Process Note: Dybbuk Plus or Minus Inpatient Miami



Almost all of my poetry, and some of my criticism, is more or less subject to or the
product of "divinatory" processes aimed toward an "epic" revelation. By this latter word
I mean epic in Brecht's sense—employing methods aimed at understanding the
multifarious causal networks of the social apparatus. By "divinatory" I mean those
processes (and processors) which/who, when faced with the unknown present, the
unknown future, employ elements of chance whose results become the basis of attuning
ourselves with the movements of the universes of varying size.

As I view poetry as a process of knowledge, real knowledge, one could justify my
methods in terms of information theory. The most unpredictable elements of an
investigation (all my poems are investigations) have the highest “information” value in
the sense that they were not anticipated by the question or querent. Thus, I have
advanced such methods in my critical writings under the umbrella term of “automatism,”
which may include trance states used in mediumistic and shamanistic practices as well as
divinatory methods such as tarot readings and the I Ching, relating them to many of the
critical methods of poststructuralist philosophy, most notably the poetically driven, punbased
procedures employed by Jacques Derrida throughout his oeuvre.

The initial goal of all these techne, I would argue, is to place one's own subject and
object relations into a state of uncertainty, to lose oneself in a way that resembles the
value of loss in the shamanistic process, the ecstasy or ek-stasis which literally places one
(which one?) outside oneself (which self?) and into the disorienting world. This is the
leap of negative theology Derrida is so fascinated by in the work of mystic Angelus
Silesius, the act of faith in which one moves into the space which is not there, which can
never be confirmed. This negative shamanism (if there is another kind) does not forgo
revelation, but foregoes certainty, particularly the certainty of the self.

In the piece shared [excerpted?] here I take the role of the "malicious" spirit of the
dybbuk, the dislocated soul which is not unrelated to the hungry ghost in many forms of
Asian ancestor worship. I must take this role even as I place a plus or minus sign upon it,
not sure if what I was trying to do here, literally conjure a woman out of the hospital, was
for me to do. . . Not to mention that in trying to understand her, her place there, why she
was there and how I could "get her out"—to where?—I had to become what we all are
but what she was most intensely at a certain time, radically dislocated.

The following is the result of an all night trance that looked in two directions, out of the
twin bug eyes of my apartment towards the hospital and onto the floor of the hospital’s
map—which consisted of literal diagrams of the space this woman was haunting,
traditional divinatory devices, keepsakes of her including photos and writings, and the
written map I spent from night time until well in the morning producing. The result,
which represents transcriptions and interpretations of my writings from that period as
well as magnetically/magically chosen visual accompaniments, all "collected,"
"combined," (I do not want to overstate the element of craft here, as I was literally trying
to write in order to cast a useful spell, and the only beauty I was after is the beauty and
terror of conjuration, its seductions of those in trouble, those we need when we’re in
trouble) is a sort of record of a process, although the process is not necessarily linear and
does not necessarily teach us anything of practical value. It doesn’t matter if it is a poem
or anything else, really it must deny all positive value except desire itself, the sort of
desire which makes us all resort to magick from time to time. It is just another lesson (to
myself, to you) about love becoming magick, aimed at the real world, real people, though
bending from dimension to dimension as the shamanistic process demands. It is the
record of an abandonment to love—and to nothingness—the nothingness required of any
act of love as I know it.


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