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  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2273",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
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  "thread": {
    "id": 2273,
    "subject": "Crowley Thoughts from the Web",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-05-27T10:50:02+00:00",
    "last": "2000-05-27T10:50:02+00:00"
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  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0029-0045@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Marty Light",
        "address": "marty_light at siecor.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-05-27T10:50:02+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Crowley Thoughts from the Web",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
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          "text": "Turned this up on the web and thought the interview piece with Crowley\nwould be interesting to the discussion group:\n\nRubrics and Tendrils of Richard Gehr\nby Richard Gehr\n11 July 1994\nThree Novels (Bantam paper, $12.95)\nLittle, Big (Bantam paper, $12.95)\nÆgypt (Bantam paper, $12.95)\nNovelty (Doubleday, out of print?).\nAntiquities: Seven Stories (Incunabula, $25).\nLove and Sleep (Bantam, $22.95).\nUntil last year, John Crowley and Cormac McCarthy seemed virtual equals in\nterms\nof great dazzling craft, critical respect, and popular obscurity--yet only\nMcCarthy has broken onto the best-seller list. Hi-fat Celestine prophesies\naside, I suspect McCarthy's ferocious violence and miseries will always be\nmore\nfamiliar to us participants in American mythology than Crowley's Gnostic\nplay in\nthe ghettoized fields of the fantastic. Moreover, where McCarthy eventually\n\nbroke out of the literary shadows by litening (cq) up stylistically,\nCrowley\nremains immersed in a complex and ambitious tetralogy, Ægypt , whose first\nvolume appeared under that title in 1987 while the second, Love & Sleep ,\ndescended onto shelves last month.\nCrowley's earliest books--The Deep, Beasts, and Engine Summer (collected as\n\nThree Novels )--visit imaginary planets and the far future. In them he\ncomes\nacross as an ambitious author who'd merely overheard rumors about science\nfiction, then decided to put theory into practice. \"That's exactly what it\nis,\"\naffirmed Crowley when I tried this theory out on him recently over Thai\nfood in\nNew Haven. \"I'm not deeply inside the genre.\" His short stories and novella\n\n\"Great Work of Time\" (collected in Novelty and Antiquities ) suggest an\noverly\ndelicate intellect. These stories, clever and precious, read like gauzy\npencil\nsketches for his immensely more densely painted large canvases.\nCrowley's early novels sold modestly, but the 1981 release of his\nSufi/fairy-tale masterpiece Little, Big earned him fans as diverse as\nHarold\nBloom, Peter Straub, and Terence McKenna, more general acclaim, and steady\nsales. Like his later books, Crowley's first major work describes a\ndissatisfaction for the world as it is and a quest not necessarily for\nsomething\nbetter, but for something utterly different . A complex, sprawling family\nhistory influenced stylistically by Dickens and philosophically by Attar's\nSufi\nfable, \"Parliament of the Birds,\" Little, Big uses fairies as humorous and\ncomplicated switchmen guiding the narrative among intersecting universes\nand a\nhouse of infinite rooms. Here, Crowley says, the problem he set himself\nwas,\n\"Can I make Arthur Rackham fairies convincingly wonderful, strange, and\nfully\nfeatured enough so they don't seem trivial?\" The novel manifests a weblike\nconnection to its literary legacy as well as to Rackham's grotesque\nillustrations, reworking a rich vein of Western esoterica and fairy lore to\n\nspeculate metaphysically on connections with our spiritual legacy that have\n been\nlost to the past. (It is also, not coincidentally, one of the more oozingly\n\npsychedelic novels you could ever experience. )\n\"One of the things I tend to write about is the solving of mysteries, or of\n\nmysterious things coming to be and people trying to understand them.\" The\ncharacters in Little, Big participate in a private sort of Gnostic religion\n\npassed on from generation to generation. Crowley, however, claims the\nnovel's\nfantasy foil was more an artistic choice than a reflection of his own\nfantasias.\n\"The idea of an Arthur Rackham fairy world as the novel's reality,\" he\nconfesses, \"was almost a completely objective choice.\"\nAlthough Little, Big has remained in print since publication, Crowley has\nnever\npaid the rent simply on his fiction. After a morning's literary endeavor,\nCrowley hunkers down to a more lucrative chore, his \"bizarre niche\" writing\n\nnarration mainly for TV sports documentaries. And while we agreed to meet\nin New\nHaven as a compromise rendezvous between his home in the Barringtons and\nmine in\nManhattan, Crowley has also recently taught courses on utopian literature\nand\nfiction writing at Yale.\nMidpoints, intersections, and doublings arise often in Crowley's books and\nconversation. The author, in person by turns owlish and garrulous, is\nhalfway\ninto Ægypt , a novel about parallel eras in history. He is the father of\ntwin\ngirls born on Valentine's Day, the same day he received copies of his\nquartet's\nfirst volume. As a child he says his life was organized in an important\nsense\naround a secret world hidden behind a polite surface. \"My father,\" Crowley\nrecalls, \"kept up this Irish jive to mask any kind of engagement with me or\n with\nfeelings in general--which I can still do also. From my mother, a WASP of\nthe\ndeepest die, I got this sense of a double life, that I am one thing on the\noutside and another on the inside, and I can communicate that fact to\nothers.\"\nIn Ægypt Crowley tells two stories at once. The older, which may or may not\n be\nrecounted by a popular historian named Fellowes Kraft, concerns the magical\n\ndoings of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno and English mystic John Dee\nbetween the\nWars of Religion, which ended in the 1590s, and the beginning of the Thirty\n\nYears War in 1620. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, academic dropout and '60s\ncasualty\nPierce Moffett has moved to a small town in the fictitious town of\nBlackbury\nJambs in the Faraway Hills of upstate New York, where he researches a book\nmuch\nlike the one we are reading and becomes involved with a pair of women named\n\nRose.\nCrowley proposes the fictive thesis (reminiscent of Kuntz's paradigmatic\nshifts\nand Foucault's epistemological breaks) that gateways exist in time such\nthat the\nworld on one side of the gateway is utterly yet perhaps imperceptibly\ndifferent\nthan that found on the other side:\nHe told her Kraft's story, the core of it, how twice in the last two\nthousand\nyears a slip or seam, a rumple in the ground of being, had allowed\nobservers\naround the world to perceive that the net of space and time is not quite\nstable,\nbut like the shifting plates and molten core of Mother Earth, can move\nbeneath\nthe feet of diurnality; can move, was moving, had moved before and would\nagain.\n(L&S, 164-5)\nHidden in this transformation is a secret history of the world Moffett\nhopes to\nuncover for what his agent hopes will be a New Age bestseller. Love & Sleep\n\nbegins in Kentucky's Cumberland mountains, where Crowley spent a few early\nyears\ninventing secret societies of his own. There Moffett acquires an inkling of\n the\nmagic, a \"secret gospel . . . [[a]]bout the end of the world\" (500) that\nwill\nfollow him into the Faraways, where, by the end of the book, all hell\nliterally\nthreatens to break loose, complete with werewolves, witches, an angelic\nbattle,\nand a double alchemical wedding.\n\"One of the jobs I set myself,\" Crowley explains, \"is to make it convincing\n that\nrealistic and ordinary people are inhabiting fictional worlds where the\nmiraculous and the unreal and the bizarre and the awful don't happen--then\nproject them into a world where such things can happen. The basic idea of\nthe\nbook, beside the idea of time passing through a gateway, is the Gnostic\nmythology that we are really the gods, that human beings are final, and\nthat the\ngods who come between us and the unknown, fore-existing God are really\nlesser\nthan us and not our masters, although we have let them become our masters.\nThe\ngods create the world by language, by imposing rules upon us; we discreate\nthe\nworld by language in the same way and create our own in its stead.\"\nThrough the angelic communications transcribed by John Dee, and the Brunist\n art\nof memory (Francis Yates's works on the Hermetic tradition are seminal\nhere),\nCrowley attempts to tap into a divine \"world of innumerable and endless\nprocesses producing an infinite number of things\" (L&S 416). The trick is\nto\nlink the processes of Renaissance magic with the fairly quotidian lives of\nhis\nBlackbury Jambs gang. These include an astrologer, a hardcore Gnostic, and\ndevotees of the pseudoscience of Climacterics, which straddles biorhythms\nand\nScientology to explain how personal growth interpenetrates with history and\n the\nfeeling that the world grows older as we do.\nWith the late Blackbury Jambs historian Fellowes Kraft mediating between\nthe\nElizabethan and more contemporary plot lines, the two Ægypt volumes suggest\n\nnumerous alternative readings and points of view as they dip into Moffett's\n past\n(his lovers have included a cocaine dealer and his literary agent), a\nmother's\nsorrow when her child unexpectedly begins undergoing epileptic seizures,\nthe\nmystery surrounding Kraft's relationship to the patriarch of the family\ninstitution employing Moffett, and the numerous theosophical digressions\nhis\nstudies inspire. The books brim with questions (does the world have a plot?\n What\nis the relation of Hermes Trismegistus to Thoth, the Egyptian god of\nwriting?\nWhy are gypsies commonly believed able to foretell the future?) that\ninspire\nfurther mysteries, mining a rich philosophical plenitude that always evades\n\nclosure.\nWriting and imagination serve the same function for Crowley as the\nalchemical\nPhilosopher's Stone of Hermetic lore. Science fiction and fantasies are\nliterature's most powerful tools of transcending everyday physical reality\nand\ncreating entirely new worlds whose infinite details are supplied by\nreaders'\nimaginations through reading's mysteries. But does\nCrowley himself buy into the mystic jive?\n\"Maybe because I'm a Sagittarian, sad with an air of assurance, I am\nbasically\nimmune to mystic apprehensions,\" he admits with a barely noticeable sigh\nwhen I\ninquire as to his own spiritual proclivities. With a certain amount of\nembarrassment, Crowley privileges the '60s as his personal watershed. But\nany\nera will do, really, in the great Hegelian spiral Ægypt suggests. \"One of\nthe\nvalues of magic, the humanist-magical option, is to say that man is really\nhere\nto learn, to understand everything, and to gain powers from nature because\nGod\nhas provided nature to give powers to man. In the sixteenth century that\noption\ntranscended narrow Protestant or Catholic ideology. For people like John\nDee, it\nwas a way to transcend trivial sectarian differences.\"\nMoffett, historian of the esoteric, shimmies constantly between the\ndifferent\nstrata of the historical past and a present in which the past's vestiges\npersist. One of Ægypt 's overriding questions is whether history exists as\na\ncontinuum or as a series of paradigm shifts, memory museums, or Brunist\ntableaux\npoised for revival, but never with values equal to their original\nincarnation.\n\"What was it Barr said,\" thinks Moffett, \" . . . that in the religious\nhistory\nof the West old gods are always turning into devils, cast from their\nthrones\ninto dark undergrounds to be lords over the dead and the wicked?\" [[501]]\nMoffett comes to realize that history is malleable and flexible. Magic used\n to\nexist; now it doesn't, and from contemporary science's point of view, never\n\ncould have.\nBut what if a magical touchstone exists that has survived history's\ngateways and\nstratifications? Without spoiling one of Love & Sleep 's major surprises,\nthe\nanswer turns out to be the single manifestation of magical influence nearly\n\neveryone experiences at some point in life, \"the alchemical power of Eros\"\n[[501]]. Moffett's erotic past, it turns out, is extracting a toll he finds\n\ndifficult to pay, a return and inversion of a repressed childhood memory\nthat\ntakes root in his dreams before extending to a cracked reality.\nIn this, Moffett mirrors a world struggling to repress its own dæmons and\ntitans--\"But it turns out that the past is harder to get rid of than that,\"\n\nCrowley emphasizes with a jab of forked shrimp in my direction, \"and that's\n part\nof the four-volume novel I'm telling, how obdurate the past really is. It\npersists and goes on having effects. Even its old revolutions go on having\neffects, being incorporated into the adventure one after another, each one\nthe\nsame as all the others. You know the chestnut about those who don't know\nhistory\nbeing condemned to repeat it? Well, those who do know history are condemned\n to\nrecognize it when it comes around again.\"\nAs Crowley finishes his scotch and our conversation winds down, I wonder if\n he's\nfamiliar with Voyage to Arcturus , David Lindsay's seminal 1920 fantasy.\nIndeed\nhe is, but it's the secondary lit that moves him more deeply than Lindsay's\n\nseminal spiritual voyage into the unknown. \"One of the most wonderful\nexplanations of heroic fantasy,\" he says, \"is Harold Bloom's essay,\n\"Clinamen :\nTowards a Theory of Fantasy\" [[in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism ]],\n\nwhich is all about Voyage to Arcturus . Bloom's terrific argument moved me\nvery\nmuch as a writer of the stuff. His basic question is: If you've got this\nform\nwhere anything can happen, in which anything is possible, why do the same\nthings\nalways happen and why are the stories all so alike? Bloom of course tends\ntoward\na Freudian explanation about fear of breaking out and obsessions and such,\nwhich\nis reasonable enough. But it also sets the writer a task: How do I make it\nnot\ncome out the same as it always does, yet make it satisfactory as a story?\n\"That's my quest. You can come to the same old conclusions. What's\nimportant is\nthe effort you make and risks you take as a writer, what it costs you to\naffirm\nthe same old conclusions.\""
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