OCD in Williamsburg

Riding the L east to Williamsburg, I wish I’d found a sushi place to grab a bite. I have three delis within spitting distance of my new apartment, but a desert of options beyond. I assume somewhere along my route I’ll pass something more appetizing. I still think of myself as an unpicky eater, despite a mountain of evidence.

I travel freely across the city and amongst the boroughs, but not out of a comfort with the area. Rather, my lack of familiarity allows me to treat each stop as just another stop, just as likely to sit at the heart of a culinary mecca as a barren beruit. So when I exit the Lorimer station and Yelp shows me nothing, I am not surprised, but also not pleased. On my way to Pete’s Candy Store (no candy, just liquor), I stop at a deli for some antipasti salads mixed into a to-go container.

I’m there for an installment of the OCD lecture series. It’s something about Open City. Maybe Drama. Maybe Diatribe. I’m early so I sit at the bar and order two vodka tonics while happy hour prices make me ambitious. I eat my salad and read my book. I get into a little chat with the fellow to my left about his recent expulsion from his part-time gallery job. Later I make a note to remember that anyone as early as I am is probably an organizer of the event I’m attending. This one turns out to be the MC. I don’t like breaking down that wall between performer and audience, especially before the show starts. I’m reminded of the time I chatted with Dave Couliet, not realizing he was about to get up on stage and bomb before my stunned company as part of an ill conceived corporate bonding event. It’s a wonder I talk to anyone in public anymore.

Halfway through my drinks, and fullway through my salad I stumble elegantly into the meeting room. The walls are lined with hipsters and I feel like I’m walking a gauntlet. I wish I still had my beard. During my time at the bar, I went from awkwardly early to embarrassingly late. I’m supposed to cop a squat on the floor, but find a stool hidden under a table at the front. I sit between a couple, maybe on a date.

Mitch Horowitz wrote the book Occult in America. He takes the stage and launches into a litany of exposition. He hooks me right away with tales of his childhood fascination for magic. He talks about how happy he is to have rediscovered one of the passions of his youth when he stumbled into a job with a small publishing house. It sounds like the opening to Foucault’s Pendulum when he describes the fringe manuscripts he’d review, connecting him back to days in the early eighties when he scoured libraries for books illustrated with pentagrams and archaic histories of early western settlers. Were the eighties a time for such things? Or do we all go through a phase where Mysteries of the Unknown put us on the trail of bigfoot and the loch ness monster, aliens and esp? As he recounts his early days of Ouija boards and séances, it dawns on me that through my youth and up until the last decade I’ve moved from one fantastical mythology to the next. Starting with the mythic beasts of cartoons; moving on to Herman Hesse’s western interpretation of eastern magic; then Robert Anton Wilson’s woven tales of conspiracy and chaos magic.

Mitch goes on to paint a history of the occult and it’s migration to America as a tale of our own unanswered questions and a longing for progress in the face of oppression. Brought to the new world by refugees of religious persecution, the occult grew out the conflict between what these immigrant revolutionaries felt was right, and what their society told them was appropriate. With no social context to promote things like equal rights, or free thought, they found their voice for these concepts in whispers from the spirit world. Mitch ties it all together in a long train of thought culminating in some broad who packs up and moves to India, and then on to London where she hosts a young Gandhi as he struggles through law school. There can be no better example of the occult leading us towards cultural liberalism than by inspiring Gandhi on his mission of Truth.

So the historical portion of the lecture was enlightening. But once Mitch started in on the modern trends in the occult it became clear he’d not only studied up on the past, but drunk the cool aid of the present. I don’t understand how someone can have such a clear understanding of the historical pressures that lead an isolated society to fantasize answers that added comfort to a confusing time, and then buy into the very same answers years later. Where did this idea come from that those who came before us had a more pure vision of truth than we have today? The history of the occult is one of a search for earlier and earlier answers; before Jesus, before Abraham, before Vishnu, before Adam. Today we know the further back we look for answers, the closer we get to caves and trees and oceans. To be sure there are answers to be found in our origins, but not by theologists. What questions have been answered in the last hundred years that have not been answered by science? And what can be more contrary to science than the occult?

So as I move from a deep appreciation for the research and history uncovered by this lecture to a discomfort with the conclusions being drawn, I look around and feel isolated. The questions being asked by the audience place me in a minority of doubters. Glazed eyed boys expound their views seeking affirmation on their theories. The man next to me unwraps a piece of gum from his pack, a wad already chewed sometime ago. The girl to my left shares with me her book on Sexual Magic, asking if I’ve read it.

Despite the brief dip into madness there at the end, I left the lecture with a nicely framed picture of the occult as a mechanism for social change. The catalog of myth and rumor I’ve carried around with me for decades has clearly informed my politics. What are bigfoot and the loch ness monster if not parables for a connection between man and beast closer than what society at large recognizes? What lesson do they teach if not that mankind must think of nature as magical and precious; something that at any moment can vanish into mystery? The city of Atlantis: a cautionary tale on the decline of a civilized world. UFOs and visitors: a treatise against xenophobia and a battle cry to race to the stars. ESP: a call for sensitivity and observance of the ways we connect to each other. In every case I can think of, these stories of magic tie back to some yearning for progress, or some fault found with the current world. And throughout the 1800s and 1900s, they were real agents of change. Stories from the spirit world swept the country, opening peoples’ eyes to the possibilities of a morality beyond any single religion. Not until the co-opting of these concepts by the commercialized mass media interests did the occult move from a grassroots network of free thinking into a self-help service industry preying on the curious. Those same questions that once fueled Gandhi to rage against centuries of oppression, now fuel more and more minutes on the line with telephone psychics. The infection of ancient myths into conservative religious groups once opened the door to new ideas, but now only teach us about Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code.

Not a bad night for the price of a few happy hour drinks. On the train home I finish my book: Mao II by Don Delillo. The guy down the car from me is reading White Noise. Weird coincidence, or the Universe telling me something?