Two Weird Books

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Two Weird Books

By Don Curren

The late, lamented cultural critic Mark Fisher says something that likely resonates with many of us at the beginning of his 2017 book The Weird and the Eerie: “…. I have been fascinated and haunted by examples of the weird and the eerie for as long as I can remember.”

I know it resonates with me. Music, movies, books, experiences that could be characterized as “weird” have attracted and intrigued me for, well … as long as I can remember.

I recently happened to read two highly enjoyable books that explore aspects of weirdness, namely Fisher’s above-mentioned book and High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis.

While Davis cites Fisher’s work, they are two very different kinds of books.

Fisher’s is a succinct sketch of his understanding of the weird and the eerie, and briefly explores some examples of both “genres,” in books, films, and even music.

As readers of his perhaps better-known book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? would recognize, Fisher had a talent for exploring large, abstract issues in trenchant, engaging prose.

In The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher suggests that what characterizes the weird, at least in its artistic manifestations, is that it concerns the eruption into an established order of something that comes from outside it, something strange and monstrous and unaccountable in the normal course of affairs.

His paradigm for the weird in literature is H.P. Lovecraft, whose fans know that his stories usually concern monstrous entities from other dimensions popping up in the mundane world of 1920s Massachusetts.

“The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even as its negation),” Fisher writes.

In addition to the paradigmatic Lovecraft, Fisher offers some intriguing examples of the “weird”; some are fairly familiar – for example David Lynch and Philip K. Dick. Others less so: in one particularly interesting chapter, he explores the idea that the UK post-punk group The Fall can best be understood as a musical expression of the weird and the grotesque.

The basic conception of the weird in Fisher’s book overlaps significantly with Davis’s; in fact, Davis quotes the definition of weird from Fisher’s book cited above early in his book.

But Davis’s book is much lengthier and more ambitious than Fisher’s, and also more narrowly focused.

Davis examines three instances of a specific kind of weirdness that proliferated in the 1970s in California. He examines weird, visionary experiences undergone by three writers and cultural figures who worked in that milieu – Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick, who also, as mentioned above, figures in Fisher’s text.

All three were broadly countercultural figures – McKenna an independent researcher into the effects and significance of psychedelic drugs and related esoterica, Wilson a writer and cultural renegade who co-wrote the Illuminatus Trilogy, and Dick a wildly prolific and creative science fiction writer – who had intense, visionary experiences that seemed to defy the normal logic of everyday, “consensus” reality.

What makes Davis’s book so intriguing is the philosophical framework he uses to explore and interpret these three men and their experiences.

Drawing heavily on the works of the philosophers William James and Bruno Latour, the constructivist school in sociology, and experts in the study of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto, Davis approaches the experiences of his triumvirate of “psychonauts,” as he refers to them, with an approach that would be described as a particularly sophisticated form of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

 Or, as he puts it, Davis takes their experiences “seriously, but not literally.”

He avoids the simplistic reductionism that would explain their experiences away as meaningless hallucinations caused by drugs or psychological illness. Instead, he looks at the cultural and intellectual traditions and the individual experiences and interests of Dick, Wilson and McKenna that shaped their experiences, and how those experiences both reflect and shape the broader cultural fabric that forms their backdrop.

Not only do we learn a lot about Davis’s “psychonauts” and their cultural surround. We also learn a lot about the philosophical framework he brings to bear on them, including important elements of the work of James, the recently deceased Latour, and other thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Derrida.

Ultimately, Davis’s work offers an interesting, informed perspective on what “reality” is, and the complex, interactive relationship between its “subjective” and “objective” dimensions.

But given the weirdness of the times and the fascinating quirkiness of the three minds he explores, it can also be a remarkably amusing read, if you’re at all interested in those domains.  

For those with a casual interest in the weird as a cultural phenomenon, Fisher’s book is a short, beguiling read that may expose them to books and films beyond their normal ken, and that provides a very broad exposure to the world of the weird.

For those with a deeper interest in weirdness, and in particular in the way it manifested itself in the druggy, post-psychedelic 1970s, Davis book is book is a long, bewitching trip, one that’s weird and rewarding in its own unique way.