Peter Valente
My Daemon Brother: A Review of Evan Kennedy’s I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before
Evan Kennedy’s new book, I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before (Roof Books, 2020), is a memoir of his passage from the physical world to an alternative world of the spirit; by removing the established foundations of his reality, he establishes an open space for his reception of the “spiritual other,” the anima that directs the body and is able to speak through and with him. In the first section of the poem, “Runt Savant,” Kennedy writes, speaking of his childhood, “As far as I understand these sights, they are mine, and as far as I do not, they are, I suppose, God’s,” and “I wish to be admitted continually to a gentler order.” At this point in his life, there is a division between himself and God but he also aware of the problems in the world and desires a different order of reality. At this point, he also realizes that he doesn’t feel shame. He is “trapped in a nonoperational body incapable of being understood.” It is a terrifying experience but he realizes nothing much has changed:
Today, there may be the statement that my body had been, or still is, nonoperational, or not as operational and sensate as I should like,
then something comes along to keep me from staring at my roots. I become distracted by something I cannot identify.
It is this sense of lack or absence that signals the presence of something else, an other. He writes that he was born “ruined.” In the doctrine of Gnosticism, the world is imperfect and so is man because his is trapped in the material body that stifles the esoteric light within. Kennedy also speaks about the solidarity he felt in the classroom as a child. But he realizes that this could not last, and that he eventually would have to abandon this pact and go out into the real world. There he learns that there are many enemies who would want to hurt him. He struggles to maintain a sense of innocence in relation to the world. But even at this early age, there was another force pulling at him, causing him to begin to extricate himself from his body. Until finally, he simply felt like a passenger in the world, on a moving train, whose destiny would be a life altering encounter with a spirit, that will change his life forever.
Throughout the book, Kennedy speaks of the limits of the body; limits that bind the body to its corporal form, where one experiences the collision of its surfaces, the spillage of fluids, piss, shit, the filth; and ultimately the decay of the body and the ruins of love. He writes, “My book is a mop that accelerates its efforts at absorbing my fluids whenever I accelerate by destructing body.” Union with another body seems impossible. At this time, he makes a distinction between semantics and the sonic quality of language: “I am still in disbelief that the alphabet before you stands in for the sounds that I have been making.” But language is no help in bridging the distance between himself and the world. Yet he is moving away from the laws of the physical body, and language, so that the spirit can manifest. It is essentially a metaphysical project, that was suggested in Jerusalem Notebook, where Kennedy wrote, “I had been compelled from home / to sink at the tomb toward some kind / of mansion on high.” He would like to be “sick with that body and its operator.” This is because of his frustration and inability to exist with the other “as a singular breathing.” The body, as we know it, has become extinct, entombed in the flesh; the human must be reconfigured, re-contexualized, in terms of its function. Kennedy writes: “I said to myself, Perhaps I will have written myself out of a body;” thus, being outside of time, and cause and effect, and not subject to decay and ultimate ruin, his desire could be consummated in the spirit.
At one point, Kennedy suggests this different context for the body in relation to the “other”: “I would prefer to discover the relation between my blood flow and another body’s curves.” The thrust is outward, and towards an other; this violates the sense of a fixed identity or self. He seeks the self’s oblivion. The trajectory is from the “I” of the body to the “you” of the spirit:
In a work, if no body is present, it could be said that spirit is suggested: when a body happens to be present, there is the occasion for an
alternate anatomy to be brought in the open. I in that bed, I was concerned with inner depths as well, but I never dared ask my artist whether
this portrait looked a thing like me.
The self has become increasingly unfamiliar, unrecognizable, in the dark; this darkness is necessary so that an esoteric light can flow unimpeded by the corporeal body. The following is from the Gnostic gospel of Thomas:
Whoever does not know the work of perfection does not know anything. If one does not stand in the darkness, one will not be able to see
the Light. There is a Light within a person of Light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark. If then the Light inside
you is darkened, what darkness that will be! For this reason I say, if one is whole, one will be filled with Light, but if one is divided, one
will be filled with darkness.
For Kennedy, this darkness is positive and not the darkness that suggests evil in Christianity. It is a moral stance in which the self is not the center of action; it is in the negation of this self that one can achieve a better understanding of the world by allowing the spirit (the esoteric light) to emerge. It is an attempt to seek a different order of reality. It also an attempt to “tune out the police sirens.” About this darkness, Kennedy writes:
Darkness, of course, is not limited to the world but is also reflected within our very selves…Having the darkness implies that we are alive,
and acknowledging this is to have the darkness. The best outcome is a moment here and there of transcendence, such as an affirmation of
goodness or an expression of care that opens a view upon a brilliant totality that includes us.
This metaphysical project has as its focus a transcendence of the limits of the physical body. It is thought that Holy men have bright and glistening auras. But members of certain spiritual traditions desire to absorb all experiences, which they regard as equal, and thus their auras appear darker. Darkness here also signifies experience, total experience, and the obliteration of the self.
Kennedy describes a sensation where the “I” dissolves and encompasses all of space, becoming the sensation itself, because there is no separation. In the section, “Positions of a Passenger” Kennedy writes,
Forgetting where I am for a moment, I am only a passenger within human anatomy, rather, human-enough anatomy. If I register sensation,
I become it, or its resonance, slurring my surroundings if I am speaking, or blurring them if I am watching.
The very language is not properly spoken but “slurred” and the visible not clear but “blurred.” The representations of reality are breaking down. He is in a transitional space, between the corporeal world and the spiritual world. Certain occult traditions speak of the aspirant’s defining moment in the desert, where everything is lost, after one has cast off all the unnecessary parts of oneself, and when there is no hope left and language fails; but when everything is lost, something does remain: god. Kennedy writes,
I write my biography and lose interest in who I am. I am not performing an autopsy or life study. I might be past examination. / Not to
disappear up my navel, I am staying responsive to the world from the quiet of my room.
This project must not be understood as escapist but metaphysical. Stillness, and increased perception indicate that something is trying to break through. It begins with noticing that the physical world is imperfect.
In spiritual traditions one’s “holy guardian angel” is defined as everything that is not “I.” Kennedy suggests this experience early in the book,
when he speaks of himself in terms of the very large and the very small:
I am finite between two kinds of infinities: whatever is larger and whatever is smaller than me…what else am I but a station of a particular
size, a site of countless appearances and disappearances…though I am certain I am finite, there are perhaps an infinity of finite things that
shape me.
In The Sissies, he began working towards this experience: “It’s the outside that concerns me here, not the so-called organic realty that is my pustular and blistered body…” There is a moment near the end of the second part, “Positions of a Passenger,” where the body has become an ecology; the body crosses the line between the human and the animal: “Unheard colors are seen on the flora and fauna found on and inside me, a terrain of musculature and fatty deposits”; “the hollow of my groin attracts forms known for their resilience through the seasons.” The self is coming apart and distinctions are disappearing. In the following, Kennedy is no long writing about himself but addressing the other, the “you,” the “anima”:
You must take me as just one erotic and neurological, sensate and creative totality: one nose, two eyes, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten
toes, though my description here becomes presumptuous: I have not recently verified these figures.
The experience of despair, in a spiritual desert, has caused this change; it has resulted in the realization that one is alone, but no different from that which one considered other, such as nature or the animal kingdom; one is in the process of being othered. The separation between “I” and “you” is dissolving. It is first indicated by this alternate experience in relation to the physical world. In Jerusalem Notebook, Kennedy writes: “Heaven be praised – I mean earthly city.” The second part of the book ends with an eclipse; this mirrors the darkness necessary for the light to emerge. It is also necessary to free oneself from attachments to the world: “In the darkness, I started taking steps from the crowd with almost alien movements, loosening myself from affiliation.” The body begins to enter a new context.
The final section of the poem is entitled “Your Life.” The speaker is now in the company of his “daemon lover.” I use this phrase in order to suggest a kind of carnal relation to the god as well as to highlight the fact that this spiritual light is not necessarily Christian but gnostic. I have also used the Greek spelling to distinguish “daemon” (meaning anima, spirit) from the Satan of Christianity. This “daemon” is the light-bearer. Kennedy writes:
You suggested a method that would leave me still standing and speaking, reshaping my mouth to announce my extinction, not only to
antagonism but to many of my actions and thoughts. Let me find your gestures turned into my reflexes.
He is losing control of his self. The poem is never about control. He addresses the daemon: “I am most content when I appear as your mysterious arrangement of the piles of atoms creating my physical dimensions.” He is still, in a sense, bound to the physical body. But he is aware that the body contains mysteries. Furthermore, Kennedy writes: “I hear within me those syllables you spoke.” This is dictation. In this section, Kennedy speaks of the limits of language and desire:
When I say that your arms are around me and that they are not, I speak to the limits we face whenever we are together. The limits of my
language are far worse. If I am ever to speak properly about you these connotations must change.
Language is insufficient when expressing metaphysical desire. Something must change; there needs to be a new context for the body in relation to language. But of course, Kennedy, is still in the world. Human needs occasionally conflict with the spiritual. He is on the edge of both terror and elation when he says: “I might be taken out of myself so that the light you tend to is no longer obstructed.” In Kennedy’s book, The Sissies, he already spoke of this relation to the god and of what he would have to dispense with in order to join with his “other half”;
glad to find your presence
through weak means
I absent this body
bad habits like hunger
and toward your wondrous
correction of poise
no allure but yours
or event untended
but sent clothed
in fists or fond severance
set within one
Kennedy is aware that, “When I first laid eyes on you, I knew we would spend a life together, but not mine, at least as it was or continues to be.” As a result, he realizes that his memoir was an attempt to write about an “incomplete form of a life” and this was a mistake. Now, he has clarified the nature of his desire and realizes that when “you pulled me out from it [his body], you bent my chronology into circularity, the circularity of return.” In gnostic belief, after one has been released from the physical body, one returns to the original realm of light. The transformation is complete.
The book concludes with an interchange between “I” and the “other”: “You asked me what was on my mind, and I said that I was thinking of how to reply. When you asked, To What?, I said To how you indicate a life” since it is “difficult to follow the tenderness of your ethics.” The “other” responds “It’s not about imitation but sustaining the care shown by your friends.” Perhaps, this includes a kind of return to the solidarity of childhood. In any case, this metaphysical project is also concerned with breaking down the false differences between each other. The “daemon lover” will watch over him, and teach him things. In the final passage of the book, Kennedy writes: “There was a pause in our conversation, though all else continued. By this time, it was dusk, or it was dawn, and a passage opened within me, and I said,” and the phrase ends there, in mid-sentence. One option is to interpret the passage as ambiguous, suggesting incompleteness or the unknown. But it is interesting if we take the title of the book as a kind of response: “I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before.” This sentence does not end with a question mark, which calls our attention to the use of “I am” and “am I.” The former stands for the “I” that exists (the self) but the latter is the “you” that exists (the other, the anima). There is no distinction here between “you” and “I.” I = I. Not either/or. The god is man; man is god. They are one. The line is now a circle. According to Hermes Trismegistus, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” But Kennedy writes, “My promise to you is as yet unarticulated.” It is beyond language, yet the words of the title seem like they are those of a kind of divine being, the I that is I, speaking of the creation of the world at the origin, or after the flood. Nevertheless, Kennedy places his trust in joy, in opposition to violence and hatred. His book contains the hope that another order of reality is still possible in this world. I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before, is the work of a consummate metaphysical poet. Evan Kennedy is a light-bearer in a world that grows darker every day and for this reason, I am glad his books are in the world.
Evan Kennedy’s new book, I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before (Roof Books, 2020), is a memoir of his passage from the physical world to an alternative world of the spirit; by removing the established foundations of his reality, he establishes an open space for his reception of the “spiritual other,” the anima that directs the body and is able to speak through and with him. In the first section of the poem, “Runt Savant,” Kennedy writes, speaking of his childhood, “As far as I understand these sights, they are mine, and as far as I do not, they are, I suppose, God’s,” and “I wish to be admitted continually to a gentler order.” At this point in his life, there is a division between himself and God but he also aware of the problems in the world and desires a different order of reality. At this point, he also realizes that he doesn’t feel shame. He is “trapped in a nonoperational body incapable of being understood.” It is a terrifying experience but he realizes nothing much has changed:
Today, there may be the statement that my body had been, or still is, nonoperational, or not as operational and sensate as I should like,
then something comes along to keep me from staring at my roots. I become distracted by something I cannot identify.
It is this sense of lack or absence that signals the presence of something else, an other. He writes that he was born “ruined.” In the doctrine of Gnosticism, the world is imperfect and so is man because his is trapped in the material body that stifles the esoteric light within. Kennedy also speaks about the solidarity he felt in the classroom as a child. But he realizes that this could not last, and that he eventually would have to abandon this pact and go out into the real world. There he learns that there are many enemies who would want to hurt him. He struggles to maintain a sense of innocence in relation to the world. But even at this early age, there was another force pulling at him, causing him to begin to extricate himself from his body. Until finally, he simply felt like a passenger in the world, on a moving train, whose destiny would be a life altering encounter with a spirit, that will change his life forever.
Throughout the book, Kennedy speaks of the limits of the body; limits that bind the body to its corporal form, where one experiences the collision of its surfaces, the spillage of fluids, piss, shit, the filth; and ultimately the decay of the body and the ruins of love. He writes, “My book is a mop that accelerates its efforts at absorbing my fluids whenever I accelerate by destructing body.” Union with another body seems impossible. At this time, he makes a distinction between semantics and the sonic quality of language: “I am still in disbelief that the alphabet before you stands in for the sounds that I have been making.” But language is no help in bridging the distance between himself and the world. Yet he is moving away from the laws of the physical body, and language, so that the spirit can manifest. It is essentially a metaphysical project, that was suggested in Jerusalem Notebook, where Kennedy wrote, “I had been compelled from home / to sink at the tomb toward some kind / of mansion on high.” He would like to be “sick with that body and its operator.” This is because of his frustration and inability to exist with the other “as a singular breathing.” The body, as we know it, has become extinct, entombed in the flesh; the human must be reconfigured, re-contexualized, in terms of its function. Kennedy writes: “I said to myself, Perhaps I will have written myself out of a body;” thus, being outside of time, and cause and effect, and not subject to decay and ultimate ruin, his desire could be consummated in the spirit.
At one point, Kennedy suggests this different context for the body in relation to the “other”: “I would prefer to discover the relation between my blood flow and another body’s curves.” The thrust is outward, and towards an other; this violates the sense of a fixed identity or self. He seeks the self’s oblivion. The trajectory is from the “I” of the body to the “you” of the spirit:
In a work, if no body is present, it could be said that spirit is suggested: when a body happens to be present, there is the occasion for an
alternate anatomy to be brought in the open. I in that bed, I was concerned with inner depths as well, but I never dared ask my artist whether
this portrait looked a thing like me.
The self has become increasingly unfamiliar, unrecognizable, in the dark; this darkness is necessary so that an esoteric light can flow unimpeded by the corporeal body. The following is from the Gnostic gospel of Thomas:
Whoever does not know the work of perfection does not know anything. If one does not stand in the darkness, one will not be able to see
the Light. There is a Light within a person of Light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark. If then the Light inside
you is darkened, what darkness that will be! For this reason I say, if one is whole, one will be filled with Light, but if one is divided, one
will be filled with darkness.
For Kennedy, this darkness is positive and not the darkness that suggests evil in Christianity. It is a moral stance in which the self is not the center of action; it is in the negation of this self that one can achieve a better understanding of the world by allowing the spirit (the esoteric light) to emerge. It is an attempt to seek a different order of reality. It also an attempt to “tune out the police sirens.” About this darkness, Kennedy writes:
Darkness, of course, is not limited to the world but is also reflected within our very selves…Having the darkness implies that we are alive,
and acknowledging this is to have the darkness. The best outcome is a moment here and there of transcendence, such as an affirmation of
goodness or an expression of care that opens a view upon a brilliant totality that includes us.
This metaphysical project has as its focus a transcendence of the limits of the physical body. It is thought that Holy men have bright and glistening auras. But members of certain spiritual traditions desire to absorb all experiences, which they regard as equal, and thus their auras appear darker. Darkness here also signifies experience, total experience, and the obliteration of the self.
Kennedy describes a sensation where the “I” dissolves and encompasses all of space, becoming the sensation itself, because there is no separation. In the section, “Positions of a Passenger” Kennedy writes,
Forgetting where I am for a moment, I am only a passenger within human anatomy, rather, human-enough anatomy. If I register sensation,
I become it, or its resonance, slurring my surroundings if I am speaking, or blurring them if I am watching.
The very language is not properly spoken but “slurred” and the visible not clear but “blurred.” The representations of reality are breaking down. He is in a transitional space, between the corporeal world and the spiritual world. Certain occult traditions speak of the aspirant’s defining moment in the desert, where everything is lost, after one has cast off all the unnecessary parts of oneself, and when there is no hope left and language fails; but when everything is lost, something does remain: god. Kennedy writes,
I write my biography and lose interest in who I am. I am not performing an autopsy or life study. I might be past examination. / Not to
disappear up my navel, I am staying responsive to the world from the quiet of my room.
This project must not be understood as escapist but metaphysical. Stillness, and increased perception indicate that something is trying to break through. It begins with noticing that the physical world is imperfect.
In spiritual traditions one’s “holy guardian angel” is defined as everything that is not “I.” Kennedy suggests this experience early in the book,
when he speaks of himself in terms of the very large and the very small:
I am finite between two kinds of infinities: whatever is larger and whatever is smaller than me…what else am I but a station of a particular
size, a site of countless appearances and disappearances…though I am certain I am finite, there are perhaps an infinity of finite things that
shape me.
In The Sissies, he began working towards this experience: “It’s the outside that concerns me here, not the so-called organic realty that is my pustular and blistered body…” There is a moment near the end of the second part, “Positions of a Passenger,” where the body has become an ecology; the body crosses the line between the human and the animal: “Unheard colors are seen on the flora and fauna found on and inside me, a terrain of musculature and fatty deposits”; “the hollow of my groin attracts forms known for their resilience through the seasons.” The self is coming apart and distinctions are disappearing. In the following, Kennedy is no long writing about himself but addressing the other, the “you,” the “anima”:
You must take me as just one erotic and neurological, sensate and creative totality: one nose, two eyes, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten
toes, though my description here becomes presumptuous: I have not recently verified these figures.
The experience of despair, in a spiritual desert, has caused this change; it has resulted in the realization that one is alone, but no different from that which one considered other, such as nature or the animal kingdom; one is in the process of being othered. The separation between “I” and “you” is dissolving. It is first indicated by this alternate experience in relation to the physical world. In Jerusalem Notebook, Kennedy writes: “Heaven be praised – I mean earthly city.” The second part of the book ends with an eclipse; this mirrors the darkness necessary for the light to emerge. It is also necessary to free oneself from attachments to the world: “In the darkness, I started taking steps from the crowd with almost alien movements, loosening myself from affiliation.” The body begins to enter a new context.
The final section of the poem is entitled “Your Life.” The speaker is now in the company of his “daemon lover.” I use this phrase in order to suggest a kind of carnal relation to the god as well as to highlight the fact that this spiritual light is not necessarily Christian but gnostic. I have also used the Greek spelling to distinguish “daemon” (meaning anima, spirit) from the Satan of Christianity. This “daemon” is the light-bearer. Kennedy writes:
You suggested a method that would leave me still standing and speaking, reshaping my mouth to announce my extinction, not only to
antagonism but to many of my actions and thoughts. Let me find your gestures turned into my reflexes.
He is losing control of his self. The poem is never about control. He addresses the daemon: “I am most content when I appear as your mysterious arrangement of the piles of atoms creating my physical dimensions.” He is still, in a sense, bound to the physical body. But he is aware that the body contains mysteries. Furthermore, Kennedy writes: “I hear within me those syllables you spoke.” This is dictation. In this section, Kennedy speaks of the limits of language and desire:
When I say that your arms are around me and that they are not, I speak to the limits we face whenever we are together. The limits of my
language are far worse. If I am ever to speak properly about you these connotations must change.
Language is insufficient when expressing metaphysical desire. Something must change; there needs to be a new context for the body in relation to language. But of course, Kennedy, is still in the world. Human needs occasionally conflict with the spiritual. He is on the edge of both terror and elation when he says: “I might be taken out of myself so that the light you tend to is no longer obstructed.” In Kennedy’s book, The Sissies, he already spoke of this relation to the god and of what he would have to dispense with in order to join with his “other half”;
glad to find your presence
through weak means
I absent this body
bad habits like hunger
and toward your wondrous
correction of poise
no allure but yours
or event untended
but sent clothed
in fists or fond severance
set within one
Kennedy is aware that, “When I first laid eyes on you, I knew we would spend a life together, but not mine, at least as it was or continues to be.” As a result, he realizes that his memoir was an attempt to write about an “incomplete form of a life” and this was a mistake. Now, he has clarified the nature of his desire and realizes that when “you pulled me out from it [his body], you bent my chronology into circularity, the circularity of return.” In gnostic belief, after one has been released from the physical body, one returns to the original realm of light. The transformation is complete.
The book concludes with an interchange between “I” and the “other”: “You asked me what was on my mind, and I said that I was thinking of how to reply. When you asked, To What?, I said To how you indicate a life” since it is “difficult to follow the tenderness of your ethics.” The “other” responds “It’s not about imitation but sustaining the care shown by your friends.” Perhaps, this includes a kind of return to the solidarity of childhood. In any case, this metaphysical project is also concerned with breaking down the false differences between each other. The “daemon lover” will watch over him, and teach him things. In the final passage of the book, Kennedy writes: “There was a pause in our conversation, though all else continued. By this time, it was dusk, or it was dawn, and a passage opened within me, and I said,” and the phrase ends there, in mid-sentence. One option is to interpret the passage as ambiguous, suggesting incompleteness or the unknown. But it is interesting if we take the title of the book as a kind of response: “I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before.” This sentence does not end with a question mark, which calls our attention to the use of “I am” and “am I.” The former stands for the “I” that exists (the self) but the latter is the “you” that exists (the other, the anima). There is no distinction here between “you” and “I.” I = I. Not either/or. The god is man; man is god. They are one. The line is now a circle. According to Hermes Trismegistus, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” But Kennedy writes, “My promise to you is as yet unarticulated.” It is beyond language, yet the words of the title seem like they are those of a kind of divine being, the I that is I, speaking of the creation of the world at the origin, or after the flood. Nevertheless, Kennedy places his trust in joy, in opposition to violence and hatred. His book contains the hope that another order of reality is still possible in this world. I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before, is the work of a consummate metaphysical poet. Evan Kennedy is a light-bearer in a world that grows darker every day and for this reason, I am glad his books are in the world.