Our second Fall short course explores the role of the imaginal in the transformational cosmology of Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004). {Gloria Anzaldua Website}. We first read parts of Light in the Dark a few years ago in one of these online courses. I had come across her work in searching for people who were influenced by, or who at least mentioned, the work of Henry Corbin. Anzaldua’s tradition is already deeply embedded in an imaginal cosmology, and she didn’t “need” his, or James Hillman’s, articulations of it, but she was happy to accept them as fellow travelers, which she does in this book which will be our text.
In the past few months her thought has surfaced for us again in the contxt of Jeff Kripal’s “impossible thinking” and his relationship with AnaLouise Keating, who has been for many years the primary scholar of Anzaldua’s life and work. And in the intervening years my long simmering attraction to the cultures of Latin America has grown, to include the blend of African, European and Amerindian cultures that she celebrates, along with all such border-confounding and destabilizing encounters.
This is a world view based on the idea of the power and reality of the in-between, reminiscent of Ibn ‘Arabi’s notion that from one point of view, everything is imaginal and mediating, since anything that is, is always, and in a variety of ways, between something and something else. Anzaldua’s experience of reality is fundamentally in sympathy with the vision of imagination in both Henry Corbin and James Hillman. And yet she takes us in very different, and to me, very exciting, directions.
Light in the Dark will be our text. [Buy Light in the Dark on amazon.]
By way of introducing Anzaldua, I suggest this lecture by Keating:
AnaLouise Keating, Plenary Lecture, Archives of the Impossible Conference, 2023:
Thinking the Impossible with Gloria Anzaldua: Towards a Transformational Politics of Spirit.
We learn here, among many other things, of Anzaldua’s long study of the “Seth” books of Jane Roberts, recently revisited by Peter Skafish in his book Rough Metaphysics. As I’ve mentioned in class, Skafish is an anthropologist, and translator and editor of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics which is a foundational text in transcultural ontological and epistemological thought of exactly the sort Anzaldua pioneered. All roads lead me to the same place…
Here are some hints of Gloria Anzaldua’s writing:
I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds. Gloria the facilitator, Gloria the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. “Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say the members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender, to women,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label.
You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web.
Who, me confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.
WHY AM I COMPELLED TO WRITE? . . .
Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.
I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. . . . To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit . . .
Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.”
La facultad
La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant “sensing,” a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world.
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Live Sessions: Tuesday/Thursday 4-5:30 EST — October 1-24
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