The Power of Occulted Life

A post-Beltane letter

The mechanism of control in the capitalist order is the same one first hit upon by the state priests of the “singular” god. A god claimed to “know the hearts of all men” and to judge “every word and every deed” is a terrifying weapon, a heavy bludgeon easily crushing every deviation from what is demanded and expected. And so, while none of the bits about charity or love were imported from that old religious order into this new one, the fear of the all-seeing god has been a core feature in every update.

The swelling heat of the turn of the month ebbed for a few days into a soft, still warmth and then further into a pensive coolness. And that’s why I’m writing this letter to you, because it’s exactly such times I’ve found to be best for writing.

It’s been a week, now, since I rode my bike to an ancient stone grotto for a Beltane ritual. In that place, where the Treveri Celts performed rituals to Arduinna, and then later Diana and then to Freyja, I drank Damiana and dreamed.

Below the place I lay dreaming, a child built a wooden fort in a stone crevice under the joyful guidance of his mother, their laughter echoing throughout the stones as I let the Damiana guide me into becoming headless.¹

To tell all this, of course, is also to tell something else completely which, by necessity and by desire, I choose to occult.

I’ve been struck by a recurring theme in many of the things I’ve recently read about the point of secrecy, of holding things back, and especially of having a private self. In a manuscript I’m editing from the excellent writer Thomas Ogden, he recounts something that Jorge Luis Borges’ widow, Maria Kodama, said personally to him: “the things the ones we love don’t know about us are the things we have to give them, the things they will never know.”²

Such things withheld, which Kodama later calls “gifts” and others might call “secrets” or “privacy,” need hardly be even all that interesting, only that they remain unknown except to the self. And such a withholding runs completely counter to the capitalist drive to know absolutely everything about everyone. The more is known, the more easily we are managed and controlled.

Especially, the sense that we feel as if “they” already know what we want and are thinking — the false synchronicity of the social media algorithm — is quite suffocating. Worse, though, is that in portraying the sense that they know what we were already thinking, we are given to believe such things were actually what we were thinking. As in a manipulative sales pitch that convinces us we’d wanted to buy a product all along, we come to mistake the planted desire for something emanating from within.