August 23, 2024

What’s weird is the way the meaning of “weird” has changed.  Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz scored a hit and created a meme when he labeled not only his opponent JD Vance but the whole Trumpian and Republican crew as “weird.”  It has turned out to be an effective weapon in the war of “vibes” that this election has turned into.  I welcome it, but it is an unexpected reversal of a situation that had lasted my whole lifetime, and the Republicans are not the only ones caught off guard by it. 

I grew up in the 1950’s, when there was a “normal,” and the weird was what lay outside of it.  Actually, the weird was kept largely invisible for the straight, white, middle-class people who grew up within the norm.  Segregation meant that I do not recall ever meeting a non-white person until I graduated from my elementary school into a slightly more diverse junior high school.  Gay and lesbian people were of course closeted, and I doubt that most people had ever heard of “trans.”  Even those who fell out of the protected space of the normal were sequestered away invisibly and not talked about.  Those with severe enough mental health issues were put in insane asylums—which meant that “homeless people” as we know them now did not exist, since most of the homeless were those turned out into the streets with the closing of the asylums beginning in the 70’s.  And the amount of unacknowledged addiction was appalling.  Working class men were “heavy drinkers,” but only called alcoholics when they reached the point of hitting bottom.  The isolative, stressful role of middle-class housewife led to closet addiction to both alcohol and pills.  The famous family sitcoms of the 50’s and early 60’s were popular because people yearned for the kind of pastoral normality they depicted—not because they reflected actual conditions in many households. 

Then came the 60’s, an explosion of weird.  Normal parents looked at photos and television footage of the Summer of Love and Woodstock and saw part of the younger generation, often including their own sons and daughters, dressing in what seemed like the most outlandish, deliberately anti-normal, ways possible, flagrantly doing drugs and practicing “free love,” courtesy of the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, making anti-normal music, which is what rock very consciously was. We were weird, not because we didn’t fit in or adjust but because we rejected normality and all it stood for.  Because normality was achieved at the cost of giving in to the demands of exploitative capitalism, of averting one’s gaze from the racism, sexism, homophobia, and Cold War paranoia of a society that seemed hell bent on World War III.  We hippies were largely children of the white heterosexual middle class, but the Stonewall riots in 1969 inaugurated the gay rights movement that soon led to the in-your-face prominence of theatrical kinds of gay behavior: pride parades, drag shows, the flamboyant outfits of the BDSM community with their leather, collars, and masks. 

It seems to have been forgotten that many counterculture youth referred to themselves not as hippies but as “freaks,” thereby sending a message.  These days, carnivals and circuses are disappearing, but in the early 20^th century they were nomadic enclaves of the weird, and drew normal people who found themselves unaccountably fascinated by and drawn to such weirdness.  Early fantasists were drawn to them for that reason, such as Ray Bradbury in Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes and Theodore Sturgeon in The Dreaming Jewels.  Todd Browning’s remarkable film Freaks in 1932 became a cult classic by depicting the hard life of carnival “freaks”—portrayed by real-life examples and not Hollywood actors—with real humanity.  Browning’s film was one of the inspirations for Bill Griffith’s underground comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, still going strong after 50 years as Zippy.  Zippy is a “pinhead,” but not because Griffith is making fun of him.  Quite the contrary:  he admires Zippy, who wears a polka-dotted mumu and is blissfully unconcerned about being regarded as weird, enjoys life because he is free of conventional expectations of what he should like and how he should behave, and shares a love of surrealist absurdity with his creator (who sometimes shows up in the strip). Griffith despises the mainstream superhero comics, but the theme of the weird showed up there too.  The X-Men are mutants, feared and hated by ordinary humanity.  Alan Moore’s milestone graphic novel Watchmen is based on the premise that all superheroes, if they existed in real life, would be marginalized weirdos, not shining and admired beacons of heroism. 

Lady Gaga in her early, breakthrough days portrayed herself as a “monster” and her fans as “little monsters.” Her bizarre outfits—meat dresses and the like—makeup so stylized that it was years before anyone saw her actual face, and surrealistic music videos conveyed the message that “You can’t reject me because I reject you first.”  Gaga is a pop artist, but her predecessors were the rebels of rock music, who advertised their rebellion not just in decibel levels but by weird outfits and stage shows.  A few of them, such as Kiss, Black Sabbath, and Marilyn Manson, were as weird as Gaga.  But even folk, blues, and country performers to this day may signify their success by wearing flamboyant, gaudy shirts, jewelry, and tattoos to stand out from the crowd. 

The intellectual wing of the “weird” uprising during the 70’s and 80’s went under many names—post-structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, revisionist Marxism—and was in some ways so heterogenous that it has been questioned whether it was a single movement at all.  But the various theoretical critics and schools in both the humanities and social sciences tended to agree on one thing:  There is no norm.  There is in fact no human nature:  to think so is “essentialism,” and opens you to the charge of being reactionary.  Not a single universal can be posited across various cultures throughout history.  What is a virtue in one culture is a sin in another.  A smile means friendliness in one society, a declaration of war in another.  There is only difference.  Such extremism was a backlash to centuries of imperialist and colonialist propaganda that declared the values and customs of the ruling white race to be universal and all other customs and values to be “savage” and “barbarian.”  A norm was imposed for the good of the poor benighted natives, whether they wanted it or not.  It was the white man’s burden to govern the inferior races and educate them to the superiority of Western European and American values and customs.  Often, this did not mean democracy and equal rights.  It meant conditioning to accept a racial and economic class system, the subordination of women, and the exploitation of the masses in the name of capitalist “progress.”  It was understandable that no one wanted to hear about universal values according to which we are all brothers when it was apparent, as George Orwell said, that some were more equal than others.  But declaring all talk of common values suspicious meant that there was no way to achieve the kind of solidarity necessary for social change.   Which is why “high theory” more or less faded away as its practitioners aged and retired.  The “theory wars” of the 70’s through the 90’s had the beneficial effect of waking the critical world from its dogmatic slumbers, to use Kant’s phrase for the effect that Hume’s skepticism had on him, and it helped to open the literary canon to diversity.  But a good deal of critical and cultural theory became so extreme and alienated that it became, well, weird.  These days the tendency is not to talk about  it, to let memory of those days of strident conflict fade away, to pretend that much unpleasantness never happened. 

We are left, therefore, with the question that “high theory” was never able to address:  after all the deconstructing and demystifying by the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” how are we to posit a “normal” based on real human commonality rather than the imposed ideology of an elite?  We may start with the observation that “normal” usually means adjusted to the norm of the subject-object perspective, the commonsense view of a subjective ego looking out on a world that is objective, external to it, faced with the task of interacting with it.  From an expanded perspective, that view is wrong:  Blake called it the “cloven fiction” and rejected it.  But it is where any theory needs to start because that is where we find ourselves, even if we will not remain there.  In this perspective there are, theory notwithstanding, what Abraham Maslow called basic needs and Northrop Frye primary concerns.  All human beings, no matter what their ideology, need food, drink, sleep, shelter, safety—in short, the physiological and safety needs that are the first two categories of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings must have these things—and therefore have a basic right to them.   Unconditionally.  An ideology that declares one of these needs as illegitimate instantly discredits itself.  There are plenty of religiously based societies eager to condemn the desire for physical health and well-being as temptation to sin, to dictate asceticism and austerity to the point of ill health, not to mention declaring that it is God’s will that their enemies or their sinful neighbors should starve and be afflicted, even annihilated in a holy war.  There are plenty of secular societies willing to condemn the need for safety, shelter, comfort as unnecessary for the lower classes or races, who after all aren’t really human.  A society that makes such decrees reveals itself as immoral.  It is not the clever word-mongering of Western science to say that people need food and protection.  No studies need to be done “proving” this.  Any argument to the contrary is bullshit.  Liberal relativism unwilling to judge cultures on this basic level leads to inhumanity.  Jesus said that the poor we shall always have with us and that humanity does not live by bread alone—but he fed the hungry, cured the sick, even raised the dead.  The Church that claims to speak in his name must try to do likewise—so also must secularists.  Otherwise, “libertarianism” and “rugged individualism” are just euphemisms for selfishness.    

A society that makes gratification of basic needs conditional upon “earning” them is also immoral, and I am well aware that this notion will meet with considerable resistance.  Some people these days sit smoldering with resentment because some people get “handouts” while they had to work for their sustenance.  One libertarian slogan is summed up by the acronym TANSTAAFL:  there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  No, there ain’t: like most people, I have had to “work for a living” all my life.  For many people, this becomes a source of pride that easily turns to self-righteousness.  “I’m not a parasite.  I’ve done my share and I deserve what I’ve been given.”  In a truly civilized society, however, this claim could not be made, because everyone would be provided with what is necessary for minimum survival.  Dismissing such an idea as wildly utopian and unrealistic is a ploy.  Yes, work has to be done to raise the food that we all need, and someone has to do that work.  But if someone refuses to pitch in, it is still not morally acceptable to let them starve.  We could consider it cruelty to animals to let them starve because they do not contribute to their own upkeep.  But the fact is, whatever was true in earlier times, the frenetic overwork characteristic of the United States is not a necessity for survival.  European countries do not demand nearly so many hours work with an inadequate social safety net, one that conservatives wish to abolish at that.  A universal basic income was actually the idea of a conservative thinker, Milton Friedman, so long ago that I first read about it as a teenager.  Capitalists do not want it because it would mean an end to their ability to threaten the working class by threatening their means of life.  But we already have the means to provide basic nourishment, health, and safety for every citizen, if our resources were not distributed so that the 1% have as much as the bottom 90% put together. The fact that we do not do so means simply that we do not live in a fully civilized society.  No one does, of course.  No society is completely civilized.  But the right to survive is an ideal that cannot be discredited by any “work ethic.”  It remains the proper goal to strive for, even if no society has yet reached it, and we could come much closer to it than we have if various factions did not contrive against it. 

Actually, people might like to work if their jobs were not dehumanizing.  The idea that human beings would all be lazy parasites if given the chance is more propaganda, designed to rationalize exploitation.  And if basic needs were met for everyone, without exception, the fear and hatred stoked by the right would largely dissipate.  Powerful figures, especially among the super-rich elite, want ordinary people to be anxious about their economic survival and safety.  The mass media, and social media, become tools to fan anxiety into hatred of various scapegoat groups—Black people, immigrants, poor people in cities—so that the exploited will expend their energies attacking such scapegoats and thus be distracted from recognizing what is really the cause of their precarious fortunes, namely, a grotesque income inequality kept in place by a collusion of rich capitalists,  conservative politicians, and a corrupt judiciary.  Wild left-wing radicalism?  Only to those for whom any kind of social safety net is “socialism” or “Communism.”  Nothing in the preceding paragraph contradicts the view of some like, say, Robert Reich, the mildly progressive economist who used to be Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.  He predicted clear back in the 80’s the disappearance of blue-collar jobs and the rise of “symbolic analysts,” college-educated professionals who made their living by manipulating numerical or verbal symbols.  All happened as he predicted, and it tore the Democratic Party in half, as a laboring class was abandoned by the party’s educated elite.  It was not necessary that educated neoliberalism should lead to people consigned to anxiety and deaths of despair.  A real book, not a fake book like Hillbilly Elegy, would call out the real villains and not blame the downtrodden for their bad luck.  The right has gotten weird about this, trying to characterize Tim Walz as a wild-eyed socialist because he says without qualification that students have a right to free lunches and teenage girls to tampons.  In Minnesota, there is such a thing as a free lunch.  And most people are good with that. 

The next two steps upward on Maslow’s hierarchy, love and self-esteem, are more complicated.  It is hard to argue against the necessity of the physiological and safety needs, but are love and self-esteem truly necessities rather than luxuries?  “Love” is a vague word, and “self-esteem” sounds like a sentimental self-help term.  If we argue in terms of the subject-object context, however, we can define these words more usefully.  Maslow once argued for love as a basic need by saying that if babies don’t have love, they actually die.  So by “love” he meant care and nurture, of the type that most animals give to their young.  But human beings need more than just a caregiver.  As I have argued in The Productions of Time and elsewhere, the subject-object state is inherently alienated and lonely.  Donne said that no man is an island, but every isolated ego is a castaway on an island.  We need love in the sense of connection, of outright identity with the other.  Many forms of neurosis originate in lack of connectedness, even if physical needs are met.  We simply cannot bear solitary confinement, and tend to go mad in it.  As for self-esteem, Maslow made clear that he meant by it a sense of power and autonomy, influenced by Adler’s theory that the will to power is a second human drive parallel to Freud’s Eros.  In other words, there is an innate human need for freedom, which can be defined as the state in which we are not objectified, our individuality erased by domination by another individual or system.

We need connection, but we also need independence.  The reductive argument that these are mutually exclusive is, like all reductive arguments, reactionary.  If both parties are not free and autonomous, it is not love but domination or co-dependency.  And one who is strong and independent by rejecting love is suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.  At this point, we see that the subject-object perspective is beginning to change.  Both love and self-esteem belong to a perspective in which subjects and objects, subjects and other subjects, are not divided but interinvolved and mutually transformative.  The vision of the ego has begun to give way to the vision of the imagination, which sees everything in terms of what Romantic philosophy called “identity-in-difference.” The unit of verbal expression for this state is metaphor, which says that A is B.  Two lovers are the A and B of a metaphor, and a community is a union of free individuals who nonetheless declare themselves one. 

At the top of the hierarchy, Maslow’s end state of self-actualization implies an individual whose ego-perspective forms the center of a much larger, circumferential sense of self.  Jung capitalizes the “Self” to signify that such a larger identity extends the boundary of psychic identity to the boundary of the conceivable, where it disappears into paradox and mystery.  Maslow began to realize some of the implications of this argument in his final years, and began talking of a “transpersonal psychology” beyond “humanistic psychology.”  In terms of this newsletter, this extension of identity is “expanding eyes,” a phrase from Blake, who referred to the imagination as “the Real Man,” whose full awakening would be identical to what the Bible calls apocalypse, which means “revelation.”  The role of the arts in this process of putting our ego perspective through what Blake called a Vortex is to guide and inspire it by the creation of models.  The realistic tradition in literature models the world of the subject-object cloven fiction, which the symbolic tradition of myth and metaphor decreates and recreates according to the categories of human desire: wish and nightmare. 

All that sounds, well, normal.  But the argument is still incomplete at this point, and has to be carried further.  In the 50’s and early 60’s, the United States settled into a wish-fulfilment version of the normal as the kind of peaceful Hobbit-life that war-weary Americans aspired to, epitomized by family sitcoms.  When Katie Britt delivered her attempted rebuttal of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address dressed like a housewife sitting in a kitchen out of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show, she was implying that her party stands for the “normal” implied by that stage set.  By implication, the Democratic party is the party of weirdness—of angry, childless feminists and man-haters, of LBGBTQ+ groomers, of Black Lives Matter rioters, of undocumented immigrant criminals and rapists and drug smugglers, of “woke” attempts to police how people talk and to control hiring based not on ability but on lip service to “anti-racism,” of people who want to ban your light bulbs and gas stoves and force you to buy an EV, of people who want to take away your guns that you want because you are afraid of those BLM and immigrant criminals, of people who want to give your hard-earned money to undeserving others even though you can barely get by yourselves.  We are normal: we are husbands who are providers, wives who like staying home and raising children and cooking.  We are what this country has always stood for.  We are America.  They, the liberals, are a collusion of weirdos.

But something has happened to undermine this sales pitch, and it has happened so quickly that the right has been blindsided by it.  In 2008, Barack Obama was forced to pretend that he believed that marriage is between a man and a woman, clearly thinking that he would doom his chances if he did not do so.  That is a mere 16 years ago, within the lifetime of my college freshmen.  Four years later he was able to reverse himself, because the country had changed, and changed fast.  To its credit, America has widened its definition of normal to include, at least imperfectly, all the groups excluded or kept out of sight when I was growing up.  Women’s independence, racial equality, gender and sexual acceptance are now included in a greatly more comprehensive idea of “normal,” of what America not only should look like but already does.  Much that had been weird before—radical, strange, upsetting—is now taken in its stride by the majority of average people.  We have had a Black president, and we may be on our way to a president who is female, Black, and East Asian, with a Jewish husband. And she belongs to a “blended family” along with her husband’s former wife and children—hardly a radical experiment in this day and age.  Most of America has accepted these changes, not just theoretically but by living them.  This is an admirable, hopeful advance, though we have hardly noticed it because the right keeps turning up the volume of the culture wars to distract us. 

What is normal has changed, and the people who are weird are those who refuse to accept the changes.  Yet the ultimate goal of such people is not merely to return to some imagined version of the 1950’s.  That is the cover story, but not the actual agenda of most of the far right, who espouse a Christian nationalism that includes a kind of extreme Handmaid’s Tale patriarchy that has in fact never been normal in this country outside of various cult enclaves and the reactionary wings of both evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism.  Christian nationalism has in turn joined forces with two other factions, one fascist and authoritarian, admirers of Putin and other dictators, the other a veritable army of grifters who are using social upheaval in order to make fortunes by various scams, starting of course with Donald Trump himself.  The whole sick crew is exactly what Tim Walz called it, weird—and the term was doubly effective coming from a guy who actually has lived out a lot of the old American Dream—high school teacher (rather than lawyer), National Guard careerist, coach, hunter—yet at the same time has led his state in the championing of humane progressive values. 

I will grant the far right only one point, yet it is an important one.  The attempt to define an enlightened sense of “normal” based on universal human needs may, hopefully, provide a blueprint for a more adequate vision of utopia, one that includes difference rather than regimenting it.  But the imagination is not constrained by needs.  As Frye put it, the limit of the imagination is not the possible but the conceivable.  To put it another way, there is a difference between need and desire, and desire is constantly leaping beyond the possible into fantasies that are…weird.  Take the issue of women’s independence of the demand to be breeding machines and homemakers if they so choose.  Mother-homemaker is a role defined in terms of the fulfilment of needs.  The human race needs to be reproduced, and someone must take care of the children.  It is a good role, even a noble one if freely chosen.  But the women who do not choose it have chosen desire over need.  Desire for what?  For careers and economic independence for one thing, but to understand right-wing terror of women’s freedom it is necessary to see that underlying it is also a terror of women’s unleashed sexuality, indeed of unleashed sexuality in general.  Such a terror was evident in the hysterical reaction to the sexual revolution in the 60’s, to “free love” and other such abominations.  Now, it accounts for the calls for extreme male domination, designed to control women’s imagined wayward urges.  After all, if women’s sexuality is not anchored in the practical task of reproduction, what is its purpose?  The Project 2025 goal of banning “recreational sex” may seem bizarre, but behind it is fear of a desire that no longer knows any limits.  If women do not want babies and family, what can they possibly want?  Where will their desires stop?  Oral sex, vibrators, porn, hookups, multi-partner relations, polyamory, kink—who knows what those single ladies do in private?  Only their cats.  Male dominance is necessary to put an end to all this sick and decadent behavior and return sexuality to normal. 

Fear of gender and sexual difference is closely related.  The roles of heterosexual male and female are yoked to reproduction and the raising of family.  What are all these other identities and sexual preferences linked to?  What weird things do they desire?  Trump’s deliberate racism about Kamala Harris is driven by a similar anxiety about race and ethnicity.  It used to be, “Are you white or black?”  But now there are all these mixed-race people.  Who are they?  How can you be Black but also East Asian?  Clear and distinct categories, especially ones based on practicalities like reproduction and social class: that is what some people feel the need for.

Even a great thinker like Freud fell victim to such reductionism.  His phrase “polymorphous perverse” yokes a pioneering insight with a reactionary judgment.  Freud clearly saw that human sexuality is not restricted to reproduction but is polymorphous:  the imagination can desire almost anything, and does.  He tried to take it all back by labeling the polymorphous as perversion, on the grounds that anything that does not lead to the goal of reproduction is a kind of immature or neurotic bypath that maturity must outgrow.  But the imagination is not about to be limited by mere need.  Even King Lear knew that:  “O, reason not the need,” he complained to his daughters.  Restrict us to need and we are no more than a bare, forked animal like the beggar Poor Tom.  Freud’s fear of what exceeds the limits of his kind of rational materialism led directly to his explosive break with Jung.  If Jung is to be believed, Freud told him that the sexual “doctrine,” the reduction of all human motives to the sexual drive, had to be preserved in order to guard against the “black tide of mud.”  When a baffled Jung asked what that black tide was, Freud replied, “occultism,” knowing Jung’s interest in the esoteric traditions.  All that weird stuff.  Freud confined his practice to neurotics because their problems were at least “normal.”  But Jung’s training was in a psychiatric hospital for psychotics, the mad, the weirdest of them all.  Jung took psychotics seriously enough to actually listen to them and try to understand their weird fantasies.  Freud could not deal with the weirdness that manifests itself at the boundaries of ordinary reality.  He reportedly fainted when a parapsychological event, a loud explosion, took place while he was arguing with Jung.  That is exactly what the rationalistic, paternalistic doctor-husband does in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” when confronted with the ravings of his mad wife. 

Ah, but the weird will not stay outside, is not content to remain a projected “other” but follows us indoors, as Freud himself showed in a brilliant essay on “The Uncanny,” the German word for which literally means “unhomelike.”  In horror and supernatural fantasies, this may mean a literal invasion:  “They’re here,” as the child says in Poltergeist.  In more realistically displaced stories, the internal weirdness is psychological.  Clint Eastwood’s unfairly derided movie about J. Edgar Hoover is fascinated by how Hoover, the fanatical persecutor of deviants of all persuasions, was privately a cross-dresser.  Tony Kushner’s Angels in America shows Roy Cohn as a guy who liked to have sex with men, but who “was not gay” because gays are effeminate and weak.  Roy Cohn was of course Donald Trump’s mentor.  The Moms for Liberty school board member in Florida had to resign when it became known that she and her husband had had sex with the same woman.  Both Trump and JD Vance portray immigrants as horrible people, yet both are married to immigrants.  Usha Vance is not only Indian, like Kamala Harris, but was a lawyer before she set aside her career.  By rights, Vance should have married Katie Britt, or at least the character she cosplayed.  Clarence Thomas, who made sexual remarks to Anita Hill, is married to a white woman who is an extreme conspiracy theorist.  It is not a matter of judging these people’s secret sexual practices or marital choices, only of showing that they do not live up to their public personas and professed ideals.

In fact, no one is “normal.”  Everyone is “weird,” and we are all to some degree “passing” in polite society.  The film American Beauty (1999) articulated this for a previous generation.  Healthy societies are those that, at a minimum, tolerate all difference that is not harmful to the individual or to others, and, at best, zestfully encourage difference and individuality, appreciating the vitality and potential creativity that resides in the weird.  Northrop Frye points out that the normative characters in many comedies, the young lovers for example, are so normal that they are bland and boring.  What holds our interest are the eccentric characters.  This is even true outside comedy:  Falstaff in Shakespeare’s history plays is far more memorable than all the power-obsessed plotters.  Healthy societies know that we can only be normal for so long before we need a temporary release from its constraints.  Hence the type of festivity that scholars designate by the name “carnival,” in which the ordinary rules of normality are relaxed and people are allowed to act crazy for a limited time.  Shakespeare’s play about this is Twelfth Night, whose subtitle is Or, What You Will.  Contemporary authors of utopias know that the old kind of regimented utopia, perfect in a static way because everyone obeys the rules and plays the role that has been set for them, is obsolete.  Various attempts at pluralistic utopias or, to use Ursula K. Le Guin’s term, heterotopias, explore ways of accomodating various kinds of difference within a single community, including Le Guin’s own The Dispossessed, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton.  In the latter, the city has an “unlicensed sector” in which there is no rule of law.  You may do what you want, but at your own risk.  It is not such an audacious idea as it may seem, for cities have always had unlicensed sectors.  Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was in one, across the Thames, outside the city limits, along with prostitutes and bear baiting.  Last week I spoke of Elijah Wald’s book on Jelly Roll Morton, who got his start playing in the red-light district of New Orleans.   Ambitious politicians often try to appeal to the law-and-order crowd by cleaning up the unlicensed sectors:  the corruptible judge Angelo does this in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, just as Rudy Giuliani did for Times Square and 42^nd Street.  And we all know how normal Rudy Giuliani turned out to be.  

Mythologically, it is only this middle earth that is normal.  Above and below it are realms of strangeness and wonder.  In some societies, the shaman is the figure able to journey to the realms above and below, by virtue of having made weirdness into a vocation.  A person becomes a shaman beginning with a kind of psychotic episode—a breakdown that is nevertheless a breakthrough into visions and voices.  Shamans are typically wild men, Tricksters, dressing bizarrely, sometimes in women’s clothes, not respectable and yet necessary.  In some mythologies, a mysterious Otherworld exists as the other side of this one. In what have been termed “portal fantasies,” people may pass into the Otherworld from the ordinary one through some kind of nexus:  a mirror in the Alice books, the back of a wardrobe in the Narnia books, a wall in a train station in the Harry Potter books.  “Immersion fantasies” are set entirely within the Otherworld, as in Tolkien or Spenser’s Faerie Queene.  Shakespeare’s last four plays, the romances, are full of transformations and reversals, of things that only happen in plays.  The characters repeatedly use two words to describe their impression of what they have been through.  One is “wonder.”  The other is “strange.”  The weirdness of myth and romance is that of dreams, which are not ruled by daylight logic but by the primary process, as Freud called it, of the unconscious.

One of the healthier developments over my lifetime is an increasing acceptance of literature that is not realistic and so is “weird.”  In my early days of teaching, I would encounter students who said they didn’t like all that weird stuff:  they would rather read about real life.  Science fiction and fantasy were dismissed by academics as substandard escapism popular with those of immature tastes.  The surging popularity of non-realism in both books and films has come as a welcome surprise, and I would like to think it implies a wider and more flexible sense of what “reality” is, an acknowledgement that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by anyone’s philosophy.  Something in the weird calls to us: after all, “weird” was originally wyrd, fate or destiny.  Christianity’s representations of what lie beyond life in time and space have been unfortunately normalized.  Heaven has become a middle-class fantasy of how we will all live Normally Ever After.  But it is the rigid, fanatical insistence on a kind of authoritarian normativeness that has, with exquisite irony, turned the far right weird in a negative sense.  The religious form of this normativeness is an obsession with “orthodoxy” and a condemnation of “heresy,” a tendency whose authoritarian leanings are fairly obvious.  I suspect that the decline of Christianity in our time has less to do with scientific rationalism than with the fact that its need for control has excluded imagination for so long that the Christian myth is dying.  Christian nationalism is a Christianity that has sold its soul to the devil.  But if religion, not just Christianity but religion itself, opened itself to the strangeness out of which it arose, it might be reborn in a form relevant to the world in which we live—a weird world, but a world that is full of wonder.