to.

There is a knot inside of it.

It’s just there.

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it’s gone.

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my ankle is still fuzzy. I feel my circulation speeding up.

It feels nice.

 

 

 

Case Study 3

40.24 min

 

This is difficult. I don’t feel anything. Hm. phwwwssshhhhhhh. I feel, what do I feel, is that, it’s like, it’s an electricity in my chest. It’s very uncomfortable. Why are you asking me to feel uncomfortable? It’s like my heart wants to jump out of my chest, ahk, it’s fighting, my heart is fighting, it’s trying to not beat in time with the ticking of the clock. It resents the clock. It is full of anger at the clock for forcing it to beat in time to a machine. Ungh, the right side of my body, it’s pulling me, I’m…

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so heavy…

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it’s like I’m melting, of course I’m not, I’m not melting, it feels like I am, so warm, like a warm mud sliding down the right side of my body pooling around my feet. My brain is resisting, it resents you for asking this of me, it resents my body for feeling so good, it is analyzing my response while I am responding, my heart is angry at my brain for trying to pull me out of feeling this good….

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This is … difficult… Oh! Those little shits! They are all disagreeing! All my organs are… how do I say this? They are dancing, they are having a party. It’s a party in my stomach and all my organs are dancing and they are wearing little hats. Party hats…

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my chest is burning,

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NNNGNGGGGGGGHHHHHH

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ahhhh…

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oh my god. oh… my… god….

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it’s like, I’m very…. far… It’s difficult to come back and my heart is angry again, how dare you ask me to describe… so far… ah, it’s so beautiful, I can’t… why can’t I just enjoy it? What a stupid word, beautiful. It’s like a vast ocean. What size? Inside me, except I’m as big as the room, no, as big as space, the heavens, I am black and empty, I am a mother, that’s not possible you know, how can I feel like a mother? … … but… it’s dark…

the ocean is deep… I am the emptiness of space, oh it’s so beautiful….

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fucking cosmos

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ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha, you can’t make me, no, you can’t…

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ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hee hee hee hee hee ha ha ha

…

 

I might have told you I was not aiming to torture for the sake of the state, but I can never be certain to what degree I was opening myself up to become the instrument for ideology. If it was pleasure I managed to produce, or if it was an aesthetic experience I produced, I do not want to take the embedded sub-texts for granted, I need to examine them. Where precisely did I place the knife? How deep was the cut? There seems to be an assumption that working in a specific institutional contexts guarantees the production of art. There also seems to be some kind of assumption of autonomy, that somehow the materials can transcend the boundaries of the institution and exist as a pure idea, free from detritus. If the Devil is in the details, I would argue that God is in the grammar, by which I mean to say that the idea of the work is bound to the material of the work, that there can be no separation between thing and idea, the structure and articulation of a work matters as a form of matter. This is the matter ready to hand for artists who write and writers who use art as a material for production.

 

Notes