John Pistelli delivers a rare and provocative meditation on the collision between aesthetics and occultism, arguing that the modern obsession with magical systems often produces "bad aesthetics" that undermine the very truth artists seek. While the piece functions as a weekly digest, its core insight—that the drive to "create a system" is more dangerous to art than the drive to tell the truth—offers a sharp corrective to contemporary spiritual and literary trends.
The Enemy of Form
Pistelli begins by engaging with Steff's distinction between art and magic as "near enemies," defining the latter as a quality that superficially resembles a spiritual virtue but actually undermines it. He writes, "These bad aesthetics also derive from what Steff calls the 'corny' moral messages of magic's orientation toward truth instead of beauty." This framing is crucial because it shifts the debate from content to form. The author suggests that while philosophy, religion, and politics often claim to be the truth, art's primary duty is to the vehicle, not the message.
The commentary here is particularly astute when Pistelli turns to the history of literature to illustrate the danger of rigid systems. He observes, "I fear that magic can be an enemy of art not because of its will-to-truth but rather because of its will-to-system. This interferes no less than a pre-given moral with what should be artists' free relation to their subject matter." This is a bold claim that resonates with the Russian Formalist tradition, which argued that art's purpose is to make the familiar strange, to "make the stone stony," rather than to serve a pre-ordained ideological or magical function.
"The occult artist may confuse a magical system, the more esoteric the better, with an aesthetic structure."
Pistelli argues that this confusion leads writers down a blind alley, citing William Blake, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats as examples where the drive to construct a personal mythology damaged the work's accessibility and organic form. He notes that Blake's motivation to "create a system" drove him into "incommunicado last books." The author contrasts this with writers like Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, whose spiritual inflections remained organic to their stories rather than planned according to "charts in a grimoire." A counterargument worth considering is that for some readers, the dense, systematic nature of works like Yeats's A Vision or Pound's The Cantos is precisely where their value lies, offering a complex intellectual architecture that resists easy consumption. However, Pistelli's point remains valid: when the system supersedes the story, the art risks becoming a private code rather than a shared experience.
The Politics of the Face
The piece takes a darker turn as it examines the relationship between the human face and the literary imagination. Pistelli explores the idea that true empathy in literature requires a certain "facelessness," a depersonalization that allows the reader to project themselves into the narrative. He cites Philip Traylen's observation that "Only Dostoevsky and Cervantes achieve facelessness," whereas Kafka's presence is so overwhelming it feels incinerated and smeared in his prose.
Pistelli illustrates this with a haunting excerpt from his own novel, describing a character who covers her mirror with cardboard to avoid seeing her own decay. The character reflects, "Man shouldn't be able to see his own face: there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes." This passage serves as a powerful metaphor for the literary experience: the novel allows us to inhabit a consciousness without the distraction of the physical self, creating a space where the "atopic-utopic effect" of literature can flourish.
"I've still never read Levinas, but what if he was wrong in all those books I didn't read? What if we can only truly sympathize with someone whose face we've never seen?"
This questioning of Emmanuel Levinas's famous philosophy—that the face of the Other is the primary site of ethical responsibility—is a striking move. It suggests that in the digital age of face-to-video interaction, the loss of the "faceless" literary space might be eroding our capacity for deep, unmediated sympathy. Critics might argue that this romanticizes the distance of the written word, ignoring how visual media can also foster profound empathy. Yet, Pistelli's intuition about the unique power of the "unseen" in literature holds weight, especially as visual culture increasingly dominates our attention.
The Melancholy of Resistance and the Circus of Chaos
Pistelli's review of László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance provides a fascinating case study in the tension between high-modernist ambition and narrative coherence. He admits the novel "did resist my effort to read it," describing it as a "verbal movie and not enough the pure essay it might have been." The author critiques the book's focus on "meaningless scenes of violence and chaos" over the philosophical quarrels between its characters.
He writes, "The novel's superficial high-modernist pastiche doesn't go far enough; it is too much the verbal movie and not enough the pure essay it might have been." This critique aligns with the René Girardian perspective mentioned in the piece, which values the "banality" of great literature's final accordance with immemorial wisdom, provided the form itself remains startling and non-banal. Pistelli suggests that Krasznahorkai's work, while impressive in its scope, fails to fully transcend its own stylistic affectations.
"More Mann, less Kafka."
This brief, punchy verdict encapsulates the author's desire for a literature that balances philosophical depth with narrative clarity. The reference to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka serves as a shorthand for the tension between the essayistic and the surreal, a tension that defines much of modernist literature. While some readers might defend Krasznahorkai's chaotic style as a necessary reflection of a chaotic world, Pistelli's preference for a more structured, essay-like approach highlights a specific aesthetic vulnerability in contemporary high modernism.
The Bottom Line
John Pistelli's commentary offers a sophisticated defense of artistic freedom against the encroachment of rigid systems, whether magical, political, or philosophical. Its strongest argument is the identification of the "will-to-system" as the true enemy of aesthetic vitality, a claim that challenges both occult practitioners and ideological writers. The piece's greatest vulnerability lies in its somewhat dismissive treatment of complex, system-heavy works like The Cantos or Finnegans Joyce, which many readers find deeply rewarding despite their difficulty. As the literary landscape continues to grapple with the intersection of spirituality and art, Pistelli's warning against the "bad aesthetics" of systematized truth remains a vital guide for creators and critics alike.