Weird Studies

Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo is a conspiracy thriller, a postmodern experiment, a revolutionary tract, a celebration, and a magical working. It is a novel that, over and above prophetically describing the world we live in, creates a whole new world and invites us to move in. For Phil and JF, Mumbo Jumbo exemplifies art's creative power to generate new possibilities for life. It is also the perfect occasion for pinpointing the difference between the kind of magical thinking that fuels virulent conspiricism, and the more profound magical thinking which alone can save us from it.

**Image: **Albrecht Dürer, Two Pairs of Hands with Book

REFERENCES

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

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Weird Studies will launch its fourth season on January 6th, 2021. But to celebtrate the end of very strange year, we thought we'd release a conversation which until now was available only to our top-tier Patreon backers. Therein we discuss the philosophical underpinnings of "Puhoy," memorable episode of the brilliant animated series Adventure Time. This was JF's introduction to a show that Phil has often recommended for its novel treatment of complex ideas and downright weirdness.

Watch "Puhoy" on YouTube:

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Before Coraline, before American Gods, in the early days of the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman collaborated with Dave McKean on some truly groundbreaking graphic novels: Violent Cases (1987), Signal to Noise (1989), and the work discussed in this Weird Studies episode. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (1994) is the story of a boy whose initiation into the dark realities of life, death, and family plays out in the shadow of the (in)famous Punch & Judy puppet show. Unlike some of Gaiman's more overtly marvellous offerings, Mr Punch is a subtle fantasy whose weirdness hides in the gaps and folds of lost time. It is in Dave McKean's brilliant art that the magic shines through, letting us know that the narrative is only part of a vaster, hidden thing. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the themes, ideas, and mysteries of an unparalleled piece of comics art.

REFERENCES

Watch Aaron Poole's 9-minute short film "Oracle"

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, _The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch

"That's the Way to Do It! A History of Punch and Judy", Victoria Albert Museum

Ronald Briggs, Father Christmas

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It would be wrong to describe Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) as a work of nonfiction, since the book features a narrative frame that is as moody and irreal as the best tales penned by this luminary of weird fiction. But if the eccentric recluse at the centre Hieroglyphics is a fictional philosopher, he is one who, in Phil and JF's opinion, rivals most aesthetic thinkers in the history of philosophy. The significance of this text lies in its willingness to disclose a function of art that few before Machen had dared to touch, namely its capacity to generate ecstasy by confronting us with the mystery that beats the heart of existence. In this episode, your hosts discuss a work which, in their opinion, comes as close to scripture as the nonexistent field of Weird Studies is likely to get.

REFERENCES

Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

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The German polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the founding figures of what we now call weird literature. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss one of his most memorable tales, "Der Sandmann." Originally published in 1816, it is the story of a young German student whose fate is sealed by a terrifying encounter with the eponymous figure during his youth. The story packs several tropes that would later become staples of the weird: the protean monster, the double, the automaton... Your hosts discuss how Hoffmann uses these tropes without letting any of them coalesce into a stable thing in the reader's mind, thereby effecting a slowbuild of ambiguity upon ambiguity that culminates in a true paroxysm of dread. The argument is made that Freud does essentially the same thing in his famous essay "The Uncanny," wherein Hoffmann's story plays an important role.

REFERENCES

E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Sandman

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Since its release in 1973, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has exerted a profound influence on the development of horror cinema, a rich vein of folk music, and the modern pagan revival more generally. Anthony Shaffer's ingenious screenplay gives us a thrilling yarn that is also a meditation on the nature of religious belief and practice. Just in time for Halloween, Phil and JF discuss the philosophical ideas that undergird this folk horror classic, focusing on the perennial role of sacrifice in religious thought.

REFERENCES

Robin Hardy (director), The Wicker Man

Stanley Kubrick (director), The Shining

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This second instalment in our series on the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck features the Empress. As Aleister Crowley writes in The Book of Thoth, this card is probably the most difficult to decipher, since it is inherently "omniform," changing shapes continuously. In a sense, the Empress is variation itself. Her card becomes the occasion for a conversation about the less knowable side of reality, the one that tradition associates with the Yin, nature, potential, and -- controversially -- the feminine. This in turn leads to a discussion of white versus black magic, and how the two may not always be as diametrically opposed as we might believe.

REFERENCES

P.D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot

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David Lynch's Lost Highway was released in 1997, five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me elicited a fusillade of boos and hisses at Cannes. The Twin Peaks prequel's poor reception allegedly sent its American auteur spiralling into something of an existential crisis, and Lost Highway has often been interpreted as a response to -- or result of -- that crisis. Certainly, the film is among Lynch's darkest, boldest, and most enigmatic. But of course, we do the film an injustice by reducing it to the psychological state of its director. Indeed, one of the contentions of this episode is that all artistic interpretation constitutes a kind of injustice. But as you will hear, that doesn't stop Phil and JF from interpreting the hell out of the film. Just or unjust, fair or unfair, interpretation may well be necessary in aesthetic matters. It may be the means by which we grow through the experience of art, the way by which art makes us something new, strange, and other. Perhaps the trick is to remember that no mode of interpretation is, to borrow Freud's phrase, the one and only via regia, but that every one is just another highway at night...

REFERENCES

David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway

Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Vertigo

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The Book of Changes, or I Ching, is more than an ancient text. It's a metaphysical guide, a fun game, and -- to your hosts at least -- a lifelong, steadfast friend. The I Ching has come up more than once on the show, and now is the time for JF and Phil to face it head on, discussing the role it has played in their lives while delving into some of its mysteries.

REFERENCES

I Ching, Wilhelm-Baynes translation

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The British writer M. John Harrison is responsible for some of the most significant incursions of the Weird into the literary imagination of the last several decades. His 1992 novel The Course of the Heart is a masterful exercise in erasing whatever boundary you care to mention, from the one between reality and mind to the one between love and horror. Recounting the lives of three friends as they play out the fateful aftermath of a magical operation that went horribly wrong, Harrison's novel gives Phil and JF the chance to talk contemporary literature, metaphysics, Gnosticism, zones (see episodes 13 & 14), myth, transcendence, history, and arachnology. Together, they weave a fragile web of ideas centered on that imperceptible something that forever trembles at the edge of our perception, beckoning us to step into its world, and out of ours.

REFERENCES

M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart

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