Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume IV: Tarrying with the Impossible: The Aporetic Aphorisms of Andrew D. Chumbley

Tarrying with the Impossible, the final volume in the Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience series, will explore the metaphysical impasses in Andrew D. Chumbley’s posthumously published, Khiazmos: A Book Without Pages.  These metaphysical impasses can be best described as aporias, which defy the law of non-contradiction.  Tarrying with the Impossible begins with an “Uncanny Prologue” that sets the tone and lays the foundation for the rest of the book.  Here, Edwards starts with a mythopoetic reading of Khôra as the womb of becoming and being, an an-0ther beginning, a mythic alternative to the Genesis account with Chumbley as Khôra’s scribe, who writes from the Other-side, transmitting silences into words. 

Throughout the book, Edwards is guided by Chumbley’s aphorism, “Let the contradictions be: seek not Unity, it is here now!”  While this aphorism is one of many, Edwards shows how it winds its way through each and is integral to Chumbley’s Crooked Path Sorcery as a whole.  The introductory chapters situate Khiazmos from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of both Khôra and Aporia and then in relation to George Bataille’s Acéphale as described in The Sacred Conspiracy.  Edwards also compares Chumbley’s “The New Flesh” in Khiazmos with Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Body without Organs” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 

“Dying” is explored as “waiting at the limits of truth” and “death” as going beyond those limits, the path of peran, the path to the beyond, a way of dying before one dies.  Edwards connects death and dying in the aforementioned sense with waiting at the crossroads for the Other’s arrival and then as a sorcerous practice of being carried beyond to the Other side.  He shows how this leads to a type of “Sitra Achra perception” situated within a phenomenology where being is serpentine, or in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “winding”.

Following from previous volumes in the Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience series, Edwards further expands upon his notion of the nullpunkt as the zero-point at the center of the crossroads of non-being, becoming, and being.  He looks at the nullpunkt from the perspective of Chumbley’s “Point,” “Qutub,” or “I” and develops a new understanding of Heidegger’s dasein as “sorcerous being”, a type of “Acéphalic dasein”.  Edwards also relates many of the key ideas in Khiazmos to Aleister Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis, Austin Osman Spare’s The Book of Pleasure, Kenneth Grant’s Wisdom of S’lba, and C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus: The Red Book. 

The essence of the book involves a careful reading of Khiazmos that integrates fundamental aspects of deconstruction and Acéphalic mysticism.  Edwards titled this chapter, “Introduction to the Without Life,” a sort of a play on St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life.  The sections in this chapter adhere closely to Chumbley’s own style.  Edwards didn’t simply write about Khiazmos but ventured to write from the place that Khiazmos was written, as a “transmission through the Oracle of Silence.”   The sections in the chapter explore the intersection between what Edwards calls “aporiosis,” kenosis, and apotheosis, Chumbley’s Al Q’Mu as a Cypher for the Nameless, “Silence Knowing Itself,” Chumbley’s “My Body” as Transition, The Path of the Sanctified Devil, and “The Other: From the Symbolic to the Real”.  In his “Introduction to the Without Life,” Edwards highlights the importance of what he believes to be the central notions in Khiazmos – the importance Chumbley places on “Becoming Magic,” his “Godless Apotheosis,” the Geminus – Absence-in-Presence/Presence-in-Absence, and the New Flesh.

At the back of the book, there is a special Appendix section.  In this section, divided into four Appendices, Edwards introduces 1) Four Acephalic Meditations that he created, using Chumbley’s “Four Excellences” as a foundation; 2) his “Thirty-One Parapraxes of the Sacred”; 3) “Schizes and Flows,” which is a brief meditation on the work of Antonin Artaud, concluding with the development of what Edwards calls his “Magic Theatre,” patterned after Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, consisting of five “Collective Monologues” between Chumbley as “Alogos,” Artaud as “Artaud the Momo,” and Edwards as “(Q)ayin-Mu”, an inverted “trinity” representing the Sanctified Devil; and 4) “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus absentia”, as what Edwards calls an “Adversarial Mantra” that the reader is invited to pray using special instructions.  (This is an inversion of Jung’s famous, Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit, which Edwards views as a “Geminus,” using Chumbley’s term).

Tarrying with the Impossible evocatively concludes with what Edwards calls a “Concluding Incomprehensible Postscript,” which is a play on Soren Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.”  The Postscript is more than just a conclusion to Volume IV but serves as a conclusion to Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience as a whole.  In this section, Edwards explores his own “becoming magick,” and dare he say, “Apotheosis.”  He notes that his realization, the “telos that guided his vision” in Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience was to heal himself from, to quote Jung from The Red Book,  “the God (who) appears as our sickness…since he is our heaviest wound” and to articulate that “the practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.”  Edwards writes,

“With my scythe, letters of otherness were torn into the page, lacerating each word with the Impossible.  I wounded the word to reclaim magick from the shadow of the comprehensible, returning it to the Oracle of Silence who spoke the Inceptual Wordless Word.”