An Apology (of sorts) for Kelly Marie!

 

Kelly Marie seems to have no last name but she does have a remarkably flamboyant website (https://abbasministry.com/). Situated at her mike, phone in hand for ready reference, stationed before a giant pink and purple Aslan, she is hands down my favorite You Tube prophet.[1] She is of course AGGRESSIVELY pro Trump but that is not what I will be focusing on. Nor will I be addressing the strange amalgam of Evangelical Christianity, holistic healing and new age nostrum that is her website though I wish I could! I will however address the one thing I have no doubt you are all thinking about and that is her mental health and that of people like her. Anyone watching Kelly Marie would put her instantly in the category ‘crazy’ (I know David Pakman would) but I have seen enough of her prophetic performances to have determined that whatever is wrong with her ‘crazy’ does not cover it. I believe this is clinically true for her behavior is culturally coded and is, in the community in which she moves, probably highly adaptive. This eliminates ‘crazy’ in the DSM sense. However ‘crazy’ has a broader, normative meaning that attempts to label certain behaviors as unpleasingly disordered and disruptive of social order. In this sense the 18^th Century poet and visionary Christopher Smart was ‘crazy’ though all he did was ask that people pray with him in public. As Samuel Johnson pointed out (in a moment of humanity rare in that great but cruel literary century) this was simply a quirky (and admittedly annoying) expression of an underlying sociality and NOT a good reason to lock someone in a cell with only a cat for company (Jeoffrey...look up that great literary feline!). Smart was odd but not obnoxious in the moral sense at least according to Dr. Johnson. In this sense YOU might well think Kelly Marie as mad as a hatter but I don’t think this is adequate either. In other words, I think there is much about Kelly Marie that makes perfect sense if you happen to be Kelly Marie (at least on the basis of what I can learn from her public persona).

Because, and I mean no judgment in this statement, she is a contemporary North American she begins from a stance of victimhood. The stance of victimhood is, of course, the prelude to the story of how I overcame victimhood and claimed my true agency. That, I take it, is the function of the great purple lion AND the roars and growls and grunts and whoops that punctuate her prophesying. She is making NOISE by way of compensating for being silenced. Now, when Kelly Marie says she was a victim of physical and sexual abuse I have NO reason to think she is lying (though she might be I suppose). That bare facticity, though, now comes with an emancipatory narrative that perhaps did not exist in the past (perhaps slave narratives were the first form of it?).  At any rate Kelly Marie now projects the image of a roaring lion. It is a roaring, richly maned, MALE lion. I read this as Kelly Marie having it both ways. She has, behind her, an image of masculine strength, authority and paternalism. The lion is a protective fatherly image who may stand in for the inadequacies of a human father.  At the same time though she, a woman in what I suppose is a patriarchal setting, is roaring LIKE the lion and indeed assuming the mask of its authority. The lion dies and is reborn as Kelly Marie!  She roars “from her belly” as if has eaten it and absorbed its strength.  Perhaps, as a female, she has eaten and overcome the male rather like a black widow spider! It is easy from this to conclude that, as a woman subjected to a certain patriarchal constraint, Kelly Marie has taken up one of the few leadership roles open to women and run with it. She is not alone in this by the way. Many of the Trump prophets seem to be women. This may be counter-intuitive to us but not to them. Being a prophet for Trump empowers them in their communities as they can take on a mantle of leadership that might otherwise be closed. Patriarchy as such may not be challenged, indeed in the image of Aslan the Lion it may be affirmed but Kelly Marie and her ilk have carved out a nice little niche in it. She has constructed herself a little queendom as we all try to do and to that extent she might just be a smart cookie.

                Surely though when we get to the content of her prophecies we find a woman who is unhinged and ‘crazy’ in the non-clinical sense we typically use this word in. I am glad to say this is not correct either. The reason I am glad is that she is the product of a culture that millions of people are attached to and if you define the problem as ‘those people are nuts’ you have defined it in such a fashion as to preclude a realistic solution.  I will admit that when Kelly Marie is not prophesying about Trump much of what she says conforms to the basic discourse of North American therapeutic culture. So in that sense mental unease is very much what she is concerned with because, like so many people in our mad society, she probably suffers from it. Indeed, there are many people in America AND Canada who have no realistic access to mental health counselling  and these people could do worse, much worse than Kelly Marie when she is not burdened with the mantle of the political agitator. There are ten to twenty minute stretches of her videos where she actually is giving decent, if unremarkable, advice. Even so I have heard Kelly Marie articulate, apply and extend several metaphors at a time while maintaining the thread. I am sure there are many poets who would kill for this ability! In one remarkable "gust" she works the same metaphorical ground as Shelley does in his Ode to the West Wind (https://www.youtube.com/watchv=4mUTAggDFl0&fbclid=IwAR0QMWP33RN6a5oxox6cThXdXomab6ntxFcxE1dK5oWvVVa5Ibywl3wDjcc)

On that level, the symbolic and its application, her thinking is, in fact, highly ordered. Here we get to the nub of the issue.[2] Kelly Marie operates on an identifiable set of ontological and epistemological principles. I have partly articulated this elsewhere. Kelly Marie and her ilk operate by a technique of imagistic association. Poets, when they do this, are supposed to be among the saner parts of the population (or so I would hope). Kelly Marie operates by chains of symbol that link contemporary events with the magical dream time of Biblical days. To revert to what I said above a North American woman might, by assimilation to the Biblical type, become a Deborah or an Esther; types of female power in a patriarchal era! Thus, we might think of Kelly Marie as living under the reign of typology or a symbolic ontology. This ontology unveils the apocalyptic meaning of the now (for Kelly Marie lives absolutely in the now as we are constantly told by therapists to do!), the absolute moment of the crisis point of history. You might think this ridiculous when Kelly Marie does it and often, frankly, it is but is the technique itself contemptible? If you think it is I invite you to consider the prophetic poems of Blake which operate on comparable principles. She also has an epistemology of a sort: one that accepts dreams and visions as symbolic communication. In this Kelly Marie certainly conforms to the historic human norm. Most cultures accept dreams as a language that conveys a content and indeed I know many fairly secular people who avidly analyze their dreams. Of course dream imagery and poetic free association here seem untouched and undisciplined by standards of reason, argument and evidence if we take these words in the discursive rather than intuitive sense. The poetic seems to operate free of a culture of reflection. However, take any point you will in history and when will you find a discursive culture of reflection as anything but the thin veneer of an elite that speaks reason before the world but privately pursues dreams of power and dominance that have little to do with a rational reflection on the aims of life? Shelley excepts only "some few of Athens and Jerusalem" and he may not be far wrong. I hardly blame Kelly Marie for doing nothing but what the rich and powerful do so casually that they cannot notice themselves doing it no matter how much it is pointed out to them. I’m sure there is somewhere a liberal American plutocrat raging against the prosperity Gospel as we speak (so vulgar!!!) though this is only the rage of Caliban looking at himself in a mirror.

So yes, dear reader, I am indeed saying that Kelly Marie is you and me and all of us. This is not to say I think she is correct. I know there will be readers who are anxious for me to articulate why, after all is said and done, they are better people than the Kelly Maries of the world; so much smarter, edgier, cooler! Well, I will tell you: I do not believe in the apocalyptic moment. I do not believe in the crisis of the now and I do not believe that now, right now, is the apocalyptic show down of good and evil. This idea is dramatic, vivid and I understand why people who live boring, constricted lives want to live in its light. This is not to say that we do not face profound and difficult problems only that the construction of an absolute apocalyptic moment is not the way to deal with them. This is why I reject the prophets not because I can prove there is something crazy, inhuman, stupid or (gasp!) ‘epistemologically incorrect’ about the stance of prophecy.[3] If I could it would be a banality of no interest to anyone but You Tube atheists. Part of the reason I say this is structural. Kelly Marie’s stance is not a product of distorted thinking but it IS a form of thinking that cannot interact with any other. If Kelly Marie were sitting before me there would be no occasion for dialogue. Poetic intuition cannot converse with poetic intuition without some discursive intermediary and that, alas, would be plain, boring old reason. I should say dialogic reason not pure ‘formal’ reason but that perhaps is a distinction for another piece.  

To conclude though, let me make a couple of points. One is that I don’t want to offend Christians for whom John of Patmos is a canonical author. Apocalyptic thinking can be serious and humane  as in Gregory of Nyssa or Eruigena where humanity is divinized and nature humanized in the final restoration of all things. There may well BE an apocalyptic moment in that elevated sense but it is NOT one that humans can construct for themselves or force by anticipation and, frankly, forcing the apocalypse to come NOW and on OUR timing is the sum and substance of Kelly Marie’s prophecy. Still, whatever the final showdown of good and evil entails it is NOT a showdown between Democrats and Republicans and it is NOT a showdown over America. It is NOT a showdown between progressives and conservatives either and this is not just a delusion of the right. These views are a construct of human apocalyptic thinking and the result of a temptation we all share to immanentize the eschaton. There may be an end but it is the end above all things that we must not try to picture. Picturing the end in a way that attempts to go beyond aesthetic projection reduces the end to world immanent categories which negates the idea of an end. The end simply becomes a mode under which things continue as when the J.W.'s posit that the wealthy Job will be Jesus' finance minister in the Kingdom of God. The problem with THIS is that relative evils become absolute evils and the crisis now becomes the absolute crisis. This makes our enemies not human enemies but types of Anti-Christ. In such a scenario all institutions become corrupt and fated to destruction by Krakens and other mythological beasts. The present is a Hobbesian battle between the forces of darkness (with a smattering of light!) and in that battle the notion of a ‘strong man’ who can protect us becomes not crazy but inevitable. If we live in a Hobbesian world something like the Hobbesian ruler becomes the inevitable solution even if the Leviathan proves a gaudy fool and con man.

As a final point, let me bring up one more unfortunate fact. If people in the realm of popular culture believe that political, media and educational institutions are hollow shams masking nothing but a malign will to power who is to blame for that? Partly those institutions themselves in so far as they have failed to serve human good. Partly though the Demos are simply aping their betters. They apply the same hermeneutic of suspicion that many professors do; ineptly perhaps but their core conviction is no different. Institutions have no legitimacy because they mask evil and power. Authority is bankrupt and all must be questioned and being questioned rejected. ‘Question everything’ is the one thing I don’t need to teach my students yet when people flock to the internet to do just this we academics realize there are interests and authorities we want to protect after all. Of course, it is no surprise if this skepticism also goes with shocking credulity: a man who believes nothing is primed to accept anything said Chesterton and he was surely correct. Nor is it a surprise that people so readily believe that appeals to justice, goodness and truth are shams as it is often true.  Still, we might wonder if hermeneutic practices in this vein are reaching the limit of their utility. We might wonder if these terms might require a certain re-enchantment, at least to the extent that people understand basic things like the need for everyone to pull together in a plague. Suspicion is an acid that eats social bonds and we can’t simply have a ‘culture’ of it and expect to survive. This is perhaps to say that we need a hermeneutic of suspicion grounded in a more primary hermeneutic of charity. This would be something different than a simple return to vanished innocence one hopes but that, again, is for another piece.

   

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[1] Kelly Marie is a charismatic prophet to be sure but when she interrupts her speaking in tongues to (charmingly) check her phone one is reminded of what Max Weber said about the routinization of charisma. Here is her endlessly diverting channel:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh0SWJGtGMPNTOEnnoMmb_w

[2] I constantly hear the phrase ‘mental illness’ associated with ‘disordered thinking’. My own experience in the matter makes me doubt this association is as firm as some think. In the throes of whatever it was I had I was capable of feats of ratiocination that as a well (i.e. medicated) person I doubt I could duplicate. Discursive reason and its power is that insignificant: us ‘crazies’ can do it like nobody’s business! I can confirm this from what other sufferers of bi-polarity have told me: that it was in the high ‘manic’ end of their cycles that they could do the most complex problems in math and chemistry. I sometimes wonder what the madness of people like Gödel had to do with their mathematical genius. But when ‘rationalists’ like Sam Harris go on about religious folk being ‘crazy’ and ‘mentally disturbed’ I have to wonder how much Xanax gets HIM through his day.

[3] Marxists say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary product of the dialectic YET at the same time we cannot sit back as if the dialectic will work by itself. Grace presumes effort. Interestingly, the prophets say the same thing. A prophecy of Trump’s triumph is an invitation to humans to co-operate with God’s purposes not a dead, robotic empirical certainty. Again, grace presumes effort.