A Bloody Theory of Divine Light live @ Amazon

here  

First review now in:  "Sounds surreptitious, sleight-of-mind, and dangerous. Qualifies as a must read." From Mr. Solomon himself.

Second review:  The first time I saw Michael Portnoy dancing in the street wearing a pink tutu, cavorting like a matador with a taxi cab outside the Surf Reality performance space in the Lower East Side, I had a similar feeling to reading this collection of short Internet essays by the poet A.E. Reiff. Watching Portnoy’s amazing 90s performance piece in the NYC streets, I wanted so much to be like that — magical, completely mad, jousting with society, but somehow untouchable, pristine and pure of heart. In an intellectual sort of way, this book is a little bit like that, especially in that Reiff is so well read, his writing is difficult for me to touch. Still I cannot help but speculate, so please forgive my fumbling attempt at a review here. I will say this book dovetails nicely with my own readings in systems theory, folklore, and conspiracy. This is an intellectual sort of conspiracy, and for that reason unusual, as such intellectual tall tales generally come entirely from the left wing as a description of ‘systemic’ problems with ‘society’ which is classed as a trivial machine and ‘if only we could fix this one thing or group or type of thinking we could fix all of society’. Certainly conspiracy theories arrive from the right flank but they usually are not as intellectual or nearly as heavily referenced. One thing missing is UFOs (to make it really modern), unless I missed a subtle reference in these dense pages. Perhaps you could stretch to speculate that UFOs are really time machines sent back from the future by the Artilects. Such a suggestion could line up nicely with the rest of this detritus washed ashore in the wake of theory, folklore, and science fiction — Obama and the pagan altar, Jonah and the whale, scorpions and oil wells, Terrans and Cosmists, Chuang Tzu and stand-up comedy, the owls burning at Bohemian Grove. Not to mention, the sacredness of the human family — man, woman and child — the new blasphemy that cannot be spoken aloud, not only in the halls of power/memory, but also in the halls of academe. There is just a dash of Pere Ubu and David Thomas too, like a punk-rock Professor gone horribly wrong, shuffling through hand written notes on stage at the Cats Cradle while the band slams it out. I will say I find the author is correct about some of this, particularly the family, but still there is something missing. When he starts spouting off the typical sad-sack (which, unless they are talking about MK Ultra or the CIA, is usually from the left) line about how “torturer and victim are one” (p. 77), I found myself wishing he had read a bit more Primo Levi, but instead we get the abject hero and Charles Manson by implication, a rather totalitarian collapse of distinction (and a different kind of family altogether). He does suggest MK Ultra and the even more folkloristic and even mythical ‘Project Monarch’ I should say, as no conspiracy theory would be complete without it. The severed yet still sentient head mentioned on page 33 — a folklore motif — is quite apt. Artificial intelligence as it has mostly been conceived of late is sentience absent a body, which may be the real problem with it or obstacle to its full realization, or so I’ve read elsewhere. The disembodied head is an old story touched in both folklore and, as I mentioned before, science fiction. You can see it in C. S. Lewis (whom the author cites) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (which the author here does not mention). At times, like so many avant-garde doomsayers, the author walks a thin line between poetical verbiage and near incoherence. He hardly explains many of his references but I suppose if you read these essays online you can link to some of them. I do agree with him about the uselessness of magicians and here the paradox is his dissection of such occultists as actually passive, when the heresy is in placing their actions on par with God’s. “The peasant farmer, hungry and benighted, ignorant of higher math, who had music and art, and even more, community, had no difficulty until he became an individual, coincident with the rise of science.” (p. 8) This aligns with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory in that the modern conception of the individual is a necessary predicate for the modern differentiation of these social subsystems, so I would carry this further and say also “coincident” with the rise of art, law, economy and religion (insofar as it now constitutes only one among many functional subsystems in society). Thus, one senses the author’s accurate description of the conflicts between the premodern (undifferentiated) and the modern (differentiated or, as we might also suggest, corporate). The author deviates from Luhmann (and perhaps science) however when he (accurately in my opinion) takes down the gnostic heresy as well. What loving God would condemn human beings to live merely as blind cave fish in His creation? (See p. 43 — “neo-Gnosticism, the idea that ‘you have lived your entire life in the darkened basement of reality.’”) Yes, Kafka too makes the point that “science . . . unrestrained . . . is dangerous” (p. 37), but the Kafkaesque (or ‘Kafka squared’ as I am fond of phrasing it now) dwelling on the threshold of modern society has now risen to the next level of reinsurance, not just insurance anymore. This is analogous to second order observation as Luhmann might point out. Modernity is ultimately a question of contingency, yes, but technology and divination remain distinct in this (mostly) disenchanted and differentiated modern society. I’m surprised the author here didn’t bring in H. P. Lovecraft, whose slumbering Old Ones could be seen in the same (sometimes bloody) light as those cosmic gods (the Artilects) dreamt up by the controversial Hugo de Garis. Controversy is the game here I think on multiple levels, especially in this age of clicks. Will the Unabomber be an anointed saint in the transhuman wars to come? Or is the idea of the human, like the idea of Rome as suggested in the film Spartacus, ‘eternal in the mind of God’? I admit questions such as these are, if I can say this without sounding too passive or rendering my argument too circular, in God’s hands. I sense perhaps (and identify with) the author’s struggle with faith. Ironically enough he is writing about the future, yet decries fortune tellers like Yeats. He adequately debunks utopia (“the golden age”) but still I find (forensic) traces of Pol Pot in his prose — “The golden age as an over-intellectualized self-alienated view of nature and humanity was wrapped in the guise of a pastoral by people who never had real jobs (work done with hands).” (p. 57) Here it becomes too difficult to distinguish the author’s own accusations from those he accuses. I think Luhmann calls this in some respect the ‘unity of the paradox’. Notably, Luhmann calls paradox ‘the holy shrine’ of modern society. So where does this ‘holy shrine’ as described herein leave us? It leaves us squarely at the doorstep of modern society, alongside the reinsurance company agents and the undead salesmen, observing patiently the unfolding of this paradox (as folklore) in the form of science fiction, fantasy, advertising, Hollywood, and Burger King, which the intellectuals and the scholars abhor. “The dissonance of their choice to reject the primitive folk life as being superior they cannot accept as dissonant.” (p. 58) Or as Luhmann says ‘a preference for information over noise is only a preference.’ “The rich . . . pretend to be poor.” (p. 62) Again this reminds me of the avant-garde and performance art, particularly Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The ruling elite abandon their wealth to go on their pilgrimage to discover it is they who are the Immortals. The role playing gamers gather on the weekend to shed the skin of their day jobs and become heroes! The Taoists quaff their potions of longevity and dream of mind control experiments. The poets weep for the future, where they are kept as pets by the Artilects, who occasionally bring them along for a road trip through time in their UFOs. “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” Papers tossed in the oil drum fire which burns all night outside the Repo Man’s palace, an empire of junk, movie clips, Internet arcana, and folk tales only half remembered. It is not so much that I dislike any particular thing in this collection, only that it feels unrealized, a masterpiece only half finished, a work that speaks to my own sense of failed genius — neither entirely a poem, nor an online rant, nor academic criticism, yet simultaneously all three. I suppose, when in the mood for such rumination, this foam of words and ideas could crash against the rocks of your mundane mind until there is nothing left but sand and surf...

Bill Weaver