Yeah, mostly I think that Harold Bloom is a blowhard (Harold “I think the actual precursor to Swinburne is not Hawthorne but Twain, hmmhey” Bloom) as a literary critic, but I like his ideas about spirituality. Here’s his thoughts on Gnosticism:
” I propose a simplifying definition of Gnosticism in the apprehension of genius: it is a knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicising, and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self. A God cut off from the inmost self is the Hangman God, as James Joyce called him, the God who originates death. Gnosticis, as the religion of literary genius, repudiates the Hangman God.
Hans Jonas, for me the most incisive guide to Gnosticism, said of the ancient Gnostics that they experienced “the intoxication of unprecedentness.” I recall remarking to Jonas, an intensely brilliant and genial person, that he had described what strong poets always sought for: freedom for the creative self, for the expansion of the mind’s conciousness of itself”
- Harold Bloom, “Genius”.
And then I read a much better book, Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool Acid Test“. It is a book which describes the possibility of being True and Vital. I kept connecting Kesey and Jack Parsons in my head, crazy prophets both, trying to destroy that, what, post-Lapsarian condition, is that what it is? When desire floods up like a crescendo, then the beat drops and it’s relief and we start again. But how to rise again from that plateau. Without repeating the sins of history. Jack Parsons wanted to bring about the Apocalypse, unleash upon the world the ultimate evil, because after that desire is spent, in that zero-point after orgasm, we will be refreshed. But afterward, we have to get up out of bed and go to work and fire people. It is a knotty one. I wonder if Kesey felt as though, here they were, given another chance, a key to the door to the garden, and they were the new disciples and, and then “we blew it”. Is that the answer to the question, the question of The Condition? That actually what it is is a stupid hunger? Or is it a massive Promethean weight of the aggregrate that pulls down the desire of the individual? Is it that Kesey, in those hazy Mexican delirium days, realised that the Garden had to be lost, that there are no singular points anymore, that we have only collections of pieces of other puzzles we jam together into a completed magic eye to be squinted and turned round until maybe we can see a whale or a pony or something.
I’ve been riffing on this one line, over and over again: “But what to do in that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible”. The way it seems to me, and the meaning that my 1990s 30 year too late naive imagination seems to gather from all this, is that that heavy phrase “We Blew It” refers to those selves, picking themselves up from the streets after the fire and brimstone has all been washed away and they’re all blown away by that cosmic visitation of the Godhead and the notion that all will be ok: well some fucktard is going to start up an insurance firm and we’ll be right back where we started.