ABSTRACT
It is with homesickness that I begin and it is with homesickness that I shall surely end, hoping to make of this looping journey homeward some sense of the wondrous powers contrived from womb-sprung worlds, in particular with the power of imagined orders, systems, and other such elegant devices for explaining the magic of Others. The figure of such journeying is the figure of celestial, shamanic, flight, in many ways the obverse of terror, as I have presented it. But as obverse there nevertheless remains starkly profiled an uncanny relationship to the function of arbitrariness in terror, and that is why this journey homeward, this celestial flight, is principally a worrying about the role of order in empowering those activities deemed “explanatory.” And just as the figure of celestial flight serves me as a figure for the movement of “explanation” as a curing movement deemed to transform chaos into system, then the alliance of that movement with the magic and rituals of “primitive” societies is what I want to also bring into the dialectic of Enlightenment.
