Susan Sontag once claimed that “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself.”[2] For Sontag, spirituality referred to “plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural conditions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.”[3] Even before getting to the actual asking (What is spirituality right here, right now?), there is something to be said about the processual and unfinished nature of the terms Sontag chooses. Something is being worked through. Spirituality becomes a fantastically human exercise – intimate, discursive, socially aware.

In a way, the spiritual struggles considered above mirror what Roland Barthes describes in A Lover’s Discourse, which opens with a bold statement: “The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one.”[4] While spirituality is, in all its different forms, hardly silenced (from the quartz-brandishing, hashtag spirituality of TikTok, to the violent resurgence of religious conservatism in Europe and the United States; not to mention non-secularised cultures all around the world), the lonely earnestness of the Barthesian lover might be as unfashionable, or at least, as ripe for renewal, as that of someone trying to grapple with consciousness, transcendence, and structural asymmetries – let alone a God long dead.

The disconnect between the individual’s discourse (romantic or spiritual) and the structural conditions (Western capitalist) might be what Michel de Certeau had already identified: the technocratic focus on efficiency, productivity, and consumption making do without what is not immediately useful to its purpose. These spiritual practices thus get caged in the “zoo of the imaginary,”[5] together with other forms of human imagination, such as science fiction, romance, or the “witchcraft of ethnology.”[6] What all these fictions seem to have in common is that they express some kind of desire for something that cannot be fully rationalised or addressed in economic or utilitarian terms: a passionate need for meaning, or a need for meaningful passion. The attractiveness of these fictions lies in a promise, a line of flight that is able to escape the hegemony of the “functionalist totalitarianism”[7] of modern society, as de Certeau calls it.

That said, for de Certeau, a wayward Jesuit himself, this isolation is not necessarily a bad thing; alternative practices and discourses bloom by trying to challenge the hegemonic position. Because it is unwarranted, ignored, and maladapted, a spiritual discourse can become wild and creative. No longer an offer of certainty and salvation, it can now perhaps contribute to a kind of mental survival, a reminder that there are other ways of doing, other ways of speaking about what happens to us. A reinvention, as Sontag foresaw.

Poet Nisha Ramayya, in States of the Body Produced by Love, a hybrid work on Tantra, describes this tradition as

the practice of extending, of stretching to make connections, of creating something from those connections…the weaving of multiple threads and the extrication of one part from the whole…literal, metaphorical and abstract; historic, mythic and imaginary; formal, ethical and philosophical…the plucks and glides of your body as you bend between what you want and what you are able to do or to have.[8]

Maybe this is applicable as one of the spiritual projects for this disenchanted, late-capitalist era: an extension from the lonely lover to become part of a greater whole, even if this whole is imaginary, even if this extension requires the body to “pluck and glide” along the way that brings reality closer to desire (and vice versa).

An impossible autotheology

In this second issue of Passage, we want to gather some fragments of a spiritual discourse from an autotheoretical – or rather, in this case, an autotheological – perspective: essays that blend, just like Barthes and Ramayya, different spiritual discourses and practices of others with personal, intimate experiences.

As Jeremy Stewart succinctly puts it in his contribution,

creative-critical writing is characterised by a desire to find space within academia for otherwise marginalised experiences. This is often a case of drawing on personal, emotional, or spiritual registers typically excluded from academic writing, rendered illegitimate in advance as modes of academic knowledge.

What makes the inclusion of the said spiritual register in an academic context especially useful is that it provides a supplementary form of knowledge and an opportunity to reflect upon these neglected intimate and domestic experiences, often regarded as far too everyday or too pathetic to become part of serious research.

On being/having a parent

An everyday, complex condition that appears in most pieces in this issue is that of being parented, or being a parent oneself. There are deceased parents (Brady Schuh), estranged parents (Jeremy Stewart), complicated parental figures (Theodore Locke), family separation (Libby King), and the blend of violence and boredom of early parenthood (J’Lyn Chapman and Sebastián González de Gortari). From a psychoanalytical perspective, it is of course not surprising to notice how these literally familiar experiences become entangled with a religious discourse. These are Freudian truisms, after all, not only in the sense that we create gods in the image of these seemingly omnipotent creatures we first encounter, on whom we depend for our survival, but also in the sense that the ecstasies, fears, and drives we experience in childhood keep on haunting us, expressing themselves in both collective and personal myths and fantasies. Religion, in its many forms, provides a framework for dealing with these overwhelming emotions and experiences, while at the same time allowing us to keep a distance and not be overwhelmed, especially if we are no longer capable of taking this religious discourse too seriously.

Tradition

Linking intimate, personal experiences to a spiritual tradition results in an obvious comfort because of the reassurance that you are neither alone nor the first person to experience whatever it is that you are going through. There is a meaning to it that transcends your own life, relating it to other generations. In this sense, the discourse of spirituality offers, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett[9], “a shape to accommodate the mess” (a sentiment that re-appears in some of the texts in this issue, explicitly in King’s and Chapman’s, but also intuited in Smeyers’s, Stewart’s, or even Palekaitė’s). Tradition is in a way a borrowed practice, a way of working with, and talking about, specific intimate experiences. But, as Schuh demonstrates, in their juxtaposition of contemporary American burial and mourning practices with the short-lived burial fad of Judaic ossuaries during the Roman era, these traditions are already messy to begin with. Traditions do not possess some pre-supposed legacy of ancient wisdom, let alone being able to be neatly transposed to the present as balm for a spiritual malaise when dealing with death and loss. As Amy Hollywood remarks: “our reception of tradition is always also a critical engagement with it.”[10] The critical engagement thus has to be also a creative one, transformative, capable of forging new relations, because “we realise that we occupy the world differently – or desire to occupy the world differently – than at least some part of the traditions into which we have been born demand.”[11]

And the fact that these traditions are messy and do not fit the present makes them a valuable tool. As González de Gortari makes clear in his essay on the trickster god Tezcatlipoca, religious syncretism, the blurring of boundaries, the fusion with other traditions and other cultures, allowed this god “to survive and thrive.”

Fiction, but all the same

Speaking of blurred boundaries, the one between fiction and reality is particularly important. As we stated earlier, considering spirituality, in whatever form, as fiction, a product of human imagination, is not a pejorative statement, nor a way of disempowering it. The question González de Gortari asks himself about his relationship with Tezcatlipoca – “Is my worship of him a fiction or is fiction the way I worship him?” – cannot get a definitive answer; if anything, it is one way any spiritual discourse may become effective. An acknowledgement of the fictionality may shield the overwhelming feelings and sensations one sought to mediate and express. Going back, once again, to psychoanalysis, we may term this a form of fetishism, a disavowal that Octave Mannoni famously summarised as, ‘‘I know well, but all the same.”[12] In a traditional, religious context, a fetish has a comparable duplicitous capacity. While clearly a human-made artefact, it is, all the same, believed to be supernaturally powerful. With this double step, the figure of the fetish, independently of context, acts as a substitute that mediates the intolerable absence of the ultimate object of desire, and the equally intolerable excess of the real itself. Referring to the work of David Graeber, González de Gortari re-thinks the role of the fetish. Rather than being a superstition, it is re-interpreted as an ingenious cultural supplement, the basis for creativity ؘ– something new, revolutionary.

In Chapman’s  paper, fetish is an intangible construct that enables her to grapple with reality. An imaginary grid becomes a sort of devotional tool that helps the author deal with the dullness and demands of domestic life as a young parent. The grid, most commonly associated with perspective, secularism, science, and objectivity, turns here into a device she mentally projects onto reality. In doing so, she literally frames reality, contains it, offers some order to it. Citing Rosalind Krauss, she interprets the said grid as a pseudo-fetish: “the grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”[13] The grid’s newly acquired qualities make possible presence in empty space and allow for a contemporary, non-confessional form of revelation, a mystical “showing” of what is there, for better or for worse.

In Goda Palekaitė’s text, two archetypical characters, a female Mystic and a Vampire, act as two fetishistic stand-ins in order to allow to creatively think the impossibility of erotic passion. The two characters appear as discursive, clearly artificial creatures, bringing together Christian faith, folkloric superstition, mystical treatises, and the aesthetics of B-films. Again, the artificiality is a crucial factor. As hybrid forms, part fictional, part historical, part collective, part personal, they are used to express experiences of obsessional love. Here the blurred boundaries are those of the self, as they demonstrate how entangled one is with the self’s many discursive others. It is not possible to discern who speaks through whom because the influence goes both ways. Here too, tradition shapes our most intimate experiences, while at the same these experiences distort and transform tradition. A paradox Palekaitė summarises in a quote from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “I am rooted, but I flow.”[14]

In Brady Schuh’s piece, fiction is used to travel, both across vast spans of time and through different traditions. A Mustang, a casket, and stone boxes all contain not just the physical remains of others, but the stories of who they may have been, and the loved ones who survive them. The author, whose voice acknowledges the performativity of the text (“Listen,” it begins), at some point confesses to being deceitful and passing on hearsay as truth, but all the same - after all, what do we inherit from history if not a few well-intentioned guesses, a handful of bones, and some names etched on stone? Schuh fully inhabits uncertainty, furnishing both careful observational details and research data. And a regular appeal to a “you,” an imagined reader, keeps bridging the ambivalent reality of their text with that of their audience, who are, in themselves, an educated guess or an assumption.

Phenomenology

Obviously, the trickster god, the grid, and the vampire do not exist in a strictly ontological sense. It turns out that asking whether the discourse one borrows from is believable or not might simply not be the right question; spiritual experiences are a question of experience rather than existence. Or, if you prefer, phenomenology rather than ontology.

Kristof Smeyers makes this clear in his contribution. When it comes to personal accounts of supernatural experiences, like abductions or mystical raptures, a historian cannot reduce them to a strictly linear and rational narrative. The essence of these events is that they do disrupt the normal, logical flow of time; they act as a glitch, an excess of time. These stories are not obviously “true” in an objective sense, as demonstrated, for example, by how, over time, kidnapping fairies have been replaced by aliens from outer space. Just like the encounter with the trickster god, these disruptive glitch-experiences clearly adapt to and acquire their meaning from their context. Still, that leaves the question of why they keep returning, even if with a difference, to a world that should by now be properly disenchanted. The anachronistic tension this creates is symbolised by the many visiting cards of modern-day “doctors” which promise, in a strange mixture of languages full of grammar mistakes, magical help for a multitude of problems. Smeyers keeps these cards as bookmarks in his scholarly books on religious and the supernatural history. As Fremdkörper, alien bodies, the cards’ disproportionate claims are a reminder of linguistic games that challenge the hegemony of a rational, materialistic perspective.

On a more personal, intimate level, this tension of the (un)believable is also at stake in Stewart’s revisiting of Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Stewart links this proto-autotheoretical text by Derrida with the biblical book of Daniel, and a premonitory dream about a certain pastor named Matthew Barnett, whom he subsequently meets. The autobiographical narrative resonates with, and in a way re-enacts, the texts based on the signifier Daniel (referring to the prophet, but also to the name of Derrida’s unacknowledged son and the author’s own middle name). It quickly becomes clear that a different kind of hermeneutics is at play here. The point is not whether Derrida really refers to a son in his book, or whether the dream in which God spoke to the author of Matthew Barnett was just a strange coincidence, or whether the book of Daniel prefigures the troubles and dreams of the writer. The point is how these coincidences, these associations, this constellation of intertexts and events is able to give meaning or shape to a narrative — even if, in the end, this narrative does not provide closure, and is unable to fully deal with the messiness of life itself.

Theodore Locke writes about precarity, grief, and childhood, and introduces a caretaker, Mema, who, albeit loving, also has very real flaws. Moving in and out of domestic and religious interiors, the relationship between the narrator and Mema is rendered in layers — different affects, different ages, different shifts in mutual dependency. The two grow together, learn of each other’s needs and vulnerabilities. Despite the God in the background, the mystical exercise here really is the way-making to Mema: the dirt roads, the desert vegetation, the couch, the episodes of Jeopardy!, a beloved curry recipe, a reproduction of a naive painting of an androginous child. Memory and senses build towards a faith of the familiar and daily, quite literally embodied in this central, complex figure. The loss of Mema leads to a helplessness akin to a loss of faith. What can one hold on to when the person who held so much together is no longer there?

In Libby King’s fragmentary, embodied writing, the narrator seeks patterns to make sense of a changing reality. Linking remote landscapes, different phenomena hint at a greater meaning (woodchips, puppies, melanin pools, baseball caps), an almost-tangible pull that weaves people together, enmeshing them in time and space (sometimes violently). Despite the mention of being “suspicious” of myth, symbolic narratives keep on finding their way in and out of this piece, insistent on testing the relationship between thought and reality – a reality full of historical, environmental, and political shocks. By using brief bursts of consciousness and bringing together works by Sheila Heti, Amitav Ghosh, Karl Ove Knausgård, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, among many others, the text keeps on trying to find a reason, or a path, towards hope.

In all these texts, however widely different the spiritual traditions they engage with are, it becomes clear that autotheory is very much a performative genre. All these spiritual discourses are in a way a practice. They do something (they “bend between what you want and what you are able to do,” remembering Ramayya). In the end, they work and iterate everyday life: In Locke’s case, they are used to restore and possibly repair communication; in Palekaitė’s and Schuh’s, they fuel a process of, respectively, passion and mourning; in Chapman’s, they help in dealing with the dullness of domestic chores; identity issues in King’s and González de Gortari’s, or serendipity in Stewart’s, and in Smeyers’s case they prevent a historical discourse from closing in on itself, becoming too complacent in its presumptions. In each case, the connection to some form of spiritual discourse allows a person to escape the deadlock of the autobiographical. Just because it was untimely and maladapted to contemporary subjectivity, the romantic discourse became attractive for Roland Barthes. Precisely because of its loneliness, Barthes could turn it into an antidote to gregariousness. Deprived of power, the discourse became a way of challenging the doxa, the common sense, and of exploring alternative ways of talking about the self.

The same goes for a spiritual discourse. It confronts the egocentric with the eccentric, juxtaposes the self with a radical otherness that cannot be fully assimilated in the present.