Transcendental Anarchy: Confessions of a Metaphysical Tourist

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

At some level, the rather heavy-duty title of this book is meant to be
interpreted in an ironic fashion. That is to say, this book of
“confessions” is “transcendent” and “metaphysical” only in a
very personal way that has little to do with how these terms are
construed in mainstream academic discourse. In keeping with this ironic
deployment, many of Lesley Choyce’s latest autobiographical
ruminations convey a widely felt sense of the deadening effects that he
perceives scholarly theorizations of art and society have had on
cultural and spiritual life.

What makes these 27 short essays so vacuous, however, is the
author’s lack of critical reflection on what constitutes personal
subjectivity; how it is continually reshaped; and the impossibility of
ever giving a transparent, exact version of one’s thoughts and
identity. Knowing, from the book cover, that Choyce is himself a
university instructor, one would have hoped for more trenchant
theorizations of, for example, such a fascinating topic as why he feels
he ought to get a vasectomy. By resorting to a cheeky comment (“[i]n
my own small way, I was beginning to see that my cheery attitude toward
my vasectomy could make me a minor feminist hero”), the author casts
aside an opportunity to explore male–female gender politics.

Like numerous other former hippies, Choyce has become a tacit supporter
of the status quo through his unquestioning possession of a large
property, secure work, and a nuclear family. Throughout Transcendental
Anarchy one gets the sense that Choyce is edgy about this
self-transformation and is therefore searching for a way to dredge up
something of the spirit of his earlier anti-authoritarian years, while
maintaining his present material comforts. The opening essay, in which
he presents a highly personal form of pop-mysticism, speaks most clearly
to this troubling split. Whether reveling in a “virginal jackhammer
experience” or a “raven’s caw and the cumulus sky,” Choyce tells
us that “[t]o tap the ecstasy, the cloud has to roll away inside the
mind.” As if to safeguard himself against the kind of criticism I am
leveling, in the next paragraph he writes, “so much of this will sound
like hogwash.” Unlike his contemporary, Spalding Gray, a writer who
possesses a similar perspective on modern Western life and values,
Choyce remains trapped inside his personal form of pop-mysticism, and
thus much of what he says does end up sounding like “hogwash.” While
Choyce’s boyish merriment might be admirable as a prose style, a
little of the “cynicism” that he so cavalierly disparages might have
helped to give this collection a more socially useful voice.