Harry Smith Cosmographies: The Naropa Lectures 1988-1990


Harry Smith, Harry Smith Cosmographies: The Naropa Lectures 1988-1990. Edited by Raymond Foye. Los Angeles, CA:  Karma Books, 2023.

review by Robert Podgurski


Harry Smith’s teacher, Charles Stansfeld Jones aka Frater Achad, upon enduring his supreme initiation declared that arising in his consciousness was

[…] a state unlike the normal and which, by description might appear very like madness (Path of Aleph IS Madness), since Reason was destroyed and transcended. The Air became his Balance. [Liber 31, 13]

The air like the psyche has its facets and various temperaments that is sometimes mild but often daemonic. The volatility of such an aetherial pivot was continuously on display in Smith’s actions and artistic endeavors. There’s little doubt his chaotic lifestyle, vagabond existence, and freely associating intellect dismantled reason in telling and visionary ways. A variable current of creativity and expansive consciousness fluctuate throughout these talks originally delivered at the Naropa Institute. Overall, these transcribed lectures, in their flights of fancy and mantic circumlocutions, provide an open speculum reflective of Harry Smith’s enlightened mania.

In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of four types of mania with the amatory at the apex followed by the prophetic, hieratic, and poetic. Smith’s lectures may be invariably grouped about the latter three pivoting on the hieratic or instructive hierophant. (However, this is not to posit that the amatory element is absent from these talks but tracking this component down may prove the most challenging.) His discourse is often hieroglyphic in a wonderfully open manner. These imagings are certainly mantic as well as manic with flashes of visionary insight appearing at any moment without warning. For instance, in the first lecture “The Rationality of Namelessness” that is perhaps the most chaotic, Smith, in speaking about the surrealist exquisite corpse exercise, mentions: 

                                                anything you did as a child…

                                                                                               because

            those things that are connected with us in our nonage

                                                                        and in our dotage

            have a peculiar structure to them

                                                                        [p. 31]

This declaration is somewhat confessional given Smith’s tenure as an aging babe of the abyss, and within a year of his final lecture he would depart from this world. His aim is partly instructional but the route taken is hardly straightforward and may be seen as perhaps extra-intuitive.

This book is in two parts, the first being the lectures with the second, the supplemental handouts taken from anthropological studies, diagrams of Rube Goldberg contraptions, and more. “Harry did not always speak in coherent sentences,” according to Peter Wilson. And likewise, his handouts do not necessarily parallel these lectures initially on any discernible level. [p. 16] As a result, one is almost forced to read through all the supplemental materials and then connect them thematically or topically to the transcribed lectures as the threads between them come to mind. Consequently, HS’s means often subverts his ends, if in fact he had any definite objectives in mind as he assembled these talks. More often than not, HS takes great leaps between topics seemingly disconnected or flat out drops them no sooner than they were addressed. For example, right after HS covers the matter of the exquisite corpse exercise, he blurts out: “OKAY, CAN I GO NOW. IF there are any questions, but I’m very poor at answering questions.” [p. 51] This interjection appears as yet another autonomous limb sutured onto his exquisitely bandied together lecture as a whole. A structure, or perhaps rather a post-structure of a playful nonage and more serious dotage emerges and manifests throughout this assemblage comprising HS’ ideas at that time.

Beginning at the ripe age of fifteen, Harry became a self-taught anthropologist meeting up with local tribes of the pacific northwest such as the Lummi and the Salish peoples. He was, in fact, one of the first to record their songs and rituals, collect their carving, art, and more. In Lectures V and VI, Native American Cosmos I & II we get a sample of Harry’s immense range of understanding of Native American cosmologies but it is by no means systematic in its exposition. At one point Allen Ginsberg prods Harry to get on track with what he has “prepared” but Smith will have none of it and just sniggers in response and rejoinders, “not now, not now.” [p. 106] HS then proceeds to talk about peyote and how it was transported all about the west making its way into groups that it never would have been endemic too, at least in terms of local availability. Then, in connection with South American Aztec tribes, he discusses legends about twins, a brother and “very often a wolf,” and in attempting to draw a diagram on a chalk board of it all he states that “the whole thing resembles a brain, maybe we’re just looking at ourselves.” [p. 110f.] Then out of seemingly nowhere HS states he doesn’t really know what to say when people ask, “how are you?” “I’ve tried saying ‘I’m a hallucination’” but then “everything’s a hallucination” so “it’s hard to speak of precisely where that diagram exists.” [p. 111]

In its own way we see the psychoactive element migrate from the autochthonous groups he studied to surface in HS’s own discourse and multivalent thought processes. This is not to say that Smith was under the influence of peyote in organizing his workshops at Naropa but that psychoactivity is something art and literature is able to produce if it’s permitted to alter our way of processing the world. HS was hardly averse to such influences.

The accompanying handouts to these cosmography sections are extremely interesting but attempting to tie them in directly to the corresponding lectures is difficult. Instead, we’re prompted to meander and light upon certain elucidations and notions circuitously, and then consider HS’s ideas in relation to the supplemental texts almost serendipitously. And attempting to reign in these circumlocutions systematically is bound to prove frustrating if we impose any straightforward logic on HS’s array other than following his mischievous anti-method. Given the opportunity, HS’s relays are prone to disrupt and liberate most rational expository approaches from their traditional moorings.

To be enthralled by HS’s locutions is the first step, practically speaking, in engaging with these lectures as activating elements. As Charles Stein surmises in the afterword, “thralldom is magic’s provenance, the capacity to manage thralldom is its very business.” [p. 256] HS without a doubt made such a stewardship his own task on a variety of registers. Obviously, these lectures are an extension of HS’s thaumaturgical or wonder-working art. They tend to demand a careful close reading and simultaneously child-like abandon and fearlessness to freely associate all that is being served up as fancy dictates. “Their tone can be both magisterial and splenetic, in the latter case comprising sentences sometimes boastful, acerbic, and lodged against other alchemists whom [HS] deems ignorant or otherwise inauthentic – sentences often difficult to integrate with the purported intent of the text.” [p. 254]

Raymond Foye’s opening Editor’s Note does a particularly succinct job of setting the stage for these lectures in terms of Harry’s mindset and general condition.  Along with Foye’s opening, Diane DiPrima’s account of HS at Naropa establishes his human condition with some wonderfully insightful and anecdotal accounts. And as a matter of fact, Charles Stein’s afterword: “Some Notes on Harry Smith’s Alchemy and Magic” provides an invaluable spin not only on HS’s pivoting mechanism but the condition of magic in the modern milieu and current world will’s theater. This piece is a standalone testament worth any student of magic and consciousness’ consideration. A certain degree of appreciation is also owed to Peter Lamborn Wilson for his efforts in managing these lectures’ difficult and often tricky transcription. As Peter outlines:

                        I arranged the spoken text in irregular lines like vers libre in order
                        to mimic the sound and pacing of Harry’s verbal art. This experiment
                        seems to work, I think. The lectures can be experienced as poetry.
                        Why not?
[p. 16]

Far from taking any liberties with Smith’s orations, Peter’s proscribed method is relatively practical given the overall tenor and unhinged apparatus of Smith’s modus operandi.

For the student of Harry Smith’s life and oeuvre these lectures are an important living artifact. And for those new to his ways these talks are still able to transport and transform through their peripatetic power. Constantly turning in and about themselves these orations are merciless in their demands upon our attention in their vast breadth. To abandon any expectations of a standardized curriculum is recommended. When permitted to make sense in their own way, Smith’s wildly dancing ideas and energies of this collection remain powerful fetishes never to be reduced to any easily summarized or formally assessed school of thought.

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