Playing With Dimensions of Being
A Conversation About Oracular Poetics
On Sunday, September 1, the Alembic will host the afternoon workshop Dive Into Divination: An Introduction to Oracular Poetics. We thought maybe you’d like an introduction to the introduction, so we asked the workshop’s leaders—the writers, diviners, meditators, and teachers Denise Newman, Sean Negus, and Miranda Mellis—to hold a conversation about the creative landscape they are inviting us to explore, a liminal zone stretched between oracles, poems, dreams, and individual and collective sense-making.
Miranda: The morning of the day Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, I saw a very dreamlike thing as I was driving: two eagles with their talons locked together, whirling in a circle through the air with their wings out. I texted you both about it, since we often tell each other when we encounter “signs.” Sean wondered if it was an augury of American brinkmanship? Which resonated so strongly. It was both a sign, and a line of poetry, passing through my line of sight. If I had dreamed it, it would have been astonishing enough. Do you use dreams in your poems?
Denise: Yes, I see dreams as material. I relate the act of oracular poetics to my use of dream imagery. Objects appear in dreams with a certain glow and sometimes seem more real than they do in an everyday setting. In my poems, encounters in dreams have the same personal relevance as those encounters I record in waking life. I find that the more I track my dreams, the more I see how dreamlike waking reality is. Amazing things start presenting themselves, like your visitation of the whirling eagles, Miranda. It’s like a reward for paying attention.
Sean: What you’re saying feels true. There was a time when I would tell people in my life about happenstance events—at least people who had an appetite for that kind of thing! Because the craziest shit would just happen in my presence. I was just somehow more open to the experience. Part of the work is getting into that state of mind, right?
Miranda: What are we looking for when we look out for signs and synchronicities? The relationship between poetry and divination is connected to this, to whatever it is we’re doing when we’re “reading into things”, finding significance in some way that may not be objectively verifiable but experientially has the ring of truth.
Denise: Oracular writing can be a way of attuning to the potential of every moment and place, uniting inner and outer experience. Remember the last time we met, I had a question about my name? Sean, you had me pull three cards. It made me laugh how well those cards lined up narratively. They gave me a new way of looking at my question. It didn’t answer the question, but it organized and furthered my thinking about it. So much of experience is a complete jumble of thoughts and feelings. There’s rarely one clear emotion. So how do we talk about our experience, how do we interpret a muddle? An image or cluster of images can turn a question into something concrete that we can hold and study in its nuances.
Sean: Yeah! The dream image is this morphological object that’s neither total dream nor total reality—neither self nor completely other—but some kind of repositioning inbetween those things. And that indeterminancy is just like the divinatory object. But that is what orients us and reorganizes us into a new relationship to what is.
Miranda: “Reorganizing us into a new relationship with what is” also includes making the ordinary sacred. If I were inclined to, I could take the double-headed eagle image to sacralize what’s unfolding politically, as messianic movements and a range of prophetic spiritual traditions have done throughout history, and still do, in a spirit of anarchic religiosity. In such times, there appears to be an upsurge in signs and wonders that confirm the mandate of the people to change things, to prefigure and energize a collective path out of oppression.
Denise: The oracular event offers a method for relinquishing control. This is key because aesthetic or formal control often leads us on a more predictable route, based on habit, and so there’s less chance of discovery. Chance findings aren’t necessarily more real or profound than those gleaned from traditional routes, but clearly there’s greater potential for discovery when the known is destabilized.
Miranda: Yes, this is so fundamental to poetry and its forms and histories: the interplay between chance and control, predictability and indeterminacy.
Sean: This brings to mind Freya Matthews’ concept of onto-poetics, which describes a resonance between observer and observed. Knowing that resonance, we make ourselves available to what is, and because we do so, things will manifest through that mode of attention. We can’t really find the edges. Is it form in the content, or content in the form? This nice confluence is the domain of oracular poetics. There’s an architecture that arises to meet the occasion, to meet the need or intention.
Miranda: To awaken our sense of pattern, divinatory methods and materials help, like tarot decks, which have this huge, beautiful range. It’s as if all of the cards in the deck form a cosmos. Or they develop potential cosmologies; they form mandalas. The potential—portent-full!—that tarot speaks to is an interaction between the psyches of the players and the decks themselves. You pull cards and it’s evocative, like plucking strings, a sounding—as in, this is a C sharp, which isn’t true or false, it’s what’s playing in me. Among an infinite number of combinations, this particular composition sets a reading in motion.
Denise: Is there one comprehensive cosmology of forces and archetypes of existence that all tarot decks draw from?
Miranda: My great-grandmother read cards for people in her small village in Ukraine in the early 20th century. These were derivations of playing cards, but they still contained the basic elements you need to inquire into the past, the present, and the future by symbolizing an interplay of events and figures that include everyday life as well as unusual, magical, fortunate, or catastrophic encounters. The basic ingredients are there, and then the reader performs an intuitive exegesis that moves between the psyche’s introjections and relations, somewhat like psychoanalysis perhaps, but with a much more playful and inclusive palette. Monarchs, depending on the situation, can represent internal or external sovereignty. Our own mixed feelings can be mirrored. As Wittgenstein put it, to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life. A tarot deck is a language, a way of communicating.
Sean: Totally all of that! I think the historical answer to your question Denise is that the tarot was initially created for entertainment in the Italian Middle Ages. Over centuries, the cards were further embellished and endowed with hermetic/occult meanings, so they represent a composite of sorts. People have been recreating and reimagining the historical cartomantic systems in fantastic ways for a long time. There’s Lenormand which was a beautifully illustrated French card system, for instance. I think each deck essentially aspires to create some structure but that meaning system can be looser and more interpretive by configuring different dynamics of the human experience without necessarily thinking in terms of a linear life structure. Rather than actual births or actual deaths, they identify the elements of experience in a more subjective sense.
It’s nice that oracular systems are available and are useful in their own ways, but I think artists are, in a way, also like channels, scryers, and augers. Why? Because they’re entering into different cosmological structures and playing with different meaning systems or even different dimensions of being. They’re refashioning, reimagining, deconstructing a world order to create possibilities of meaning by breaking up those social and political structures through aesthetic and divinatory objects, so that we can enter some new way of being or have a new way of proceeding.
Denise: This imaginativeness is so fundamental to being human! Through the imagination, we can become intimate with what’s otherwise invisible to our senses. That’s the way we can become able to imagine the experiences of other sentient beings. We’re born with the capacity to imagine and that’s largely how children learn, through imaginative play. But if we don’t engage the imagination, we can lose it. The exploratory nature of art and divination practice open us up to the vast networks of interrelations. As Miranda was saying, we can start to notice patterns in the jumble of impressions and these patterns become sensible in artistic forms.
Sean: Think of the way that these forms can shake up our everyday sense of reality in a mundane humorous way! The kids from the family that lives downstairs from me were doing chalk art on the sidewalk and I just happened to see it when I was outside. They had drawn outlines of human bodies, chalk outlines on the sidewalk, but they had happy faces colored in. I had been kind of distressed because the street takeovers in Oakland are just getting really bad. I was stewing, and then I saw the crime scene-style chalk outlines with smiley faces and it made me laugh. That’s the power of these aesthetic or oracular moments: they break things open and catch you in a moment of unexpectancy.
Denise: I’m interested in art that invites imaginative participation. We aren’t invited to think critically in mainstream culture—the emphasis is on consuming—and so it’s largely left to artists to create opportunities for people to engage with signs and patterns based on their own life experiences.
Miranda: Yes, we need the imaginative, and in the political sense as well. There’s a painful side of chance in our explicitly gamified political system, which is how it’s so constricted—not truly playful, with this reified two-party system. Every four years there’s a roll of the dice, voters have to put money down—their vote—on one of two horses—the donkey or the elephant—hoping their chosen animal can outrun the doom they fear. This is a deadly game. In the face of politics-as-wager, how can we use our imaginations to do what Walter Benjamin described as redeeming the unfinished work of the dead, towards universal liberation? And of course, divining plays a role here, as a way to commune with spirits and hear the guidance of elders. The ancestors were the original divines, as it were—the first divinities, and to divine was to contact them. “The divine” in this sense is the person who attunes, listens. The intuitive.
Miranda Mellis is a writer from San Francisco now living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches writing, literature, and environmental humanities at Evergreen State College. She is the author of Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books), The Spokes, The Revisionist, None of This Is Real, Demystifications, and a number of chapbooks including, most recently, The Revolutionary. She is a long time practitioner of divination and contemplative practices.
Denise Newman is a multimedia poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her poetry collections are Future People, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, Human Forest, and, forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press, The Redesignation of Paradise. Newman is also involved in video and social practice projects that explore dissonances between language and reality, and for many years she has collaborated with composers providing lyrics for choral works and songs. She teaches in the MFA Writing program at the California College of the Arts and she is a long-time meditator.
Sean Negus is an artist who works in the expanded field of poetics. In addition to a book of poems published bilingually in Portuguese and English, Hurricane Music, he has also published an artist book in limited edition, Congeries. His recent work inquiring into archival poetics has been exhibited in publications by the Goethe-Institut and Tasaworat Collective. A professor in Writing and Literature as well as Critical Studies at both California College of the Arts and Santa Clara University, Sean has been steeping in emptiness and attuning to the oracular for a good while.
“Dive Into Divination: An Introduction to Oracular Poetics” with Denise Newman, Sean Negus, and Miranda Mellis will take place on Sunday, September 1 from 1 to 4 pm. For more information, and for tickets, please see our Eventbrite page.
Transmutations is a biweekly publication from the Berkeley Alembic, a transformational center that offers classes, workshops, retreats, and warm cups of tea.
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