More Weirdness Everyday

A letter from Brazil

As those of you who participate in my “classes” are aware, I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kripal’s books for a couple (3?) weeks. I’m about done with my fifth. This is all Ezra Klein’s fault, since it was one of his podcast descriptions that sent me to Erik Davis and his book High Weirdness, which, to my surprise and utter delight, I read at a tremendous speed in about two days. That left me reeling way off balance and I spun directly into Jeffrey Kripal, who I had met at the Corbin conference last spring at the Harvard Divinity School. At the time I only really knew that Kripal was someone whose worked seemed a little too odd for me, but which I figured I should look at “someday.” I don’t recall what his talk there was about (I was not prepared to get it) except that I thought “he seems like a super nice, really smart guy with a great sense of humor who is doing really weird shit.” To oversimplify a complicated story: He got me. I’m in. And I strongly suspect you all should be too—in the sense that if you are enthusiastic about Henry Corbin and James Hillman, and art and literature and poetry and “spirituality” (whatever that may mean to you), then what Kripal has been doing for many decades should thrill you, and maybe make you uncomfortable, which is exactly what he’s hoping for. There’s no way for me to summarize his world, even if my understanding of it were stable enough for that, which it isn’t yet. But he does a good job of that himself. And, if you’re that kind of person, you’ll get an entire enormous bibliography of new things to read. Which is a problem, but then we can just use Kripal as our Interpreter.

I began this fast trip to crazy with Erik Davis’ High Weirdness which I emphatically reccommend. And these are the books by Kripal (who was Davis’ graduate advisor I think), that I’ve read to date, in the order in which I read them: The Superhumanities, Secret Body, Authors of the Impossible, Changed In A Flash, and The Flip. Mutants and Mystics and Comparing Religions are next up. There are more, written earlier than any of these, and I might yet get to those too. I think I’d suggest beginning with Secret Body. Then either Authors of the Impossible or Changed In A Flash. But just grab one and get started. My complicated experience with immersion in this material might be tentatively summarized (so far) by saying that, first it opened a huge door into even vaster realities than I already was moving in (or trying to), and that Kripal grabbed me by some of my very own ideas and arguments and dragged me places I was not willing to go alone. All of his weird world seems to me quite soluble in imagination as I’ve come to think of it, but the chaos of swirls and changing colors during the mixing has been very unsettling and entirely wonderful and thrilling. It also brings me back full-circle to my childhood love of theoretical physics (and science in general), science fiction and weird literature - you’ll see! And, here’s a spoiler and a teaser: it’s hermeneutics all the way down.

I don’t think I could have found permission for this stuff without all those years with Hillman and Corbin, and then the poets… We’ll be talking about all this in classes one way or the other for the foreseeable future.