Backlist Bulletin #7: The TV Sutras

Catching the zeal for Dodie Bellamy’s The TV Sutras was slow at first, and then total. I grazed tentatively through the first half of the book, which is made up of 78 sutras, or aphorisms of received spiritual knowledge. In the preceding note, “The Source of the Transmission,” Bellamy claims that her process was not an attempt at “irony, cleverness or perfection — or art. The TV Sutras are totally in-the-moment sincere, even if that sincerity makes me cringe afterwards” (14). The text challenged my modes of reading; the sutras aren’t poems, but I wasn’t sure that I should internalize them as honest advice. The received knowledge, after all, was transmitted via television broadcast and written into the form of an ancient Indian scripture. In an interview with David Buuck, Bellamy cites Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a book of aphorisms on the practice and theory of yoga, as the base for her form, and a bad therapist who recommended yoga and meditation at home as a catalyst.

For each day of her 78-day sutra practice, Bellamy includes both a divinely inspired soundbite and its human-filtered interpretation. Both parts reach into their own well of images: for the sutras, a broader cultural subconscious as refracted through the commercials and melodramas of daytime television; for the commentaries, the store of spiritual language within Bellamy herself:

#16

Who says you have to have 12 periods a year on the pill.

Montage of young women repeating, “Who says.”

COMMENTARY

Each of us progresses, unfolds at our own speed. There is no set route. Acknowledge and follow your own rhythm. Trust your own experience/authority over societal expectations/programmatic doctrine.

— p.32

The commentary reflects central concerns of the book: how subjective experience is located in time, how spiritual authority is conferred, what boundary we can possibly draw between self and culture. In the essay that follows, “Cultured,” Bellamy unwinds the spiritual autobiography that formed the conduit to these sutras — in particular, she discusses her ten years as a member of a New Age cult. Dodie as narrator recounts events in a chatty, semi-fictionalized, often otherworldly manner, laced with fantasy.

Bellamy grabs hold of pieces of memory, allowing them to glisten with the sense of bliss found in her spiritual devotion. On a trip to Jacksonville, Florida, for a cult convention — Dodie’s first trip out of the midwest — she describes a potted plant: “a series of waxy green banana peels stacked one inside the other, and from the center pokes a trumpet of magenta, too intensely magenta for this world, its ‘petals’ sharply pointed — like razors — the incandescent dentate of an alien vagina” (111). Images of “other realms” and archetypal spiritual authority are superimposed over her young adult life. Delusion and euphoria bounce off of each other: “With my Teacher/sixth initiate boyfriend, high in the air, surrounded by treetops and light, life from then on would be one long spiritual retreat; I’d be like one of those ancient naked yogis who lives on a platform on stilts, wooden fence all around to hide his enlightened cock and balls as he waves to his devotees” (136). If the first section of the book is an even-paced, methodical, and procedural sequence, the second part is an unfurling, spiraling, high-entropy revelation. It is delicious prose, like listening to someone you love gossip. I eat it up and I’ll believe anything she says.

Throughout “Cultured,” memories work like sutras, accessed as the smallest possible unit that holds itself together, “terse, easily memorized, but […] intended to be expanded and explained” (207). Bellamy writes, “I’m reminded of the way that anyone from my past is reduced to a discrete set of images — and one fragment will emerge” (207). Memory is encountered from a new vantage point, again and again.

*

I want to convince everyone I know to read this book. If I told everyone that it was about cults, charisma, abuse of power, desire, sex, and bliss, everyone would read it. I put my head down when cultists in the subway station offer me literature, but I want to know who they are and what their lives are like. Sometimes they look at you with gentle ease spread across their faces, sometimes alarming concern for your soul. I remember being a Christian mega-church attending pre-teen filled with desire to bring everyone into the envelope of love I’d found in my bible study group. Years later, I still answer the door and talk to the evangelists about the Lord for too long, before my roommate makes me politely move on with a fake obligation. Faith — even others’ faith — can be so bright. I know better.

In the beginning of “Cultured,” Dodie is in a nail salon where Oprah is playing in the background, airing an investigative montage on Tony Alamo, an apocalyptic cult leader and sexual abuser. Last month, I watched a new documentary on Bikram Yoga in which toned and optimistic women gleefully enmesh themselves into a pyramid scheme/fitness club, under a verbally and sexually abusive leader. Like in Dodie’s cult, where a plagiarism scandal rocks the foundations of their leader’s authority, the appropriation of Eastern spiritual traditions into an American profit machine is foundational. The drama of the cult is consumable because it allows us to see an intensification of commonplace power dynamics, made into something recognizably perverse.

*

In Barf Manifesto (UDP, 2010), Bellamy celebrates writing that moves through the body and makes a mess, through a discussion of Eileen Myles’ essay “Everyday Barf.” Of this aesthetic, Bellamy writes:

The Barf is an upheaval, born of our hangover from imbibing too much Western Civ. The Barf is reflective, each delivery calls forth a framing, the Barf is expansive as the Blob, swallowing and recontextualizing, spreading out and engorging. Its logic is associative, it proceeds by chords rather than single, discrete notes. Hierarchies jumble in the thrill, in the imperatives of purge.

— p. 32

“Cultured” unfolds in this logic. After Bellamy disentangles herself from the cult, the same patterns resurface in different forms — in her entry into an experimental writing scene in San Francisco of the 1980s, specifically the “cult of New Narrative” to which she belonged, in the endless options for spiritual healing she engages in, in the pyramid scheme of teaching creative writing professionally. In this jumble, the draw of a charismatic spiritual leader who makes it all cohere is strong. But those figures are counterbalanced by moments of meditative clarity, the internal authority of Bellamy’s “bullshit meter,” her perception. Each paragraph delves into one of these modes, building on one another until they reach a crescendo. As she remembers sitting in a park with her girlfriend in Bloomington, Indiana, Bellamy writes, “No one told me that moving closer into what I perceived on a daily basis, the swingness of the swing, was the key to spiritual writing.” (230)

Towards the end of the essay, the “I” becomes increasingly destabilized, moving fluidly between the perspective of Dodie and a charismatic, frenetic guru alter-ego. The TV Sutras creates fertile ground for a curious, shifting perspective, allowing both writer and reader to enact the roles of spiritual leader and acolyte. As Bellamy writes, “The sutra process is the opposite of accepting things as they are, highlighting instead the instability of knowing.” (207)

— Paige Parsons

TV Sutras is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on March 6th are 50% off, use discount code CHARISMA at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.