The Gods Might Be Crazy
No matter what you think about it, one of the liveliest aspects of the New York Times Book Review in the Tanenhaus era is the increased openness with which it provides an arena for literary feuds. Take this week’s letter column, in which Cynthia Ozick makes fun of Walter Kirn in verse, right after Daniel Pinchbeck (right) gets mad at Anthony Swofford for panning his latest book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. The argument runs something like this: Pinchbeck says his book “weaves together ideas from such thinkers as Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Gebser and Fritjof Capra,” while mean ol’ Swofford makes it out to be a litany of psychedelic hallucinations from, as the review put it, “a bohemian intellectual who writes plodding sentences that utterly fail to render his ascent into other, better worlds of consciousness and sensation.”
Having read 2012 myself (I was a fan of Pinchbeck’s first book, Breaking Open the Head), it’s easy for me to report that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but definitely leaning in Swofford’s direction. Let’s put it this way: You can say, “Look, I know this sounds crazy, but….” as many times as you want, but it’s not going to make you sound sane, especially when you claim that you’re the chosen vehicle of Quetzalcoatl’s return to this plane of reality. By merely quoting Pinchbeck’s description of what happened to him as “a gift handed backward through space-time, from beyond the barrier of a new realm,” Swofford actually downplays the sheer strangeness of it all, especially when he leaves out the part where Pinchbeck realizes his June 1966 birth means he might be the Beast of Revelations (6/66, get it?), which is itself another symptom of his ambivalent self-identification with the legendary occultist Aleister Crowley.
The longer explanation: For all the fancy, acceptable-to-the-mainstream names Pinchbeck drops in his letter to the Times, he clearly wants to present himself as the 21st century’s Carlos Castaneda…or, for even better magickal* street cred, its Robert Anton Wilson—so much so that I was actually surprised he never claims that Quetzalcoatl had sent him to immanentize the Eschaton. (Well, okay, he does, just not in those words.) The only problem is, based on the available evidence of the text, Pinchbeck still falls short of the levels of detached self-interrogation and self-skepticism that Wilson achieved in Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati and which make that book an enduring magickal diary. In this respect, Swofford’s right to point out that Pinchbeck’s revelations appear to be a highly stylized reaction to all the personal crises going on in his life. In particular, Pinchbeck’s attempts to emotionally and spiritually bully a fellow spiritual seeker into sex because “I felt she gave strong indications she wanted to be with me” and “I don’t think [she] knows, or wants to know, her own nature,” paint him and his quest in an unfavorable light. It’s possible to argue that Pinchbeck’s looking back at such incidents from a more mature perspective; it’s just as easy to counter that if that’s the case, he doesn’t do an effective enough job of showing it in his writing.
At least he’s still level-headed enough to recognize that Crowley’s not exactly the safest of role models for the would-be visionary—and if there’s one significant gap in Swofford’s review, I’d presume to say that it’s a lack of familiarity with the sort of shamanic/occultic material that would enable a reviewer to tease out that subtext. Then again, maybe the NYTBR editors didn’t think their Sunday morning readership is quite ready for invocations of an alleged Antichrist…now that would probably get the Eschaton rolling! Because for all the potential problems readers could have with 2012, it’s still one of the most accessible distillations of the various New Age-y strains of thought swirling around the “Singularity” prophesied to hit us at the end of that year. Personally, I prefer Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, but you try getting people to read a seven-volume graphic novel epic…
*Trust me, the ‘k’ isn’t a typo…
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