The Madness of Kelly Marie
On the very day her prophetic dreams came crashing to
earth and her righteous, godly cause fizzled ignobly in a spastic riot, Kelly
Marie donned her queen bee hat and put on a prophetic performance for the ages
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4eGLlFLlWg&fbclid=IwAR1p3cSU78WqEjMDuUPu844OD2kmVMP3LWJ9YZv0oMgaToeauQMb-Skyc3I).
I don’t say this lightly or
sarcastically. Judged aesthetically this is one of the most remarkable things
I’ve ever heard. If I were still doing my radio show on weird Americana I would
certainly play a portion of it. Indeed, I would have to select highlights for
Kelly Marie keeps this up for over three hours. I once had Kelly Marie pegged
as a backwoods Homer but she is also, it seems, a backwoods Wagner! This very
stamina might indicate some manic possession or, to use the kinder old
fashioned phrase, poetic frenzy. To her followers, of course, it is the divine
madness of the prophet. Yet, and this is the interesting point, it is a madness
that leaves the creative faculties perfectly intact and indeed, probably
heightens them. Kelly Marie is in control of every note, every cadence and
every dramatic pause. She speaks as musically as she sings and it is often as not
a gruff, earthy music. At all times she is hypnotically intense. She varies pace and tone as the spirit moves
her yet, anchored to a drone from her synthesizer, never disrupts the flow of
her prophesying.
Afflatus is a worry for religion and art. We all crave
it yet it can sink the critical faculties. It can produce great artistic
effects or spectacular artistic failures. It can wed great artistic power and
energy to ridiculous or even malign causes. Think of artists like Pound, Hamsun
or Celine. Some might think it absurd to
include a ‘folk’ or ‘outsider’ artist like Kelly Marie in this company but I
don’t agree. When she invokes (with a little dash of Greek!) the ‘dunamis’
power of the ‘spirit’ this is, in fact, a primary energy of the self we cannot
banish without succumbing to dead, repetitive order. Ironically though, an
overemphasis on afflatus can produce a dead repetition of its own as when the
prophet begins to hammer the same points obsessively and compulsively. However,
I am not interested in stigmatizing madness of any kind divine or otherwise.
Given a certain family history of mine I would be a hypocrite if I did. Nor can
I sneer at ‘outsiders’ for when I look in the mirror I often see one. If there
is a balance of the unconscious and conscious, reflective energies of the self
I cannot honestly claim I embody it. In a better world, perhaps a post
technocratic, post capitalist world, the manic energy of Kelly Marie might find
some productive outlet rather than the futile performance of angry, resentment
fueled rebellion. That said she has gone to a place I distrust profoundly yet
cannot honestly banish. This is the place of inspiration, intuition and
spontaneity, the place of ‘spirit power’. It is the place of self-illuminating
inner truth and light.
In the 17th Century this was called
‘enthusiasm’ and EVERY proponent of established state and church order pegged
it as the enemy to be fought with every available weapon philosophical,
theological, scriptural or other. This other included flogging and jailing
Quakers who were the arch enthusiasts and proponents of ‘inner light’.[1]
Yet, in key respects the crazed prophets and enthusiasts of the 17th
Century won many of the basic battles of modernity. They did not win them by
superior scholarship either. The ARGUMENTS of people like the Quakers and Diggers were
often (though not always) crude. If there is reason in history it is not discursive reason!Yet, we must say, the spirit of these and
other ‘dissenters’ is the spirit of our age and our institutions to a
considerable degree. This, I guess, is what arguments count for. History, at
least, does not care about them one bit. Anyway, the ones who win the great
battles of history get to caricature and distort the arguments of their enemies
so that forever after they go down to posterity as either supreme dunces or
lying knaves.
The dissenters, for instance, won out in America and
that is why we have Kelly Marie to deal with. It is why we have so little idea
what Christianity could look like if it does not look like Kelly Marie. If it
is not ALL afflatus and ALL direct revelation and ALL prophecy and miracle ALL
the time then what is it? Religion is now the sphere in which the a-rational
forces of imagination, intuition and fantasy get to run riot.[2]
It is one of the basic spheres in which we allow those things to express
themselves while the rest of us buckle down to an economically driven
technocratic order that involves its own, less visceral, sort of madness.
Hooker, Locke, Swift, Dryden and the Cambridge Platonists would all be
horrified at the victory of enthusiasm over orderly national Protestantism (so
in fact would Luther and Calvin!). Dryden perhaps saw it all coming and turned
in the end to Roman Catholicism. He, then, would be doubly appalled at the
‘Charismatic’ Catholicism of Amy Coney Barrett. The enthusiasts may even be the
future of Catholicism thanks to America! This shows, surely, that there is no
place to hide in a meltdown. At any rate all these figures defended a
conception of order that has proved too restrictive and too socially exclusive
to contain the energies of an expanding modernity.
Private access to unmediated truth is scarcely a
‘Christian’ thing anymore however. My students have their own private ‘truth’
exactly as Kelly Marie does and demand that others recognize that truth when
they ‘speak’ it. The enthusiasts have won that battle, the battle for inner
light and illumination over public standards of reason and observed fact. This
is not a criticism either (history doesn’t care about that) but just a
statement of fact. The measure of their victory is that they have captured, nay
defined the ‘secular’ world too. The contempt for external authority noted in
the early dissenters, who refused to doff their hats to gentlemen, has won out as
well. ‘Question authority’ is now the reflexive stance of young and old. Rush
Limbaugh was telling nothing but the unfortunate truth when he said that the
Capitol Hill rioters were the ‘American revolutionaries’. America is founded on
a precedent of rebellion and elites can cry all they want about insurrection
and subversion but it can only ring hollow.[3]
We all admire some rebel somewhere because rebellion has glamor and allure.
What is more, a nation founded on revolution can only ever mask and paper over
its basic problem with legitimacy: why was our revolution justified but not these other
ones? What is behind the pompous language of law and order but a basic
insecurity about legitimacy? Once the traitors win they are no longer the
traitors but glorious revolutionary heroes and indeed they get to call the old
regime traitors to the people! Traitor, rioter, looter, terrorist and other
such terms are a muddle of subjectivity and even bad faith.[4]
Further, for every Kelly Marie writhing in the spirit there is another devotee
of raves or a spiritual tourist dabbling in ayahuasca. The values of her subculture reflect the
larger culture it is embedded in and vice versa. This is why there are two
Americas only in a certain restricted sense. If there ARE two Americas they are
two Americas competing for much the same turf. They are competing for who gets
to speak in tongues and be lauded as woke and enlightened and who gets to speak
in tongues and be mocked and ridiculed. Tongues; private, vatic, occluded
truths may reign either way.
[1]
There is an underlying problem here. Christian philosophy has long accepted, in
varying degrees, the notion of illumination as the ground of knowledge. When
the English Locke came across the writing of Malebranche and his doctrine of
the vision of all things in God he immediately assumed Malebranche was an
enthusiast. This was a jejune error on his part of course: Malebranche was an
Augustinian for whom inner illumination came from a mental contact with the
Platonic ideas, indeed the idea of such ideas which is the substance of God
apprehended as the notion of general being. The ideas were universally
available to all minds by way of the same process of introspection and were in
fact the ground of human communication. Still, the language of inner light in
the Quaker or Shaker sense can readily be mistaken for Augustinian illumination
and minus the doctrine of ideas ‘inner light’ or Christian interiority becomes
precisely this: subjective inspiration that cannot be mediated to anyone
else.
[2] A
profound and seemingly intractable problem is that fantasy can encode perfectly
sound perceptions of the world though in displaced form. The Capitol rioters
are absolutely correct that the nation has been stolen from them and they are
correct about where this theft took place. The lizard people stand in for the
ordinary plutocrats and their political lackeys who have stolen and looted a
nation not behind the secret doors of a cabal but in plain sight. Yet, like the
purloined letter, their crimes are perfectly hidden to their primary victims.
If fantasy could see its own content it would become revolutionary politics but
alas it is the nature of fantasy to occlude itself from itself.
[3] I
have heard it said that Jihadis watch Star
Wars the same as everybody else and actually wonder why others cannot see
that they are the ‘rebellion’ fighting the ‘evil empire’. These images are
imbedded not only in Western popular consciousness but are global archetypes as
well.
[4]
Every man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Similarly, every man’s rioter is
another man’s protestor. Every man’s rebel is another man’s revolutionary and
every man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter. As public order cannot
come down simply to whose ox is being gored alas, there need to be certain
proscribed actions that are wrong no matter who does them. I would nominate
killing as one of these. Civil disobedience is a vexing question but I agree
with King that even while breaking unjust laws we need to find ways to respect
a general principle of lawfulness.
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