"You give yourself hours, and even whole days, which are, I say it unambiguously, like tears in the approximate and plausible fabric of our existence [...] as if they had forced you to take a look at the dark reverse of things, there where everything is frost and horror. In other words, as if you had given a turn to the moon โ.
(Thomas Landolfi, Voltaluna, 1942)
Psy * Co * Re, AXIS world & Mens ex Machina
have the pleasure of presenting
THE FANTASTIC CONTINUUM:
conversation on the literary mystery
5 February 2021
Fantastic literature, provided that all literature in its totality does not aspire to the fantastic, is a grandiose secular ceremony, a silent rite that favors the encounter with the radically other (what for Rudolf Otto is an area of โโrelevance to religion), a vehicle of radical estrangement, the way and method of the paradoxical, of a different psychic logic (and not reducible to discursive logic) which can break into the daily prison like a mysterious breach in the wall of our beliefs. The fantastic is a psychedelic that opens up to extraordinary experiences starting from a small element out of place, something wrong (as in Time out of Joint by PK Dick) or by means of a violent rupture of the worldly plan (such as that caused by the inhalation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror).
Curated by Simone Capozzi, an online conversation with:
- Erik Davis: American writer and cultural critic, his analyzes focus on media, spirituality and psychedelics. His latest published book is High Weirdness. Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (MIT press, 2019).
- Marco Maculotti: writer and essayist, founder and editor of the online magazine ยซAXIS mundiยป. Author of several contributions on Arthur Machen and the vein Weird/ fantastic in books and specialized magazines and an upcoming monographic essay on the first season of the TV series T (Carcosa unveiled. Notes for an esoteric reading of True Detective, Mimesis, 2021).
