By Allen Allen
Honestly, I couldn’t follow much of B.W. Powe’s latest extraordinary book… But what I did glean as an entry point was a balancing out of “feeling” and “knowing” our experiences. One page reads that “even angels feel… even demons know…” In a time where understanding intellectually, which includes culturally or politically, becomes emphasized over having more of an experiential sense of our lives, this book stands apart as trying to awaken our deeper understanding of this whirlwind moment in time. Through the sensual, through beauty, through slowing down and creating spaces in time so that unusual awareness may eventually peek through our smoggy hearts and minds, the reader is coaxed into taking the extra moment to not just contemplate but truly feel the messages here, let them resonate like a note of music.
The mission of the book seems to be going against the grain of the commonplace iBrain and the knee-jerk techno-scape of internet, phones, mass media and constant electronic information stimulation. Our world is plugged into externalized hyper-knowing, in contrast to the richness of intuitions and inner voice — voices that may or may not even be our own but that are trying to speak with us through strange and mysterious cracks in our assumptions about reality. Have we turned away from the paths of true communication in favour of staying superficially electrified? Cities have always feared the plague of drug addiction but is it possible the greatest drug of all was always hiding in plain sight: Our electronic mesmerizing us in somnambulist-hypnotized trance.
The new book picks up where many B.W. Powe themes have left off: the effects of technology, media and the electronic world are a familiar life-long fascination for Powe, a Marshall McLuhan student. However, Powe was also a student of McLuhan’s University of Toronto English Literature rival Northrop Frye (with Frye, conversely, the rival of Marshall McLuhan) and “Mysteria” brings out the Fryegian side of Powe more than anything else he’s written yet. Frye believed “mythology” as we know it now, as falsehood, was a degradation of the word and Powe’s new book, both halfway believable as fact and completely believable on another plane of consciousness, is part mythology — legend that feels more authentic than fact — and part overhead conversation during the pandemic, when many conversations in endless isolation began to became very unusual indeed. For example, Powe’s family, in Cordoba, Spain during the pandemic, makes a list of groceries; after food and vitamins and necessities have been listed, Powe’s daughter requests “a friend.” …Perhaps true to what happened, perhaps not, the simple mythic moment summarizes the other impacts of the pandemic more heart-achingly than any article that was published about it.
To circle back to Frye: Frye was the great Canadian visionary of literature (or “The Great Code” as he called it) and one of Frye’s most profound gift to Canadian readers of literature may have been a message that one must stay bookishly aloof from society and solitary to a degree if wisdom and visionary inspiration is to bloom in one’s self. Or, put another way, reading words and stories becomes a spiritual act in itself… in more ways than we can immediately fathom. That latter observation is what Powe has increasingly been exploring, it would seem. “We tell stories so we won’t disappear” he observes at one juncture in “Mysteria.” This statement gestures to the pandemic of loneliness upon the world now and how, historically, reading and writing were ways of coping and finding our way through the isolation, the sort John Lennon sang pop songs about, that threatens to swallow our souls into something beneath despair, our minds into madness.
Powe, who I can recall from my precious few classes with him at York University, always preached that reading and writing are really about sentences — “how do you feel about sentences”? — and he has remained true to that sentiment: The older he gets, he is writing words eloquently, yes, but caressing the language, loving the beauty of words, sentences, writing and books. The calligraphy used in “Mysteria” (alternating with traditional type) reminds us of a time before computer processors hammered out words per minute and reminds us, too, that every carefully chosen sentence is a work of hope just by taking the time to craft it. In a time when the world moved more slowly, there was more time to craft, to share hope, to shine light on cold shadows.
“Mysteria” sentences like: “Let nothing censure your light… but don’t stand too alone in the dark” hopes not just for more spiritual light but for a resistance against what Powe describes as a “virus” that is spreading post-pandemic, infecting every aspect of life, threatening to limit us to grimly narrow thoughts and feelings, ultimately resulting in very real physical consequences. The global mental health crisis is just the most obvious proof of the virus; there are multiple other crises happening at any given moment that speak to a global instability most closely traced back to a lack of spiritual health… if we were only able to be honest about such things. The very lack of ability to frame conversations that way in the world today, without major eye-rolling push-back, is itself a sign of how tightly the virus grips us.
Powe’s daughter offers him an explanation as to what his book will offer as antidote: “So it’s about Everything?” To which Powe offers a humorous follow-up to that thought which I won’t spoil here… but she is not wrong. Powe has long tried to persuade the public that our scopes of understanding are too restricted, which is how we miss so much more of what is “really” happening. If we broadened our understanding to include imagination and the cosmos, the mysteries of both, as well as the flip-side smaller details of existence which may seem trivial but are often of equal significance, perhaps we would begin to solve problems we currently barely grasp; better yet, perhaps we would feel dimensions we did not perceive as being there, or recognize truths that could open us up to new experience, more experience, liberating breaths of fresh air previously untapped, so to speak. Maybe we wouldn’t be junkie-scrolling news on our phones every fifteen minutes… or less… The soul requires room to grow, forever, and the more the virus tells us we are nothing, we are less, we must responsibly be less… the more we become suffocated, deadened inside, further infected.
Without detouring this review too much more, quickly I must mention that Powe in “Mysteria” takes great interest in the Swedish great Ingmar Bergman, the cinema of silences and faces and profound musings and mysteries, particularly in “Persona” where two women in cottage isolation merge into each other’s identity… and then into non-existence. I understand some of the significance of Bergman to Powe and “Persona” to the pandemic, perhaps less than I would like to understand as it is a fascinating comparison, but a recent rewatch of 1972’s “Solaris” reminded me of Powe’s work just as much and enhanced my reading of “Mysteria” so I share this thought: The famous Russian science-fiction film, from cinema’s most ponderous and meditative filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, is based on a Polish book about a psychologist sent to a space station to see if the researchers there have become insane… or, perhaps, they have discovered conscious alien life that manifests itself through an ocean that can create clone-like beings out of each nearby human’s subconscious, something to do with that which makes them feel incomplete… The movie ultimately adds up to the scientists in the isolation of the space station each becoming entranced by and obsessed with the mystery of the meaning of life that the alien life mirrors to them — they each gradually become lost in endless philosophical reflection, forever.
Tarkovsky admirably imbues the movie with as much philosophical, “slow moving” cinema as possible, however, the greater message of the movie is about the seduction of the quest for more self-knowledge. The movie’s legendary ending is implied as a tragedy about the human condition: Yearning for exploration in our lives infinitely… but simultaneously wishing we could (and mourning the loss off the ability to) go back home to the familiar, to a sense of rock-solid knowledge that cannot be shook. …Powe is working out the balance between these two opposite destinations in “Mysteria”…
Societies (and nations especially) tend to emphasize a safe “home” over the dangers of exploration, including spiritual boundaries being crossed. As a painfully obvious example, “America First” is a paranoid battle cry against the possibility that America is no longer in a fixed, easily definable state. We need to know precisely what we are! Our borders must be limited! No confusion allowed!
But in our time when it is becoming commonplace for a sense of home to be shook, displaced or disoriented, Powe, like Tarkovsky, is suggesting the less we explore, the more our sense of home fades; the more we explore, the more we begin to create counter-environment that make us realize what our home is. Powe is a Canadian married to a Spanish woman (Cordobian, who apparently are like the Irish of Spain in speaking style) and the contrast between the cool “snow-dune” Canadian landscape and heat-dancing, red sun Spanish vistas fascinates Powe in this book, helping him realize not just what makes Canada Canada and Spain Spain but even more so that there are mysteries between the two that lead to questions, or quests, for more understanding about the human condition. Like Tarkovsky, Powe is dreaming of mysteries between worlds, of infinite reflection. The contrast between the two countries becomes almost cinematic — the ice of Canada and fire of Spain become two opposite yet complementary energies highlighting an elusive dynamic that is difficult to put into words but also contrasts against the fire and ice energies of our current social landscape as mediated through technology: People are becoming colder, at the same time they are plugged into the burning of electricity, burning the whole world up with glowing light…
If these musings seem too abstract, Powe also grounds himself (so that he would not float away lost in airy contemplation) by sharing a few heart-melting farewell stories of his World War II veteran family. These moments remind us of a world we are quickly losing connection with, a powerful sensation of home that is being eroded with time during the merging of the world into one giant hive-mind. The heavy presence-in-silence of WWII veterans reminds us that some flames burn less wildly, less harshly, more quietly… but steadily and all the stronger for it… in contrast to unstable flames, the flames of the chaotic restlessness the world is often charged with now. In absence of a little dosages of inspiration to help tie each of us over between revelations, the world becomes frenzied, panicked, insatiable and voracious.
We often mythologically think of our elders and the ancient could as living with so little yet being so comparatively content. You hear much about the greed, selfishness and superficiality of subsequent generations. Powe is resistant to those simplistic judgements but “Mysteria” points to another possibility, that rather than us all being smaller than ever, are we actually all still part of something much larger than anyone has fully comprehended yet? This is an existential invitation — are we human enough to move past mere thinking and into the depths of the soul to guide us forward? Will we dare to burn steadily, like the veterans, quiet the noise inside us to be able to hear more? What new frequencies might we begin to receive if we were able to do so?
In a 24/7 news cycle world where even distinctions between day and night are becoming less sure, the noise prevents us from being able to dream. (Something Tarkovsky also was obsessed with in “Solaris”, humans losing their ability to sleep…) When we imagine our collective predicament deeply, we charge it with self-less, empathic resonance that reaches out to other hearts, cultivating a different sort of electricity, another sort of cosmic phenomenon we are part of, which technology is just one literal expression of — a mystery so complex and so compelling, so humbling and yet so inspiring, that we wake up each day in awe and fall asleep each night dreaming even before we rest our heads. Whereas, when we complain bitterly of others, withering each other down to size, it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in which the world is only as small as we make it.
Powe believes something more is afoot here than petty, negative squabbling. Much of the world has lost interest in being human, yet are perpetually shocked when their lives then somehow appear unfulfilling. Powe laments this shortcoming in humanity, often seen through our replacement of the quiet flames within us with the glow iPhone screens. Yet, passion remains obtainable through our imagination’s ability to conceive of more. For Powe, the pandemic, while traumatic, became exemplary of how humans must band together to defy the virus. Sounds of chatter in streets, aromas, eroticisms, joys of birth, sorrows of death, the horror of a child’s nightmares and what sacred awareness they may have about the world that adults cannot instinctually sense yet — these all become gateways to more questions, more life… if you want it.
“Mysteria” weaves and moves about eclectically through avenues of personal anecdote, poetry and philosophy, stories of mystics, ancient stories of romantics falling from grace and the aftermath, letters and everything between including imagined group talks between John and Yoko Lennon and Marshall and Corinne McLuhan… Tying the wandering thoughts and imagined scenes together is a desperate plea to not give up on the memory of the human quest just yet. Instead, Powe asks us reimagine our every day as embedded with traces of meaning, questions less in need of answering and more in need of feeling through… in order to bring feeling sensation back.
If we could bring the feeling back to life, if we could make time slow down enough to feel the openings in it, the breaks or portals through which phantom-like but vital soul-thought begin to enter our consciousness, then maybe moments in time may become rich with experience again and maybe our days would not just pass by. Perhaps we could combat the ugliness currently eating away at every aspect of our contemporary lives. Perhaps we could shrink the void growing in our hearts. Maybe we could become our own teachers again, rich with thinking based in original discoveries. To that end, Powe calls us all out, like a sincerely free musician, to free ourselves:
“Cast your ideas aside
And play what you sense,
Only what your fingertips and hands, you wrists and arms
Want and recall, only what lips whisper,
What your breathing knows.
Cast your concepts away,
Play from exploring intuition.
You’ll sing or perform a rose, a tide, a cloud, a willow,
The wings, the full moon, the morning sun, and the darkling shore
You knew in her womb sea.”
The sea imagery again recalls “Solaris” and its supernatural ocean that can create ghosts from the depths of our own minds. What we most fear a relationship with is what the ocean conjures up, coaxing us into exploring the mystery of what thoughts and feeling remain hidden there. We are faced with a similar dilemma now, which Powe describes through a Sufi wisdom writers’ idea of “unlettering”: “Peeling away your preconceptions, seeking what’s momentary with a gloss, unfiltering your clogged senses, breaking from a domineering concept of reality, unlearning what you’re told to perceive” and so on… I believe the alien consciousness in “Solaris” is communicating a message of hope with the humans it comes in contact with — help them become more human, that is, by provoking them to look again, think again, feel again, alter perceptions of the darkest (most ignorant) assumptions they had of themselves. “Solaris” was fiction, though, whereas Powe is suggesting, as the Radiohead “Idioteque” song chants: “this is really happening…”
Humanity has reached a point in our evolution where we are brushing up against something alien, supernatural, cosmic, whatever you might mythologically call it, that is the flip-side of the “virus” we inadvertently unleashed through our ignorance. We are being torn apart by our reluctance to embrace the challenge of the cosmos to us, to embrace mystery — we are hiding within the confines of the virus, scared. We are scared to not join with the infected, with death, with certainty… We fear exploring the possibilities; we fear feeling like we do not know everything.
As an aside: Radiohead’s “Idioteque”, off their Y2K “Kid A” album with its title perhaps a reference to the dawn of Gen Alpha (the ones soon inheriting the mess we all made) and its cover an illustration of melting polar ice caps, opens with references to women and children being led to bunkers for safety. The song seems to vaguely allude to some sort of spiritual threat that no emphasis on responsible caution and closing ourselves off can actually protect us from. The visionary, prophetic song also mentions “mobiles” or phones “swerking” and “chirping” endlessly as if all this frantic phone messaging will save us somehow… The song concludes with: “Here, I’m alive: Everything, all of the time.”
A quarter century after the notoriously abstract alternative band Radiohead rang the alarm that something was going wrong with the new world order, Powe, like a doctor, is able to begin actually diagnosing the root cause: We lost touch with our own words and stories. They became mere barbaric blunt instruments we bludgeon each other with — we let their magic slide away instead of respecting the enchanted mysteries between us. The more we define reality by “I’ll believe it when I see it”, the more we become deaf to the voices leading us from one point to another view. One doesn’t go far believing the world always ends at the tip of the nose.
I can’t be sure I am actually understanding what Powe is saying — and none of us ever really fully know anyone else — but what I can be sure of for now is that Powe continues to be an author attuned to the invisible webs connecting us all, even at a time when it seems the world is increasingly fractured and wounded by one another. “Mysteria” is a challenging read, accompanied online by a moody Michael Mahy soundtrack for the book that enhances the overwhelming haunting quality of the work, but it is also a work observing of ironies and humility in the face of the rather large or epic phenomenon that Powe can only outline as best he can. It will take efforts from the rest of humanity to actually run with his words and approach their lives with belief again.
But what a gift this book is in guiding us through this precarious path. Frye once noted literature is not necessarily a benign path for readers to follow… Powe reminds us what the stakes really are at a time when we are starting to become nihilistic and apathetic towards anything mattering aside from flesh and bone survival. This supposed survival often means keeping our sensory systems cooled down — by feeding it streams of ideas we already believe to be true.
We spend hours and hours plugged in online nowadays, lost in reveries of stimulating-drugging information, burning our eyes out, keeping our souls distracted from the work ahead. “Mysteria” reminds us to unplug, to enter the air again, to move about in the unknown, away from the reassurances of our echo chamber Google searches.
An author who has always improved with age, “Mysteria” is Powe’s magnum opus, a lifetime of wisdom and musings collected, yes, but more crucially, it is our last breathing link to a world beyond the confines of a rectangular, glowing screen. One of the few works in the world right now, in any medium, that believes we still have much left to wonder about and explore… and must, as our future political, military and AI tech leaders tell us everything is just a matter of trusting them to fight off other nations and make their one true nation rich in money, material and booming career opportunity.
All we have to pay for these promises, it would seem, is accepting a poverty of dreaming, a poverty of soul depth and a poverty of possessing open spirits which allow us to feel the textures of invisible auras and dimensions that influence the human parts of us, our unique identities. Times are tough and with everyone struggling to make ends meet, sacrifices are made. Powe explores this in “Mysteria” as well, however briefly. The poor who put their pursuit of poetry and dreams aside for responsibilities, necessary action. To sacrifice, nobly, is one thing; to not understand that it was a sacrifice — a loss, a lost possibility — is another. We increasingly live in a virus trying to erase our sense of sacrifice being loss, instead trying to reframe it as what defines humanity — dreaming becomes cast as the work of evil and books like “Mysteria” become sacrilege. They distract us from “important matters.” In a world where nothing really matters… because we have assumed it to be so.
Our very fear of appearing outside regulated normality, of seeming “out of touch” with worrying constantly about survival and material comfort, becomes the very reason our society cannot find a path forward. If you make no time to dream of alternatives, there will be no alternatives. If you disrespect mystery, there will be only destruction. If you forget to explore, to sense more, the survival itself begins to appear empty, meaningless. We wonder why we have a global mental health crisis but the answer is already there… the questions are becoming so huge, so alarming, that the mind begins to crack.
“Mysteria” offers a whisper, a murmuring, a rumour to the left of the stage where the politicians frighten us with talk of life-or-death decisions, as if there is only life and only death and not also the complexities, questions and mysteries of the human quest — the quest that Frye believed all of literature outlined collectively and infinitely. To shrink into cruel judgement of that which is different or startling in its unusualness… or, to embrace the apocalypse of mystery and loose ends upon us now, “Mysteria” poses that choice.
We are often disturbed by that which could unravel us if not handled carefully; this fear understandably leads us to withdraw, lock down, isolate, quarantine, contain and contagion parts of our lives in separation from other parts. The disarming truth
“Mysteria” is unravelling might be that when taken to single-minded extremes, we inadvertently create the virus this way, like bacteria growing in extreme heat or cold.
When accepting we are part of something larger, stretching out to the cosmos, a story not so easily understood, we create dimensions and textures of life, which bring traces of meaning and inspiration, which make our life into a life. These motivating glimpses of our story are necessary for the sort of heroic energy required to tackle the problems we all face now, while also sometimes necessary to understand what exactly we are confronted with to begin with.
Can those of us who still sense these concerns are critical begin to persevere again for a way through the commotion of living today? Powe’s struggle to do so is a personal one for him, something he finds necessary as a person, not just an author; he is not asking us to be heroic, just asking us if we hear something, too, rustling through the rest of the noise, see something glistening through the darkness, feel something remaining through the eviscerating fire and numbing ice — the invisible but no less present conditions of our virus-plagued environments.
- Allen Allen, January, 2025
