The White Review Under Rebecca Tamás's Spell

At the White Review, read an excerpt of Rebecca Tamás's contribution to the latest issue: "The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult." We're already interested, and, as Tamás points out, that's no surprise because "in the UK, and across Europe and the US, there has been a growing fascination with the occult, and especially with the figure of the witch, in all her variety, difference and infinite capacity." From there: 

Much has already been written about contemporary Western culture’s renewed interest in witchcraft and the occult, from the appearance of ‘insta-witches’ to the rise of neo-pagan practice. But what I want to do here is think about this ‘occult moment’ in relation to poetry. I want to explore this because these occult elements, to me, seem to offer something that speaks particularly to the nature of and difficulties of poetry itself – to what it might be possible to make language do, to what might be made possible through language. My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing. What she has made possible for me is a new relationship with poetic speaking, with the power of the word, and with what that power might make possible for liberatory, feminist thinking. But before I begin to unpick those possibilities, I need to look back.

MYSTERY

It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.
— Anne Carson

Poetry, like the occult, embraces the necessary irrationality that exists squashed up against rationality in the material world. It does not ‘reject’ the rational, but it does extract what else is there, the elements that don’t fit. Dorothea Lasky, in her poem ‘Thing’, says, ‘It is the irrational / That is worth living for.’ Irrationality is not apolitical, but politically radical; radical because it takes an interest in what it’s actually like to be alive as a human being – what it’s like to live alongside many nonhuman creatures and things, what it’s like to not make perfect sense, to not always be in control of what happens, to want joy, to have a complicated body, to rise and fall unpredictably, widely, to love or desire others more than ‘procreation’ or ‘hormones’ ask of you, to want to worship while also feeling extremely sceptical.

At an event where the American queer astrologer Chani Nicholas was 19 speaking, a member of the audience asked (rhetorically) ‘Why is it that all straight white men hate astrology?’ Ignoring the slight exaggeration for effect (of course some straight white men love astrology, just not many), this struck me as an interesting enquiry. There are many elements to what might look like an answer. It can certainly be frustrating to get caught in the binary of male knowledge: rationality, science, facts; female/queer knowledge: irrationality, magic, feeling, instinct. After all, women and queer people are as capable of rationality as anyone else. Yet it is in the derided ‘feminine’ spaces of magic, myth, history and feeling that we have found new kinds of power, forms of knowledge that fill in the gaping wounds that rational capitalist society leaves in our communities and beings.

Read on at the White Review.