Occlusion and Surveillance: Timeless Infinite Light and the Poetics of Occult(ing) Technologies
technology and the occult, spellcraft, surveillance states, Palantir, scrying stones, healing crystals, lithium, mining. Contraverse, Terror Matrix. presented at the University of Louisville.
NOTE: The following is a paper I presented at the 50th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture at the University of Louisville where I was part of a panel on poetry and magic led by Peter O’Leary.
The paper is about the Oakland based poetry press Timeless Infinite Light, which has described the work it publishes as “spells for unraveling capitalism”. I begin by trying to figure out how a poetics of anti-capitalist spellcraft might operate, but as I go on I become more interested in the poems’ engagement with technology, especially surveillance technology. I am especially interested in the dual meanings of occult, as in the esoteric/ magical sense and in a Marxist sense ie: what kinds of labor and what kinds of material are occluded by capitalism and the relationship between occlusion and surveillance.
(I am including the paper exactly as it was for the presentation. As a result, some of the phrasing might be a little informal or geared towards addressing an in person listening audience. If there are typos, or if Substack has messed with the formatting, please forgive me. If there are citation errors, please forgive me or let me know.)
Joel Gregory, editor of the the Oakland based independent poetry press Timeless Infinite Light, describes the work the press publishes as “spells for unraveling capitalism”1. Today, I’m planning to talk about few works published by the press, and to take a look at what a poetics of anticapitalist spellcraft might look like. The poems of the collections I am going to discuss; Contraverse by Alex Cruse, Terror Matrix by Zoe Tuck, and The Next Crystal Text by Melissa Mack make frequent explicit reference to magical practices and iconography while establishing their own incantatory poetics and fracturing lyricism. However, the poetics of spellcraft that animate these works are never uncomplicated by interrogations of the technics of spellcraft, that is to say the labor and and material that shape spellcraft as a mode of production. The poetry in these collections is shaped by the same forces of technology as everything else. The poems meet overwhelming techno-capital with magically informed resistance, or as Alex Cruse’s Contraverse is described, “a counter-spell for the nexus of big business, big data, and the state”.2 Surveillance technology and the security state in particular haunt Contraverse and Terror Matrix. These collections understand the occult features of the security state in its desire to hide the mechanisms of power. Revealing the occulted is one way these texts work to unravel capitalism. Next Crystal Text, for example, works to make visible the labor and material of the gemstone industry that has been occulted by capital. It is this sense of the occult, that of what is made hidden by the productions of capital, that I want to focus on in my study of the spellcraft in these poetic works.
Timeless Infinite Lights’ mission follows in the tradition of countercultural poets like Diane di Prima, who, like Timeless infinite light, operated in the Bay Area. Her collection, Revolutionary Letters, is a combination of small spells and anarchist broadsides, that mixture of mysticism and clear eyed revolutionary materialism that also defines the work of Timeless Infinite Light. The work operates at the meeting place of anti-capitalist action and magic, insisting on the need for both. This is clearest in “Letter 45’ (page 31), which begins
And it seems to me the struggle has to be waged on a number of different levels:
they have computers to cast the I Ching for them but we have yarrow stalks
and the stars
it is a battle of energies, of force-fields, what the newspapers call a battle of ideas
//
to take hold of the magic any way we can
and use it in total faith
to seek help in realms we have been taught to think of
as ‘mythological’
//
In this poem, which drafts magic into the very real war against oppressive forces, there is one image in particular I want to focus on: the computers casting the I-Ching for the forces of capital. I want to highlight this image because it recognizes early on the use that computers play in the dominating force of capital, foreshadowing the battle of technology and magic that will define the works of Timeless Infinite Light. This poem, and this line especially, stand out to me in relation to these contemporary works not just for the thematic and stylistic forebearance but the context of the poems’ creation. The years the Revolutionary Letters were written, 1968-1971, was, and I promise this is a paper on poetry and magic, the timespan in which the first Department of Defense funded ARPANET routers went live at UCLA and Stanford. I promise this is a paper on poetry and magic. The military origins of the internet are important here, when discussing especially Contraverse and Terror Matrix. And it matters that the is happening at the same time and place as the Bay Area counterculture. When Di Prima writes of the forces of empire using computers to cast the I-Ching, she writing this at the moment that military is developing the internet. That is to say, at a moment new levels the battle to be waged on are emerging.
As a Bay Area press, Timeless Infinite Light operates in the shadow of the Silicon Valley infrastructure that have sprung up from ARPANET servers. Silicon Valley has, and again I promise this is a paper on poetry and magic, in the past few years, pivoted hard to defense contracts and surveillance technology. The era of zero interest rates is over3, the mask is off and the rhetoric coming from out there has taken on a nihilistic, paranoid, eschatological edge4 and is also more susceptible to occult like proclamations. That is to say, they are seeming more and more like
the front men for a gang of black magicians
based ‘somewhere else’ in space
to whom the WHOLE of earth is a colony to exploit (pg 31)
that Di Prima warned of.
One brief example, and I promise this is a paper on poetry and magic: Palantir, the weapons and surveillance tech company founded by Peter Thiel, has a name taken from the Lord of The Rings. It’s been a while since I’ve read these books so forgive me if I am a little off, me, but in the books, Palantir are basically indestructible crystal balls, that allow Sauron, the evil wizard, to have total surveillance of Middle Earth. And I mention this for here for a few reasons. It is important that it is a crystal, for reasons I hope will become clear later when I talk more about The Next Crystal Text. It matters that these tech companies are not only drawing influence from fantasy but are taking pride in aligning themselves with the dark wizards. And it matters that Palantir is a surveillance company. That it develops technology that allows the user to see without being seen, to surveil while remaining hidden. And again, this is the sense of occult that drives my analysis.
The divide between what is occulted and what is made visible under surveillance capital drives the work of both Tuck and Cruse. Cruse identifies the “ontological statuses, more caul then lens (25)” that arise in the navigation of a mediated world, the “libet lag. waiting for news events to load.”(25). Cruse finds an occult numerology hiding in in the language of computer coding, the
fathered pliancy in the matrix of disguises,
proportions. geometry
drunk and
asleep at the pentagram (40)
and
“the rare math of death masks” (46).
In these lines there are masks and disguises, things to hide with, but they are threshed by, the dark mathematics of a surveillance technology. Take, for example, the role that the facial recognition software developed by a company like Palantir and deployed by government agencies has had in suppressing protests5.
Zoe Tuck’s Terror Matrix makes even more explicit a subject of the security state. The collection seeks to greet the computers that continue to pervert the I-Ching and “solv[e] code under the goblins hall where CGI moss grows” (30), with its own incantatory spellcraft, one that makes explicit reference to witches and rituals and the materials of spells, such as
I with the devil think or was it ride as witches clerics said and with medieval scholars ponder the devils complexion became a tulips pupil for a whole sheaf because the internet was down (23)
or
“my horn of bone your toothsome blotchy stamp as candelsticks recede I took a pinch of luck and charged my crystal phone” (17)
In this collection, Tuck articulates a poetics of spellcraft, but also interrogates this poetics, saying in one of the key lines of the collection,
“think this for a moment/ when a withces spell first word is toil/ then does a poem mix?”(5).
Spellcraft here is thus reframed as a labor. The antecedent toil of the spell is a driving theme of Melissa Mack’s The Next Crystal Text, a collection that looks at gems and sees “the actual work of mining”, a phrase taken from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and repeated throughout. The book again offers a poetics of spellcraft, but more than the other two I’ve mentioned, it is intensely focused on interrogating the technics, the alchemaic materialism that shape the production of the commodities of a spell.
The collection has moments of fluid lyricism. At times it finds the musicality of the eye of newts and toes of frogs of the mining industry, the material, the
“gangue, gob piles, culm banks, tailings, chat, slag, gyp stacks, bullion, slickens, slurry (32)”
However, the book most often operates in a documentary register, quoting promotional copy for Bulgari jewelry alongside news stories about slain miners. Even as it allows for the incantatory spellcraft of a poem, it remains grounded in the material world, the earth that produces the gems and the labor that removes the gems from the earth, seeking making visible the labor that has been occulted by fetishistic capital. It brings to mind Marx’s assertion that commodities are “crystals of a social substance” which have “human labor power accumulated in them”(128), or as Mack says, the object where “physical earth reveals itself as persons” (15). Mack reminds us that crystals are
“scooped by barefoot kanesema with shriveled skin/ alluvivial washing agent inundation/ seived buddled submitted sold on the street” (14).
Mack is sensitive to what is occulted.
On the subject of an exhibition of Bulgari brand jewelry, Mack asserts “the signage boasts that the viewer is being let in on the whole process/ Not true!” (66) Instead, “everything is shown about process of making jewels except the laborers who bring the metals and stones out of the ground”. (66).
The occult is found in the is the “mystification of Columbian Emeralds” which “go an extra step — towards fraud” as the gems pass from enslaved African miners to Jewish merchants “hounded and tortured by the inquisition” finally to “despotic Muslim rulers” (44). Mack traces this historic colonial violence to the present day, where
“police shot dead 34 striking workers at the Marikana plantinum mine in South Africa. The victims were killed a week after walking off the job for higher pay (51).
That isn’t to say that the collection spends its entire time in this register. These are the moments when the bluntness of documentary gives way to a vivid lyricism, and it’s in these moments that a different kind of magic is allowed to exist. One such moment is the poem “#mood”. The poem begins
“moonstone cameo/ camo for clothing my feelings/ for to walk in spring to the faerie ring/ for scrying school/ there are benches made for humans/ just like the one the soldiers made/ in the cuban revolution/
The poem ends with the line.
“the moonstone camo/ is for protection while fighting.” (105).
This image crystalizes two key juxtapositions. The moonstone is drafted from the spiritual, the camo from the military, and together they create a militant spiritualism, one for a battle fought on all levels. The same is true for the of casting fairy rings into the fight alongside cuban revolutionaries. Moreover, the image of moonstone camo highlights the contradictory impulses to conceal and reveal. Camo occults. The moonstone scryes. Together they create the ability to see without being seen.
Even recast though in revolutionary magic, the moonstone is still a mined commodity. In the spirit Mack’s' documentary research I wanted do a little research of my own. And I’ll be honest, I had to cut a lot of it, but I still want to talk about it a little, (because its interesting to me) and because the issue of occulted labor and material extends to occult practices.
In a 2019 article in The New Republic[title], Emily Atkins looked into the process of crystal production, paying special attention to the labor conditions of the mines the gems were sourced from, and ran into the same problem that Mack did. Atkins says that “Sourcing is a very murky topic within the healing crystal community, for a variety of reasons,” (atkins). Part of it, she argued, stems from “the deep, psychological construct of the mining industry, where everything is a little bit hidden.”
That is to say, the source of the raw commodity in the mining industry is occulted. This occlusion of course, comes at the imperative of capital.
Atkins continues:
“Publicly-traded mining companies don’t routinely disclose all of their byproducts, nor to whom they sell these byproducts. Annual reports for shareholders tend to list only the cumulative profits from byproducts. It’s therefore difficult to assess what percentage of the healing crystal market is sourced from industrial mining operations’ (Atkins).
I wanted to try to look specifically into the moonstones used in #mood. In my “research”, which was way less in depth than either Mack or Atkins, I ran into the same problems, but I did l find Tripadvisor reviews for The Meetiyagoda Moonstone Mine in Sri Lanka, which offers a “holiday excursion to look at the production of moonstones.”6 A common theme of the reviews was a sense of disappointment in the fakeness of the mining on display.
As sainani_sameer says: “The expectation is that this will be a site where there will be major digging going on and several people would be working in the mine to extract the stone. This is where the disappointment starts.”
DeuceWoooo says: “Although we had 2 men pop up from the mine, one I felt was for show & the other possibly for real. Actually I was well impressed when the real man jumped in that dirty great pool! I almost fell for it & tipped him, but there were 3 of them & I didn't feel that the other 2 warranted a tip”
missemar says: “little more than a hole in the ground - was it genuine? Not sure.”7
Like Mack says, “the signage boast that the viewer is being let in on the whole process. Not true! (66) The tourists, like Mack are, disappointed that they don’t get to see the “real” labor, only a performance of it. The “actual work of mining” is abstracted to a pantomime of the work of mining. In this way, labor is further occulted.
And, to be clear, this isn’t anti crystal or anything, and I think that it’s actually more interesting to think about this from the starting point of believing in them. To ask, what if moonstone does bring calm and balance but at the cost of violent exploitation of labor to mine them. What is the cost of a spell, even one to unravel capitalism? And if you aren’t willing to suspend your disbelief about spiritual crystals, then consider, at least for a moment, the crystaliline substance lithium, the one that powers the “crystal phone” that Zoe Tuck’s speaker was charging and all our devices.. It’s easy to think of the internet as something that exists entirely in the cloud but it runs on material mined from the earth like anything else. Lithium is an occult material and it generates a tremendous amount of energy at this tremendous environmental cost and I’ve had to cut all the research I did on lithium because this is after all a panel on poetry and magic but I am so fascinated by it but I at least wanted to mention it in the context of energy generating crystals and Timeless Infitinite light and the internet and occult material and labor. And as Mack says, “Fuck that silicon valley bullshit” (65).
Because it is a battle of energies. Whatever the fancy new language that tech companies use and whatever dark enlightenment bullshit they are trying to sell, the occult of the tech industry is just the same occulting work that capital has always done: hiding labor, hiding material, fetishizing the commodity. And as suggested by these collections one way the poetics of a spell to unravel capitalism might work is by scrying the things that capital seeks to occult. To work against the occlusion of the mundane labor of life. Spells for making the hidden visible. But I have to go. As I was finishing this, I got a spam email telling me “my gold and silver guides may be sorely out of date”, and I need to go fix that.
https://openhousepoetry.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/our-books-are-spells-for-unraveling-capitalism-an-interview-w-timeless-infinite-light/
From an uncredited blurb on the books back cover.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/11/techscape-zirp-tech-boom
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3854159-palantir-likely-to-benefit-from-governments-usage-of-facial-recognition-tech-bofa