The Other Side is Myth

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"The Other Side is Myth":
William Irwin Thompson, Cultural History, and the Evolution of Consciousness

This paper was given at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Savannah, GA, November 1996.

So there are some signs in the cultural evolution of America that, while the cold-blooded dinosaurs are tearing up the landscape, there are some tiny mammals around with warm blood in their hearts. William Irwin Thompson,
Darkness and Scattered Light

The Wissenskünstler lives at the edge of science the way the bard lived at the edge of kingly power. Always at an edge with socially accepted definitions of reality, the Wissenskünstler becomes a "Juggler of Our Lady" who found no room for work in the corridors of the monks and so juggled alone at midnight in front of the statue. The juggler has to play the fool among experts to find a new place for the archaic in the contemporary. Metafiction need not, therefore, be merely an ironic commentary on its own composition; it can also become a shift of consciousness, a movement from noia to metanoia, from travel to homecoming, from domestic habituation to cosmic astonishment. William Irwin Thompson,
Islands Out of Time

Formerly a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founder of The Lindisfarne Association, a counter-culture think tank dedicated, like its original Gaelic inspiration before the coming of the Dark Ages, to synthesizing and preserving esoteric knowledge beyond the turning of another Yeatsian gyre and disseminating it to a coming New Age, William Irwin Thompson is the author of a variety of books on cultural history, futurism, and the evolution of consciousness. (See the bibliography on the handout.) Now a resident of Switzerland, Thompson writes about American culture in the tradition of Henry James and T. S. Eliot, as seen from a European perspective, as an expatriate (he praises his adopted country's efficiency). But he is careful to distinguish himself from postmodern Eurocentric travel writers like Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco who have taken the United States as their subject: "fascinated by America's hyperreality," Thompson observes, "they always try to appropriate it as exotic ethnographic material for European discourse. They are more like moths drawn to a flame than swallows demonstrating the possibilities of air for imaginative flight." Always an extoller of such flight, a practitioner of wissenkünst, of science/knowledge/and art combined, Thompson prefers cultural criticism (Thomas Pynchon's is his example) able "to perform the culture in the process of describing it." Since At the Edge of History (1971), the Yeatsian-inspired Thompson has been speculating on the end of the century, the end of the millennium, the end of our gyre.

"In an electronic culture," Thompson demonstrates convincingly, "one cannot think, one can only entertain ideas"; and yet Thompson's thinking, metaphorically rich, dense with allusion (full appreciation and comprehension requires the reader to recognize references to and possess some understanding of everything from "punctuated equilibrium," enantiodromia, Pythagorean mysticism, the Irish literary renaissance, alchemy, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead to Sri Aurobindo, Edgar Cayce, AE, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Teilhard de Chardin) nevertheless entertains. A true "thinker" in E. M. Cioran's sense ("thinkers," notes the Romanian essayist, write for other writers, while philosophers write only for professors), Thompson traverses an incomparable variety of topics with a playfulness that makes him always readable even when dealing with the most abstruse material.

How many writers can forge a description of wrestler Hulk Hogan's trademark off-the-mat resurrection and an evocation of William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" into a powerful commentary on ecological destruction? Who else could delineate the "cosmic food chain" with such metaphorical brilliance?

The cosmic food-chain is an energy symbiosis, from the plants that feed off the sun to the devas and asuras that fed off the astral emanations of collective human thought. Just as we corral beasts to keep them in their place for our use, and as we sit on the fence and watch them ruminate all day long, we wonder how they can stand to eat all the time; so do the gods and demons corral us in history, and as they sit on the edge, they wonder how we can stand to think all day long. Within our corrals of history they come to stir up our wars and passions, so that we can be fat with the astral emanations that sustain them. Knowing that we are afraid of death, they catch us with its linked opposite, sexuality. Eros is thus the attractive jailkeeper in the prison of Thanatos.

(Thompson has charted the cosmic food chain in the "yantra" to be found on this web site.)

Who else would conceive of the end of the millenium as a stuck record? "The record of civilization is over," Thompson writes in Passages About Earth,

and like a record at its end, it keeps going on with the noise of a needle stuck in its ruts: the revolution of the workers, the protest of the young, the new creations of the avant-garde, the rise of new forms of sexual liberation, the appearance of new religions. This side of history is over, and on the other side is myth.

Who else could turn Levi-Strauss on his head by evoking (in Darkness and Scattered Light) DNA and cosmology simultaneously?

Levi-Strauss has said that "myth is an act of faith in a science yet unborn," but that point of view is still too close to Frazer; it sees myth as a foreshadowing of something which will be truly known through science. You could just as well say that science is an act of faith in a mythology yet unborn, and that when we truly know the universe of which we are a part, we will see that the way DNA spirals in our cells and the way nebulae turn in space are all related to a particular dance of idea and pattern.

Who but Thompson would chart the germ plasm of civilization, tracking the historical permutations of the original tribal community through four phases of civilization?

Who else could conceive of the CNN Center in Atlanta as "a rendering of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere . . . a planetary lattice of satellites in which non-stop 24-hours-a-day news gives us the experience of time under control-history under new American management"?

Literalists, no doubt, will find it difficult to decipher Thompson's tone. They may not understand that when he refers to "New Age sissies," or quips that "Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream, but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip," it is in fact, as the context in each case makes clear, the patriarchal mind-set and obsessive technology for which he has no sympathy. When they read the following account of contemporary Los Angeles, they may take it to be a paranoid raving and not a metaphoric alternative history:

My city was attacked in the fifties by General Motors with poison gas warfare in the skies of L.A. First they infiltrated the local government, then they took out the infrastructure of the city by demolishing the Pacific Electric railways, and then when they had a clearer path for their land war, they invaded with millions of poison gas-emitting tanks.

With a characteristic relish for trope (Thompson has, after all, written and published a great deal of poetry as well as prose), he speaks disdainfully of contemporary "dehydrated" non-fiction shot-up with "shelf-life additives put in by editors and packaging by the sales department so that it can be quickly microwaved in two minute radiations on TV talks shows," plugged by "microwaved celebrities [who] grow cold as fast as they grew hot."

Earlier books have ranged over the perennial philosophy and the philosophy of science, high culture and low, the Gaia hypothesis and the ecology of mind, kundalini yoga and oral sex. The ecelecticism of his books is mind-boggling. Even a partial catalogue would have to include:

the dubious motives of Biosphere II;
Omni as a postmodernist Popular Mechanics;
a phenomenological analysis of Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean;
noise as "the solvent of Renaissance individuality";
the health effects of ELF (extremely low-frequency radiation);
cyberpunk science fiction;
the ulcerous nature of modern/postmodern art ("Art grows out of culture and is fed by culture," Thompson writes, " If art has to feed upon itself for mythology, it will die; like a stomach with nothing in it, it will soon digest itself");
the contemporary relevance of occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner;
Marshall McLuhan, Jean Gebser, and Owen Barfield on the evolution of consciousness;
Disney "Imagineering" compared to deconstruction;
the Catholic Church as the "world's first multinational corporation";
the evolutionary causes of the Great Depression;
jazz as the manifestation of a new economic order;
the movie theatre in the Depression as a "mystery school in which people could pass from misery to happiness";
pollution as "the new source of improvisation, the new 'ground' for economic value";
Jungian-style interpretations of 1) planetary ecological damage, 2) Third World drug trafficking, and 3) the Persian Gulf War;
the "cultural entropy of global religious warfare from Ireland to Indonesia to Idaho";
the philosophizing of Richard Rorty as "the frustrated shriek of a pettifogging clerk";
the essentially patriarchal mind-set of his friend, poet Wendell Berry;
Islamic "nativistic attacks" on airlines compared to the Ghost Dance movement of the plains Indians;
Ted Turner as "the true dharma heir in the esoteric lineage of Walt Disney";
Ronald Reagan as "the first entirely Audio-Animatronic President";
George Bush as the perfect President for our "TV-shortened attention span";
why Saddam "ironically energized the system he wished to annul";
an impressive catalog of potential tribal and racial wars across the globe;
the skinhead movement as the "ghost dance of the rednecks";
a meditation on the "industrial delicacies" available in an Arkansas supermarket;
chicken farms as concentration camps;
"the debasement of food in America" as "a very clever and rather insidious preparation for a more general debasement of our politics as culture" (in the U.S., Thompson writes," even the food is a moon shot, a fast food rocket aimed away from the Earth");
addiction as "adaptation . . . to the newly emerging artificial environment";
the Gnostic visions of robotics pioneer Hans Moravec;
the classic fairy tale Rapunzel as a tale of molecular evolution;
an analysis of the prophetic value of Moby Dick;
the "autopoetic" nature of American capitalism and its uncanny ability to "generate new planetary mythological systems" . . .

For the most part Thompson's method is that of the Nietzschean aphorist, a mountain climber leaping from one peak to the next. His descents nevertheless lead to some valuable discoveries in several significant valleys. "To understand contemporary culture," Thompson writes in Evil and World Order,

you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air.

Thompson's great subject throughout is his own native land. His criticism of the "ever teenage culture" of the United States--of "Dan Quayle's Spaceship America"--is unrelenting and, coming from an author who coined the phrase "the Los Angelization of the planet," not surprising. Like the German poet Rilke ("Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life"), he finds the land of his birth the seedbed of the ersatz, a "peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech":

In truth, America is extremely uncomfortable with nature; hence its culturally sophisticated preference for the fake and unnatural, from Cheeze Whiz sprayed out of an aerosol can onto a Styrofoam potatoed chip, to Cool Whip smoothing out the absence of taste in those attractively red, genetically engineered monster strawberries.

Surprisingly, Thompson's critique of American simulation, of "the American replacement of nature," is, by his own admission (a first), that of "a patriot."

As early as At the Edge of History, Thompson had declared his inability to decide whether we are, at the end of the century, "aborigines of another fall or the adepts of a new civilization beyond matter." Thompson's new hesitant faith in the United States may seem at first to be the all-too-typical turn-to-the-right which has characterized the aging of many early radicals, from William Wordsworth to John Dos Passos, but it is in fact deeply ironic and of a piece with his larger faith in the evolution of consciousness:

So call me an optimist in that I blindly choose to see our dark ages as temporary, give or take a century or two. And put me down as a patriot who saw in the repellent, ugly, and evil of our American society's revelation of a planetary culture approaching us on the other side of catastrophic transformation.

Throughout The American Replacement of Nature Thompson returns to his underlying hypothesis: that the "esoteric destiny" of America in the "planetization of humanity" (a concept he borrows, of course from Teilhard but which he reads with an Hegelian grasp of dialectic) "does seem to be that of the catalytic enzyme that breaks down all the traditional cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or European," a necessary dissolution (and disillusionment) which may well seem for those undergoing it like "an intellectual dark age," but prelude to, in a world-historical irony, "a new global culture that will become humanity's second nature." Damning America to its evolutionary fate with faint praise, Thompson even finds justification in the Muslim characterization of America as "the Great Satan": for indeed the new human nature that awaits us "is so artificial, so opposite to anything that a traditional person would wish to call cultural or natural, that it appears on the horizon of the human as something inhuman, monstrous, and evil." But neither the now moribund Communist menace or the Islamic Ghost Dance has been or will be capable of preventing the advent of this new humanity: "there seems little chance," Thompson concludes, "of getting out of this century with the same human nature with which we entered it."