The Cloud of Unknowing

Robert Yarber

Configurations, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 269-282 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/con/summary/v016/16.2.yarber.html

Access Provided by Universiteit van Amsterdam at 02/07/11 11:24AM GMT

 The Cloud of Unknowing

Robert Yarber
Penn State University

Abstract
The author presents a case of self-organizing daimonic mythopoi-
esis. The spiritual tourist, entheogenic experimenter, and the painter
enfold a matrix of inter-developed “sorties” into the allotropic dif-
ferentials of the autopoietic process. Fieldwork in Mandi, Himashal
Pradesh, India provides an introduction to the virtualities of the
peripersonal as it manifests in a “darshan” or self-showing of the
goddess where the velocity of the psychopomp’s body approaches
pure phase-space. The immersive space of the peripersonal is further
revealed in the author’s absorption within the wire-frame virtuali-
ties of currently available three-dimensional modeling programs.
Parallel work is conducted through experimentation with Animita
muscaria, a traditional entheogen revered in various cultures. Possi-
bly the ancient Soma of the Vedic scriptures, the mushroom pro-
vides occasion for somatic dissociation within which phenomeno-
logical data is gathered. Use is made of the phenomenological
method of introspection, which more literally becomes a driving in-
ward of the homuncular eye along a trajectory of the cine-somatic
gaze through an introjected, intra-corporeal immersive scene. In the
conclusion, this ancient “gaze of the clinic” is deemed useful to cur-
rent research, as corporeality and the politics of peripersonal space
enter new technological and juridical frames of reference in relation
to agency, identity, and the state.

Configurations, 2008, 16:269–282 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

269
270 Configurations

“To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my will-
ful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective
views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or
worse.”
C. G. Jung1

“It is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are only the forms
of recognition. What we encounter are the demons, the sign-bearers: pow-
ers of the leap, the interval, the intensive, and the instant; powers which
cover difference with more difference.”
Gilles Deleuze2

Mandi
I have arrived in Mandi, the capital city of the former kingdom of
the same name, located in the Himalayan foothills of Himachal
Pradesh, northern India, in the summer of 2000 (Fig. 1). I accom-
pany my friend and guide Ram Alexander,3 of Haridwar on the Gan-
ges and Assisi. We have arrived at the decrepit palace of the heredi-
tary Wazir4 of Mandi and I sleep the night in a spider-infested garden
side-room (when I at first enter, flipping on the light, I see furry,
black polka-dots moving across the greenish-yellow walls and ceil-
ing) cocooned in my sleeping bag with my face covered in DEET.
The next day, we visit assorted temples of the district, as our prog-
ress by car north toward Kullu-Manali has been delayed due to road
closures, avalanches, and torrential rains. Although confident we
can proceed safely, we have been encouraged to stay. Later in the
day, the Wazir’s son, a man of age thirty named Raman, the owner
of a dry-goods store from whom I have purchased assorted fabrics,
invites us to join him that evening for a darshan5 of the goddess. As
the sun sets to the clamor of drums, cymbals, and horns through
the streets of Mandi, my friend Ram and I move through a medieval
maze of alleyways to the designated location, where we meet Raman.
Entering a dusty courtyard, I am instructed to remove all leather and
place it on a small table at the bottom of a wooden staircase leading

1. C. G. Jung, “Interview,” Good Housekeeping, 1961.

2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), p. 145.
3. Ram Alexander, ed., Death Must Die (The Diaries of Atmananda) (New Delhi: Indica
Publishers, 2000).
4. The office of the Wazir, or council to the king, is hereditary though now largely
honorary.
5. A darshan is a showing, a vision.
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 271

Figure 1. Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India, photo-illustration by Robert Yarber. (Reprinted

with the permission of the artist.)

to the upper room where the darshan is to take place. Being the con-
scientious spiritual tourist I am, I remove my shoes, belt, and leather
wallet full of identification, cash, and credit cards, along with skep-
ticism, cynicism, and any other impediments to my purpose of ex-
periencing without prejudice, as impossible as that may be, the self-
showing of the goddess.
Going up the cramped stairway to a low-covered balcony, we are
brought, being shown some deference, to the front of a line of local
devotees. With Ram, my American friend, and Raman, the heir ap-
parent to the Wazirship of Mandi, I am led into a small room filled
with the smoke of incense, the pounding of drums, and the shrill
keening of flutes. About twenty of the devotees are squeezed into
the chamber, with flute players and drummers standing against the
crumbling brick walls. I am seated on the floor facing the back of a
curly-haired young man of age twenty or so who is unremarkably
dressed in a loose plaid shirt and khaki slacks. I had met him earlier
in the day. He is one of the clerks in Raman’s dry-goods store. He sits
272 Configurations

facing a wall covered in blackened reposse’, formed into figures and

designs of writhing complexity, down which hang, suspended from
chains, various figures, fetishes, and censors of smoldering incense.
In the middle of this display is a blackened metallic abode, within
which stands a small, silver, exquisitely detailed figure of the wide-
mouthed, grinning Kali—multi-armed, with weapons brandished. A
chain lies in the young man’s lap, which he lifts and slowly begins
to beat across his back in synchronization with the now quieter
drumming.
The flutes fall silent and the chanting stops as the young man is
suddenly wracked by a series of violent paroxysms. These body shocks
quickly concentrate upward to his head and neck, which begin to
swing from side to side at an ever-accelerating rate. With the head‘s
rapid rotation, the long, dripping curls become a darkly pearlescent
phase-space, and flesh and bone part ways in a loudly flapping bifur-
cation of solid and fluid, the distended profile of the face continuing
its trajectory east as the skull hurtles west. The distortion of this ef-
fect reminds me of the film of the man on the rocket sled, facial
musculature pushed backwards in G-force traction6 as, inches before
me, the tractor force of this velocity threatens to remove this face
from this head. Faster, and a blur of motion is achieved, a sustained
visual hum approaching pure virtuality. The limit of endurance
being met, the face and head imperceptibly begin to rejoin as the
oscillation slows. The concentration of force expands back down
into the body, which undergoes a convulsive dehiscence, tailing off
to the equipoise of the original position. The chain, which I haven’t
particularly noticed, suspends its flailing. As the young man quiets
amid the communal exhalation of the assembly, I shift in my cross-
legged posture, my knee briefly touching his back.
Raman, our interlocutor, rises to stand. Turning to Ram and my-
self, he asks if we have any questions of the goddess, now manifest
in the form of the possessed youth. Glimpsing at Ram, who seems
hesitant to speak, and with a hundred different questions demand-
ing address, I summon my strength to ask Kali if it is safe to go on
with our journey to its final destination, the Spiti Valley in the far
reaches of the Himalayas. The goddess fiercely replies at once in the
high falsetto of the young man’s strangely lilting, yet terrifying
voice: “Do not go forward. Do not proceed. The raging waters will
destroy you. The mountains on top of you will descend.”

6. Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp conducted a series of manned-rocket sled tests during the
late 1940s and ’50s, in which broken bones and other injuries were regularly experi-
enced. At the time, he was known as “the fastest man alive.”
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 273

Our prompter Raman now comes to our defense: “But they have
come so far, and they have come to you O Devi,7 and they seek your
protection. Can you not give them your assurance?”
Kali, through the boy, replies again in her fierce yet tremulously
sing-song cadence, in Hindi, or English, I cannot recall: “You must
take me into your heart, you must walk in my fire. Then I will pro-
tect you.”
Satisfied by her answer, Raman motions to us and we rise to leave,
as others crouch down to take our place. We wedge our way through
the crush of shrouded supplicants at the doorway as we make our
exit. I walk wobblingly down the staircase, aglow in the light of the
darshan, all the while remembering my wallet and its surfeit of
worldly documents and legal tender I have left sitting on the table
in the courtyard below. I arrive at the table to find my wallet and
other items as I left them, thanking Kali for her mercy.
The next day, Ram and I continue our journey north along the
water-swollen and decomposing roadways toward our next stop,
Kullu-Manali, with our final destination being the Ki monastery in
the Spiti Valley of what was historically western Tibet, where the
Dalai Lama is to perform the Kalachakra Initiation. Having delayed
our trip by one day in Mandi, we are now concerned that our plan
to take a rarely traveled route through the beautiful deodar-covered
slopes of the Rampur Valley will have to be abandoned for a faster
one. Do we regret our delay in Mandi, and have we forfeited our
discovery of a seldom-seen land of the high Indian Himalayas? That
night we repair to the restaurant of the 500-year-old former palace
stronghold of Naggar, now a government-run hotel. As we sit en-
sconced in our booth with a surreptitiously supplied bottle of Johnny
Walker, we ponder our squandered possibilities. Suddenly the waiter
comes, shaken and greatly upset, to relate to us the news that has just
arrived. It has just been reported that the road, the valley with its
many villages, and the town that we would have been in this very
night had we not lingered in Mandi, have been destroyed by a power-
ful torrent—a massive floodtide washing away all before it—from out
of the steep mountain valleys of Tibet.8 Many lives have been lost.

7. The goddess.
8. On August 1, 2000, a sudden cloudburst over the Tibetan border joined a torrent
from the faraway origin of the Sutlej River on Mt. Kailash—the abode of Shiva—caus-
ing devastating floods and landslides along the length of the Sutlej in Himachal
Pradesh, India. The frequency of devastating floods in the region can be accounted for
by the steady deforestation of the hillsides, the attempted modification of the river
flow through public works, and the yearly northward advance of the monsoon line due
to global warming. See R. S. Pirta, chhaya@nde.vsnl.net.in.
274 Configurations

“Jai Kali! Jai Mahati Devi!”

The Spiritual Tourist
The spiritual tourist and the “entheogenic”9 dabbler may be sub-
ject to similar types of suspicion. The spiritual tourist is accused of
superficiality by both the devotee and the unbeliever. The psycho-
naut practicing with “secret substances” using “special means” may
be dismissed by the more endocrinally endowed, unadulterated
mystic, as well as by the scientist, the psychologist, the politician,
and the cop, and viewed as a decadent ministrant of false conscious-
ness seeking escape from the “Real World.”
Reality, of course, includes these substances and the brains that
have been altered by them since the dawn of consciousness. Brains
require data to ascertain reality as a projection of their own neural
activity. Special means using secret substances ensure a wider spec-
trum of phenomena within which to calibrate an advantageous set-
ting for a particular brain. These calibrations must be reset from time
to time, as circumstances and curiosity dictate.
Secret substances and ritual manifestations alike are tools “ready-
to-hand.” As the frayage of postmodern identities allows de-territo-
rializing drifts across cultural boundaries, giving postmodern sub-
jects access to cultural tools and techniques not always desired by
“modern” subjects indigenous to their own transitional cultures,
one is forced to cross boundaries, stepping outside one’s hereditary
cultural identity, just to hold one’s place in the disorganized global
flow of the multitude,10 always carrying a stamped certificate of dis-
similitude should one find one’s self in too chokingly familiar a sur-
rounding.

Virtual Worlds
Upon my return to the States, I throw myself into a spiritual regi-
men fueled by my experiences in Mandi and at Ki. Balancing this

9. Debate exists concerning the suitability of the term “entheogen(ic),” or “god-con-

taining,” for any of a class of vegetable materials, the ingestion of which is known to
temporarily induce radical sensory and conceptual brain-state changes, especially as
used in the fields of ethno-botany and religious studies. See Valentina Paulovna Was-
son and R. Gordon Wasson, Mushrooms, Russia, and History (New York: Pantheon Books,
1957); Jonathan Ott, Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History,
2nd ed. (Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Company, 1996); Huston Smith, Cleansing
the Doors of Perception (New York, Jeremy R. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
10. On the theory of the multitude and its place in global transformation, see Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin, 2004).
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 275

intense process of spiritual awakening with the requirements of be-

ing a “householder” and father prove increasingly difficult. As I puz-
zle over the direction my interests might take in the light of my re-
cent experiences, I set about exploring the virtual realms of the
wire-frame universe one finds available in various digital three-
dimensional-modeling programs.11 Surrendering totally, I fall into
this world as into an abyss and spend nights in a classic fugue state,
driven by sensory-motor ecstasy to mesh with these illumined virtu-
alities. I know that the ghosts of Piero and Uccello12 lurk in the cob-
webs of these electronic vectors and rays. As thumbnail renderings
of worlds of my creation flicker across the computer screen in a ka-
leidoscopic array of possibilities, I occasionally stir myself from my
reverie to hit “save” with the cursor so as to preserve at least a trace
from the parade of images flowing by.
Slowly over the weeks a vision emerges. A series of compositions
form themselves around an initial premonition of the coming catas-
trophe, the shock and awe of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. I draw a paral-
lel of this harrowing premonition with the recollection of the Man-
son gang’s dune-buggy forays into Death Valley in search of the
entrance to the netherworld, making vivid the desert scene as a
precinct of saints and prophets, mad and disastrous campaigns, and
as the graveyard of many an invading emperor. I set about printing
out dozens of renderings of the new beings that are coming alive in
my wire-frame incubator, denizens of a desert of the infinite plane.
The prints serve as templates for the series of paintings that result:
“Sortie: The Demonological Survey.” A sortie can be defined as a set-
ting forth, a venturing out, a reconnoitering, an engagement that as
an event is glancing, improvisational, and open to indefinite out-
come. It is often answered by a counter-sortie.

The Cine-Somatic Eye

Decamping from the mental barrens of this conceptual terrain, I oc-
casionally go forth into the woods surrounding my home in the moun-
tains of central Pennsylvania. There in profusion are found spread
through the lichen, moss, and rotting stumps of the forest floor chant-
erelles, black trumpets, and angel wings—mushrooms galore for the
table. Amanitas become an interest, the magnificent Caesar’s
11. Bryce and Poser are landscaping and figure-modeling digital-design tools.
12. Italian painters Piero della Francesca (1420?–92) and Paulo Uccello (1397–1475).
Uccello is criticized by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Painters for having squandered
the success of his early career and many important commissions in the solitary later
pursuit of his obsession, perspective. Exquisite “wire-frame” drawings remain from this
period.
276 Configurations

mushroom (Amanita caesarea)—the captivating Death Angel—and

especially the Amanita muscaria,13 or Fly Agaric, reputedly the Soma
of ancient Vedic scripture.14
With the family away one weekend, I return from a mushroom foray
and decide to make a bowl of a “secret substance” I call Black Cloud,
the ingredients of which include dried Amanita muscaria and Salvia di-
vinorum,15 two of Gordon Wasson’s16 ethnological pharmacopoeia.
My bowl full and packed, I lean back to inhale the Black Cloud,
which I might well have called “the cloud of unknowing.” Opening
my eyes for a moment, I see a large brown furry thing crawling
across my floor. Having a magnifying glass at hand, I raise it to peer
at the brazen interloper. It is a Carolina Wolf Spider, and she is drag-
ging behind her a placental sac of spiderlings who, on emerging, are
crawling up on their mother’s back in rustic frolic. I retrieve a teacup
with which to remove this future colony of spiders from the interior
of my home, and while viewing through the magnifying glass I ex-
amine for one last time the laboring mother. Crouching to within
an inch of her, I stare into her eight black eyes. Within them I gaze
into the abyss of the Other. Whatever interspecific bond one can
make with a spider, I make. Our understanding of each other is so-
matic. Then, carefully, holding a playing card to the floor, I move
the carnivalesque brood into the teacup and transport it outside.
Sitting back down, I relax into a calm expectancy as the “cloud”
descends through my peripheral nervous system. My attention be-
comes centered on the flexor-extensor paths of my right hand,
which though nearly still, becomes a Bergsonian cascade of micro-
positions. Actual and virtual finger contractions mirror each other

13. A blood-red mushroom with white veil remnants found throughout Eurasia, and
the western United States. In the northeastern United States, the yellow-skinned Aman-
ita muscaria var. formosa is reported to have varying levels of psycho-activity depending
on locale, time of season foraged, and age of development; ingestion of raw specimens
can cause a muscarinic reaction; drying or cooking specimens converts ibotenic acid
into psychotropic muscimol. Ingestion can cause delirium and the loss of motor coor-
dination; the periphery of the perceived body image becomes a-positional and de-real-
ized as distinctions of inner and outer collapse; also, induced, inadvertent bellowing
and shouting can occur. These involuntary broadcasts become enunciatory ejacula-
tions of sound—the somaticized word.
14. Identified by R. Gordon Wasson, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), a view supported by Doniger O’Flaherty, as reported
by Wasson in “The Soma of the Rig-Veda: What Was It?” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 41:2 (1971).
15. A Mexican entheogenic plant of the mint family identified by R. Gordon Wasson
in “Notes on the Present Status of Ololiuhqui and Other Hallucinogens of Mexico,”
Botanical Museum Leaflets 20 (1963): 161–193.
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 277

in a cine-somatic montage. Pierre Janet’s “‘Reality function,’ the

consciousness of certain displacements of our members,”17 is ana-
morphically occluded by Bergson’s “consciousness of incipient
movements,”18 and the images of these prehensile segmentations,
both actual (actually achieved) and virtual (incipient with the pos-
sibility of achievement, or having been achieved, recollected as
memory of achievement), are superimposed as images of durational
flux. This micrological segmentation, observed in inner vision as a
luminously colored X-ray, becomes a chromatic ballet mecanique.
The epidermal limit is effaced in a hypostatic blur.
Plunging deeply into the Soma, I become “the eye in the flesh”—
I am the cine-somatic eye. Before me floats in aqueous green light a
histological slab, seen in three-quarter planar view, a living speci-
men of membranous vasculature, an image of the “plane of imma-
nence.”19 The eye in the flesh does not occupy the occipital cavity,
but acquires motility within this supporting fluid of visceral light.
The homuncular eye20 penetrates the fluid hydraulics of this matrix
in perfect osmosis, and thereby dissolves (Fig. 2).

Self-Organization and the Daimonic

Consequent to my researches into wire-frame and Soma, a new
understanding of the trajectory of my work as a painter shapes itself.
Ideas regarding the self-organization of systems, as discussed in the
work of biologists such as Stuart Kaufman and Francisco Varela and
cosmologists such as Lee Smolin, are bringing us back to what might
be called, paraphrasing Varela, a “re-enchantment of the concrete.”21
Contemporary science makes a place, narrow to be sure, for a kind
of speculation regarding materiality that in some respects parallels
ancient thought. The clay in the ground isn’t just sitting there, it is
doing something: self-organizing, in an “errant and even ‘delirious’
distribution.”22 And it may perhaps be aware, on some incredibly
16. R. Gordon Wasson (1898–1986), international banker, amateur botanist, and author.
17. Pierre Janet, French psychologist (1859–1947), cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The
Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 163.
18. Henri Bergson, French philosopher (1859–1941), cited in ibid., p. 163.
19. For remarks on Deleuze’s “plane of immanence,” see Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor
of Being,” trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
20. For more on the homuncular eye, see Robert Yarber, “Suspension of Disbelief: The
Body of the Painter in the Face of the Virtual,” Art & Design 48 (1996): 64–71.
21. Francisco Varela, “The Reenchantment of the Concrete,” in Zone 6: Incorporations, ed.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 320–338.
22. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (above, n. 2), p. 36.
278 Configurations

Figure 2. “Eye Cave,” by Robert Yarber. Ink on paper (2004). (Reprinted with the permis-
sion of the artist.)

primitive level, of what it is doing. With the potency of such a min-

eralogical panic exerting itself—“Oh deathly quiet pandemonium!”23—
the idea of the daimonic,24 or nonhuman though conscious entity—
comes to mind.
The paintings comprising “Sortie: The Demonological Survey,”
beginning in late 2000, present desert settings serving as staging
grounds for the deployment of various “entities” inspired by medi-
tation upon the ancient “elementals,” or daimonic beings, of Helle-
nistic and Indian myth in their nature as loci of natural and social
power relations (Fig. 3). The demonology of the late antique period

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Dionysosdithyramben. The word panic, derived from the name
of the god of nature, Pan, is perhaps related linguistically to the ancient Vedic Soma:
“Since the ancient Eurasian word for Amanita muscaria, pangk, and ancient words for
inebriation in Finno-Uralic languages such as pagal derive from the same root (the lit-
eral meaning of pagal is ‘bemushroomed)’” (Wasson, as cited in Ott, Pharmacotheon
[above, n. 9]), the association of pangk (Soma) and panic seems reasonable.
24. The daimonic, “that which binds the body to the soul”—i.e., tutelary genius, follow-
ing Homer in the Iliad—is used throughout the writings of the Neoplatonists. The
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 279

Figure 3. “The Triumph of Polyphemus,” by Robert Yarber. Oil on linen (2004). (Reprinted
with the permission of the artist.)

serves as a kind of speculative physics. Neoplatonic philosophers

struggle to define the makeup and nature of the daimonic.25 There
are, for the Hellenes, beneficent demons and evil ones. Manipula-
tions according to set ritual practices, often involving complicated
physical tasks as well as flesh sacrifice, will ensure the service of this
or that demon. Porphyry cautions against the nourishment of the
“humidity” of demons: “These are beings rejoicing at ‘drink offer-
ings and the odor of fat,’ by which their pneumatic and bodily parts

daimon often refers to the individual “genius” of a person, although it can also refer to
the daimon of a place or thing, such as that inhabiting Proclus’s heliotrope. The demon,
on the contrary, as is found in Christian literature, usually bears the connotation of an
evil, rather than a neutral being. Proper usage is therefore as indeterminate as the many
opposing views regarding the beneficence, neutrality and malevolence of demons.
25. “The daimons of Iamblichus may be likened to ‘laws of nature’”; see Gregory Shaw,
Theurgy and the Soul (University Park: Penn State Press, 1995), p. 195.
280 Configurations

are fattened.”26 Demons are therefore seen to be more or less embod-

ied, if very ethereally, in the basic constituents of matter. They are,
moreover, not so much willful imps as they are instrumentalities,
albeit conscious and desiring ones, subject to causal relations in ac-
cord with the rest of nature:
With respect to their powers, those of daimones must be defined as fecundat-
ing, for they oversee nature and the binding of souls into bodies.27 (Fig. 4)

Such a distribution is demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity

of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action, as it
is to leap over the barriers or the enclosures, thereby confounding the barriers
between boundaries. Oedipus’ chorus cries, “What demon has leapt further
than the longest leap?”28

Mythopoiesis, or the becoming or “bringing into being” of myth,

closely parallels what Varela describes as autopoiesis, or the auto-con-
struction of the self. The daimonic elementals serve as talismanic
concentrators of the allotropic (interior but alien) forces of the self,
which function as the anterior dimension necessary for the disequi-
librium of the autopoietic process. They are emissaries of the nonhu-
man that abide in the heart of the human:
What is neither individual or personal are . . . emissions of singularities in so far
as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent prin-
ciple of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from
fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of syntheses of consciousness.29

The self (body/soma), as constructed in this matrix of associa-

tions, is ultimately revealed as the membra disjecta of the dispersed,
anamorphic flesh of the Blakean polypus, scattered over the Deleuz-
ian plane of immanence. The Sortie paintings might therefore be
seen as fetishistic reifications marking the desire for stasis in this
chao-errency30 of the autopoietic process, functioning, in a fashion,

26. Christian philosopher Calcidius follows Porphyry in using humidity as a descriptor

of the thickened and dense (obesum corpus) daimonic body that shares “an excessive
partnership with matter”; see J. Den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons (Leiden: Brill, 1977),
pp. 3, 41.
27. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, cited in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul (above, n. 25), p. 133.
28. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (above, n. 2), p. 37.
29. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 102 (emphasis in orig-
inal).
30. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (above, n. 2), p. 57.
Yarber / The Cloud of Unknowing 281

Figure 4. “Encosmic Hearer,” by Robert Yarber. Oil on linen (2004). (Reprinted with the
permission of the artist.)

as a burlesque31 of the Freudian death drive. This would mark their

failure. Ideally, as talismanic operators, they generate morphoge-
netic change in their environments. Although apparently not far
removed from the phantasms of today’s popular culture as found in
computer games and horror movies, they are intended to suggest an
efficacy beyond the aesthetic (Fig. 5).

31. Ibid., p. 17: “The death instinct must be understood in relation to masks and
costumes.”
282 Configurations

Figure 5. “Eye Propagator,” by Robert Yarber. Oil on linen (2004). (Reprinted with the
permission of the artist.)

The gods are attributes, accidents arisen out of chaos. Across al-
lotments of attributes, the masks of the divine and the abject are
exchanged in silence, a quiet pandemonium. The dice are thrown,
the wager made. Through quiet perturbation, painting propagates
its errant species in molecular distribution, across the aetheric vel-
lum. Should it enter the brain, through the eye in the flesh, a sig-
num, signature, or chip implant might lodge to form a new disjunc-
tive synthesis, a post of the outside, a somatogenesis of a new
flesh—an exchange of the mask of the state body for the mask of a
god.