The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions, and Recent Lacanian Studies

Introduction:
Working Assumptions

My work has taken a strange yet not unexpected turn. As the title of this unconventional review essay may suggest, it has recently centered, if that is the word, on strands of discourses—literary, scientific, psychoanalytic—which have one thing in common that I now understand has been my critical focus from the beginning of my career: visionary language and its cultural effects, particularly its promise, to the visionary thinker, of becoming divine, in the form of symbolic immortality. That Professor O'Hara finally understands what he has been doing, however, is not necessarily of interest even to a small public.

My newfound self-understanding preceded by only several months the events of September 11th. My primary working assumption nowadays is that the World Trade Center catastrophe made visible and underscored in an unforgettable manner what has been emerging for some time: not a new world order but a new dark ages. In saying this, I do not assume that any side in the continuing political and military struggles represents "civilization." In fact, I assume that all parties to the new global conflict are representatives of a new terror, a new terror that, ironically enough, demonstrates the greatest continuity in human history, that of religious vision. Our species may or may not constitute the earth as an ascetic planet, but it surely has made it, and will continue to make it, now with an awful vengeance, an unearthly realm.

My corollary assumption, therefore, is that the Enlightenment, with all its critical "posts" and "modernities," is over. I know that such an apocalyptic perspective is easily derided as irrational. But in light of the last century and a half of history, the most rational conclusion would seem to be precisely that reason, as theorized in the Enlightenment and after, simply does not exist. Or, if it does exist, in its secular, humane, and progressive modes, it does so, as it has always done, in a few selective cases, for a few moments at a time, in highly selective circumstances, with no predictable or consistent influence on anyone's praxis, not even on those few rational beings. Reason, if it really occurs in humans, is, in short, virtually a miracle.

My next assumption is, then, that the grand modern experiment to educate all peoples according to the Enlightenment ideal of progressive scientific, critical reason has failed without recourse or possibility of remediation. The United States of America is now a bona fide empire with an imperial civic religion of its own, and for understandable and other causes, it is at war with all other religious cultures in the world today.

Consequently, what I think we must now do is not only explore the worldly effects of unworldly visions but appropriate as best we can the traditions of vision in our own and other cultures so as to promote the possibility, sometime much later in human history (if any), of a basis for critical appreciation, understanding, and discussion. What follows is a first small attempt in this process of critical appropriation in my own case. Redeeming the time, in this modest fashion, is the best I think we can hope to do now and for some time to come. Unless, of course, we discover, as Yeats did in A Vision (originally published in 1925, then revised and reprinted in 1937), that we must promulgate a new divinity of our own.

1

"The Cold Heaven" is a twelve-line mock Miltonic sonnet (mock because it is shortchanged by two lines) collected in W. B. Yeats's poetic volume Responsibilities, published in 1914. ¹ The exact date of composition is not known. Yeats explains the poem's general intention to Maud Gonne in 1912, when he tells her in a letter that "it was an attempt to describe the feelings aroused" in him "by the cold detached sky in winter." Feeling alone, Yeats...