Weird Studies

In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, namely the feeling that it all means something, that the universe, with all its chaos and randomness, nevertheless contains -- or is itself -- a kind of music. This episode goes deep down the rabbit hole...

B. W. Powe is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and professor at York University, in Toronto. His work, though it covers an immense range of topics from politics and poetics to magic and technology, proceeds from a mystical apprehension of the universe as the locus of magical operations, the site of experiments in cosmic becoming. In his various books and essays, Powe continues a uniquely Canadi...

In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fiction has never been more important than it is about to become. Soon, she prophesied, "we will need writers who can remember freedom -- poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality." In this episode, Phil and JF plumb the prophetic depths of one o...

At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past...

The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psychological romance, and a meditation on the nature of the divine. Its weirdness is as undeniable as it is difficult to locate. On the surface, the story is straightforward: five nuns are tasked with opening a convent in the former seraglio of a dead potent...

The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't remain safely ensconced our modern, common-life construal of thinigs. It must become fantastic and incorporate aspects of "nature" that feel "supernatural" from a modern standpoint. Jonathan Demme's scr...

Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears out. But there are those who can make out certain patterns in Ra's life and work, patterns that place him among the true mystics and prophets. Of course, these people already believe in mysticism and pro...

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the mysteries of walking. It points to the undeniable yet baffling relationship between walking and thinking, between putting one foot in front of the other and uncovering the secret of the soul and world. In this episode, JF and Phil exchange ideas about the...

What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it matters, and what we are supposed to think and feel in its presence. Cast in in this mold, the critic is an arbiter, not just of taste, but also of sense and meaning. The American art critic Dave Hickey c...

Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies episode, the film is "a Trojan horse of the Weird, easy to let in but once inside, apt to take over." This conversation sees him and JF discuss a movie we dismiss at our own risk, a cinematic masterpiece replete with enigmas that reach back to the foun...

The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can...

No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take on the weird is singular: here, it isn't the cold reaches of outer space that elicit in us a nihilistic frisson, but the vast expanses of our own planet's wild places -- especially the northern woods. In his story "The Wendigo," Blackwood combines th...

"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how inert matter could give rise to subjectivity and feeling has proved insoluble under the dominant assumptions of a hard materialism. Recently, the American filmmaker Errol Morris presented his own brand...

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on the collective psyche would feel dated today. But Gibson's insight into the deeper implications of digital culture and soul-rending consumerism are such that we are still catching up with Cayce Pollard, the novel's protagonist, as she journeys into the...

The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, is a cultural contrivance rooted in politics and history, an illusion that exists only in human heads, for human reasons. On this view, a world without us would be a world without beauty. But in this...

Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkin...

The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on the "kids on bikes" subgenre of science fiction, a loving pastiche of 1980s Hollywood cinema. And as Phil and JF attempt to show in this episode, Stranger Things is also a deep investigation into the metaphysical assumptions of our times, and a bold st...

In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical forces that shape their physical and mental environment. Where other philosophers like Plato saw virtue in remembering eternal truths that earthly existence had wiped from our memories, Nietzsche extolled the virtues of forgetting, of becoming "untimel...

Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In this masterwork of weird scholarship, Davis explores the simultaneously luminous and obscure worlds of three giants of Seventies counterculture: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Their psychon...

Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something like what William Burroughs called the doctrine of control. We live in a world governed by technologies designed with a particular idea of society in mind, one that has its roots in the trauma of global war and the utopian dreams of modern thinkers. T...

In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It is the story of a boy whose vivid dream life is sapping his vital force, and who resorts to esoteric measures to rectify the situation. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the beauty and horror of dr...

"May the present 'you' not survive this little book," Jeffrey Kripal writes in the prologue to The Flip. "May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways." Indeed, Kripal's latest is a kind of manifesto, a call to embrace the metaphysical expanses that reveal themselves to many who dare dip a toe outside the materialist lifeboat we've been rowing away in for a couple of centuries now. In this convers...

The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which Ja...

Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Jackson didn't cut her teeth in the pulps but among the slick pages of such illustrious publications as The New Yorker. On the other hand, whether because her most famous novel uses the traditional ghost story form...

In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of inst...