« The King Kong of flowers | Main | RepRap » Stairway to HeavenWhat could be better than an Erik Davis book that explores the roots in mysticism of Led Zeppelin's songs? A Mark Dery interview with Erik, is what! I believe the interpretive imagination is "open," and that a responsibility to one's creative daemon, and to questions of ultimate meaning, is as fundamental as a responsibility to history or the disenchanting function of the intellect. This interest in imaginative overreading underlies my abiding fascination with religious revelation, the occult, and "visionary culture" of all stripes. In my view, the occult is peculiar in that it is almost designed to elicit creative overinterpretation—it encourages the reader to start connecting x and y, planets and roses, and drawing links between different texts until an immense quasi-conspiracy of signification arises. This process, once unleashed, takes on a life of its own, and takes one on a journey from which you never altogether return. Because the occult is designed for this sort of hermeneutics, one no longer needs to speak about the intentionality or ultimate value of individual texts. Random information—want ads, comic books, stray conversations—can be transformed into grand cosmologies through the occult imagination, a process that ultimately leads to psychosis but underlies scores of great fictions as well. I don't believe Plant and Page consciously put a lot of the stuff in that I describe, but I believe the creative imagination did. In other words, I allow the creative imagination a sort of agency because that's the ticket to get into the door, an animism of consciousness. So I'd like to think my mythopoetic reading of a goofy rock record is both legitimate and perverse, and sustained—like the performance of magic—only by its own ability, or not, to amuse, instruct, bewitch. I am drawn to a sort of "sacred irony": irony not as a simple dodge, but as a deeper turn of the screw. jon posted this at 12:16 AM |
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